Джерейнт Джонс - Siege

‘Stay with Stumps and the others when I’m gone,’ I urged, watching the moment sail by me as I had once watched the ships leave the pier of my home.

‘What do you think is going to happen to me?’ she asked. She was angry with me. Angry with our place in the world.

‘You’ll be all right with them.’

‘I’ll tell you what will happen to me, Felix.’ Linza spoke over me, closing in so that her flushed face was inches from my own. ‘If Malchus doesn’t rape and kill me here, another man will. German, or Roman. That’s my place now. That’s what you soldiers see me as. Plunder.’

‘That’s not true,’ I urged, but I could hear the frailty of my words.

‘Of course it’s true,’ she snapped. ‘Sooner or later this fort is falling. I will not fall with it, Felix,’ she vowed. ‘I will take my own life before that.’

Her words hit me harder than any blow I had suffered at the hands of Titus. The thought of a man forcing himself on Linza revolted me, angered me and filled me with shame in the same moment – shame that I could not protect her. Guilt that I had failed before.

‘I can show you a way to make it quick?’ I tried.

She laughed at me then. It was a bitter, furious laugh. Instantly, I knew that I had failed a test. My soul and manhood had been on trial, and both had now been condemned.

‘You think that’s what I wanted to hear?’ She shook her head, her face made ugly by bile. Resentful that she had let her shield and defences down, as I had my own.

‘Go and fuck yourself, Felix,’ she snarled at me. ‘Go and look for your war.’

She walked away from me. Defeated, I made no attempt to follow. No attempt to call out. Instead, I vowed that I would take her guidance, and do what I had been doing since the first moment I had known loss, and true pain.

I would look for my war.

It was dark by the time I joined Titus and H in the barrack room. Neither soldier was surprised, assuming that my time had been spent doing what every soldier wants to do when he sees the end of his life hanging by a thread.

‘That much fun, was it?’ Titus smiled, his teeth yellow in the flame of the room’s flickering stove.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked.

‘Guard duty.’

My stomach turned sour. My self-pity had cost me the chance to say goodbye to my comrades.

‘Get your kit and let’s go,’ H instructed me. ‘The runners are waiting for us at the gate.’

We joined them soon after. Having ruined my farewell to both Linza and my comrades, I was anxious to be free of the fort and to place myself in danger, where my thoughts would be occupied with survival and not recrimination. The two runners were young men, and carried themselves with confidence. Both had been known and trusted by H for years.

‘We’re not in any rush to get there,’ H told us as we let our eyes adjust to the darkness. ‘Priority is to get the runners clear to the Rhine. Once that’s done we’ll lie up, and start working out the goat-fuckers’ positions and routines.

‘Any final questions?’ H asked. Once we left the gate, we would only speak when strictly necessary.

‘Don’t you mean last words?’ One of the runners grinned, keen to show indifference towards the danger that lay ahead.

We chuckled darkly at the joke. That was the soldier’s way.

H turned to the men of the guard. ‘Open the gate.’

Without armour and shield we moved quietly through the night. The air was cold but not vicious, and I felt beads of sweat trickle down my lower spine. I had a blanket rolled and looped over one shoulder and down to my waist, and alongside that rested a bundled pack of drinking-skins and rations. There was little weight to either – we would be returning to the fort in a fortnight, or we would be the ones providing meals to nature’s creatures.

It was a still night, and the moon was low and shrouded. We knew that Arminius had scouts watching the fort, but we didn’t fear them. The land surrounding Aliso was vast and the number of enemies in close proximity few. Should we happen to stumble upon them, then the more pious amongst us would take that as a message from the gods that the mission was doomed to fail from the start.

My own thoughts on a chance meeting were a little different. If we found the enemy then we could steal their mounts. As far as our reconnaissance was concerned, it wouldn’t be helpful to announce our presence thus, but the beasts could carry the runners to the Rhine more quickly than their feet. However, before leaving the gate, H had been fast to veto my suggestion of hunting the enemy scouts for such a purpose.

‘If we unsheathe our blades, something’s gone wrong,’ he told me. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry, Felix,’ he added, sensing something in my nervous energy. ‘There’ll be killing to do if we’re ever to reach the Rhine.’

He was right about that, of course. He was also right that I wanted to draw blood, I then realized. I wanted to fight. I wanted to lose myself in that chaos. That savagery.

There was nothing savage about the way we crossed fields and woodland. Our approach was calm and methodical. H led from the front, and we followed in a loose single file. I brought up the rear, pausing often to watch and listen that we were not being tracked.

There was no need or room for words. We took our lead from our centurion: walking where he did; stopping when he did. There was little of this, as we aimed to cover twelve miles in the darkness. The Roman soldier marches at four miles an hour with full equipment, and is expected to cover twenty miles a day in such conditions. Though unburdened, we were required by stealth and terrain to moderate our pace, and so pauses in our advance west were limited to the time it took to piss, and to draw a few gulps of water from our skins.

The spectre of dawn was threatening the sky when H broke from a farmer’s trail and led us towards the darkness that promised the refuge of trees. We found what we wanted there, and so we set about building our hide. Fallen branches formed the support for blankets. Each had thin rope stitched into the corners, and we used pegs to stretch the material tight, as we would a tent. We then covered this structure with the decaying leaves that autumn had left thick on the woodland floor.

‘Everyone inside,’ H whispered. ‘Get some rest. I’ll take first watch, and check the hide and position once it gets lighter.’

With the others, I slithered inside our temporary home. Titus struggled to enter without shaking leaves free, and I knew that the big man would be cursing inside his head. There was little room for personal space, nor did we want it – following our labour, sweat was now growing cold. Our collective body heat beneath the blankets was our best defence against the German chill.

We were not out of danger, but we no longer had to have our senses on high alert, and so thoughts that I wished left in the fort began to fight to be heard. I wanted none of them. Fortunately, the day and night had been long, and my emotions were as exhausted as my feet. I tucked my chin against my chest as Titus began to snore. It wasn’t long until I followed his example.

The daylight hours passed without incident. I was woken sometime in the afternoon by Titus, and took my turn at the opening of our hide, my eyes and ears tuned to the autumnal woodland and the shuffling of bronzed leaves, the dank of wet earth and mulch rich in my nostrils.

There was no escaping my mind as I lay beneath the trees. As the coming winter stripped the branches above me, so too were my thoughts laid bare.

I loved Linza. I loved her because she had told me to go and fuck myself. I loved her because she was scared, but she was defiant. I hadn’t understood it at the time, but after she had got so angry I had come to realize that she didn’t need me, but that she wanted me. I was as certain of that as I was that my misreading of her emotions had cost me my chance.