Ruin and Rebirth

by Michael Whitehead

  The conversation continued around him, and he was amazed at how these men with so much to hide from each other could drink and laugh together. It was all a game when it came down to it, wasn’t it? They all made their moves, trying to pry a little more power, a little more notoriety, and a little more reputation from the hands of the other. Why else would a legate of Rome knowingly walk into an enemy held town? He could have sent his men in without being here himself. Yes, Numarius had said it served as a diversion, but really it was all about bravado.

  The legate's escort were standing to attention a discreet distance from the conversation. Their presence made Julius nervous, so how the Gauls could sit there, drinking and eating while armed and armoured men were standing a few arms' length away was beyond his reckoning.

  Quietly and almost out of earshot there was a crash of metal and a shout. Numarius did not react as if he had heard it at all, but the Gauls seemed to be alert almost at once. The leader of the group called a warrior over and said something to him in their hard, almost barking language. The man called five more fighters to him and they headed off in the direction of the noise.

  “We may not have had a lot of trouble with the undead, but we do still get some. The guards on the barricade should be able to cope but it's better to be safe.” The man spoke to the group as a whole but kept allowing his eyes to flit back to Numarius so that the legate knew the explanation was for his benefit.

  The general smiled and wafted a seemingly inebriated hand, “Would you like some of my men to assist?”

  “No need, my friend,” the Gaul said, he watched the direction his men had gone, over the Roman’s shoulder.

  “It really wouldn’t be any trouble,” Numarius slurred. He got up from where he lay slouched to a more upright sitting position. He stumbled slightly as he did, giggling drunkenly at the same time. Finally he sat up and signalled one of his escorts over.

  Three things happened at the same time. Julius was unsure where his attention should be, and the leader of the Gauls must have suffered the same indecision. From outside the celebrations the clash of metal on metal could be heard, and this time it was unmistakably the sound of fighting.

  At the same time the leader of the Gauls leaned forward to tell Numarius that he need not trouble himself in sending the legionaries after his men. Julius was still unsure whether this was because he assumed it was drunken brawl or the Risen and not Romans attacking the walls, or if it was an attempt to keep up the pretence of everything in the town being fine.

  The third thing that happened, at exactly the same time as the other incidents, was that the legate snapped out of his sham drunkenness. He waited until the legionary leaned in to hear his commander's order, slipped the dagger from the soldiers belt and with a movement so quick Julius almost didn’t see it, held it to the Gaulish leader's throat.

  It all happened so quickly that most of the people around the small party failed to react until the general had total control of the situation, and those that did were far too slow to change what was happening to their chief.

  One Gaul stepped in, sword drawn and ready to stab at Numarius. He made it to within three feet before he toppled forward, a gladius in his back.

  A second Gaul came at the Roman from behind. The legionary who had provided the weapon Numarius now held, straightened back up gladius in hand, and drove the blade into the assailant's stomach. Julius clearly saw the blade exit the man’s back as he was lifted off his feet and driven to the ground by the force of the soldier’s attack.

  By this time the sound of fighting on the far side of the celebrations had risen in volume then died away. Numarius looked out over the crowd and Julius saw an armoured Roman come into the light of the torches lifting his sword above his head. It must have been a signal, because the general grunted and nodded, obviously satisfied. He turned back to the Gaul and drew his blade across the man’s throat.

  Blood drenched the front of the man’s tunic and sprayed into his thick black beard. He grasped weakly at the front of the Roman's armour, and when his fingers failed to find a hold he fell to the ground at the legate's feet.

  Members of the crowd had finally started to realise something was amiss and Julius heard cries of anguish as the Gauls saw their leader fall. Legionaries began to appear in the crowd with swords drawn, cutting down a number of unsuspecting men before the crowd could rally themselves to fight. Numarius watched this happen before turning back to the townsman who had sat looking terrified throughout the short, but violent struggle.

  “Where are the rest of the people from your town?” Numarius asked, it was almost casual after the bloodshed that had preceded it.

  “I...I...I don’t know. They took them after they took the town. We were kept here to keep up the pretence of normality. I thank the gods you came!” The man held out a hand to the legate, but he was already turning to one of his men.

  “There must be one of these barbarians who knows where the women and children are. I want you to find him and get him to talk. Order the gates opened and secure the rest of the barricade. I want fifty men in here now, the rest are to guard the walls and the camp.”

  He turned back to the town leader. “We find your people, and then you all come with us. I don’t want to hear any arguments. You’ve proved yourself incapable of staying safe, so you will be better off with us.”

  The man attempted to answer, and Julius saw him start to shake his head, but the words did not come out. Numarius would not have heard him anyway. He was already heading off, talking to another of his men.

  Chapter Twenty

  The horse beneath Julius jigged and stepped backward, made nervous by the death and suffering before it. The animal had been trained and hardened on the battlefields of the empire but nothing it had seen had prepared it for what it now saw.

  “For the love of the gods, who could do such a thing?” As he spoke, he heard one of the legionaries behind him begin to gag and then vomit onto the grass, and he felt his own bile begin to rise.

  After taking the town, Numarius had ordered all of the Gauls to be gathered together and kept as prisoners. He had first questioned the town elders, and it seemed the Gauls had arrived in the town offering peace and protection. At first it had been a good arrangement - the town had a plentiful food supply and the Gauls provided strong arms and sharp swords. In such a time of need, both sides would have had plenty to offer the other.

  The peace hadn’t lasted long, however. The Gauls had begun to see the advantage of this well stocked, defendable town, so they had taken the women and children hostage as insurance that the men would remain passive. Then they had used the men as slaves, making them work and fight on the makeshift defences.

  The elders said this had all happened weeks ago, nobody had been allowed to leave town, and they had no idea where their families were.

  “You never tried to fight back? You never tried to find the women?” he growled at them, but not one of those greybeards dared to look him in the eye.

  “We were worried they would kill the children if we tried,” one of the elders said, unable to stand the silence that Numarius had allowed to linger after his question.

  “You were worried you would be killed as well, I suppose,” the legate snapped, watching the men glance at each other rather than him.

  Finally, he spat on the floor, turned way from the old men and left the meeting, taking Julius with him. They stepped out into the town square where the Gauls were on their knees, hands tied behind their backs. Some of them were bloody from the fight with the legions but Julius noted most were willing to meet the legate's gaze.

  Numarius signalled to one of his men and the legionary stepped forward, drawing his sword at an unspoken command. The general stopped in front of the kneeling men and pointed to three of them.

  “That one, that one, and him.”

  The legionary stepped forward, blank faced and relaxed. He stabbed the first man in the chest, and as he pulled his sword free, a gout of b
lood began to pulse from the wound.

  He moved toward the second man and the Gaul lifted his head and exposed his chest for the blow, but instead the legionary ran the edge of his blade across the man’s throat. He died slowly, spraying blood with his last few choked attempts to breathe.

  The third man tried to shuffle away as the soldier came close to him, almost crying and begging for his life. One of his fellow prisoners cursed at him with harsh words - Julius didn’t need to understand the words to grasp their meaning.

  “Stop,” Numarius said, almost lazily as the legionary neared his third victim, and he stopped and turned towards the legate awaiting instructions. The general gestured to the man who had spoken out against his cowering compatriot. “Kill him instead and bring this one to me,” pointing at the crying man. With that he beckoned Julius to follow him.

  He led the younger man across the town square to a house that he had commandeered as a temporary office, and the room echoed to the sound of the hobnailed boots both men wore as they trod the wooden floor.

  The man who had begged for his life was led in cowering as he was pulled inside and forced to his knees. He babbled in the strange language until Numarius raised a hand to silence him.

  “Can you understand me?” The legate's voice was measured but Julius could hear the anger that lurked at its edges. The Gaul looked petrified and looked around him as if hoping for someone to help him understand what was being asked of him. Numarius became angry and growling, he picked the man up by the front of his tunic and punched him back to the floor.

  “Where are the women? The children?” the legate asked him, standing above the prone figure, teeth gritted.

  Something the Roman had said must have made the man understand, as a flicker of recognition came into his face. He performed a crude mime of a woman, holding his hands to his chest in the shape of breasts.

  This seemed to infuriate Numarius even more but the fact that they were now communicating at all saved the Gaul from another punch. Instead the legate nodded and prisoner seemed to take heart from this. He performed a second mime, indicating himself and pointing out toward an imaginary place that to which he would take them.

  Numarius picked the man up off the floor, one hand wrapped deep into the front of his tunic. The Gaul was not a small man but Numarius seemed to handle him with the ease of a child with a doll.

  “One false move, one breath out of place, and I will personally tear you to pieces,” the general growled. The man obviously did not understand but cowered at the force of his captor's will.

  Outside Numarius ordered a century of men to form up and passed care of the prisoner into the hands of the centurion. He then mounted his horse and bid Julius do the same.

  They had walked no more than a few minutes out of the camp before they found the first body. The remains of a young woman was tied to a tree where she had been eaten, more than half of her gone. Rotting flesh hung in ragged strips across the open cavity of her chest. She had turned and become undead but somebody had already ended her afterlife before the legion had arrived.

  Numarius had remained passive, but Julius could feel white hot rage radiating off him as he sent scouts out into the surrounding woodland and ordered the Gaul to lead them further.

  More bodies were found, each in a similar state to the first. They had all been tied to trees, like sacrificial lambs tied to stakes. Each had been killed and eaten, and all but one had turned into Risen. The last was so badly dismembered that there was little left to turn, a young child by the size of the remaining limbs.

  Finally, they had come to the clearing where trees had been felled and huge pits had been dug into the earth. They were deep and the sides sloped away from the centre as they got deeper so that anyone trying to climb out of one of the pits would end up hanging backwards in order to find a handhold.

  Over these pits large wooden frames had been made using the trunks and the largest branches of the felled trees, a feat of engineering that a legion would be proud of had it not been used for such a horrendous act.

  Hanging from each frame, high over the pits was a wooden cage that contained a number of women and children. At the bottom of each pit were sharp wooden stakes driven into the ground, and was now home to hundreds of Risen in various states of both life and decomposition.

  It did not take long to understand what had been done here. The women and children had been used as bait in order to lure the undead into the trap below. They had leapt at the living flesh high in the air, only to plummet onto the stakes. Some had died, their skulls pierced by the wood. Others writhed and struggled to free themselves from the spear-like points that protruded from their chests and other parts of their unnatural bodies.

  Still, the Risen were not the worst part of the scene. The captives in the cages were emaciated, simply left here to die by an enemy who cared nothing for their lives.

  In a number of cages dead bodies shared the cramped space with the living, the bars being too close together to allow them to eject the dead. Julius felt a hot rush of acid hit his throat as he saw a hollow-eyed woman holding what was clearly a dead baby. The prisoners had the vacant eyes of the starving; their skin was stretched and gaunt, like thin leather stretched over their skeletal frames.

  Two of the cages held Risen. Julius’s distraught mind wondered for a moment why the Gauls had locked Risen into a cage. They, of course, had done no such thing. Julius could see what had happened, the image burning like acid into his mind’s eye.

  A Risen had managed, despite the distance between the ground and the cage, to reach his prey. He had bitten one or more of the petrified women, or maybe even a child. Then the other people in the cage, unable to do anything else had been forced to wait as the bite victim grew sick and died. They would have watched this and known the inevitable outcome.

  Maybe they had tried to kill the bite victim, to stop her turning into their worst nightmare, but without a weapon they would not have been able to deal the blow that would damage the brain and kill the monster. Finally, after the agony of waiting the victim had changed and they had been caged with a killer, locked up with a creature from Hades.

  Julius slid from his horse, turned from the scene and vomited onto the grass. A steaming gush of yellow bile burned his throat as it passed from him, and he turned back to see that he was not the only one who had lost control of themselves.

  Numarius looked down at him without judgement, but Julius still felt shamed and guilty for belonging to a race capable of such an act. Men looked down on animals but they were not cruel. They killed for food, they killed for survival. Only men knew how to make each other suffer such indignity.

  “Centurion, have messengers sent back to the town. I want every Gaul brought to this place. Give orders that no man from the town is to accompany them, they do not deserve to see this, despite their cowardice. I want these women cut down and I want the wood from the frames made into crosses,” Numarius said, his voice distant.

  The centurion saluted and began giving orders to his men while the legate turned his horse and moved away from the death pits. Julius followed, keeping his distance in case the general wanted privacy. but he began to talk to him, forcing him to gee his horse in order to catch up.

  “They must have been planning this for weeks. The digging alone must have taken days and I refuse to believe none of the men in that town knew anything about it. The edge of town is a few minutes' walk from here, so how could they not know?” Anger flared in his voice and Julius chose to remain silent. “If I had any way to know, if I could prove any of them knew, I would disembowel them personally,” Numarius continued.

  “What can be done?” sure he already knew the answer.

  “What indeed. It makes my blood boil to think of it. We are taking none of these people with us! We deal with this and move on to join the emperor. I will not have those men march with us. They deserve to rot here, knowing they did nothing to stop this.”

  * * *

  Th
e Gauls screamed as they looked down from the crosses on which they had been nailed. They had been tied in place, as well. Lengths of rope around the shoulders and chest holding them. Platforms had been nailed to the crosses, giving the men somewhere to stand.

  At first Julius had thought the extra support was a show of mercy. The purpose of crucifying someone was that the pressure on the windpipe caused by the victim's head dropping towards the chest would give them a long slow and painful death by suffocation. He had been told that the victim would feel like they were drowning, unable to take a breath. By tying the men in place and giving them somewhere to stand, this just would not happen.

  Then he realised his folly. This was exactly what Numarius wanted. The crosses had been spaced out in a wide circle outside the town. They would form a living barrier for the Risen. Giving the undead something to attack before they reached the people beyond, it was a punishment fitted to the crimes they had committed against the women and children of the town. It would also serve as a reminder to the men of the town that they had done nothing to ease the suffering of their wives, mothers and offspring.

  Julius wasn’t sure what Numarius expected the men to have done against such a warlike enemy. These weren’t legionaries or warriors, they were simple ordinary men, and they would have died had they tried to help the prisoners. Then he realised that this is exactly what the legate would have done. The man was a force of nature, and he would have let nothing stand in his way.

  More than half of the women had been dead when the legions cut them down. The children had fared a little better, their young bodies more resilient. Some of the nursing mothers had fed even the older children, allowing them to suckle their life-giving milk, even as their own bodies died.

  In the hours since they had been released, three more women had passed away. They had held on to life long enough to see their children safe once more, then had given up their grip on this world.