[Geist] - The Dead Fen

[lslaw.livejournal.com]

Out here, the rain smothers everything in a cold, grey curtain. It's like a veil, pale and slick, clinging to your skin and pooling in your boots. Even when the rain stops for a few moments, the mist that follows is almost as bad. Some of the lads can't imagine why the people fight so hard for country so miserable, but I guess it's like digging out a dung-hill rat. If you've lived your whole life in a pile of shit it's hard not to get attached to it.

There's a fort on the hills that we've been besieging for a week and a half, while the damned rain falls constantly and the water rises up and sucks the tents down into this interminable fen. We're clustered on the hillside, too close by half to the enemy, but it's not like they've got any arrows or spears left. The lads are pissed off and fed to the back teeth with rain, but we just can't break the enemy defence. It's partly because there's nowhere solid enough to set up a ballista, but even besides that they're just so damned tenacious; worse than the bloody Iceni.

They call themselves Brutoi, and near as I can tell they're the only ones there are; this one miserable little pissant, backwoods 'fort'-load of tribesmen and women too stupid to know what an anachronism they are. Even the other tribes hate them more than they hate each other; we've got Iceni and Catuvellauni and Trinovantes practically lining up outside the camp to volunteer as auxiliaries. I don't even know how they found out we were attacking the fort, but they hate these Brutoi that much. They bring stories of strange, bloodthirsty rituals, and given how their own druids carry on, I'm surprised this hill isn't stained red from top to tail.

At dawn we attack again and again they drive us back. We lose half a dozen at most, they lose almost fifty, and yet they never seem to run out of men. At nightfall we're settling into camp when the sentries report a squad of mounted auxiliaries approaching from the south.

The leader of the newcomers, a group of Friulian outriders, is a decurion named Draco Veneti. He tells me that they have come to help, and that tomorrow the camp will fall.

That night, they sit at their own fire. One of them crouches down, eyes closed and presses his palm into the earth, and at once I feel a strange chill in my flesh, deeper even than this wretched country usually produces. Two others sit back to back, their eyes closed, while the remaining five, with their commander, form a circle around the fire, which begins to dim, although the flames leap as high as ever.

Then the water begins to flow from the channels and the pools of the fen, and it flows up the hill towards the fort. After that, the shouting begins, and then the screaming, although given the size of the fort, surprisingly little of either if anything is happening.

And then there is silence.

In the morning, the walls are undefended. We find maybe a dozen men in the central hut who look to have died in the night; the rest have clearly been decomposing for days.

"Burn it," Veneti tells me, and I don't even think about arguing rank.