Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

I got my first taste of the answer as I saw the front ranks ahead of us become still, as if they had broken out of a seizure.

‘Enemy’s backing off,’ Varo said, though he seemed to doubt every word.

I expected to hear taunts follow them. Challenges. None came. Every man who had fought struggled to stay on his feet. I knew what was coming next.

‘First Century!’ I heard my friend Priscus bellow. ‘In open order, quick march!’ We opened up gaps in our ranks and files. Within moments, the men that had been fighting before us began to move back through us. Beneath the rims of their helmets there were hollow eyes, devoid of any spark of life. They were ghosts. Hollow vessels. They reacted to orders because they had been drilled and drilled, and that discipline kept their bodies obeying even when their minds had fled.

This time I did look down. I couldn’t face them. When I looked up, it was not Roman soldiers that I saw, but a rebel army. The space between us was a canvas of bodies that moved as the wounded writhed and crawled. The enemy were barely a hundred yards away now, and they were moving. Moving fast.

But not towards us.

‘We beat them?’ I asked, incredulously.

Varo looked at me then. ‘No, Corvus.’ I think that I saw tears in his eyes. ‘They’re marching on Italy.’

We had lost.

I stood in the front ranks of a defeated legion and watched as our enemy marched by us towards Italy. Towards Roman lands that were ripe for sacking, and Roman citizens who were destined for rape and slavery. They marched onwards because we had failed. There were only a hundred yards between us and the rebels, the streaming procession of thousands, but for all the use we were now, they might as well have been on the other side of the Adriatic.

I looked about me as best I could. I could see treetops behind us. A small wood, maybe. Behind that was the menacing ridge where sheep and goat trails ran through the jagged stone. I wondered if some shepherd had watched on like a god as war played out beneath his gaze.

I turned back to my comrades, then. If it was possible to age a decade in a day, we had done so. There was little conversation – a few muttered curses here and there – but the atmosphere wasn’t one of pity, but bitter shame.

I felt a presence pushing through the ranks to come to my side. Brutus. ‘We lost,’ I thought I heard him say.

I had a question for him. It took me a long time to ask it. ‘The lad from my section. Gums. He lives?’

Brutus kept his grey eyes staring out at the rolling sea of the enemy, and said nothing.

The sun was touching the mountaintop to our front when Priscus returned with our orders.

‘We haven’t lost,’ was the first thing he said, and then he explained how we had come to be in a position to watch the mass of enemy walk by as though they were on a summer stroll.

‘The legate could see that we couldn’t hold,’ our veteran explained – though I supposed we were all veterans now. ‘There was a river running through the valley over on the left flank. He used a wide bend to anchor us, and pivoted the cohorts back so that the valley was open to the enemy.’

The legate had been correct in assuming that the enemy would take an open road to Italy over a grinding battle. There was nothing to be gained by killing what remained of us, but in Italy they could shake an empire. Find riches and plunder. And for every moment they wasted in battle, Tiberius and his army in the north would be closing the gap to cut them off.

‘What does any of that matter?’ Varo growled. ‘They’re past us! They’re on their way to Italy!’

He took no solace in the fact that he still lived. I don’t think that any of us did. Shame is a powerful force, and its blade was in our guts as fiercely as any rebel sword could be. There was more, too. Pragmatically, we knew that there was no happy ending for a beleaguered force in a hostile country where the enemy numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Die today or die tomorrow seemed to be our choice. At least by giving our life on this field we could have achieved something.

‘We still can,’ Priscus said as Varo gave voice to that sentiment. There was no smile on his face, but there was life in his eyes. There was a force I could trust. That I believed with every fibre of my body. Priscus had been there for me since the day I arrived at the legion. If he told me we could win, then we would win. I wanted to embrace him. Instead I asked him how we would beat an army ten times our size.

He put his hand on my shoulder as he told me. ‘We’re going to attack.’

At first I thought the words were bluster. Some attempt to drag our shattered morale from out of the bloodied dirt.

I was wrong.

The first evidence came after dark; after the sun had crept behind the ridge to our front, casting the valley into a pink haze. That morning, I had never thought to see a sunset again, and though shame at our defeat burned at me I was grateful to see its majesty. Now, it seemed as though it was the next sunrise I was unlikely to witness.

Because we were going on the attack.

It had struck us all as craven that our legion commander would spare our lives and allow the enemy to march on Italy – some men had even muttered that he should take his own life for his failure of command – but now it became clear that he had had a plan all along. Recognizing that his understrength legion could not hold the line forever, he had offered the enemy the open route that it craved. In doing so he had saved two-thirds of his force for an audacious roll of the dice – we would take to the goat trails of the mountain behind us, overhaul the enemy in the night, and fall on them in the dawn.

Simple.

Deadly.

And with almost no chance of success.

‘At least it is a chance,’ Varo offered, anxious to draw blood and rid himself of the sense of failure that clung to us all.

When darkness had claimed the valley we were pulled back into the small wood that had been at our back. Here, I discovered, the walking wounded would form a wall of shields at the front of the trees. The enemy would have scouts to watch our movements, and should they try and probe they needed to be met with challenge and javelin. The main body of the enemy, we were told, had advanced out of the valley, and encamped for the night. Our own scouts had brought this information, and these hard men would now be the ones to lead us along the mountain trails to outflank the rebels.

Octavius started laughing.

‘Keep the noise down.’ Brutus hissed.

He couldn’t, and so Varo hit him across the back of the helmet. ‘What’s so funny, you dickhead?’ he demanded, as quietly as it was possible for the big man to speak.

‘Are we the bad ones?’ Octavius asked back.

‘What?’

‘Are we the bad ones, here? You know, like in every story, there are good ones and bad ones. Are we the bad ones?’

Varo snorted. ‘We’re the good ones, you cock.’

‘Just wondering,’ Octavius replied, and though I could not see his smile, I could hear it, ‘because this all reminds me of something.’

Priscus asked him what.

‘Thermopylae,’ my friend enlightened us, referring to the famed last stand of the Spartans, a tale that all aspiring warriors relished.

‘There’ve been a lot of last stands,’ Varo grunted, clearly unhappy with how ours had gone.

‘I don’t mean that,’ Octavius told me. ‘I mean how the Persians got led through the mountain pass to come out behind the Greeks, and then beat them.’

‘Exactly,’ Varo said. ‘And we’ll do the same.’

‘That’s what I’m asking. Are we the bad ones? Are we the Persians?’ Octavius teased. ‘I think you’d look good with a pointy beard and a couple of young boys in your harem, Varo.’