‘You want to stick this on them?’ he asked me.
I nodded. ‘Everyone except us thinks he took a Syrian arrow. Won’t be hard to believe he went looking for payback.’
‘Not like he could keep his fucking mouth shut,’ Brando grunted.
‘I don’t know.’ H shook his head. ‘Half the garrison’s at the Syrians’ throats as it is. A fuck-up during battle? Maybe that they can understand. But this?’
‘What’s the alternative?’ Titus asked. ‘Either way, the civvies and half the Romans here hate the Syrians. What’s to be gained by you losing a good man?’
‘I’m not afraid to die, Titus,’ Brando stated again. ‘I’m glad that I killed him. When I die, I’ll laugh about it with Folcher. If saving my head means more fighting in the fort, then that isn’t something I want. I did what I did, and I’ll take my punishment.’
‘No one’s asking you, you dense German dickhead,’ Stumps dismissed the Batavian. ‘I’m not losing another mate.’
The harsh silence fell again. All eyes rested on Statius, and the dagger in his chest.
‘What will it be, H?’ Titus finally asked the officer.
H continued to look at the floor for a long time. ‘You’d take your punishment?’ he finally asked of Brando, raising his gaze.
The Batavian met his look with unblinking eyes – he would.
‘And I believe you,’ H conceded, with more than a little admiration for the killer. ‘But if you lose your head, Brando, I’ve got a feeling that I’d be joining you in the afterlife soon after.’ He cast his eyes over the assembled, grim faces. Brando’s comrades. His family. Men who would kill for him. Even an officer they admired.
‘You’re a good man, H.’ Stumps shrugged, trying to shake off the truth of our primitive instincts.
‘I’m a realistic one,’ the centurion snapped. ‘Statius isn’t coming back, and if he was a coward, then fuck him. But this is the legion, boys; we kill who we’re told to, not who we want to.’
He was right, of course. Kill a thousand and you would be a hero, but cut the wrong throat and you would be condemned a murderer.
‘I can’t be with you lot after this.’ H shook his head, touching his fresh bandages. ‘I’m in no shape to fight anyway. I can’t promise I can keep you together – you and what’s left of the century will probably get split up to boost the others.’
‘You’re not a bad soldier for doing this, H,’ I offered, seeing that he was coming to his conclusion, and one that sat badly with him.
A ghost of the man’s former smile crept on to his weathered lips. ‘Good or bad doesn’t matter on the frontier, Felix. Are you alive, or dead? That’s all that counts.’
Those words were true, and Statius was now amongst the fallen. With tight faces and nervous movements, we set about ensuring that his end would be attributed to others.
‘Here.’ Titus returned from a storeroom, a saw and an axe in his hands. ‘Stumps, take Micon and watch the front.’
H grimaced, taking in the tools in the big man’s hands. ‘Time for me to go.’
Titus shook his head. ‘You stay until it’s over.’ What did rank matter when murder was concerned?
‘I can’t be a part of this,’ the centurion asserted. ‘There has to be a line somewhere.’
Titus shrugged. ‘Turn your back, but you don’t leave my sight until this is over. Afterwards, you’ll never have to see me again.’
H hesitated for a moment. Then he took a wineskin and walked away, sinking on to his heels when he was clear of the blood that had run from Statius’s body. It was as well for his own safety that he stayed. I knew from experience that Titus was not opposed to killing officers, and Brando was one of his wards, now – the Batavian’s kinship to myself and Stumps had seen to that.
The former auxiliary stepped forwards now, and held out his hand to Titus. ‘Pass me the axe.’ Then, blade in hand, he straddled the body of the man that he’d killed. ‘You said Folcher died for nothing,’ he snarled at the corpse. ‘Well, what did you die for, you cunt?’
Titus looked at me. ‘Are you ready to do this?’
‘What choice do we have?’ I asked him.
There was none, of course. To protect the life of one comrade, we would have to butcher the remains of another.
Titus knew that truth. His eyes were as grim as his words.
‘Start cutting.’
Part Three
46
There are a lot of ways that a soldier can die, and death at the hands of a comrade is not an uncommon one. In fact, when the legions require the most malevolent form of discipline, army commanders can enact the punishment of decimation, where lots are drawn between men of a section and a single man is then condemned to be beaten to death at the hands of the men he called brothers. Funny, how an enlightened civilization keeps its soldiers in check.
Murder was a staple, too. Sometimes pre-meditated, but more often as a result of a drunken brawl or a bull-headed grievance. Fall the wrong way, hit your head in the wrong place, and a man’s lights could go out, never to be relit.
Then there were the accidents. During times of peace – or at least, when not prosecuting campaigns – the army was the Empire’s corps of engineers, and building bridges and aqueducts carried with it the inherent risk of injury. A dropped stone from above or a wobbly piece of scaffold could see a soldier dead or, worse, crippled. Reduced to be a beggar in the streets, living amongst the filth and surviving on scraps.
Of course, soldiers were not immune to the plagues and diseases that were a constant of every civilization. Even senators had to fear the unseen killers, and for the men of the legions, often travelling into new climes, death was more likely to come from a sweated fever than an enemy spear. The discipline of the legions ensured that its men did not live in filth and squalor, but even so, a tightly packed mass of men often seemed too tempting for the gods, or whatever force, to pass by. Entire legions could be reduced without a blade being drawn. Even the baths, a benchmark of Roman enlightenment, were an invitation to death for a man with an open wound.
Boredom could be fatal. Many soldiers were young men, and young men do stupid things. In Pannonia, I recalled watching a soldier who had been challenged by his friends to leap from one rooftop to another. He failed miserably, his life ending as a heap of fractured bone and skull.
Thinking was no good for a soldier’s health, and was to be discouraged. Think too much about your place in the army, and the army’s place in the world, and you might well become a deserter, and deserters died painful deaths. Think about what you had done in the name of glory and perhaps, as I had done, you would consider taking your own life. Then there were men like Statius. He had been stupid enough to give voice to his thoughts, and his dismissal of purpose in Folcher’s death had been enough to bring about his own end.
I thought a lot about that murder during the weeks that followed. The way the saw had ground against Statius’s bones. The way that his blood had soaked the sacks into which we’d shoved his dismembered body. The pant of the hungry dogs that had followed us through the darkest parts of the fort, and the way that they had pulled an arm free from the sacking before we had a chance to run breathlessly clear.
I thought a lot about the murder, and the butchery, but it wasn’t with guilt or shame that I looked back on it – it was with anger. Anger at myself that I should have ever allowed the killing to take place. Anger at myself that I had not dealt with Statius’s cowardice in my own way.