Siege

by Geraint Jones

  The men moved quickly to obey him and eject their drunken friend as, from the corner of my vision, I felt the approach of someone whose shoulders were twice the thickness of my own.

  ‘Hello, boys.’

  ‘Metella,’ I replied.

  ‘Come for the wrestling?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I looked at Titus. ‘Have I?’

  The man grinned. ‘He’s come to see that he won’t be going hungry.’

  ‘A friend of Titus is a friend of mine.’ She smiled too, through broken teeth, catching Titus’s meaning before turning back to him. ‘You want to get started?’

  ‘This is your show, darling. I’m just the humble quartermaster.’

  ‘All right then.’

  She walked away to the centre of the wrestling ring that was drawn out on the storeroom floor. The eyes of the drinking soldiers caught the movement, and there was a noticeable drop in volume as they watched her take centre stage.

  ‘Shut up then, you tarts,’ Metella ordered the few soldiers who had yet to quieten down. ‘Same rules as last night. You register over there with Plancus. Price of entry is a day’s rations. You’ll get matched up against someone your own size, and winner takes the scoff. You want to bet for coin, it goes through Plancus and me, or my fist goes through your fucking head, understood? You can bet in your groups, but house takes a twenty cut. Don’t like it? Fuck off. We’ve got plenty more who want to come in.’

  There were no dissenting voices. The soldiers on the benches had come to win food or make money. So had the whores whose arms were draped about the men’s necks.

  ‘Right,’ the burly woman concluded. ‘Plancus? First two names.’

  An old soldier stepped forward as Metella moved away into the crowd. He walked with a severe limp, his hip dropping low with each step.

  ‘Met him a couple of years ago,’ Titus confided in me. ‘Solid bloke. Worked with us in Minden.’

  I thought back to Titus’s black-market trading in the army’s summer camp – how his deal with the Seventeenth Legion’s quartermaster had led to Roman blades in German hands. Titus’s twisted sense of honour had compelled him to kill that man for his deceit, and so I could only imagine that he had found Plancus to be innocent of any part in it.

  That grey-haired veteran now called out a pair of names belonging to men of the Nineteenth Legion. Plancus’s voice was as tired as his legs: the man must have been close to sixty, pushing two terms of enlistment within the legions.

  ‘What do you get out of this?’ I asked Titus as two muscular soldiers entered the ring. Both carried themselves with confidence, flexing shoulders as they eyed their opponent.

  ‘Besides entertainment?’ he grunted. ‘Half of the door,’ meaning the money that was collected for entry. ‘And half of what the house takes on bets.’

  I didn’t need to be a mathematician to see that it would be a profitable night for him. ‘That’s a big cut. How did you get them to agree to that?’

  The big man smiled. ‘Metella’s an old friend. And she might be built like a war galley, Felix, but this is a man’s world.’

  I had little to say to that. There was no doubt in my mind that women played the tune of men’s hearts and heads, but in the world’s eyes only a man could stand to the fore in business or power. Roman society was built on subjugation, and that extended to gender as much as social class or nation of birth.

  ‘Coin on the dark-haired lad?’ Titus then offered me.

  ‘Why not? It’s your money, after all.’

  We lapsed into silence and watched as the two soldiers went at it, both content to dispense with caution and to charge at their opponent, looking for the quick opening and win. Wrestling was a mandatory part of training in the legions, courage and strength being highly valued virtues, and both fighters were looking for victory through those means, rather than tactics.

  ‘My bloke’s got this,’ Titus grunted, assured. ‘Look how the other lad keeps trying to duck out from under his grip. He’s goin’ to end up on his face.’

  The wrestlers stood locked in a vice-like grip, the veins of their biceps like pipes as they clutched at each other’s necks and shoulders, each fighting for the leverage that would allow them to flip their opponent on to the floor. Sure enough, my man looked as though his neck was buckling.

  ‘Loser’s going to be a lot more hungry than if he just stayed on half-rations,’ I noted.

  ‘That’s what makes it interesting.’ Titus was clearly proud of his ability to turn a profit from disaster. ‘They’ll double down then, and be back for the next one. They’ll hold grudges. They’ll get desperate. We’re under siege, Felix. People aren’t goin’ anywhere, and so for distraction they’ll pay anything. With or without those pay chests, I’m going home rich.’

  ‘To find your son?’ I asked, trying to keep my tone casual. Titus had shared a secret with me as the army had died: that his boy, thought lost with the navy, had surfaced alive, but in trouble. I had never referred to it since.

  Titus said nothing. If it was possible to make silence violent, then he did so. His face grew taut. I saw the warning signs of his anger, and let my curiosity die.

  ‘You were right,’ I said instead as the dark-haired soldier finally tripped his opponent, sending him sprawling on to his front and giving up his back so that he was quickly pinned to the floor and defeated.

  Titus simply grunted as cheers came from the bet’s winners, and jeers from the angry losers.

  Plancus hobbled back to the fore as the defeated wrestler stormed away in disgust. ‘Next one’s a treat!’ the veteran announced. ‘Come up Macro, Nineteenth Legion, and … Fuckin’ ’ell. I’m not gonna try and read this name. Something foreign. Who’s the Syrian?’

  A lithe archer raised his hand and stepped forwards, doubtless taking his cue from the look of puzzlement on Plancus’s lined face. The archer was tall for an Easterner, and measured up well against the smirking Roman who now rubbed chalk into his hands and spat on to the boards for luck.

  ‘Smash him up, Macro!’ a man called from the benches, and others soon followed his example.

  ‘Put him on his arse, the cunt!’

  ‘Hammer the raping bastard!’

  I looked at Metella, and saw a satisfied smile tease her thick lips. The animosity towards the archer was palpable, easily drowning out the support of the dozen or so of his comrades. Amongst these angry taunts were calls for bets, coins changing hands rapidly. No matter the outcome of the match, Metella and her associates would harvest a pretty profit.

  ‘Fight!’ Plancus called, hobbling quickly to be out of the way.

  Unlike the first pair, both men began to circle at a low crouch, eyeing their opponent. They would be judging distance, and speed. Power and strength. Calculating if an opening in their opposition’s guard was a weakness or an invitation to a counter-attack. Watching them, I thought back to my own days in the wrestling circle, and how my stomach had tightened with anticipation and excitement as I eyed my challenger as a wolf does a sheep. How my chest would swell with pride as my father would pull me from the ring, and lift me on to his thick shoulders, victorious …

  ‘Ten on the Syrian,’ I offered Titus.

  I was ignored. Titus’s eyes were fixed on someplace far from Germany, led there by my asking about his son.

  The Roman made the first move. It was a quick lunge for a leg, but the Syrian was quicker, spinning out of harm’s way. It was a risky play to open up his back and his blind side, and I wondered if the Roman would have the sense to see it, to feint, and to take it when offered again.

  He did, and half lunged.

  Just as the Syrian had wanted.

  This time there was no spin. No evasion. The Syrian held his ground, and the Roman, only half committed to the lunge, didn’t have the momentum either to fully pursue it, or to pull back. Instead, he caught the Syrian’s knee fully with his jaw.

  ‘He can’t do that, the shit!’ a man roared as the Roman hit the floor, un
conscious.

  ‘That’s fucking bollocks!’ another shouted.

  ‘That’s bullshit!’

  ‘Cheating bastard!’

  Soon the air was thick with accusation. The Syrian had the sense to leave the ring, narrowly ducking a mug that was thrown at his head.

  ‘Shut it!’ Metella ordered with a thunderclap, stepping into the ring as if she would fight any dissenters. ‘He won fair and square. If you have a problem with it, you can stick your name down to fight him tomorrow!’

  Plancus was then almost overwhelmed in a stampede, as a half-dozen indignant Romans rushed to him for just such an opportunity, anxious to restore both legion and national honour.

  ‘You’re a clever bastard,’ I grunted to Titus, watching the frenzied circus that he had whipped up with his comrades.

  The big man shrugged. ‘We’re out here on a limb because it puts coins in senators’ pockets,’ he said, rubbing a hand over his granite jaw. ‘We’ve lost this war, Felix, but you don’t have to be on the winning side to be on the winning side.’

  I knew those words were accurate, but also how they held true in the opposite case; where was victory for the soldier who died in supposed glory for the profit of an emperor and his senators?

  ‘Just be careful,’ I warned my friend. ‘You rub two sticks together long enough, you’ll get a fire.’

  Titus waved my worries away with an open palm. ‘You can get in on it too?’ he offered.

  I shook my head.

  ‘All right then. So what will you do?’

  I had no good answer for him. Whether the enemy was in sight of our walls or not, we were under siege in a hostile province. Freedom of action was something that Arminius had taken from us, and so what choice did I have?

  ‘I’ll wait.’

  34

  I rubbed the chalk into my hands, the fine powder falling like the snow that now clung to the hillsides. Winter had come, but the gymnasium was hot from bodies and breath, my skin shining with sweat.

  ‘Again?’ my opponent asked me.

  ‘Again,’ I confirmed, and then stepped into the wrestling ring.

  The fight was over as quickly as the last. The man was like the sea, always moving, and with a grace that belied his power. There was no doubting that strength now as he kicked my legs from under me and drove my snarling face into the dirt.

  ‘You’re too angry,’ he told me as he pulled me to my feet. ‘You come charging in like a boy that’s seen his first pair of tits. Control yourself, Corvus.’

  I said nothing. I was angry. I woke angry, and I fell to sleep angry. Every moment of the day I was one wrong word or look away from lashing out. It made me angrier still that my friend could be so calm, so perfect, and yet beat me in the ring as if I were a child.

  ‘I used to be the one doing this to you,’ I grumbled. ‘I hate losing, Marcus, even to you.’

  My oldest friend saved me the mercy of pity. ‘Times change. Concentrate on wrestling instead of trying to take my head off, and maybe you’ll have a chance.’

  ‘You know it’s not your head I want.’ I spoke darkly, taking the offered cup of water.

  ‘I know.’

  Our conversation lapsed there, but my mind was not so easily pushed into silence. Voices – all of my own creation – fought as angrily as I had wrestled to be heard: You’re a coward. Why are you here? You’re weak. You’re pathetic. Why did you—

  ‘Again,’ I snapped at my friend, desperate to fight, knowing no other way to shut off the voices.

  His eyes narrowed as he took in my battered face. ‘Corvus, your nose is already ruined. Let’s just call it—’

  ‘Again!’ I boomed.

  And so we fought. I let the anger consume me. I charged at my best friend with every intention of breaking his bones, and he used that weakness against me, turning me inside out with feints and lunges, planting blows against my skull that only enraged me further, causing snot and blood to bellow from my shattered nose.

  ‘Let her go, Corvus,’ he told me as a jab crashed into my eye socket.

  I would not. Instead I roared. I charged. Without knowing how I got there, I was then on my front, the weight of my friend pinned against my back, driving the air from my lungs and the blood from my face.

  ‘Let her go,’ he said with a calm that had no place amidst the violence.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I spat into the dirt.

  ‘Let her go.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  And then I felt the fingers on my windpipe. I felt it close. I felt the breaths becoming ragged, and the panic in my mind as my vision closed in.

  ‘Fuck you. Fuck you,’ I gurgled, blacking out.

  And then all was silent.

  35

  I couldn’t breathe. My mind was racing. Terrified.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  I was dreaming, I knew I was, and yet there was no escape. I was trapped within my mind, and with each rapid heartbeat, each shallow breath, I knew that I was panicking myself towards death. I tried to scream, but the sounds died in my closed throat. I tried to call out for my mother, for her, but there was no sound except the pulsing of blood in my skull.

  I didn’t want to die like this, but if I didn’t wake up, I knew that I would.

  Somehow, my mind, conscious yet locked in its dream state, knew how to wake. Arms flailing, I fought for the edge of my bunk. With all my strength, I pulled myself out and crashed on to the floor.

  I woke. I cried for her.

  Brando leaped to me and took hold of my shoulders. My chest began to heave as painfully as if I’d been kicked by a horse. My eyes were wild.

  ‘Felix!’ Brando said urgently. ‘Felix!’ he pressed, trying to pull me back into his world.

  I heard the words, conscious now, but all I could think of was her.

  ‘Who was she?’ Stumps asked me.

  We were atop the wall, yet another watch that stretched the day’s hours into an endless tedium. The fields ahead of us were empty, the only movement the birds that sought out scraps of tribesman in the abandoned trenches.

  No answer was forthcoming, so my friend shrugged, his eyes on the crows. ‘It could be worse, I suppose.’

  Still I said nothing. My own eyes were fixed on the cold horizon, where the endless forests appeared like spilled ink.

  ‘Titus says you’ve sorted it for me to go and work with him in the quartermaster’s?’ the veteran tried instead.

  I gave a shallow nod.

  ‘I appreciate that, Felix, but I can still fight. We all have bad nights.’

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the words fell away. Finally: ‘I’m so fucking tired of this,’ I confessed. ‘We can’t ever get away from it, can we? You close your eyes, pretend it doesn’t happen, and then it finds you in your dreams.’

  ‘We can drink?’ my friend offered helpfully. ‘Seems to be working all right for me,’ he bluffed.

  ‘Until it runs out.’ I shook my head. ‘What life is that, Stumps? Crawling around pissed like the village idiot. Is it what you pictured when you signed up to soldier?’

  His look told me that it wasn’t. ‘What did you picture?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ It was the truth. ‘I didn’t know what I was joining, just what I was leaving.’

  ‘Her?’ he tried at last.

  I didn’t answer.

  We watched the feeding crows.

  Days passed with guard duties and half-empty stomachs. Moods grew as dark as the brooding German skies. There was an unseen enemy beyond the horizon, but the soldier’s concern now was the battles he fought against appetite and boredom.

  ‘This is shit,’ Stumps grumbled after yet another stint on the walls. The previous day, Balbus had been sent to the surgeon when a cut on his hand had turned septic. Unable to hold a javelin, he was currently relieved of all but light duties, and so Stumps’s transfer to Titus had been cut temporarily short.

  ‘Better than being in the forest,’ Folcher said, trying to lighten the m
ood.

  ‘Forest or fort.’ Stumps shrugged, climbing for his bunk. ‘All the fucking same. People out to do us in, no pubs and no women.’

  ‘There’re women here,’ the Batavian offered.

  ‘You seen a decent one? They only managed to sneak out of the forest because they looked like boar.’

  ‘The one that Felix talks to is nice.’ Folcher smiled. ‘The Batavian,’ he explained, wondering at my sudden unease.

  ‘I like her company,’ I explained to Stumps’s sly look.

  ‘The company of her tits in your face,’ he leered. ‘Good for you, Felix. At least someone’s getting some fanny.’

  ‘Not like that,’ I answered, pulling off my sandals. ‘I haven’t even seen her for days.’

  ‘Probably found some new cock, then,’ my friend teased me, enjoying my discomfort. ‘Maybe young Micon here? You look like a fine swordsman.’

  The boy soldier, an admitted virgin, blushed at the attention.

  Brando smirked. ‘There’re whores in the fort.’

  ‘That’s why you have stopped fucking your mattress?’ Folcher laughed.

  ‘So it’s mattresses as well as goats for you lads, is it?’ Stumps grinned, leaning over the edge of his bunk. ‘I’ll keep that in mind when I retire and open my brothel.’

  ‘You’d retire in Germany?’ Dog put in.

  Stumps recoiled in horror. ‘Fuck me, Dog, we’re supposed to be on half-rations. How come it smells like you’ve eaten a sack of onions? And no. The only way I’m staying in this shithole is if some goat-shagger nails my head on to a tree.’

  ‘They do that.’ Micon spoke up without emotion.

  ‘They do, my friend,’ Stumps granted. ‘Civilization for me. Back to Italy. No more forests. No more snow.’

  ‘I’ll come and visit.’ Folcher laughed again, enjoying the fantasy. ‘I will show my children Rome.’

  ‘Why not?’ Stumps rolled on to his back. ‘A nice picnic whilst we watch a few executions in the arena. A proper Roman family day out.’