With that simple motion, he decides both the old man’s fate, and my own.
I cut.
The old man bled to death at my feet. He left the world in spasms, the screams of his kin making a symphony of his death. I thought of Centurion Justus. How he had told me that such barbarity against the enemy was a necessity to see our own men through alive. As I looked around the assembly of soldiers’ faces, I saw no condemnation in their eyes. I had butchered an animal, and nothing more.
‘Will you talk now?’ the cohort commander asked the others.
They would not, and so they screamed instead.
‘Maybe they had nothing to say?’ I asked Marcus.
‘What does it matter?’
Maybe it didn’t.
We sought out wood ash. Marcus wanted to clean his armour. I wondered if he was doing it to be rid of the memory of the people who had painted it. I was wrong, of course. ‘I feel like a soldier again,’ he told me once he was the cleanest legionary on the mountainside.
We didn’t speak much after that. We were too tired for words, and among true friends – brothers – words are decoration. Simply being in each other’s presence is enough.
But I had other friends. Other brothers. ‘I need to go and see them,’ I told Marcus, though it broke my heart.
He nodded. He tried to make it easier. ‘We’ll be held in reserve for a while. No more clearances like that.’
I wasn’t easily fooled. ‘You told me you do them all the time.’
A week ago, he would have smiled. ‘There’s cavalry coming.’
A dozen mounts. We walked to them. ‘Why so many?’ we asked a trooper.
‘Too many dispatch riders going missing.’
‘Can he get a ride down with you?’ Marcus asked. ‘He’s the standard-bearer.’
‘Of course.’
I turned to look at my friend. I wanted to know why he wanted rid of me.
But I saw the answer behind him. His century. The burden of command was heavy enough. He did not need the weight of carrying his friend into danger, too.
‘I should get back to my men,’ he said, and I saw the pain that the words caused him.
‘You should.’ I wanted to say more, but as every soldier learns, goodbyes are only tolerable when they’re short. ‘Keep your shield up,’ I said, ‘and move fast.’
‘The same to you, brother.’
I pulled my friend close. After the ravine, I knew that his men would understand. ‘Don’t fucking die, Marcus,’ I threatened into his ear. ‘Don’t you dare fucking die.’
I stood back, and watched as my brother walked away to his soldiers.
I never saw that man again.
PART THREE
33
I found Varo and Octavius in the valley. They were bored by their own mission. Worried by my absence. They asked me questions, and I told them lies.
‘See much action?’
‘No.’
‘Kill anyone?’
‘No.’
Varo looked at my feet. I’d tried to scrub them in the river, but the material was still stained by the old man’s piss and blood. He knew that I was full of shit. ‘Rumour mill says the Sixth cleared a couple of fortified villages?’
I was caught in a truth, and so I told him about stone walls, dead soldiers and raped women.
The big man shrugged. ‘That’s war.’
Now that I had opened my mouth, I realized that I was troubled, and that his simple answer was not enough. ‘I grew up a hundred miles from here,’ I explained to myself as much as to my comrades, ‘and if my father wasn’t a Roman citizen, then I wouldn’t be either. I’d have been drafted into the auxiliary cohorts, I’d have been told we were rebelling against Rome, and now I’d be your enemy.’
‘Be thankful that you’re not then.’ Octavius smiled, ripping off a fart.
‘It doesn’t bother you?’ I asked with irritation at my friend’s breezy attitude. ‘Those men in the villages, maybe they had family with our enemy, but they weren’t the enemy. They weren’t picking up a shield and a sword.’
Octavius raised his hands. ‘So? What are you getting at, Corvus?’
‘So? So why did they have to die? They weren’t a threat to Rome.’
Varo shook his thick head. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Why doesn’t it?’ I demanded, hoping to understand it all. Hoping to sit with the same certain peace as my comrades. ‘Tell me why, Varo. Tell me why we’re killing the same people that we were protecting a few weeks ago. Tell me why the dead that I’m seeing are old men, women and children. Tell me why the people that I grew up with are now my enemy. Please. I need to know. Fucking tell me.’
The lump looked at me as though I was an idiot. I suppose that I was.
‘Because that’s war.’
It was our war, and after two weeks of it, we were still only halfway between the cities of Siscia and Salona, trapped in the mountains like stale air. As we inched further south the mountains were becoming more angry, appearing as shark’s teeth turned up to the sky. Deadly, and vicious.
Hook-nose rotated his troops. My old cohort climbed to the east to replace the Seventh. The Sixth, and my brother, were similarly replaced. The change came after the legate had visited his troops in the heights. He wanted to know why progress was so slow, and so he went to see for himself. I expect that he went thinking he would find excuses and dragged feet. Instead he found heat, and ambush, and soldiers dragging the bodies of their friends as arrows from an unseen enemy tasted flesh.
Relief rolled over me when I’d discovered that my old ccohort would be taking to the heights in the east, and not the west. The Seventh had come under attack, but they’d suffered far less than Marcus’s cohort. For whatever reason, the enemy presence was stronger in that part of the region. Tribunes on the staff had concluded, because of the coordinated nature of attacks, that there was one enemy band operating there under a single command. Sometimes, in the night, assaults fell on different outposts or units at almost the same time. Often these attacks would last for no more than a few seconds – a couple of sentries killed; some supplies set ablaze – and then the enemy were gone, swallowed by night and the land that they called home.
I sat back against a slab of rock, Varo and Octavius either side of me. We had climbed all day. Balius had been returned to me, but I had turned down the saddle so that I could share the same hardship as my comrades. How could it be any other way? We were soldiers.
‘I feel like my lungs are still halfway down the hill,’ Octavius wheezed. ‘If these mountains are what we’re fighting for, then they can have them back. What use are they to us?’
There was no answer for him. Not a real one, anyway. ‘If we don’t control the mountains,’ Varo began, ‘then the officers back in Rome don’t get to colour in this part of the world on their maps.’
The time to worry about a soldier is when he is not complaining, and I knew that there was more to my friends’ grumbling. There were nerves in it. An edge of fear. These rocky slopes were death’s domain. Before the battle on the plain, we had stood in ranks of shining steel and watched and waited as our enemy advanced. There had been time for goodbyes. There had been time to prepare for the end. Here, a soldier could drop dead before his comrades’ eyes with an arrow in his throat as they sat down to share biscuits. A sentry duty could be a death sentence, the butchered soldier found days later, or never at all.
‘We were born fifty years too late,’ Octavius told us. ‘Imagine being in the battle lines of the civil war? None of this fucking around like goats in the mountains. Line against line, lads. Legion on legion.’