Oh, yes, I knew the Wall, knew it on winter nights when the sleet blows in your face as you pace the ramparts on sentry duty, knew it in green spring dawns, with the plover crying on the wind – there’s always a wind blowing up there. Knew it with the distant hills a’swimmer in the August heat haze and the heather honey-scented and tall enough to hide a Pictish raiding party. Knew it before most of it was there at all, for I had a hand in building it. All three of the Legions in Britain had a hand in it, sending up each a couple of cohorts at a time. We’ve always been our own builders and road makers, we who follow the Eagles.
Anyway, there I was, just back from service in Germany, and newly promoted Centurion – young for it, too, though I says it that shouldn’t – and my men behind me, tramp, tramp, tramping along the road towards Cilurnum at the day’s end. Oh yes, the road was there already, looping along from hill-crest to hill-crest between the remains of an older frontier ditch and the new beginnings of the Wall. We came marching up the last slope into the eye of a low sunset, and checked before a timber gateway; and it’s a proud man I was when I answered the sentry’s challenge:
‘Tenth Century, Tenth Cohort, Victrix. Detailed for Wall building duty!’
So the gate guard passed us through, and we marched into the big quarter-built fort, and grounded our spears before the row of wooden shacks that would be barrack-rows one day. And there we were at Cilurnum, more or less on the edge of nowhere. I went and reported to the fort commander, and next day, straight from the long march north, we started work.
It was the third working season, and the forts and mile-castles were beginning to take shape, and in places even the Wall itself was a course or two up from its foundations. Each Century worked on its own section; mine had the section running down to Cilurnum bridge where a river came out through the Wall from the North. Handy that was, because there was no bath-house up there as yet; and when the day’s work was done, and we were hot and gritty from head to foot, with the stone dust even in our eyebrows, a plunge in the river was the next best thing to a proper bath.
The only trouble was that the fort’s Asturian Cavalry, whose job was to guard us while we worked, came down to water their horses at about the same time.
It was a trouble I ran into on my very first day. We’d stripped off and taken to the water. Oh, but it felt cold and good on our hot, gritty hides! I was plunging and rolling like a porpoise, my ears so full of water and the sound of my own splashing that I did not hear the trampling of horses’ hooves and the jink of accoutrements, until a bit of shouting started, and I came up and shook the water out of my ears and eyes, and saw the Cavalry Troop among the alder and hazel scrub on the bank. The shouting was going to and fro between them and some of my own lads close inshore, and there seemed to be a trifle of unpleasantness starting up. So I waded ashore, and addressed myself to the thick-set young man who seemed to be in command.
‘What might be the trouble?’
He rounded on me, answering my question with another: ‘What, in the name of Hades, do you think you’re doing?’
‘Taking a bath,’ I said, scrambling up the bank. I’ve often noticed that the simple truth annoys people. It seemed to annoy him even more than he was annoyed already.
‘Upstream of the watering place! Do you expect my horses to drink the water you’ve been washing your filthy selves in?’
I grabbed at what dignity I could – which isn’t much, when you’re stark naked and dripping wet, and confronting a fully caparisoned cavalryman – and said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ or something equally stupid.
He nodded. ‘I saw you march in. You’re the new Centurion, and you command sixty men to my thirty. Not, if I may say so, that it shows at the moment.’
Suddenly I began to get a glimmer of an idea that the thing was funny. ‘If you’ll just give me time to dry off and put on some clothes, maybe I can make a better showing.’
He said encouragingly: ‘You do that, you put on your fine feathery helmet and I’ll call you “Sir” and salute you; but meanwhile, call your lads off from fouling my horses’ drinking water. There’s all the river downstream for bathing in.’
‘I do beg your pardon,’ I said, ‘I’m fresh from Castra Regina. We have baths there and no problem with the Cavalry drinking the bath-water.’
I found that I had begun to laugh. And he looked at me a moment, trying not to join in; then the corners of his mouth started to twitch and he gave up trying.
And that was how I made my first friend at Cilurnum. Felix, who commanded our single troop of Asturian Horse.
It wasn’t long before I came to feel as though I’d been on the Wall since the day I was born. Life on the Wall has that effect on people. It’s a life that gets into your bones. We did all the skilled work ourselves: shaping and dressing the stones, and making the mortar (an ugly job, working as we did, with unslaked lime, which is to say quick-lime, and slaking it afterwards. You get the hardest mortar that way, but if anything goes wrong and you get the foul stuff on your skin, you can end up dead or blinded as though by fire). And, of course, we did the actual building, with native labour teams from all the villages round to cart sand and gravel and bring up rough stone from the quarries; aye, and fell timber and work the lead mines under Roman overseers.
But I’m going too fast. I’d not been in Cilurnum much above a week when Centurion Marius Frontinus arrived on a visit of inspection. He was the Engineer-in-charge, and had his headquarters at Corstopitum, the big supply depot a few miles back from the frontier. But most of his time was spent moving up and down the Wall from coast to coast and back again, stopping a night or two at each fort, and keeping an eye on all things as he went.
I remember it well, too well for comfort, that first inspection after our arrival. We were working on the blockhouse at the Cilurnum end of the bridge. Getting the main walls up – inner and outer facings of cut stone, and, every time they go up another two or three courses, you pour liquid mortar into the space between, and pack the rubble filling down into it, and so on till you reach the top and the rampart-walk. It’s quite simple really, but you can get air-pockets if you’re not careful, and that weakens the structure. Well, so that’s what my lads were doing; and along comes the fort commander, and Marius Frontinus with him, a little leathery man with an eye like an east wind that didn’t miss much.
I gave him the salute, and would have stood my men to attention, but he made a quick movement of his hand for them to carry on, and fixed me with that east wind eye of his. ‘Ah, Centurion, you’re new since I was last this way.’
I said: ‘We arrived nine days ago, Sir.’
He nodded: ‘Done any building before?’
‘Some of my men have. It’s my first experience.’
‘Thought so,’ he said. His glance flicked once along the wall, and back to my face. And I had an uncomfortable and rather naked feeling that that single glance had probed out every nook and cranny of the building, and taken in every stone and every scrap of rubble and every joint in the masonry that might be a hair’s breadth out of alignment, down to the deepest course of the footing. ‘With experience you’ll maybe learn to keep a more open eye on the work.’
I felt myself stiffen. ‘Sir?’
‘Take a look at that filling,’ Frontinus said, pointing with his vine staff. ‘Bit rough, isn’t it?’
‘I think it’s quite sound, Sir.’
‘“Think” isn’t good enough. Soon see for sure,’ he said; and raised his voice – it creaked like new harness leather. ‘Crowbar here. Somebody break me a hole in that filling.’
I nodded to my senior optio to see to it; and, in a few moments, one of the men stepped up with the crowbar, and looked to me for the order. ‘Get on with it,’ I said; and he set to work.
We all stood round and waited, watching, not without anxiety, the hole that was growing in our nice new wall. All save Centurion Frontinus, that is, who seemed more interested in watching a buzzard as it spiralled,
mewing, in sky-wide circles above us. Once, when the Legionary checked for an instant in his work with the crowbar, he brought his gaze earthward and said: ‘Deeper, man, deeper,’ and then returned to the wheeling buzzard. At last he was satisfied.
‘So – that will serve. Now fill the hole with water.’
Another man brought up a slopping pail, and poured it into the hole; and again, we all stood by, waiting to see the water drain away into some badly packed hollow in the filling. It was one of the worst moments of my life. But the water stayed where it was. You could almost hear my men letting out their held breaths – me as well, come to that.
Frontinus said: ‘No, seems sound enough. Right, fill in the hole. Carry on, Centurion!’ and turned on his heel and walked away.
Telling Felix about it that evening, as we sat playing draughts in his quarters after supper, I was hot behind the ears with indignation. ‘And not another word! Just strolled off and left me standing there like a corner stone – with an ugly great hole in my filling to be made good!’
Felix laughed, and moved a piece on the board. ‘Did you expect him to apologize?’
‘I’m not quite a lunatic! No, it was the way he did it, as though neither my men nor I were human beings.’
‘Your move,’ Felix said; and when I’d made it – it was a bad move and cost me the game – he reached for the jug of sour army-issue wine which was all one could get up on the Wall in those days, and refilled my cup. ‘Have some more vinegar to drown your wrongs. . . . Oh, my Lucius, by the time you’ve been through a few more of his inspections, you’ll have got used to the idea that our respected Chief Engineer cares much more deeply for corner stones and copings and well-cut ditches than he does for human beings.’
It was true in a way, I suppose; and yet – not altogether true. I remember one day towards the end of the working season, I rode over to the lumber camp with Frontinus. He had some trouble to settle with the native work team, the kind of thing you settle best, not by issuing a string of orders, but by going and talking to the chief man over a piece of bread and a pinch of salt. We rode south, dropping into the wooded valley where felling was going on at that time. The camp was pitched on the fringe of the trees, among the stacked trunks and white scars of newly felled scrub oak, and the faint haze of smoke hanging over brushwood fires. But well before we reached it, something rustled among the dun bracken and low-growing hawthorn of the hillside; and out on to the track just ahead of us burst a very small man-child clad in nothing but a rag of filthy saffron wool round his middle, and flourishing, in cheerful defiance, a wild cherry branch flaming with scarlet leaves.
Frontinus, who was nearest, swerved his pony aside, and stooped as he passed, scooped the baby up, blazing branch and all, and set it astride before him. It screwed round and looked up into his face, its mouth open, but too surprised even to yell, and Frontinus said gravely, speaking in the vernacular, and as man to man: ‘It is always wise to learn what odds are too great for you to handle. Also you are too far from home.’
‘Hup!’ said the small one, cheerfully, belabouring the pony between its ears with the bright cherry branch.
‘And that is no way to treat a horse.’ Frontinus captured both the branch and the small brown fist that held it. ‘Sit up straight and cease from wriggling like an eel, and you shall ride into the camp like a chieftain.’
I was riding a little behind and to one side, watching the two of them, and I thought what a sad thing it was that Felix would not believe one word of this when I told him. When we came down to the edge of the camp, a woman standing in the doorway of a branch-woven bothie saw us, cried out and came running, with a very new baby that she had just been feeding still at her breast.
‘Baban! Wicked one!’
‘This is yours?’ Frontinus said. ‘We found it halfway up the hill. It tried to get itself killed under my horse’s hooves, you should not let it stray so far from home.’
‘Stray! he is for ever straying – the moment that my eyes are off him. And now that there is the new one to see to –’ She put up her free arm to take the child as Frontinus stooped from the saddle to give him to her, and let him slither to the ground, where he slipped behind her and stood peering out at us from the shelter of her skirts.
‘Truly, my thanks are to your honour for bringing the bairn home to me,’ she said. She was in rags, with her hair – it would have been bright as new-minted gold had it been clean – hanging in wisps out of its careless braids; but, like all her kind, she had the manners of a Queen to use when she chose. And Frontinus made her the gesture of courtesy that he would have made to a fine lady. No, I think he would probably not have made it to a fine lady. It was for her and the man-child clinging to her skirts and the small brown baby she was still feeding. I saw his face, and for a moment there was a look on it that I could not read, or that passed before I had time to read it. And we rode on into the camp.
It was evening when, with the trouble that had brought us sorted out, we rode back over the high moors towards the Wall. The bracken and hawthorn scrub of the lower slopes had given place to heather that was almost over, a dark tide of heather making a dry hushing sound about our horses’ legs, and one or twice a starring of faded harebells in the shelter of a lichened stone. Ahead of us, drawing nearer, the Wall flung its giant strides along the crest of the land, and again there was the haze of smoke, from evening cooking-fires this time, rising from the fort and the labour camp to the south of it.
Frontinus, who had been very silent, sniffed like a hound. ‘Smell of frost in the air. Soon be time to shut her down for the winter.’
‘We’ve got a good season’s work done, Sir,’ I said.
‘Not so bad; not so bad at all. Nothing to spare, mind you. It’s the third season, and the Emperor’s orders are to finish in five.’
We rode on, in silence again, no sound but our horses’ feet brushing through the heather, and the soughing of a little thin wind that had begun to rise, and the walls of the fort rising higher and darker as we drew towards it. And then, as though there had been no break, Frontinus said, ‘And what will you be doing with your well-earned winter leave?’
‘Head south and see a bit of life at Eburacum,’ I said. ‘I might even try for a look at the bright lights and fleshpots of Londinium if I get long enough to make it worth the trip – and you?’
He did not answer for a moment. Then he said: ‘Don’t suppose I shall take much leave. There are always the lumber camps and the quarries to keep an eye on, even when work stops on the Wall itself. . . . And I’ll have all the leave I want – more – all the leave in life, when the next two seasons are over.’
Something in his voice made me glance aside at him, but his leathery face was shut, and there was nothing in his eyes but the distance and the fading daylight. And yet I felt – I don’t quite know what I felt, but it came to me suddenly what the future must look like to a man of Frontinus’ kind when he had laid his last road and built his last fort. And I knew that I couldn’t just leave the thing lying there.
I began awkwardly: ‘You mean –’
‘I’ll be due to retire, yes. I’ve built a good few roads and bridges, and drained a marsh or two in my time. But the Wall is my last job before I take my wooden foil.’
I said: ‘It’s a good sizeable one.’ It sounded stupid and obvious, but it was the best I could do.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Something to think about, while I rust out at Aquae Sulis or another of those pleasant little towns in the South that my kind retire to.’
And I, I was stricken suddenly with pity, which isn’t the kind of thing you expect to feel for a man like Marius Frontinus, and I didn’t quite know what to do about it. To cover up, I said quickly and lightly: ‘There should be plenty to think about, at all events; it’s said along the Wall that you are personally acquainted with every stone of it from one end to the other.’
‘And with every foot of filling, eh?’ he said with a flicker of amusement, and we ro
de on again in silence. We were almost into the Wall workings when he broke it again, abruptly, and looking straight between his horse’s ears. ‘There was a time once, I thought I’d have other things – people – to fill the gaps after my time with the Eagles was through; but that was long ago when I was young. She – died when the child came, and took it with her. . . . I suppose, lacking wife or children, you make do with the job, and it grows to take their place. But when the time comes for your wooden foil, you have to leave the job behind. . . .’
And so we rode into camp, without another word.
I’ve wondered often enough since what made him open up like that, just once, and to me whom he hardly knew. It could have been the urchin down at the lumber camp and the urchin’s mother with the new baby. Smaller things have toppled empires before now. The moment came, and passed, and it happened to be me that was riding beside him; that’s all I know.
Well, that season ended and the next one came, and we got the main part of the fort built round ourselves, and also a bath-house south of it among the scatter of turf and timber bothies that were beginning to spring up like toadstools round an old tree stump. You know how it is, wherever there’s a Roman fort a town of sorts springs up in the lea of it. Stables and granaries and little streets of merchants and craftsmen and temples to a score of Gods and the bothies where the Legionaries keep their women and families and kennel their hunting dogs.
Not that there was all that at Cilurnum then you understand; but it was beginning. That season an ex-Legionary applied for permission to open a wine-shop. And a British bronzesmith set up his smithy, making the kind of harness extras and ornaments that the cavalry like but the army doesn’t provide as regulation issue. We had begun to be a trading post, too, where merchants from the south met hunters down from the north with wolf and bear and mountain-fox skins for sale. Then there was the usual trade in hounds and fighting-cocks – horse-coping, too. The men north of the Wall used to come down from time to time with small sturdy hunting ponies to sell among the frontier garrisons. Felix and I got to know one of them quite well, a little, bow-legged, red-headed devil called Conn. . . .