I looked at my comrades. I imagine what they saw in my eyes was the mirror of what I saw in theirs – unbridled excitement, like a child seeing his first toy.
‘Where’d you hear this?’ Varo asked, sceptically, knowing how prone soldiers were to inflating numbers.
The soldierlegionary jabbed his thumb behind him into the inn. ‘There’s a couple of clerks in there from the legion staff. They’ve been spilling their guts for a drink.’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked quickly.
‘North, across the Danube! King Marabodus is due a good Roman shafting!’
I watched Priscus’s face as he absorbed the news. For the first time, I saw a little hesitation amongst the jubilation.
‘He’s King of the Marcomanni,’ our old head finally ventured. ‘That’s a big tribe.’
‘Exactly!’ the veteran slurred drunkenly. ‘Enjoy your night, boys! We’ll either be rich or dead by the end of summer!’
‘I know which I’ll be.’ Octavius smiled as he pushed his way to the bar and waved for the innkeeper’s attention.
‘You could find King Maro-what’s-his-name’s own horde and you’d still owe us money, you tight bastard.’ Varo smirked. ‘So what you think, Priscus? You’ve gone quiet.’
‘It’s a big tribe,’ repeated the old soldier.
‘Who did you think we were going to invade?’ Varo shook his head, irritated that his friend’s mood had slumped. ‘Not gonna get rich turning over a couple of farmers, are we?’
Priscus held his tongue, instead helping himself to a cup of wine that Octavius held out.
‘And what about you?’ Varo asked me. ‘What do you think?’
I said nothing.
‘Well, you two are great fucking sport,’ Varo snorted, draining his cup in one.
But the big man had misinterpreted my apathy for disinterest – I didn’t care who we fought, I just wanted to fight. Not since that day in the mountains had my sword been pulled from its sheath for anything other than drill and training, and I thought back to those few short moments of combat with a yearning usually reserved for lovers. The truth was that I didn’t care if I was fighting against King Marabodus or General Tiberius. I just wanted to fight. To draw blood. To kill. To lose myself in that moment. The only moment where I had really – truly – forgotten the reason that had driven me to the legions in the first place.
‘Hey!’ I heard the innkeeper shout. ‘Hey, Corvus: don’t be starting fucking trouble again tonight. I’m warning you!’
I was known in the Black Sheep, and the proprietor had seen the dark mood that had laid itself across my features like a shroud. He knew what that portended. So did my friends.
‘Don’t,’ Priscus begged me, taking hold of my arm.
But it was too late.
A drunken soldier stumbled into me, and I had my excuse.
Less than a heartbeat later, the inn became the scene of a riot.
2
Thick swarms of flies buzzed about me as I dropped to my knees in the sewage and cursed my lot in life. For starting the fight in the inn I had been awarded extra duties, and now I had the task of unblocking a pipe that led away from one of the cohort’s latrines. I tried not to gag as I dug away at the blockage, the tool in my hand coming away thick with shit that splattered up my forearm.
‘You’re a natural,’ I heard from the bank above me.
I turned, and found myself looking up at the Roman ideal.
Marcus.
If it were possible for a man to outshine his armour, then he did so. The Greeks would have adored him for his perfect symmetry, and the Spartans for his noble, effortless bearing. Marcus resembled a statue of Achilles made flesh, a fact that I was keenly aware of since we had grown up together as young boys, and he had been the envy or want of everyone in our town. He was, in all ways, perfect.
I threw a lump of shit at him.
He dodged it without effort, of course. So clean was his aura that I doubted my friend ever needed to squat and crap like the rest of us mortals. He was an optio – the second in command of a century in the Sixth Cohort – and as such we were often separated, even when it was only by a short distance within the camp.
‘What do you want?’ I growled by way of greeting.
‘I heard you were in the shit.’
‘You’re funny.’
‘And you’re an idiot. Another brawl?’
I shrugged, wiping my filthy hand against the dusty earth of the bank. ‘He started it.’
Marcus shook his head, but with fondness. ‘Let me guess. He bumped into you.’
‘He was looking for trouble.’
‘Well, he found that, didn’t he?’
He had. No sooner had the man touched me than I dropped him with a headbutt. My face was far from the unmarked beauty of Marcus’s, and the scars on my forehead and tilt of my nose told a story of other drunkards, and other fights.
‘Why do you do it, Corvus?’ Marcus asked me, looking down from atop the bank. ‘You could be a centurion one day if you weren’t so hostile and aggressive.’
‘I’m an infantry soldier,’ I grunted, surveying the length of pipe that I still had to clear. ‘I’m supposed to be hostile and aggressive.’
‘Not to your own side.’
And he was right, I knew, but rank and station had never been my ambition. I had joined the legions for one reason. If I couldn’t be given an enemy to do battle with, then the soldiers of my own empire would do.
Not so Marcus. He had left our home town two years before me with a head full of grandeur and glory. He was going to expand Rome’s borders and bring the barbarians to heel. He was going to bring enlightenment to the dark corners of the world. He was going to build an empire that lasted for thousands of years. He was going to do all this, and he wanted me to be beside him when he did it.
‘Why are you laughing?’ he asked me now.
I couldn’t stop myself, but nor could I tell my friend the reason behind it, and risk hurting his idealistic feelings – all that noble talk, and yet here was the reality: Marcus had never wet his blade in battle, and I had a legion’s shit on my hands.
‘Just thinking about the good old times,’ I said instead. And there had been plenty of those. Times when we had run over the hills. Times when we had dived into the clear blue sea. Times when we had fought for each other, lied for each other, taken hidings for each other. We had been born to different families, but we were destined to be brothers. No day had that proven truer than when I had run away from home, and towards the legions.
‘What’s wrong?’ my oldest friend asked me.
My smile had slipped. ‘Nothing.’
But there was no lying to Marcus. Within a moment he had slid down the bank, his immaculate sandals now buried in the sewage of the overflowing pipes.
He smiled at me. ‘Let me help you with this.’
How could I not grin back?
‘Always in the shit together,’ I snorted.
‘Always, brother.’
3
In the days that followed the fight at the inn, two things of note occurred.
The first was that my friends began to call me turd-lover, and accused me of getting into trouble deliberately so that I had an excuse to indulge my disgusting fetish. The second was that news of the coming campaign began to trickle its way through the fantastical machine known to the soldier as the ‘rumour mill’.
‘We’re marching with ten legions,’ Octavius said confidently as we leaned against the wall of our barracks, enjoying the spring sunshine that warmed the skin as comfortingly as the prospect of war warmed my soul.
Varo creased his thick brow. ‘Where’d you hear that?’