I walked. I saw the shattered skulls of children. The smashed ribs of men. I saw piles. I saw patterns.
I saw death.
I walked for hours. Maybe days. I walked from the field of bones to a mountain. I climbed its steep trails. Scrambled up its slopes. At its summit I expected to find clarity. Reason.
Instead I found Priscus.
He was smiling. I couldn’t understand why, or how. There was a gaping hole in his chest. ‘Hello, friend.’
‘Priscus?’ That smile. ‘Where are we?’ So patient and paternal.
So calm.
I wanted to punch him. ‘Where are we?’
My friend looked at me as though I were simple. ‘We’re dead.’ He laughed. ‘We’re dead, Corvus.’
I shook my head. If this was the afterlife, then why was I talking to him? Why not her? ‘I’m looking for—’
‘Beatha? You won’t find her here.’
I took a sharp step backwards. How did he know about her? How the fuck did he know her name? I’d never spoken of her to my comrades.
My old friend saw my ill-ease. Put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Do you trust me?’
‘Of course…’
‘Then trust me. She’s not here.’
I bit back my angry words. Instead I looked down the mountainside at the field of bones. ‘Where’s Brutus?’
‘Brutus?’
My patience snapped. ‘Brutus, you fucking idiot! Brutus! Where is he?’
A shrug. ‘Not here.’
I looked for something that I could kick instead of my comrade, but the mountain was bare. ‘So who is dead?’ I demanded. ‘Tell me that!’
A smile. ‘I am.’
I snorted at my friend’s tolerance. ‘You and me then, is it, Priscus? You and me and a field of bones.’
Priscus shook his head. ‘Not you, comrade,’ he said. ‘Not now.’
Then the old soldier smiled goodbye, and closed his eyes.
I woke to the stink of blood and wounds. I heard moans. I heard prayers.
I opened my eyes.
A hospital.
I was lying on the floor. I looked to my left. The soldier was so close to me that I could see the pores of his grey skin. Hear the shallow rasp of his breath. His eyes were closed. He looked like he was going to die. I turned to my right. This one already had.
Shit. I’d been put in with the ‘expectant’. Those who had fallen foul of triage.
Those who weren’t going to live.
The legion had only a small number of surgeons, and before blacking out, I had been standing on a field strewn with wounded. At some point the saw-men would be busy taking limbs, but first they would patch up the soldiers that could get back into the fight – there was a war to win after all, and the ceiling above me was evidence that I had survived one of the first battles of it.
For now, at least. I looked back to my left. Grey-skin’s raspy breaths had stopped. I tried to speak. I tried to stand. But the pain in my head told me that I should lie down. Lie down, be still, and wait for my own turn to die.
And so that’s what I did.
A soldier needs more than friends. More than comrades.
He needs brothers.
It was my brothers who found me on the floor, packed amongst the dead and those soon to join them. It was my brothers who took me from the legion’s hospital ‘for burial’, and instead carried me into the town beside our fort, and put me on to the table of a civilian doctor.
‘How much can you pay?’ I was told the local man had asked.
‘What are your children’s lives worth?’ Varo had growled back.
I wasn’t the only one that they’d taken there; Brutus lay on a bed beside me, his leg thick with bandages, eyes heavy with sorrow. I swallowed back my fear.
His skin had the same grey complexion as the man who’d expired beside me on the hospital floor. ‘I’m getting better at dying,’ Brutus croaked.
The pain in my head was receding. The pain in my heart was growing. I tried to swing my legs from my bed so that I could stand by my comrade’s side. Instead, weak as a newborn foal, I collapsed heavily on to the floor, taking a jug of water with me. ‘Shit!’
I heard a door opening. Rough hands gripped me by the shoulders and legs, placing me on the edge of the bed like a child.
‘You’re alive,’ I said when I saw their faces.
Varo and Octavius. ‘We’re alive,’ said the big man.
‘But not Priscus…’
They looked solemn. Varo spoke. ‘Not Priscus.’ He didn’t give voice to the other truth in the room – that Brutus seemed likely to join him soon.
Octavius looked uncomfortable, and ran a hand over his head. I noticed the fresh scars where blades had nipped his flesh. Then he said what all soldiers say when they need to find their courage: ‘I’ll go get us something to drink.’
‘What happened?’ I asked Varo.
He told me. He told me of how he had found me amongst the hundreds of casualties. He told me about his threats. How he had held one of the doctor’s children hostage until he had cleaned and sewn the deep wound on Brutus’s thigh. ‘There wasn’t much he could do for you,’ Varo explained. ‘You’ve just been flat out. He said you’d either wake up, or you wouldn’t. Even if you did, he said you’d probably be an idiot. More of one, anyway. How’s your head?’
It hurt, but I could live with hurt, rather than singing pain. ‘Better.’
‘You must have got knocked out,’ Varo guessed. ‘A swinging arm. Flat of a blade. Who knows? I lost sight of you in the fighting, and the stretcher parties put you in with the worst cases. Those that didn’t die on the field.’
I had a question. ‘Why aren’t we all dead?’
It was Brutus who answered me. His smile was a bright line in his ashen face. ‘Tiberius came.’
Or more accurately, Varo explained, Tiberius and his army had come close enough so that the rebels knew their entry to Italy would be blocked, and that by continuing to engage our force they risked a bigger army falling on their rear. Instead they had chosen flight, and retreated back through the same plain where we had first faced them.
‘We did enough,’ Varo said proudly. ‘We did enough to hold them, and keep them from Italy.’
But at what cost?
My friend looked at the floor. Of the two and a half thousand men who had taken the field in the plain, little over twelve hundred remained alive, and of them, hundreds were injured. He went on to list the men known to us personally who had perished, most revered amongst them Priscus and Centurion Justus. ‘I wish he’d hurry up with that fucking wine,’ Varo simmered.
Octavius arrived moments later. Varo grabbed a cup and drank as though he’d just wandered out of the desert.
‘Here,’ Octavius said to me, passing me my own. I motioned that he should give it to Brutus.
‘You first,’ the old soldier insisted. ‘You saved my life, Corvus. Again.’
I needed that drink, then. Like Varo, I threw it back in one. It was clear from his skin that if I had saved Brutus, then it was only for a matter of days. ‘How long since the battle?’
‘Two days,’ Octavius said. ‘You were out a long time. Do you even remember what happened?’
‘You saved my life,’ Brutus said sharply. ‘And you saved the eagle!’
I’d forgotten about that fucking stick.
I snorted. I had never been one for the customs of the legion – save for the tradition of violence – and they knew as much. ‘I needed something to brace myself,’ I told them honestly.
Varo believed me and laughed, but Brutus shook his head.
‘You saved the eagle.’