‘Yes sir,’ came the murmur from the ranks, the words as pathetic as a sickly child crawling in the gutter.
‘General Tiberius is one of the greatest military minds ever known to Rome,’ the senior centurion concluded, seeing the martial spirit fleeing from his men and attempting to retrieve it. ‘Do not think that you are in a position to out think him. Instead, think of how you may best serve the general, and Rome, by being obedient to his commands. Now fall out.’
And with that order, five centuries of men fell out of their ranks, and into the pits of their individual despair.
7
When Marcus found me, the knuckles of my right hand were red and bloodied.
It had been a comment from a man in Octavius’s section that started it. I’d overheard him say to a friend that he wasn’t too sorry about the news – at least this way he knew that he’d be alive come the winter.
It wasn’t the kind of thing that I wanted to hear.
I don’t know if it was a hatred of cowardice that made me hit him, or just because I was so selfish arrogant that anybody whose thoughts did not align with my own was likely to enrage me. Whatever the reason, it hardly mattered once I’d crashed my fist into his nose and begun to kick his prone form when he collapsed to the ground. Octavius and others had pulled me away, and my friend had been furious with me for what I’d done. Varo and Priscus, already aggrieved at the news of our exclusion from campaign, had shaken their heads at me and walked away. So it was that I had been alone in my barrack room, having ordered my young section out. After seeing the murder in my eyes, they hadn’t needed telling twice.
‘Octavius has every right to be angry,’ my visitor Marcus told me gently, having heard how I’d come to throw my weight around. ‘Those are his boys. He’s got to live and die for them.’
‘Except he hasn’t, has he?’ I answered with poisonsnidely. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’
That fact hung in the air like a flaming ember. If it landed in the wrong spot, it could cause fire, and carnage.
Marcus sought to extinguish it by appealing to logic. ‘Think about this, Corvus. Tiberius is one of the greatest commanders that Rome has ever been blessed with—’
‘That you’ve been blessed with.’
‘Let me finish, brother. He’s a great commander about to embark on a campaign. Do you think he takes the decision to leave half of a legion behind lightly?’
‘No,’ I finally conceded, beaten into answering by my friend’s patient gaze.
‘Exactly. There will be a reason for it, and where legions are concerned, the reason is usually war.’
‘There’s no war here,’ I grumbled.
‘True.’ Marcus shrugged. ‘But look east, brother. The Dacians are a constant threat. Tiberius is pulling a force together for war, and those troops have to come from somewhere. It won’t go unnoticed. Maybe an enemy sees the chance to grab land, or quick plunder. You will be the force that stands against them.’
I scoffed. ‘You said Tiberius is a great general, Marcus. You can’t have it both ways, saying that he’s overextending himself. He’s left enough troops on the frontiers to put off the Dacians. You know that.’
‘Then why do you think you’re staying here?’ he asked me, holding up his palms.
The truth was, I had no idea. My rage was clouding my judgement. I could only see the result of our omission from the campaign, and not guess at the reason.
‘It really doesn’t matter anyway, does it?’ I eventually spat. ‘The fact is I’m staying here, and you’re going to war.’
‘I’d trade places with you if I could.’ My friend spoke earnestly.
‘I know you would, you bastard.’ I was still simmering with wrath. ‘You’re too fucking nice for your own good.’
He smiled. ‘Well, we even each other out, don’t we?’
‘We did,’ I replied, despondent, realizing that there was more chafing at me than simply being left out of the campaign. I was about to be separated fully from Marcus, the one constant from my old life that was with me in the new. The one person that knew my every secret, and who had stood with me at his own peril in my darkest moment.
‘It kills me that you’re going without me,’ I finally admitted, looking at my feet.
Marcus said nothing at first, and simply nodded. I felt as though he was waiting for me to turn my gaze up from the floor. Reluctantly, I did so. His eyes had not changed as we had grown older. Where mine had become narrowed and angry, Marcus’s were still open and kind.
‘You know I always dreamed of campaign,’ my old friend said, and I had no need to reply. We both remembered the childhood days where Marcus would recite tales of long-dead generals, or when he would pay limbless beggars in the streets to describe the battles that had shaped and scarred their lives. Marcus was ambitious, and that ambition was martial in its essence. He wanted glorious conquest. To bring noble enlightenment to the barbarian. Not me. I had only wanted one thing, and only when it was taken from me did my mind become enraptured with the idea and adventure of war.
Marcus knew as much.
‘Never did I expect to see you as this, brother. A soldier, and a great one at that. Now that I do, my own dreams of war seem tainted. No matter the honour that my cohort will find in battle, it will be sullied by you not having been there by my side.’
The words were well meant. An expression of my friend’s deepest love.
I laughed all the same.
‘You always were good with your words, Marcus. Just promise me you’ll be as good with your sword, and better still with your shield. You’re the only thing I have from our old life. If I lose you, I lose the only thing left of…’
They were hard words for me to utter, and I looked at my hands as I did so. I felt, more than saw, Marcus get to his feet.
I knew that I had to follow the gesture.
I stood, and looked into my friend’s noble face. ‘You already look like a fucking hero. Don’t try too hard to prove it.’
And with those words I threw my arms around my brother.
The next morning, Marcus and half of the legion marched to war.
8
I watched from the battlements as the Sixth to Tenth Cohorts marched forth from the fort in all of their brilliance, two and a half thousand armoured men shining in the spring sunshine like the serrations of a blade. A blade that was now aimed at the throat of Rome’s enemy. A blade that would not return to its sheath until it was bloodied and covered in glory.
It didn’t enter my mind for one moment that there would be any other conclusion but victory. Roman heavy infantry was the best in the world; it was as simple as that. I didn’t see it as hubris – I just felt it as fact. Legions would march, enemies would fall and the Empire’s borders would grow. It was as predictable and as unstoppable as the rising of the sun.
But we would lose men, I knew, and that knowledge gripped at my guts. Watching them go from the battlements, I accepted the truth that I would rather see every other man fall so long as Marcus returned alive. Likewise, if the legion lost only one man in the coming war, and it was my brother, then I would take no solace in the sparing of other lives. In the five cohorts of soldiers that tramped their way from the fort, shoulders back and chins held high with pride, there was only one life that mattered to me.
‘Don’t die, you bastard,’ I hissed, looking for him in the mass of sword and iron and shield. ‘Don’t die.’
It was not from choice that I watched this procession of men on their way to war. Some cruel joke had seen to it that my century was tasked with guard duty as others marched nobly on to the campaign trail. Crueller still was that my post was close enough to the gates to see them leave. To feel the excitement. To smell and taste the dust kicked up by the feet of more than two thousand hungry killers, their footsteps followed by the iron hoofs of auxiliary cavalry, big Germans in the saddles, chests as broad as their predatory smiles.