Hadrian's wall

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 to 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.

The ring and clang of drawn Celtic swords carried clearly up the hill, the barbarians banging their shields to drum warning and fortify their own courage. The Roman mounts checked at the rumbling, the animals remembering this noise and knowing it meant battle. There seemed to be two leaders of the Scotti war party, Galba saw: a redhead to the left, with drawn sword and restless manner, and a great hairy blond lout of a pirate on the right, lumbering in front of his men with shouldered ax. Both chieftains gestured and shouted and raised their middle finger in what they'd learned was the Roman gesture of contempt.

Galba rested his own sword across the twin front pommels of his saddle in loose confidence. He'd ridden before he could walk, killed before he knew any woman, and could map his travels with scar tissue. Now came the anticipatory moment he liked best in life, that frozen time when the energy of warring men was coiled and almost breathless, the immortal pause before the practiced charge. He looked down the rank of men with whom he'd drilled and marched and shot and slept and shit, professionals all, and felt an intimacy with them that he'd never felt with any female. Each sitting high, his reins in the hand of his left shield arm, spear shouldered, helmet tight, legs dangling loose until the kick of the charge.

He loved war and what it could win for a man.

He loved the hunt.

"An eagle, tribune," a centurion commented.

Galba looked to where the man was pointing. The bird was riding the morning's rising tide of air, wings dipping as it rotated. The perfect sign.

"Look how the gods favor us!" he roared to his men. "A bird of Rome!" Then his black warhorse, Imperiurm, jerked at his nudge. "Forward!" Heels dug, and the Roman cavalry started downhill with a sure, awful, accreting acceleration, the discipline of constant practice keeping the line abreast and the lances pivoting down in synchronization as steady as the drop of a drawbridge gate. Their mounts quickened into a trot, the very earth beginning to quake, and the men bent, shield high, thighs tightening, each picking a target as the thunder of the attack swelled until it filled their whole world. Against a more disciplined enemy they would have formed a wedge or diamond to pierce the line, but the Scotti were so disorganized that the barbarians had left gaps, some backing from the approaching Romans, others foolishly running ahead and shouting challenge. The Romans would shred them with line abreast. The cavalry didn't break into gallop until the last fifty paces, so their line could remain even, Galba signaling the final rush with a wave of his sword arm. Then their mounts burst forward in the final sprint. Grass rolled underneath the cavalry in a blur, clods of earth burst upward like sprayed water, the pennants rippled in the wind, and each of the cavalrymen took up the cry of their ancestral homeland, of Thrace and Syria and Iberia and Germania.

"For the standards of the Petriana!"

Arrows whizzed past like buzzing insects.

There was a great crash as the lines met, a scream of horses and shout of men, and then the cavalry was over the barbarians and past them, their lances left upright in writhing, impaled bodies. The Romans slid free their long swords and turned.

Galba's own sword had hit something solid in the initial collision, coming up red and glistening. Now he sawed with his reins, his horse's eyes rolling with the pain of the harsh cavalry bit, and charged toward the blond giant with the ax. The chieftain was whirling his weapon and singing a death song, his eyes opaque with wonder at that ghostly world he'd already half stepped into. "So shall I give it to you," the Roman promised. He cut with his sword to parry the ax shaft, used the heavy shoulder of his horse to knock his enemy over, and then leaped from his saddle to finish the pirate off. Strike fast, when they're down.

Yet the butted chieftain kept rolling and so Galba's grunting stroke missed and struck turf, sticking there. It was an almost fatal mistake. The barbarian came up howling, covered in grass and dirt and the smoke and blood of his earlier pillage, his torso a topography of sinew, bone, and blue tattoo. When the warrior reared back to lift his ax, he was like some monstrous bear, and a newcomer to war might have been transfixed enough to let the Scotti strike.

But Galba was a veteran of a hundred fights and gave his opponent no time to set himself. Instead he saw opportunity. Yanking his blade clear in the time the Scotti took to raise his ax, he made a quick horizontal slash that opened the barbarian's stomach and then stepped smartly back as the ax whizzed by his ear. The shock of disembowelment caused the Scotti to let the heavy weapon thud all the way into the ground, and so the Roman swung again and heard an audible crack of bone as he took off the chieftain's hands. The Celt staggered, only dimly realizing what had happened to him, screamed to the gods who'd forsaken him this day, and held his bloody stumps to heaven. Then he crashed to earth.

Galba whirled for another antagonist, but his men had already made short work of the rest who'd dared stand, the bravest already dying or enslaved. The Roman horses were prancing over the corpses as if uncertain where to put their hooves, and there was that familiar battlefield smell of urine, dung, hot blood, and fearful sweat, as bizarrely intoxicating as it was repulsive.

Galba looked at his chipped blade tip. It was the first time he'd missed an enemy already down, and he couldn't make that mistake again. Grunting, he stooped and pried a severed hand off the ax handle to look for a ring. There was a fine golden one, he saw, with a red stone. Probably stolen from a Roman.

"I'll take this back, boy." He used his dagger to saw the finger off.

Victory!

"They're getting away!" a decurion shouted.

Galba stood and whistled for his horse, leaping agilely into the saddle and roaring his men into some kind of quick order. The redheaded chieftain had escaped and was leading twenty of his raiders into the trees toward the water.

"Let them run!" he shouted to his men.

The Romans pursued just out of bowshot, weaving through trees. As the barbarians ran they looked back at their seemingly wary pursuers and jeered, but Galba held his men in careful check. They came to a bluff in time to see the Scotti fling their weapons and helmets aside and spill like lemmings into the sea. The barbarians surfaced, wet and howling from the cold, and struck for longboats hidden among the reeds of an estuary.

"Hold and watch!"

The redhead who'd escaped turned in the water and taunted them in thick Latin, vowing revenge.

"Hold, I say!"

The Romans stood mute and winded, lining the bluff.

The Scotti reached the reedy water on the far side of the inlet, some managing to stand in the shallows and others thrashing for their boats. They shouted for the comrades they'd left behind, gasping explanations, and anxiously grasped oar holes to lift themselves aboard.

Then there was a Latin shout, Falco's command carrying across the inlet of water, and a row of helmeted heads rose from the bowels of the longboats.

More Romans.

Falco's wing had ridden around and already captured the craft, slaying their guards. Now they stood from the hulls where they'd been hiding and fell upon the unarmed barbarians trying to climb aboard.

Galba's plan had worked.

The red-haired one, half naked and weaponless now, saw the murder that was happening and thrashed his way to a muddy bank.

Falco himself rode the man down.

The bang and thud of weapons and the screams of the wounded echoed across the water for only moments and then it was done, the reeds stained red, bodies floating like logs.

"Come," Galba said. "We meet Lucius Falco on the other side."

The two wings of cavalry joined at the head of the inlet, the longboats already burning as fiercely as Cato's village. A handful of captured warriors would stay with the Romans as slaves. Some of the booty would be returned to their client, others kept as tax.

One of them was the defiant red-haired chieftain: a rib cracked after being overridden by Falco's horse, head bloody, manner abject. In minutes he'd gone from conqueror to conquered, from lord to prisoner, and he stood trussed and naked with that dull expression of shock and resignation that comes from enslavement.

"I was hoping that one for my own, Falco," Galba congratulated.

"He's a bit of a badger. Even after riding over the top of him, I had to club with my dagger. He'll be trouble, perhaps."

"Or spirit. Get him home and make clear how things are."

Falco nodded.

"Let's find out who he is." Galba walked his horse up to the subdued barbarian. "What's your name, boy?" These Scotti were a last stubborn branch of those Celtic tribes the Romans had been fighting for eight centuries, their ferocity in battle and despair in defeat both as predictable as the tides. It might take a bit of whip and club to tame this one, but he, like them all, would submit. "What do they call you, stripling?"

The man looked up sullenly and for just one moment Galba felt chilled. It was a blackly baleful look he got, the captive thinking no doubt of the hearth and woman and horse he'd never see again, but beyond that there was something in his sorrow that seemed to give a glimpse of a dim and troubled future. Let Falco keep him, indeed.

"I am Odocullin of the Dal Riasta. Prince of the Scotti and a lord of Eiru."

"Odocul-what? That's more mouthful than a Sicilian sweetcake. Repeat yourself, slave!"

The man looked away.

Galba's hand went to the pouch at his side. He could feel the severed finger of this man's dead compatriot and the hard curve of the barbarian's ring. None ever ignored Galba Brassidias for long, and someday this carrot-colored Hibernian would learn that too. In the meantime, who cared what the captive was called by his own people? "We'll name you Odo, then," he pronounced, "and the cost of your defeat will be slavery in the house of the soldier who defeated you, Lucius Falco."

The Scotti still wouldn't look at his captors.

"Odo," Falco repeated. "Even I can remember that."