‘Is he here?’ I asked the officer, meaning the valley floor.
He scooped water on to his lined face before he answered me. ‘Seconded to the First Cohort. They needed an additional century. They asked for my best, so I gave them Marcus.’
Pride is no small thing, even in the face of danger – especially in the face of danger – and I felt it well in me now. Marcus, my brother, requested from amongst his peers. I had to see him. How had I let it go so long? Damn my fear. He was closer to me than blood. War could not change that. War would not change that.
I bent down to the stream and scooped a handful of the blissful water into my mouth. I knew that I was about to be thirsty for a long time.
‘Where is he?’
I went into the mountains in search of ‘the Barbers’. That’s what Marcus’s century were calling themselves now, my guide informed me. He was of the same cohort.
‘This boss said that every century needed a name along with its number,’ the soldier informed me, referring to the cohort commander whom I’d talked to at the river.
‘A name?’
‘That’s right, standard-bearer. The boss’s only rule was that it had to be something aggressive and warlike.’
I pulled a face. ‘What’s aggressive and warlike about the Barbers?’
The soldier grinned at me – I recognized it as an expression that one gives to a man who is not a party to an inside joke.
We joined a resupply column forming up in the lowest reaches of the slopes. Pack animals and burdened men. Slaves. Both were the property of the legions. Where had they come from? A dozen shades of skin, a dozen tones of hair, all united by the same expression in their eyes: hopelessness. I looked at the men who now ordered them into a ramshackle column – tidy ranks would not survive the first hundred yards of track. The armour of these soldiers had been scrubbed in the valley, but there was no getting the dirt from their lined faces. Even after a short respite, their eyes were grey and lifeless. Gone were the songs. Gone were the jokes. The mountain had leached humour away, breaking the spirit of the soldiers as certainly as their slaves had been broken to the whim of their owners. The mountains were our masters. Slaves of Rome, slaves of war, slaves to the sharp-toothed leviathan that seemed intent on devouring us all, piece by piece.
‘Lovely day for it, isn’t it?’ a toothless soldier asked me, his spirit endowed with greater strength than most.
‘Lovely day,’ I made myself reply. I was the fucking standard-bearer after all.
A rippling order. ‘Prepare to move.’
A rippling movement. ‘Move.’
Like a wounded caterpillar, the column lurched forwards, and upwards.
One foot in front of the other. Feel the loose stone give. Feel the creak in your knee. The stab in your ankle. Feel the hot sweat that stings your eyeballs, those empty orbs scratched by dust and drained by stress. Try and keep your head on a swivel. Try and scan the rocks. Try and think about how you will react if you get attacked from that position. Try and think about how you will cover and withdraw the casualties if you get hit from there.
Try not to think about why you are here.
Try not to think about when, and how you will leave it.
Try not to think about how you came to be here in the first place.
‘Standard-bearer?’ The toothless soldier. ‘We’re gonna catch our breath here, if that’s all right with you?’
Here was a collection of half-torn-down hovels. I could smell goat shit, and rot.
‘Bit on the stinky side, isn’t it?’ the old soldier asked me as he sucked on a dry biscuit.
‘Here.’ I offered him some wine. It was good. Very good. The legate had given it to me himself.
The man’s eyes lit up as he drank it. ‘Take another pull,’ I offered, but the soldier handed it back.
‘Can’t deprive a man of his luxuries up here, standard-bearer, but thank you. I’ll get this lot moving again just as soon as everyone’s had time to put something down their necks, and drop their arses.’
Following his own advice, the man moved away and dropped to his haunches; the biscuit was still in his mouth. I thought of the rigorous standards enforced upon me as a child – eating and the use of the toilet as regimented as any other part of my schooling – and I almost smiled. Only the stench of death kept my lips tight.
I found them in the closest hovel. Their skin was black, and bloated. In parts it moved. Creatures smaller than my thumbnail were the masters of death’s domain, and here was a feast worthy of whatever hellish gods had spawned them. There were four bodies. All naked. All rotting.
None with their heads.
The answer to that mystery was found as we passed through the gate out of what had been a village. The heads sat atop a wall, eyeless and maggot-ridden. Some joker had arranged them so that each pair were kissing.
Maybe it was this distraction that kept us looking in, and not out. By the time the men up front had heard it, and called a warning, a loaded cart was plunging towards our ranks from the track ahead. It was loaded with rock, and turned the slave that it hit into a bloody smear on the mountainside. The man hadn’t moved. Was he dumbstruck, or tired of life?
What did it matter?
‘That cunt was carrying the fucking biscuits,’ the veteran raged, poking his javelin into the stew of slave and oat. ‘Someone’s going to go hungry.’
Not the slave.
‘Prepare to move!’
My feet moved doggedly up the mountain track, but my mind wandered carelessly into my past.
There it was met by an ambush of misery.
36
I landed hard at the bottom of the wall, the blood on my hands smearing the hot tile. There were shouts behind me, more plaintive than angry. I didn’t think that I needed to fear pursuit – not immediately, at least – as the first priority of the slaves would be to save the life of my father. I had tried to kill him, but I knew in the next breath that I had failed.
‘Corvus!’ A voice thick with blood and broken teeth. ‘Corvus, get back here!’
Instead I ran.
First to the beach, to wash off the blood in the waters of my childhood. My adolescence. My innocence. As I scrubbed torn knuckles I knew that I was washing myself of family. Of security. Of love. Everything I had known had changed in an instant.
No. Not everything.
Marcus. Through blood and betrayal he would stand by me, I knew it.
I looked at my tunic, marked by the stains of my act. I looked at the sun, now at its zenith. My father had use of his tongue, and I had no doubt that he would be sending slaves to summon the town’s watch. That he lived for now did not mean that he would survive his injuries – if he died and I was caught, it would be the most hideous end for me. If he lived and I was trapped? I did not expect mercy. Rome was an empire built on patriarchy, and I had viciously turned on my father. He was the emperor, I was the rebel, and in such a conflict there could be but one resolution – death.
And so I ran.
It was three miles to the villa that was Marcus’s home. It sat atop a small hill amid the orchards of our childhood. The trees were heavy with fruit now, the shadows welcoming, and I used them to creep unseen to the lowest point of the outer wall, hauling myself over as we had done whenever we were up to mischief.
‘Marcus?’ I whispered outside his room. ‘Marcus?’
My heart was in my throat. My brother was home on leave from his beloved Eighth Legion. If he had gone into town, dare I wait? A better question: dare I run without him?