Джерейнт Джонс - Siege

‘You see a theatre around here?’ Stumps asked his friend. ‘We’ve been standing like spare pricks on the wall. Give us some entertainment.’

‘Shouldn’t you be in the quartermaster’s?’ Titus rumbled back. ‘Go stack your blankets on the hand carts ready to leave.’

‘Tell him about that, Stumps,’ said Micon with a rare smile of mischief.

Stumps’s own face turned sour and curdled. ‘Had to bribe the bastard Albus to reverse the transfer.’ His voice was forlorn.

Titus kept his eyes shut, but his thick chest bounced with laughter. ‘You got the job you always wanted and you paid to come back here? You soft bastard.’

‘Someone has to look after the suicide section,’ Stumps countered. ‘That’s what the rest of the century calls us, thanks to you lot. Especially you, Felix. Volunteering for everything like you’re tired of living. I’m starting to think you’re one of those strange ones that likes women to hit his balls.’

I allowed my friend a smile for that insult. Amongst my friends, and soon to set things right with Linza, a quiet confidence had settled over me. Perhaps it was the power of hot water, but I felt invigorated and full of life. I was under no illusions that there were trials to come, but for now I was content to take Linza’s advice and live in the moment, rather than fear the possible, and the inevitable.

‘Titus!’ Stumps exclaimed dramatically. ‘You missed it! He smiled, and you missed it!’

‘I’m going now,’ I told them.

‘Have fun.’ Stumps smirked before turning back to Titus. ‘Come on, mate, give us one bloody story.’

As I pulled back the partition to the equipment room I heard a groan as Titus gave up his battle for peace and began to tell his friend how a group of foraging German women had come within twenty yards of our hiding place.

‘One of them was the most delicious thing I’ve ever seen,’ Titus explained as I opened the door, the cold instantly assaulting my freshly shaven face. ‘I’m not going to lie. I was seriously considering certain death, just to have a go with her.’

Stumps’s reply was lost to me as the door closed quickly behind me, taken by the wind.

I turned and made my way in the direction of the civilian quarters. I wondered what I would find there, now that word would have reached them of our intended departure. The men of the legions were drilled in such decampment, and they would have prepared their kit and equipment within hours, the labour made easy by Caedicius’s order that only a day’s ration and fighting gear would be carried. The message in such an order was clear – this was an evacuation, not a relocation. I wondered if the civilians would understand that.

‘Felix,’ a voice called from behind me.

Livius, the section commander to whom I was now accountable. Titus had been incorporated into our section too, which now numbered nine men. I worried that this anomaly was the reason that he approached me now, about to break the news that our circle would be split up, and one of us moved on to a section of strangers.

I should have prepared myself for worse.

‘We’ve just been moved up to immediate notice to move. Prefect’s orders,’ the soldier told me.

His youthful face was excited at the prospect of our attempted escape. My own had turned to stone.

I knew what that notice would mean.

‘No one can leave the barracks.’

I re-entered the room a different man than I had left it. My comrades saw as much in the defeated slope of my shoulders.

They grimaced in sympathy for me when I told them why.

‘Albus wants us all in armour, helmets on, ready to go.’

Stumps spat at the order. ‘Takes all day to put a helmet on now, does it? How big’s his fucking head? We can be good to go in no time. We’re all packed. Not like we turned up with a villa’s worth of furniture, is it?’

‘I’m just telling you what he said, Stumps.’ I spoke tonelessly, suddenly drained by the knowledge that I was kept from Linza, with her so close.

‘Yeah, sorry,’ Stumps apologized, sensing my disappointment. ‘You’ll see her when we get to the Rhine, mate,’ he offered. ‘We may get stood back down anyway. You know how these things go.’

But the strong winds flirting with the barrack block told me otherwise. Soon rain was lashing against the walls.

‘It’s got legs,’ Titus opined, having opened the doorway to look at the sky.

Brando had joined him. A native of the lands, he knew the German seasons better than any of us. ‘We’ll go tonight.’

But darkness was a long time away. To leave in daylight would be suicide, offering the German scouts ample time to ride ahead and warn their army, and so the order to remain in barracks chafed at me like a rope around my neck.

‘I’m going to the latrines,’ I told my comrades.

‘I’ll keep you company,’ Titus offered. ‘Sound of this rain has me pissing like a horse.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Stumps smirked. ‘Develop some new friendship whilst you were away, did you, boys? Well, enjoy,’ he joked, hoping to lift my mood.

It didn’t work.

I stepped outdoors, the rain whipping across my face. Its touch was cold, and violent. I savoured it.

‘You don’t need to keep an eye on me,’ I told Titus as we walked to the latrines.

‘It’s not that.’ He shook his head, surprising me by coming to a stop. We were short of the latrines, fully exposed to the elements.

‘Not a good place to piss?’ I spoke up, wondering at what was in the man’s mind.

‘I don’t like the odds on this one,’ Titus confided in me with a look towards the shrouded skies. ‘There’re still chests full of coin in the forests, Felix. You can take the chance to get them if you make it out.’

A legion’s pay chests. A fortune.

As the approaching storm assaulted me, I thought of what those coins could buy: a ship; a home; a new beginning.

‘Where?’ I asked my friend. I had been born with a sense of direction and distance, and my time in the legions and escape from that service had only honed the talent. I trusted in my ability to find what Titus was offering.

‘You sure you don’t want to write it down?’

‘I’ll remember.’

And so, closing in so that his words would not be lost to the wind, Titus told me where I could find a fortune. When he was finished, I repeated the directions back to him.

‘It’s a needle in a haystack,’ Titus acknowledged. ‘But at least we know the haystack.’

We said nothing as we went to piss in the latrines, our thoughts caught up on that day when three eagles had tumbled, and Titus had walked into the forest alone, leaving his comrades behind him. It had been a day of misery, and bloodshed.

Tonight would be no different.

Wind carried rain below the brim of my helmet and into my eyes. It forced it into every crack of my armour. Every space between clothing and flesh. The rain felt all the harder for its coldness, the fat drops like the pebbles I had thrown at Marcus as a child, back when we had fought our first war as toddlers on the beach.

Marcus. I would see him soon. The certainty of it gnawed at my conscience like a rabid wolf. It was not a reunion I was ready to embrace.

I was not the only man to stand miserable in the pelting rain. We had formed as a century at the excited calls of the company runner. His cries of ‘Prepare to move!’ had sent us reaching for shields and weapons. Men had streamed from the barrack rooms to form up before the block, some bolting quickly to empty bladders before the formation was fully formed.

‘It’s still fucking daylight,’ Stumps had scowled.

By that light I saw the faces of the men about me scratched red by the cold. We stood impotent, awaiting an order to move and lurch forwards towards the gate. All that we knew was that we were leaving. The details were in the minds of our commanders. There was nothing for the foot soldier to do but stamp his sandals, blow air on to his hands and think.