Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

Maybe it was this distraction that kept us looking in, and not out. By the time the men up front had heard it, and called a warning, a loaded cart was plunging towards our ranks from the track ahead. It was loaded with rock, and turned the slave that it hit into a bloody smear on the mountainside. The man hadn’t moved. Was he dumbstruck, or tired of life?

What did it matter?

‘That cunt was carrying the fucking biscuits,’ the veteran raged, poking his javelin into the stew of slave and oat. ‘Someone’s going to go hungry.’

Not the slave.

‘Prepare to move!’

My feet moved doggedly up the mountain track, but my mind wandered carelessly into my past.

There it was met by an ambush of misery.

I landed hard at the bottom of the wall, the blood on my hands smearing the hot tile. There were shouts behind me, more plaintive than angry. I didn’t think that I needed to fear pursuit – not immediately, at least – as the first priority of the slaves would be to save the life of my father. I had tried to kill him, but I knew in the next breath that I had failed.

‘Corvus!’ A voice thick with blood and broken teeth. ‘Corvus, get back here!’

Instead I ran.

First to the beach, to wash off the blood in the waters of my childhood. My adolescence. My innocence. As I scrubbed torn knuckles I knew that I was washing myself of family. Of security. Of love. Everything I had known had changed in an instant.

No. Not everything.

Marcus. Through blood and betrayal he would stand by me, I knew it.

I looked at my tunic, marked by the stains of my act. I looked at the sun, now at its zenith. My father had use of his tongue, and I had no doubt that he would be sending slaves to summon the town’s watch. That he lived for now did not mean that he would survive his injuries – if he died and I was caught, it would be the most hideous end for me. If he lived and I was trapped? I did not expect mercy. Rome was an empire built on patriarchy, and I had viciously turned on my father. He was the emperor, I was the rebel, and in such a conflict there could be but one resolution – death.

And so I ran.

It was three miles to the villa that was Marcus’s home. It sat atop a small hill amid the orchards of our childhood. The trees were heavy with fruit now, the shadows welcoming, and I used them to creep unseen to the lowest point of the outer wall, hauling myself over as we had done whenever we were up to mischief.

‘Marcus?’ I whispered outside his room. ‘Marcus?’

My heart was in my throat. My brother was home on leave from his beloved Eighth Legion. If he had gone into town, dare I wait? A better question: dare I run without him?

My lungs began to move again as I heard a hand on the door. It opened inwards.

My brother, so noble, so perfect. I, a wretched creature of stains and torn skin.

I embraced him. I wanted to weep. I wanted to tell him everything, but the words choked in my mouth. Too much to say.

‘What can I do?’ he asked me.

‘Run with me, brother.’

We ran.

I woke with weak sun on my face.

Dawn.

I lifted my head from the helmet that was my pillow, and looked about me. My sleep had been deep, if not troubled. The First Cohort, whom we had joined in the night, had already stirred. In the dark I had asked for Marcus, but my friend had been dispatched to clear a village further west with two other centuries.

I tried to work up enough moisture in my mouth to spit. It felt as though our legion had become caught in a cruel circle that continued to feed itself. Where was the battle? Where was the enemy? Nowhere. Instead there was nothing but the seemingly endless loop of climb, search, descend, and the gods grant that each grinding turn of that wheel was free of ambush and dead friends.

A soldier had been watching me. His face was young, but his eyes belonged to a man at the end of his life. I nodded assent for him to approach.

He knew me. Knew of me. ‘Standard-bearer?’

‘Yes?’

A flicker of something passed over his face. Pride? ‘I saw you at the battle of the night and day,’ he told me. ‘I saw you save the eagle.’

I rubbed at my face. Thick stubble there. I needed to shave. ‘They need to come up with a better name for that fucking battle,’ I told the lad.

‘I’ll think of one,’ the soldier promised.

I looked him up and down. His tunic and armour hung off his slight frame. ‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen, standard-bearer.’

I noticed blood on his tunic. He saw. ‘The enemy’s, standard-bearer.’

I searched for something that sounded like the kind of thing the inspirational standard-bearer would say. ‘A good kill?’

He hesitated. ‘No, sir.’ Licked his teeth. ‘A woman.’

‘Women can be enemies too,’ I offered.

‘Yes.’ But I could see in his face that the death at his hand was born of butchery, not battle – if there was even a difference there. Whether under the gaze of generals and eagles, or that of a sixteen-year-old boy soldier shitting his pants, the result was the same. Blood in the soil. Blood on the hands.

‘You should shave,’ I told him with a smile. There wasn’t a hair on his childlike face.

Something twitched at the corner of his lips, then. I could see that he wanted to say the same to me. ‘I know,’ I told him, feeling at the dark stubble on my gaunt cheeks. I took out my razor. It was dull. Every hair clung as stubbornly to my throat as we did to the mountains.

The young lad was still watching me.

‘What’s your name?’

He hesitated. I lowered the razor.

‘… Scipio.’

Named for one of Rome’s greatest generals. I smiled as I wiped the blade against my tunic. ‘Do you intend to follow in his footsteps?’

Scipio shrugged, and looked around us at the savage peaks. ‘At least the enemy can’t bring elephants up here, sir.’

‘That’s what they said about the Alps,’ I replied, teasing him. I scraped my throat again. ‘You should get back to your century, Scipio. I expect we’ll be moving out soon.’

But he didn’t leave. He needed to know. Some life had come into his tired eyes. Some purpose. With a look, I gave him permission to give voice to his question.

‘What was it like?’ the boy asked. ‘Carrying the eagle in battle, sir?’

There it was. The question in every young man’s heart. The thirst for glory, honour and meaning.

There was already enough desolation in this campaign. I couldn’t bring myself to trample on the fire that burned in the boy’s heart.

‘Glorious,’ I told him, allying myself with the emperor, the senators, the recruiters, and the old and bold soldiery who saw out their active service far from any battlefield. ‘It was glorious,’ I told him, perpetuating a myth as old as time.

He left then, smiling, and behind him I saw the price of lies.

There was a column coming into the makeshift camp, and there was a killer at its head. His face was as hard as the stone at his feet, a baleful grimace stretching skin baked almost black. Amongst his company of soldiers his armour burned brightest, but it was the killer’s eyes that seared like the open maw of a volcano. He was a terrifying sight to behold, hate encased in chain mail.

It broke my heart to see him, because this man was my brother.

‘Marcus.’ I greeted him hesitantly, having watched the officer fall out the hard, gaunt men of his command – the Barbers, who were growing infamous in the legion for their ruthlessness.

‘Corvus,’ he replied.

There was no embrace. No more words. It was as though I was talking to a corpse, and my heart wrenched to see such a change in a man who had been so quick to emotion.