‘It’s the truth.’
‘It was probably just some pissed soldier.’
‘Nope. It didn’t have a head. It was a ghost, I’m telling you.’
‘Probably shoved his own head up his arse so he didn’t have to smell you,’ Stumps said provocatively.
‘You don’t believe in ghosts?’ asked Dog.
‘Not really. How many goat-fuckers are dead on the other side of that wall? They’d all be running around here, wouldn’t they?’
‘Only unhappy spirits are ghosts,’ Dog argued.
‘Yeah, and I’m sure they were really happy dying from their wounds in a stinking ditch.’
‘I believe in ghosts.’ I spoke up, surprising my men.
‘What?’ Stumps’s face creased beneath the brim of his helmet.
‘I believe in ghosts,’ I repeated. ‘But not like Dog thinks he saw. I think that ghosts live in our heads. They come with us from battlefields. Those dead Germans in the ditch? Their ghosts went back with their friends. Some of them are in the heads of the men who fought on the wall.’
Stumps chewed over my words, doubtless thinking of the voices he heard inside his own mind, and the images that were painted there. ‘That makes sense,’ he agreed.
Brando and Folcher were also slowly nodding.
‘Not many of us to carry the ghosts out of the forest,’ Brando considered. ‘A lot to fit in a few heads.’
Folcher rubbed at his face, almost as if he was trying to feel for a presence within. ‘If that is true, I would be happy to see these things. To have my comrades still with me.’
His words hit me. I had carried my ghosts, but I had always considered it a curse. Could it be that through my own suffering, I offered my comrades a taste of immortality? Was that not a price worth paying in pain?
When the scream echoed through the night, I almost thought that they were answering me, but moments later, a trumpet began to blare from the direction of the headquarters building.
‘They’re su-sounding the assembly,’ Balbus said. The distinction was important; this was not a stand-to. We were not under attack.
I led the section at a jog-trot towards the trumpet. The other sections of the night’s watch converged with us. The crest of Centurion H appeared from the door of the headquarters building.
‘With me!’ he shouted, and led off at a run.
I recognized our direction. We were going into the part of the fort that had been turned over to the civilians. I wondered why, but heard my answer before I saw it: angry shouts; cries of grief. So deep in the night, they could only mean death.
The alleyway between buildings was packed with three dozen civilians. Most were adult women, and the ones that were not crying hissed insults at whoever was in their midst. I saw then flashes of shields – soldiers were in the centre of the crowd.
‘Close shields,’ H ordered us. ‘Keep weapons sheathed. We’ll push them off if we have to.’ Then he ordered the civilians: ‘Move back!’
‘Fuck you!’ a young woman spat back.
‘Last chance, darling.’
The noise of the crowd dropped as the civilians finally began to realize the power of the overlapping shields, and the centurion’s intent to use them.
They moved, and as they pulled away they revealed a section of soldiers who had closed in a circle. As the crowd gave them space these men opened their formation, revealing a body in their centre.
It was a young girl. She was shy of her teens. A quick look was all I needed to see that she’d been butchered like a pig.
‘Felix, use your section to close off this stretch of the alleyway. Make some space around her,’ H ordered, gesturing to the slaughtered girl. He then moved his other sections, and very soon the girl’s body was in the centre of an island of calm. On the edges of that space, angry faces spat and cursed at the soldiers who kept them from the body.
‘It’s those fucking Syrians!’ I heard a male voice shout repeatedly. I identified him in the group to my front, dark-skinned and bearded. Likely a trader who had followed Varus’s army on campaign, but had escaped its destruction.
‘Come here,’ I ordered him.
I had to repeat my words more forcefully before the man stepped forwards.
‘Syrians did this?’ I asked him.
The man’s volume decreased as he stood closer to me and my men, but his words were thick with bile. ‘Of course they did. Look at that poor girl! They butchered her.’
‘You saw them?’
‘No, but it was them. Look at her!’ he implored me. ‘Of course it was the savages!’
H joined me on my shoulder. ‘You witnessed this?’ he asked the man.
‘No, but—’
‘Then shut your mouth and fuck off. You’re wasting my time. Did anyone see what happened?’ he asked the crowd.
No one had.
‘Anyone here family? Anyone know her?’
Two pairs of hands crept up. They belonged to a girl who was about the same age as the victim, and a terrified-looking mother with wild blue eyes.
‘Come here,’ H ordered them, gesturing that they come forward. I moved aside to let them through, and then cocked my head to listen in on their conversation.
‘Who is the girl? Is this your friend? Daughter? Who is she?’ H asked.
‘My Latin not good,’ the woman answered eventually.
H appraised her blue eyes and fair hair, then turned to Brando. ‘Brando. Is she German?’
Brando let loose a string of words in his native language. When the woman replied, H gestured for the Batavian to join him.
‘You’ll translate,’ he told the man. ‘Who is the girl?’
Brando delivered the words in a voice of stone. The woman’s own words were guilt-ridden and tear-filled. ‘Her family was lost with the legions. Her father was a legionary. She came here with them. Her name was Frida.’
‘And what happened to her?’
‘I don’t know. She must have gone to the latrines. I woke and she was gone. Then I heard the scream as someone found her.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ H assured her, understanding the emotion if not the language. He asked his next question delicately. This was a young girl lying dead, but the world was sick as well as cruel, and so H asked what needed to be asked. ‘Was she… was she selling herself? Was someone else selling her?’
The woman shook her head strongly.
‘Do you think I have no shame?’ Brando translated.
‘Wait with them,’ H ordered instead of answering. ‘Who found the body?’ he asked the crowd.
An older woman with thinning silver hair stepped forward. She seemed unsteady on her feet. She was shaking. Folcher saw it too, and quickly draped his cloak over her bony shoulders.
‘Tell me what happened,’ H asked her. He had to repeat himself as the woman’s wet eyes fixed squarely on the body that lay in the dirt.
‘I went to the latrine,’ she finally managed. ‘It was dark, and I tripped.’
‘On her?’
The woman lifted her hands. They were stained with blood.
‘It was you that screamed?’
‘She’s so young…’
‘Was it you that screamed?’
She nodded slowly.
‘And you didn’t see anything?’
‘It was dark.’ Her eyes crept back to the body. ‘She’s so young…’
H caught Folcher’s eye, and motioned that he take the woman aside.
‘The Syrians did this!’ a voice shouted. ‘They’re not Roman! Get them out of the fort!’
H walked to the front of the crowd. ‘Shut up and be calm,’ he snapped. ‘Did anyone see Syrians here tonight? Have they been around here, watching the girls? Anything like that?’
‘I saw them looking at me when I went to get water,’ a dark-haired woman called out.