Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

I looked for my friends. I wanted to die with them. I wanted them to know that I had been with them until the end. A true comrade. A true brother.

Instead I saw the eagle. The standard-bearer was long dead. A soldier streaked in blood, arm ruined from combat, stood holding the totem in his place.

‘Brutus!’

I tried to run to him. I tried, but this was battle. Instead I had to cut my way towards him like a man clearing thick brush, my swings wicked and evil. So single-minded was I that only the shield drill of a fellow legionary kept my blade from his throat.

Chaos.

And in the middle of the screams and the stink, my friend with his hand on the eagle. He couldn’t even defend himself, the idiot. He was at the centre of a feeble last stand of about a dozen men, about which the enemy snapped and lunged like angry wolves. One firm rush and they would carry the standard away. They would lose men to do it, and they knew that, but once they overcame that fear then the eagle would be gone. I couldn’t have given two shits about that if it didn’t spell death for my friend. Something had to be done.

It was Priscus who did it.

‘With me! With me!’ He saw his oldest comrade in danger. He saw our personal tragedy, and our legion’s disaster. He saw the end, and he charged towards it without a backwards step.

I followed. I was on his shoulder. That was how I saw the spear push out of his back. That was how I saw my friend – my teacher, my brother – spitted like game.

I screamed. I roared. I had no time to mourn him, then. The enemy were in my face, and so I killed for him instead. Like wildfire I danced amongst them spreading death, hacking with my sword, biting with my teeth. My fury bought me inches, and in this space I turned to find my brothers. Priscus was on his back, the shaft of the spear held upright in his lifeless body. There was a man beside him on his knees. It was Brutus. The eagle was in his hand. I knocked a young rebel aside with my shield, and covered my comrade with it.

‘Fear the Eighth!’ I heard a voice boom, and I felt the presence around us as soldiers fought to buy the eagle’s salvation. There was nothing to be done for Priscus.

‘He’s dead!’ Brutus shouted in my face, his grey eyes wild.

‘Come on!’ I yelled back. ‘We need to move!’

‘I can’t!’

‘He’s dead! We have to move!’

Brutus shook his head, and looked down. He was on his knees because a blade had torn open the front of his thigh. Muscle and sinew smiled back at me through the gaping wound.

I wasted no time in dropping my sword and shield, hauling my friend on to my shoulder like an unruly child. ‘I’ll carry you!’ I promised.

‘The eagle!’ Brutus pleaded.

Fuck the eagle. His life was my concern, and so I took my first step.

My knees almost buckled. I had a man more than my own size on my shoulder, and my body had been continually punished for almost an entire day and night.

I stumbled again. ‘Fuck!’ On instinct I reached out to steady myself. My hand bumped against wood, and I grabbed at it. For a horrible second, I thought that I was bracing myself against the spear lodged into Priscus.

I wasn’t.

I was holding the eagle of the Eighth. The famed totem. A symbol of Rome’s glory.

And now my walking stick.

Holding Brutus over my left shoulder, I used the eagle to brace with my right hand. My head was forced down by the bulk of my comrade, but I saw enough of a red blur ahead of us to recognize our lines – or what was left of them. In my ear, I heard the scream of men and steel as someone fought a rearguard to protect us. I don’t know how far I stumbled – twice almost dropping Brutus as a dying man grasped at my feet – but at some point he was pulled from my shoulders, and my knees finally gave way.

‘Protect the eagle!’ someone shouted.

‘Fear the Eighth!’ another roared.

I was trying to push myself up from the bloody ground – trying to die on my feet – when darkness took me.

I awoke in a field of bones. Tens of thousands of them. White, and gleaming.

I walked. I saw the shattered skulls of children. The smashed ribs of men. I saw piles. I saw patterns.

I saw death.

I walked for hours. Maybe days. I walked from the field of bones to a mountain. I climbed its steep trails. Scrambled up its slopes. At its summit I expected to find clarity. Reason.

Instead I found Priscus.

He was smiling. I couldn’t understand why, or how. There was a gaping hole in his chest. ‘Hello, friend.’

‘Priscus?’ That smile. ‘Where are we?’ So patient and paternal.

So calm.

I wanted to punch him. ‘ Where are we? ’

My friend looked at me as though I were simple. ‘We’re dead.’ He laughed. ‘We’re dead, Corvus.’

I shook my head. If this was the afterlife, then why was I talking to him? Why not her ? ‘I’m looking for—’

‘Beatha? You won’t find her here.’

I took a sharp step backwards. How did he know about her? How the fuck did he know her name? I’d never spoken of her to my comrades.

My old friend saw my ill-ease. Put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Do you trust me?’

‘Of course…’

‘Then trust me. She’s not here.’

I bit back my angry words. Instead I looked down the mountainside at the field of bones. ‘Where’s Brutus?’

‘Brutus?’

My patience snapped. ‘Brutus, you fucking idiot! Brutus! Where is he?’

A shrug. ‘Not here.’

I looked for something that I could kick instead of my comrade, but the mountain was bare. ‘So who is dead?’ I demanded. ‘Tell me that!’

A smile. ‘I am.’

I snorted at my friend’s tolerance. ‘You and me then, is it, Priscus? You and me and a field of bones.’

Priscus shook his head. ‘Not you, comrade,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

Then the old soldier smiled goodbye, and closed his eyes.

I woke to the stink of blood and wounds. I heard moans. I heard prayers.

I opened my eyes.

A hospital.

I was lying on the floor. I looked to my left. The soldier was so close to me that I could see the pores of his grey skin. Hear the shallow rasp of his breath. His eyes were closed. He looked like he was going to die. I turned to my right. This one already had.

Shit. I’d been put in with the ‘expectant’. Those who had fallen foul of triage.

Those who weren’t going to live.

The legion had only a small number of surgeons, and before blacking out, I had been standing on a field strewn with wounded. At some point the saw-men would be busy taking limbs, but first they would patch up the soldiers that could get back into the fight – there was a war to win after all, and the ceiling above me was evidence that I had survived one of the first battles of it.

For now, at least. I looked back to my left. Grey-skin’s raspy breaths had stopped. I tried to speak. I tried to stand. But the pain in my head told me that I should lie down. Lie down, be still, and wait for my own turn to die.

And so that’s what I did.

A soldier needs more than friends. More than comrades.

He needs brothers .

It was my brothers who found me on the floor, packed amongst the dead and those soon to join them. It was my brothers who took me from the legion’s hospital ‘for burial’, and instead carried me into the town beside our fort, and put me on to the table of a civilian doctor.

‘How much can you pay?’ I was told the local man had asked.

‘What are your children’s lives worth?’ Varo had growled back.

I wasn’t the only one that they’d taken there; Brutus lay on a bed beside me, his leg thick with bandages, eyes heavy with sorrow. I swallowed back my fear.