William Dietrich: Hadrian's wall

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.

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.