by Larry Niven
Old Crassus was a hard taskmaster to the convoy. He had to be. The civilians and women traveling with us in creaking wains were a hindrance and a peril. We did not let the emptiness of the land deceive us into thinking that we were unobserved. We knew the land was alive though it seemed desolate, and we avoided or hastened through limestone country for we knew it meant caves.
With the legionaries not only singing their usual interminable marching songs about the venereal charms of Lalarge, but with women actually present, there were potential discipline problems. Crassus routed women out of their lines when we made camp at night, stuck to our predawn starts, and generally made himself exceptionally hated even for a ducenarius. He was as tough an old stick of gnarled vinewood as his own cudgel, and I had little to do but look impressive. I also began dictating an account for the old man to Publius, my secretary.
We saw nothing really strange, apart from moving lights in the northern sky: some like drifting stars, some larger and nearer, one huge like a second moon. Sometimes they formed patterns. No one, including the veterans and merchants who knew this country, had seen anything like them before, but at that time they did not trouble us. We were more concerned with robbers and broken men nipping at our heels, or even attacking in force if there were enough of them or if the Scots had landed to encourage them against us. But we reached the wall at Borcovicus with little trouble, apart from a few arrows fired into the camp one night.
Winter is the defining fact about the wall. The climate is even worse than the rest of Britain, with its cold drizzling rain so many days. On the wall you have wind-driven sleet month after month, and dream of walking in the sun under a purple sky in the olive-groves and vineyards of Tuscany, or quaffing the wine of Melita amid the bee-pastures of its flowers (though I have seen more than purple skies since then). Troops from Germany regard it as a soft billet after the winters they have there, but for Spaniards like the Ninth it was very much a hardship posting. They had done their best to modify it with baths and barbers and brothels, but they wore padded woolens under their armor and shivered.
Still, the bathhouses were a credit to several generations of military engineering, and the Principia was well lined with woven rugs. Further, the day after our arrival was actually fine, with blue skies and wide views. Those rolling hills of red and brown heather had a kind of beauty under the sun.
The prefect, Bassus Septimus, was the type I expected: weather-beaten and wind-bitten, eyes permanently narrowed from squinting across heather and into sleet, an old sandal-leather man. He had a keen eye for his own comfort but he was a competent veteran who knew the land. I had seen plenty of the type in Gaul. The officers and senior centurions I met were much the same. Some think our officers are fops and amateurs, but these of the frontiers were not, and those who think that way might find it difficult to explain how we have ruled an empire of four thousand cities and forty-four provinces with swords, spears, and animal power.
The men were legionaries, and when you have said that you have said all. They were the drilled, disciplined troops of an empire that was an island of civilization in a world that was a welter of barbarism. They were versatile soldiers and engineers, who could fight barbarians or other Romans by land or sea, build walls and siege engines which I then thought gigantic, drain marshes, drive roads and bridges through wilderness, calculate to a fraction what pay they were owed, fight fires in multistory tenements, plow the land to feed themselves in any climate or distribute food in a famine. Versatile.
I thought that then. How much more do I think it now!
Some said we ruled the world, but we senior officers knew better: We had silks from China and merchants' tales from further yet. The Greeks had measured the sphere that is the world and we knew the size of it. That helped me understand much later, but for the moment, if forty-four provinces sounded large, and it was, the Barbaricum, we knew, was larger.
I tried from the start, as they were presented to me, to remember as many names as I might but knew it would take some time to tell the centurions apart: they looked as if they had been hammered from the same metal in the same mold by the same smith; as indeed they had been. Our army was full of such. I knew that later they would become individuals to me. Sooner rather than later, if we saw action.
Bassus took me to the wall. He was worried, which was part of his job, but he was also more bewildered than I had often seen such a one.
"Patrols have disappeared before," he said. "They go too far and the Picts suddenly decide they would like the armor and weapons of the metal men. Or they run into a few boatloads of those cursed Gaels from Hibernia. But sooner or later we always hear from our spies what happened.
"Anyway, the local Picts are on their way to being civilized—we've sent enough punitive expeditions to teach them that attacking the metal men was not a good idea, and I can drink with the local chiefs without all of us keeping our hands on our swords or even needing a poison-taster. It's become not much more than a bit of sport for us to fire arrows at each other when they come to steal blades from the ditch.
"Now, nothing. No patrols returned, no spies, and no Picts. We have a frontier scout force beyond the wall and no word from that either, though of course it's sometimes gone for weeks at a time. That wolf pack hardly drills like Praetorians—I commanded an ordo of them a long time ago—but they know the country and they fear nothing in it. If it was an attack by the Caledoni they'd report it as such. That's what they're there for. This is something different.
"Also, the spymasters and political officers who work among the Northern tribesmen know their business. They don't last long otherwise.
"Look!"—he gestured across the vast sweep of heather—"not a wisp of smoke anywhere. There are Pictish villages beyond those hills. Normally on a day like this you can see the smoke of their fires. But they've cleared off. No word. I don't know why, unless the tribes are gathering in the highlands for some sort of mass descent."
"Would they be capable of such organization?"
"Did Varus ever wonder such a thing?"
I had spoken of Varus with the old man and I wondered now that his name still seemed to keep cropping up after more than a century. Perhaps it haunted every frontier commander. I wondered how often it was mentioned on the Rhine, or in those distant red deserts of sand where our legions wait for the Parthians or Persians.
"Anyway, they're gone without a word," he continued. "After the patrols we'd lost I wasn't taking any chances. I sent a strong force to investigate, with orders to turn back at the first suspicion of trouble and not to march north beyond sight of our beacons. They reported the Pictish villages deserted. Nothing else, except those lights in the sky."
"I thought you always saw them in these parts," I said.
"That's the aurora borealis, the northern glow. The further north you go in Caledonia the more you tend to see it, in winter anyway, but it's nothing like these. These moving stars are new."
"Pictish gods?"
"I've been a soldier a long time. I've never seen gods like that." He too had the brand of Mithras on his brow and knew the mysteries. "We have all sorts of religions here, even Jews and the fish-worshipping Christians. Gods from Spain and Syria and Melita and places only the gods themselves know. But no one has a god that is a light traveling in the sky. Some of them are frightened, I think, and they'd show it, if they weren't more frightened of me and their centurions."
I didn't like the idea of a legionary frightened by anything but his own superiors. It should be what the philosophers and logicians call a contradiction in terms. "So what do you think?"
"Since it's futile to speculate about gods, I speculate about men, which may be just as futile. I think what I told you: that the tribes are gathering for a massive attack southwards. If they breach the wall, there's nothing to stop them before Eboracum. And that's not much more than a shell, now that we've brought the Ninth here. They'd take it. Then they'd either straggle back to Caledonia with their booty or they'd go
on. I think they'd go on."
"Why?"
"You don't fire siege ballistas at a hare in a field. An attack to punch through the wall isn't just to plunder the northern marches and return. They'd be aiming for Londinium and the channel—to chuck us right out of Britannia. It would be more than brigandage and piracy, it would be politics. If the Gauls cooperated with them, and the Germans..." He made an eloquent gesture.
"The Britons tried it themselves once," I reminded him. "It didn't do them any good. Two legions brought them to bay and wiped them out."
He had been in Britain longer than I and knew more of its history.
"They were disunited and had bad leaders," he said. "Another attack may be better led. And they know us now. They're not going to flee in panic at the sight of a Testudo, and they know better than to close against a legion with short swords in the field.
"Even if we could beat them in a pitched battle, that wouldn't solve it. If I commanded them, my tactic would be to dodge our field army, and wear down our supply trains with ceaseless harassment. They can live off the land better than we can. Nip off isolated forts and garrisons and ambush the relief forces. Then melt back into the forests and dare us to follow them. Only this time they would be taking cities, not mile castles. Harassment happens all the time in wild country, of course, but think of it on a far bigger scale. Then, when we're scattered and worn down and Londinium says the money's running out and we can't pay our auxiliaries, they launch a main-force attack."
He waved again to left and right, at the miles of wall marching across the hills and valleys to east and west and out of sight. Here and there the helmets of pacing sentries shone as they caught the sun, seeming to slide atop the stonework. It was new, almost unweathered, and majestic. A colossal statement of the might of Rome.
"Look at the wall itself. Our garrison is stretched from sea to sea, from Luguvallium in the west to Segedunum in the east. Our problem here is the problem of the Empire in miniature: they can attack when and where they choose. We have to try to be strong at all points at once and we can't be. Where is our central reserve?
"We have better tactics and discipline, but we have to spread the grease on the bread very thinly. This wall looks impressive but it's largely a bluff. See that sentry?" He pointed to the glittering bead of a helmet visible above the rampart of the next mile castle. "Twenty men and a decurion are sometimes all we've got in a castle, along with their women and camp followers. We rely on our spies and scouts to warn us when an attack is coming so we can concentrate our forces to meet it. But one real punch, delivered without warning, could go through a weakly garrisoned section like wet parchment. Especially if they had help from the other side—we can't watch all the coast to know what landings may take place beyond our lines. This wall is trying to do something too big for it."
"And once they were through?"
"We'd attack them from east and west, of course. Cut their communications. We can handle a big attack. But not an all-out attack by all the tribes, and not at too many points simultaneously. I'm not saying they would inevitably throw us out of Britannia if they tried—you know how good our boys are—but they could do a lot of damage, and leave us that much weaker when they've bred up enough to try again."
"So what do you recommend?"
"Find out whatever is happening and nip it in the bud. One thing on our side is the fact that these tribesmen take a long time to assemble. Not just their people. Even some barbarian chiefs know now that you've got to get a commissariat together for a serious war far from home. That puts a delay on them.
"We've wasted a lot of time already, but I'd say hit them now, at once, with everything we're got. You've got the Ninth Legion. And we're not Picts and Scots. We can march in strength at short notice. Break the back of the thing with one quick stroke. Kill and return.
"Whatever happens," he went on, "don't let the Caledonians make a massed charge from close by. A long-distance charge across the rocks and heather you can break up with javelins and artillery, perhaps—and we have put a lot of emphasis on making sure the scorpions and other light artillery can be worked quickly. But get a horde of the screaming red-haired devils leaping at you from a quarter-mile away—and they like to hide in ditches and wait for you—and you're in real trouble. More than one Roman formation has come to grief at the wrong end of a Caledonian charge. Men and women, shrieking, half-naked, foam on their mouths. Between you and me—" he lowered his voice, as though we might be overheard in that windy, empty place "—enough of them, and they might give a full legion a hard time."
"And the flying lights?"
"Maybe they've stuck swans' wings on chariots. I don't know. But I'm sure they're not ready to attack yet. Otherwise we'd see them now. They aren't good at patience. But if we find the tribes mustering and break up an attack before it's delivered, then it's a Triumph for you."
From the way he said "Triumph" I knew he meant it in the particular as well as the general sense. That could lead to other things. He probably thought that I, like so many of my rank, felt a bit more purple would look well on my cloak and toga; and perhaps he wasn't wrong.
"And if we don't find the tribes mustering?"
"We come home. We've given these loafers of ours a good exercise and we've shown the Picts the reach of civilization."
So we talked. I repeat this talk because I remembered its arguments many times in later days. I inspected the men as we prepared, and met some of the scouts as they came in. Gaunt, keen-eyed frontier wolves they were, battered and scarred by weather almost as much as by battle, they made me think uneasily on what the philosophers had written, of how luxury and soft living could corrupt, of how Rome was allegedly going soft at the heart. Still, we were its hard edge yet. I thought of the pleasant villas and smiling vales of the south, even here in Britain, of the farms of Tuscany, and reflected that civilized men must be guarded by less civilized ones.
Still, I felt no guilt about relaxing with my officers in the bathhouse that night. We would not, we knew, enjoy them again for some time.
Normally, despite the prefect's bravado, it took a legion time to prepare for a march. Six thousand fighting men and their auxiliaries are not easily uprooted. But the Ninth had only just arrived. It was rested but not settled down, and anticipating any possible siege the granaries and warehouses behind the wall were kept filled (crucifixion was a deterrent to pilfering). It could be quickly resupplied from them.
So once again, a few days later, it was our usual predawn start. A whole legion this time, the aquilifer with the Eagle and the significers in their leopard skins bearing the legion's battle honors at the front of the column. (Though not quite at the front of the force—we had scouts ahead of us. Unlike Varus.)
The wall appeared even more imposing looking back at it from the north, without the straggle of civilian dwellings along its southern side: a grim, hard rampart of civilization. New as it was, it seemed to have been standing since time began. And Mithras knows, a legion marching with its Aquila and its standards going before was a sight to see!
The country looked superficially the same as the hills and heather moors to the south, but felt different. There was, if you allowed it to get to you, a feeling of nakedness, knowing that we were outside the wall, beyond the Roman World. Even that column of armored men looked small in the vast purple heather country, under that sky. It had been different in Gaul, where there was no such obvious rampart, though perhaps crossing the Rhine would have felt like this. For a moment the sight of the wall marching east and west to the distant hilltops and out of sight filled me with pride, as when, a boy on my first visit to Rome, I had seen the great buildings of the capitol. And again I felt, as I had then, a sudden stab of feeling like despair and death, a feeling the poetry of Virgil echoed for me: "Man can do no more!" The god of the Jews was gaining converts in Rome now, I had heard, and I thought I knew why. We had need of a god to save the world, more powerful than our little godlings of sanitation and so forth, our
pantheon of deceased emperors... I set my head to the north, and I think I betrayed nothing in my face.
We were in Britannia Barbara, part of the encircling, ever-threatening Barbaricum, where anything might happen.
But nothing did, for the rest of that day. We passed the Pictish villages, with their cold hearths, some dead livestock around and a few hungry dogs and wildcats scavenging. I was interested to see that the Caledonian wildcats, great fanged things, easily kept the dogs at bay. Crassus said it was odd the Picts had abandoned their livestock. Our scouts looked for tracks, but too much rain had fallen for anything to be made out apart from their general route further into the north and the hills. We had the scouts, both on foot and mounted, and the auxiliaries, spread out far and wide. We saw and heard nothing human.
We didn't have to entrench ourselves that night. There was hard-standing for a camp a long day's march north of the Wall. (Though calculating a day's march was fiendishly difficult in that country, where the sun seemed to shine almost all night in summer and was gone as soon as it had arisen in winter. As a worshipper of Sol Invictus I had wondered sometimes why that happened. Now I know!) There was a ditch and walls ready for our use if we supplied the stakes for the palisades and our soldiers used their entrenching tools to repair the erosion. There were a few sheep grazing inside it, and in that uncanny emptiness and silence we were glad to see them as tokens of the world we knew. The cooks soon had them on spits.
It grew dark. The night sentries were posted. A nearly full-strength legion and its auxiliaries, six thousand fighting men, plus a well-trained and armed servant for every four men and a straggle of camp followers who could also heft arms if necessary, need not normally fear attack—rather anything in the rest of the world should fear them—but if the Caledoni attacked in force, who knew? And I thought again of Varus.
With Crassus, the other senior officers, and the pilus primus I inspected the lines. Scouts from outlying pickets came and went. We had brought extra scorpions and set them up around the camp.