Джерейнт Джонс - Siege

The soldier was dying. Wounds and starvation were bringing him to his knees. Death had shadowed him from the moment he had entered the forest, and through a thousand cuts and days of agony it now reached out to claim its victim.

The soldier spat in its face.

He could feel it on his heels – it snapped at them. Grasped at him. Its cold touch was on his shoulders. He ran from this cloying force, every painful mile of the race worn on his uniform like a decoration. Every rip, every stain told a story.

It wasn’t a happy one.

What was left of his clothing was torn and filthy; a broken sandal flapped against a foot rife with blisters.

As the soldier broke through the forest’s branches, the final stitches of his footwear pulled away. He cursed as his bare foot hit wet grass and slid outwards. Feeling the screaming of his tendons that warned of rupture, he gave into gravity. His body slammed down on to the slope, where it gathered momentum. The man grimaced as he felt a sharp stone rake across his back, and then he hit the ditch, feet plunging into the stagnant water. He used his battered knees to absorb the impact, his backside sinking down towards his ankles, the breath forced out of him as the cold water reached his waist.

Instantly, the soldier looked up the slope.

His eyes were wide. He was scared – very scared – but it was not a fear born of cowardice. For the past few days, his life had been measured by hours and miles. The fact that he drew breath meant that he had won the race so far, but the broken sandal, and now the slip, had cost him time.

He spat, and prayed that it would not cost him his life.

The soldier searched his surroundings. There was no sign of them, but that meant nothing. The men that chased him were mounted, and this was their land. They could predict where he would run, and be there to greet him with spear-points and smiles. Maybe, if he was lucky, they’d be forced to kill him in the chase. If they caught him… He spat again to clear that image from his head. The soldier still carried a blade, albeit a short dagger. It was no match for a sword, let alone a cavalryman’s spear, but it would be good enough to nick his own throat and deny the enemy their entertainment.

The soldier scooped up a mouthful of ditch water to slake his thirst. ‘Fucking goat-fuckers,’ he growled.

The words and the rage warmed him. He was intelligent enough to be scared, but he was also angry enough to be dangerous. ‘Fucking goat-fuckers,’ he mumbled again, looking out in frustration across the open ground ahead of him.

It was cultivated farmland, seemingly abandoned now that blood was flowing in the province. To attempt to cross such a killing ground was an invitation to the afterlife, and so the soldier knew what he must do to reach the smudge of smoke creeping up on the horizon.

He would have to crawl.

Day became night. Night grew to dawn. Hour after hour, the soldier moved through the ditches like a rat. Farmland became a patchwork of fields and wooded groves. Concealment became easier, but the soldier’s vision began to swim from fatigue. The thought of a forest of corpses kept his limbs moving.

At some point during the second night he collapsed on to his face. When he woke in daylight he tasted blood. A tooth came away from the gum. The soldier threw it into the grass, angry at his body for giving way. Angry because it was a sign of the end.

And then he saw the smoke.

It was no smudge now, but a stark tower of soot that rose from behind thick wooden walls. Thick wooden walls that were studded with guard towers set beside an open gate.

An open gate.

The soldier’s stomach lurched into his throat. No!

‘Close it!’ he tried to shout, but the words fell pathetically from his lips. He stumbled, cursed, crawled. The fires within him began to burn stronger. He had come so far. Too far to fail.

The soldier dug his fingernails into the dirt. Finally, words formed: ‘Close it, you idiots!’ he roared. ‘Close the gate!’

But it was too late.

He could hear the hoof beats. He could feel them through the soil.

Bastards! he screamed in his mind. Fucking goat-fucking bastards!

In that moment the soldier knew that it would be death for him. He could no longer run from it, not even crawl from it, and so he drew his blade, pushed himself on to his knees, and saw the horsemen for the first time.

He tried to swear, but his tongue had become dry at the sight of them: a charging wall of armour and beast. A tide of murder.

The soldier drove his dagger into the dirt, and gave himself to death.

I thought I knew fear.

I had seen it: men screaming and wailing, bodies whole but minds shattered through combat. I had smelt it: the piss, shit and puke that came with every battle. I had felt it: my muscles dancing and quivering like netted fish. I had even tasted it: the rank acid that burned my throat as my insides churned and retched.

Yes, after years of bloodshed – years of the butchery I was told was soldiering – I had thought I knew fear.

I was wrong.

It was not battle itself that now had me shaking like a child, a dribble of tears cutting paths through the grime and blood coating my hollow cheeks.

It was what was to follow.

I stood in a field of corpses, the carpet of dead so thick that a man could step from one body to another as children would dance on stones in a river. I watched as these cold Roman bodies were hacked apart by the German blades and feasted upon by crows that owed allegiance to none but the gods.

We numbered a few hundred. A few hundred miserable, half-starved, blood-drenched creatures. The sole survivors of a Roman expeditionary force that had marched into Germany with the might of three legions, only to be torn apart inside an endless, vengeful forest. Brutal hurricanes of wind and rain had been followed by murderous storms of German steel, and on those blades I had seen my comrades die. Only Stumps, right ear half hanging from his head, stood beside me now.

Yes, I had thought I knew fear, but no skirmish or battle could compare with the terror that now filled my mind, because it was no longer death that I dreaded.

It was life.

The life of a prisoner.

The life of a slave.

‘We have to escape,’ I whispered to Stumps.

My comrade stared back blankly.

I had not fought my way through the war in Pannonia, and through Arminius’s treachery in the forest, to live and die a slave. ‘We have to escape,’ I repeated.

‘You’re right,’ I heard behind me. The Latin words were accented, and I turned to see the face of a Batavian auxiliary, one of the light-infantry soldiers recruited into the army from provinces under Rome’s control.

The man was tall, thickset, with a scruff of blond beard covering his face and throat. Batavians were as German as the men who guarded us, but keen allies of Rome; they had chosen the losing side of this battle.

The man spoke to me, his blue eyes wild and lively. ‘We have to act soon, whilst we have the strength.’ A fighter, who could not conceive of defeat even when the savage evidence of it surrounded him.