The Blood Road (Legionary 7): Legionary, no. 7

by Gordon Doherty

  In the winter-gripped countryside between these two great entrenched forces, the Claudia existed. No way through to Kabyle. No way back south to make contact with Saturninus. But damn, they had tried to break through both ways, Pavo cursed inwardly. During autumn, they had spotted a horse cropping lazily at a patch of grass. A war horse, still saddled and bearing reins along with a streak of blood along its flank. It was no doubt a stray of battle. The young legionary, Matho – once a stablehand – had managed to steal up behind the beast and seize its trailing reins. He had calmed it, mounted it and ridden south, sure he could spear between two of Gratian’s camps near the eastern edge of his lines, under the bulky shadow of the Mons Asticus massif. Pavo had watched with a small group of his men as the rider hurtled across the plain, then as two Western Gentiles riders had burst from the Mons Asticus valleys to circle him. They had trussed him and taken him back to Gratian’s main fort. Pavo and Sura had shadowed the trio back there, plotting to free their young comrade. No such chance came. They heard the Western Emperor’s screeching denunciation of poor Matho, the crowded cohort braying about his desertion. Then they had both shrunk in despair when they heard the Western Emperor give the order for decimatio. ‘Use your fists and whatever blunt instruments you can find as cudgels. Let this dog be the first of the Claudia to suffer as the rest soon will.’ The sickening song of Matho’s screams and the dull crack of sticks and fists pounding flesh soon ended. The young legionary’s unrecognisable, bloated and purple corpse was dumped unceremoniously in a waste pit outside the camp later that day.

  The north, too, was blocked just as fiercely. They had focused most of their efforts on piercing the arc of Gothic strongholds, but to no avail. Two men of Cornix’ Third Cohort had approached one of the roving Gothic horse bands, waving the pale-cloth banner of truce. The riders had cantered towards them, then sliced off both of their heads. Twice more – to Pavo’s shame – men had been brutally and swiftly murdered despite bearing the white banner. So they had turned their efforts to sneaking through, only for more men to have been caught: one group burned alive, another whipped and tied out in the bitter cold, naked, before a bear’s den. When Pulcher and Libo had tried to sneak through one warband camp, they had been spotted. Only Libo’s quick-thinking in kicking over a sconce to set light to the nearest tent bought them the breath needed to escape.

  ‘Pavo, is this it – our way to Kabyle?’ Sura repeated.

  Pavo shook his head of the thoughts and peered at the twin hills again and the river rolling between them. Up on the crests of both hills, skeletal trees were laden with snow, and the space within the tree stands was hazy. In his heart, he believed there was nothing up there. In his head, he knew no good general would fail to fortify or watch such a tight choke point. But his heart screamed loudest. ‘This might be it, Sura, a gap in the armour. A way throu-’

  His words ended when Sura rolled towards him, grabbed him and rolled on another turn.

  Thrum… whack!

  Both men stared at the quivering Gothic arrow, jutting from the snow where Pavo had just been. Pavo stared with wide eyes at the twin hills. Now he saw the kneeling, stock-still Gothic archer, his white leathers blending in with the snow and his hair and face dusted with a white war paint. Only his eyes betrayed his humanity. He was not alone: dozens of them, Pavo saw now – on each of the two hills. A horseman trotted up onto the crest of one, asking the archer in some guttural tone. ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Romans, I think. Just a few of them though,’ the archer’s voice sailed across the distance between the hills and the knoll. The Goth lifted the horn strapped around his neck and caught a torch thrown up by an unseen other. He moved the torch towards the stacked wood.

  No, Pavo mouthed. If the beacon system was lit, the horn blown, then the warbands camped closest would converge here. He and Sura would be like rats in a cage. The rest of the Claudia too.

  ‘Hold on, let’s be sure. I’ll take my riders out to check,’ the horseman said, wheeling his steed round and vanishing from sight, before he and a score of horsemen appeared round the base of the hill and charged across the snowy flats towards the knoll.

  ‘Move,’ Sura hissed.

  They ducked down and sped across a stretch of snowbound meadow, puffs of white flicking up in their wake. Both skidded to a halt before a twist in the Tonsus, deep and wide – swollen by the snows. The snow-muted drum of hooves sounded from behind the knoll, drawing rapidly closer.

  Both men cursed at their error in running to a dead end. ‘The river is too strong to swim,’ Sura panted.

  Pavo looked across the stream, to the snow-heavy boughs of the pine woods there. Without a moment of hesitation, he looped an arm around Sura’s back and hopped down into the river. The waters were like icy claws, searching deep to their bones the moment they landed, chest-deep in the nearside shallows.

  ‘Pavo what the fu-’

  Pavo clamped a hand over Sura’s mouth and pushed him back against the overhanging roots and grass of the bank – a meagre canopy. Then he ripped his sword from his scabbard and gripped it by the blade, before taking aim and hurling it across the river. The spinning blade chopped through the nearest of the branches over there with a crackle and a snap of wood, and snow sloughed and showered down, leaving a strip of vivid green needles, shuddering amongst the white.

  The hooves drummed right up to the bank, directly overhead. Pavo and Sura looked up, seeing through the gaps in the canopy of roots the snorting, pawing horses, breath steaming.

  ‘Impressive,’ said one Goth, looking over at the far banks.

  ‘What?’ snapped another.

  ‘They forded or swam the icy waters. See their footprints here on this side, and the disturbed trees across the way?’

  ‘You are sure it was Romans?’

  ‘I saw no steel or colours. Perhaps it was brigands or beggars.’

  ‘Still, we should send word to Iudex Fritigern. An extra few hundred warriors and a good picket would make this spot near-impassable.’

  With a soft pad of hooves through snow, the horsemen left, returning to the double hills.

  Sura, lips a shade of blue and body jerking with the cold, clambered out first. Pavo followed, helped by his friend. They staggered, shocked by the cold, their soaked clothes hardening to ice, downriver until they came to a dell lined with oak. They stepped over a thigh-high pile of hawthorn branches. To the passer-by it might have looked like naturally piled foliage, but the men of the Claudia had heaped it in a ring around the dell, to snag any would-be intruder. Picking their way down through the trees onto the dell’s low floor, they heard muted voices call to them from different directions: ‘Sir. Tribunus. Primus Pilus,’ said the Claudia men, hunkered down in the trees and keeping watch.

  The pair came to a small clearing in the dell floor. Here a small brook chattered along, joining the Tonsus somewhere west. A few tents sagged, heavy with snow. A handful of the Claudia men turned spits loaded with rabbits and pheasant – the smell of the sweet, roasting meat was glorious. Libo and Rectus rose from their haunches and flanked the returning duo.

  ‘Bring dry cloaks and a bowl of hot broth,’ Rectus asked of one of the legionaries, then guided the two towards the edge of the clearing. There, a shelf of bedrock rose, piled with thick snow, and dappled with frosted moss on its side. Durio and Indus stood guard either side of a dark opening in the rock, swaddled in their cloaks and furs they had collected during their early winter hunts. The two saluted and took a step aside each. Pavo ducked a little to enter the cave. Inside, the air carried just a touch of heat – thanks to a long-burning brazier in the corner of the deep, low chamber. Hundreds of men lay curled in balls, wrapped in their blankets and asleep, many more sitting up, deep in thought, carving at wood with knives or playing muted games of dice. The shields, armour and weapons and the legion eagle itself were stowed in piles at the back of the cave. One of the men saw Pavo and sat bolt upright, then the rest did too.

  ‘Tribunus! Primus Pilus!
’ their salutes reverberated around the cave.

  Pavo raised a shivering arm in salute to them all. The Claudia, he thought, with a cave as their barracks, and a badge of desertion as their legacy.

  He moved over to the brazier, his teeth chattering violently as his numb fingers unclasped his cloak while Rectus helped undress him of his tunic and trousers. Within a few moments, both were sitting on rocks by the crackling flames, with dry woollen blankets around their bare shoulders and hot, steaming cups of hare broth in hand.

  Rectus knelt before Sura, rubbing his hands across the primus pilus’ frozen fingers and pinching and massaging the palms to bring blood back to them.

  ‘I can almost feel my fingers again,’ Sura mumbled, his lips still tinged blue. ‘My cock, however…’

  Rectus stopped. ‘If you think I’m rubbing that…’

  Sura thumbed open the hem of his loincloth and peeked inside. ‘To be honest, you’d be hard-pressed to find it at the moment,’ he said, then shuffled a little closer to the fire.

  Rectus chuckled, then flicked his head towards the cave entrance and the outdoors. ‘So the river route isn’t an option either?’

  Pavo rubbed his hands together over the brazier. ‘There were archers posted there and cavalry too. As soon as they saw us they shot at us. The Tonsus is as well-watched as the woods and the plains.’

  ‘That place was our last hope,’ Libo said quietly.

  ‘No Roman can sneak through those lines,’ Sura agreed. ‘If we want to get to Kabyle we’ll have to sprout wings or dig a huge tunnel.’

  ‘I’ve said it before, but we don’t have to sneak,’ Rectus said. ‘We are a legion after all.’

  Pavo shook his head. ‘Fight our way through? It cannot be the way. Either we stand before Fritigern as an embassy, or not at all. Were we to force our way through his watch camps then we would turn up at Kabyle streaked in the blood of his kinsmen. That is not the way to assure him of our intentions.’

  ‘What about their intentions!’ Libo raged. ‘We’ve lost nine men we sent to them with the white banner. Trust has to exist on both sides.’

  ‘Trust has to be earned. If we show the way, Fritigern and his people will follow,’ Pavo said, willing himself to believe it. He glanced to the cave entrance: outside, snow drifted down in great white clumps, thick and silent, now half-filling the opening. Indus and Durio were already busy digging out their own sentry stations. The light outside was grey from the snowfall and from the oncoming evening. All fell silent, staring into the brazier, searching for answers.

  The gentle snowfall and the silence proved to be soothing, and Pavo took comfort in the positives: there was no sign of danger nearby, and they still had time to devise a plan before spring came and the war resumed. The dell cave, the heat of the wine and the gentle glow of the fire conjured a sense of safety like a warm blanket. A chance to think, to find a way. He finished his wine, then lay down to sleep. The sensation of resting his head on his rolled-up tunic was like sinking into an emperor’s bed. The scratchy, dried grass under him felt soft and comforting, the coarse and heavy woollen cloak trapping his warmth within.

  His first blink took him into a dark oblivion of restful sleep.

  He did not hear the noise outside the cave – a gentle shuffle of a body falling into the snow.

  Chapter 12

  The last piece of iron on his body was ripped away by the barbed scourge and the corpse army screamed in impending victory. Pavo’s every step was like that of an aged man, shaking, feeble. His naked body was laced with cuts and the red-slicked road was now streaked with veins of darker lifeblood. He clung to the legion standard as a sailor might hold onto a mast amidst a violent sea tempest. The crone, walking with him, her face etched with growing despair, whispered to him, her voice cracking up. ‘Not far to go now. You can make it. I know you can.’

  His head hung like a limp drape, lolling, and it was all he could do to look up now and again. The olive tree and the Goddess of Peace awaited, still, but they were impossibly distant, and the sun behind them was now half set.

  Pavo wrapped the fingers of both hands around the legion standard and thrust it forward another stride’s-worth. The mounted cadaver king circled as he went, and now he reached out and grabbed the standard, yanking it from Pavo’s grasp.

  Pavo fell to his knees instantly. The dead roared in delight, then exploded with joy when the rider champion snapped the staff in two and tossed both halves aside. ‘Let us see how he fares without his precious eagle,’ the thing droned, the sibilant voice escaping through the many sinewy holes and tears in its long-dead throat.

  Pavo stared at the broken standard, and knew his legs had nothing left in them.

  ‘Up, Pavo,’ the crone wept. ‘You must get up.’

  ‘I cannot,’ he croaked.

  ‘You must get up!’

  When he looked up at her, her puckered, withered face had changed. She threw her head back like a wolf and howled.

  He sat bolt upright, sweat droplets leaping from his skin, eyes wide in the gloom.

  Silence. Then.

  Hoooooooowl.

  His head snapped round to the cave entrance. Movement in the night, the crump-crump of feet on snow and a rapid drumming of… paws?

  Hands grabbed him by the shoulders. Pulcher’s face was pale and twisted in fright. ‘Get up, they’re here!’ he hissed, looking beyond Pavo’s shoulder to the cave mouth.

  ‘The Goths?’

  ‘Worse.’

  Pavo leapt up from his bed, the bitter cold of the night embracing him as he slung on a dry tunic, pulled his cloak over his shoulders and slid on his boots. All around him, he saw his men scrambling from their bed rolls. He moved towards the cave entrance and stepped outside into the deathly cold. It was moonless and dark – just that eerie uplight of the snow marking out the dell clearing and the black treeline, fresh flakes floating gently through the blackness. Indus and Durio stood, feet apart, spears levelled to the night, eyes tracking the sound of padding paws and panting somewhere up on the dell’s edge, circling. The padding stopped for a moment, and then a tortured snarl and scream pierced the air.

  Sura pressed a spatha hilt into his hand, stepping out beside him, pointing. ‘What in Hades is that?’

  Pavo stared along the length of his friend’s arm until his eyes adjusted and he saw the nightmarish scene at the treeline: one of the Claudia sentries watching the dell’s edge now lay on his back, the snow around him black with blood. A nightmarish shape hovered over him on all fours, jerking and shuddering, pulling sinews from his belly. He remembered stories he had been told as a child: of forest demons, of creatures that lived in darkness and feasted on the flesh of men. For a moment, he felt like a helpless boy. He took a half-step forward to see better, to be sure… then stepped on a twig somewhere beneath the snow.

  The creature’s head swung round, ears pricked up, staring at Pavo. Pavo stared. The beast pounced… only for the thick chain attached to its neck to yank tight. Pavo noticed the spiked collars and iron plates strapped to the demon’s body and he saw it for what it was now: a Molossian hound.

  ‘Easy, boy,’ a familiar voice spoke. A hooded, cloaked man stepped forth from the trees, holding the end of a leash. Despite the lack of light Pavo instantly knew who it was. Pulcher was right: It certainly was worse than the Goths.

  ‘We have you surrounded,’ Vitalianus said calmly.

  A shrill whistle blew. Gruff cries echoed along the treeline all around the dell, along with the snap and crackle of hawthorn being trampled over or brushed aside. Pavo saw hundreds of shadows moving amongst the trees now, converging on the dell floor, hearing the snarls of many more hounds.

  ‘Deserters!’ one of the shadows shrieked. A legionary from the III Julia Alpina, Pavo realised, straining to hold another of the wretched killer dogs at bay.

  ‘Scum!’ cried another legionary.

  ‘There’s nowhere to run this time,’ continued Vitalianus, his voice measured and relaxe
d as he stepped from the trees enough for the snow’s uplight to betray his silvered temples and handsome face.

  Pulcher, naked and armed with his turf-cutting tool, barged outside to stand with Pavo, Sura, Indus and Durio. Cornix charged out holding a torch, blinking and straining to see in the strange light. Opis came too, holding the legion eagle like a makeshift lance, barefoot, helmet on but untied.

  ‘Lay that eagle down, traitor!’ the Julia Alpina men seethed, emerging from the trees in their multitudes, spears levelled. They edged closer, the hounds snarling and barking, gobbets of foam and saliva leaping from their leathery jaws and yellow fangs.

  Vitalianus beheld the seven and the cluster of others gathered inside the cave mouth – semi-armed. His face rose in a charming smile. He flicked a finger. ‘Kill them. Kill them all. All apart from the tribunus.’

  At once, the Julia Alpina legionaries surged forward. A maw of spears stabbed out for the barely-prepared seven. One lance ripped across Pulcher’s chest as he ducked back, and a sword came slashing down for Pavo, who rolled clear and brought the flat of his spatha up at the temple of one Julia Alpina man. The legionary fell like a sack of wet sand, and the sight struck Pavo through with horror: a legionary falling to his own sword. The likes of this had happened only once before – when the rogue I Dacia legion had turned against the Claudia in Bosporus. Now the Claudia were the rogues in the eyes of all others.

  Opis swished the eagle across the path of the Julia Alpina men, driving them back a few steps, but scores more were flooding from the trees now. And the clank of the dogs’ chains being unlocked sent a streak of icy terror through them all. Finally, a whirring sounded from higher up the dell sides, unseen.

  ‘Slingers,’ Pavo realised, then grabbed Indus and Durio by a shoulder each. ‘Get back! Inside!’

  He hauled them through the cave mouth just as a volley of lead stones whacked against the stonework with a shower of sparks – but not before Cornix fell, vomiting blood, his bare back riddled with bleeding holes