Instead I saw him smile.
Not a happy smile. Not a painful one.
A soldier’s smile. It was the smile which said that bad things happen, and on this day, on this battlefield, they had happened to him. His voice was like gravel as I heard him shout: ‘Die hard, boys! Die fucking hard!’
He pushed himself up on to his backside, and laid a sword across his lap. That was the last I saw of him. Like dozens of others who could not find their feet, he would be left to die by his own hand, or by the enemy that pressed against our front line, giving us no inch as we tried to pull away.
I took another half-pace backwards, feeling my heel hit against something of metal and flesh. It groaned. This time I did as Varo told me. I did not look down. I stepped over the obstacle – a brother of my legion – and I hoped that I could be forgiven. That he would not curse me for following my orders before the desires of my gut and heart.
I chanced a look to my side. Varo. I had always known him as a physical bastion, but today his presence was a bulwark for my mind. With him on my flank I was anchored. Steady. I could do what needed to be done.
My foot hit another wounded man. I stepped over. A few more paces. I heard whimpering. I heard someone beg for a clean end. I kept my eyes up. I saw a pair of javelins come in from the mass of the enemy. Watched them pluck a soldier I had known for three years off his feet, dead before he hit the ground. I saw a lot of things like that as we stepped back, my dry tongue stuck to the top of my mouth as though it had been nailed there. The broiling sea of the enemy gave our front lines no rest, but after some time the going became easier for those of us towards the rear – there were no more wounded to step over. Either they had walked to the rear of our force, or they were dead.
Varo: ‘We’re turning.’
I followed his eyes to the top of the steep mountain ridge on our right.
Except it was no longer on our right. It was coming ahead of us.
‘We must be wheeling the legion,’ he said.
Were we? It’s not for the rank and file to know such things. Our battle is confined to hardly more than a few javelin lengths around us – less, in the front ranks – but the position of the ridge was an undeniable truth. We were turning, moving to almost a right angle from our original position, though further down the valley, beyond our initial contact. Why? Why would we give ground this way? Our lines held intact. If they did not, we would already be a broken rabble, chased down as we fled by the enemy cavalry. So why the manoeuvre? What the fuck was going on?
I got my first taste of the answer as I saw the front ranks ahead of us become still, as if they had broken out of a seizure.
‘Enemy’s backing off,’ Varo said, though he seemed to doubt every word.
I expected to hear taunts follow them. Challenges. None came. Every man who had fought struggled to stay on his feet. I knew what was coming next.
‘First Century!’ I heard my friend Priscus bellow. ‘In open order, quick march!’ We opened up gaps in our ranks and files. Within moments, the men that had been fighting before us began to move back through us. Beneath the rims of their helmets there were hollow eyes, devoid of any spark of life. They were ghosts. Hollow vessels. They reacted to orders because they had been drilled and drilled, and that discipline kept their bodies obeying even when their minds had fled.
This time I did look down. I couldn’t face them. When I looked up, it was not Roman soldiers that I saw, but a rebel army. The space between us was a canvas of bodies that moved as the wounded writhed and crawled. The enemy were barely a hundred yards away now, and they were moving. Moving fast.
But not towards us.
‘We beat them?’ I asked, incredulously.
Varo looked at me then. ‘No, Corvus.’ I think that I saw tears in his eyes. ‘They’re marching on Italy.’
We had lost.
21
I stood in the front ranks of a defeated legion and watched as our enemy marched by us towards Italy. Towards Roman lands that were ripe for sacking, and Roman citizens who were destined for rape and slavery. They marched onwards because we had failed. There were only a hundred yards between us and the rebels, the streaming procession of thousands, but for all the use we were now, they might as well have been on the other side of the Adriatic.
I looked about me as best I could. I could see treetops behind us. A small wood, maybe. Behind that was the menacing ridge where sheep and goat trails ran through the jagged stone. I wondered if some shepherd had watched on like a god as war played out beneath his gaze.
I turned back to my comrades, then. If it was possible to age a decade in a day, we had done so. There was little conversation – a few muttered curses here and there – but the atmosphere wasn’t one of pity, but bitter shame.
I felt a presence pushing through the ranks to come to my side. Brutus. ‘We lost,’ I thought I heard him say.
I had a question for him. It took me a long time to ask it. ‘The lad from my section. Gums. He lives?’
Brutus kept his grey eyes staring out at the rolling sea of the enemy, and said nothing.
The sun was touching the mountaintop to our front when Priscus returned with our orders.
‘We haven’t lost,’ was the first thing he said, and then he explained how we had come to be in a position to watch the mass of enemy walk by as though they were on a summer stroll.
‘The legate could see that we couldn’t hold,’ our veteran explained – though I supposed we were all veterans now. ‘There was a river running through the valley over on the left flank. He used a wide bend to anchor us, and pivoted the cohorts back so that the valley was open to the enemy.’
The legate had been correct in assuming that the enemy would take an open road to Italy over a grinding battle. There was nothing to be gained by killing what remained of us, but in Italy they could shake an empire. Find riches and plunder. And for every moment they wasted in battle, Tiberius and his army in the north would be closing the gap to cut them off.
‘What does any of that matter?’ Varo growled. ‘They’re past us! They’re on their way to Italy!’
He took no solace in the fact that he still lived. I don’t think that any of us did. Shame is a powerful force, and its blade was in our guts as fiercely as any rebel sword could be. There was more, too. Pragmatically, we knew that there was no happy ending for a beleaguered force in a hostile country where the enemy numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Die today or die tomorrow seemed to be our choice. At least by giving our life on this field we could have achieved something.
‘We still can,’ Priscus said as Varo gave voice to that sentiment. There was no smile on his face, but there was life in his eyes. There was a force I could trust. That I believed with every fibre of my body. Priscus had been there for me since the day I arrived at the legion. If he told me we could win, then we would win. I wanted to embrace him. Instead I asked him how we would beat an army ten times our size.
He put his hand on my shoulder as he told me. ‘We’re going to attack.’
At first I thought the words were bluster. Some attempt to drag our shattered morale from out of the bloodied dirt.
I was wrong.
The first evidence came after dark; after the sun had crept behind the ridge to our front, casting the valley into a pink haze. That morning, I had never thought to see a sunset again, and though shame at our defeat burned at me I was grateful to see its majesty. Now, it seemed as though it was the next sunrise I was unlikely to witness.