William Dietrich: Hadrian's wall

This is the kind of man the empire has relied on for centuries to sustain its borders, and even he has lost heart. I look away. "What do you intend to do?"

"Rebuild my farm as best I can. I have no desire to soldier on. I'll live by the Wall and make my living there, as generations have before me, and make my peace with whoever finally wins. There was a time when we only looked south for guidance. Now we look north, as well."

"But there's nothing in the north!" It bursts from me in frustration, this central mystery of my entire investigation. "The north is wilderness! Why would she go north?"

"It's full of free and hard men, with restless new energy. Someday they'll come across that wall to stay, and bring a different kind of world with them."

It is an ominous prophecy to make in the wake of Roman victory, and yet our triumph was so bloody and prolonged as to be exhausting. It is not that people can't sustain the empire; it is that they barely wish to. The old gods are dimming and this new one, this Jewish mystic, is a god of women and slaves. I like the sound of the Celtic gods better, I think: Taranis and Esus and the good god Dagda. These are gods of songs and men. "Someday," I concede. "Someday."

"And what will you do, Inspector Draco? Travel to some warmer place and make your report?"

"I suppose so." I say it without thinking. Indeed, what will I do? What exactly is it that I am going to report? The imperial court and Senator Valens already know about the barbarian conspiracy and the recent war. My mission is to explain something more baffling: the passions of women and the yearnings of men.

I could write it in four words: She fell in love. But in love with what? A man? Or a place outside the suffocation of my own empire?

"But only when I finish," I amend. "Only when I understand."

He laughs. "If you understand Britannia and the Wall, inspector, you'll be the first. And if you claim to understand young women, you'll be a liar."

I dismiss him so that I can think in solitude for a while. I brood as I listen to the heavy tread of soldiers in the corridor outside. My world suddenly seems a tired one, of ancient traditions and musty laws. Rome is old, almost indescribably old. The woman I seek is young, and in an entirely new place. What do I really know about her, even now?

I suddenly realize that I am profoundly lonely.

I send again for Savia.

She comes and sits quietly. She senses that the end of our interviews is near and that I am going to move on. What will be her fate? And yet instead of the anxiety I detected when we first met, there is calm. As if she thinks I understand more than I realize.

"Why did you not go with her?" I now ask.

She smiles. "Leap from the Wall?"

"In the confusion afterward, perhaps. She was still your mistress, whatever this Caratacus proclaimed."

"I tried, inspector. I was arrested at midnight, trying to unbolt the gate. They made me a cook for their camp and took me to Londinium and then here. As maidservant to a senator's daughter I wasn't an ordinary slave. They thought she might come to me. They thought they should keep me for you."

"To be interrogated for my report."

She nods.

"What is it really like up there?"

Now she cocks her head, thinking of a suitable reply. "Rugged. Yet the air is clearer, somehow. Happiness simpler."

I shake my head. "I do not really understand what's happening."

"About the empire?"

"About everything."

She nods, and we sit in silence some more. It is an oddly companionable quiet. I feel we are communicating even when we don't speak. Is this what long-married couples do? But then she does speak. "I think the Christ is coming, master. Coming everywhere. And that his coming is accomplished in mysterious ways. Priests like Kalin feel the wind as much as you do. The druids are dying too, I think. The world is holding its breath."

"The wind has blown against the empire for a thousand years."

"Every tree must fall."

I turn to look at her. "What should I do, Savia?" It is the first time I've used this slave's name, and it seems thick on my tongue, but not unpleasant. "How can I make sense of what happened here?"

"Find her, master."

"Not master. Not inspector."

She looks at me a long time, her eyes deep and kind. "Find her, Draco."

Of course. If I am to understand the walls of the empire, I must go beyond them. I must see for myself this new world that presses like a wave against our shores. I must talk to the one person I've not yet talked to, the woman herself. Valeria.

"Will you guide me?"

"I, and Kalin."

"The druid?"

"He's dying down there from lack of light, as doomed as a flower. Free him, Draco, and take us both. You'd be an excuse for the garrison to get rid of him. He'll be our guide and guarantee of safety. I was terrified to go north the first time, but it's only there that you'll understand what's happening to the empire."

"l am an old man, Savia."

"And I'm an old woman. But not too old to search for new things." She pauses, embarrassed to admit all her motives. "I want to go north and tell them more about the Christ. They sense his wisdom. It might put an end to their feuds and cruelties."

"You're going to preach your faith? You-"I am about to say slave, but I check my tongue-"a woman?"

"Yes. And I want to go with you." She is saying what I already know, and still it comes as a thrill. Who has wanted to go with me anywhere before? Who has not dreaded my arrival and been relieved by my departure?

"It will be as a freed woman, not a slave," I say thickly. "Caratacus gave you your freedom up there. So will I."

"I know." She expected this manumission all along, I realize. She knew these stories of freedom would infect me.

"And what is it that you think I'll find up there?" I ask her.

"Yourself."

No, no, it is impossible. The north! I must make my report to the emperor.

Yet not until I am ready. Not until I understand.

I realize I've made this decision long ago, made it somewhere in the course of these interviews and the course of my travels, made it because of the weary rot of the imperial court I represent.

Where is she now, this Valeria? What tower does she watch from? What has she seen? What is she learning? What does she think?

A senator's daughter!

We go north, starting tomorrow.

We go to find what she found.

Thirty-nine years after the battle of the Wall, on the last day of the Year of Our Lord 406, the Rhine River froze solid during the coldest winter in memory. Hundreds of thousands of waiting Vandals, Alans, Suevi, and Burgundians emerged from the forests of Germania and marched across the ice into Gaul.

A thin and dispirited Roman and Frankish army mustered to meet them but was easily brushed aside. With that, the world was open to pillage.

Some of the barbarian invaders claimed new lands in Gaul. Others struck south toward Italy, Spain, and Africa. In 410, the Gothic warlord Alaric sacked Rome. It was the first conquest of the city in eight centuries.

In that same year as the sacking, the province of Britannia sent an urgent plea to the emperor Honorius to seek military assistance against barbarian invasion.

The inheritor of Caesar replied that the island would have to look to itself.

No other communication from the empire was ever received.

Hadrian's Wall is a work of fiction based on real events. There was a "Great Barbarian Uprising" in a.d. 367 that convulsed northern Britain, though the details of this war are obscure. There was a famed cavalry called the Petriana. There was a great tidal mixing of migrating tribes, religious faiths, new ideas, and old dissatisfactions in both Roman Britain and the empire as a whole in the fourth century, a prelude to the storm that would break in the fifth century. Above all there was Hadrian's Wall, today one of the most evocative ruins of Rome's imperial glory. Some have declared that a walk along its length is the greatest hike in Britain.