Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

Maybe. I had no one that I cared for in that land. Save Marcus, my family stood here in the ranks around me. The legion could fight to save Italy, but I would fight for the lives of my comrades, if only for a dawn.

I looked at the horizon. Black sky was now grey ash.

A voice rang through the night. It was the promise of death, of pain and bloody murder.

It was the promise of a reckoning.

The promise of battle.

‘Eighth Legion! Advance!’

We stepped off in shadow.

Less than a day before we had faced this enemy on the open plain. As a brute barges open a closed door, they had used their mass to force us aside.

Not today.

Today we came for them in dawn’s fading darkness, and if yesterday they had been brutes, then today we were assassins. We were dealers of death. We were nightmare made flesh. The enemy had carried the field, marched through the pass, and then they had rested. They were amateurs, and amateurs in victory forget that a win in war is but a fleeting moment. Survive one sword stroke, and the next might take off your head. That was as true at the strategic level of leadership as it was for the foot soldier, and the leadership of these men was lacking. Even our call to advance had drawn no response. Only when the tramp of a fifteen hundred pairs of feet was on their head did the enemy know that they were waking with a blade to their throat.

And those blades were thirsty.

‘Eighth Legion! Charge!’

In rank and file, we came like demons from the shadows of their fires. The dark night gave birth to us, our arms and armour shining in the firelight, caked in the dry blood of our enemy’s brothers. They were sleeping on the ground, exhausted, ‘victorious’. For many, the first sign of their misconception was cold steel in their insides.

Gods, it was a slaughter.

Flame, and the exaltation of seeing a panicked enemy – that was my impression of our charge. I drove my blade downwards as often as up, and before I had chance to breathe, I had killed, and I had maimed.

‘Please!’ a rebel begged in Dalmatian.

I drove my sword into his chest. Then I was on to the next.

Flame and death. Amateur against professional.

We butchered them. Hundreds died in those first moments of terror. Maybe more than a thousand. The stink of blood and guts cut through the stench of sweat and the smoke of their fires.

I saw Varo take off a man’s arm with a swipe of his sword. He finished the rebel by stamping on his face. He turned. Saw me.

He was smiling.

‘Fear the Eighth!’ he roared into the night. ‘Fear the Eighth!’

Oh, there was fear. It was everywhere. In wails, and screams, and the fleeing backs of our enemy. Perhaps, if they had numbered only ten times our own force, we would have beaten them all before the sunrise.

But they were almost twenty thousand, and we were not much more than one.

Behind the bolting foe, in the depths of their camp, the enemy host rallied.

They rallied. And then they attacked.

‘Hold the line!’ someone was shouting. ‘Hold the line!’

I looked to my left and right. Flame lit the fugitive figures of the enemy as they raced for life from our now halted soldiers. Behind them was a stirring black mass. A mass that was soon to charge against us.

Something bumped into my back. I turned, my sword up.

Priscus. He wore the helmet that had once belonged to Justus. He was my leader now, as well as my friend. ‘Form up!’ he urged me, then shouting to the others: ‘Here! Form here! Three ranks! Three ranks! Form!’

A stranger came to each side of me. We touched our shields. Roman soldiers were replaceable parts, and we could fight as well with one comrade as another, though I hoped that my brothers were close. There was shouting in the night. Shouting in a language that I understood, and I knew that the guttural growls were no order to retreat.

‘They’re coming!’ I shouted, the words hard in my scorched throat. ‘They’re coming!’

And they came. A black blizzard. A storm of flesh and steel.

‘They’re coming!’

I heard a laugh behind me. I’d recognize it anywhere. Octavius. ‘Hey, Corvus? Do you think they’re coming?’

I had no time to laugh even if I’d wanted to. The enemy were upon us, battering against my shield, dying on my blade.

‘Fear the Eighth!’ I heard Varo bellow from somewhere, and other men took up the call. I screamed it myself as I rammed my sword into flesh. Shoved my shield against shield. Spat in my enemy’s face. ‘Fear the Eighth! Fear the Eighth!’

The battle line was horror. Pure horror. But I was lost to it. No time to think. No time to do anything but gnash my teeth and fight for every second of life. I didn’t even know that the battle was no longer being fought in the shadows of campfires but in the growing light of dawn. I didn’t know that the skies were now the same slate grey as Brutus’s eyes, and in that light, the enemy now found a reason to fight for something greater than defence, and survival.

They saw the eagle of the Eighth.

I felt a hand wrench me back. ‘Rotate! Rotate!’

I stumbled back as Octavius took my place. Held above the heads of our men I saw the gilded standard of our legion, the enemy swarming towards it like ants on to a carcass. The eagle was a symbol of the Roman Empire that they had rebelled against, and they wanted it. They knew the pain that its loss would cause. The news would carry across the world. Even the Emperor himself would be struck a blow. The eagle had come from his divine hand, and now it was coming close to falling into the paws of the men who had told him ‘ no! ’

‘Protect the eagle!’ a centurion growled. ‘Protect the—’ His words cut off as a spear tore through his throat.

I looked wildly about me. Varo was doing the same.

Shit. He looked worried. ‘They’re rolling up our flanks!’

Our extended line was no match for the number of the enemy. They were outflanking us, their numbers allowing them to bypass our fighting front which was held engaged. Soon, they would fall on the unprotected backs of our legion. Then we would die.

‘Form square!’ came the order, our legion command having seen the same. ‘Pull in the flanks! Form square! Form square!’

Thousands of hours of drill and discipline is what kept men obeying the orders, and moving as one unit – albeit a battered and scarred one. Centurion Justus – now dead on the plain – had pushed us in our every free hour at the fort, and in those actions he now saved the lives of others. As the flanks fell back under control the enemy were held at bay, though only just. The Eighth was reduced to a bloody square of embattled brotherhood, and against these four walls of flesh and iron the enemy seethed.

‘Get the wounded in the centre!’ Priscus yelled. ‘Get the wounded back! Get them back!’

Some were dragged. Others crawled. Maybe it was one of these men that caused two beleaguered soldiers to trip backwards, opening a gap in the front rank. It was only there for a second, but in battle a second is enough, and into this cavity now poured the elite of the enemy’s troops. The professionals. One look at their hard faces was enough to know that these were the bastards who had lived a life of violence long before Rome had tried and failed to bring them to her standard. Now here they came, shouting and killing, tearing into our ranks like a serrated blade.

Our unified front was broken.

The enemy were everywhere.

It was over.

Chaos.

Pure bloody chaos .

The enemy had broken through one side of the square, and this put them at the backs of the other walls of flesh. Some of those men turned, others didn’t, but any hope at cohesion was now lost. Walls of shield and battered ranks began to fall apart into knots of desperate soldiers and individual melees. This was a legion on its knees – we were just awaiting the killing blow.