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.
XIV
Brigonius's birthplace happened to be close to the site where the Wall's western turf construction met the stone eastern sections. Thus as he reached Banna that evening the turf Wall came into view.
If anything it was an even more spectacular sight than the stone Wall, for along its line the legionaries had stripped away the vegetation right down to the pink-white boulder clay beneath. The turfs they cut-and hauled here sometimes from miles away, for good turf was hard to find-were heaped up on a central strip of remnant greenery. The finished curtain wall was fourteen feet high and twenty feet wide at the base, punctuated by turrets of stone or timber, and a rampart of white clay was laid out before the Wall on the northern side. So as Brigonius looked down from the higher ground, the cleared strip of land stood out, a gash in the landscape brilliant white in the sun, with the green-brown line of the Wall itself running along its centre line.
At length he arrived at Banna. To the south of its escarpment the valley still cut deep, and far below the river washed as it always had. But the landscape bore the mark of the Romans. To the north a road set off straight as an arrow, heading for the northern outposts, and the hills where men had once seen the reclining form of a goddess now glimmered with the fires of watchtowers.
Banna itself was now the site of a Roman camp. As he approached Brigonius saw sentries silhouetted against a setting sun, their bare heads and spear tips clearly visible above wooden ramparts. The place bristled with activity, the roughly laid roads that led from east, west and south were full of traffic, and the turf all around had been churned to mud. The camp itself huddled against the escarpment, protected from any threat by a complex of ditches and a palisaded trench to the north, and the cliff to its back.
As he approached the camp's defences Brigonius was passed through a line of sentries. Within was a neat array of the Romans' leather tents. There were soldiers everywhere, of course, in their leather tunics and trousers,
