Hadrian's wall

by William Dietrich

  The corner of the room was against Galba's back, trapping him, and for the first time the officer's dark eyes showed fear. There was something supernatural about this assault, he thought, a combination of strength and fury he'd never faced before. Were there really gods? And had this barbarian oaf somehow summoned them? Had that fat cow Savia summoned hers?

  It was time for something desperate.

  As Arden swung, the Roman suddenly dove to one side, sacrificing his own balance to put the Celt off aim. The tip of the barbarian sword slammed into stucco and stone and sheared off with a shrill ring, the broken piece spinning backward and narrowly missing Arden's face. Plaster exploded in a puff of smoke. Galba's knee hit the floor, but he managed to stab as he fell, his spatha finding his opponent's thigh. It sank in an inch, and Arden saved himself only by recoiling, falling onto his back.

  It was enough!

  In an instant Galba was up like a cat, his sword swinging overhead for a final cleaving blow at the man sprawled beneath him. The spatha made an audible whistle as it cut an arc through the air. Yet at the last moment Arden spun desperately on his back, and the death slash missed by inches, thunking disastrously into the wood floor. It stuck there, imprisoned.

  It's my blunder against the Scotti chieftain all over again, Galba realized with a curious detachment. Then Arden's own long sword swept horizontally like a scythe and struck the Thracian in the ankle, severing tendons.

  Brassidias roared with fury and toppled, wrenching at his sword.

  It broke too, snapping off a hand's-breadth from its tip.

  The men reared up, both limping and desperate now, Galba managing to make a thrust toward Arden's throat before the Celt could get his guard up.

  His sword stopped harmlessly, however, missing by a finger's width because the Thracian hadn't adjusted to his shortened sword. Even as he missed, his severed ankle buckled beneath him.

  "Dung of Plut-"

  The curse was cut off as Arden's sword, its tip gone too, whipped down and chopped at the joint between head and neck, slicing into Galba's shoulder, chest, and chain mail with a sickening thud of connection. It struck like an ax into a block of wood, and the tribune quivered as the force reverberated through every fiber of his being to confirm his mortality. His own sword dropped.

  Arden wrenched his bloody blade free, chest heaving, arms trembling. "Look your last on my woman, Roman pig."

  Then he swung horizontally, and with a crack of severed spine Galba's head came neatly off, its expression locked in stunned surprise, the skull flying to whap against the wall with a wet crack. It and Galba's torso hit the floor at the same time, the latter ejecting a great gout of blood.

  In a corner, the head rocked like a spilled pot.

  The barbarian staggered back, his body shaking from the violent exertion, muscles dancing, his great sword wavering.

  "Arden!"

  Then his own sword dropped, and he collapsed into Valeria's arms.

  Even as the barbarian chieftain gasped for breath, bloodied and naked, the locked door of the commander's house boomed dully as Roman soldiers roused by Marta hammered against it. "Open up!"

  Falco, frozen in fascination by the fight, jerked to action. "Come!" he shouted to the couple. "Onto the roof!"

  "Wait." Arden broke from Valeria, stooped for something, and then came back to seize her hand. The rhythmic pounding followed the fugitives as they clambered upstairs to the building's loft. Below they could hear the front door splintering.

  "What now?" Valeria asked when they reached the rafters. They seemed trapped.

  "Across the rooftops to the parapet!" Falco explained. "You'll find a horse waiting on the far side."

  "A horse?" Arden asked.

  "My slaves, it seems, have friends among your people." It was a grim, almost regretful smile.

  "You're a Celt yourself, aren't you, Falco?"

  "Aye, loyalties have become blurred. Who's a Roman and who's not? Who a Briton and who an invader? We sort it out with blood and thunder."

  Falco used his shoulder to butt the underside of the roof. Clay tile broke loose and skittered to the pavement below, making enough of a hole to let Arden scramble out onto the roof's slippery surface, his torn tunic now tied haphazardly around his waist. He reached down and pulled Valeria up after him. They could hear the front door caving in far below, the shouts of anxious Roman soldiers, and then their sudden stunned silence at the sight of the decapitated body of Galba Brassidias.

  What had happened to his head?

  "Go!" Falco called up at them. "I'll misdirect them. The moat has been dammed and filled with recent rainwater as a defense. It may be enough to break your fall."

  "They'll kill you, centurion."

  "No, I'm the only commander they have left. Get over the Wall, and they'll stop worrying about you and start worrying about their own survival. Run!" He disappeared to intercept the soldiers climbing the stairs.

  The couple looked around. It was cool and clean up on the roof. There was a rosy glow to the east from the rising sun, a promise of renewal, and yet the longer they lingered, the surer the light would make them targets. They could hear argument in the house below, Falco's voice among them, and knew they had only moments before discovery.

  Arden grasped Valeria's hand. "Can you jump?"

  She took breath, and with it, courage. "I'll not leave you again."

  "Run now, as hard as you can!"

  They sprinted on the tiles, the edge of the house a yawning pit, and then leaped, legs churning, bodies falling, and in salvation sprawled on the stable roof across an alley, skidding to safe purchase. They could hear the horses neighing in consternation below. Loose tiles slipped off the building, breaking with a bang. Soldiers were shouting. Then they were up and running lightly along the stable peak, hearing like music the confusion of sleepy sentries.

  Another edge and another wild leap, this time into a canvas awning that spilled them into a hayrick. Even before Valeria had time to understand what they'd done, Arden was hauling her up once more, and they sprang over a low fence and made for one of the stone stairways leading to the top of the wall.

  It was all a wild blur.

  A decurion loomed to block their way, his sword out, his look desperate and undecided. Arden had no weapon! But then suddenly the Roman looked at Valeria in startled recognition and lowered his blade.

  She recognized that it was Titus, their guide in the forest, long since promoted by Galba. He'd avoided her after the ambush. Now he bowed his head in shame.

  "I betrayed you once, lady. I won't again."

  Even as she gasped thanks, they rushed past, hurtling up the stairs to the parapet and gaining a glimpse of the lightening countryside beyond.

  Caledonia! Freedom!

  "There they are! Stop them!"

  An arrow whizzed by their heads, and then another. Boot steps rang on the paving below, a horse was screaming, and somewhere a trumpet called an alarm.

  "Now!" Arden shouted in her ear. "The water!"

  "Not yet! We need to slow them!"

  She pulled free and bent to a rack of weapons. Another arrow hissed by. But then she had a bow too, hastily strung. As Brisa had done to her long ago, she swiftly notched, pulled, and shot. There was a cry in the dark and yells of warning. The next Roman arrow went wide.

  "Now!" she agreed.

  He jerked her off the edge of the wall.

  Valeria's heart seemed to stop as they plunged into a void. Then she saw the glint of water. She was slowly rotating backward, looking back up at helmeted heads popping over the edge of the wall to look for them, and then with a titanic splash they hit the water rump first and, an instant later, the muddy bottom.

  They recoiled upward, and before she could even notice the shock of cold, they were scrambling up the muddy bank. There'd been just enough water to break their fall.

  "Where are they?" soldiers were shouting. Shadows briefly hid them. A random arrow plopped into the mud with a sucking
sound, and they tumbled down the outer hill, running wildly from the fort and its white wall.

  Arden's hand gripped hers as if welded. Valeria's decision was irrevocable, and it felt good. Tremendously right.

  A horse whinnied. "Over here!" someone called.

  It was Galen, Falco's slave, who'd crept over the Wall as his master freed Caratacus. He'd found some barbarians, and a conscious Brisa, her arm and head bandaged after the recent battle, had come to lend a horse.

  The chieftain vaulted onto the stallion's back and pulled Valeria up behind him. She was breathless, sore, dizzy, and as wildly triumphant as she'd ever been in her life, grasping her man like a tree in a storm. Brisa mounted another horse as well.

  "Come with us, lad!" Arden urged Galen. "Come to freedom!"

  The slave, lying on the ground to escape detection and Roman fire, shook his head. "My life is with my master. Ride quickly now. Ride with the gods!"

  An arrow arced down and slunk into the ground not far from them. Then another and another. It was at an extreme range, but the Romans were trying. Soldiers were aiming a ballista.

  "Soon!" Arden promised. "Soon a free Britannia!"

  "Tell Savia I love her!" Valeria added, her voice breaking.

  Then he kicked and, riding like the wind, made a wild race for the trees.

  One of his hands was on the horse's mane, guiding it.

  The other held the wet, bloody head and soul of Galba Brassidias.

  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 happeni
ng."

  "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?