Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

I breathe out harshly. A warm breeze comes through the tent, and I think of Beatha’s kiss on my cheek. She is smiling, and I love her. She has given me purpose.

I lower my sword.

‘Up on your feet, you lazy tarts!’

He is Gripper, a squat centurion known for his tendency to grip his men by the throat. He is the man the legate has given me to search for Varo and the missing section.

‘You have a day,’ Hook-nose had told me, his eyes patient in his severe face.

‘Ready when you are, standard-bearer,’ Gripper tells me.

A nod is all I give him. Sunlight is fighting its battle for the horizon. I do not want to waste a breath.

We move out.

In the furnace heat of the valley floor we searched for the missing. We prayed for comrades. Expected bodies. Found nothing.

‘Not a fucking blood trail or anything,’ Gripper growled, looking as though he wanted to strangle the mountain. ‘It’s getting dark, standard-bearer.’

The night was coming, and hope was fleeing. The signs our best amateur scouts could find were muddled, and misleading. Three times we had come back to the same point. I had the feeling that we were being watched. Gripper thought it was more than that.

‘They’re fucking laughing at us.’

Maybe, but I couldn’t hear the humour, just the hammering of blood in my ears as a voice in my head told me Varo was gone. That voice was calm and reasonable. The voice that screamed at it to shut up was angry and heartbroken.

‘We need to go back, standard-bearer.’ Then the hard man apologized, and I could see that it wasn’t an action he relished. ‘I’m sorry. I wish we could keep looking, but…’

But men die in war, go missing in war, and a century couldn’t be put at risk to find nine men, not even when they were commanded by a soul like Varo.

‘Move your men out, centurion.’ I told him, and with those words, I felt as though I was the one to drop the axe on my comrade’s neck.

The officer hesitated. He sensed something in my demeanour. ‘And what will you do?’ he asked me.

‘I will find my brother,’ I promised.

The only one that I had left.

At dawn I left to find Marcus.

The legion had reached a break in the mountains, and on this plateau between the peaks stood a village of some three dozen hovels behind stone walls. Marcus’s cohort and one other had been drawn up in front of this bastion to intimidate the occupants into abandoning their stronghold, and to surrender.

From my vantage on the opposite ridge, I saw that none of ‘the enemy’ were stirring. I wondered if they had heard the stories. Why give up your arms when it will mean your head coming off your shoulders?

I wanted to be down there. I needed to be down there, not to fight, but to restrain. I wanted to be by Marcus’s side not to kill with him, but to be his conscience, as he had so often been mine.

I wanted that badly, but I knew that I had to pick my battles. I was waging a war for decency now, and I knew that my words would only fall on deaf, hot ears if I tried to speak to them at this moment. I needed to fight my battles when men were calm. Their blood cold. Or, at least, so far as that was possible on campaign.

And so I watched as the cohorts stepped forwards, and the rippling ranks passed over the stone defences as though they were manned by children. It was no battle. The legionaries had faced greater challenges on the parade ground, and now here they echoed the orders to dig out the enemy hiding in their homes. To burn out the rebels. To take no prisoners.

‘Can I join you?’

The strong voice came from behind me. It was a voice used to command. To leadership. It held force, but promised comradeship. There was an accent to the proud Latin.

I turned.

His uniform was that of a cavalry officer, though there was no sight of his mount. His handsome face was open and whimsical, as if the screams of rape and murder emerging below us were a prelude to a joke. I had seen him before. He looked older than he had when he had marched out to join Tiberius’s army on the Danube. Older than when the Eighth and his auxiliary cavalry had been tasked with the operation to clear down to the coast.

He now looked with discomfort at what was happening in the town. After a shake of his head, the German turned to face me.

‘Corvus, sir,’ I greeted him.

‘Arminius.’ He offered me his hand, man to man. His rank and bearing spoke of noble birth, but he didn’t show concern for it. I accepted the gesture, and in that moment I saw confirmation in his eyes that he felt the same loathing for this campaign as I did. A loathing of an empire’s order that relied on butchery to survive.

‘Those are our own citizens we’re killing,’ Arminius observed, his tone low. In the closest street, a man was being hacked apart by inexperienced boy soldiers. It was a bad death. A long one.

I turned my eyes from the sight, not in disgust, but because I wanted to take the measure of this man. My fatalism had not vanished, and I yearned to say out loud words that could condemn me to the cross should he betray my trust.

I do not know how he gained my confidence, but it was given to him as easily as a babe loves its mother. Perhaps it was because I had developed such contempt for my own life that I no longer cared for its preservation. I simply needed to unburden my soul. To make something of my life. To go to the next one with something that I could show Beatha. My friends were gone. Marcus too, in spirit. I couldn’t talk up the ranks. I couldn’t talk down. I needed someone outside of my legion, and here was such a leader, with his feelings of distaste plain to see.

And so I spoke.

‘We’re going to lose this war,’ I said.

The words hung in the air. Defeatism was not welcomed in the ranks, and yet…

‘Why do you say so?’ The words gentle, and even.

I pointed to the town. ‘We are supposed to be the shepherds, but we pushed the flock towards the wolves of war, and they panicked. Instead of guiding them back to the fold, we are slaughtering them where we find them.’

‘What else could we do?’

‘Talk to them?’ It seemed so obvious, yet even as I said the words, I realized how ridiculous they would sound to soldier and senator.

‘Do you think they would listen?’

I let out a frustrated breath. ‘Now that there’s been battles? Sisters and mothers raped? Family killed and enslaved?’ I shook my head with bitter anger. ‘No. No. Too many want blood, now.’

The prince nodded at the words. He watched the butchery in the village. ‘Today is revenge for men who have lost brothers on this campaign,’ he said. ‘The next rebel ambush will be revenge for those who lose friends and family to our blades today. And so it will go on.’ He turned to face me. His eyes were heavy with grief. ‘I fear this province is destined to drown in blood, my friend.’

My province. Home to all those I had called friend, and teacher, and family, and lover.

‘I can’t… I can’t let that happen.’ I shook my head, picturing them all as gleaming piles of bone, the next words out of me before I considered their true danger. ‘I can’t serve an empire that does this.’

There. It was in the open. I had put a blade to my throat with my treasonous words. Arminius need only push, and my life was forfeit.

Instead, with a slight narrowing of his eyes, the noble considered my words. He did so until the man in the street had ceased his screaming. Other citizens, found cowering in their hiding places, were beginning theirs.

When he spoke, his words were heavy with responsibility.

‘I look to my own people,’ he said, and gestured to the death in the town. ‘The tribes in Germania. When they feel as though they deserve a voice in the running of the Empire that they are told they are a part of, will this be their reward? Will I be asked to carry my sword against those of my own blood?’