I woke. I cried for her.
Brando leaped to me and took hold of my shoulders. My chest began to heave as painfully as if I’d been kicked by a horse. My eyes were wild.
‘Felix!’ Brando said urgently. ‘Felix!’ he pressed, trying to pull me back into his world.
I heard the words, conscious now, but all I could think of was her.
‘Who was she?’ Stumps asked me.
We were atop the wall, yet another watch that stretched the day’s hours into an endless tedium. The fields ahead of us were empty, the only movement the birds that sought out scraps of tribesman in the abandoned trenches.
No answer was forthcoming, so my friend shrugged, his eyes on the crows. ‘It could be worse, I suppose.’
Still I said nothing. My own eyes were fixed on the cold horizon, where the endless forests appeared like spilled ink.
‘Titus says you’ve sorted it for me to go and work with him in the quartermaster’s?’ the veteran tried instead.
I gave a shallow nod.
‘I appreciate that, Felix, but I can still fight. We all have bad nights.’
I opened my mouth to speak, but the words fell away. Finally: ‘I’m so fucking tired of this,’ I confessed. ‘We can’t ever get away from it, can we? You close your eyes, pretend it doesn’t happen, and then it finds you in your dreams.’
‘We can drink?’ my friend offered helpfully. ‘Seems to be working all right for me,’ he bluffed.
‘Until it runs out.’ I shook my head. ‘What life is that, Stumps? Crawling around pissed like the village idiot. Is it what you pictured when you signed up to soldier?’
His look told me that it wasn’t. ‘What did you picture?’
‘I didn’t.’ It was the truth. ‘I didn’t know what I was joining, just what I was leaving.’
‘Her?’ he tried at last.
I didn’t answer.
We watched the feeding crows.
Days passed with guard duties and half-empty stomachs. Moods grew as dark as the brooding German skies. There was an unseen enemy beyond the horizon, but the soldier’s concern now was the battles he fought against appetite and boredom.
‘This is shit,’ Stumps grumbled after yet another stint on the walls. The previous day, Balbus had been sent to the surgeon when a cut on his hand had turned septic. Unable to hold a javelin, he was currently relieved of all but light duties, and so Stumps’s transfer to Titus had been cut temporarily short.
‘Better than being in the forest,’ Folcher said, trying to lighten the mood.
‘Forest or fort.’ Stumps shrugged, climbing for his bunk. ‘All the fucking same. People out to do us in, no pubs and no women.’
‘There’re women here,’ the Batavian offered.
‘You seen a decent one? They only managed to sneak out of the forest because they looked like boar.’
‘The one that Felix talks to is nice.’ Folcher smiled. ‘The Batavian,’ he explained, wondering at my sudden unease.
‘I like her company,’ I explained to Stumps’s sly look.
‘The company of her tits in your face,’ he leered. ‘Good for you, Felix. At least someone’s getting some fanny.’
‘Not like that,’ I answered, pulling off my sandals. ‘I haven’t even seen her for days.’
‘Probably found some new cock, then,’ my friend teased me, enjoying my discomfort. ‘Maybe young Micon here? You look like a fine swordsman.’
The boy soldier, an admitted virgin, blushed at the attention.
Brando smirked. ‘There’re whores in the fort.’
‘That’s why you have stopped fucking your mattress?’ Folcher laughed.
‘So it’s mattresses as well as goats for you lads, is it?’ Stumps grinned, leaning over the edge of his bunk. ‘I’ll keep that in mind when I retire and open my brothel.’
‘You’d retire in Germany?’ Dog put in.
Stumps recoiled in horror. ‘Fuck me, Dog, we’re supposed to be on half-rations. How come it smells like you’ve eaten a sack of onions? And no. The only way I’m staying in this shithole is if some goat-shagger nails my head on to a tree.’
‘They do that.’ Micon spoke up without emotion.
‘They do, my friend,’ Stumps granted. ‘Civilization for me. Back to Italy. No more forests. No more snow.’
‘I’ll come and visit.’ Folcher laughed again, enjoying the fantasy. ‘I will show my children Rome.’
‘Why not?’ Stumps rolled on to his back. ‘A nice picnic whilst we watch a few executions in the arena. A proper Roman family day out.’
‘Felix,’ a voice called from the barrack room’s doorway. It belonged to a young soldier. Dressed in helmet and mail, he was acting as the company runner. ‘Centurion H wants all section commanders to his quarters for briefing.’
I looked down at the pair of sandals I had unstrapped from my feet. Sleep would have to wait.
Stumps snorted. ‘Privileges of rank. Ask him if I can go back to Titus.’
‘Missing life in the stores?’ Brando asked.
‘Those blankets won’t stack themselves,’ Stumps answered as I left the room and made my way to the centurion’s accommodation.
‘Get comfortable, lads,’ our centurion offered to the small assembly of section commanders. His tone was reserved; H was usually a genial soul, and I wondered at the cause of his change in humour. Whatever the reason, I doubted that it would be good.
‘Right, lads. General situation is still the same. Only sighting we’ve had of the enemy is a few mounted scouts, and we expect they’re keeping eyes on us constantly from Bald Crest Hill on the northern flank. Visible fires at night seem to confirm they’re in that area, but not in any force that we need to worry about.’
‘Any news from our own scouts?’ a section commander asked, referring to the two men who had left the camp with Malchus a week before, and who had been sent onwards to the Rhine in an attempt to rouse the legions there into effecting our rescue.
‘You’ll know if there is,’ H shrugged. ‘It’ll be like a triumphal march by the time everyone comes out to hear what they’ve got to say. But no, I’m afraid. The situation’s the same, boys. Germans out there. Us in here.
‘Now look,’ he went on, his brow creasing. ‘It should be that, with us in here, and them out there, nobody in this fort is dying. Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case. One of the First Century lads got stabbed by a mate of his last night, and bled to death in the barrack room. He died because he was complaining about someone’s fucking snoring – don’t laugh, you fuckers – and we cannot afford to be losing blokes for that kind of bollocks.’
‘Noted, boss.’ One of the veterans smiled. ‘Beatings only for snoring.’
‘I’m fucking serious,’ H warned, trying to suppress his own dark grin. ‘I don’t want to lose men to the Germans. I sure as fuck do not want to be losing men over shit like that.’
‘First Century lads have always been nuts,’ the veteran offered, and H shrugged in agreement.
‘Even so. Keep a close eye on your boys. Keep the discipline. I’m not one for bullshit, you know that, but I’m going to start doing snap inspections of the block and the lads’ kit. Extra duties for anyone who’s not up to standard. Section commanders included,’ he added with a smile.
After a few dramatic groans from the veterans, the men were dismissed. I hung back.
‘He can go back to the QM’s once you get Balbus back from the hospital,’ H told me in answer to my question on Stumps’s transfer. ‘Could be a few days though. His finger looked bloody horrible when I went to see him.’
It did not surprise me that H would visit one of his men in the fort’s hospital, even for an innocuous injury. His leadership pushed me to chastise myself for not calling in on Balbus myself that day.