Behind him in the turret, shadows sweep the cloak pegs between me and my watchfire bundle. A hand snatches up my sword.
So I jump, the impact rattling my teeth when I land. When I get to my feet, something hits me flush in the face. On the ground I hear two more muffled blows, though I don't seem to feel them. I'm facedown. Pain pierces inward from any mouth movement and teeth loll and slip atop my tongue. I'm kicked around. When my septum contacts the turf a drunkenness of agony flashes from ear to ear.
When it recedes there are harsh, muted sounds. One of my ears has filled with liquid. There's commotion for a while, and then it's gone. In the silence that follows I make out the agitated murmur of the detachment mustering and then setting out.
I test various aspects of the pain with various movements. Lifting my head causes spiralling shapes to arrive and depart. Fluids pour across my eyes. At some point, silently weeping, I stop registering sensations.
In the morning I discover they'd been pouring over the Wall on both sides of me, the knotted ropes trailing down like vines.
Everyone is gone. Smoke is already high in the sky from both the milecastle and the fort. When I stand I teeter. When I look about me only one eye is working. The boy from the turret door is dead not far from me, having landed on rock. That his weapon is still beside him suggests he was overlooked.
The rain's stopped and the sun's out. My mother's wool tunic is encrusted and stiff. I walk the Wall throwing back over those ropes closest to my turret, blearily making my dereliction of duty less grotesque. It requires a few hours to walk across the heather past the milecastle, and then on to the fort. Since I can't move my jaw, I presume it's broken. Two of the fort's walls have been breached but apparently the attack was repulsed. Legionaries and auxiliaries are already at work on a temporary timber rampart. Minor officers are shouting and cursing. The Brittunculi bodies are being dragged into piles. The Tungrians' bodies probably have already been rolled onto pallets and carried into the fort.
My head is bound. A headache doesn't allow me to raise it. My first two days are spent in the infirmary. My assumption about my jaw turns out to be correct. I ask if my eye will be saved and am told that's a good question. A vinegar and mustard poultice is applied. Two messmates come by to visit a third dying from a stomach wound. They regard me with contempt tinged with pity. Over the course of a day I drink a little water. My father visits once while I'm asleep, I'm informed. I ask after those I know. The clerk who shared my little room died of burns from the barracks fire. He survived the night but not the morning. Somehow the location of the raid was a complete surprise, despite the rumors.
It takes all of six days for four cohorts of the Ninth Legion, with its contingents of light and heavy horse, supported by two of the tattered cohorts of the Tungrians, to prepare its response. The Romans suffer casualties as though no one else ever has. There are no speeches, no exhortations, among either the legions or the auxiliaries. The barracks ground is noisy only with industry. The Romans, hastily camped within our walls, go about their business as if sworn to silence. Only butchery will allow them to speak.
I live on a little porridge sipped through a straw. No one comments on the joke. On the fifth day I report my ready status to my muster officer. He looks me up and down before moving his attention to other business. “All right, then,” he says.
On the sixth day of our muster my father appears over my pallet, the first thing I see when I wake in the barracks. He's wearing his decorations on a harness over his mail, and the horsehair crest of his helmet sets some of our kitchenware, hanging from the rafters, to rocking. He's called himself up to active duty and no one's seen fit to argue with him.
It's only barely light. He tells me he's glad for my health and my mother sends her regards and good wishes and that he'll see me outside.
At the third trumpet signal the stragglers rush to take their positions in the ranks. A great quiet falls over the assembled units, and the sun peeks across the top of the east parapet. The herald standing to the right of a general we've never seen before asks three times in the formal manner whether we are ready for war. Three times we shout, We are ready.
We march all day, our advance covered by cavalry. The sun moves from astride our right shoulder to astride our left. By nightfall we've arrived at a large settlement with shallow earthen embankments and rickety palisades. Are these the men, or the families of the men, responsible for the raid? None of us care.
Their men are mustering themselves hurriedly into battle order before the settlement, unwilling to wait for the siege. They wear long trousers and have animals painted on their bare chests: Caledonii. Is this their tribal territory? I have no idea.
We are drawn up on the legion's left. At the crucial time, we know, the cavalry will appear from behind the settlement, sealing the matter. On this day, with my father somewhere lost in the melee off to my right, we will all of us together become the avenging right arm of the empire. We will execute what will be reported back to the provincial capital as a successful punitive raid. I will myself record the chronicle with my one good eye. I will write, When we broke through the walls and into the settlement we killed every living thing The women, the children, the dogs, the goats were cut in half and dismembered. While the killing was at its height pillaging was forbidden. When the killing was ended the trumpets sounded the recall. Individuals were selected from each maniple to carry out the pillaging. The rest of the force remained alert to a counterattack from beyond the settlement. The settlement was put to the torch. The settlement was razed to the ground. The building stones were scattered. The fields were sown with salt. My comrades-in-arms will think no more of me than before. My father and I will continue to probe and distress our threadbare connections. And what my mother will say about her marriage, weeping with bitterness in a sun-suffused haze a full summer later, will bring back to me my last view of the site after the Twentieth Tungrians and the Ninth Legion had finished with it, pecked over by crows and studded with the occasional shattered pilum: “We honor nothing by being the way we are. We make a desolation and we call it peace.”
Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak
Guy's hurt? Fuck 'im. Guy can't get up, play's still going? Run his ass over. Whistle's blown? Stretcher bearer time. Grab a blow and let the Sisters of Mercy do their thing.
“Faggots,” Wainwright says whenever the trainers come out for someone. He means the trainers.
We're not talking games, here. We're talking summer practice, two-a-days, guys keeling over in the heat. When more than one guy has the dry heaves we call it Hee Haw because of the sound.
“That shit's not funny,” somebody'll say when they see us laughing. Some fat shit, holding his knees, blowing chow. “Dude for the Vikings died.”
We have it written in chalk and boxed on a corner of the blackboard that doesn't get erased: trample the dead, hurdle the weak. When the coaches first wrote it, they spelled it e-l, both times. “Dumb fucks,” Wainwright said when he saw it. He rubbed it out with his arm and wrote it right.
“Who's been screwing with my inspirational slogans?” our defensive coordinator wanted to know.
“I been,” Wainwright told him. It was after the afternoon half of a two-a-day and those of us not on fluids or hurling were on the rug, our legs spread out, because it felt cooler than the benches or we couldn't get up to the benches. “Just streamlining the spelling, Coach.”