Siege

by Geraint Jones

  ‘Put the light out and go to sleep,’ he told me. ‘Your face is hurting my eyes. I’d rather take my chances with the nightmares.’

  The insult told me that, for the moment at least, my friend was restored to himself. Lying back on to my bed, I pulled the cloak tight about my ears. I wanted to rest. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to dream about a past life.

  The screams didn’t care.

  They echoed across the fort until dawn approached, and the time to stand-to arrived. They echoed as we stood guard on a wall that overlooked empty fields scarred by trenches. They echoed as we were relieved and filed back to our barrack block with drawn faces and sunken eyes.

  ‘Will you shut up?’ Stumps snapped, barking at the sky. This time, when he told me he was going to seek out Titus, I did not try to stop him. The agony of the tortured prisoners was seeping into my own mind, and I would not deny my friend the comfort of drink.

  ‘You coming with me?’ he grunted, desperate to be on his way.

  I shook my head, hit suddenly by a pang of guilt and embarrassment, for I knew there was a place where I could seek out my own comfort, and a window to my past.

  And so I went in search of her.

  ‘That’s a different one.’ Linza spoke quietly, her eyes on the floor as a shrill wail penetrated the October morning. ‘It sounds like a boy.’

  I tried to swallow the biscuit that was now like lead in my mouth, thinking about the young German I had captured in the night, and how I had herded him towards his dreadful fate. Would it have made any difference if I let him run? Would sparing his life have cost the lives of my friends? Doubtful.

  But then I thought of Arminius. How I had saved his life on the parade square when his uncle had tried to warn Varus of the prince’s treachery. How I had spared it when I stepped from the forest, a spear in my hand and the clear target of Arminius ahead of me. I had thrown myself into harm’s way to save lives I thought worthy before, and where had it led? Three legions rotted in the forest because of my sensibility. Suddenly, the rush of guilt and nausea slammed into me like a chariot. The half-chewed biscuit stuck in my throat as I choked.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Linza asked me as the crumbs fell on to the floor of the empty barrack block.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lied, like every other soul within the fort.

  ‘You turned white.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Here, take some water.’

  ‘I said I’m fine,’ I spat, angry and disgusted at my actions that had led to this misery, then instantly nervous that my words would be seen by Linza as an attack on her.

  I needn’t have worried.

  ‘Just don’t waste your food,’ the Batavian girl warned me, pushing her blond hair back over her shoulders. ‘German winters are long. You look like a skeleton. You should eat.’

  ‘Now the fort commander’s ordered half-rations I don’t think anyone’s getting any fatter.’

  Linza shrugged and pulled a face. ‘There’s always someone who gets fat, even when everyone else starves. That’s just the way the world is,’ she answered pragmatically. ‘My father said so. He travelled a lot.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He was a sailor. I think he died at sea.’ She shrugged again. ‘Maybe. Or maybe he found a new family.’

  Or maybe he was butchered on a foreign shore. Maybe he was taken into slavery, and now pulled an oar as a whip scarred his back. The world was a brutal place, and not many on the fringes of Empire were destined for a peaceful life.

  ‘My father and now my husband. Both lost.’ Linza’s eyes wandered over the civilians and soldiers who passed us by. ‘They could both be alive. They could both be dead. I will never know.’

  ‘It’s not too late for your husband,’ I tried. ‘We made it out.’

  ‘When the army was here, at the fort. How many days since then? Where are they now?’ she asked dispassionately. ‘No. Better he is dead in the forest. I say that because I love him.’

  We lapsed into silence. Linza wiped at an eye.

  ‘It’s all right if you want to cry,’ I managed feebly.

  She snorted. ‘I am tired of crying. I want to live or to die.’

  ‘We are alive.’ I said, yet I was unsure if I believed the words myself.

  She turned and smiled at me as another animal scream rolled towards the sky, the prisoner’s agony making her point for her: this was not life. It was clinging to existence, with the hope that life could one day grow again from the ashes of suffering.

  ‘Tell me something funny.’ She spoke quickly, taking me off guard.

  ‘Something funny?’

  ‘A joke. A story. Make me laugh.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘No one is this serious all their life, Felix. Tell me something funny,’ she challenged me.

  And so I closed my eyes. I tried to forget the screams. I tried to remember the time when I was always smiling. Always laughing.

  ‘My father,’ I told her, remembering. ‘He liked to drink, but he could never remember where the toilet was when he’d gone to bed. One night I heard a crash, and I ran to my parents’ bedroom. I thought maybe it was a robbery, and I had my dagger in my hand. I was scared. My heart was racing. But when I burst through the door, I found my father on the floor, tangled within a table. He’d tried to piss through the window, but the table had collapsed underneath him. There was piss everywhere.’

  Linza’s smile was growing. ‘Your mother must have been so angry.’

  ‘She was used to it.’ I smiled myself, the fondness of the memory warming me. ‘She wouldn’t get up to help him. “I told you you were getting too fat for that,” she was moaning as he tried to untangle himself.’

  Linza’s smile was bright now. My own stretched the cracked skin of my cheeks. ‘That’s funny,’ she snorted. ‘Do you miss your father?’

  ‘No,’ I answered quickly, the smile gone in an instant, that bright memory eclipsed by the clouds of others – memories that were dark, savage and brutal. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Felix …’ she tried.

  But it was too late. She had reminded me of that stolen life, and I left her in my wake. Her smile behind me. I marched in search of the one constant of my adopted life. The one thing that had distracted me, as a soldier, from the memories I had left behind.

  I sought out pain.

  I sought out the screams.

  32

  Familiar as I was with the unchanging layout of a Roman encampment, I knew that the screams were guiding me towards the blacksmiths. The rain of the past night had gone, but the ground was still slippery beneath my feet, the air cracked with cold and the promise of the coming winter.

  They would be lean months. No one – save Arminius – had foreseen the massacre of three legions, and the forts on the Lippe had been provisioned with rations based on the idea that there would be trade with the locals, and resupply from the legion’s stone-walled bases on the Rhine. The fort’s position on the river had been chosen to allow barges to ferry in supplies, but the Germans would have blocked the channel up river. Any attempt to clear it would be met with battle, and the Rhine garrisons had shown no inclination to pursue such an outcome. There was not a single enemy warrior within sight of the walls, but the fort was cut off and besieged as well as if the German tribes swarmed against our gates.

  The screams were growing louder as I closed in on their source. Between the cries, I could now make out the bellow of angry interrogation. I watched as two young children crept forwards, building up their courage to witness the cause of such misery. Something in their manner made me think back to a time when it was I and Marcus who prowled the streets together like feral cats. Boys are the same the world over, and war and death hold an irresistible attraction for us. Only the most brave, stupid or desperate to prove their worth would actually go on to become an army’s fighters and killers – at least by choice – but death itself was an inescapable part of life. Just by reaching these young years, the
children had done well. How many brothers and sisters had their parents wailed for? How many times had they heard screams of anguish that surpassed even the prisoner’s cries of pain? Some say that one can become inoculated to death and misery, and that once you have seen so much, it affects you no more. That has not been my own experience. True, a mind can become numb in order to survive, but the pain is always there, ready to rear its head in an angry second. We live amongst death, and we fear it more than anything else. If it held no terror for us, then why would men desert the legions on eve of battle? Why would they shit themselves at the thought of it? Why would mothers tear and rend their own skin through grief at the loss of a child they had never known until the same day of its birth, and death? Accustomed is not accepted. Every death, every loss, shapes a man and his mind. Some become wrecks, others become monsters, but none come away from death’s touch unchanged.

  The boys must have felt my dark thoughts. Clapping their eyes on me, both twisted on their heels and fled.

  I turned the sharp corner to the blacksmiths’ yard. There was such a building in every fort, the legion training some of its number to become the specialists who would hone the point of javelins and sharpen short swords. As experts they earned a degree of privilege in the ranks, and were immune from such trivial responsibilities as guard duties and the digging of ramparts, but the stench of scorched flesh in the air told me that it was not steel that was now receiving the careful attention of the red-hot irons.

  There was no sign of the prisoners, but outside the building stood a section of soldiers fully armoured and on their guard. They were not the only legionaries present. A dozen or so others milled around, trading gossip. I was not the only one with a curious and twisted mind.

  Or a broken one.

  ‘Stumps,’ I greeted my friend who sat crumpled in the dirt.

  ‘What you doin’ ere?’ he slurred.

  ‘I came to find you,’ I answered honestly. Indeed some sense had told me that Stumps would be drawn to the suffering as I had. I took in the sight of him now, more wine than man, his uniform filthy. Without doubt he had been sleeping in some muddy alleyway between the buildings.

  ‘Come on. We need to get you back and cleaned up before you get disciplined.’

  ‘Where’s Chickenhead?’ he demanded instead, confirming that he had passed beyond any normal state of inebriation.

  ‘Chickenhead’s dead,’ I told him gently.

  ‘I know that, you arsehole.’ The veteran waved his hands. ‘I mean, where’s his body? We need to bury him. And the cat. We need to bury them!’

  ‘We will,’ I lied.

  ‘Today?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Today.’

  ‘All right.’ He nodded, a little happier. Then: ‘Felix, I’m out of wine. I think someone took it.’

  A child would have been able to wrestle Stumps’s possessions from him. He was lucky he still had the tunic on his back.

  ‘Where’s your helmet?’ I asked him. ‘Your armour, Stumps? Where is it?’

  ‘Left it with Titus,’ he managed before belching. A second later, powerful red vomit bounced from the dirt.

  Behind us, I heard a pair of soldiers snigger.

  ‘What’s your fucking problem?’ I snapped at two legionaries barely out of their teens. They said nothing, but one shot Stumps a contemptuous look. It was enough for me to leave my friend’s side. Hand on the pommel of my sword, I crossed the short distance to them at speed, seeing the fear etch into their faces as they recognized the murder in my own.

  ‘You have a fucking problem?’ I repeated, gripping one by his red neckerchief and pulling his face towards mine.

  What did he see? A once handsome face that was now a patchwork of cracked skin and scars. Deep-set eyes that had seen too much, now nothing but empty pits. Rage that could drive my blade into an ally’s stomach as soon as an enemy’s.

  ‘We’re sorry,’ the second boy managed. ‘We didn’t mean to offend.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I snapped at him, shoving the other boy backward as I released him. ‘You enjoying the show?’ I gestured to the building that housed the prisoners, and their screams.

  The young soldiers said nothing. Like the tens of thousands of citizens who crammed into arenas across the Empire, the boys had come to see suffering as an escape from boredom. I couldn’t blame them for it any more than I could blame a snake for its venom, but I knew that, once they had seen and endured enough anguish of their own, the fights of gladiators and the execution of criminals would no longer hold any allure. That every death, every scream, would echo the ones given by their dying comrades. By their friends.

  But how to tell a young soldier that?

  ‘Just fuck off,’ I said to them instead. ‘Get out of my sight. If you ever laugh at my friend again, I’ll cut you open.’

  The boys were hurriedly moving away when I was struck by a better idea.

  ‘Get back here!’ I called, and they turned nervously to face me. ‘Pick him up.’ I gestured at Stumps, who was now passed out on his back. ‘That man’s killed more men and seen more battle than you could ever fucking imagine. If you drop him, or even graze his arse against the floor, I will kick your fucking brains out through your arseholes. Do you understand me?’

  They did. And so Stumps was carried to Titus.

  ‘He’s goin’ to drink me dry, this fucker,’ Titus snorted, casting a concerned eye over our friend who now snored heavily in the quartermaster’s stores. ‘I had to smack a couple of lads around when they complained that Stumps was getting more than his fair share.’ The big man chuckled at the thought. ‘Fair? What the fuck does that even mean, Felix?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. Like Titus, I had learned through experience that it was an empty concept. Life was about avoiding suffering, and accumulating power. As long as he did not upset the most senior leadership, Titus had enough of his own within the camp to do as he pleased. The man’s sheer size silenced most critics. His monstrous fists did for the rest.

  We were alone, but loud voices came through the adjoining wall. They were excited. Animated.

  ‘Business?’ I asked.

  He gave a gruff nod as he pulled a blanket gently over his comrade’s sleeping form.

  ‘Why the fuck did he go to the prisoners?’ Titus shook his head. ‘And volunteering for a raid? That’s not like him.’

  ‘I don’t think he even volunteered.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It was dark. I think he just joined on.’

  ‘Why? You, I can understand. You’re one of these fucking idiots who thinks they can unfuck the world. But Stumps? What’s got into his head?’

  I shrugged again. Clearly the experience of the forest had shaken Stumps’s mind, but no soldier reacted to war in the same way. And so, instead of offering guesses, I tried to put forward a solution for keeping our comrade away from the fighting.

  ‘I think I can swing it with my centurion that he joins you here. Shouldn’t be a problem, if you pull it at your end.’

  ‘Yeah, good thinking,’ Titus agreed, pulling a huge hand across his jaw. ‘He’s been injured enough times that they won’t hold it against him.’ It was common practice in the legions that the men who saw the most action, or who suffered the most wounds, should get the pick of the more comfortable and desirable positions within units.

  ‘What did you do to those young fuckers who carried him in?’ Titus smiled, suddenly amused. ‘Thought one of them was goin’ to start crying.’

  I waved the question away. Instead I filled the big man in on the news that the boys had been eager to spill to ease my temper. The news that had dribbled from the trembling lips of the tortured prisoners.

  ‘Arminius is mopping up everything east of the Rhine, Roman or allied to the Empire,’ I told him. ‘The blocking force that we raided is the only thing between us and Roman lands.’

  ‘Enough though, isn’t it?’ he grunted. ‘And once Arminius is done he can come back here. Finish what he started.’


  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘Why lose the men when he can let winter do it for him?’

  Titus had nothing to say to that.

  ‘The Germans seemed to think the Rhine garrisons have been bolstered,’ I offered.

  ‘Probably the lower Rhine legions moved up. No good to us unless they cross the fucking river though.’

  ‘They’d have done that already if that was the plan, wouldn’t they?’ I asked glumly.

  He nodded slowly. ‘Winter’s coming, and you don’t fight a war in German winter.’

  ‘You’re going to get skinny,’ I teased, trying to lighten the mood.

  Titus grinned. ‘You’re the legion toothpick. I’ll be fine. Our lot will be fine. Don’t worry about winter, Felix. I’ve got us sorted out.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  33

  Titus pushed open the door to the rear of the quartermaster’s building. Instantly I was assaulted by the heat of bodies crammed into a tight space, and the opposing cries of gambling: joy and despair.

  I shook my head in wonder at Titus’s industry. ‘It looks like a circus.’

  The long building had once been a storeroom, but now stacks of supplies had been removed to make room for games of dice, casks of ale and wine, and a wrestling ring surrounded by benches. The ring was currently empty but the seats full, and I expected some spectacle was soon to begin. Until then, Roman legionary and Syrian archer busied themselves with drink and a dozen whores.

  ‘There must be a century in here?’ I asked Titus.

  ‘I tell the lads on the door not to let in more than sixty, but they probably take a few coins and forget how to count.’ He shrugged. ‘They’re infantry, after all.’

  ‘Is it like this every night?’

  ‘Not really. Got busier since Caedicius ordered half-rations. Nothing makes a man gamble like a bit of hunger.’ Then Titus turned to a knot of soldiers, pointing at an inebriated man in their midst. ‘Oi. You lot. He’s gone or you all are.’