‘Felix,’ a voice called from behind me.
Livius, the section commander to whom I was now accountable. Titus had been incorporated into our section too, which now numbered nine men. I worried that this anomaly was the reason that he approached me now, about to break the news that our circle would be split up, and one of us moved on to a section of strangers.
I should have prepared myself for worse.
‘We’ve just been moved up to immediate notice to move. Prefect’s orders,’ the soldier told me.
His youthful face was excited at the prospect of our attempted escape. My own had turned to stone.
I knew what that notice would mean.
‘No one can leave the barracks.’
I re-entered the room a different man than I had left it. My comrades saw as much in the defeated slope of my shoulders.
They grimaced in sympathy for me when I told them why.
‘Albus wants us all in armour, helmets on, ready to go.’
Stumps spat at the order. ‘Takes all day to put a helmet on now, does it? How big’s his fucking head? We can be good to go in no time. We’re all packed. Not like we turned up with a villa’s worth of furniture, is it?’
‘I’m just telling you what he said, Stumps.’ I spoke tonelessly, suddenly drained by the knowledge that I was kept from Linza, with her so close.
‘Yeah, sorry,’ Stumps apologized, sensing my disappointment. ‘You’ll see her when we get to the Rhine, mate,’ he offered. ‘We may get stood back down anyway. You know how these things go.’
But the strong winds flirting with the barrack block told me otherwise. Soon rain was lashing against the walls.
‘It’s got legs,’ Titus opined, having opened the doorway to look at the sky.
Brando had joined him. A native of the lands, he knew the German seasons better than any of us. ‘We’ll go tonight.’
But darkness was a long time away. To leave in daylight would be suicide, offering the German scouts ample time to ride ahead and warn their army, and so the order to remain in barracks chafed at me like a rope around my neck.
‘I’m going to the latrines,’ I told my comrades.
‘I’ll keep you company,’ Titus offered. ‘Sound of this rain has me pissing like a horse.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Stumps smirked. ‘Develop some new friendship whilst you were away, did you, boys? Well, enjoy,’ he joked, hoping to lift my mood.
It didn’t work.
I stepped outdoors, the rain whipping across my face. Its touch was cold, and violent. I savoured it.
‘You don’t need to keep an eye on me,’ I told Titus as we walked to the latrines.
‘It’s not that.’ He shook his head, surprising me by coming to a stop. We were short of the latrines, fully exposed to the elements.
‘Not a good place to piss?’ I spoke up, wondering at what was in the man’s mind.
‘I don’t like the odds on this one,’ Titus confided in me with a look towards the shrouded skies. ‘There’re still chests full of coin in the forests, Felix. You can take the chance to get them if you make it out.’
A legion’s pay chests. A fortune.
As the approaching storm assaulted me, I thought of what those coins could buy: a ship; a home; a new beginning.
‘Where?’ I asked my friend. I had been born with a sense of direction and distance, and my time in the legions and escape from that service had only honed the talent. I trusted in my ability to find what Titus was offering.
‘You sure you don’t want to write it down?’
‘I’ll remember.’
And so, closing in so that his words would not be lost to the wind, Titus told me where I could find a fortune. When he was finished, I repeated the directions back to him.
‘It’s a needle in a haystack,’ Titus acknowledged. ‘But at least we know the haystack.’
We said nothing as we went to piss in the latrines, our thoughts caught up on that day when three eagles had tumbled, and Titus had walked into the forest alone, leaving his comrades behind him. It had been a day of misery, and bloodshed.
Tonight would be no different.
65
Wind carried rain below the brim of my helmet and into my eyes. It forced it into every crack of my armour. Every space between clothing and flesh. The rain felt all the harder for its coldness, the fat drops like the pebbles I had thrown at Marcus as a child, back when we had fought our first war as toddlers on the beach.
Marcus. I would see him soon. The certainty of it gnawed at my conscience like a rabid wolf. It was not a reunion I was ready to embrace.
I was not the only man to stand miserable in the pelting rain. We had formed as a century at the excited calls of the company runner. His cries of ‘Prepare to move!’ had sent us reaching for shields and weapons. Men had streamed from the barrack rooms to form up before the block, some bolting quickly to empty bladders before the formation was fully formed.
‘It’s still fucking daylight,’ Stumps had scowled.
By that light I saw the faces of the men about me scratched red by the cold. We stood impotent, awaiting an order to move and lurch forwards towards the gate. All that we knew was that we were leaving. The details were in the minds of our commanders. There was nothing for the foot soldier to do but stamp his sandals, blow air on to his hands and think.
It was the final action that caused me the most hardship. I had learned to live with the brutal conditions of the continent, and I fancied that not even a German winter could match those I had endured fighting on Pannonian mountainsides. I could master shaking limbs, quivering jaw and chattering teeth, but what I could not master was the chariot race of thoughts that wheeled around my skull as if it were the Circus Maximus: an endless loop of reproach and regret.
‘Tell me a story,’ I told Stumps, desperate for distraction.
He looked at me with surprise. I’d never asked for such a thing before. ‘I’ll tell you a story. It’s about a soldier who stands shivering his balls off in the cunting rain whilst his dickheaded officers sit in their quarters drinking wine and dreaming up new ways to fuck us over.’
‘Cheer up, Stumps. We’ll be at the Rhine in two days,’ Livius tried, the youthful section commander yet to realize that the time to worry about a soldier like Stumps was when he was not complaining.
‘Yeah, I can just see us doing that,’ Stumps scowled. ‘I mean we’ve had great preparation for it, haven’t we? Standing on a wall. And then there’re the civvies. I’m sure they’re all great fucking athletes. Olympians. We’ll probably reach the Rhine by morning.’ Sarcasm dripped from him with the rain.
‘Don’t you want to get home?’ Titus tried instead, his words as hard and as flat as hammered steel.
‘Course I do,’ Stumps allowed.
‘Then save your energy for the road.’ His friend was firm but gentle.
‘Here comes Albus,’ Brando noted, and I saw the curdled face of our centurion appear before the ranks.
‘Stand down. Back to your rooms,’ he ordered.
A chorus of groans and questions was launched like arrows in return, demanding why we had been kept shivering in the elements.
‘I don’t fucking know!’ Albus answered. ‘We stay on immediate notice. Fall out.’
Entering the room, Stumps made straight for the stove. Its embers were still glowing, and he hastily set about reviving them.
‘What the fuck was that about?’ he grumbled. ‘“Oh, go on lads”,’ he mimicked. ‘“Go stand out in the fucking rain. Not like you’ve got anything better to do!”’