Like You'd Understand, Anyway

In my isolation and sadness I've continued my history of our time here. So that I might have posterity as a companion as well.

More rain. Our feet have not been warm for two weeks. We are each and every one of us preoccupied with food. We trade bacon lard, hard biscuits, sour wine, and wheat. When it's available, we trade meat: ox, sheep, pig, goat, roe deer, boar, hare, and fowl. We trade local fruit and vegetables. Barley, bean, dill, coriander, poppy, hazelnut, raspberry, bramble, strawberry, bilberry, celery. Apples, pears, cherries, grapes, elderberries, damsons and pomegranates, sweet chestnuts, walnuts, and beechnuts. Cabbages, broad beans, horse beans, radishes, garlic, and lentils. Each group of messmates has its own shared salt, vinegar, honey, and fish sauces. Eight men to a table, with one taking on the cooking for all. On the days I cook, I'm spoken to. On the days I don't, I'm not. The other clerk runs a gambling pool and is therefore more valued.

The muster reports worsen with the rain. Eleven additional men are down with roundworm. One of the granaries turns out to be contaminated with weevils.

For two nights one of the turrets — off on its own on a lonely outcropping here at the world's end, the Wall running out into the blackness on each side — contains only one garrisoned sentry. No one else can be spared. He's instructed to light torches, knock about on both floors, and speak every so often as though carrying on a conversation.

It's on this basis that one might answer the puzzling question: how is it that our occupation can be so successful with so few troops? The military presence is by such methods made to seem stronger and more pervasive than it actually is. We remind ourselves that our detachments can appear swiftly, our cavalry forts never far away.

This tactic could also be understood to illuminate the relationship between the core of the empire and its periphery. Rome has conquered the world by turning brother against brother, father against son; the empire's outer borders can be controlled and organized using troops raised from areas that have just themselves been peripheral. Frontiers absorbed and then flung outward against newer frontiers. Spaniards used to conquer Gaul, Gauls to conquer Tungrians, Tungrians to conquer Britannia. That's been Rome's genius all along: turning brother against brother and father against son. Since what could have been easier than that?

Peace on a frontier, I've come to suspect, is always relative. For the past two years of my service our units have devoted their time between small punitive raids to preventing livestock rustling and showing the flag. But over the last few days we've noted our scouts — lightly armed auxiliaries in fast-horsed little detachments— pounding in and out of our sally ports at all hours. Rumors have begun to fly around the barracks. Having no friends, I hear none of them. When I ask at the evening meal, having cooked dinner, I'm told that the Britons are after our porridge.

My night sentry duty comes around. I watch it creep toward me on the duty lists the other clerk and I update each morning so no one's unjustly burdened or given exemption. The night my turn arrives, it's moonless. The three companions listed to serve with me are all laid low with whipworm.

At the appointed hour I return to the barracks to don my mail shirt and scabbard. As I'm heading out with my helmet under my arm, one of my messmates calls wearily from across the room, “That's mine.” At the duty barracks I'm handed a lantern that barely lights my feet and a small fasces with which to start the warning fire. All of this goes in a sack slung over my shoulder on a short pole which I'll carry the mile and a half through the dark along the Wall to the turret. Before I leave, the duty officer ties to the back of my scabbard a rawhide lead with two old hobnailed sandals on the end of it, so I'll sound like a relieving party and not a lone sentry.

“Talk,” he advises as I step out into the night. “Bang a few things together.”

The flagstone paving along the Wall's battlement is silver in the starlight. With the extra sandals and my kit sack I sound like a junk dealer clanking along through the darkness. Every so often I stop to listen. Night sounds reverberate around the hills.

I'm relieving a pair of men, neither of whom seem happy to see me. They leave me an upper story lit by torches. Two pila with rusted striking blades stand in a corner. A few old cloaks hang on pegs over some battered oval shields. A mouse skitters from one of the shields to the opposite doorway. There's an open hearth for heat in the story below, invisible from the heath. Up here two windows afford a view but with the glare from the torches I'm better off observing from outside. The moonlessness won't grant much opportunity to track time.