The mist hung heavy over the forest, as Death hung heavy over the soggy earth at their feet. His task was to have been the daily breaking of this root-veined ground so that his masters might plan the next day’s march from behind hastily dug lines. But today his task was but to die.

The other calone next to him—Antonax was his name—lost his bowels as the chanting from the mist hung woods all about oppressed them. The world dripped and the woods sang. Antonax cried out and made a break for the marsh only to have the Centurian’s blade drop his head behind his own still running heels. The headless body teetered forward, half-turned as the last well of blood soaked the muddy tunic beneath the neck stump, and fell, impaling it’s self on a jagged sapling stump that Dmos himself had felled with his own pickaxe.

The men in the clearing were silent: a standard bearer with an arrow through his neck who was still miraculously alive; two legionnaires in various stages of despair; a trooper who had lost his horse and limped along using his spear for a crutch; and the Centurian, the man with no name who was all rank, who regarded Dmos with a supernatural glare that had held six hundred men together through three days of slaughter.

Now they were six, and Dmos was the last of his kind. As the woods came alive with the low barbaric throat chant that seemed as if it should be issuing from the throat of a vile god in some Gallic temple rather than from the throats of a thousand mud-streaked faces as they crept ominously from behind the dripping trees out of the mist from all points of the star.

As they neared the muddy cloth-covered legs pumped higher over fallen log and felled man, squishing in the shallow filth of the forest floor. Thousands of legs now pumped, the feet below sucking, slipping and slurping as the muck that had been the First Cohort gripped at their fiendish feet and ultimately let them go, to come bearing down on Dmos where he stood next to Centurian, the last in a line of harsh masters that had circumscribed his backbreaking world.

Dmos was not armored, not even clothed according to his father’s standards. The loose tunic that he did not even own was draped over his broad shoulders and tied at the waist with a cord of rawhide. He held his pickaxe—the Emperor’s pickaxe he had often been reminded—between his thick calloused hands. He was not afraid to die. His life had been one bucket of toil, one long shovelful of drudgery since he had been seized at Ostia by the Romans while offloading his father’s oil.

Numerous javelins sprouted from the soggy leather harness of the legionnaire to his left. He felt a sick sensation as one passed through his own belly and lodged there. His guts were afire as the few remaining men fell beneath a storm of missiles and the standard bearer was engulfed in a mob of stabbing bodies.

The Centurian alone was unscathed, standing in his tattered armor hung with the silver medallion faces of his brutal ancestors. He cast Dmos a sideways glance as the clearing was mobbed and growled, “Quick or toilsome slave?”

The Centurian had hefted his blade into the executioner’s grip offering mercy. Dmos grunted back, through the dulling pain in his gut, “Dig another hole I suppose.”

The Centurian cut the haft of the javelin away with one quick stoke and then raised his sword to block the great wooden war club that was arcing down toward Dmos’ head. The blade shattered and the diverted club crashed into Dmos’ left shoulder, burning his being with a fire of pain that rivaled the death in his gut.

The world tilted and slowed as a great axe obliterated the snarling face of his cruel master. The Centurian’s still defiant body fell at his feet—his face pasted to Dmos’ cloth-covered chest—leaving Dmos, last ditch digger slave to a dead army, as the last representative of Rome under the forest of Germania.

There was no mercy for a dying slave of Rome in the eyes of the two giant tribesmen who stood above him, only a haste to be the bearded beast to have taken the last invader’s breath. Dmos knew that he would soon be sharing a bier below with the cruel man—who they had all regarded as having a spirit that was nigh inextinguishable—whose only act of kindness had been an offer of a quick and honorable death. A sudden urge to appear in the City of Dust with a story worth telling animated him.

The head of his pickaxe ripped upward into the groin of the club-heaving barbarian, bringing a very wet sounding grunt from the man as the head of the pick that had broken a thousand camp grounds sunk into that pelvis like a stake into clay.

Dmos ducked squat like, as the shaft transfixing his guts would not permit a bending at the waist, as the great axe whistled over his head from the right. As he squat ducked he pulled down on the pickaxe with his remaining hand—a hand stronger than any barbarian paw—yanking the tool head free of the shit, urine and balls that spilled over it. Then, with all of his remaining might, and with no war cry able to issue from his speared belly—he ripped a back hand with the axe head to his right, cleaving in the hairy ribs beneath the mud-spattered and blood-stained clothes.

The two hairy giants now lay at his feet as a dozen spears menaced him and a half dozen more pushed out through his chest from behind with a queer prickly sensation accompanied by the sound of popping cartilage and tearing flesh and fabric. The spears before him sunk into him as well, and raised him, together with the many shafts that had pierced his back, from the ground like some ascendant hero.

Dmos had become the singular fruit of a tree of death in a lonely forest of doomed men. As his life slipped away toward the earth that had drunk so many souls yet remained unfathomably thirsty he met the eyes of a thickly bearded youth who looked up to him in open mouthed amazement. As he returned the wondering stare of this one barbarian he wished he were able to speak, and speak in German, so he could say, “I’m Dmos of Elis, where the heroes used to come. My father’s olives are the best. These men made of me a beast. I am free.”

The absence of sound suffused the painless bridge beyond.