Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

Two soldiers approached. They dumped stained sacking at my brother’s feet.

‘Help me with these,’ Marcus said.

I hoisted one. It wasn’t heavy, but the smell was rank and oppressive. I knew what I was carrying.

We walked in silence, I a half-pace behind him. So many questions in my mind, but I found my lips sewn shut. Did I really want the answers?

‘Hard patrol?’ I finally asked. Stupid question.

‘Yes.’

‘I spoke to your cohort commander in the valley,’ I tried. ‘He’s very proud of you.’

Nothing.

‘As am I.’

Nothing.

‘Sir!’ Marcus called.

The commander of the First Cohort. Eyes rimmed with dark bags. A skeleton in armour.

‘Centurion. How many have you brought me?’

Marcus dropped his bag, then bid that I do the same. I took a step back to save my feet from what I knew was coming. Marcus emptied the sacks, and nine heads rolled into the hard dirt.

The cohort commander trapped one with his foot. ‘Good work,’ he told his man.

I looked at that good work. Three young men, one old man, three women, two children.

‘Rest up,’ the commander told his man, kicking one of the heads down the slope as he walked away.

Maybe Marcus felt my eyes, then. Maybe he felt my doubt.

‘What would you like me to say, Corvus?’ He spoke in a tone I had never heard from him before, slow moving but as deadly as lava. ‘We’re at war.’

I said nothing. Marcus turned to the collection of trophies at our feet. His words were for me, but he stared into dead eyes as he spoke.

‘Do you think I’m enjoying it? I’m doing this to keep my men alive.’ He looked at me, then. ‘I’m doing this for Rome.’

There was savagery in his eyes. I wanted to step back. Instead I told him, ‘I know.’

Marcus laughed. A laugh so full of anger and misery that it sounded like a mortal wound. ‘What do you know about war, Corvus?’ he chided me. ‘Where have you been? How is it down in the valley?’

My pride bristled at the words. Before I knew it my mouth was open, and I was growling. ‘I stood in battle lines before you, brother. You’ve had a hard time, I know’ – I pointed at the skulls – ‘but do not mistake this for war.’

Marcus’s smile was a grimace. He folded his arms, those limbs scraped bloody by the rock of the mountain. ‘No, Corvus,’ he lectured me, ‘it is you who are mistaken.

‘This is war.’ He kicked one of the heads. ‘Not the battles. Not the glory. It is the willingness to do what is necessary. It is attrition. It is evil against evil, where only the most wicked will survive.’ He stepped closer to me then. His hostility was such that I almost went for my sword. ‘I will not see my men die.’

His eyes were ablaze. His message was emphatic. Marcus would become the immoral man in the mountains, and he would do it for the love of his comrades.

I couldn’t let him.

I put a hand on his shoulder. He looked at it as though he’d bite it from my arm.

‘Marcus, listen to me.’ I tried. ‘What if these mountains were Iader? What if we were sent into our home town, with the same orders as we have here? Our old friends. Our old neighbours. Are they truly an enemy because one day someone writes a command, and orders it so?’

His eyes drove into my own like a blade. ‘This region has revolted against its lawful master. Against Rome.’

Rome. The city he had never seen. The idea for whom he would kill, and die.

‘No, Marcus.’ I had to try. ‘A leader and his men have revolted, not the region,’ I near pleaded in desperation. ‘Think, Marcus. The people we grew up with. They were good people, and loyal to Rome, were they not? Would you kill them without mercy? Would you condemn them for the actions of other men that they have never met? Never seen?’

I was asking the wrong man.

‘Yes,’ he told me simply. ‘Every one.’

A long breath escaped him, then. His eyes fell to the distant mountains. Somewhere, the ghost of my closest friend stirred. ‘I will not do it, brother,’ he almost whispered. ‘I will not see another of them fall. I will not have another slip away in my arms. For my men, I will kill every rebel, woman and child in this province and beyond, if that’s what it takes. I will do it for my men, I will do it for you, and I will not stop until I am sent to join those I have already failed.’

‘You haven’t failed anyone,’ I begged.

But the mask was back. A mask of iron, and hate. When he looked back at me, I saw pity. Pity that I couldn’t understand. Pity that I couldn’t be the man that Rome needed me to be.

‘You’re just tired, standard-bearer,’ my brother told me as though speaking to a stranger. ‘You should head back down to the valley, and get some rest.’

I felt as though he had driven his sword into my heart.

‘Marcus, don’t.’

He broke away from my hand on his shoulder. ‘I have to see to my men.’

He walked away. I wanted to follow, but my legs were concrete from grief. ‘Marcus!’ I called after the best part of myself. ‘Marcus! Talk to your commander. We can find a better way. There has to be a better way!’

He stopped, and turned. When he looked at me, I saw only disgust in his eyes. Shame at my weakness.

‘Leaders don’t talk,’ Marcus snorted. ‘They lead.’

He turned his back, and grief ran through every fibre of my being.

I had lost my brother to the mountains.

I took Marcus’s advice, and returned to the valley with the resupply column that same day, arriving late in the afternoon.

I soon wished that I hadn’t.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked a bloodied soldier who was helping a comrade to the aid station. Their faces were familiar to me.

‘Second Cohort got ambushed,’ the soldier told me, confirming my fears – these were men that I knew.

‘Which centuries?’ I asked quickly.

The man delivered the words I dreaded to hear. ‘First and Second.’

I ran towards the hospital. Dozens of wounded were being helped or carried there. I looked among them for Varo and Octavius. Instead I saw Iulius, a weathered soldier who had taken over Octavius’s section when my old friend had been promoted to optio.

There was a red slice across his upper arm.

‘An arrow,’ he told me, but I saw more pain in his face than such a weapon could have caused.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘Tell me!’

He didn’t answer at once, and dread climbed with hooks from the pit of my stomach.

I shook him. ‘Tell me!’

The soldier met my eyes. I saw tears in his.

‘Octavius is dead.’

I looked down at the body of my comrade.

Octavius lay on his back, an arrow through his throat. Eyes that had been bright with mirth now gazed at a blue sky as empty as the vessel that had carried my friend’s indomitable spirit.

‘You weren’t supposed to die,’ I told him, closing his eyes and brushing away the flies that sought to take treasure from tragedy.

I took my friend’s dead hand in my own. His sword, unbloodied, had fallen beside him.

‘You were a great brother,’ I told the man who had been with me since my first day as a recruit. ‘Do you remember when we first met? You complained I was taking too long in the latrine, and when I came out I tried to put you in it. The training staff caught us fighting and ordered us on to shit duty for a month.’ I laughed then. It was a choke, but it was happy.

‘I miss you already, you fucking bastard,’ I cursed, squeezing his dead flesh. ‘ You weren’t supposed to die .’

And my comrade hadn’t died alone. With tears blurring my vision, I looked about me now. Amongst the rocks of a narrow defile, a dozen other soldiers were going through the same ritual that I was, saying goodbye to men that they knew better than their own families.