Джерейнт Джонс - Legion

He licked his lips. ‘And not with you because…’

Shit. I looked at the faces of the other staff officers with him. Their eyes were on me, now. They sensed blood had just dripped into the water.

‘I heard the Tenth Cohort had been brought up, sir,’ I bluffed, recognizing an officer of that unit. ‘I was hoping the eagle had come with it.’

Hook-nose grinned, then. Not a friendly smile, but that of a hungry vulture. ‘No holding you back from a fight, is there, Corvus?’

‘No, sir.’

He pointed to the map laid out before him. ‘Then come and join us, standard-bearer,’ he ordered. ‘We are about to have ourselves a real battle.’

The place was a considerable-sized hill fort that clung to a mountaintop like a limpet. Through reconnaissance, and information obtained from the capture of two rebels who had been caught stealing weapons from the camp, and were now crucified in the valley, the legion had identified the place that was home to the men who had been harassing and killing us for weeks. With high walls, and an estimated three hundred rebels to hold them, it would be a tough shell to break, but the men of the Eighth were hungry to sink metal into the meat of their enemy.

It was to this end that Hook-nose had brought up the reserve of the Tenth Cohort. These men were fresh, undrained from the mountains, and would form the spearhead that would rise up from the western slope, Rome’s glittering blade of steel. To the east, a secondary attack would be launched by the weakened Sixth and Seventh Cohorts – it was there that I needed to be. It was amongst their ranks that awaited the reason that I had flogged my horse and ridden alone from Iader.

‘You’ll go with the Tenth,’ Hook-nose informed me again as we stood alone in his tent. ‘They are our main thrust, standard-bearer. It’s the proper place for you.’

I grasped for a reason for me to be on the opposite flank. ‘The Sixth and Seventh have been bled on this operation, sir,’ I tried diplomatically. ‘Maybe they’re in greater need of the inspiration of their eagle?’

‘Revenge will lead them well enough,’ the aristocrat told me, and I hated that his words were true. ‘This will be the first real taste of campaign for the Tenth, Corvus. You must be there with them. They’d die for you.’

He saw the disbelief on my face. ‘You are a hero in this legion, and beyond,’ he explained patiently. ‘You’re too humble a soldier to see it, but that’s the truth.’

The truth? The only truth I cared about was with the Sixth Cohort.

I needed to try one more time. ‘Sir, it’s just that…’

‘Speak,’ he said with a gesture.

‘My brother is in the Sixth, sir,’ I told him honestly. ‘The only one that I have left.’

Hook-nose brightened at my innocence. ‘No, standard-bearer.’ He smiled. ‘You have an entire legion of them.

I was dismissed.

I sat alone with only an eagle for company. I looked at that prized piece of metal, and vowed that I would hand over a thousand of them if it meant the return of just one of the people that I loved.

Beatha, Octavius and Priscus lay in graves. What of Brutus? Surely by now he had succumbed to his wounds. And if not? Who among us would live through this war? There were hundreds of thousands of the enemy loose somewhere in the two provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia. Bled slowly as we had been, it was easy to forget that there was a huge body behind the enemy’s invisible face, and that body was far superior in numbers to our own. Where were they?

Three hundred were in the hilltop fort that we would assault at dawn. High, thick walls of stone. There would be arrows, and spears. There would be blood, and piss, and shit, and death. Into this fury I would carry the legion’s eagle, and the eyes of enemy and ally alike would look to me. My own men for example, my enemy for capture. How I wished I had my comrade Varo beside me, but he too was lost to the mountains – I had asked for him at the hospital, where the air stank of death. I had asked for him at the cohort, where men shook their heads in grief. I had asked for him at headquarters, where the clerk’s scrolls listed him as FU on the ledgers of the legion – Fate Unknown.

But his end was clear. Like dozens of others, my friend had been captured by the enemy. Doubtless his death was then a thousand times more ghastly than it would have been in any battle.

I rubbed at my eyes. It was the dead of night, and they were red with fatigue and the dust of the road, but I could not sleep. I would not sleep. Not with what was coming with the sun.

I wasn’t scared of dying, not now, but I was scared of dying with the truth unknown. I couldn’t go to the next life with a mind full of hateful accusations and half-truths – I had to know .

I got to my feet. There was a wineskin in my hand. It wasn’t my first. ‘Drink up,’ I told Gallus, famed eagle of the Eighth. ‘Drink up.’

I poured some of the red liquid over his beak. Looked into his metallic eye. What had this totem seen? What manner of death, and glory, and strength, and weakness?

I fought to forget. I fought for comrades. Tradition and virtue had never been the force that moved my shield and blade, but I wasn’t fool enough to think that it didn’t move other men. That they wouldn’t give their all, and more, for an idea. For a distant place. For people who would never know their names or their deeds. Who would know only one of two things: did their sacrifice end in victory, or defeat.

There was no doubt in my mind that tomorrow’s butcher’s bill would buy another victory for Rome, but this would be no battle talked about in forums and remembered in annals. Too small for that. Three cohorts against three hundred. A mere skirmish in the history of Rome’s conquests. Of her enforced peace.

‘What do you think to that?’ I asked Gallus.

The eagle looked back at me, impassively stoic as ever.

‘Well said,’ I mumbled.

Gods, I was lonely.

I looked at my pack. Xanthus was there, the wooden horse that had belonged to one of my young soldiers. He had left the child’s toy on his bunk to save him from the danger of battle. I decided that I would to do the same, and placed the talisman in the tent atop of what passed as my possessions – a few spare pieces of clothing. A small rock I had taken from the village on the first day that I fought and killed. There was a red smear on it. The blood of one of my first. It was a grisly memento, and I had been proud of it. Now, I wondered about the lives I had ended that day. I had killed them gladly and I would do so again if they so much as threatened my friends, though I was running ever shorter of such people. But… but now I wondered if they had felt that same way. Did they only attack us because we threatened their beloved? I had always wondered why they hadn’t fled higher into the hills when they first saw our superior force. Why had they stood and fought against odds that they could never hope to beat?

For love, I realized.

But love of what? A wounded comrade who could not be moved, perhaps? The love of their home that they refused to abandon? Whatever the details of their devotion, I had seen enough of war now to know that love is the elixir that the battle-mad drink. It is love of country, or comrades, or plunder, or excitement, but is always the love of something.

A man cannot kill without love.

I felt Gallus’s eyes on me. He was judging. Looking for holes in my theory.

‘I’m telling you it’s true,’ I slurred. The wine was rank, but it had a back like Arminius’s horse. ‘And what the fuck would you know?’

A lot more than me, but I didn’t have enough wine to make an eagle talk, and so I was forced to look into stern eyes, and wonder how many men would die beneath her gaze in the morning. How many men would die for their own reasons of love.