The only thing that moved were the standards wedged into the earth beside their fallen carriers, the standards that the barbarians hadn’t taken with them. It was an eerie sight. The silence played tricks on my mind, making me think I could still hear the clash of battle in the distance.
I carved a sign in Latin onto a rock: “30 MILES SOUTH, EAST OF ARELATE. SAFETY FOR ALL ROMANS.”
The guide asked if we should give away our location so openly. Lucius and I just shrugged. The Reds had moved on their way, gone off West to enjoy themselves while Rome mourned. They’d be back, but when they did, we doubted a few starving Romans would concern them.
Lucius and the guide helped me gather a few standards and prop the stone up. If anyone came looking for other survivors, at least they had a direction.
But after seeing all the dead, I doubted there were many more of us left.
2
Scroll II
Four days before the nones of September 650 ab urbe condita
That rock proved to be useful over the next month. It was true—there weren’t many of us left. But a few, a handful, had stumbled back to the wreckage of Arausio and spotted our sign waiting for them there. They trickled in, one or two a week, for the remainder of August.
“How many do we have now?” I asked Lucius. It was early in September now and hot out for a Gallic morning. I was sweating profusely despite moderate exertion, but I didn’t care. Luxuries like bathing were of no concern to me now. Water was perhaps available in Arelate, but personal hygiene was no longer important. We had all survived like animals, and so were resigned to smell like them as well.
“Twenty-seven,” he said, taking a knee and propping himself up on his shield. Despite our walls and our complete inability to actually fight, Lucius never went anywhere except in his fighting kit.
“It seems like more.” I adjusted my eye patch, which at that time still chaffed my brow horribly.
“That’s because we had so few, for so long,” he said, feigning a smile. He tended to me as a good trainer does to a damaged colt. We talked little of Arausio and all that we had lost, but he was just as aware as anyone that I hadn’t ever left the battlefield. How could I? I left my brother, Titus, there to die. He demanded that I do so, and he was bleeding profusely from the nubs of his severed legs…but could I have done more?
“Do you think there are more camps out there? Like ours?” I asked with all the naivety that still remained in me.
He bit his lip and looked away from me. “I don’t think so, amicus. I’ve kept my ears open, and the traders say they’ve visited every city for miles and haven’t heard any news about other camps.”
The lavender and glasswort swayed with a gentle early-autumn breeze. The white flamingos bobbed for fish in the swampy pond past our camp. Even the mosquitoes, which had been fierce and active previously, were beginning to leave us alone as the weather was cooling. At any other time, for any other person, it would have been picturesque. The kind of landscape a man can sit within and ponder the wonders of life. But it all seemed dead to me. It all seemed like a lie. A facade covering up the truth about the world that had been so poignantly displayed at Arausio.
“This can’t be it, Lucius. I can’t believe that,” I said, gesturing to the soldiers sitting around our little fort. I did believe it, though, I just didn’t want to.
“Cheer up, Quintus. That’s twenty more Romans who survived than we believed.” He patted me on the shoulder. Twenty was more than just the two of us, but it paled significantly in comparison to the ninety thousand mules we had marched with a few months prior.
“Hello, boys. Hungry?” Arrea approached behind me, delicately balancing a few steaming bowls of soup.
“May Juno bless you,” Lucius said, helping her with the bowls and wincing when some of it spilled onto his hands.
“Thank you,” I said, not bothering to turn to my left to see her, for I no longer had the eye to do so, “but I think I’ll wait awhile.”
“Quintus, you must eat!” she chided me as my mother had when I was a child, and I loved her for it.
“Make sure the others eat first.” It was my standard response for refusing a meal. I was a centurion by rank, and so it was my job to make sure the other men were fed before myself. But, in truth, I simply didn’t want to eat. My stomach was perpetually unsettled, and it didn’t seem quite fair that I could dine on Arrea’s simple stew while my brothers were being dined upon by the carrion birds.
“I’ve made enough for everyone. Now, if you’re their leader, you need to stay strong.” She handed me the bowl, and once I caught sight of it with my good eye, I took it and decided to eat, even if it was just for her.
For all the military decorations that can be bestowed on a soldier, all of them should have been awarded to Arrea. Since Arausio, she had systematically tended to the injured and sick among us like a one-woman medicus corp. Soldiers are most often inept at cooking, as we had a special century devoted to preparing our meals, and so Arrea did most of our meal preparation too. When she found a rare moment of quiet, she stitched our torn tunics, returning to us a modicum of our honor as soldiers.
“Sit by me.” I slid on the log and made room for her. She hesitated, always feeling that there was something else to be done, but after I gave her a look only lovers may extend to one another, she relented.
“You know,” Lucius said, waving the heat away from a spoonful of soup, “we should think about moving soon.”
“Moving where? We’re protected here,” I said, only half sarcastically.
“Back to Italy. Somewhere safe. I met a saffron trader who claimed that General Marius has set up camp. The consul told you in that letter he’d be coming after the snows melt. And they’ve melted. Perhaps it’s true?” Lucius said. He wasn’t bred to stay in this Gallic shit-hole and sit on his hands. He knew our duty to Rome wasn’t completed yet, and we were ready to meet our fate. I knew this, too, but was perhaps less prepared for what lay ahead.
“I don’t think so,” I said, taking a bite of soup and feeling my stomach churn.
Arrea and Lucius exchanged a look.
“We haven’t received any orders. We should stand by our post until word arrives that we’re needed elsewhere,” I said. We had paid one of the villagers to take a letter to Rome, so Marius knew where to find us. Even knowing this, my case was weak. It was unlikely that Marius would send an orderly several hundred miles to tell us what he had already told us.
By this time, some of the other mules who had heard us talking had begun to gather.
“Talk of leaving, eh?” one said.
“I like the sound of that.”
“Anywhere is better than this,” another said.
I looked at Lucius as if to say, “See what you have done?” He only shrugged in reply.
“You all feel this way?” I strained to look around. Everyone nodded.
I struggled to my feet, my leg now mended, but improperly.
“Well, if you’re all in agreement, then…then we can move.” I didn’t want to. I knew it was the right decision, but I didn’t want to face the rest of the world. Our dreary, dank little camp was a lot less intimidating than returning to the borders of Italy and revealing to the world that I had lived, while all the others had died. Could I face Marius, look him in the eyes, and tell him that I had seen all of our standards taken by the enemy, all of our men butchered? Could I hold my mother and tell her that her son Titus had died in my arms?
“You’re the centurion, here. We’ll follow your orders,” one of them said, and the others nodded. They weren’t my men, and I had never met them before Arausio, but they were like any others. They were good legionnaires, and deserved a better leader than I.
“One of the centurion’s first priorities is to understand the will of his men, and to act in accordance to that. If you’re all ready to move, then we need to deconstruct the camp. We’ll leave at first light.”
They all seemed to exhale in relief, an
d Arrea reached for my hand to comfort me. It would be a long journey home, and far more arduous than simply the miles that spanned from here to there.
As the men set about taking down our feeble little walls, I approached the cot where Arrea and I had made our home for the last months. Nothing covered it save a few capes draped over some sticks, leaving us soaked through every time it rained, but it was our little place. When I held Arrea there, it was only the two of us. The war was a memory, a cruel memory. Or perhaps a tragic play I had seen once in the forum. Packing up that little cot meant returning to reality, to see what remained after Arausio.
I rolled up the cot and took down our makeshift tent. Beside it sat a lockbox that Arrea had kept for me since Lucius had dragged me to Arelate dripping wet and still bleeding from the stone lodged in my eye.
She placed every piece of my fighting kit inside, laying each one delicately beside the next to wait for the day I awoke to my duty. I had not touched them since that day.
I took out each piece, one at a time, and tried to remember how to adjust them properly. My feet sank into the leather of my sandals where they had worn grooves into the soles as we marched for miles in formation to the sound of booming cadence and the calls of buccina and tubas. I slid my lorica on, the chain mail weighing heavier on my shoulders than I remembered. I had lost weight since Arausio, and it showed.
At the bottom of the lockbox sat something I had almost forgotten existed. It was a crown of leaves, which I was given after I’d scaled the walls first at Burdigala. The foliage had been collected from the battlefield that day and presented to me by the consul and my friend Gnaeus Mallius Maximus. I might have once considered that the proudest day of my life. I could stare up at the vast expanse between earth and sky and not have to worry about if my ancestors were proud of me.
Arrea, knowing this, had saved it for me, even when our priorities should have been on sustenance and clothing. That revealed the kind of heart she had. But holding that crown in my hand now, it meant none of the things to me that it once had. Several of the leaves had been plucked off during our travels, and the tendrils were dying and brown. The copper, which bound it all together, was beginning to rust.
The oak leaves seemed to look at me with judgment and condemnation. How trite a military decoration like this seemed now.
I strapped my gladius to my hip and my dagger to my ankle, then stood. I almost walked away, but then I returned to pick up that flimsy little crown.
“I’m taking leave, be back by eleventh hour,” I said to Lucius as I passed by to the entrance of our camp. He stared back inquisitively but said nothing.
I didn’t know where I was going, but I needed a moment to myself. A brief pause from the duties of leading a band of injured survivors, and a pause from the watchful eyes of Lucius and Arrea.
As I walked, the Gallic villagers stopped what they were doing. Some of them turned away, some looked down, others scolded their children for staring. Noticing my limp and the cloth over my eye, they must have all thought me risen from the dead, about to die, or both. The citizens of Arelate were used to our presence by now, but they still refused to meet my eye. A curt nod or a sad shrug was all I was afforded.
After walking aimlessly for a while, I found myself at the banks of the Rhône River. It was calm, the water trickling over smooth stones in accordance with a peaceful wind. It was of a cool-blue hue, and I could see the bottom even where the water was deepest.
It had not looked like this previously.
I will always remember the Rhône as violently red with the blood of my men, rotten corpses bobbing up and down the rapids.
I knelt and ladled some water in my cupped hands. Had even nature forgotten our losses? Regardless, I hadn’t. I wouldn’t.
I took that leafy crown and nearly cast it into the water, as far away from myself as possible, where I hoped it would travel and bury itself wherever the blood of our men had found its resting place. But I couldn’t do it.
Filled to the brim with rumination and pointless contemplation, I turned to find a young Gallic boy behind me. He stared with wide, wet eyes, amazed at the monster looking back at him. He took a few steps back in fear but then regained his composure and approached me.
Taking two sticks in his hand, he tossed one to me and hoisted the other, wielding it like a sword.
Teeming with anticipation, he waited to see what I might do.
I studied the boy, and felt that I knew him well. He was like so many others, like I had been once before, so long ago. He had heard tales of war, of bravery. He wanted to be in the legends, the hero in a campfire story, as most young boys do.
I wanted to tell him how foolish he was. How misguided, how ruinously misguided were those stories. I wanted to tell him that if he was a soldier, his brothers would die, his friends would die, and that he too, eventually, would die. I wanted to tell him that there was nothing good in war, that there was no glory or adventure to be had in it.
When I had lingered just long enough, the boy decided I must be disinterested. He lowered his play-sword as well as his gaze.
As he began to turn away, I picked up the stick and lunged at him.
A look of excitement spread across the boy’s face as he lifted his stick to block the attack. He jabbed at me just as ferociously as Achilles at Troy, and I feigned injury when the stick found its mark.
I gestured for him to come close, and I placed him at my side. I picked up the shield that had followed me through so many battles, nearly twice his size.
Together we marched a few paces, and I showed him how to stab over and under the shield, how to keep your balance and find your mark.
His eyes glowed with fascination, his cheeks lighting up as red as his hair in pleased embarrassment.
As we finished our movement drills, I knelt beside him and ruffled his hair.
I looked into his eyes then, and wished that I hadn’t. Visions of the pale, dead-fish stares of my fallen comrades swarmed my mind, and I nearly staggered away from him. I lowered my gaze.
Taking the crown of leaves from my hand, I placed it on his head. He knew nothing of what it meant, or what was done to earn it. I couldn’t tell him what I had seen, what I had endured. He would have to find out for himself, but I hoped he would never have to.
Returning to camp, I spotted on the ridge above us a figure that was so decrepit as to make the rest of us look like marble statues by comparison. A few of the men who had better eyesight than me hurried up the hill.
“Lucius, who is that? A local?” I said to my friend.
He used his hand to block out the sun’s glare.
“I don’t think so, comrade,” he said, noticing what I had. The tattered scarlet cloak of a soldier hung around the man’s neck.
Only after the mules had helped this skeleton man into our partially deconstructed camp did I recognize him. It was the man I had once hailed as my own centurion: Gnaeus Tremellius Scrofa.
I hurried toward my old centurion. Despite his obviously tarnished condition, it was good to see him. I couldn’t help the smile from splitting across my face. At least one man of my century had lived.
I stopped short of the man and gave him a salute. He did not return it.
“Centurion Scrofa, thank all the gods! You live,” I said, extending my hand. When I saw that his hands were now thumbless, my hand dropped, as did the grin on my face.
We helped him to sit on the log around our campfire, and Arrea prepared him a bowl of soup. His eyes shone when he saw it, and it was clear from his shallow cheeks and exposed rib cage that he was starving, but he couldn’t hold the bowl and eat as well. Arrea, goddess that she was, sat beside him and helped raise the spoon to his cracked lips.
“Centurion, can you tell me what happened?” I asked, kneeling before him.
His gaze was aimless and empty; he didn’t seem to know that I was addressing him.
“Centurion?”
Finally he looked up at me, his mouth open not fo
r a bite but in realization.
“Centurion Sertorius, Third Cohort Second Century—brother of Prefect Titus Sertorius.”
“Yes,” I nodded, Lucius patting my back, “yes, that’s me.”
“Does your brother live?” he asked. They had once been great friends. They had served together long before I donned the Colors.
I swallowed and looked down. “He does not, Centurion,” I said. He looked away, with no discernible emotion in his eyes.
“Well, that’s a shame,” he whispered to himself.
“How did you survive? Where have you been?” Lucius asked. I turned to him and shook my head—perhaps now was not the best time for questions. The centurion still seemed to be in his own world, but he answered in his own time.
“I woke in a cage. I died on the battlefield. I did, I swear on the Black Stone of Jupiter that I did. I died, right there, right with my men, beside my standard.” He pointed to an imaginary location on the ground, eyes fixed but seeing something entirely different. “I died, but then I came back. The gods, they…they sent me back. To the Reds. I woke up in a cage, with thirty other dead men.” His eyes began to water, and his larynx bobbed in his neck as he struggled to swallow.
“You were taken prisoner by the Cimbri?” one of the men asked.
“I was. They kept us there. For years and years, they kept us. Feeding us only the rats that are meant to feed on us.” It certainly hadn’t been years, but I’m sure it felt like it had been to him.
“And how did you make it here. How did you escape?” I asked. When he did not respond, I leaned in closer and put a hand on his knee. “Centurion?”
He looked at me, right into my only eye, and whispered, “I didn’t escape. They sent me away. They burned the rest of our men…in a wicker cage. I—I…they said, would live.”
The Noise of War Page 2