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.
After a few minutes I find I haven't the heart to make noise or clatter about. I untie the rawhide lead and pitch the sandals down below. I don't bother with the hearth and in a short time the lower story goes dark. The upper still has its two torches and is nicely dry, though a cold breeze comes through the windows. I alternate time inside with time on the Wall. It takes minutes to get used to seeing by starlight when I go back out.
Some rocks fall and roll somewhere off in the distance. I keep watch for any movement in that direction for some minutes, without success.
My father liked to refer to himself as stag-hearted. He was speaking principally of his stamina on foot and with women. “Do you miss your brother?” he asked me on one of those winter fort-nights he spent hanging about the place. It was only a few years after my brother's death. I still wasn't big enough to hold the weight of my father's sword at arm's length.
I remember I shook my head. I remember he was unsurprised. I remember that some time later my mother entered the room and asked us what was wrong now.
“We're mournful about his brother,” my father finally told her.
He was such a surprising brother, I always think, with his strange temper and his gifts for cruelty and whittling and his fascination with divination. He carved me an entire armored galley with a working anchor. He predicted his own death and told me I'd recognize the signs of mine when it was imminent. I was never greatly angered by his beatings but once became so enraged by something I can't fully remember now, involving a lie he told our mother, that I prayed for the sickness which later came and killed him.
“I prayed for you to get sick,” I told him on his deathbed. We were alone and his eyes were running so that he could barely see. The pallet beneath his head was yellow with the discharge. He returned my look with amusement, as if to say, Of course.
Halfway through the night a bird's shriek startles me. I chew a hard biscuit to keep myself alert. The rain's a light mist and I can smell something fresh. My mother's wool tunic is heavy and wet under the mail.
When I'm in the upper story taking a drink, a sound I thought was the water ladle continues for a moment when I hold the ladle still in its tin bucket. The sound's from outside. I wait a few seconds before easing out the door, crouching down behind the embrasure to listen and allow my eyes to adjust. I hold a hand out to see if it's steady. The closest milecastle is a point of light over a roll of hills. My heart's pitching around in its little cage.
Barely audible and musical clinks of metal on stone extend off to my left down below. No other sounds.
The watchfire bundle is inside to prevent its becoming damp. In the event of danger it's to be dumped into a roofed and perforated iron urn mounted on the outer turret wall and open-faced in the direction of the milecastle. The bundle's been soaked in tar to light instantly. The watchfire requires the certainty of an actual raid, not just a reconnaissance. You don't get a troop horse up in the middle of the night for a few boys playing about on dares.
There's the faint whiplike sound of a scaling rope off in the darkness away from the turret. I raise my head incrementally to see over the stone lip of the embrasure and have the impression that a series of moving objects have just stopped. I squint, then widen my eyes. I'm breathing into the stone. After a moment, pieces of the darkness detach and move forward.
When I wheel around and shove open the turret door a face, bulge-eyed, smash-toothed, smeared with black and brown and blue, lunges at me and misses, and a boy pitches off the Wall into the darkness below with a shriek.