with flowing white hair and a Bismarck 'tache, who looked like Getafix but fought like a thousand cornered polecats. He approached me at a bellowing gallop, kicked my shield aside without breaking stride and unleashed a frenzied volley of sword blows, the majority of them post-mortem, accom panying each with a horrid Jimmy Connors grunt.
If that appointment with Great Uncle Punishment was my daily low, the highlight was scorpion drill. The public demonstrations Laurent organised every afternoon were safety-first affairs, with the machine we called Charybdis aimed at a patch of bare hillside and fired well below full velocity. How much more exhilarating were the freelance trials we held before the park opened, winding the tensioning gear as far as it would go and strafing the distant countryside with fat-shafted, iron-tipped bolts. One thunked so deeply into a tree trunk half a kilometre away that Germain and I had to use axes to hack it free. 'With Charybdis,' smiled Laurent when we returned, patting one of her solid wooden wheels, 'an accident is a death.'
A couple of days later, Laurent went off in the legion's minibus to visit a nearby Viking museum (along with Vincent, who had insisted on doing so in full Roman kit), leaving me alone to present Charybdis – and more challengingly the mysterious tangle of plumb-lines that was the legion's surveying equipment – to the gathered visitors. They were a predominantly teenage intake; all morning their unusually partisan jeering had irked me, and now, in camp, they swiftly took unkind advantage of my flustered naivety.
'Hey, dude, why don't you just use a laser?'
'Wit dis measure stick – how many metres from my ass to your face?'
Worse was to come when I raised my shield and thoughtlessly trotted out the standard lecture-ending challenge: 'So, if anyone wants to try their luck against the Roman defences . . .' That this would be the prelude to something other than the usual drumming of infant fists was apparent when the first kick landed. I hunkered down behind my shield as the Nike-powered impacts intensified into a fearsome tattoo, and the warm Nordic air was soon alive with my curse-studded cries for a ceasefire.
A pair of the most vicious assailants – one I recognised as having thrown an apple at us during the pre-battle walkabout – ambled up as I laid my shield to rest against our weapon rack, shaken and breathing heavily. 'You are many times defeated today,' began the smiling elder, tracing a finger along the point of an authentic display pila . 'It's maybe because of a tactic problem?'
His accomplice weighed in before I could reply. 'Or because you are wearing a dress?'
'Careful with that javelin, sonny,' I hissed. 'That's how I got these .' And I pressed my weeping, purulent knuckles right up to his freckled nose. Later we learned that Lejre had been host that day to a visiting party from a residential school specialising in the treatment of serious emotional disorders.
Debilitating as the many physical strains of pretending to be a Roman soldier surely were, I came to realise that my almost constant state of exhaustion was due in no small part to the brain-hungry efforts involved in making sense of what Frenchmen were saying to me. One night, having been introduced to a pastis and mint-syrup combination and made very good friends with it, I stumbled through some portal of alcoholic omniscience and heard myself debating speed-camera technology with Laurent. The linguistic fallout was dreadful. Thereafter, whenever I tried to convey a lack of comprehension – typically through the catch-all shrug/wrinkled nose/headshake combo – Laurent would be on hand with a dismissive gesture and some wink-accompanied comment about continuous-wave radar.
Yet all the while, I was slowly progressing. By day three I'd discovered an unexpected aptitude for certain period talents, prominently splitting logs and not washing. Dropping an axe on my foot while engaged in the
If that appointment with Great Uncle Punishment was my daily low, the highlight was scorpion drill. The public demonstrations Laurent organised every afternoon were safety-first affairs, with the machine we called Charybdis aimed at a patch of bare hillside and fired well below full velocity. How much more exhilarating were the freelance trials we held before the park opened, winding the tensioning gear as far as it would go and strafing the distant countryside with fat-shafted, iron-tipped bolts. One thunked so deeply into a tree trunk half a kilometre away that Germain and I had to use axes to hack it free. 'With Charybdis,' smiled Laurent when we returned, patting one of her solid wooden wheels, 'an accident is a death.'
A couple of days later, Laurent went off in the legion's minibus to visit a nearby Viking museum (along with Vincent, who had insisted on doing so in full Roman kit), leaving me alone to present Charybdis – and more challengingly the mysterious tangle of plumb-lines that was the legion's surveying equipment – to the gathered visitors. They were a predominantly teenage intake; all morning their unusually partisan jeering had irked me, and now, in camp, they swiftly took unkind advantage of my flustered naivety.
'Hey, dude, why don't you just use a laser?'
'Wit dis measure stick – how many metres from my ass to your face?'
Worse was to come when I raised my shield and thoughtlessly trotted out the standard lecture-ending challenge: 'So, if anyone wants to try their luck against the Roman defences . . .' That this would be the prelude to something other than the usual drumming of infant fists was apparent when the first kick landed. I hunkered down behind my shield as the Nike-powered impacts intensified into a fearsome tattoo, and the warm Nordic air was soon alive with my curse-studded cries for a ceasefire.
A pair of the most vicious assailants – one I recognised as having thrown an apple at us during the pre-battle walkabout – ambled up as I laid my shield to rest against our weapon rack, shaken and breathing heavily. 'You are many times defeated today,' began the smiling elder, tracing a finger along the point of an authentic display pila . 'It's maybe because of a tactic problem?'
His accomplice weighed in before I could reply. 'Or because you are wearing a dress?'
'Careful with that javelin, sonny,' I hissed. 'That's how I got these .' And I pressed my weeping, purulent knuckles right up to his freckled nose. Later we learned that Lejre had been host that day to a visiting party from a residential school specialising in the treatment of serious emotional disorders.
Debilitating as the many physical strains of pretending to be a Roman soldier surely were, I came to realise that my almost constant state of exhaustion was due in no small part to the brain-hungry efforts involved in making sense of what Frenchmen were saying to me. One night, having been introduced to a pastis and mint-syrup combination and made very good friends with it, I stumbled through some portal of alcoholic omniscience and heard myself debating speed-camera technology with Laurent. The linguistic fallout was dreadful. Thereafter, whenever I tried to convey a lack of comprehension – typically through the catch-all shrug/wrinkled nose/headshake combo – Laurent would be on hand with a dismissive gesture and some wink-accompanied comment about continuous-wave radar.
Yet all the while, I was slowly progressing. By day three I'd discovered an unexpected aptitude for certain period talents, prominently splitting logs and not washing. Dropping an axe on my foot while engaged in the
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