Thirty-one

  The Tale of Sir Scipio

  “Where we going, chief?”

  It was one of the soldiers who spoke. Scipio didn’t really distinguish between them too closely, they were just limitanei, border troops, not regular army.

  “Silence in the ranks,” Scipio said.

  “You go where the centurion tells you.” Servius, his optio, rode at the rear.

  “Maybe we’re going to Rome,” someone said.

  That got some wry chuckles. Some of these men would certainly die for Rome. But none of them, just as certainly, would ever see it.

  Scipio didn’t turn around at any point during this exchange, mostly because he didn’t feel like looking at his men, because his men looked like shit. Scipio was a spit-and-polish man, everything in good order, but their mail was streaked and stained with rust. Most of them didn’t bother wearing helmets anymore, and the two that still did were each missing one cheek guard, which made them look ridiculous. But the smith died last winter and hadn’t been replaced, and regulation army gear was hard to come by in these parlous times, in this parlous place, at the very northern edge of the very northernmost province of the Roman Empire.

  Scipio looked good though, in immaculate bronze scale adorned with white leather strips and a sparkling silver-gilt helmet. He maintained his kit at his own expense and frequently with his own labor.

  The company was eighteen men in all, two eight-man squads plus the two officers, Scipio and Servius, all straggling in a double file along the edge of a wide tufty field. The men walked, the officers rode. Scipio kept scanning the ridgelines. You had to keep your eyes on the edges of things, this far north of the Wall: skylines, tree lines, stone walls, the soft shadowy margins of forest.

  Servius came forward to join him.

  “Where, in fact, are we going?” he said more quietly. Servius had a fat face and a weird permanent squint on one side, some kind of palsy, which made him look like a fool. But Servius was a shrewd number two and nobody’s fool.

  “We’re looking for trouble,” Scipio said. “And if we can’t find trouble, we’ll go to Dogtown.”

  Scipio was a prefect and the commander of Fort Aesica, the ninth fort on the Wall, if you were counting east to west. He was much too senior an officer to be leading a raiding party but he needed some dead Picts, and if you had to kill Picts, you went where the Picts were. That was the job. And these days, in this army, if a job needed doing Scipio generally had to see to it himself.

  Also he enjoyed it. Scipio had been sent to Britain to get things in order. He’d done it before in Numidia, and again in Germania. This was no different, really. They sent him wherever the borders were getting ragged. Scipio was a pure creature of empire, the quintessence of the Roman military machine. He ate barbarians, with pepper and fish sauce, and shat law and order.

  They tramped along through silent meadows with their solitary oaks and alders, skirted bogs, negotiated bluffs and escarpments, tiny figures in the vast green expanse of Caledonia. They stopped at a ford in a river for lunch, but the midges were too much so they ate on the move instead. Five nights ago a Pictish warband had climbed over the wall between Aesica and Vercovicium and gone marauding from farm to farm, raping and plundering as they went, till the local garrison there chased them back north. That’s not how things were supposed to work, and apparently the Picts needed reminding of that.

  Around midafternoon, as they were traversing the side of a lovely hill covered in heather just starting to bloom, one of the soldiers took an arrow in the chest.

  It was either a lucky shot or a very good one. Pictish arrowheads were sharp but they were made of flint and wouldn’t penetrate even rusty Roman armor. But the bowman had slipped his shaft in just above the collar of the man’s mail shirt at a high angle. Only the arrow’s crude gray goose fletching was left exposed, like a decorative pin on his collar.

  No one even noticed what had happened till the man sagged down onto his side, then rolled over on his back, groaning and stretching like a sleeper who couldn’t get comfortable, and died. The other soldiers swore and edged away from him, as if arrows in chests might be contagious.

  “ ’Ware arrows!” Scipio shouted belatedly.

  “Arrows! Arrows!” Servius craned his head around to see where the attack came from. The top of the hill, pretty obviously, though they couldn’t see anybody up there.

  “Well?” Scipio said. “Go on! Up the fucking hill! Run! Up the hill, and I’ll kill the last man to the top with my own hands!”

  The men turned and started struggling uphill through the gorse, their boots slipping and sliding everywhere. What they needed were hobnailed boots, but they didn’t have them, for the simple reason that you couldn’t get nails anymore on this godsforsaken fuckwater island, because iron was too expensive.

  Scipio urged his horse upslope after his men—she was a good hill-climber—and swung out in a wide arc to the left. He thought the Picts might run for it, because tactical retreat was article number one in the Pictish military playbook, but they chose to make a stand. Good. He would circle behind them. They sent down a few more arrows plus a flight of javelins, probably already regretting whatever rash impulse had caused them to take a potshot at a passing Roman patrol. Servius barked an order and the men dropped to their knees behind their round shields, each one bearing the gray wheel of Aesica. An arrow stuck in one shield with a hollow knock, and a javelin clanked off the metal boss of another. Then Servius got them up and running again.

  These Picts were teenagers, most of them, probably grew up together in the same village, talking shit about what they’d do to the Romans one day if they ever got the chance, and now here it was. One of them even wore a looted Roman helmet. A light rain began, slicking Scipio’s face. Cresting the hill, he became weightless for a heartbeat. Off to his right he heard the crash and the yells behind him as his men came over the top and bulled into the Pictish line, such as it was, shattered it like a hammer tapping glass. The yells were all Pictish; Scipio drilled his men to charge in silence, not screaming like a lot of barbarians. Silence was scarier.

  The Picts were brave enough, he’d give them that. It was discipline they lacked. The Romans came on in three lines, swords and spears, while Servius and another man hung back, throwing heavy metal darts overhand. Servius was lethal with those things, and between him and Scipio and the swords and the spears, the Picts didn’t know where to look.

  When it was all over Scipio stood apart from his men, feeling his racing pulse settling, the high fading, as the soldiers stripped a silver pin off one of the Picts and reclaimed the looted helmet—it had both its cheek guards, for a wonder—and collected the thrown javelins from downslope. You couldn’t waste anything nowadays.

  But he felt good. He wouldn’t even kill the last man up the hill, whoever that was. They left the corpses for the wolves, though not without first arranging one of the bodies face down on another one’s crotch, so it looked like he was sucking his buddy’s dick.

  Now can we go home? they asked.

  Now, Scipio said, we go to Dogtown.

  * * *

  • • •

  Dogtown was a Pictish village. Scipio didn’t know its real name, or why his men called it that. It was close enough to the Wall that over the centuries the Picts there had been more or less domesticated, and Scipio and his men swaggered through town, still jittery from the fight. They broke some pottery, spanked a few old people across the face with the flats of their swords, waved a burning brand around, just reminding people who’s boss. Their little gang was down to sixteen now: the archer had picked off another man on his way up the hill. Mars, he’d been good. They’d buried the two men on the hillside, though Scipio couldn’t even give them proper burials now, just chucked them into the raw bare ground.

  Why? Because they had no coffins. Because they had no fucking nails.

  They drank some of the brutally strong Pictish ale, which was brewed with heather, and ate some food, if you could call it that. These people wouldn’t know what a fig was if it bit them on the ass. Didn’t even have apples. Didn’t even have fish sauce! In the damp depths of one of the dark longhouses, a couple of pale, yellow-haired Pictish women serviced them.

  They left behind a few thin, clipped silver siliquae, three emperors out of date, bearing the words VIRTUS ROMANORUM.

  Afterward Scipio went off for a ride by himself. He missed his wife. His kids would barely know him, he’d been gone so long.

  A crowd of little Pictish kiddies was standing chattering around his horse, and Scipio shooed them away. They’d drawn white chalk circles on the ground around the poor thing, and on its haunches—some weird Pictish game. The rain was thickening, and his wool cloak gave off a musty smell, the pungent ghost of whatever sheep it was shorn from. He rode out of the village through the clouds of mist that flowed endlessly across the road.

  Britannia was a weird place, no question. Growing up in a Mediterranean clime, Scipio never imagined in a thousand years that he would come here. Britannia was so cold and distant and insular and northerly as to be almost mythological, a miserably damp demi-realm confabulated out of gray stone and wet leaves and coarse grass. A different sun hung over Britain, a worn, debased tin version of the great golden coin that stared unblinking down at Rome.

  Some people couldn’t take it. The officer Scipio replaced out here, he sure couldn’t. The day he arrived Scipio sat down with him for a debriefing, and the man—if you could call him that, he was one of those pussy milkwater Christians—started mumbling about the Picts and their scary guerrilla tactics and their singing and their creepy burial mounds, and finally Scipio just had to say stop. For fuck’s sake. Stop. Mars Cocidius, are you listening to yourself? Get the fuck out of here. Go home. Go on. Go home and suck some Jesus dick, you’re an embarrassment to the Imperial Army.

  Scipio could take it. That was his job. This land cried out for Roman roads to bind it, for baths to wash its filthy people clean. It begged to be ruled into grids and planted so that its golden wheat could feed the appetite of empire. The tin moldering in its earth demanded to be freed and turned into strong Roman bronze. Spit and polish. Law and order.

  The only trouble was that in a way that guy had been right, because the Picts were different. Scipio had been here two and a half years already, with the simple instructions to secure the border and spread Romanity, but for the first time in his career he hadn’t been able to carry out his orders. Two and a half years since he’d seen Rome. Did his kids even remember him? Lucia might, but Linus would be only four. But the job wasn’t done, wasn’t even close to done.

  It was hard to say exactly what it was about the Picts. They were just more Britons, after all, and the gods knew that Rome knew how to beat Britons. They did it all day long. South of the Severn-Humber line the Britons were forbidden to own swords. They spoke Latin and lived in sprawling country villas, the rich ones anyway. They’d forgotten they weren’t Romans.

  But Rome couldn’t seem to beat these particular Britons. The Picts were spooky bastards, relics of the old times. They couldn’t read or write, and they were useless as slaves, but if you tried to cross the Wall in force they would harry and ambush the piss out of you and then melt right back into the land. Caledonia ate Roman armies and shat more Picts. Eventually Rome just walled the whole place off.

  Privately Scipio had a certain amount of respect for the Picts. He understood something most Romans didn’t, which is that they had no idea who the Picts really were. They called them Picts because some chronicler who’d probably never even been to Britannia heard they tattooed pictures on their skin, but they had their own name in their own language. A lot of them didn’t even have tattoos. They left standing stones scattered around with runes and spirals carved in them, and nobody knew what they meant. Once he’d found a little carved ivory elephant in a house in Dogtown that must have come all the way from Africa.

  Through a thin line of trees, smack in the middle of an otherwise empty field, Scipio spotted a mound.

  He’d heard about these things—that cross-licker he’d replaced had whined about them. He left his horse cropping the grass and waded through the wet meadow toward it. The mound was maybe twenty yards high and fifty across. Roughly round, roughly symmetrical, though not quite either.

  He took a running start and jogged right up it to the top. Easy-peasy. King of the castle. He stood there looking around, hands on hips, in the fog and the rain. If this thing was supposed to be a fort it was a pretty pathetic one. Though he guessed the Picts probably said that about the Wall. Rome didn’t have enough men to man the whole thing, not nearly, so if the Picts wanted to go south they just found a spot with nobody on it and brought a ladder. Or they went to sea and sailed around it. Well done, Hadrian. Regular Oracle of fucking Delphi, you are.

  Maybe the mound was a tomb. Maybe there was treasure here. He should come back with a few men and dig it up.

  But there was something about this place, it felt not so much eerie as wild. Un-Roman. This, right here, this was the Caledonia they’d never been able to conquer. This big lump, this was the hard knot that Rome couldn’t digest. It was the great heart of Britannia; he could almost feel it beating under his feet. He thought of drawing his sword and stabbing it. Take that. He would murder Britannia once and for all.

  Scipio trotted down the far side of the mound but—the fuck?!—he missed his footing and fell the last ten feet with a high-pitched yelp. He scrambled to his feet, slapping wet grass off his backside.

  There was a doorway cut into the side of the mound, and warm bronze firelight flickered inside it. There was a whole little room in there! Inside sat a woman at a table, tall and slim and pale. Her hair was red gold. She wore a rope of fine Pictish silver around her neck.

  Scipio goggled at her. This was what they’d been missing. Caledonia had been holding out on them. He wiped cold dirt off his hands. This woman must be some kind of Pictish queen or high priestess or some such. Capture her and those sneaky Picts would bow down quick.

  She was doing something at the table, it looked like metalwork. The table was strewn with tools. She turned to look at him, so quickly he almost startled.

  “Who are you?” she asked, in pure Roman Latin.

  Her small, pale face had swirly indigo lines on it—finally some of those famous tattoos he’d heard so much about. And her eyes were strange, they had no white and no pupil, they were a uniform indigo all across, the same color as the tattoos. But the way she looked at him, she didn’t seem blind.

  “Scipio Hostus,” he said. “Prefect, First Cohort, Twentieth Valeria Victrix legion, is who I am. You live out here all by yourself? Where’s your husband?”

  “Where’s your wife?”

  The question took him aback.

  “…Rome?”

  She tilted her head, amused.

  “A prefect of Rome, nervous as a little boy. Well, come in, oh victorious one. You have work to do.”

  He could never explain it to himself later, but when she said that Scipio walked right into the smoky dimness of the mound and picked up a twig broom from the hearth. He’d planned on taking the woman hostage, then dragging her bound and kicking back to Aesica. But he lost track of those plans as soon as he was inside. Instead he started sweeping her floor.

  It was hilarious, even to him. If the boys could see me now! he chuckled to himself as he swept out a corner. Or Galla. Look, it’s your fearsome husband, the Animal of Aesica, sweeping up after a Pictish queen! They would laugh about it together. He smiled and shook his head at the thought.

  After he was done Scipio chopped wood for his new mistress. He carried water from a well. He cut the grass. He drew her a bath. She never thanked him, in fact she barely took any notice of him except to give him orders and once to rap his knuckles, painfully, when he spilled water. He worked so hard for so long that finally he just lay down on the packed dirt floor and fell asleep.

  He woke up outside on the grass. There were pink drifts of cloud in the morning sky. The dawn chorus was in full cry. What the hell was that? A dream? Did they slip something in his beer?

  His horse was gone. It took him two hours to walk all the way back to Dogtown. When he finally got back to the Wall they said he’d been gone for three weeks. Everybody thought he was dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  Scipio got right back to work. Whoever Madam Mound was she was right about one thing: he had work to do. And it wasn’t getting any easier.

  It wasn’t just the Picts, there were threatening rumbles from the Scotti and the Attacotti and the Saxons and Angles across the North Sea. It was almost like the barbarians were communicating with one another somehow, if that weren’t completely impossible. Meanwhile dark rumors ran up and down the Wall about what was happening on the Continent: the Visigoths shaking down the Senate for a fortune in gold and silver; the Rhine frozen over and Vandals pushing into Gaul in force. In the southlands usurping would-be emperors kept arising, and each one stripped more troops from the Wall to support his claim.

  And the soldiers Scipio did have were barely even Roman. When it was first built, Fort Aesica had been garrisoned with Gauls from Belgica. Over the years they’d married and interbred with the local Britons, and then some Iberians showed up and interbred with them, and now a few centuries down the line Aesica was its own weird mongrel tribe, speaking a mongrel Latin-Belgic-Iberian-British dialect and worshipping a mongrel pantheon of Roman and barbarian gods. Sometimes he looked at his men on one side and the Picts on the other and all he saw was barbarians fighting other barbarians.

  He set his men to refurbishing his local stretch of Wall, which after 250 years was nearly as old and weathered as those Pictish stones. They rebuilt the collapsed sections and cleared brush from the defensive ditches and reopened the milecastles. Scipio paid a long overdue visit to the advance fort seven miles north of the Wall that was supposed to be keeping an eye out for trouble. He found it in a sad state, with much undue fraternizing with the locals. Scipio sacked the commander and replaced him with Servius.