for Dave Thomas
It wasn’t my first time being burned, but this time I wasn’t alone. The fire hadn’t caught my field clothes, but the flames from a lit torch held by one of the revenants was pointed at my face, and no matter how I cringed, they jabbed, and there were cruel intervals when a piece of my arm, leg, or hair were singed by my captors.
When you’re in fear for your life, time itself slows down, and your awareness of your surroundings becomes granular to the point of privilege. Emotion becomes secondary to those tiny but sharp points of focus—a loose thread in your clothing, a worm in the noodles, an empty beer can in your car wreck.
My enclosure this time was not the steel or chrome of a vehicle, but a mass of sticks and twine that, although crooked and hurried, had been lashed together with such determination that only fire or edged metal could loosen even a section of it. I gripped one of the thicker columns, its bark still steadfast although moistened by the downpour. There was no getting away, but I was at this point beginning to understand a little better why this had all unfolded.
The rope around my neck tightened as I pivoted toward the soldier before me. The afternoon sun hit his decay and lit up the bones beyond the maggots and their hatchlings. This one was the tallest of the group, but maybe he was standing more erect than any of the others of the legion who seemed to be weighed down by the air itself, or the decomposition had gotten to them so badly that their bodies lacked the strength to maintain their dutiful march. I could also tell by then, part of their listless stature was possibly diminished by sorrow, maybe even disillusionment. On some of the worst of them, though, their armor looked pristine, intact, polished.
The wide-open landscape was just as the excavation team had left it before the rainstorm, with a few important exceptions: the roof of the visitor center was no longer visible; the museum displays and commemorative paving stones had also vanished. The late-summer air and the enclosing forest were maybe the only common threads between sanity and whatever this carnage had turned into. We can fantasize and nerd out about opening portals, summoning or unleashing ghosts or curses, or discuss funding initiatives until we’re blue in the face—I expect nothing less—but the crucified body of Ivan was real enough as we passed by it along the track.
Yet the man I’d hated the most, he who had given me the most shit, seemed to have been the only other survivor of this rout. His survival and the realness of the decayed corpses of Varus’s legions were enough to drive reality home for me: This was no dreaming state, no abstraction of the ethics of what Ivan had attempted to fool the team with. The very fact that my wheeled prison had been fashioned after a wolf rather than a man standing upright solidified my understanding—the soldiers were real, their pain and humiliation of defeat were real, and to treat us invaders as the German tribes who had themselves routed this army, it was a purgative exercise through which they sought release.
Ivan had summoned something he could not send back, but the thought of Peg snapped me back into my own determination, and as the fire got closer, drying the tears that had betrayed my already terrible face, I recalled my own experiences with near death and as in some (but not all) nerd circles, I steeled myself back to presence of mind and the adage that takes so little real effort: “Not today.”
I leaned toward the tallest soldier and began to speak.
It wasn’t my first time falling off the sobriety wagon, but this time I wasn’t languishing in a desert. The Hotel Osnabrück had a bar where I didn’t have to worry about the lighting plowing my face into even more grotesqueries. Dealing with customs and the TSA had been bad enough, but the jet lag compounded by my humiliation in front of the excavation team had me spiraling to the point of just not caring. If I had to return to rehab back in the States when I got home, then that was for later. Right that evening, I’d needed a drink even more than I needed the income contracted to me by Craig and the excavation team.
In fairness to Craig, he’d done all he could for me during the orientation. But being heckled with a bunch of nonsense during my presentation to the team had made me more sad than angry. I decided that if a drink would kill me worse than the transmisogyny, then that was a chance I was ready to take.
But also, I sure as hell didn’t expect to find Peg Bishop sitting there at a table in the hotel bar, big as life and seemingly without a care in the world other than the piles of notebooks that surrounded her.
“Jesus,” I let out. “No way.”
Her eyes dashed right up, and we beamed. Even from across a room, we know the tells. I’d only met Peg online, so we may not have memorized each other’s voices, but we’d both geeked out about our projects at university. She was a linguist teaching at Oxford, and I wondered what she’d be doing here in Lower Saxony.
We got the “nod” and the hug over with, and after, I sat down across from her. I squinted into the murk for any signs of Jägermeister. I was back to my old ways already, but this finally felt like the time, and the place, for which my drinking might involve having less judgment hurled at me from without.
Right out of the gate, I asked Peg about the notebooks. This didn’t look like the type of work she’d been known for.
“I’m on my way to Hamburg,” she said past a stray tuft of hair.
“Seems far enough from Britain.”
I took my first drink since my so-called car accident. I needed it, after only a half hour of being laughed at by people I would be working with outdoors in September for a couple of days; being there with Peg galvanized me to abide.
She went on to tell me she was moonlighting away from her linguistics research.
In Hamburg she was interviewing several trans women who were verified granddaughters of the also-trans courtesans John Lennon had reciprocated during the Beatles’ residency in St. Pauli. Although I had reason to be skeptical of the veracity of this oral history passed down, I was only then just beginning to understand the logic behind it: Even if it turned out to be a complete bag of lies, at least we were talking about us instead of waiting to be seen and heard from the outside yet again. It was going to be an actual book rather than a post on social.
“I’m just sick of the hypocrisy,” Peg went on. “I mean, we’re talking real trans history here.”
“What about rock history?”
“Fuck rock history.”
“You’re going to piss some people off,” I told her. “Maybe at Rolling Stone.”
“And then a decade later, they’ll do their own feature with the same transcribed interviews.” Peg looked down, crestfallen. “Even if I’m still around.”
“Be around.”
I remember moving a little closer with my drink when I saw Craig coming into the hotel bar. He scanned the crowd and then locked his eyes on me. His shirt was untucked, and his hair looked scraggly at one end, as if he’d been rolled through something outside, across the quaint cobblestones and dog shit.
Or he’d gotten into a fight.
Peg shifted a little in her dress, but I held my hand out to her, at stomach level. We were safe.
Craig had hired me for the project and had shown deference since my arrival. He hadn’t met me post-transition and had proved as respectful as my trip from Mexico City had been long, but his silence during the heckling by the team during my presentation about the Kalkriese battlefield is what had driven me into this state. It turned out to have been a mixed blessing.
He glanced at Peg only a moment. She had packed her piles of notebooks into a bag and set them aside. Craig wasn’t part of our network, so I doubted he’d recognize her, Oxford cred notwithstanding.
Craig’s eyes were downcast as he approached the table.
“You can save it,” I told him. “If this team of yours is just here for the ride, then I hope we don’t find so much as a chicken bone in the ground.”
I introduced Peg, and they both just shrugged at each other. Craig had his agenda, but with Peg there, I was beginning to grow my own. She could tell, and we exchanged another pair of small but knowing smiles.
“I spoke with them after you left the suite,” Craig began. “Sofer had some choice words for Ivan and Dieter, especially. He offered to send them on the next bus out of here, and that shut them both up.”
Werner Sofer was curator of the Varusschlacht Museum, and was the one to oversee us. A citizen science team had uncovered the skeleton of a mule and a few buckles, but their time had been limited, so Sofer decided to commission a dig team before winter set in.
Craig had known me from way before I transitioned, when we were on the Anasazi project in Arizona. That hadn’t gone so well, mostly due to the greed of a few team members who got away with looting. But Craig now had a leadership role with this contract, and knowing my background in Roman history, he called me in.
But I sure as shit wasn’t going to stand for what had happened during my PowerPoint, and I told him this right away.
“Also, it looks like you’ve been mugged,” I went on. “Was it Ivan?”
Craig saw I was looking at his mussed-out hair, and he tried to flatten it down. “You should see Ivan,” he grunted.
Ivan hailed from Adelaide, and was open about his penchant for Nazi memorabilia. A real class act. He didn’t seem to care what the legalities in Germany were, so I wondered if he’d brought some along for his new pal Dieter’s benefit.
“I don’t know why you hired these two,” I said. “Neither of them knows any Latin, and Ivan doesn’t speak a word of German. Did you pick them out of a randomized Google search?”
“Their networks,” Craig said.
“Follow the money, yes,” Peg offered, then demurred. Craig wasn’t an intimidating presence, but she seemed to sense he’d been hurt. I gave her a little shush, because better things were about to happen anyway.
“Look,” Craig recovered, “you’re the real consultant on this. Anything we find in the ground runs by your appraisal. I made it clear to the rest of the team. Sofer knows that too.”
And this was for the money, by all accounts. When you lose your tenure just for deciding to go on living, that really puts the zap on your head. I could abide some more transphobia for a few days for the sake of making an equivalent almost-year’s income. Here’s a state secret: Most transition costs burn a white-hot hole in our pockets. So despite the upset, I needed the income. And seeing Peg, another veritable unicorn, quite by chance in that noisy, dark, and stunted hotel bar, I can only attribute to planned happenstance.
“And Sofer told me he’s definitely in your corner. His niece is trans.”
I furrowed my brow at him.
“You’re second in command,” he said.
“But without the agency to send anyone packing.” My reply was as much a statement as a question.
“Leave it to Sofer,” Craig tried to assure me. “But keep your ears open.”
“And your eyes,” Peg said.
I was glad the Jäger shots were wearing off.
“We have another day before going out,” Craig said, standing up as if in salute. “Relax with your thoughts.”
And he was off to relax with his own. The crowd noise had died down into a tired rumble. Peg and I looked at each other, and you couldn’t have shot us out of a cannon fast enough to get us out of that bar and into her room.
Battlefields live on, long after the dead and their wares and tactics and reversals have gone, recovered or lost, remembered or forgotten, and the same goes for the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, where Varus’s seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth Roman legions were led into a Germanic trap and decimated.
Apart from brief footnotes in history, knowledge of the Varian Disaster at Kalkriese had only been in the public consciousness a few decades. Peg herself had questioned me on this.
“I don’t know why you’re bothering with this,” she’d said after our thirteenth orgasm together. The booze had worn off, and I was feeling impeccable, natural elation from the companionship of someone like me.
“Clunn already uncovered the lion’s share of this battle,” Peg went on.
Unlike me, Peg was a Brit, so Clunn’s discoveries at the battle site in the late twentieth century had been a point of English and German pride for as long as we’d both been alive. Rome had fallen, so I cannot speak for their own affinity for Kalkriese, despite the lion’s share of artifact recoveries being of their own imperial pride, two millennia on.
Next morning, Sofer gave us a quick tour of the displays in the museum. Although I’d read the histories and guidebooks and pretty much devoured the website, being there made the difference, not only because of how well put together it is, but we were in actual proximity to the recovered objects. The massive Imperial mask replica greeted us with a resigned solemnity that made Peg’s words echo through my head: Perhaps, just as the Roman attempts to subjugate the German tribes during the first dynasty of Rome, this was all for nothing.
I didn’t pay much attention to Ivan or Dieter during the meeting or the tour. To them this was merely a diversion from a pub or a trip to an Osnabrück Chick-fil-A franchise.
On the other hand, having Peg and Craig there with me was enough to rouse me for the purpose of our few days of excavation, which if it didn’t turn up so much as a bone fragment, at least I got to experience a battle site that had haunted and intrigued me for so very long. Seeing so much of what had been uncovered already and preserved with such professionalism and care for the collective memory of the battle stirred me deeply: Even the loss of my tenure due to the bigotry of my so-called peers seemed like a turned, maybe torn-out page of my past, and the rest would take care of itself for a young trans woman’s hope, or folly, or faith.
“This place,” Sofer told me as an aside, “is like our way of trying to make the wrong right.”
“I’m not sure you can achieve something that human,” I said, glancing at the displays of Roman formations, tiny doomed soldiers dotted in blocks of discipline. “You can pay tribute to them, but honor is kind of their own call. You don’t honor the spirits of the dead with replicas.”
“These are exhibits,” Sofer countered. “And Rome knew how to put on a show.”
“In the arena.”
Sofer nodded, and we left it at that.
Peg told us that had it not been for the Kalkriese battle, Germany may have been assimilated into the Roman Empire, and the history of humanity could have been altered in some magnificent but perhaps stunted ways.
“It’s not up to us,” I told Sofer. “But if we find anything here, I’ll be glad to see it curated.”
Craig smiled, shrugged.
We were then led into the observation tower where you can see a panorama of the entire site, field and forest verge alike. As it was early September, just as the battle itself, we had the dregs of late summer, and Sol Invictus seemed to favor the entire project ahead of us, brief though it would be. The complex was plated with panels of rusted metal, giving the whole place an aptly sanguinary look that complemented the verdant greens and imposing blue skies.
The others had left, and it was just Peg and me gazing out at the horizon from the tower.
“This was like September eleventh for the nascent god Augustus,” I told Peg, probably for the hundredth time since we’d first hooked up. The battlefield stretched out before us in a midday fuzz of paganized avowal. “Literally.”
“How many on this team, besides you, speak any Latin?” she asked.
Peg was great with her Latin, but she was about to embark to Hamburg for her own excavation, trying to cull the deliciously scandalous dalliances of an immortal rock star from storied granddaughters in the Hamburg St. Pauli district, trans women who, like their ancestors, were just trying to eke out a living among the screwheads, jackoffs, and imposters of this world.
“Cis” is not a slur. It’s Latin: “the same side of.”
I smiled at her, shrugged, and, glad for a moment alone again, we kissed deeply and held one another, enjoying what we could in what remained of the late-summer heat. If anyone else came up into the observation tower, we didn’t notice them. There was plenty else to experience.
The next morning was just as hot early on as it had been midday of the museum visit. I didn’t notice I was setting out with a hangnail until we began digging the initial layers. Before embarking on my connecting flight through Portland, the TSA had confiscated my nail clippers after taking me aside into a room, where they made me expose myself just for the shits and giggles of it.
I knew my biting at the nail would only make it worse, so I asked members of the team if they had any clippers. If in reaction to this blank stares or smirks were dollar bills, I could’ve taken the next flight home with more cash than this project’s guarantor.
These people were nerds but not my kind of nerds. Even Craig seemed out of his element this morning, aloof and not running at one hundred percent.
Sofer had marked well where the previous excavators had uncovered the mule skeleton, and a few yards farther along, the buckles that had been appraised as true of Roman legionnaires.
The flags were not far from the famed swamp that had winched Varus’s forces against the Kalkriese hill. The Romans had been harried for three full days not only by Arminius but by the place itself. Also the gods had not favored them—the downpours had ruined their shields and arrows, and their sense of duty had only served to play into the hands of the “barbarian” Germanic tribes. The whole thing had been a rout and a deceit. Not many appreciate this in hindsight, but these soldiers were people, not robots. Many days’ ride from home, I could speculate for their terror and bewilderment as I stood surveying the site. It brought to mind the fictionalized depiction of the collapse of the Marines in the xenomorph hive in Aliens, and that was maybe twenty soldiers compared to the nearly twenty thousand who’d met their demise here.
Panic, disorientation, and the Roman way all forsaken to the sticks, mud, and ancient mounds.
A tiny chipmunk darted in front of me after I passed the paving stones meant to approximate the forest track made by the doomed Romans.
I hoped it was a good omen.
Instead, the distress of the small, furred courier transferred, and took my physical dysphoria to a level I hadn’t experienced since arriving in Europe. There is no army in across-the-Rhine Germany—
“What’s up?” Dieter asked at my shoulder. “You’ve been staring at that area since we got here.”
I shook my head.
“It was the swamp,” I said. “It was drained hundreds of years ago, but in the time of the battle it was a pinch point. I keep thinking of how many of them tried to make for it when they were outnumbered.”
“Or how many bodies were recovered.”
I wanted to ask if Dieter was from Hamburg, but was still wary of him because he and Ivan had been such fast friends. He looked like he was about to ask me something else when someone cried out to us.
The layering had begun slowly, so I’d have been surprised if they’d found anything already. I’d bitten at my hangnail all morning despite any strength of will, and I’d not even glanced at a trowel. There was some effect the place was having on me—back in Arizona, Mexico, or even in Ohio, you couldn’t have dragged me away from the soil until I’d turned up some kind of artifact, a link with someone who’d lived epochs before and might have even been trans themselves (or were wondering about that, despite jaded edicts of the time). But at the field I was tentative, cagey, as if our actual tread was a form of rape. The landscape of the preserved battlefield was too beautiful to disrupt, even though it had been curated and landscaped for our modern, timid, condescending gaze.
I caught myself biting at my nail again and was about to look for the first-aid kit when Ivan came running up.
“We found some things,” he panted at us. “Small pieces.”
I tried my best not to see him as a dark shadow, but nevertheless, the light in his eyes told me that this might indeed be a successful project and there could be more money coming.
Dieter picked up what Ivan put down.
“Where?” I asked.
“Base of the hill,” Ivan said.
Right away I was suspicious, but we followed him to the place he’d flagged. Despite the acreage and scope, the site had been raked over so many times, one had better not expect a Sutton Hoo breakthrough. And yet we rounded the verge, and there the team had flagged five pieces on the tarp.
Craig was already there and motioned me over.
“We need to get these out of the sun,” Craig said.
I glanced down, my hangnail already forgotten.
“You’re . . . Fuckin’ A,” I muttered, heedless of how baritone I sounded.
The fragments screamed of breastplate armor and hinges. They seemed too good to be true, but Craig was right about the urgency—exposure to the late-morning sun was not going to help these objects that had lain in the earth for so long. Thankfully the appraisal tent wasn’t far.
Before Ivan could get his paws on this stuff, Craig and I bunched them into the bins and hurried off. We rounded the same corner I’d come from when I noticed the bushel.
Stripped bark and branches had been lain at the juncture of the drained swamp and the paving slabs.
I stopped a moment and wondered if this was part of the museum landscapers’ duties. But I hadn’t seen anyone else working the site other than our team, and this had to have been placed recently. Surprisingly, it measured several feet in diameter and hadn’t been tied, so it was more of a pile than a curated mass.
Craig and I made for the appraisal tent, where we could get ourselves out of the sun along with those little finds. The rest of the team were out, and I was glad to have some time to watch Craig work. We unfolded a table and set the fragments down.
“These look period,” he offered after brushing their edges. “No insignia.”
They appeared a little too pristine, but I didn’t want to say for sure without Sofer also having a look. I felt incredulous because we’d not been there an hour and already our excavation had unearthed finds that Clunn with his trusty metal detector was unlikely to have missed all those years ago when he first identified the battlefield, and especially in such a major feature in the landscape. That enormous hill was notoriously important to the whole memory of this place.
Dieter traipsed in and told Craig that Ivan wanted a word with him. I was too busy examining the fragments to pay much attention to this at the time—I was measuring and comparing the stuff with my notes, and the authenticity of the pieces unfolded moment by moment. I began to question the very concept of time, of memory, of my very own dysphoria.
Would this find get my tenure back? Was this success? Was this defilement of the restful dead?
My thoughts raced in this manner perhaps because of my disillusionment with how badly the Arizona project had turned out. The museum itself prostituted objects sacred to Anasazi scholarship and then lost all trace of the material (so they’d said). After that, I was determined not to let it happen again, but even here at Kalkriese, anxious to get my so-called career back together and desperate to get my derailed transition on track again, I felt like a grave robber. What was I supposed to do with all of those years of study and fieldwork? What else could I do? Where else could I go?
A slow patter of rain began on the tent canvas, and I looked up to find Dieter had been staring at me the whole time. I squinted past him and outside where the weather shifted into a heavy downpour. I hoped Craig would come back alone, but Ivan was at his shoulder. They weren’t that drenched.
“Great.” Ivan brightened at seeing me. “Just us guys.”
“Oh, go fuck a kangaroo,” I spat back. “What’s your malfunction, anyway? Why are you even here? You’re unlikely to find any panzer shit in the ground.”
This only encouraged Ivan, and he went on to ask about Peg, and what kind of sex trans women are supposed to pretend to have, but I expected this from him.
I kept at him regardless.
“I saw you on the subreddit. You know all that Nazi shit’s not legal here anymore, right?”
The rain really came down hard then. Some of it hit my arm through a rent and instinctively I began chewing at my nail again. I’d forgotten to look for the first-aid kit.
Dieter just shrugged.
“Like, is it frotting, or what?” Ivan grinned as he stepped closer to me. “You rub yourselves together?”
“Only your mom,” I snapped back.
Craig gestured toward the finds.
“Hey, both of you, I didn’t travel halfway around the world to waste my time like this. I can just send the lot of you home and Sofer and I can get on with this ourselves.”
Where was home?
The rain let up slowly but steadily, as if from a tap. Craig told me to cover the finds and that we should all get back to the dig. That the sooner we finished surveying, the sooner we could move on to the next section Sofer had assigned. Craig had my back with Ivan’s harassment, but I wished the curator was there too. I wondered what he’d have thought of what we’d found, which was more than I’d expected. The site had been picked over so many times over the years. And yet I felt we had spoiled history itself. It wasn’t just Ivan’s being a bastard—I felt dirty.
We stepped out, and my eyes had to adjust. The storm left just as suddenly as it had come. The brightest sun now shined, and yet it felt unsafe.
“It smells different out here,” Craig muttered.
“Well, maybe it’s something pagan,” I quipped. “Or rain.”
“No rainbow.”
I wasn’t looking for that anyway.
My eyes were drawn back to the old drained swamp, not so dry anymore as the rainwater had formed a vernal sea that stretched beyond the forest verge, but there was something else—the bundle of sticks I’d seen at the junction earlier had tripled in size. I shielded my eyes against the glare to see, and then wondered if we were being punked by the museum, or Blair-Witched by some freckle-faced student filmmakers.
My boots were squelching in mud, and I was about to turn back to the tent when Ivan started again, waving his arms from the verge.
There was a point of light there, aspiring to the sun.
I had no wish to get closer to Ivan. Craig got there before me. I knew I had to maintain my appraisals if I wanted to get my share of the stipend, so I quickened my pace.
What Ivan picked up from the turned grass and mud looked anomalous to the rest of what we’d found: a fully intact baton, ivory-white handle, about the size of a small lamp, topped by a cast golden eagle with its wings fully spread out.
There was no fucking way.
“The nineteenth legion,” Craig told us. “SPQR.”
“The Senate and the People of Rome,” I muttered. “And maybe eBay.”
Even from that distance I knew it had to be a replica. Maybe Sofer was testing us to see if we’d be able to make the call, as if this whole thing was some odd scavenger hunt rather than an excavation. If so, that would’ve been in poor taste, and I wouldn’t think the curator would want to waste our time and the trustees’ money like that.
“That’s not real,” I told them. “It has to be a facsimile from the exhibits.”
“How do you know?” Ivan sneered.
“You haven’t found anything real. If you’d read Tacitus and Cassius Dio you’d know all of the aquilae were recovered when Rome came back to bury what was left of the bodies. And the standard of the nineteenth had been the very first one. Germanicus recaptured it from the tribes.”
Again, vacant stares from Craig, Ivan, and Dieter.
“Ask Sofer himself.” I shrugged. “That thing may as well have just come from a Happy Meal.”
I ran my index finger along the headpiece, which, despite its dubious origin, reflected the afternoon sunlight with some defiant glory of lost empires. It wasn’t cheap; it was solid and cast in steel, but so unweathered and unblemished that it had to have been planted only just in advance of our arrival that day.
Ivan kept after me.
“How are you so sure it’s not real? Maybe someone put some of them back, or we only have the histories to say so.”
Indeed all traces of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth standards had been lost to obscurity, but there was a small matter of the very gradual decline and fall of an empire to contend with. Two millennia had passed, with Rome shunting itself eastward to Anatolia before ultimately acceding to Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453.
All told, none of my so-called team members had taken Clunn’s thorough excavation of the site into consideration. And by this time, I could tell there was no talking to these people. Again, these were nerds but not my kind of nerds. Even Craig as he held the object seemed entranced by it, as if he’d found something sacred and singular rather than counterfeit. The aquilae had held as much importance to the “barbarians” as it did to the Roman military, this was undeniable.
I turned back toward the appraisal tent, and there was the landscape, not forgotten but lost, hostile, fucked up.
“Where’s the museum?” someone behind me asked.
The observation tower that had stood meters above the tree line had vanished. This wasn’t some trick of the sun—I’d glanced at the hulking column in my eye line throughout the morning, of course not thinking much about it except to wonder if Sofer had stood up there and watched us occasionally. Any trace of it had gone and made me wonder if the thing had collapsed during the rain, but I think we’d have heard that take place. The grinding of those pre-rusted plates would not make a subtle commotion.
I was incredulous Craig could have been hoodwinked so fast and easily. Ivan or Dieter (or both) could have bought the replica online, or even at the museum itself. They’d had all morning to plant it at the hill. The more this dawned on me, the less I thought about the missing tower.
There had to be some other explanation for that. Unless the wanton desecration of the site, or the juvenile attempt to deceive Craig and myself had disrupted some semblance there of time or space. I shook the notion away as soon as it had entered my mind, but when I tromped closer to the tent I got a better look at the trees, a thick line of late-summer shade, a shelter against the blaring and heedless Sol Invictus.
I didn’t recognize the faces. They weren’t attached to bodies, or even necks. These were human faces, though, defiled to the quick: each piked to a trunk, some through the mouth, some the eye, the farthest gone to decomposition through the forehead.
I turned back to the others. “Is this supposed to be—”
Craig’s eyes were still as wide as saucers as he held the counterfeit aquilae aloft, as if he himself had won some great victory over the ages and mysteries. But if it was a hollow gesture on his part, perhaps he wasn’t entirely to blame. The replica was indeed very pristine and beautiful, and I considered searching online for a copy to place in my own apartment (especially from the nineteenth legion), when a javelin point pierced Craig through the sternum from behind, killing his enthusiasm, then his breath.
The replica tumbled out of Craig’s clutches and disappeared into the shrubs just west of us. I watched Ivan’s eyes follow the eagle as it flew off, but before I could lunge away, an edged metal bit the skin at my throat.
“Deinde te,” a broken voice whispered, wheeling me around.
You’re next.
The forces arrayed before us looked closer to a cohort than a legion. The latter would have filled the visible field, but this was more than enough: four of us against hundreds, and what soldiers! Each stood at full height once their heads fully reattached. It was something to see, this resurrected army.
It didn’t take long for my fascination to give way to terror as the rotted heads popped off the trees, wriggled from the soil, and rained from the sky. Absurdly, I wondered if all of the heads matched their origin.
When the unspeakable happens, when the world turns upside down and the ground feels like it’s swallowing you up, time slows to a grinding halt, and you wonder if you’re just abiding a waking nightmare. This had happened during my tenure hearing, when the people I’d thought supported my decision to live had reversed themselves overnight and painted me as a criminal to the board. Unfair doesn’t even begin to describe it.
But the concept of fairness hadn’t even been a dream in the cheapened lives of these soldiers. They’d allowed themselves to be deceived and routed in unfamiliar terrain. Their commander Varus himself had been warned repeatedly of the impending disaster.
The soldier with the sword at my neck ordered me in Latin to step forward.
The eyes were the worst of them. The mud, the twine, and the sticks aided the soldiers’ bodies to stand erect. But their eyes burned with a red light that pierced me to my innermost dream-world, my chromosomes, my wishes to see Peg again, and any hope that had driven me to stay alive up to that moment felt useless, shrunken.
It was our turn to be routed.
The revenants stepped over Craig’s prone body and made to dispatch Ivan and Dieter in short order.
My disassociation went into hardcore overdrive—everything I’d built up to then had all been for nothing. My decision to stay alive had in itself been folly—the tenure hearing, my catching shit for clothes shopping at Target, the randomized harassment by TSA, mall cops, and customs officials just to get to this part of central Germany, where all it was amounting to was having these creatures come out of the woods and torture us to death. Perhaps we deserved it—we’d disturbed a place of sacred history, not in the religious sense but historically. Archaeology is a very white pursuit that more often serves to perpetuate colonization and dominion. The Romans had been taught this lesson, and I was only just beginning to learn its egregiousness and futility. Let sleeping corpses lie.
But no, there had also been Peg.
To have spent so many years lying to myself, deciding that the best way to deal with searing dysphoria was to ignore it and drown myself in histrionic studies that others had written in the field (often badly enough to remind me that this approach wasn’t working). And to top it all off, the social aspects of my closet—to be constantly wondering what intimacy or even a dinner date would feel like for the deserving and lucky among us, and still to keep hitting that wall where people who haven’t lived through the shame and guilt at not feeling right within yourself won’t deign to look across a table at you, much less hug you when you’re down. Maybe it is like having a hangnail that only gets worse the more you bite at it.
Spending a day with Peg, though, someone not just like me finally but someone who understood the pitfalls of navigating academia as a trans woman, was enough to have galvanized me during this terror, but it also filled me with regret that I hadn’t just dropped everything and gone with her to Hamburg.
But I also knew better on three fronts: First, I’d have been a distraction to her. Peg was off on a project that would shine a light on one of the most famous celebrities of the latter twentieth century, himself a murder victim, and that was highly emotive stuff if not plain dangerous. She needed her focus. Second, I’d lose the stipend Craig and Sofer had promised me, and without my tenure, I had no savings to fall back on. Third, the lovers who burn twice as bright risk burning twice as short, and I didn’t want that. It had taken so long to find someone like Peg, and all told, I didn’t want to blow it.
And yet there I’d blown it, by not going with her and staying behind only to be swallowed by nightmare and slaughter in that late-summer daylight.
Ivan turned to run but only just right into more ghouls who glided up from the soil and clutched his legs. He fell with a thud right into the still-forming limbs of our captors, their solidity ever-burgeoning with the sticks and weeds that flew into them as if pushed by a tide. Their red, glowing eyes never blinked once.
Dieter just stood there in shock as one of them grabbed him from around the neck, easily enclosing it, and grunted something unearthly as it marched him back toward the appraisal tent. That place had been the last semblance of the real by then. All else had unleashed some uncanny vortex of violence so sudden and hostile, I wondered if this was what it had felt like for the soldiers in the quick of the ambush itself at Kalkriese.
I thought I heard the guard who held me fastened to his own sword laughing as Ivan was then brought to his feet by five of the opaque creatures. One of them then whirled the Aussie around to face me. The creature’s strength and agility was astonishing. I saw no mouth hole as it nodded sidelong to its prize, and then it addressed me in Latin.
I saw no movement in its face composed of soil and bracken, but its voice was clear, albeit sounded like gravel tossed down through a harvester machine.
“No more lies,” it said, in the most erudite Latin.
With one hand it yanked Ivan’s head back by the hair, and then its other shot lightning-quick into Ivan’s gaping, ridiculous mouth, twisted a moment, and tore the tongue out with the finality of a scythe. Ivan’s eyes clamped shut, and his gurgling scream was met with greater violence as the entity slapped him upside the head with the denuded tongue and then shoved him back down into the mud.
No more lies.
Were they trying to purge what had happened to them all that long, long time ago?
Ivan’s burbled screaming increased as the other soldiers dragged him by his boots toward the tree line where I’d first seen the heads. The museum tower still wasn’t there, or at least not in the time and place where this was happening to us.
Dieter was marched out of the tent, artifacts cradled in his arms. He saw what was left of Ivan and let out a cry of his own. The revenants weren’t done with their liar.
More sticks, leaves, and mud gathered to the creatures as they fastened Ivan to one of the bigger trees, his rent and bloodied face to the bark. It looked like they were trying to crucify him. It takes a long time to die from that.
And now it was our turn.
Ivan’s squealing died down a little, maybe out of exhaustion. Dieter called me by name as some of the company turned to face him. He dropped the small pieces we’d first unearthed and turned to run. The afternoon was getting on, and as he tried to make distance from the creatures, I saw him silhouetted against a break in the clouds. The sunlight caught him just right before a soldier stepped out from behind the appraisal tent and with one stroke lopped his head off. Also not a quick death, but perhaps more merciful than what Ivan was compelled to endure.
I’d read plenty about how the tribes had dispatched the captives from the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth legions, and as the ripshit and malignant spirits of those same victims turned in my direction, I finally realized the atrocities they had in mind for me.
The wicker enclosure they’d crammed me into wasn’t upright. I was in fact lying prone inside the hull of a wolf bitch, constructed with twine and wood and sod that when spirited together formed a cage that felt harder and colder than my own car where I’d tried to kill myself in order to avoid facing the truth of my being. The rope around my neck tightened with every breath. The landscape had also continued to build these vengeful spirits. Their flesh hadn’t grown any more human—the mud and soil made them darker than midnight—but by that time, most of them towered almost to the tops of the trees, and how they had constructed the wheels that bore me inside the wicker construction, I couldn’t tell you. Whatever force had made it, was keeping it together, and preventing me from escape (to where?), it was the only reality left to me by then.
Until the fire came.
They started at my feet; and although it wasn’t my first time being burned, it’s the worst pain every time. Perhaps it’s the dehumanizing aspect of the element; it takes all of your features away, perhaps even one’s own memory—the ultimate fuck-you.
I’d have gladly forgotten my suicide attempt, but the fire brought that night back in a flood of sorrow. Not only did I feel regret for just not going along with Peg, but I was dying for something that didn’t make any sense. All told, I’d never consult on a dig again.
Through a gap in the rib cage of the wolf, I saw Ivan drooping against the tree they’d crucified him to, still facing the other way. But then, I also saw the replica—the sunlight hit it with such precision, pollen danced about it like fireflies. I screamed at the petty little bastard, imploring Ivan to tell these beings that the eagle was counterfeit, to admit that he’d ordered it online from wherever.
Then I stopped myself—they wouldn’t have understood him, even with his tongue.
Right then, a torch was thrust at my head through a gap in the wolf. The right side of my hair singed, and I let out a short curse, in Latin.
The fire carrier stopped short.
Its glowing red eyes narrowed, and the revenant muttered something about cleansing me with fire. Beautiful fire.
Over the grass, dirt, and twigs, the pieces of armor that we’d initially found were fastened to the being’s torso. This mattered to them more than any fascination with the dead past mattered to me, in the end. I wanted a future, if not with Peg, then to be happy living in my own skin, to be alive-for-real in the truest, deepest, most human sense.
The being continued staring down at me, its torch powerful and pointing skyward.
To avoid another jab, I cleared my throat, and in Latin, I asked its name.
Fraxinus Antonius, it said. Of the nineteenth legion.
Fraxinus—ash trees, of the family Oleaceae. Ashes are also a symbol of rebirth. The lost soldiers had come back to Kalkriese, just not as human.
The other soldiers looked back at me, heedless of the seeming delay in dispatching me to the flames. One of the taller ones, seemingly in a panic, thrust his own torch at my shoulder. I winced, and with my limited mobility in the enclosure, it was difficult to dodge these attacks. Upon his withdrawal, I saw the twine at one of the hinges stay aglow and curl into itself.
“I am Tamora,” I told them in Latin. Their hesitation was the only expression I could glean. This was all guesswork and desperation to buy time.
And of course, I began to fuck it up right away.
I thought the eagle, fake though it was, might somehow appease the revenants.
The twine at the hinge burned almost through. It was an advantage that I needed. I kicked, shouted, and rolled out of the wicker wolf and onto my side in the grass. The momentum was unstoppable, my desire for a future, to see Peg again. To start facial electrolysis back home and abide that burn. Perhaps even to gain tenure again at a seat of learning that would actually put into practice its non-discrimination policy, some concept.
Clouds set in again. All the soldiers’ eyes were on me as they shuffled closer, and then I saw PEG.
There she stood, realer than the Hamburg dalliances of the nascent John Lennon, and she was holding the eagle standard replica aloft. Beyond her, Ivan had stopped wriggling.
SPQR.
Senatus Populusque Romanus.
We both said it together, like a beguiled couple who eat, drink, fuck, love.
A sword crossed her throat. I screamed and fell to the ground with both the replica and Peg. I was overwhelmed as the legion surrounded me and watched me sob into nothing.
After a while, it began to rain.
They all just stood there, staring at the aquilae languishing in the grass. Some of the more soil-based among the dead things began to sag, but Fraxinus stood tall, his armor gleaming against the elements.
I wiped my eyes and glared at him.
“It’s not real,” I told him. “Fraxinus Atoninus, all of the eagles went back home, to Rome. This one is a replica. It’s fake.”
Ivan thankfully was toast by then; he was the one to blame for all of this happening. Not me. I just wished his suffering had gone on for longer.
Peg had stopped moving.
The afternoon was getting on, and once more the rain let up. Late summer is a motherfucker. And so is Kalkriese.
I gripped Ivan’s cheap replica stunt, stood up, wiped the dirt and rain from it against my torn and singed dress, and offered the thing to Fraxinus.
Senatus Populusque Romanus.
SPQR.
As soon as the being grasped it with its wooden fingers, the whole army blew apart in a quiet sigh of borrowed components. The fake standard fell into the very bundle of what Fraxinus had been approximated into, himself a replica of the lost and the, yeah, forgotten.
They had all been lied to. That was the shit memory of this battlefield. It was a humiliation where duty had stood for precious little else than futility, except perhaps for changing the course of European history.
Peg rolled over in the mud, her hand pressed against her neck. She sat up amid the piles of sticks and the broken wolf of wicker interstices, and then asked me what had happened.
Elated she survived, and exhausted, I slumped my shoulders and pointed to the eagle.
Just then, Sofer’s frantic voice could be heard from just beyond the verge. Ivan, Dieter, and Craig remained just as they had been when they’d been ended. The curator’s face was a sun of outrage. The observation tower of the museum stood just beyond the scene in all of its rust-plated glory.
“Was zur Hölle ist hier passiert?” he demanded.
Peg picked up the eagle replica from the bundle of what had been Fraxinus and scrutinized it a little more closely. She didn’t look too bad; like my burns, the wound across her neck also seemed to be a thing of the past. Perhaps she remained alive because she didn’t die during the rout—at least not in the real sense, any sense that would’ve otherwise made sense at that battlefield.
Peg let the fake thing fall back into the mess of sticks, and asked Sofer if he had any wine for us.
I shrugged, and bit at my hangnail anew. It didn’t hurt as much. We try for these little things, although they don’t usually work out.
After our benefactor ran back screaming toward the museum, flailing his arms like a child, Peg and I decided to stay there and wait until sunset before deciding whether or not to continue our journey to St. Pauli in Hamburg.