I looked about me. Saw a man take an arrow in his shoulder. Saw another have his helmet knocked clean off, an astonished look on his face as he realized he was alive. All about me was blood, screaming, oaths and death. At the top of the wall I saw the shapes of the enemy, stabbing, throwing, firing and dying. The Tenth were amongst them now. They were at the wall’s top.
I should be with them.
I spat to clear the fear from my throat. I thought of my friends. Brutus, a lingering end. Priscus, fallen on the battlefield. Octavius desecrated. Varo vanished. I raised the eagle high.
‘Fear the Eighth!’ I hollered. ‘Fear the Eighth!’
My heart swelled with pride as I saw my beloved friend’s battle cry rip through the ranks like fire. ‘Fear the Eighth!’ they cried in bloodlust. ‘Fear the Eighth!’
I gripped the eagle tightly – I had honoured my friends.
Now I would kill for them.
I charged up the ramp of shields, and threw myself at the enemy.
Within moments, Gallus was slick with blood. I hadn’t intended to use the eagle as a weapon, but as I reached the top of the wall an enemy fighter came at me from the right, and I swung Gallus into his livid face, the precious metal splintering bone and skull. ‘Fear the Eighth!’ I roared. ‘Fear the Eighth!’
Maybe they did fear us, but they fought like cornered mountain lions. All about me was the ringing of steel. The screams of challenge, or pain. Behind me, a sea of rolling red shields glinted in the rising sun. We had the wall. We had the numbers. The day was won.
Now we just had to kill.
I found a victim. He didn’t come at me looking to win an eagle. He came at me like a startled rabbit, bouncing from one skirmish to the next, desperate to escape.
I ended his flight as I drove my blade into his ribs. ‘No!’ he begged as he died. There was an edge to his words. An accusation of unfairness. It caught me, and the distraction was almost my own end.
I felt blood spurt across my arms. Saw a bearded man drop by my feet.
‘Stay sharp, standard-bearer.’ Centurion Paulus, smiling like a wolf with a bloody snout.
‘Thank you.’
‘The wall’s ours. And over there. Look.’ I followed his outstretched arm and sword. On the opposite side of the town’s dwellings I saw red and gold gleaming in the sunlight – the other cohorts were carrying their own fight. ‘I want that,’ the officer then told me, and I saw that his eyes were set on a banner in the centre of the enemy’s camp. It would be as precious to them as our own eagle. A worthy prize for whichever man claimed it. ‘I’ll be fucked if I let the other cohorts get there first,’ he growled, looking about him – the fight on the wall was over. A few of the enemy lay moaning as they were dispatched by hungry blades, but the majority of the enemy were retreating into the centre of the hill fort.
‘Form battle line on me!’ Paulus called, and I knew that my place was at its centre.
Why? To kill? For glory?
No. For answers.
I wanted to be the first to reach the other cohorts. I knew who would be at their head. I knew who would be cutting through the enemy as though they were naught but bleating goats.
‘Tenth Cohort,’ Paulus commanded, ‘by the centre, advance!’
We stepped off. I don’t know who began beating their sword against their shield, but soon it was rolling thunder in the mountains, announcing the immediacy of death. Ahead of us, the enemy cowered in shaking ranks. There were at least a hundred of them in a tight knot of bristling spears and pale faces.
‘I’m gonna skull fuck your corpse!’ a man shouted from our ranks.
‘I’m gonna put my babies in your daughters!’ another promised to savage laughter.
I saw them, then. The civilians that cowered in the centre of men and arms. Their plaintive wails hit me at the same moment. It was the kind of sound to drive a man mad. No wonder the soldiers around me were eager to silence it with their blades.
I looked at Centurion Paulus. His pace was quickening. He wanted the enemy’s banner. He wanted glory. It was only as one of the enemy broke from their ranks, unarmed and seemingly unafraid, that the officer ordered his men to halt a mere fifty paces from their enemy. ‘They want to talk?’ he said almost to himself.
That was exactly what they wanted. It came in a shout of Dalmatian, and I wondered if I alone understood it.
‘He says they want to surrender,’ I told the officer beside me. ‘He says the men will surrender if the women and children are not harmed.’
Paulus laughed violently, and made a show of looking around him. ‘You’re not in a position to be negotiating!’ he called. After a moment, I translated. As I did, I looked at the fearful faces of the enemy – young and old. Pale and tanned. There, undoubtedly, a pair of brothers. From the grief-stricken look on one man’s face, it was his wounded son he knelt beside. All of them had wide eyes fixed on the machine of death that had overcome walls and now stood in splendid, bloodied ranks before them.
The Dalmatian leader said nothing back. I expected at any second that Paulus would order the charge.
Instead I heard him sigh. ‘I don’t want to lose more of my men for a battle already won,’ he confided in me. ‘Tell him to get his men to lay down their weapons, and then we’ll talk.’
Surprised, I shouted the words. I could feel the Dalmatians’ hesitation. Behind him, on the far wall, the sound of fighting had ceased.
‘You will spare the woman and children?’ he asked, recognizing that his own life was forfeit.
He didn’t ever receive his answer for, at that moment, a harsh voice cried out from our left flank. ‘The other cohort’s over the wall!’ the man shouted urgently. ‘They’re in the town, sir!’
That did it. Paulus raised his sword. He would not see others take his share of glory. ‘Fear the Eighth!’ he bellowed. ‘Fear the Eighth!’
I had just a moment to see the looks of resignation and abject terror pass through the cluster of our enemy before the Tenth Cohort charged past me, hollering the words of my friend as they ploughed into ranks of man, woman and child.
I did not take part in the charge. Instead I let it run by me, a violent torrent of hate and power. I heard the steel sing. I heard the cries. It was all a blur, the peaking sun now burning into my eyes. Eyes that stung with tears.
They were not tears for the butchered, nor tears for the butchers.
They were tears for the inevitable. For the pain I could no longer ignore.
The hill had been carried. The day belonged to the Eighth, and to Rome. There was no longer an enemy force standing, and so I sheathed my sword; it was questions that I must wield, and the answers to them would be as deadly as any blade.
‘I don’t want to do this,’ I said out loud. ‘I don’t want to do this. Please,’ I pleaded with my own conscience.
I tried to shut my eyes. To shut my mind.
But Beatha was always there. Naked. Raped. Murdered.
Under the stare of her lifeless eyes I found my courage.
‘I’ll do it.’
I wanted to sob. But no tears came. Just a shaking in my limbs, and bile in my gut. I fought to stay upright as a wave of nausea passed through me. I fought to be the man she had always thought me to be.
Through her I found my courage, and against a backdrop of screams, I went to find the answer to my own.
Individuals among the enemy fled through the buildings like whipped dogs, their eyes huge and wild. On their tails were packs of Roman soldiers, and when they caught their quarry they dragged them viciously to the floor. The men they butchered. The women they raped. The children… it depended on the age.