The German army was not so inhibited. They sang as they marched. They sang as they killed. They sang as they looted. This was their hour, and they knew that, should they cross the Rhine, the innards of the Roman Empire were ripe for gutting.
And then, a week after the collapse of Varus’s army, something changed in the ranks of the German tribes. It was a feeling – untouchable, but it was there. The singing died away. There was less laughter. Rigid shoulders showed signs of nerves, not bluster.
‘Something’s happened.’ Brando sensed it also. ‘Bad for them and good for us.’
He made a gesture, and I shuffled with him so that we stood on the outside of the cohort of prisoners. We had been brought to a halt, and I watched as German dispatch riders sped by our flanks on flogged steeds. Brando strained his ears for snippets of conversation. Eventually, he heard enough to smile.
‘A fort’s closed its gates. A big one.’
‘Arminius can’t leave that on his flank,’ I thought out loud. The German prince had proven himself to be a masterful tactician so far. He would not make the blunder of leaving a Roman garrison in his wake, where it could raid his baggage train and supplies.
‘No,’ Brando agreed. ‘He’s going to attack it.’
I bore no witness to that assault, only to its aftermath. The Germans were not singing, now.
They were screaming.
We saw their wounded carried back from a battle that raged a mile away from us, the action obscured by a thin treeline. The fight had begun with a roar from German voices, but that defiance had quickly turned to pain. I saw that many of their wounded had shafts of arrows protruding from their red flesh.
Eventually, the clash of arms died to nothing. The screams of the wounded and the dying continued. I heard one word repeated over and over by the maimed as they passed our position. I asked Brando what it meant.
‘Mother.’
They started to carry the German dead from the field; I stopped counting at a hundred. Brando was smiling. I warned him to hide his emotions if he did not want to join his enemy in whatever afterlife the Germans believed in. He thanked me, suppressing his glee.
‘Germans don’t know how to lay a siege,’ the Batavian said. ‘The fort must have been ready for them, and now they’re fucked.’
But Brando was wrong. The German tribesmen may have been ignorant of siege warfare, but Arminius had served in the Roman ranks as a brilliant staff officer. In Pannonia he had seen war in all of its forms: open battle, skirmish and siege. He knew how to crack a nut, and he had hundreds of other trained men at his disposal – his Roman slaves.
Dusk was falling as we were herded forwards and tools were thrust into our hands. Germans with a grasp of Latin barked orders, and we began to dig. From the positioning of the earthworks, I could see that Arminius was attempting to set a ring of defensive positions around the fort, and of that bastion I now had my first sight.
The river, silver in the dusk, ran close to the southern wall, rendering that flank near impossible to attack. The fort’s palisade was thick and wooden, with guard towers flanking a wide gate that was barred in the face of the enemy. An enemy that lay dead beneath the defences, a thick carpet of the chequered cloaks and painted shields of the tribes.
‘What fort is this?’ I asked aloud.
‘Aliso,’ a veteran of the Nineteenth answered. ‘I’ve been here. This is my legion.’ He spoke with pride.
I looked from him to the German dead, and then to their living. They had been repulsed, but they were not beaten. Battle lines were being drawn, and blood would flow.
I intended to be within the fort’s walls when it did.
It was time to escape.
6
Arminius’s men worked us into the night. By torchlight we scooped out the soil of his growing defensive works, and by that same light I saw the animated faces of my comrades. The labour was hard and jarring, but the presence of a Roman force so near had given our muscles and minds the fuel we needed to go on. Questions burned inside our heads, but we kept them buried whilst our masters were close. They were angry after their first taste of defeat, and we didn’t want to give them an excuse to avenge themselves on Roman flesh. Brando looked cautiously over his shoulder, seeing our guards deep in animated conversation – it was time to talk.
‘What’s the garrison’s size?’ Brando asked the soldier who’d named the garrison as Nineteenth Legion, his parent unit.
‘Don’t ask me stuff like that,’ the man shot back quickly, glancing towards the guards. ‘They could speak Latin for all you know. I’m not looking to be tortured.’
The soldier had a point, but I shook my head. ‘Arminius knows who and what’s where. If he didn’t, he’d have been pulling men out of the ranks to find out before we ever got here.’
The man kept his lips shut, unconvinced.
‘Look what he did to our officers,’ I pressed. ‘You don’t kill them all out of hand like that unless you already have the information that’s in their heads.’
This time, the legionary shrugged his shoulders. After wiping the back of a muddied hand across his face, he confided in us with his voice low, his eyes never leaving the guards: ‘Last time I was here there was a cohort.’
A cohort was a subdivision of a legion, further divided into six units, know as centuries, of eighty men. Close to five hundred heavy infantry on the fort’s walls would be a formidable force.
‘Was the cohort full strength?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ the man admitted. ‘I doubt it. Varus was sending us every which way, wasn’t he? Garrisoning every fucking mud hut with a goat.’
All with Arminius’s insidious encouragement, no doubt, spreading the occupying forces thinly enough so that they could be destroyed piecemeal by the tribes.
Until now.
‘There were arrows in the German wounded, weren’t there?’ I asked, as this was unusual. Legionary units themselves were not manned with archers, and these specialists would come from auxiliary cohorts. Units drawn up on the outside of the Empire, the soldiers recruited with the promise of Roman citizenship at the end of their twenty-five years’ service.
‘Weren’t here when I passed through, but that was beginning of summer. Could be all changed now.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Vinicius.’
‘Do you know a way into the fort?’
The soldier laughed, guessing at my meaning. ‘Sure. Through the gate or over the wall.’ He half snorted. ‘Don’t try anything stupid, my friend. I don’t want to die in this ditch.’
I caught Brando sneering at the comment, then saw his eyes come to rest on the form of his comrade, Ekkebert. The Batavian’s cheeks were hollow and grey, his eyes shrunken. Ekkebert’s strength had ebbed quickly during the march, and the sight of a fighting Roman force had done nothing to revive it.
Brando asked the man something in their native language. There was no reply. When Brando turned away, I saw the concern for his comrade etched deep into his own drawn face.
We dug on in silence. Silence except for the sound of metal breaking into dirt and the hard breathing that went with it. Deep into the night, a German adorned with a thick golden torque about his neck passed by where we laboured. The wealth marked him out as a man of station, and his visit appeared to be an inspection of the work. It seemed as though we had passed, for our guards then came forwards with drawn blades and their customary insults. For a moment I feared we had dug our own graves, and was loath to drop my shovel, my last feeble line of defence. Brando sensed my hesitation, and spoke quietly as he threw his own tool into the dirt.
‘They won’t waste graves on us, Felix.’
Of course he was right. I dropped the shovel. The tools were collected, and then we prisoners were herded together and marched away from the fort. Thus far into our enslavement we had been held unbound, the promise of hideous torture enough to keep us in our place, but Arminius and his leaders must have known that the
sight of Roman defiance would lift our spirits, and so that night we were tied tightly by our hands, six men to a rope. I found myself between Micon and Brando, our shoulders pressed together so snugly that I could feel the twitch of their muscles.
Micon soon spoke up. ‘I can’t feel my hands.’
A week ago Stumps would have jumped on such a statement. Can’t feel your brains, more like, or some other insult would have passed his lips. Not now. Stumps was enduring his captivity with the quiet detachment of a condemned man. We missed his humour. A warrior had to find absurdity in suffering. How else could he repeatedly face it?
With Stumps silent, it fell to me to try and distract Micon from the pain in his hands and the cold that made his teeth chatter in the darkness. ‘You’re from Pompeii, aren’t you?’
‘Y-y-yes,’ he stammered eventually.
‘I’ve never been there. How is it?’
‘It’s a-a-all right.’
‘Pretty girls?’
‘Some. Yes.’
So it went on. Then, sometime during the early hours, my body graciously gave in to sleep. When I woke, my limbs were concrete in their joints. My throat was dry, my empty stomach churning. I felt every mile I had carried since the day of my enlistment into the legions. Every wound, every bruise, every fall. I just wanted to sleep, but German threats and spear-points persuaded me otherwise.
They marched us towards the fort. All about us I saw the tribal war bands with their painted shields and thick beards. These warriors were stirring in the grey dawn, but there was no sense of urgency or purpose to their movement. Fires were being lit, and animals butchered, the reek of smoke and beast thick in the air. If another attack on the fort was coming, then it was not imminent.
Our guards halted us at the ditches we had dug the previous day. These defensive works were now manned by tired-looking German sentries, posted there to guard against breakout or raid by the fort’s garrison.
‘Slaves, look at me!’ a German voice commanded in Latin. I turned in the direction of the sound, seeing a barrel-chested warrior, his beard a rich chestnut. ‘You will dig, like this!’
The German pointed his sword towards the fort, and then used the blade to cut a zigzagging line in the dirt. I grasped his intention. Having been savaged by the archers on the fort’s wall, Arminius would use the trenches to creep closer, and minimize the time his men were exposed to the missiles. Spoil from the digging would be placed on the fort-facing side of the trench to add further cover from both view and arrows. The basic siege work would be highly effective in giving protection to the assaulting troops.
Of course, someone would have to dig the trenches first.
Shovels were thrust into our hands. Spear-points were levelled at our waists. Our choice was simple – risk Roman arrow, or suffer certain German spear.
We began to dig.
The progress was good. Even knowing that each yard brought us closer to the risk of arrows, there was an irresistible pull in knowing that we were inching closer to a Roman bastion. I knew that the digging of this trench would provide my best chance of escape, but, out of range of the archers, our German guards prowled over us on the ditch’s lip, and that first day provided no opening, only burning muscles and parched throat. Then, as dusk was approaching, I heard the sound of a body hitting the floor.
It was Ekkebert.
‘Felix, help me!’ Brando whispered, desperate to get his exhausted comrade on to his feet before the guards spotted the useless slave. I shuffled towards the Batavians and grabbed a piece of Ekkebert’s tunic beneath his armpit.
We began to lift. But we were too late.
A half-dozen German warriors appeared instantly on the lip of the trench. They looked down at us with uncompromising disdain.
Brando spoke to them. I could not understand the words, but they were respectful. Almost pleading.
The enemy laughed at his hope. Three of them dropped into the trench beside us. My hands were on Ekkebert’s tunic, but my eyes were on the spear-points above us.
Brando whispered something to his ruined friend, doubtless urging him to his feet. The words fell on deaf ears. Then a German hand gripped me by the shoulder. I saw another grab Brando by the hair. They pulled at us, and in that second, we were forced to make the choice between dying with a comrade or abandoning him.
We let ourselves be pulled back.
I looked at Brando. He closed his eyes. A moment later, a dagger was driven into the base of Ekkebert’s skull.
That night, as we lay huddled and tied together, I whispered to Brando beside me: ‘I’m trying tomorrow.’
The big Batavian grunted, ‘I’m with you. I can’t do that again. I …’ His words slipped away with the same tired struggle that Ekkebert’s life had ended.
Then: ‘Why us, Felix?’ he asked me.
I gave no reply, for I had none. Instead I willed myself to sleep, and to hope.
7
The next morning we were returned to the trench. Again the German army stirred but did not appear as if it would strike.
‘Do you think they know yet? On the Rhine, and in Rome?’ Brando asked, swinging his pick into the dirt with simmering anger.
‘I think so,’ I answered. I’d considered the question, and come to the conclusion that the mobilization of the tribes was too great an undertaking for word of it to not have filtered back to Rome through spies, traders and sympathetic allies; not all of the German people would stand behind Arminius. The Batavians alongside me were proof of that.
‘So now what?’ he asked.
I had no idea. To my knowledge, a large portion of Rome’s military might was still in Pannonia and Dalmatia, putting out the final embers of rebellion that had raged for three years, drenching the provinces in blood. Even with immediate notice, it would take weeks to reach a position where it could block Arminius should he cross the Rhine and advance into Gaul.
‘There’re two more legions on the Rhine.’ Brando spoke up, mirroring my thoughts. ‘But they’re spread out in the forts, and to the south.’
‘They don’t need to be together to hold him at the river,’ I suggested. ‘They just need to cut loose the pontoon bridges.’
‘And then what happens to us?’
I said nothing.
After a morning of labour, we were granted a short rest in the dirt of the trench. Eyeing the fort’s walls ahead, I could see that we were almost within range of the archers – the reeking bodies of German warriors, shafts protruding from their decaying flesh, were proof of that.
The sight of the dead put our guards on edge, and they abandoned the high ground to join us in the relative safety of the zigzagging trench. As a waterskin was passed from one pair of cracked lips to another, I knew that the time to attempt an escape would be soon, or never.
Our guards grunted orders. Our toil resumed. With every swing and bite of the spade, our shallow trench crept closer to the fort. The first shaft of an arrow hissed over shortly after. Men took to working on their knees. Our guards took to crouching, and I saw the opportunity that I had been looking for.
It was dusk before I took it – I needed the long shadows. Until then, I dug like a dutiful slave. When I judged that the moment had come, I looked back over my shoulder.
‘Brando,’ I warned, my look giving him all the instruction he needed. Then I dropped to my knees and hissed in pain.
The closest guard came towards me a second later. Another tall tribesman, he was stooped awkwardly to avoid arrows. There was a blade in his hand, and his blue eyes were dangerous.
He didn’t see the stone I had left half-buried in the mud. Crouched as he was, the trip was enough for him to lose balance, and as his body tipped forwards, the German’s eyes looked to break his fall, and not for an attack – it gave me inches.
It gave me enough.
I looped the spade over in a wide arc. I held it side on, and the angled steel of the head dug into the back of the man’s skull with a grotesque crack. The shape of
the zigzagging trench hid my actions, and now bought me seconds before the body was discovered – I hoped it would be enough.
‘Run!’ I hissed into Micon’s face, half throwing him with Brando on to the lip of the trench. Stumps needed no such help, and took off like a hare. Brando and Folcher were soon close on his heels. Beside me, Vinicius of the Nineteenth climbed out from the dirt.
‘You stupid bastard!’ he hissed at me as we took off, and I begged my legs to sprint.
I never felt so slow in my life. Nor, having left the confines of the trench for the open field strewn with corpses, did I ever feel so exposed. My muscles screamed at me that they were empty, and needed to stop. My mind cried that I was a fool. Behind me, German voices snarled. I did not turn to look. I simply ran.
‘We’re Roman! We’re Roman!’ I tried to shout as arrows began to hiss through the air.
The others quickly took up my call. Beside me, Vinicius’s cries were cut short as an arrow buried itself in his face. He was dead before he hit the floor, and I assumed that I would follow a moment later.
I was wrong – the fire ceased, and we covered the remaining ground panting and ragged.
‘Run then, you fuckers!’ came the encouragement from the walls.
We ran. We ran, we stumbled, and we closed on the gate that we thought would be our salvation.
‘Open the gates!’ Stumps cried, the first to reach them, his arms banging feebly against the thick wood.
The others took up the calls. ‘Open the gates! Open the gates!’
I raised my eyes to the gatehouse above me, where I saw a dozen arrows pointed at my face.
Their message was clear.
The gates would stay shut.
8
I pressed my calloused hands against the wood of the gate. It was solid. Immobile. Blood pounded in my ears. Breaths rasped against my throat.
‘Open up, you arseholes!’ Stumps roared, defiant in the face of the archers.
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