‘Not easy to watch, is it?’ I heard from behind me.
I turned, and was surprised by whom I saw.
‘It’s not,’ I replied. ‘How are you inside the fort?’ I asked the civilian as he gave me his hand.
‘Centurion Justus is an old comrade.’ Brutus shrugged. His grey eyes were like a lonely wolf’s watching the pack depart without him.
For a long time, I said nothing. We simply stood and watched together as the last of them marched through the gates. They carried sword, and shield, and javelin, and packs, but did they also feel the weight that they carried from those who were left behind? The weight of expectation. The weight of yearning. The weight of jealousy.
I didn’t need to tell Brutus that I wished I was going with them. He didn’t need to tell me the same. As the man stared at the rear of the column pulling away into the distance, I chanced a look at the arm that hung useless at his side. Had I acted more quickly that day…
Brutus suddenly swung his head, and I followed his gaze. Through the gate were returning the standards of the legion. At their head came a man swathed from head to waist in the skin of a bear. He would have been a formidable-looking man even without the snarling beast for company, a warrior picked for his courage and skill. It was the position in the legion that Brutus had always wanted.
We watched as the glinting standard was carried towards its altar at the centre of camp. To me, the standard meant nothing – it was to the flesh and blood of a handful of comrades that I was dedicated – but to Brutus, the eagle was a symbol of Rome, and as such, he was near-religious in his worship of the totem that had been touched by the Emperor’s own hand.
‘Magnificent,’ he murmured.
I said nothing.
We stood like that for some time, our eyes vacantly looking out over the battlements. I wanted to tell him that it was my fault he was a crippled civilian, and not the soldier he had been born to be. I wanted to tell him that there wasn’t a day that I didn’t replay the skirmish in my mind, and think of how it could have been different. How I could have saved them. Brutus could have gone on to carry the eagle. Young Fano could have lived.
I had failed them both.
We stood until the end of my watch. The fort felt like a sea after a storm, an oppressive calm settling heavily after the vigour and industry of a column making its way to war.
‘You said goodbye to Marcus?’ Brutus finally asked me as I was relieved by the next sentry, and we walked from the step.
‘I did.’ We both knew that the goodbye could be final.
‘He’ll come back in glory, that one.’ The veteran smiled. ‘Some people are born for it.’
From the look that he gave me, I knew that he was including me in that statement. ‘Glorious guard duty,’ I snorted.
Brutus shrugged what had once been broad shoulders, his muscles reduced from inactivity. ‘Some people find war, and other times, war finds people.’
I felt the corner of my mouth pull into a smile. ‘Didn’t have you down as a philosopher, Brutus.’
‘With enough miles under your sandals, every man fancies himself Plato.’ He winked. ‘Marching. Guard duty. That’s a lot of time to think.’
Something I had no desire for. ‘I just want to fight.’
‘You’re as much of a hothead as when you first came into my section,’ he agreed. ‘And you’ve never told me why.’
And neither would I. A look was enough.
Brutus shrugged again, and ran a hand over his beard. He might not have seen as much of me since his injury, but he was right: I hadn’t changed. I was angry. I wanted to forget. The only way I could lose myself was by fighting, and I had just watched the greatest chance for that march out of the gates.
‘I didn’t join the legions to sit on my fucking arse,’ I growled, feeling the tide of bitter resentment rising again.
‘You’re six years into your twenty,’ my old friend tried to comfort me. ‘You’ll see plenty of war, Corvus.’
If Brutus’s prophecy was to prove true, then I saw no sign of it in the week that followed half of the legion’s departure. The days crawled by as if caught in tree sap. The only chance of relief from the monotonous routine came when we were given a night to go into the town’s inns and brothels to drown or fuck away our sorrows. I was far from the only hot-tempered soldier on these nights. Many were sour at being denied a chance of campaign, and I doubt if there was a bar stool left intact after the fighting between would-be comrades and allies. As Varo was fond of saying, ‘The crime’s in getting caught,’ and of that I had certainly been guilty. I was trying to put a cavalryman’s head through a door when a centurion and the men of that night’s watch got their hands on me.
My actions cost me a week of being confined to camp, and now I lay alone in my bunk room; the young soldiers of my section had disappeared: either they were enjoying the local inns responsibly, or else they had been scared away by my quick temper. I thought about those troops now. I knew each by name, but that was as far as my knowledge of the men extended. I had learned the hard lesson in life that to care was to set yourself up for untold pain and misery, and so I had space in my heart for only a handful of people. Brutus. Priscus. Varo. Octavius. Marcus.
Marcus. Where was he now? I wondered. Had they reached the Danube and the marshalling grounds of Tiberius’s grand army? Was he at this moment surrounded by a force so large that I could not even conjure it in my mind? Of course, our legion’s command in the fort would have such information, relayed by a string of messengers on swift steeds, but we in the ranks thought of ourselves as mushrooms for a reason – we were fed on shit, and kept in the dark. The only hope of information I could expect would come through the rumour mill, and where the safety of my oldest friend was concerned, I did not trust to gossip. I would have to wait for the reports and ledgers that would be communicated to our legion after the coming battles. I would have to wait to see if my friend was among the fallen, injured or recommended for an award. Knowing Marcus, I was sure that he would be on those lists one way or another. He would be recognized for his gallantry, or die in the pursuit of that triumph.
‘I should be there,’ I growled aloud.
I stamped my foot against the wall like a petulant child, and put my hands to my face, digging the heels against my eyes.
In an attempt to distract my mind, I thought back to that day on the square when Governor Messalinus had spoken to us. I thought of his power, his presence. I tried again to picture the force that he described. Five legions, and more than a hundred thousand auxiliary soldiers raised from Pannonia and Dalmatia. These would be light infantry and cavalry, and they would come from the same lands that I had once called home. I wondered if there would be familiar faces in those newly assembled ranks. Men from Iader, the coastal town where I’d been raised. Boys that I had seen on the streets, on the beach and in the harbour. Did they now march to war? Surely, with a levy of such size, there must be some known to me who had now been pulled into service of Rome. Iader had been colonized by Roman settlers, but the majority of its peoples had moved there from the mountains, and were not themselves citizens. It was from this population of Roman subjects that the conscripts would be drawn.