Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Every man is given a daily ration of barley. When things are going badly and there's nothing else to eat and no time to bake flatbread, we grind it up to make a porridge.

  I was a firebrand as a brat, a world-beater. I was rambunctious. I was always losing a tooth to someone's fist. My father was then an auxilia conscripted in his twenty-first year in Tungria. Later, after his twenty-five year discharge, he was granted citizenship and the tria nomina: forename, family name, and surname. I was born in the settlement beside the cavalry fort at Cilurnum. My mother worked in a gambling establishment with an inscription above the door that read drink, have sex, and wash. My father called Cilurnum a roaring, rioting, cock-fighting, wolf-baiting, horse-riding town, and admired the cavalry. My mother became his camp wife and gave him three children: a sickly girl who died at birth, Chrauttius, and me. Chrauttius was older and stronger and beat me regularly until he died of pinkeye before coming of age. Our father was on a punitive raid against the Caledonii when it happened. He returned with a great suppurating wound across his bicep and had a fever for three days. When my mother wasn't at work in the gambling establishment, she attended him with an affectionate irritation. She dressed and bound his wound with such vigor that neighbors were required to hold him down while she flushed the cut with alcohol. His bellows filled our ears. When he was recovered he brooded about his elder son. “Look at him,” he said to my mother, indicating me.

  “Look at him yourself,” she told him back.

  He had a particular way he favored of being pleasured which required someone to hold his legs down while the woman sat astride him. Usually my mother's sister assisted, but during his fever she feared for her own children, so I was conscripted to sit on his knees. I'd been on the earth for eight summers at that point, and I was frightened. At first I faced my mother but when she asked me to turn the other way, I held my father's ankles and pitched and bucked before he kicked me onto the floor.

  At the start of my eighteenth summer I armed myself with a letter of introduction from him to one of his friends still serving with the Tungrian cohort. My father's command of the language was by no means perfect, and since my mother had had the foresight to secure me a tutor for Latin and figures, I helped him with it. Annius to Priscus, his old messmate, greetings. I recommend to you a worthy man … and so on. I've since read thousands.

  I then presented myself for my interview held on the authority of the governor. Though I had no citizenship, an exception was made for the son of a serving soldier, and I was given the domicile castris and enrolled in the tribe of Pollia. Three different examiners were required to sign off on a provisional acceptance before I received my advance of pay and was posted to my unit. Attention was paid to my height, physical capacity, mental alertness, and most especially my skill in writing and arithmetic. A number of offices in the legion required men of good education, since the details of duties, parade states, and pay were entered daily in the ledgers, with as much care, I was told, as were revenue records by the civil authorities.

  Thus I was posted to my century, and my name entered on the rolls. I trained for two summers in marching, physical stamina, swimming, weapons, and field service, so that when I finished I might sit at my stool and generate mounds of papyrus and birch-bark, like an insanely busy and ceaselessly twitching insect.

  I have a cold in my nose.

  We're so undermanned that during outbreaks of additional sickness, detachments from the Ninth Legion are dispatched for short periods to reinforce our windblown little tract. And there are other auxilaries manning the wall on either side of us. Asturians, Batavians, and Sabines to our east, and Frisiavones, Dalmatians, and Nervii to the west.

  My father's agitating to be put back on active duty. He's discovered the considerable difference between the standard of living possible on an officer's pay as opposed to a veteran's retirement pension. He's tried to grow figs and sweet chestnuts on his little farm, with a spectacular lack of success. He claims he's as healthy as ever and beats his chest with his fist and forearm to prove it. He's not. The recruiting officers laugh in his face. Old friends beg to be left alone. He's asked me to intercede for him, as he interceded for me. He believes I have special influence with the garrison commander. “Oh, let him join up and march around until he falls over,” my mother tells me, exasperated.

  Every day he rides his little wagon four miles each way to visit my clerk's stool and inquire about his marching orders. The last phrase is his little joke. It's not clear to me when he acquired his sense of humor. Even when the weather is inclement he presents himself, soaked and shivering, with his same crooked smile. His arms and chest have been diminished by age. “This is my son,” he tells the other clerk each day: another joke. “Who? This man?” the other clerk answers every time. There's never anyone else in our little chamber.

  Sometimes I've gone to the latrine when he arrives, so he waits, silent, while the other clerk labors.

  Upon hearing that I still haven't spoken to the garrison commander, he'll stand about, warming himself at our peat fire while we continue our work. Each time he speaks, he refashions his irritation into patience. “I've brought you sandals,” he might say after a while. Or, “Your mother sends regards.”

  “Your bowels never worked well,” he'll commiserate if I've been gone an especially long time.

  On a particularly filthy spring day dark with rain, he's in no hurry to head home. Streams of mud slurry past our door. The occasional messenger splashes by, but otherwise everyone but Wall sentries is under cover. The peat fire barely warms itself. The other clerk and I continually blow on our hands, and the papyrus cracks from the chill if one presses too hard. While I work surreptitiously on a letter to the supplymaster in Isurium, requesting that our boxes of papyrus be restored to us, my father recounts for us bits of his experiences working on the Wall. The other clerk gazes at me in silent supplication.

  “We're quite a bit behind here,” I finally remind my father.

  “You think this is work?” he says.

  “Oh, god,” the other clerk mutters. The rain hisses down in wavering sheets.

  “I'm just waiting for it to let up,” my father explains. He gazes shyly at some wet thatch. He smells faintly of potash. He reknots a rope cincture at his waist, his knuckles showing signs of the chilblains. His stance is that of someone who sees illness and hard use approaching.

  “Were you really there from the very beginning?” I ask. The other clerk looks up at me from his work, his mouth open.

  My father doesn't reply. He seems to be spying great sadness somewhere out in the rain.

  When I point out that without that wall there'd be Britons on this very spot at this very moment, the other clerk gazes around. Water's braiding in at two corners and puddling. Someone's bucket of moldy lentils sits on a shelf. “And they'd be welcome to it,” he says.

  The Wall was begun in the spring of his second year in the service, my father tells us, as the emperor's response to yet another revolt the season before. The emperor had been vexed that the Britons couldn't be kept under control. My father reminds us that it was Domitius Corbulo's adage that the pick and the shovel were the weapons with which to beat the enemy.

  “What a wise, wise man was he,” the other clerk remarks wearily.

  Nepos had come from a governorship of Germania Inferior. Three legions—the Second Augusta, the Sixth Victrix pia fidelis, and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix—had been summoned from their bases and organized into work parties. The complement of each had included surveyors, ditchdiggers, architects, roof tile makers, plumbers, stonecutters, lime burners, and woodcutters. My father had been assigned to the lime burners.

  Three hundred men working ten hours a day in good weather extended the Wall a sixth of a mile. He worked five years, with the construction season running from April to October, since frosts interfered with the way the mortar set.

  The other clerk sighs, and my father looks around for the source of the sound.

>   Everything was harvested locally except iron and lead for clamps and fittings. The lime came from limestone burnt on the spot in kilns at very high temperatures. The proportion of sand to lime in a good mortar mix was three to one for pit sand, two to one for river sand.

  “Now I've written two to one,” the other clerk moans. He rises from his stool and crushes the square on which he's been working.

  “Water for the lime and mortar was actually one of the biggest problems,” my father goes on. “It was brought in continuously in barrels piled onto gigantic oxcarts. Two entire cohorts were assigned just to the transport of water.”

  The other clerk and I scratch and scratch at our tablets.

  As for the timber, if oak was unavailable, then alder, birch, elm, or hazel was used.

  While I work, a memory vision revisits me from after my brother's death: my father standing on my mother's wrist by way of encouraging her to explain something she'd said.

  Locals had been conscripted for the heavy laboring and carting, he tells us, but everyone pitched in when a problem arose. He outlines the difficulties of ditchdigging through boulder clay. Centurions checked the work with ten-foot rods to insure that no one through laziness had dug less than his share or gone off line.

  The rain finally lets up a bit. Our room brightens. A little freshness blows through the damp. My father rubs his forearms and thanks us for our hospitality. The other clerk and I nod at him, and he nods back. He wishes us good fortune for the day. “And you as well,” the other clerk answers. My father acknowledges the response, flaps out his cloak, cinches it near his neck with a fist and steps out into the rain. After he's gone a minute or two, it redoubles in force.

  On my half day of rest I make the journey on foot to their little farmstead. When I arrive I discover that my father's gone to visit me. He never keeps track of my rest days. A cold sun is out and my mother entertains me in their little garden. She sets out garlic paste and radishes, damsons and dill. My father's trained vines to grow on anything that will hold them. There's also a new addition: a small shrine erected to Viradecthis, set on an altar. It's a crude marble of Minerva that he's altered with a miniature Tungrian headdress.

  I ask if he's now participating in the cult. My mother shrugs and says it could be worse. One of her neighbors' sons has come back from his travels a Christian. Worships a fish.

  She asks after my health, recommending goat cheese in porridge for my bowels. She asks after gossip, though it always saddens her that I have so little. How did her fierce little wonder boy grow into such a pale little herring?

  She smiles and lays a hand on my knee. “You have a good position,” she reminds me proudly. And I do.

  It would appear from my father's belongings that a campaign is about to begin. His scabbards are neatly arrayed next to his polishing tin. The rest of his kit is spread on a bench to dry in the sun. His marching sandals have been laid out to be reshod with iron studs. A horsefly negotiates one of the studs.

  She tells me that periodically he claims he'll go back to Gallia Belgica, where the climate is more forgiving to both his figs and his aches. Having returned from service in Britannia as a retired centurion would make him a large fish in that pond. But he has no friends there, and his family's dead, and there's ill feeling bound to be stirred up by the relatives of a previous wife who died of overwork and exposure.

  Besides, there's much that the unit could do with an old hand, she complains he's always telling her. Sentry duty alone: some of the knotheads taking turns on that wall would miss entire baggage trains headed their way.

  She asks, as she always does, about my daily duties. She enjoys hearing about my exemptions. A soldier's daily duties include muster, training, parades, inspections, sentry duty, cleaning our centurions' kits, latrine and bathhouse duty, firewood and fodder collection. My skills exempt me from the latter four.

  She wants to know if my messmates still play their tricks on me. I tell her they don't, and that they haven't in a long while. I regret having told her in the first place.

  When I leave she presents me with a wool tunic woven with decorations. I wear it on the walk back.

  During training, recruits who failed to reach an adequate standard with a particular weapon received their rations in barley instead of wheat, the wheat ration not restored until they demonstrated proficiency. While I was quickly adequate with the sword, I was not with the pilum and could hit nothing no matter how close I brought myself to the target. My father even tried to take a hand in the training. My instructor called me the most hopeless sparrow he'd ever seen when it came to missile weapons. For three weeks I ate only barley and have had the shits ever since. On the one and only raid in which I've taken part, I threw my pilum immediately, to get it over with. It stuck in a cattle pen.

  Night falls on the long trek back to the barracks. I strike out across the countryside, following the river instead of the road, the sparse grasses thrashing lightly at my ankles. At a bend I stop to drink like a dog on all fours and hear the rattletrap of my father's little wagon heading toward the bridge above me. When he crosses it his head bobs against the night sky. He's singing one of his old unit's songs. He's guiding himself by the light of the moon. It takes him a long while to disappear down the road.

  By any standards our army is one of the most economical institutions ever invented. The effective reduction and domination of vast tracts of frontier by what amounts to no more than a few thousand men requires an efficiency of communication that enables the strategic occupation of key points in networks of roads and forts. Without runners we have only watchfires, and without scribes we have no runners.

  In my isolation and sadness I've continued my history of our time here. So that I might have posterity as a companion as well.

  More rain. Our feet have not been warm for two weeks. We are each and every one of us preoccupied with food. We trade bacon lard, hard biscuits, sour wine, and wheat. When it's available, we trade meat: ox, sheep, pig, goat, roe deer, boar, hare, and fowl. We trade local fruit and vegetables. Barley, bean, dill, coriander, poppy, hazelnut, raspberry, bramble, strawberry, bilberry, celery. Apples, pears, cherries, grapes, elderberries, damsons and pomegranates, sweet chestnuts, walnuts, and beechnuts. Cabbages, broad beans, horse beans, radishes, garlic, and lentils. Each group of messmates has its own shared salt, vinegar, honey, and fish sauces. Eight men to a table, with one taking on the cooking for all. On the days I cook, I'm spoken to. On the days I don't, I'm not. The other clerk runs a gambling pool and is therefore more valued.

  The muster reports worsen with the rain. Eleven additional men are down with roundworm. One of the granaries turns out to be contaminated with weevils.

  For two nights one of the turrets—off on its own on a lonely outcropping here at the world's end, the Wall running out into the blackness on each side—contains only one garrisoned sentry. No one else can be spared. He's instructed to light torches, knock about on both floors, and speak every so often as though carrying on a conversation.

  It's on this basis that one might answer the puzzling question: how is it that our occupation can be so successful with so few troops? The military presence is by such methods made to seem stronger and more pervasive than it actually is. We remind ourselves that our detachments can appear swiftly, our cavalry forts never far away.

  This tactic could also be understood to illuminate the relationship between the core of the empire and its periphery. Rome has conquered the world by turning brother against brother, father against son; the empire's outer borders can be controlled and organized using troops raised from areas that have just themselves been peripheral. Frontiers absorbed and then flung outward against newer frontiers. Spaniards used to conquer Gaul, Gauls to conquer Tungrians, Tungrians to conquer Britannia. That's been Rome's genius all along: turning brother against brother and father against son. Since what could have been easier than that?

  Peace on a frontier, I've come to suspect, is always relative. For the pa
st two years of my service our units have devoted their time between small punitive raids to preventing livestock rustling and showing the flag. But over the last few days we've noted our scouts—lightly armed auxiliaries in fast-horsed little detachments— pounding in and out of our sally ports at all hours. Rumors have begun to fly around the barracks. Having no friends, I hear none of them. When I ask at the evening meal, having cooked dinner, I'm told that the Britons are after our porridge.

  My night sentry duty comes around. I watch it creep toward me on the duty lists the other clerk and I update each morning so no one's unjustly burdened or given exemption. The night my turn arrives, it's moonless. The three companions listed to serve with me are all laid low with whipworm.

  At the appointed hour I return to the barracks to don my mail shirt and scabbard. As I'm heading out with my helmet under my arm, one of my messmates calls wearily from across the room, “That's mine.” At the duty barracks I'm handed a lantern that barely lights my feet and a small fasces with which to start the warning fire. All of this goes in a sack slung over my shoulder on a short pole which I'll carry the mile and a half through the dark along the Wall to the turret. Before I leave, the duty officer ties to the back of my scabbard a rawhide lead with two old hobnailed sandals on the end of it, so I'll sound like a relieving party and not a lone sentry.

  “Talk,” he advises as I step out into the night. “Bang a few things together.”

  The flagstone paving along the Wall's battlement is silver in the starlight. With the extra sandals and my kit sack I sound like a junk dealer clanking along through the darkness. Every so often I stop to listen. Night sounds reverberate around the hills.

  I'm relieving a pair of men, neither of whom seem happy to see me. They leave me an upper story lit by torches. Two pila with rusted striking blades stand in a corner. A few old cloaks hang on pegs over some battered oval shields. A mouse skitters from one of the shields to the opposite doorway. There's an open hearth for heat in the story below, invisible from the heath. Up here two windows afford a view but with the glare from the torches I'm better off observing from outside. The moonlessness won't grant much opportunity to track time.