Hunting the Eagles

Chapter XXIV

The weather had been good when Tullus had left the army’s camp with Germanicus and a strong force of legionaries and cavalry, their destination the site of Arminius’ ambush, but it had changed. Grey-black clouds had appeared overhead as if from nowhere. They promised rain and, like as not, thunder and lightning too. The worsening conditions dredged up vivid, horrifying memories from the depths of his mind. It was hard not to feel that the gods were looking on, as they had been during those terrible days. The gods watched then and did nothing while we fought for our lives, Tullus thought with ever-fresh bitterness. They watched as almost everyone died.

A cough brought him back to the real world, and he glanced over his shoulder. One of Germanicus’ staff officers – not the man who’d taken him to the audience – was hovering, and glaring. ‘The imperial governor is waiting!’

Tullus’ eyes roved past the officer to Germanicus, who seemed expectant, but not impatient. Caecina was there; so too were Stertinius, Tubero and almost every legate and tribune in the army. Everyone who was anyone wanted to be among those first to set their eyes on the battlefield. Apart from Germanicus, Tullus couldn’t have given a fig for any of them. The men who mattered most were at his back: Fenestela, Piso, Saxa and Metilius. The other survivors from his century in the Eighteenth were present too, which had raised a few eyebrows among Germanicus’ bodyguards. Fuck them, thought Tullus. They haven’t been through the hell that we have. They haven’t had to do the things that we did.

The scouts had ridden the area the previous day, and again at dawn, to ensure there were no enemy tribesmen nearby. Not having been at the ambush almost six years before, the riders had no idea which part of the battlefield it was, but they had reported a heavy density of skeletons from this point onward. Tullus wasn’t sure where they were either, because they had approached from the west, rather than along the track he had taken with Varus and his ill-fated legions.

Tullus studied the terrain again. Off to his left, the tree-covered ground sloped upwards, while on the right, there was less vegetation. There was bound to be bog a little further on, he thought, spying the characteristic yellow flowers of goatweed. The presence of bones proved that they were at the site of Arminius’ ambush. Walking on was the only way to discover more. Grim reality, so often held at bay by dreams of recovering the eagles, sank in. Tullus could almost see the ghosts that surely lived in this place.

‘Are you ready, Tullus?’ It was Germanicus’ voice.

‘Yes, sir.’ He stirred himself, and threw up a silent prayer: I come here to honour my men, and all of my fallen comrades. Grant that we find their remains, and give them the burial that they deserve. ‘If you’ll follow me.’ As Germanicus, followed by Caecina and the rest, moved to join him, Tullus eyed Fenestela and his men. ‘Stay close.’ They gave him grim nods.

Full-hearted, Tullus led the way, with Germanicus by his side. Fenestela and the three others walked to left and right, shields and swords ready. The rest of the party came after, flanked by Germanicus’ bodyguards and Tullus’ veterans from the Eighteenth. Despite the number of men, there was little noise. Muted tramping of hobnailed sandals on the grass and the mud, whispered comments here and there, and the shhhinkk of mail, but nothing more.

They’re all scared too, thought Tullus, blinking away the sweat that had run into his eyes. A momentary break in the clouds sent sunbeams lancing down through the dark green canopy. Motes of dust spun and whirled overhead in the light. Somewhere in the distance, a woodpecker hammered at a tree. The sound was comforting, for the bird was favoured by Mars, but Tullus remained wary. ‘D’you notice how quiet the forest is, sir?’ he said to Germanicus.

Germanicus cocked his head. ‘All I can hear is that woodpecker, and it isn’t close. There should be more birds: singing, flitting about. Maybe deer, or even a boar.’

‘I see no tracks, sir.’

‘The animals shun this place then,’ said Germanicus, frowning.

Tullus was unsurprised. It wouldn’t always have been so. After the battle, clouds of crows and other carrion birds would have lived here, for many days. Wolves would have been drawn to the vast numbers of corpses, and bears too. If wild boar were anything like their domesticated brethren, they would also have partaken of the gory feast. With the bones picked clean, only the ghosts would have remained. Like as not, they still troubled the site, which explained the absence of wildlife. Tullus’ skin crawled, and he picked up his pace, wanting to get the unsettling experience over and done with.

He had been steeling himself against signs of the battle, but it was still shocking when he saw the first bent pilum. There was nothing extraordinary about the weapon – it was like thousands of others Tullus had seen in his career – but it was rusted and misshapen because it had struck a target. And it was here. Grim-faced, he showed it to Germanicus. They both studied the ground at their feet.

‘There’s no sign of the man it might have hit,’ said Germanicus in a quiet tone.

‘The tribesmen would have carried away their injured and dead, sir,’ said Tullus. ‘Just our corpses would have been left – to rot.’

Germanicus’ expression hardened further. ‘Of course.’

Despite the vegetation, the finds came thick and fast after that. There were broken frameae – the lethal spears favoured by German tribesmen – and more javelins than Tullus could count. Scuta, whole, broken, split, all rotting into the ground. Gladii, unsheathed and in their scabbards, had been piled up as if to carry off, but then left. Bronze pots that had been missed by the human scavengers, and now green from exposure, lay here and there as if they had fallen off a trundling smith’s wagon. There were orange-red Samian bowls and plates, cracked and entire, and in tiny pieces. Pickaxes with rusted heads and decaying handles. Cloak brooches. A wine strainer, bent out of shape. A soothsayer’s lituus, minus its shaft. Half a shield cover, the rest of the leather eaten away.

It was the skeletons that were most distressing. Tullus had seen men’s bones many times before – in graves that had had to be moved for whatever reason, and on other old battlefields he’d visited – but he had never seen so many, nor had they been of soldiers known to him. Recognisable as human, the whitened bones were everywhere. In places, the carpet they formed was so thick that it was impossible to walk without treading on them. The skeletons lay on their sides, on their backs. On their fronts. Hunched up into foetal positions, as if trying to escape their attackers.

Some were missing limbs. More horrifying, others had no heads. Those that did now looked like demons, thanks to the helmets and armour they were yet wearing. With clenched jaw, Tullus made himself study their empty eye sockets, grinning mouths and stumps of brown, decayed teeth. These men who had been abandoned by their comrades, left for six years to the mercy of wild beasts, wind, rain and snow, had to be honoured, if only by a nod, or a silent greeting.

Germanicus’ face was harrowed as he strode to and fro, examining different sets of bones and lifting an occasional weapon. ‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked after a time.

‘I’ve seen a shield cover with Seventeenth Legion insignia, sir, but that doesn’t tell me much,’ said Tullus. ‘There are no wagons, and no signs of civilians, so the fighting in this spot must have been on the second day, or after.’

‘Because Varus had you abandon the baggage train, and had the column assemble properly, without civilians?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Tullus could smell the burning olive oil, could hear the camp followers wailing and crying and the wounded soldiers swearing as they’d marched out that morning. ‘We left them to die. There was no other choice. If they had stayed with us, every last one of us would have been slain.’

‘Gods grant that I never have to make such a decision.’ Germanicus’ face was bleak. ‘You must have had to abandon legionaries too.’

‘Aye, sir.’ Tullus’ grief cut him, sharp as a blade. ‘I finished a good number myself, so the tribesmen didn’t capture them.’

‘You’re a fine officer, Tullus. You look after your soldiers.’

Even as Tullus coloured, and heard Fenestela rumble his agreement, he wished again that he had managed to drag more men free of this hellhole. ‘I did what anyone would have, sir.’

‘No.’ Germanicus jerked his head at Caecina, Tubero and the others, who were talking together in twos and threes, and staring at the skeletons with horrified fascination. ‘You did more than any of those could have. Your group was the largest one to escape, by some margin. Be proud of that.’

For the first time, Tullus and Germanicus looked at each other not as ordinary citizen and royal scion, not as centurion and general, but as men and as soldiers – as equals. Something made Tullus glance then at Fenestela, Piso and the others. They were all nodding. Fuck it, Tullus thought with rising pride. Maybe I can be satisfied with what I did. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Show me the rest of the battlefield. We’ll start burying the dead after that.’

‘Aye, sir.’ Grateful that his slain legionaries would rest in peace at last, Tullus set off to the north.

I’m coming to find you, brothers, he thought.

Two long days had passed since Tullus had guided Germanicus on to the battlefield.

His hopes of ever finding his fallen soldiers had faded to almost nothing, but he, Fenestela and his veterans had not stopped searching. Time was running out, however. They could not remain here forever. Already half the army had been set to dig vast mass graves while the remainder stood guard against possible attacks. When the grim task had been completed, Germanicus’ campaign to punish the still-hostile tribes would continue.

Tullus paced to and fro, using his vitis to push aside low-hanging branches and patches of long grass. He’d looked at enough skeletons to fill half the underworld, or so it seemed, yet the task was growing no easier. Six years had seen the flesh stripped from the dead legionaries, leaving nothing but bundles of bones within the rusting mail shirts and segmented armour that lay scattered along the cursed track, among the trees and in the bog. It made personal recognition an impossibility. Tullus’ frustration and grief grew with each passing hour. What might have been the easiest way – finding a unit standard, say – had also eluded them. It seemed that every item of monetary worth or of symbolic nature had been carried off after the battle, or rotted away. Not one was to be found.

Checking the underside of helmet neckpieces had yielded a good number of scratched-on names, but none that were familiar. Tullus was beginning to wonder if they would have to reconcile themselves to failure and join the rest of Germanicus’ men in digging graves for all the dead. They would nominate one such for their fallen brothers, and make their offerings over it. This solution would be far from ideal, but it was better than leaving the bones of the Eighteenth’s soldiers forever uncovered.

Tullus reached for his clay water-carrier. Despite the nearby stream, he took only two swigs. Old habits died hard. The pause afforded him the chance to see what everyone else was doing. Piso was in the trees off to his left; so too were Vitellius, Saxa and Metilius. Since rescuing Degmar’s family, the four had been inseparable. It gladdened Tullus’ heart.

‘Find anything, Piso?’ he called.

‘No, sir.’

Tullus felt another stab of disappointment. ‘Keep looking.’

A muffled curse from his right made him turn. Fenestela had been working the scrubby ground that ran on into an area of bog, a muddier job than anyone else’s. He was picking himself up, and muttering filthy curses.

‘Lost a sandal?’ asked Tullus.

‘I tripped over a skeleton.’

They had each done the same. ‘Hurt?’ asked Tullus. ‘Just my pride.’

Chuckling, Tullus stoppered his water-carrier and balanced it on his right hip again. Vitis at the ready, he took a step forward, his eyes searching for clues. Fortuna, be kind, he asked. Just this once.

There was another loud oath from Fenestela.

‘Fallen on your arse this time?’ shouted Tullus.

‘Sir!’

The urgency in that one word brought Tullus’ head snapping up. He peered at Fenestela. Even at a distance, it was clear his optio was rattled. ‘What?’

‘Come and see, sir.’

Fenestela’s reluctance to say more had Tullus moving at once. Three dozen strides, and he found Fenestela standing by a massive fallen trunk.

‘I was working my way around it, and didn’t see this poor bastard,’ said Fenestela, gesturing at a skeleton that was lying under a branch forking off the main body. ‘I’d say he crawled in there to die.’

‘A quiet place to breathe his last,’ said Tullus. ‘What else have you found?’

Fenestela pointed.

Tullus leaned in closer. The rusted segmented armour, mildewed leather straps and still-beautiful gilded belt decorations were the same as a thousand he’d seen before, but Fenestela hadn’t called him over for those. He lifted the helmet, which Fenestela had eased off the skull, and peered under the neck guard. There was no inscribed name. As he laid it back down beside its owner, Tullus’ gaze fell on something silver. He focused on something lying beneath the skeleton. ‘This?’ he asked, pointing.

‘Aye.’

Tullus realised he was looking at a silvered spear tip, which had once served as the top of a century’s standard. His heart beat faster. The soldier who’d been carrying it wasn’t a signifer, like as not, because he wasn’t in scale armour. That meant he’d taken it from the fallen standard-bearer and tried to carry it to safety. In a way, he had succeeded, Tullus thought sadly, because the tribesmen hadn’t found the standard. Yet the wounded soldier hadn’t got far. Tullus hoped he had not lingered, listening to the slaughter of his comrades.

Tullus rolled the skeleton a little to the left. Beneath the spear tip, the wooden staff had mouldered away, but the distinctive copper alloy discs and crescents that decorated a century’s standard remained where the shaft would have been. Green now rather than golden-brown, they had been pressed into the earth by the soldier’s weight. A line of metallic dots marked the outline of the silvered pendants that had once hung from either side of the standard’s crossbar.

Tullus picked up one of the discs and cleaned the dirt from its face. It was plain, and disappointment flooded through him. The same applied to the next disc, and the next, but his luck changed with the fourth. Using a fingernail to scrape away dirt from the concave surface, Tullus’ eyes devoured the raised lettering that emerged: COH•II•LEG•XIIX. Over and over, he read the inscription. His pulse hammered in his ears. The standard was from one of the centuries in his cohort, and that meant that the skeletons around him had been some of his legionaries. Which century they had belonged to, Tullus couldn’t be sure. Tears pricked his eyes regardless.

‘What does it say?’ Fenestela’s voice was anxious.

Without a word, Tullus handed over the disc.

‘Jupiter,’ said Fenestela. ‘Fucking Jupiter on high.’

Tullus lifted another disc – it was blank – and another. It had no inscription either; nor did the next one. Soon there was only one before the hand grip attached by most signiferi to make carrying the standard easier. He eased the last disc and the grip free from the earth at the same time, tapping off the attached clods of earth against one of his greaves.

Tullus threw a casual glance at the grip first. It had been fashioned from deer horn, a common material, but what made it unusual was the cap of silver foil covering its free end. ‘Look,’ he said, his voice thick with sudden emotion.

Fenestela’s ruddy face lost its remaining colour. ‘It’s our standard. Our standard.’

Julius, their signifer, had fashioned the covering himself from silver foil, making the grip as unique as a man’s scars. Tullus and Fenestela shared a glance then, this one laden with raw grief, and Tullus turned over the last disc in his hand. CENT•I, he read. Grief – and terrible memories – washed over him anew. A tear dropped from his eye on to the lettering, and a tiny part of Tullus was surprised that it didn’t turn blood red. ‘I don’t remember seeing Julius die. He was still with us on the last day, wasn’t he?’

‘Aye,’ said Fenestela. ‘I can’t recall him falling either. One of the others must have grabbed the standard when he did, and tried to get away with it.’

‘We must have already gone.’ Feeling guilty all over again, Tullus reached down and patted the dead man’s skull. ‘You did your best, brother. Rest in peace now. The standard is back with us.’

Straightening, he found every soldier in sight watching. It wasn’t surprising, thought Tullus. Fenestela calling him over would have alerted them. He cupped a hand to his lips. ‘We’ve found our century’s standard. Tread light, brothers. Every skeleton lying around you is that of a comrade.’

The words were barely out of Tullus’ mouth before his long-held-in grief struck him with the force of a storm wave hitting a harbour wall. He dropped to one knee beside the skeleton, and a sob escaped him. Beside him he heard Fenestela, a man he’d never known to give in to sorrow, weeping.

No one spoke for a long time.

In the end, Tullus mastered his pain by force of will. Getting to his feet, he ordered his men to begin the terrible task of burying their comrades.

They had started before midday. Now the sun was low on the horizon and every part of Tullus ached. His arms, his shoulders, his thighs, his back – especially his back. Hours of swinging a pickaxe had brought up blisters – new, ruptured, forming – over both his palms. The neck scarf that he’d tied around his forehead was soaked through with sweat and, under his mail, his tunic was stuck fast to his back. Waves of exhaustion battered at him, and at last he had to stop digging. He had done his bit, Tullus told himself, and there were plenty of willing and able men. Every one of his old legionaries was there, labouring with grim purpose on the mass grave. His and Fenestela’s voices weren’t needed, nor his vitis. In fact, Tullus hadn’t heard a single complaint in that time, nor seen a man stop working other than to take a mouthful of water.

He could not rest for long – he wasn’t able. Six years he’d been unable to do anything for his slain men. Now his moment had come. Wielding a pickaxe was beyond him, so Tullus began carrying the skeletons they had wrapped in blankets and, with great reverence, lowering them down into the pit. It was emotional, horrific work, and he couldn’t help but wonder which legionary each bundle of bones might have been.

A tight band of pain wrapped itself around his chest after a while, but he ignored it. He would not stand by and watch, even if the effort killed him. These are my men, Tullus thought, my fucking men. I couldn’t save their lives, but I can see them into the ground and say a prayer over their remains. Let me do that, Mars, d’you hear me? Fortuna, are you listening? I will do this. And next time you show yourself, Arminius, things will be different. I’ll be ready.