their woollen cloaks, their strapped-up military boots. Even more of them were sporting beards, such was the impression Hadrian had made during his visit last year. The camp was a sketch of the fort that would soon be built here, but it was already functioning, already an operational element in the system of the defence of the province.
Once there had been a Brigantian community here. A Roman watchtower had been built here long before Brigonius was born, a blocky stone pillar that had loomed over his boyhood. The watchtower still stood, but his home had gone, the roundhouses demolished, the defensive ditches filled in. Brigonius wouldn't have recognised the place, save for the essential shape of the landscape.
Brigonius found Tullio sitting in his own tent. Tullio had moved his household and his aides here for the building season; it was a place where he could watch over the progress of both the stone Wall to the east and the turf to the west. Some of his officers were here, including his close adviser the bucket-headed decurion Annius, and also his household slave. Karus and Xander were here, sitting with Lepidina, who looked bored. When Brigonius joined them they were winding down what sounded like a wide-ranging discussion of problems to do with the Wall, a conversation fuelled by wine served by the slave.
As usual Tullio was surrounded by heaps of paperwork. The army's system of assignments was quite complicated, Brigonius had learned, with detachments being sent all over the province, and perhaps only half or two-thirds of the nominal strength of a given unit actually being in its home base at any time. But as a soldier of Rome, in your unit's Acts your duties were recorded daily. It was the army's meticulous record-keeping that enabled the commanders to know exactly not just where each soldier was supposed to be but where he actually was. And to maintain this vast mountain of recording whole teams of clerks were required, an army within the army.
But today the discussion concerned the Wall.
'A fort every mile, two turrets every mile,' Xander said firmly. 'That's the design. That's what we are building.'
'And I'm telling you,' Tullio said, 'that it can't be done. You see, your design is all very well. I'm all for design. My cock would tumble out of my underpants without design. What I'm talking about now is fact, legionaries out there right now putting stones and turf blocks on the ground, one on top of the other. And if you try to follow your every-mile rule rigidly, Xander, you find yourself planting forts at the bottom of a gully where you can't open the gates, or at the top of a crest where if you did open the gates you would fall out.'
'Roman roads run straight,' Karus said, himself faintly mocking. 'Up hill and across valley; everybody knows that. Are you saying you can't build a simple Wall to the same standard?'
Tullio ignored him. 'And it's not just the position of the forts. I'm hearing grumbles from the legionary tribunes who've been up on inspection from Eburacum. If an assault were to come, how are they supposed to deploy through those toy-town gates?'
Xander said stiffly, 'I carefully computed the width and frequency of the gates to ensure-'
Annius said, 'Yes, but the local farmers have to use them too. What are we going to say to the legate of the sixth when he finds himself queuing up behind a flock of sheep?'
The image was so absurd it made Lepidina laugh prettily. Brigonius tried not to look at her.
Brigonius knew that the Wall-building project was actually running to schedule, somewhat to everybody's surprise. But Tullio was genuinely concerned about this issue of the useless mile-forts.
Tullio's slave, a boy aged maybe fourteen, approached Brigonius with a wine cup. Brigonius accepted it and said, 'Thanks.'
The boy looked surprised to be noticed at all. He said, 'Enjoy it, sir,' and resumed his station.
Brigonius watched him go and sipped his drink; it was soldiers' wine, strong, filthy stuff. The boy's tongue was British, Brigantian. His litter-name was Similis. Brigonius wondered what Matto would have thought if he could have seen his cousin now, being served wine by the British slave of a German officer in the pay of the Roman army, as he worked on a Wall which was meant to secure the servitude of the north of Britain for ever.
And he looked at Lepidina. He couldn't help it.
She was sitting quietly, head down, her hands folded around a half-empty cup of blood-red wine. A year under her mother's thumb in northern forts had not been good for this city girl, and there was no sign of the bright spirit she had shown during that first visit to Camulodunum. She was a bird in a cage of stone.
Karus seemed aware of the glum silence between them. As the conversation about the practicalities of mile- forts ran down, the lawyer lumbered across to Lepidina, sat down, and let the slave boy fill his cup. 'So,' he said, 'how's your marvellous mother? I don't see so much of her these days.'
'Nor do I,' Lepidina said. 'She's too busy writing letters to the governor.'
'Yes, I know about those,' Tullio rumbled, looking up from his discussion. 'Full of nothing but good news. She leaves me to tell him the truth, which always looks bad by comparison.' He sighed noisily. 'That wretched woman!'
Karus said, 'She's a difficult friend-but I wouldn't want her as an enemy.'
Xander asked, 'And how is she feeling about her precious Prophecy, now it is failing to come true?'
Lepidina shrugged. Karus glanced uncomfortably at the soldiers. Brigonius knew that to the Romans prophecies, auguries, divinations and the like were seen as sources of power-and, particularly under an emperor obsessed with his own destiny, you had to be careful. But Severa and her family Prophecy had become the talk of the Wall, and much mocked.
Annius said in his chirpy way, 'Funny thing about that Prophecy. It actually says Hadrian would come to Britain and build a Wall, doesn't it?'
'Not quite,' Lepidina said, 'but close enough.'
'I never heard of a prophecy so, so, what's the word? Specific. Did you, Tull? Usually it's a business of poking around with leaves and entrails and getting a few portents of doom that could mean anything. This is different. It's not like the gods are setting us their usual puzzles. It's more like a man is speaking to us. It's as if somebody in the future knew what was going to happen, wrote it down and sent it back into the past.'
Lepidina said, 'My mother calls him 'the Weaver'-or her-the author of the Prophecy.'
'Ah,' Xander said, intrigued. 'But is that possible in any of our philosophies? Do we allow even the gods to know the future-or to change the past?'
Karus said dryly, 'If the legionaries hadn't nailed them all to their sacred trees on Mona it would be interesting to ask a druidh such a question. I know they spoke of a continual exchange of spirits between our world and the Other, but each of our spirits is embedded in time. So I think questions of the existence of the future, or meddling with the past, would be meaningless to them.'
'But in Greece,' said Xander loftily, 'rather more sophisticated notions have been developed.'
'Here we go,' Tullio growled. 'More 'sophisticated' horse crap.' He snapped his fingers to have the boy refill their cups.
Xander went on, unperturbed, 'For instance there is the notion of the Eternal Return, in which time is cyclic, and every event is doomed to recur over and again, without limit. This troubled Aristotle, who wondered about causality in a universe in which he existed as much after the fall of Troy as before it. But I suppose you could indeed influence the 'past' by ensuring a message about it lasted long enough to reach its recurrence in the 'future'…'
'And what about eternity?' Karus cried, sounding a little drunk. 'I thought you Greeks had plenty to say about that, Xander.'
'And some Romans,' Xander said mildly. 'Eternity: a mode of existence in which all events, past and future, coexist. Lucretius argued that duration is a mere product of the mind, for eternity is the higher reality through which we move, you see, and motion gives the impression of change. But of course Lucretius was merely developing older ideas of the Epicureans. And Plato long ago said that our perception of time is a 'moving image of eternity', again foreshadowing Lucretius-'
Brigonius struggled to understand this. 'So eternity is like-like what?'
Karus said, 'Brigonius, think of a tapestry. Woven into it are pictures of trees, say, all in their different stages of growth: seeds, saplings, young, mature, old, fallen, decayed away. They are all there all at the same time in the weave, you see. Now, you are an ant running along one thread in the tapestry. And as you run you let your eyes slide over the pictures of the young trees and the old, and you connect them up in your head-and instead of seeing many trees of different ages, you imagine you see only one tree, growing and dying and rotting away. You see? A moving image derived from stasis, passing time derived from eternity.'
