Legionary(50)

‘XI Claudia!’

Nothing but the storm roared back.

Then he trod on something. Something solid. He fell again and saw the staring, dead features of a Flavia Firma legionary. The man was buried up to his chest, his mouth open in a scream, lips blue from the sand that had packed his mouth and asphyxiated him.

Pavo gawped; the nightmare was upon him. He spun in every direction, lifting the collar of his tunic to shield his nose and mouth.

‘XI Claudia!’

A wall of sand threw him from his feet again. He clawed to stand once more, but the sand piled up around him impossibly. In moments, he was waist deep in it. A heartbeat later, it spilled around his chest.

As the sand piled up around his neck, he remembered Father’s words from the dream.

‘Beware, Pavo!’

The words echoed in his mind as darkness overcame him.





Chapter 11





The following day, the desert was still and serene. The dunes lay in a tidy weave as if having been groomed by a giant’s comb. A vulture soared on the mid-morning zephyrs, its eyes trained on the slightest movement below. There would be plenty of bounty to be had following the previous night’s storm. Then its gaze snapped round on something. It dropped from the zephyr and circled lower and lower. There, it saw it; a scrawny lizard atop one dune. A fine morning meal. But then the vulture saw that the lizard was digging at the sand and something buried there – something stringy. There was a faint tinge of blood in the air – was this the raw meat of some cadaver? A far more attractive meal than a lizard. The vulture plunged and screeched. The terrified lizard darted under the sand at once.

The vulture began pecking at the stringy morsel, then it became infuriated when the tendril would not pull free of the sand. It wrenched and wrenched until, at last, the sand shifted to reveal some shining metal disc attached to the string. The vulture strutted over to the disc and cocked its head this way and that, noticing the fleshy outline of a neck, a jaw, a face, all coated in sand. It trained its gaze on an eyelid and thought of the juicy eyeball underneath. It raised its beak to peck through the eyelid.





Pavo felt something padding up his chest then come to a halt, just over his face. The sensation stirred him from the blackness. He sat up with a gasp, casting off the veil of sand, and swiped out, feeling some feathery mass beat at him before disappearing. His lungs burned as if he had not taken a breath in days. He could see and hear nothing but blackness and the thumping of his heart. He clawed at his eyes, stinging and full of sand. He dug the sand from his ears and at last he could hear again, the terrified screeching of a vulture fading into the distance. He scrambled forward onto all fours, spitting, coughing and retching. His limbs trembled as he stood upright and he could feel the deadly heat of day scorching every inch of his skin, then the furious thirst that seemed to have shrivelled his insides demanded his attention. He rubbed at his eyes again. It hurt so badly that he cried out, but he could see something after this; a blur of gold and azure.

‘Pavo!’ a voice called out. ‘Pavo!’

Pavo swung round to see a blurry shape approaching.

‘Pavo, you’re alive!’ he felt a set of arms grapple his shoulders.

‘Sura?’ he croaked.

‘Sit down!’ another voice cried out.

‘Zosimus, sir? What happe - ’ he started, then something wet splashed across his face.

‘Just sit.’ A pair of hands pushed him down.

He gagged and spat, then realised the sand had been washed from his eyes. He blinked away the remaining blurriness and saw Zosimus and Sura before him. The pair were dressed in their torn, sand-encrusted tunics and looked as dreadful as he felt. Zosimus held out the rest of the water skin. ‘Drink!’

Pavo took it. ‘Water, how?’

Felix scrambled up to the lip of the dune beside him and tipped the skin up. ‘You drink, we’ll talk.’

Pavo nodded and savoured the liquid that washed across his parched tongue then toppled down his throat. It was hot and polluted with sand, but it instantly brought moisture to his eyes and part-quenched his thirst. He gasped in relief, then his breath stilled when he saw a bump in the sand nearby. An arm poked from it, still and lifeless, with a splatter of dried blood nearby where the vultures had been tearing at the dead legionary’s tendrils. Further away, the tortured features of a fallen camel poked from the dune, its eyes lost to the carrion birds and the sockets crawling with insects. All around him were many such bumps and sights.

‘Is there nobody else . . . ’ Pavo uttered.

But then he saw it. In the shade of a nearby dune stood a cluster of haggard, familiar faces. The surviving men of the XI Claudia and the XVI Flavia Firma. There were many missing, it seemed, less than seventy left overall. Less than fifteen of the camel caravan had survived too. But there was something else. A tent with a pair of armoured legionaries standing by it. They were not of the vexillatio. They carried dark-green shields each bearing the image of a golden capricorn and a Christian Chi-Rho.