‘You coming with me?’ he grunted, desperate to be on his way.
I shook my head, hit suddenly by a pang of guilt and embarrassment, for I knew there was a place where I could seek out my own comfort, and a window to my past.
And so I went in search of her.
‘That’s a different one.’ Linza spoke quietly, her eyes on the floor as a shrill wail penetrated the October morning. ‘It sounds like a boy.’
I tried to swallow the biscuit that was now like lead in my mouth, thinking about the young German I had captured in the night, and how I had herded him towards his dreadful fate. Would it have made any difference if I let him run? Would sparing his life have cost the lives of my friends? Doubtful.
But then I thought of Arminius. How I had saved his life on the parade square when his uncle had tried to warn Varus of the prince’s treachery. How I had spared it when I stepped from the forest, a spear in my hand and the clear target of Arminius ahead of me. I had thrown myself into harm’s way to save lives I thought worthy before, and where had it led? Three legions rotted in the forest because of my sensibility. Suddenly, the rush of guilt and nausea slammed into me like a chariot. The half-chewed biscuit stuck in my throat as I choked.
‘Are you all right?’ Linza asked me as the crumbs fell on to the floor of the empty barrack block.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied, like every other soul within the fort.
‘You turned white.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Here, take some water.’
‘I said I’m fine,’ I spat, angry and disgusted at my actions that had led to this misery, then instantly nervous that my words would be seen by Linza as an attack on her.
I needn’t have worried.
‘Just don’t waste your food,’ the Batavian girl warned me, pushing her blond hair back over her shoulders. ‘German winters are long. You look like a skeleton. You should eat.’
‘Now the fort commander’s ordered half-rations I don’t think anyone’s getting any fatter.’
Linza shrugged and pulled a face. ‘There’s always someone who gets fat, even when everyone else starves. That’s just the way the world is,’ she answered pragmatically. ‘My father said so. He travelled a lot.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He was a sailor. I think he died at sea.’ She shrugged again. ‘Maybe. Or maybe he found a new family.’
Or maybe he was butchered on a foreign shore. Maybe he was taken into slavery, and now pulled an oar as a whip scarred his back. The world was a brutal place, and not many on the fringes of Empire were destined for a peaceful life.
‘My father and now my husband. Both lost.’ Linza’s eyes wandered over the civilians and soldiers who passed us by. ‘They could both be alive. They could both be dead. I will never know.’
‘It’s not too late for your husband,’ I tried. ‘We made it out.’
‘When the army was here, at the fort. How many days since then? Where are they now?’ she asked dispassionately. ‘No. Better he is dead in the forest. I say that because I love him.’
We lapsed into silence. Linza wiped at an eye.
‘It’s all right if you want to cry,’ I managed feebly.
She snorted. ‘I am tired of crying. I want to live or to die.’
‘We are alive.’ I said, yet I was unsure if I believed the words myself.
She turned and smiled at me as another animal scream rolled towards the sky, the prisoner’s agony making her point for her: this was not life. It was clinging to existence, with the hope that life could one day grow again from the ashes of suffering.
‘Tell me something funny.’ She spoke quickly, taking me off guard.
‘Something funny?’
‘A joke. A story. Make me laugh.’
‘I…’
‘No one is this serious all their life, Felix. Tell me something funny,’ she challenged me.
And so I closed my eyes. I tried to forget the screams. I tried to remember the time when I was always smiling. Always laughing.
‘My father,’ I told her, remembering. ‘He liked to drink, but he could never remember where the toilet was when he’d gone to bed. One night I heard a crash, and I ran to my parents’ bedroom. I thought maybe it was a robbery, and I had my dagger in my hand. I was scared. My heart was racing. But when I burst through the door, I found my father on the floor, tangled within a table. He’d tried to piss through the window, but the table had collapsed underneath him. There was piss everywhere.’
Linza’s smile was growing. ‘Your mother must have been so angry.’
‘She was used to it.’ I smiled myself, the fondness of the memory warming me. ‘She wouldn’t get up to help him. “I told you you were getting too fat for that,” she was moaning as he tried to untangle himself.’
Linza’s smile was bright now. My own stretched the cracked skin of my cheeks. ‘That’s funny,’ she snorted. ‘Do you miss your father?’
‘No,’ I answered quickly, the smile gone in an instant, that bright memory eclipsed by the clouds of others – memories that were dark, savage and brutal. ‘I have to go.’
‘Felix…’ she tried.
But it was too late. She had reminded me of that stolen life, and I left her in my wake. Her smile behind me. I marched in search of the one constant of my adopted life. The one thing that had distracted me, as a soldier, from the memories I had left behind.
I sought out pain.
I sought out the screams.
32
Familiar as I was with the unchanging layout of a Roman encampment, I knew that the screams were guiding me towards the blacksmiths. The rain of the past night had gone, but the ground was still slippery beneath my feet, the air cracked with cold and the promise of the coming winter.
They would be lean months. No one – save Arminius – had foreseen the massacre of three legions, and the forts on the Lippe had been provisioned with rations based on the idea that there would be trade with the locals, and resupply from the legion’s stone-walled bases on the Rhine. The fort’s position on the river had been chosen to allow barges to ferry in supplies, but the Germans would have blocked the channel up river. Any attempt to clear it would be met with battle, and the Rhine garrisons had shown no inclination to pursue such an outcome. There was not a single enemy warrior within sight of the walls, but the fort was cut off and besieged as well as if the German tribes swarmed against our gates.
The screams were growing louder as I closed in on their source. Between the cries, I could now make out the bellow of angry interrogation. I watched as two young children crept forwards, building up their courage to witness the cause of such misery. Something in their manner made me think back to a time when it was I and Marcus who prowled the streets together like feral cats. Boys are the same the world over, and war and death hold an irresistible attraction for us. Only the most brave, stupid or desperate to prove their worth would actually go on to become an army’s fighters and killers – at least by choice – but death itself was an inescapable part of life. Just by reaching these young years, the children had done well. How many brothers and sisters had their parents wailed for? How many times had they heard screams of anguish that surpassed even the prisoner’s cries of pain? Some say that one can become inoculated to death and misery, and that once you have seen so much, it affects you no more. That has not been my own experience. True, a mind can become numb in order to survive, but the pain is always there, ready to rear its head in an angry second. We live amongst death, and we fear it more than anything else. If it held no terror for us, then why would men desert the legions on eve of battle? Why would they shit themselves at the thought of it? Why would mothers tear and rend their own skin through grief at the loss of a child they had never known until the same day of its birth, and death? Accustomed is not accepted. Every death, every loss, shapes a man and his mind. Some become wrecks, others become monsters, but none come away from death’s touch unchanged.