Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

I ran towards our hill that overlooked the sea. As children it had belonged to Marcus and me. Brothers. As I grew and discovered love, it became the first place that I knew Beatha as a woman. It was our place, then. A place where we could sit, and plot, and dream of a new life beyond the sea, where we wouldn’t be owner and slave, but husband and wife. Father and mother.

I was panting hard by the time I reached the clearing at the top of the hill, my skin scratched from the reaching fingers of harsh brush and branch. It didn’t matter. I knew I was close.

As I burst into the clearing, I was smiling.

Beatha lay naked on her back, her own smile staring up at the sky.

It was a red smile, stretched across her throat.

I tried to scream.

Instead I fell.

When I regained consciousness, I cursed the world that I was alive. I beat my fists against the dirt. Drove my skull against the ground until blood ran into my eyes. I lay helpless as a newborn, the stink of soil in my nose, the beautiful sound of birdsong in my ears as a light breeze teased the trees.

‘No…’

I made myself open my eyes. I saw her. Cold. Lifeless.

Beautiful.

‘No…’

I crawled to her. I was crippled. Broken. I felt vomit rise in my throat. I didn’t fight it. It clung to me. I was a vision of hell. She, even in death, a work of art.

But someone had defiled her. Some beast, for surely no man could have been so vile? Her throat was opened to the skies. There was blood between her legs. Her clothes lay miserable and discarded in the bushes.

With trembling hands I dressed my darling. I whispered a thousand silent apologies as I clothed her. Gave voice to a million promises and curses. I was a broken man, but there was a fuel that kept me going.

It was the fuel of sworn vengeance.

I clawed at the ground with fingernails and stone. The sun had long set before I placed my life into the grave, and kissed her. I had no tears to fall on to her patient face. They were gone. Gone into the soil. I vowed that they would be followed by the blood of those who had wronged her. Those who had declared war on the world by taking its finest child.

‘I will come back to you,’ I promised. Her grave was near covered. Only her face remained. I couldn’t bring myself to steal her from life. I couldn’t bear to silence a voice of reason. A laugh of pure joy.

But neither could I live with seeing her unavenged. ‘I will come back to you,’ I said again.

I kissed her one final time, then prayed that I could carry out my promises swiftly. I wanted only to be in the ground with her, in the sanctity of this place I had loved so much. The world seemed like a mocking insult now that she had left it.

The final stone went into place on her grave. I kissed it. I kissed her.

I ran hard from the hillside, before I could change my mind.

To the east, dawn was threatening the row of mountains that stood like the lower jaw of a shark’s bite. A blood-red disc began to rise behind these vicious peaks.

I took it as an omen. A good omen – the gods approved of what I had planned.

The gods approved of me killing my father.

The sun was high by the time I made it to what had been my home. Now, a place that had held warm memories for me seemed about as inviting as the sands of the arena. I did not want to be here – I wanted to be with the woman I loved – but I had come with a purpose, and that purpose was to kill.

My father. I found him in the garden. Had he even left? From the way that he sat heavily on one of the stone benches, I felt that he had not.

He sensed my entrance. ‘I told you not to come back.’ Those were his words, but his eyes said different – there was relief in them. Hope.

Cold anger shook my limbs, and held my lips shut. How could he think that I could come back to him after… after…

‘Sit down, son.’

Son? So I was in the fold again? Worthy of love? Worthy of affection? I realized then what was in his mind. Beatha was a slave to him, no more or less prized than a piece of furniture. To him, she was just a chair that had been broken. A table that could be replaced. His ire had been for my supposed theft of property, nothing more, nothing less.

I hated him all the more for it.

‘Son. Sit down.’

I walked over. I tried to push it down. All the hate. All the rage. I tried to push it down, just long enough.

It worked.

This time it was I who struck unexpectedly, my fist ploughing into my father’s dark beard with all the force that I could put behind it.

But the blow did not unseat the man. He took it like a prizefighter, and there was time for me to see the surprise in his eyes before I hit him again, and again, and again.

We landed on the floor. He used his arms to fend off my blows, but threw none of his own. Coward . ‘Corvus!’ he yelled. ‘Son! What are you doing? Let me up!’

But I would not. Rage had dug its angry tendrils into my limbs, and controlled them as though they were of a separate body. Through a haze I saw myself punch, stamp, kick and thump. I saw blood, I heard bone, and through it all, I said nothing.

‘Corvus!’ he tried to shout against the tempest. ‘Son! Stop!’

But I would not. I was atop of him, my surprise total, and my father could not fight back.

‘Help!’ he tried instead. ‘Cynbel! Cynbel! Help!’

My rain of fury continued. It wasn’t my father that I saw below me. Just a bloody mess of wild hair and toga.

And then, I was airborne.

It was only as I slammed on to my back that I saw Cynbel, who had thrown me. There was wild panic in the Briton’s eyes. He looked from me to my father, unable to comprehend what he saw. What I saw was the father of the woman I loved. He was as oblivious to her death as I was desperate to cause another.

‘Cynbel…’ I began, but the words would not form. Instead, as I saw my father struggle to regain his feet, I surged forwards like a baited wolf.

Cynbel dropped me as though I was a child.

‘Corvus!’ he shouted in astonishment. ‘What madness is this?’

The madness of grief. The madness of love. I scrambled to my feet. Went for my father’s throat. Was put on my back.

‘Stay down!’ Cynbel warned me.

‘Detain him,’ my father struggled to say, and the Briton moved on me with sadness in his eyes.

‘Don’t fight me,’ he warned, and I knew that I could not.

He was a yard away when my father made a choking sound, and fell flat on to his face. Cynbel turned to help his master, and in that split second I saw my chance. Without blinking I pushed myself to my feet and scrambled to the wall, pulling myself up, leaving bloody smears on the white paint.

I landed hard on the other side.

‘Corvus!’ Cynbel called plaintively. ‘Corvus, please!’

I thought about shouting back. I thought about telling him the true nature of the man he had just saved, but those words died in my throat as my father showed that there was still life in his.

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

Instead I turned on my heel, and fled to my brother.

I fled to Marcus, and a life of death in the legions.

I pulled back on Balius’s reins and looked at the house I had abandoned as a young man. Now I was a soldier, and I had become proficient in the one thing I had failed to do in the wake of Beatha’s death – taking life.

I dismounted and untied my bearskin from the back of the saddle. If my father had survived sickness, then he would not see the return of his son. He would see Corvus, decorated Standard-Bearer of the Eighth Legion. I would make that bastard recognize I had done something despite him.