by Jim Shepard
After a few minutes I find I haven't the heart to make noise or clatter about. I untie the rawhide lead and pitch the sandals down below. I don't bother with the hearth and in a short time the lower story goes dark. The upper still has its two torches and is nicely dry, though a cold breeze comes through the windows. I alternate time inside with time on the Wall. It takes minutes to get used to seeing by starlight when I go back out.
Some rocks fall and roll somewhere off in the distance. I keep watch for any movement in that direction for some minutes, without success.
My father liked to refer to himself as stag-hearted. He was speaking principally of his stamina on foot and with women. “Do you miss your brother?” he asked me on one of those winter fort-nights he spent hanging about the place. It was only a few years after my brother's death. I still wasn't big enough to hold the weight of my father's sword at arm's length.
I remember I shook my head. I remember he was unsurprised. I remember that some time later my mother entered the room and asked us what was wrong now.
“We're mournful about his brother,” my father finally told her.
He was such a surprising brother, I always think, with his strange temper and his gifts for cruelty and whittling and his fascination with divination. He carved me an entire armored galley with a working anchor. He predicted his own death and told me I'd recognize the signs of mine when it was imminent. I was never greatly angered by his beatings but once became so enraged by something I can't fully remember now, involving a lie he told our mother, that I prayed for the sickness which later came and killed him.
“I prayed for you to get sick,” I told him on his deathbed. We were alone and his eyes were running so that he could barely see. The pallet beneath his head was yellow with the discharge. He returned my look with amusement, as if to say, Of course.
Halfway through the night a bird's shriek startles me. I chew a hard biscuit to keep myself alert. The rain's a light mist and I can smell something fresh. My mother's wool tunic is heavy and wet under the mail.
When I'm in the upper story taking a drink, a sound I thought was the water ladle continues for a moment when I hold the ladle still in its tin bucket. The sound's from outside. I wait a few seconds before easing out the door, crouching down behind the embrasure to listen and allow my eyes to adjust. I hold a hand out to see if it's steady. The closest milecastle is a point of light over a roll of hills. My heart's pitching around in its little cage.
Barely audible and musical clinks of metal on stone extend off to my left down below. No other sounds.
The watchfire bundle is inside to prevent its becoming damp. In the event of danger it's to be dumped into a roofed and perforated iron urn mounted on the outer turret wall and open-faced in the direction of the milecastle. The bundle's been soaked in tar to light instantly. The watchfire requires the certainty of an actual raid, not just a reconnaissance. You don't get a troop horse up in the middle of the night for a few boys playing about on dares.
There's the faint whiplike sound of a scaling rope off in the darkness away from the turret. I raise my head incrementally to see over the stone lip of the embrasure and have the impression that a series of moving objects have just stopped. I squint, then widen my eyes. I'm breathing into the stone. After a moment, pieces of the darkness detach and move forward.
When I wheel around and shove open the turret door a face, bulge-eyed, smash-toothed, smeared with black and brown and blue, lunges at me and misses, and a boy pitches off the Wall into the darkness below with a shriek.
Behind him in the turret, shadows sweep the cloak pegs between me and my watchfire bundle. A hand snatches up my sword.
So I jump, the impact rattling my teeth when I land. When I get to my feet, something hits me flush in the face. On the ground I hear two more muffled blows, though I don't seem to feel them. I'm facedown. Pain pierces inward from any mouth movement and teeth loll and slip atop my tongue. I'm kicked around. When my septum contacts the turf a drunkenness of agony flashes from ear to ear.
When it recedes there are harsh, muted sounds. One of my ears has filled with liquid. There's commotion for a while, and then it's gone. In the silence that follows I make out the agitated murmur of the detachment mustering and then setting out.
I test various aspects of the pain with various movements. Lifting my head causes spiralling shapes to arrive and depart. Fluids pour across my eyes. At some point, silently weeping, I stop registering sensations.
In the morning I discover they'd been pouring over the Wall on both sides of me, the knotted ropes trailing down like vines.
Everyone is gone. Smoke is already high in the sky from both the milecastle and the fort. When I stand I teeter. When I look about me only one eye is working. The boy from the turret door is dead not far from me, having landed on rock. That his weapon is still beside him suggests he was overlooked.
The rain's stopped and the sun's out. My mother's wool tunic is encrusted and stiff. I walk the Wall throwing back over those ropes closest to my turret, blearily making my dereliction of duty less grotesque. It requires a few hours to walk across the heather past the milecastle, and then on to the fort. Since I can't move my jaw, I presume it's broken. Two of the fort's walls have been breached but apparently the attack was repulsed. Legionaries and auxiliaries are already at work on a temporary timber rampart. Minor officers are shouting and cursing. The Brittunculi bodies are being dragged into piles. The Tungrians' bodies probably have already been rolled onto pallets and carried into the fort.
My head is bound. A headache doesn't allow me to raise it. My first two days are spent in the infirmary. My assumption about my jaw turns out to be correct. I ask if my eye will be saved and am told that's a good question. A vinegar and mustard poultice is applied. Two messmates come by to visit a third dying from a stomach wound. They regard me with contempt tinged with pity. Over the course of a day I drink a little water. My father visits once while I'm asleep, I'm informed. I ask after those I know. The clerk who shared my little room died of burns from the barracks fire. He survived the night but not the morning. Somehow the location of the raid was a complete surprise, despite the rumors.
It takes all of six days for four cohorts of the Ninth Legion, with its contingents of light and heavy horse, supported by two of the tattered cohorts of the Tungrians, to prepare its response. The Romans suffer casualties as though no one else ever has. There are no speeches, no exhortations, among either the legions or the auxiliaries. The barracks ground is noisy only with industry. The Romans, hastily camped within our walls, go about their business as if sworn to silence. Only butchery will allow them to speak.
I live on a little porridge sipped through a straw. No one comments on the joke. On the fifth day I report my ready status to my muster officer. He looks me up and down before moving his attention to other business. “All right, then,” he says.
On the sixth day of our muster my father appears over my pallet, the first thing I see when I wake in the barracks. He's wearing his decorations on a harness over his mail, and the horsehair crest of his helmet sets some of our kitchenware, hanging from the rafters, to rocking. He's called himself up to active duty and no one's seen fit to argue with him.
It's only barely light. He tells me he's glad for my health and my mother sends her regards and good wishes and that he'll see me outside.
At the third trumpet signal the stragglers rush to take their positions in the ranks. A great quiet falls over the assembled units, and the sun peeks across the top of the east parapet. The herald standing to the right of a general we've never seen before asks three times in the formal manner whether we are ready for war. Three times we shout, We are ready.
We march all day, our advance covered by cavalry. The sun moves from astride our right shoulder to astride our left. By nightfall we've arrived at a large settlement with shallow earthen embankments and rickety palisades. Are these the men, or the families of the men, responsible for the raid? None of us car
e.
Their men are mustering themselves hurriedly into battle order before the settlement, unwilling to wait for the siege. They wear long trousers and have animals painted on their bare chests: Caledonii. Is this their tribal territory? I have no idea.
We are drawn up on the legion's left. At the crucial time, we know, the cavalry will appear from behind the settlement, sealing the matter. On this day, with my father somewhere lost in the melee off to my right, we will all of us together become the avenging right arm of the empire. We will execute what will be reported back to the provincial capital as a successful punitive raid. I will myself record the chronicle with my one good eye. I will write, When we broke through the walls and into the settlement we killed every living thing The women, the children, the dogs, the goats were cut in half and dismembered. While the killing was at its height pillaging was forbidden. When the killing was ended the trumpets sounded the recall. Individuals were selected from each maniple to carry out the pillaging. The rest of the force remained alert to a counterattack from beyond the settlement. The settlement was put to the torch. The settlement was razed to the ground. The building stones were scattered. The fields were sown with salt. My comrades-in-arms will think no more of me than before. My father and I will continue to probe and distress our threadbare connections. And what my mother will say about her marriage, weeping with bitterness in a sun-suffused haze a full summer later, will bring back to me my last view of the site after the Twentieth Tungrians and the Ninth Legion had finished with it, pecked over by crows and studded with the occasional shattered pilum: “We honor nothing by being the way we are. We make a desolation and we call it peace.”
Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak
Guy's hurt? Fuck 'im. Guy can't get up, play's still going? Run his ass over. Whistle's blown? Stretcher bearer time. Grab a blow and let the Sisters of Mercy do their thing.
“Faggots,” Wainwright says whenever the trainers come out for someone. He means the trainers.
We're not talking games, here. We're talking summer practice, two-a-days, guys keeling over in the heat. When more than one guy has the dry heaves we call it Hee Haw because of the sound.
“That shit's not funny,” somebody'll say when they see us laughing. Some fat shit, holding his knees, blowing chow. “Dude for the Vikings died.”
We have it written in chalk and boxed on a corner of the blackboard that doesn't get erased: trample the dead, hurdle the weak. When the coaches first wrote it, they spelled it e-l, both times. “Dumb fucks,” Wainwright said when he saw it. He rubbed it out with his arm and wrote it right.
“Who's been screwing with my inspirational slogans?” our defensive coordinator wanted to know.
“I been,” Wainwright told him. It was after the afternoon half of a two-a-day and those of us not on fluids or hurling were on the rug, our legs spread out, because it felt cooler than the benches or we couldn't get up to the benches. “Just streamlining the spelling, Coach.”
“You better be careful you don't get on my list, Wainwright,” Coach told him.
“I'm on everybody's list, Coach,” Wainwright told him back.
Wainwright's a blue chipper's blue chipper. The top prospects in all of the regular and online rating services are always quarterbacks or running backs or wide receivers. He's been the cover of Street & Smith's High School Edition two years running at linebacker. “L.T. never made the cover,” I tell him.
“I don't think they had one for high school back then,” he tells me.
We argue on the way home from practice as to whether L.T. really wanted to kill people out there.
It's a hundred degrees with eighty percent humidity. Wainwright sweats right down the center of his chest, like he's wearing big stripes. Girls line the road we take home, just so they can say they saw him.
We want to cause panic on the field one hundred percent of the time. As far as we can tell, when it came to that, L.T. came the closest. We put him up there in the ninetieth percentile.
“You know how when you get licorice and you double it to get more in your mouth at once?” he said. “That's what he did to Theisman's thigh.”
L.T. was also the snot bubble guy. He said his favorite hits were the ones that popped a snot bubble out of the ball carrier's nose.
I met Wainwright my first day of varsity practice. I came out of the locker room and hadn't buckled my chin strap, and already there was an altercation. Wainwright and this fucking giant were locked up and pulling each other's face masks around. The giant I knew, everybody knew: Junior Cooley, our All-State offensive tackle. He benched 350 pounds. His helmet on his head looked like a bucket on a bush.
They avoided each other for a play or two, and then on a screen pass Junior swung upfield looking for someone to block and Wainwright was already in the air and en route. They hit each other so hard I could feel it. The little ear pads came out of Junior's helmet. The ball carrier and some of the pursuit all piled into the body. Everybody made those oooh sounds.
Wainwright pulled himself from the pile, his helmet a little askew. Junior's face mask bolts were snapped and the blood from his nose had fanned upward to cover his forehead. Wainwright put a hand on each side of Junior's helmet and got in close and waited for Junior to focus, and told him, “Remember: the next play could be your last, but your educationll never be taken away.”
He says he motivates through intimidation and positive reinforcement.
He runs full tilt, adjusts full tilt, arrives at full tilt. He hits like someone falling down an elevator shaft. “Friggin' seismic,” I heard the defensive line coach murmur once. What the coaches love about him is that no matter what, he gets to where he needs to go. And always arrives on time, in a hurry, and in a shitty mood.
Between games he likes to mingle with the regular students. Sprats, he calls them.
Most of us played for serious youth football or Pop Warner programs but even so this was eye-opening, this level of hitting. Whenever you'd hear a pop or a real collision on the field, a coach would murmur, “Welcome to the big time.” They didn't even need to be looking.
“Those of you who want to play, strap on your hats,” Big Coach said at our team meeting, day one. We call our defensive coordinator Coach and the head coach Big Coach. “Because we're gonna be flying around and cracking heads.”
An hour or so after Junior's reorientation Wainwright and I converged on a hit and his forearm shiver glanced off the ballcarrier's helmet and whacked mine. My helmet opened a divot in my forehead. I was bleeding like someone was pouring water over my head.
Wainwright liked my stitches afterwards. He called me The Lid for the way my scalp looked.
I had to miss two or three practices until I figured out how to keep one of my mom's maxipads over my stitches with a headband.
Here's the thing: Wainwright and me are pretty sure that my dad's kid is this All-State running back for Port Neches-Groves down around Beaumont. We saw the kid's picture in the Street & Smith's last year and he looked just like me. We checked him out on the Web site and Wainwright was like cackling when the kid's face popped up. “You, only smarter” was the way he put it. Plus my aunt made my mom cry once just by mentioning Beaumont. Plus she wouldn't answer when I asked about it. “Don't talk stupid,” she said. “I don't know any other way to talk,” I told her.
We wouldn't play a school from Beaumont unless both schools got pretty deep into the state tournament. But that could happen. They're district champs, and we're us.
Wainwright and me both got brother issues. When I point that out to him, he goes, “Yeah, except yours are uninteresting.” His brother's now with the Jaguars, getting paid serious money to hurt people every Sunday. He's third on their depth chart, but still. If you don't count Mystery Boy out at Port Neches-Groves, my family hasn't amounted to much. My regular brother's five years older than me and his main claim to fame is that he taught me how to play by kicking my ass up and down the field. I played a lot of games with him when I was
crying so hard I could barely see the ball. “Be a Spartan,” he'd say in front of our friends after he'd leveled me, to keep me from running home to my mother. “Be a Spartan.” “I'll kill you,” I'd usually scream, when I finally could, and then I'd try.
“Get off me,” he'd tell me when I'd go after his Adam's apple or eyes.
Our dad left when I was two and my brother was seven. My mom says she never heard from him again but we think she's lying. I ask my brother what he was like and he says, “What do you think?. He was a dick.”
When I keep after him he'll say to Mom, “Mom. Wasn't Dad a dick?”
“Stop it,” Mom'll tell him.
I Googled his name and came up with a guy who wrote science fiction who I couldn't tell where he lived and a guy who sold boats in Michigan. I don't think either guy is him.
There's nobody with his name in the Beaumont area, according to the phone book. But get this: the kid's name is Corey. Our name's Royce.
“Look at that: it's a fucking antonym,” I said when I realized.
“That's anagram, you fucking clown,” Wainwright said back.
But it was. I called all three Coreys the operator gave me. Of course there were two unlisted, too. It was probably one of those.
Because we're a regional high school, we pull in talent from all over. Big Coach calls us by our hometowns if he doesn't remember our names. I'm Paducah. The weakside guy alongside Wainwright is Cee Vee. Wainwright's Wainwright.
We got a Web site with home page graphics of about eight of us swarming a guy from Childress, our big rival. The Web site's called HumDuckLand, and above that it says Show 'Em You Got the HumDuck.