Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

‘What?’ I growled.

Gums didn’t speak. He just pointed. I followed the finger, and twisted to look over my shoulder.

More smoke. And close.

‘Shit.’

It was a farm, or at least it had been. I didn’t know if I was supposed to investigate such things, but the burning buildings weren’t far. It seemed like the right thing to drop down the hillside, and to approach the gutted buildings.

I was doubting that now.

It was the smell that did it. Looking at the four blackened corpses, I felt nothing. Not even when Gums pointed out that they were holding each other, a final act of love and desperation.

No. It was the smell. It was the smell of roast chicken, and as we had approached the smoking ruins of what had been a family’s life, I had embraced that smell, and pictured food and drink with my friends. My stomach had rumbled at the thought, and I had hoped that maybe some animals had been spared the destruction so that we might spit one on the end of a javelin.

I hadn’t thought that it would be the parents and their two young children that would smell so good. As soon as I realized what had caused my hunger, my stomach turned to concrete.

‘Do we bury them, section commander?’ someone asked. I don’t know who – most of my section sounded the same, young and bleating – and I made no reply. I simply looked into the mountains, then put a hand on the shoulder of the nearest body, and felt at the heat.

‘They can’t be too far from here,’ I told my section, ‘the corpse is warm. Be vigilant.’

As soon as I said the words, I realized how stupid they sounded. My section’s eyeballs were bulging from their sockets. Knuckles were white where they gripped their javelins. They could not have been more alert.

‘Do we bury them, section commander?’ the soldier asked again.

I turned to face him. He was short, and his helmet was too big for him. Beneath the rim, his face was red from exertion and stress.

‘Do you see any tools with us, Spurius?’ I asked.

He did not. We would not be digging marching camps into the stone of the mountain. Shield and javelin would be our defence. The previous night, Justus had wisely positioned us in an outcrop of rock, nature providing us with a formidable rampart. There was no shortage of such bastions in the Pannonian mountains.

‘It just feels wrong to leave them like that?’ the well-intentioned youth ventured.

I said nothing. My eyes had been drawn to a new atrocity.

‘They killed the dogs,’ Gums said angrily.

Of course they had.

But who were they killers?

And where were they now?

I stood beside my comrades. No one spoke a word as we watched the red disc of the sun slide behind the mountains to the west, the air about us cast into a dusty orange glow.

‘This job has its perks.’ Octavius spoke up, breaking our trance. No man disagreed with him.

I had rejoined my century as dusk was threatening the mountaintops and reported on what I had seen to Centurion Justus, who approved of my investigating the smoke.

‘We’re here to find rebels,’ the man had told me, wiping a day’s sweat from his brow. ‘If we follow enough smoke and bodies, we’ll find them eventually.’

I was about to salute and take my leave, but the officer wasn’t done with me. ‘There’s a small village at the end of this little valley. Varo’s section found it. It’s still intact –and there’s people there.’ He looked at me as if that was important, then became irritated that I did not grasp the implication.

‘It means they’re on the insurgents’ side,’ my centurion said definitively. ‘Why else would their homes be standing when there’re fires all over the horizon?’

I’d had no answer. Only one question.

‘Will we have someone to fight, sir?’

Justus had smiled. He was as eager for blood as I was.

‘We’ll find our enemy, Corvus. Tomorrow, we’ll find them.’

We came in the dark.

There were three sections of us, with Centurion Justus at our head. The rest other fifty men of the century – Octavius and Priscus with them – had taken blocking positions on the overlooking ridges and across the trails that led out of the mountain pass.

Our leader’s words were simple, and ominous: ‘Nobody gets out.’

It was a dog that first noted our approach through the pre-dawn gloom. Its bark was savage and caustic. Then it was nothing but a whine. After a few seconds of that, all was silent again but for stumbled steps, and the bump of shield and body.

‘Did someone kill the dog?’ a young voice whispered.

‘Shut your fucking mouth,’ I snarled as quietly as I could.

I knew the dog’s assassin. Varo had gone ahead of us with a few trusted veterans. They were stripped of all equipment but their swords. They were to find sentries, and silence them. I envied their task. I carried my shield in one hand, javelin in the other. The cheek-plates of my helmet chafed my face. The lip of the brow rubbed against my forehead. It was not a thing of comfort, but perhaps, in the coming moments, it would save my life.

‘Wall,’ I heard passed quietly from mouth to mouth in the darkness. ‘Form on the wall.’

I came to it in a moment. It was a pathetic structure, no higher than my waist. Good enough for keeping out pests, maybe, and keeping in a few sheep. No good against the soldiers who stalked the night.

I looked to the left and right of me, seeing the silhouettes of two men of my section. ‘Stay low,’ I whispered.

They crouched. My eyes looked on into the darkness. Into a void that I knew held homes of stone, and thatch. And, maybe, our enemy.

We waited.

The stillness of dawn in the mountains was absolute. Atop the nearest ridges, a pale light appeared and began to spread downwards like mercury. The village below was still shrouded in shadow. Behind the low wall, soldiers watched, and waited.

The first dark shape that I saw was the dog. At first I thought it was a rock, but as dawn crept closer, its features grew clearer. Its head lay almost flat back against its spine. Varo and his men had taken no chances. The beast was nearly decapitated.

Slowly, as if cloth were pressed against my eyes, I began to make out more shapes. They were low and rectangular, built from the same stone that surrounded us. I saw four of them, but the gloom made it hard to tell. I wondered whom they housed. Whom they would disgorge. The air was still, and promised no violence, but I thought back to the skirmish five years ago. How a seemingly deserted hamlet had turned into a place of death. How it had surprised us all. How it had surprised me, and led to the crippling of Brutus, and the death of Fano.

Not today. Today I would expect death at every turn. Today I would be prepared to give it freely. All that mattered was the safety of my friends, and my selfish desire to be lost in the lust of combat.

I looked to the left and right of me, ready to use the tip of my javelin to rouse a weary soldier. I needn’t have worried. The young troops sat poised like hares with the scent of wolf in their nostrils. Their muscles were tight, senses alert. They were ready to spring forward. They were ready to be led.

I felt rather than saw the dark shape that made its way along the wall. Then, he was beside me. Centurion Justus.

‘The one on the far left’s yours,’ he told me, meaning one of the dwellings. ‘Let’s go.’

It was time.

We crept out over the wall.

I stepped as though I was walking on a thinly iced river, each precious footfall carrying the potential to end my life. My mind told me that I was quiet, but my heart beat faster and told me that I was crashing towards the hut like an elephant. Behind me, I felt the presence of three men of my section. The other four were going to their own hut. We had discussed how we would conduct ourselves the night before, and our plan was simple.