Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

Using the nearest pillar of smoke as our guide, we rushed through the streets of slum housing. Here, non-citizens lived aside and atop one another in decrepit homes sitting on narrow and filthy streets. One of these proved to be a dead-end, and with no time to waste I ordered the soldiers up and over a low rooftop. For a few brief seconds, the added elevation carried the sound of crying and screaming and oaths and orders.

It carried the sound of panic.

It carried the sound of murder.

I found them in the street. Rounding a corner, I almost tripped over the two off-duty soldiers laid out like drunks, but it was not wine that ran red into the gutter.

‘Draw your swords,’ I ordered, and I heard steel pulled free of scabbards. I looked quickly for bloody footprints and trails, but saw nothing. Then the thick cloud of black smoke fought to regain my attention.

So did the screams.

The dead would have to wait.

We ran on.

We ran on, and I considered that I had been wrong. That what I was hearing and seeing were not the signs of panic.

They were of terror .

And perhaps fear was taking hold of the streets, but there were some who resisted the spread of the emotion that could be as deadly as disease, and as we arrived at the source of the nearest blaze I took in the dozen sweat-soaked civilians who were fighting with buckets of water to quench the flames. One section of the two-storey building was already lost, its structure gutted and visible like a blackened skeleton. Now the fight was to stop the fires spreading to the apartments that adjoined it.

‘Gods,’ I heard beside me. I followed the young soldier’s eyes upwards.

There was a woman and two children in a window, a baby in her arms.

‘Please!’ she shouted to the civilian men in the street. ‘Please!’

I realized what she intended to do: she wanted to throw the baby.

‘I’ll catch her!’ a solid-looking man promised, and perhaps he would have done, but at the moment the woman went to toss her precious child into the arms of a stranger, a supports of the building cracked and splintered in the heat, and the whole edifice tilted to its side. Time seemed to slow as I saw the mother juggle the baby in her hands, her eyes and mouth stretched open in pure terror, and then the young life tumbled into the hungry flame below her.

I don’t know if the baby screamed as it died. Nothing could be heard above the torment of its mother. Even the spitting and hissing of the fire seemed muted against her wails.

I turned to the men who had followed me, welcoming the distraction. ‘You two, get us buckets. Kick down doors if you have to, just find buckets and get back here. Go!

‘You! Get back to the fort and report on what you’ve seen. Run!

‘The rest of you, form a chain with the civilians. They’re using a fountain behind that building,’ I told them, having seen red-faced women and children stagger from that direction with filled buckets and cooking pots. ‘Go!’

I turned my eyes back to the scene. The civilians were doing their best, and now there were an extra seven sets of hands, but there was no escaping the truth that was in front of me – the flame would devour the upper apartments before we could beat back the fire. Smoke would choke the mother and her children to death, and then their bodies would be consumed.

‘Where are you going?’ a man shouted at me. The hair of his beard was singed.

I didn’t answer, but used the wooden shutters of a window to climb on to the building beside the apartment. I was a floor too low, and separated by a yard-wide alleyway, but I thought I had a way to the family.

‘Get me a ladder!’ I shouted down. ‘Quickly! A ladder! Go!’

The man with the singed beard quickly grasped my intention. ‘We need a ladder! Who’s got a ladder?’ he called, running to find it as I assessed my plan. It was a good one, and by that, I mean that it was simple. I would rest the ladder across the narrow alleyway and against the slowly tilting building. I would climb it, and then haul myself up on to the rooftop. From there I could offer my arm to the window below. I was certain that I had the strength to pull the two young children free and on to the rooftop. From there I could put them on the ladder across the alley to the lower roof. The mother, well… she would want her children saved, of that I was sure.

‘I’ve got the ladder!’ the man shouted, and he passed it up, helped by another. ‘Please get them!’ he pleaded.

I met his eye, and gave him a look that I hoped would reassure him. With the screams of the woman and her children in my ears, and smoke choking my throat and stinging my eyes, I placed the ladder across the gap of the alleyway, and began to climb.

It was as I put my hands on to the rooftop that the building collapsed.

I awoke on my back. There was no flame, but I tasted soot and smoke in my throat. My eyes itched and scratched. I moved to sit up, and winced at a deep pain in my side and head.

‘What happened?’ I asked the man with the singed beard. He was kneeling by my side. All was quiet save for muted conversation between groups of people that I saw out of the corners of my sore eyes.

‘The fire burned out the supporting timbers,’ he told me, spitting dark fluid on to the dirt. ‘Whole thing fell in on top of itself.’

The last that I remembered, I was about to haul myself on to the roof of that building. The man must have sensed my question – how was I not amongst the ruins?

‘As it started to go you pushed off the wall and jumped back,’ he explained. ‘Like a cat, except that you didn’t land on your feet.’ There was no humour in his voice. I imagined that the people in the building had been known to him, and it was more than smoke that had made his eyes the brightest shade of red. ‘You landed hard on the lower roof. I expected to find your head split.’

‘It feels like it is,’ I confessed, but my helmet had saved me. ‘The family?’

I should never have asked the question. The answer was obvious, and I saw it drive a dagger of pain inside the man’s heart.

‘Thank you for trying though,’ he told me as he left.

I pushed myself to my feet. I felt eyes upon me. It was the young soldiers of my century. They looked at me as ewes eye the sheepdog.

‘Report.’ I spoke to no one in particular.

The natural leader among them piped up. He was square-jawed and thick-set. ‘Fire’s out, section commander.’

I shook my head. ‘I can see that. I mean what the fuck’s happening in the rest of the town? Has the lad I sent as runner got back from the fort?’

‘I don’t know, section commander,’ the soldier admitted. ‘And no.’

I rubbed a hand over the back of my head. The skull felt intact, but my head was throbbing. I’d suffered hard hits to the head before – sometimes as a child who climbed too high in trees, sometimes as an adult who provoked fights in inns – and I knew that the most severe pain and consequences could come later. I did not want to lose consciousness again with this troop of green idiots as my guardians. The fact that I had woken to the care of the singed man spoke volumes as to the competency and confidence of the young men.

Still, they had followed me, and now they looked to me for orders. What would Marcus or Brutus do in such a situation? What would they say?

‘Good work,’ I told them, having no idea whether or not it was true. ‘Now let’s get back to camp.’

The gates were shut when we returned, but we were soon allowed in by the same old centurion who had sent us out. He eyed my dishevelled appearance, but made no comment on it.

‘You put that fire out?’ he asked me, jutting his vine cane in the direction of where a remnant of smoke hung lazily in the air.