Emperor

XIII

Brigonius rode west towards Banna, along the line of the Wall.

A year after Hadrian's decision, this part of Brigantia had been transformed into a vast construction yard. On this bright late spring morning, from the higher ground Brigonius could see how from horizon to horizon a corridor of broken ground cut across the crags and green-clad hills, mapped out by surveyors' flags and poles, and scarred brown by the ruts of wheels and the prints of feet and hooves. It was a slash through the countryside's green flesh. And all along its length legionaries toiled, hauling and laying stone, maggots in the wound.

In what had been left of last summer, governor Nepos had set his workforce the target of completing three miles of Wall, which had been achieved easily. This year, in the first full season, the three legions working on the Wall were each to complete five more miles.

The mile-forts and turrets came first. The forts were built to a simple rectangular plan, fifty feet wide and sixty deep, with gateways in the north wall and the south. Inside there were small buildings and an oven, and a staircase leading to a viewing platform. The turrets were even simpler, just thatched towers set on bases twenty feet square, each with a hearth and a shelter for the soldiers. The turrets and forts were intended to be part of the fabric of the Wall itself, so they were built with 'wings', stubby extensions on their east and west faces where the curtain wall would be attached.

Such was the speed of construction that in some places the curtain wall was already being built. On a foundation of slabs set in puddled clay, two courses of dressed stone were laid, rows of neat square blocks. Then a core of rubble bonded with clay or mortar was poured in to fill the space between the skin of cut stone. Drains were built under the Wall, and more significant streams were culverted. The completed stone sections were already being plastered and painted white with lime-wash render, and red stripes ran along the line of the wall, picking out the curtain's courses of stonework.

Brigonius, a stone man himself, marvelled at the pace of the work. It wasn't just the hugely efficient transport of stone that impressed him but the Romans' use of concrete. Without a core of concrete the Wall could never have been built so rapidly, or so robustly. Concrete even set hard under water, allowing the construction of firmly founded bridges. If the facing stones were robbed or decayed in the future, the concrete core would stand; the Romans were building for centuries.

The Wall was not meant to be a defensive barrier, in the way that the wall of a fortress was designed to withstand a siege. Its purpose was control. The regularly placed fortified gates would allow the army to control the flow of population through the area-and, indeed, levy tolls from it. The Wall was imposing enough to deter any small-scale raids, but if there were any larger-scale disturbance the legionaries would mass from their bases in the south and ride out through the Wall gates to meet the enemy in set-piece battles in open country. In fact, Brigonius was coming to understand, the Wall was a mere component in a system of deep control, defence and communication that stretched south of here through roads and forts back into the Roman province, and even to the north, where manned outpost forts would be maintained beyond the Wall itself.

But, watching the Wall rise grandly over the crags, Brigonius wondered how much this military theorising mattered compared to the brute physical reality of the Wall. It was a monument to the power of the Roman mind like nothing ever seen before in Britain-or, according to Tullio, in the whole world-and even if it were not manned by a single soldier such a structure would surely deter all but the most fanatical enemies of Rome.

But then, Brigonius reminded himself, despite certain harm done to him, he was not a fanatical enemy of Rome.

Brigonius arrived at his own limestone quarry. This was a great scoop out of the south side of a hillside, not far from the line of the Wall, some miles to the east of Banna. He rode up from the north, so he could stand at the lip of the artificial cliff that had been cut into the crag and view the activities in the pit. Long lines of men snaked from the quarry face to massing points by the carts, lugging stone. They were the men of the sixth legion, mostly drawn from Gaul and Germany but some from further afield. Day after day they hacked into British limestone, roughly cutting the stone blocks and dragging them to the carts to be hauled off to the construction sites.

The speed of the work was remarkable here too. In less than a full season's working the quarry had already been hugely extended, following the seam of rich creamy rock, from the small bite into the turf-covered crag that Brigonius had inherited. The legionaries had a variety of specialist tools that Brigonius coveted, such as heavy hammers, steel-tipped wedges and crowbars, and cranes for lifting heavy blocks. In one part of the quarry a watermill worked a trip-hammer, flailing arms which battered at intransigent rock. He had heard a rumour that in another quarry further along the Wall stone was being cut by a water-driven saw.

But in the end it was brute labour that was getting the job done. Even from here Brigonius could see how the sweat glistened on the backs of the legionaries as they toiled. The Wall would be seventy miles long, and somebody had to cut out every single block of stone, haul it to the Wall line and mortar it in place.

'Brigonius.'

He turned. Here was Matto, his cousin, a stocky man ten years older than Brigonius. Matto was black-bearded, dark-haired, and he wore a heavy woollen coat dyed deep blue-black, so he was a knot of darkness in the middle of a bright summer day. It was hard to imagine a figure more anti-Roman in his style.

'Cousin. You crept up on me.'

Matto grinned, and Brigonius saw yellow-brown quarry dust embedded deep in his pores. 'Just as you sought to creep up on us-eh?'

He was right. It was a trick Brigonius had learned from Tullio the prefect, who was becoming a brusque sort of friend. 'All soldiers are lazy blighters,' Tullio would growl in his thick Germanic-tinged Latin. 'It's in the blood. The only thing to do is to sneak up on them from a direction they don't expect, at a time they don't expect it. The small hours is my favourite time. You should see the whores and catamites run, like pink rats!'

Brigonius asked Matto, 'Am I that predictable?'

'You'll have to find some new spying-points. Here's the latest tally.' Matto handed Brigonius a fold-out notebook of taped-together wood leaves.

Brigonius looked over the figures; at first glance they seemed in order. 'Any problems?'

'None but the Romans,' Matto growled. 'The numbers add up in their neat columns. But they are stealing our stone, cousin.'

'No, they aren't,' Brigonius said patiently. They had had this argument many times before.

'The prices they are paying are ruinous,' Matto insisted.

So they were, even compared to the prices Brigonius had been able to extract from the soldiers at Vindolanda before the coming of Hadrian and his plan. But at least they did pay, when they could have just taken the stone. Brigonius thought he understood. For one thing by paying rather than stealing, even a pittance, the Romans kept their own consciences clean; they might be hypocrites, but they preferred to run their affairs according to the rule of law-that is, their law.

And there was a subtler purpose. When he had come to work for Brigonius Matto had had to learn Latin, and to write and tally well enough to keep adequate records. Matto may not have realised it-and Brigonius wasn't going to point it out-but by being forced to deal with the army he was becoming, little by little, literate and numerate, and locked into the Romans' economy.

The Roman army wasn't just a tool of conquest. The largest organisation in the world, boasting three hundred thousand men deployed from the Tinea to the Euphrates, everywhere it worked it used Latin and paid in the imperial coin. The army was a source of Romanness, its walls and forts a stony wave of acculturation.

Anyhow, such was the quantity of stone being extracted to build the Wall that even at the Romans' 'ruinous' prices Brigonius and his family were growing quietly rich.

Matto was recounting a long and complicated anecdote about the behaviour of a particularly obnoxious decurion in the quarry. Brigonius cut him off. 'You're even more sour than usual today, cousin. Something's been twisting your crab-apples. What's up?'

'Everybody's stirred up,' Matto said. 'It's the tax census.'

'Another one?'

'Brigonius, they are actually building their precious Wall right on top of freshly ploughed land. My land. Now I'm told I will have to cough up higher taxes to pay for it. And in future to take my cattle from one field to another I will have to pass through a Roman gate and pay a toll!'

'Matto, this is the way things are. Take it to the council if you've a complaint.'

Matto was disgusted. 'What would be the point of that? That bunch sold themselves to the Romans long ago.' Much of the Brigantian nobility had been subsumed into the government of the civitas, the Roman administrative region which had taken the name of the old nation. 'Well,' Matto said darkly now, 'there is talk of doing something.'

Brigonius grew impatient. He had to put up with this bluster every time he tried to do business with Matto. 'Like what? What will you do, throw stones at the governor?'

'You would say that,' Matto sneered. 'Some say you're more Roman than the Romans, now.'

Brigonius kept his face closed. 'Then there's no more to be said, is there?' He tapped the record. 'Thanks for this. I'll see you next week.' And he turned back to the spectacle of his quarry and the toiling legionaries. He heard Matto stomp off to his horse.

Brigonius knew he was an easy target for local resentment, because he was much more accessible than a council member. But what twisted him up about such encounters was his memory of what had been done to him a year ago at Eburacum. He had been conscious, helpless but conscious, as Primigenius had used him. When he had at last dared to approach Lepidina again she had recoiled, as if the stink of the freedman still polluted him. He was pretty sure that the harm he had suffered was more grievous than any petty land-grabbing suffered by Matto and his pals.

But the Romans were like the weather, or the passage of time; you couldn't do anything about them, you had to work with them, or slink away and die. That was what Matto couldn't see.

And as for what had befallen him that night it was not the Romans he blamed, not the Emperor, not even the bitter freedman Primigenius. It was the woman who had set the trap into which he had fallen: a Roman but by descent his own countrywoman, Claudia Severa.

In the meantime there was work to be done. He turned his horse's head and set off for Banna.