Hadrian's wall

XLI

You let a rebel loose to kill your commanding officer and abduct a daughter of Rome?" As I put this question to Falco, my tone is more incredulous than my actual surprise-my informants have, after all, been leading up to this-but still, how am I to explain all this in my report to the Senate? A deserter and brigand escaped, an aristocratic woman gone, a senior tribune dead. Everyone talks of religion in an age when nothing seems sacred.

Falco answers me without apology. "My commanding officer, Marcus Flavius, who married in my own house, was already dead because of treachery. Valeria was a widow, and Galba a murderer." He doesn't display the least fear of me. Why should he? What am I going to do to him that life hasn't already done? His estate eventually burned in the fighting. His slaves scattered. His livestock was eaten. The Wall is a sieve, half wrecked and half manned. The empire needs men like Falco more than he needs the empire. More than the empire needs my reports.

"Yet surely you see the disaster I'm dealing with here," I nonetheless grumble.

"It was the emperor who pulled troops from Britannia and tempted the barbarians, not me. And Galba who sacrificed a wing of the Petriana for his own ends. He didn't want to wed Valeria, he wanted to destroy her, as he felt he'd been destroyed. He'd ceased being a soldier and started being an opportunist. He deserved to die."

I look out at the damnable gray sky. "Yet even with Galba gone, she chose to go north of the Wall again."

"And not come back."

I nod. My entire life has been about sustaining Rome's walls. So why am I not more sorry that this one, eighty miles long and made of millions of stones, has proved so permeable?

"What happened after their escape?"

"Our military situation was already precarious. One of the Caledonii chieftains, Thorin, had already broken the Wall to the east and was raiding toward Eburacum. Scotti were landing on the west coast, Saxons on the east. We were depleted, wounded, and in danger of being cut off. With Galba gone, the Petriana came together. We retreated toward Eburacum but learned the duke had been killed. So then we fell back to Londinium, taking the captive druid with us. We could see the smoke from the burning of Petrianis for two days."

"Where were the legions to the south?"

"Tardy and afraid," Falco sums up contemptuously. He's a man who lost his home to pillage, and there's bitterness in his reply. "No rally took place until the remnants of the Wall garrison assembled in Londinium. Then the other two legions marched in support. By that time the barbarian attacks were beginning to falter. We managed to ambush some that came that far south."

"Did not Caratacus dream of driving the Romans out of Britannia entirely?"

"He was just one rebel. One dreamer. They had no king, only a council, and the offshore looters were interested only in booty. Caratacus understood the kind of organization required to permanently resist Rome, but none of the others did. Then the imperial succession was stabilized, Theodosius landed with fresh troops, and the barbarians were driven back north of the Wall."

"So the empire is saved again."

He looks at me steadily. "Yes. For how long this time, Inspector Draco?"

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.