‘Of course I fucking don’t. And you know nothing about it, so hold your tongue now. We came here to remember friends,’ I warned.
Statius shook his head. ‘Bollocks.’
Titus saw me rise, but held out a hand – he wanted me to let the man speak.
‘You came here to forget,’ Statius insisted. ‘To drink, and forget. You all know it’s a fucking sham. Glory is just something they invented to suck us in. If it were true, then why would they need to enlist us for twenty years and more? Who’d want to leave if it was like they said it was?’
No one answered. I could see on the faces of my friends that they hated Statius for his words, but that hate was born from the realization that, in some aspects at least, he was right.
‘Are you honestly telling me you’re all right with all of this?’ the man pressed on. ‘Do you not see how fucking ridiculous it is?’
Titus then stepped in, placing his cup on the table, his words measured. ‘Of course we do. But the world is a hard place. Open your head a bit, and you won’t see the army as a prison. You’ll see opportunity.’
‘Easy for you to say, when you’re running the black market,’ Statius sneered.
Titus was unblinking as he delivered his calm threat. ‘You’ve obviously got eyes and ears, and some brains between them. Learn how to keep them all where they should be.’
‘And there’s more to this than money and lands, Statius,’ Brando put in diplomatically. ‘There is something bigger than us all here. We are small parts of greatness. We are parts of Rome.’
‘What do you know about Rome, Brando?’ Statius asked, swirling the red liquid about his cup. ‘I’ll tell you about Rome. Swarms of mosquitos so thick you can walk on them. Streets running with piss and shit. Every month there’s some new fucking disease that’s filling holes in the dirt and taking your family. Rome’s a curse,’ he finished with a cautious eye towards his centurion.
H shrugged. ‘There’s no rank here,’ he said, his tone suggesting that his mind was aligned at least in part with that of his bitter subordinate.
‘You’re wrong, Statius,’ Brando countered, shaking his head. ‘Rome is no curse. The Empire is a cure. My father. My grandfather. They lived in chaos before Batavia was taken into the Empire. The system is flawed, I’ll give you that, but it is a system. It brings law and order. On the frontier, of course, life is hard, but our sacrifice as soldiers means better lives for others.’ There was real passion in the Batavian’s voice. ‘That is why I would give my life for Rome. And that is why Folcher gave his.’
‘Then you’re a fucking idiot,’ Statius mumbled, and I saw Brando’s nostrils flare like an enraged bull’s, his muscles bunching. Perhaps, if Statius had held his next thought within himself, then the bigger man would have let the insult pass.
But he could not, and the fateful sneer fell from his lips.
‘Open your eyes, Brando,’ he hissed. ‘Folcher died for nothing.’
Not even Titus had the strength and speed to stop the Batavian. Brando crossed the table like a leopard, taking Statius down in a flurry of thrashing arms and legs. He was pulled away within seconds, but those short moments were enough – blood pooled on the floor.
‘Fuck, Brando!’ Stumps shouted. ‘What have you done?’
I looked down at Statius. He lay frozen on the floor, blood on his lips, dark eyes fixed and rigid.
‘Brando…’ H whispered, his shocked gaze on the dagger that had been driven deep into the Roman’s heart.
Statius was dead.
45
Titus was the first to recover his senses, and to assess the danger of the situation that had now presented itself on his doorstep.
I wondered what was running through the big man’s mind. The death of Statius was a murder, nothing less, and Titus was surely weighing up the chances of avoiding attention being brought to his enterprises through a cover-up. Inevitably, that brought his eyes to Centurion H, the one man who had not been through it with us in the forest – Brando was one of us through companionship in enslavement. H was the weak link. A good man, but an outsider. An unknown quantity. A danger to our tribe.
I saw Titus’s hand creep towards the dagger at his belt.
‘How do you want this to play out?’ he coolly asked the officer.
Moments ago, H had been drunk. Now, with the body of one of his soldiers at his feet, the man was as sober as rock. ‘I join him if I try and report this, don’t I?’ he answered pragmatically, knowing what was on Titus’s mind. ‘Gods, Brando, did you have to kill him?’
The Batavian grimaced. There was no trace of remorse on his face, or in his words. ‘You heard what he said about Folcher. Fuck him. If he was still breathing, I’d cut open his throat.’
‘I’ll just tell that to Malchus and the prefect, shall I?’ H shook his head. ‘You know what they’ll do to you for this?’
Brando knew. ‘I’m not afraid to die.’
‘No one’s dying,’ Titus cut in.
‘No one else, anyway.’ Stumps tutted, looking at the leaking corpse. ‘Fuck him, anyway. He was a piece of shit.’
‘This is the legions, Stumps,’ H said with a heat that was at odds with his usual passivity. ‘Killing someone because they are a piece of shit is a little outside of fucking regulations!’
‘So what do you want to do?’ Stumps countered. ‘Lose Brando, too? You want to see him lose his head?’
‘Of course I don’t.’ H cursed, knowing that the penalty for the murder would be death, and nothing less. ‘And even if I did want that, I’m not stupid enough to think I’d be leaving here alive.’
Silence prevailed over the scene. It told H that his dark prediction was accurate.
‘There’s no need for that,’ Titus eventually said. ‘So long as we use some common sense.’
‘Common sense being that we forget we were ever here?’ H guessed. ‘That’s great, Titus, but there’s this little problem lying at our fucking feet.’
‘Easy enough to make him disappear,’ Stumps piped up.
‘Do you have any idea how a legion runs?’ H chided the veteran. ‘It’s ledgers and accounts, Stumps. He can’t just “disappear”.’
I had listened to the conversation up until now with near disinterest. Blood and death were the constant of my life, and the brutal truth was that I had not liked Statius, and my only regret for the end of his life was that it endangered a man that I cared about – a brave man, who did not deserve to lose his head for silencing the insults of a coward.
‘Statius was a shit.’ I spoke up, surprising the others. ‘And he was a coward. Look at the wound on his arm, H.’
After a moment’s hesitation, H began to unwrap the bandages on the body’s arm. Statius’s limbs were limp. It would be some time until his body hardened.
‘Look at that cut,’ I told my centurion. ‘That’s from a dagger. You can see how he would have drawn the blade across. He did it himself to get out of the fighting.’
‘He said it was a Syrian arrow.’ For the first time, H looked at the body with a trace of contempt.
‘I knew he was a fucking coward.’ Stumps spat, his spittle landing at the body’s feet.
Titus met my eye, then. He knew that I’d brought up the self-inflicted wound for more reason than to heap shame on to a cooling corpse.