"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.