Hadrian's wall

by William Dietrich

  I am here to interrogate survivors, which means I try to find some truth in the web of lies, self-deception, and wishful thinking that makes up human memory. Many of the best witnesses are dead, and the rest are divided and confused by what happened. They carry in their mood the stink of Hadrian's Wall, the smell of burned timbers, unburied flesh, and abandoned food pots that churn with squirming maggots. The flies come by day and the wild dogs by night, driven off by the desultory crew of sullen slaves, crippled soldiers, and pressed Briton laborers working to repair the damage. It is the stink of victory that in truth is a kind of defeat, of stability replaced by uncertainty.

  How soon before the barbarians come back again, perhaps for good?

  That too, the emperor and Senate want to know.

  I have made a list of informants to interview. The handmaiden. The cook. The villa owner. The captured druid. But I start with a soldier, direct and blunt.

  The centurion on the field litter before me is named Longinus: a good record, his foot crushed by a battle-ax in the desperate fighting, his eyes dark with sleepless pain and the knowledge he will never walk again. Still, he has glory lean only envy. I question him.

  "Do you know who I am?"

  "An imperial inspector."

  "You understand my purpose?"

  "To do the bidding of emperor and Senate."

  "Yes. And yours?"

  "I'm a man of duty. It's all I've ever been."

  "So you will answer any question?"

  "When there's an answer I can give." Crisp, unhesitating, to the point. A Roman.

  "Good. Now, you knew the senior tribune Galba Brassidias?"

  "Of course."

  "When be was promoted?"

  "I brought the news to him."

  "And when was that?"

  "The autumn of two years ago."

  "You were a courier?"

  Longinus is no simple soldier. He understands I'm surprised that a ranking centurion had been assigned the mission of riding the post. "The news was delicate. Duke Fullofaudes, the commander of northern Britannia, sent me because I'd campaigned with Galba and knew him as well as any man could know him. A hard man, but a good soldier. Galba, I mean."

  "What do you mean, 'a hard man'?"

  "Cavalry. Not the kind to have at banquet. Not a conversationalist. He was a provincial from Thrace who lacked refinement, a superb horseman but never schooled. Solid but grim. The best kind to have on your right side in battle."

  "Of course." As if I truly know. "And he took the news well?"

  Longinus gave a pained smile, remembering.

  "Poorly?"

  "None of this will make sense to you unless you've served on the Wall." It is a careful insult, an attempt to pretend at a vast difference between civilian and soldier. As if a breastplate changes the human heart!

  "I have spent my whole life on the Wall," I growl, giving him a sense of the power behind me. "Rome's wall, from Arabia Petraea to your dunghill here. I have traded insults with the arrogant warriors of Sarmatia and sifted rumors of the distant hun. I have smelled the stink of Berber camels and eaten with sentries on the cold palisades of the Rhine, counting the fires of the Germans across the river. Do not think you have to tell me about the Wall."

  "It's just that it was… complicated."

  "You said you would answer any question."

  He shifts, grimacing. "I'll answer it. To be honest isn't simple, however."

  "Explain yourself."

  "Life at the border is complex. Sometimes you're a sentry, sometimes an ambassador. Sometimes a wall, sometimes a gate. Sometimes we fight the barbarians, sometimes we enlist them. For outsiders like the woman to come in-"

  "Now you are getting ahead of my questions. I asked for Galba's reaction to his superior's appointment, not his justification."

  Longinus hesitates, appraising me. He doesn't seek to know if I can be trusted. How can you ever be sure of that? Rather, whether I can understand. The hardest thing in life, after all, is to be understood. "You've been to the breach where the barbarians broke through?"

  "It is the first place I went to."

  "What did you see there?"

  The interrogation has been turned around. Longinus wants proof I can comprehend what he tells me. I think before I speak.

  "A thin garrison. Sulking craftsmen. A cold pyre, nothing but bones."

  He nods, waiting.

  "The Wall is being repaired," I go on, betraying some of what will be in my report, "but not with the same care as before. I measured the lime, and the mix is weak. The contractor is corrupt and the imperial foreman untrained. His superior died in the fighting. The mortar will dry to little better than hard sand and will have to be redone."

  "Will it?"

  I know what he means. General Theodosius has restored rough order, but the treasury has been drained and authority is dissipating. The best builders are moving south. "It should be redone. How well depends on good Romans such as yourself."

  He nods. "You're observant, Inspector Draco. Realistic. Smart, perhaps. Smart to have gone to so many places and lived as long as you have." The centurion has approved of me, I realize, and I'm secretly flattered by his approval. A man of action seeing value in me, a man of words! "Maybe even honest, which is rare these days. So I'll tell you about Galba and the lady Valeria and the last good days of the Petriana cavalry. The patricians will blame him, but I don't. Do you?"

  I think again. "Loyalty is the first virtue."

  "Which Rome did not repay in kind."

  That is the question, isn't it? Everyone knows what soldiers owe the state-death, if necessary. But what does the state owe its soldiers?

  "Galba dedicated his life to Rome, and then the influence of this woman took his command away," Longinus goes on. "She pretended to innocence, but…"

  "You do not concede that?"

  "My experience is that no one is innocent. Not in Rome. Not here, either."

  Innocence is what I've come to decide, of course. Treason. Jealousy. Incompetence. Heroism. I pass judgment like a god.

  Certainly Longinus is right about having to understand Hadrian's Wall. In all the empire no place is more remote than this one, none farther north, none farther west. Nowhere are the barbarians more intractable, the weather gloomier, the hills more windswept, the poverty more abject I listen, my questions sharp but infrequent, letting him not just answer but explain. I absorb, imagine, and clarify, summarizing in my own mind his story. It must have been like this.

  II

  The messenger would come at dusk, the signals promised, flags rising from tower to tower to race ahead of the courier's pounding horse like shadows in advance of the sinking sun. The waiting centurion read them from his fortress parapet with concealed exultation, his face its usual mask. At last! He said nothing to the sentry beside him, of course, but instead of descending to wait in comfort, he paced the watch-post impatiently, wrapped against the biting wind by the white ceremonial cloak of the cavalry. Twenty years, and these last moments were the hardest, he admitted to himself, twenty years and these last heartbeats like hours. Yet Galba Brassidias forgave his own impatience as he forgave his own ambition. He'd soldiered for this moment, soldiered in dust and blood. Twenty years! And now the empire was granting him his due.

  The courier crested the horizon of a low hill. From long experience Galba could predict the remaining hoofbeats it would take to reach the fortress gate, just as he could number a sentry's steps before the turn. Using the faint rhythm of the approaching hooves as cadence, he counted out along the stone towers.

  Against a northern wilderness, the Wall announced Roman order. It dominated its terrain, undulating along the crest of the ridge that separated Britannia from raw Caledonia and stretching farther than a man could run or see: eighty Roman miles. As such it was both fortification and statement. Its approaches had been shaved bald to allow clear arrow and catapult shot. A ten-foot-deep ditch had been dug at its base. The Wall itself was thicker than
the axle of a chariot and almost three times the height of a man. Sixteen large forts, sixty-five smaller ones, and one hundred and sixty signal towers were spaced along it like beads on a string. By day, the Wall's whitewashed stucco made the barrier gleam like hard bone. At night, torches in each tower created a winking boundary of light. Soldiers had manned the barrier for two and a half centuries, repairing and improving it, because the Wall was where everything began and everything ended.

  To the south was civilization. Britannia's villas shone in the dusk like white echoes of the Mediterranean.

  To the north was Outside: huts, dirt tracks, wooden gods, and druidic witches.

  Opportunity, for an ambitious man.

  His own fort, the fort of the Petriana cavalry, commanded a broad ridge. To its north was a marshy valley and rolling, empty hills, to the south a backing river and Roman supply road. East and west ran the Wall. The cavalry post was as squat and stolid as an oaken stump, the corners of its stone walls rounded for masonry strength and its interior jammed with barracks and stables for five hundred men and horses. Clinging to the bastion's southern side was a parasitical settlement of wives, prostitutes, bastards, pensioners, cripples, beggars, merchants, smiths, brewers, millers, innkeepers, taverners, priests, quack doctors, fortune-tellers, and moneylenders, all of them as tenacious as lichen and as inevitable as the rain. Their houses stepped down to the river in a crazed ziggurat of white stucco and red tile, an imitation of Rome. You could smell the manure, leather, and garlic from a mile away.

  Hadrian's famous old wall was reputed to be the bitterest of stations. The wind howled off both oceans like the banshees of Celtic legend; the whores were as ugly as they were diseased, and the tradesmen as dishonest as they were disheveled. Pay went astray, dispatches were late, and recognition from Rome, when it came at all, was tardy and meager. Yet year after year, decade after decade, century after century, the damnable barrier prevailed. It worked as impediment, and it worked on the savage mind.

  And its gates? These led to hardship and glory.

  "A messenger from the Sixth Victrix!" the sentry standing stiffly next to the centurion now cried, identifying the legion of origin from the pennant the man carried. "A communication from Eburacum!"

  Galba checked himself one last time. In preparation for this moment he'd donned his parade uniform: slave-polished chain mail atop a quilted tunic, golden neck torque and armbands of valor, a silver shoal of phalarae medals on his chest, and the long spatha sword of the Petriana cavalry, its blade coated with olive oil and its pommel gleaming where his thumb rubbed its gold. In his fist he held the vinewood staff of centurion command, his knuckles white. As usual it was frigid on the parapet, his breath fogging, and yet Galba felt no cold. Only the long-banked coals of ambition, now about to burst into flame.

  "May the gods give you what you deserve, sir," the tower sentry offered.

  Galba glanced at the man, flogged not long ago for falling asleep at this post. In the old army he'd have been executed. Was there any insolence hidden now? No, only the proper measure of fear and respect. None dared mock Galba Brassidias. He watched the man's eye glance nervously at the golden chain that Galba hung from two loops on his waist. The chain threaded a curiously high number of finger rings, made of gold, silver, iron, brass, bone, wood, and stone. They bore the design of every god and every charm. Forty of them now.

  "Yes," the centurion replied. "May Rome give it."

  The Petriana was not what it once was, Galba knew. Smaller by half. A mongrel of races and creeds. Marriage allowed to stem desertion. The barracks corrupted with bitching wives and bawling children. Most of the men were owed back pay and better equipment. Both, if ever received, would likely be lost to gambling debts incurred out of garrison boredom. Too many men were on leave, too many sick, too many lingering in hospital. The entire unit was short on remounts. It was a place run on habit and complacency.

  All that would now change. All things would now become possible.

  Galba straightened, the rings jingling at his waist, and held the sentry's nervous eye. "From now on, soldier, sleep on your watch at real peril." Then he trotted briskly down the tower stairs to claim his fate.

  His victory had occurred the month before, on a cavalry foray to rescue the pigsties and lard lockers of Cato Cunedda: a neighboring warlord, smuggler, opportunist, and sycophant who pledged fealty to Rome whenever that fiction suited his politics. Word of a pirate raid by a band of Scotti, barbarians from the isle of Eiru, had sent Galba and two hundred men and horses on a near-killing pace through a long day and longer night, coming at dawn to the gray Hibernian Sea. Their greeting was a horizon of smoke and the faint wails of brutalized women and orphaned children.

  The centurion called a halt well short of the combat, his troopers dismounting to stretch and piss as their weary horses pulled at autumn grass. With practiced deliberation they unstrapped the helmets tied to their saddles and unrolled the chain mail they'd bundled to keep down their sweat, donning both as they dressed for war. A belt and baldric held sword and dagger, their hasta spears were laid in the grass. Then they bit into bread and dried fruit, eating lightly in anticipation of combat.

  "Shouldn't we break up the assault?" It was centurion Lucius Falco: capable, but too decent for his own good, in Galba's opinion. Falco was distantly related to almost everyone along the Wall because his family had served in garrison for six generations, and he thus had feelings useless to a soldier. In the old army the man would've been posted to a distant province where sentiment couldn't take root, but it was cheaper to leave officers in place these days. Such was modern Rome.

  "We wait," Galba replied to the officers gathered around him. He sat in the grass and rotated onto his lap the scabbard holding his own sword, tapping the weapon's carved white hilt with rhythmic fingers. Rumor held that the grip was fashioned from the human bone of some particularly stubborn enemy, a tale the centurion did nothing to quench and had, in fact, started himself during a drinking bout through enigmatic hints and dour silences. Galba had long ago learned that it did no harm for a commander to inflate his reputation. He'd won fights with a glare.

  "Wait?" objected Falco. "They're being skewered!"

  "Listen to the wind," Galba rumbled. "By my ear a lot of the skewering going on is Scotti pricks into Cato's bitches, which simply seeds a bumper crop of barbarians for next summer. Meanwhile, most of our allies will get to a broch tower or scatter to the woods."

  "But we rode fast through the night-"

  "To set a trap. There's nothing more useless in battle than a tired cavalry mount."

  Falco watched the smoke unhappily. "It's a hard thing to wait."

  "Is it?" Galba's look took in all the officers. "For our barbarian ally to feel some pain and panic is not a bad thing, brothers. It reminds Cato how his pathetic cow-stealing, dirt-grubbing, pig-feeding existence would be even more hopeless if the Petriana cavalry weren't around to punish his enemies."

  The decurions snickered.

  "We're going to rescue him only after he's been robbed?"

  "Watch and see if he's not happier for it, Falco! It's human nature to ignore prevention and appreciate a cure. We'll pick our ground for battle, and the wait gives the Scotti time to get drunk on Cato's beer, wear themselves empty on his wenches, and get winded carrying his loot."

  "But to let them pillage-"

  "Lets us kill them easier, and take it all back."

  The blue-painted Scotti, tattooed and exultant, finally retreated toward their longboats at midmorning, the conflagration they'd lit so fierce that the smoke boiled like a thundercloud. The sorrow they'd brought lingered behind as a low keening; their booty weighted each warrior like a mule. The barbarians were drunk, blood-sated, and doubled over with looted prizes: grain, iron pots, woolens, scythes, jewelry, and several trussed goats and squealing pigs. Some of the prettiest wenches, sobbing and stunned, stumbled along with them, tied neck to neck by a rope. Most were bruised, their clothing torn t
o rags.

  "There before you is today's practice, men," Galba told his cavalry quietly, riding up and down their hidden line. "Straw for your lance. Lubrication for your spatha."

  He'd divided his command in two. Half still went to Falco, because he respected the man's ability as much as he was skeptical of his sympathetic heart. Now Galba's hundred came over the concealing hill two ranks deep, their upright lances a comb against the sky. The Roman shields were blood red and yellow, their chain mail rippled like gray water, and their helmets glinted silver in the autumn sun. They had the advantage of high ground and an unbroken, grassy slope. There were no trumpets and no cheers, their advance so quiet that it took some moments for the Scotti to even notice them. Finally there was visible shock at this sudden appearance of heavy horsemen on a hillside above and cries of warning. The livestock was dropped trussed in the grass. The female captives, now a distraction, had their throats quickly slit like sheep in a barnyard and fell like mown hay. Then there was a ragged formation of barbarian battle line and shouts of drunken defiance.

  Galba gave them time to do it. "Easier to kill a Scotti in open combat than hunt him in the weeds." Britannia had been conquered by foot-slogging legionaries, heavy infantry that crushed every attack the frantic Celts could throw at them. It was held, like much of the empire, by cavalry. Once the barbarians had learned that they could not break the Roman legion, they turned to raid, feint, and ambush, relying on the lightness of their armor to outdistance pursuing foot soldiers. It was to the horse that Rome turned to run its enemies down, and to the horse-breeding provinces at the empire's periphery, such as Thrace, to find its cavalrymen like Galba. Both sides were in a constant race, the Celt to plunder and the Roman to block or catch him. With their hasta spear, three light throwing javelins, and long spatha sword, the cavalry could alternately break the barbarian line, harass it, or cut and chop in a general melee. Some army units on the Continent and to the east used heavily armored cataphractarii and clibinarii, who carried their heavy lances in two hands to break disciplined infantry formations. In Britannia, however, such horsemen were too slow, and cavalry stayed relatively light. War was a hunt, and Galba was its master.