Two days before we marched, a messenger came from the Prince Guidarius in Lindum, to tell me that the Coritani territory was still free of the Sea Wolves, but that even so, my old place still waited for me if I chose to return to it. I gave orders for the messenger to be fed and housed, and sent him back next day with word that I thanked the Prince Guidarius, but that I had not changed my plans. I had little time to weave courtesy into my reply, for I had both hands full with arrangements for food and war supplies to come up after us from Eburacum before the autumn’s, end. (I had already sent word back to Deva of the victory, together with a forewarning to Kinmarcus that we should need the same kind of supplies from him and from the Môn grainlands later.) With making plans for a supply depot at Corstopitum, the old depot town for the Wall fortress; with convincing the Bishop of Eburacum, who was among the returned survivors, that the income from certain Church orchard land, luckily undamaged by the Saxons, would be better spent on well-made arrows and salt and saddle leather, than laid by in gold to the Glory of God. He was not easy to convince, being less of a mouse than his brother of Lindum. But he saw my point in the end.
And the next day we marched out of Eburacum by the northern gate, and took the Legion’s road to the Wall.
It must have been a fine sight in its day, the Wall, when the sentries came and went along the rampart walks and bronze-mailed cohorts held the fortress towers and the statues and the altars to the Legion’s gods were thick along the crest; and between it and the road and the vallum ditch that followed it like its own shadow, one great string of towns, one long-drawn town under many names, straggling all the four days’ march from Segedunum to Luguvallium. The towns were as dead as the Wall, now, for the menace of the North was too near, the raids too frequent for them to have outlived the protection of the Eagles; and we rode into a ghost town, the roofs long since fallen in and the walls crumbling away, the tall armies of nettles where the merchants had spread their wares and the Auxiliaries had taken their pleasure in off-duty hours, where the married quarters had been, and children and dogs had tumbled in the sunshine under the very feet of the marching cohorts, and the drink shops had spilled beery song into the night, and the smiths and sandalmakers, the horse dealers and the harlots had plied their trades; and all that moved was a blue hare among the fallen gravestones of forgotten men, and above us a hoodie crow perching on the rotting carcass of what had once been one of the great catapults of the Wall, that flew off croaking, with a slow flap of indignant wings as we drew near.
We camped that night around the crumbling gate tower where the road from Corstopitum, and Eburacum beyond, passed through into lowland Caledonia, into the old lost province of Valentia. I called the captains together after the evening meal, and took a bit of stick and began to draw maps in the ashes on the edge of the campfire. How often I had seen Ambrosius doing that, on the eve of a campaign. I was mapping, for my own information as well as theirs, a countryside that I had never seen; but it was not for nothing that I had spent those long winter evenings listening to Daglaef the Merchant. “See — here we sit now at the Hunnum Gate; from here the road runs — so, north and a little west, to Trimontium, three days’ march.” (It was odd how, never having known the Legions, one still thought of the old legionary march of twenty miles, when one wanted to work out a distance.) “Here it crosses the Tweed — so, and runs on through the lowland hills and into the fringes of the Caledon Forest, to come out in the levels below the Highland Line.” Bedwyr and the others gathered closer in the firelight, peering over my shoulders. I went on scrawling lines and curves in the warm ash. “Now from Luguvallium, where I put this pebble, a second road runs north to Castra Cunetium, here, five marches by reason of the way the road sinks to avoid marsh country and high moors. And on, also, toward the Highland Line through the very heart of the Pict lands.” I returned to Trimontium, trying to remember exactly how the merchant had described to me the run of the Tweed. “Here the Tweed Valley narrows into a gorge, running so. Easy to see the strategic importance of the place, isn’t it, with the river valley and the road forming between them the main highways from Caledonia to the south; and the Inner Kingdom of the Picts thrusting down through the Forest in the northwest. . . . Then if Daglaef spake truth, there is a lateral road from Trimontium running thus, up toward the headwaters of the Tweed and across the high tongue of the Forest to those of the Cluta, and downvalley to Castra Cunetium. . . . Now have you all got that safely behind your foreheads? Then make sure that the rest of the lads have it, too, for it is in my mind that those three roads and those two forts are the pattern of our fate for a good while to come, for on our holding and our handling of them depends our hold of Caledonia.”
Presently, when I had done, I threw the stick into the heart of the fire, and brushed my hand through the gray ash, blotting out the crude map as though it had never been, and got up to go and take a look at the horse lines, as I always did before lying down to sleep.
Next morning Owain with fifty light-riding tribesmen set off westward along the frontier road to Luguvallium; their task was to watch the back road, the flank road of my map, and send me instant word if the enemy chose to run the hazard (for we should be on their flank at rear), of trying a break through into Britain from that side.
And when they were gone, Bedwyr and I with our foreguard rode out through the gaping ruins of the Hunnum Gate, under the charging boar of the Legion that had built it. Beyond the Wall, the country seemed all at once darker and wilder, the distant hills more brooding, the very wind through the heather blowing with a more desolate song. But that was foolishness; nothing but the knowledge in our hearts that we were beyond the frontier, beyond the pale of familiar things.
It must have been almost two hours later before the last of the rear guard was through the gate, for we moved in the usual formation for a march through hostile country, the foreguard of cavalry scouting a few miles ahead of the foot and baggage tram, the rear guard following a few miles behind, and the light horsemen scattered against the threat of flank attack on either side. I hated to ride in that formation; it lengthened the time of the day’s march unbearably, or else cut the distance covered. But to take any other course would have been to go bleating for trouble like a lost lamb in wolf country.
We got the trouble soon enough, without bleating for it. From the Wall to Trimontium was a three-day march, and we did it in something over three weeks. There was no random turmoil throughout the country, the thing had passed beyond that stage. But clearly Huil Son of Caw had had word of our coming, and sent out his light war parties to hold us up while he finished the gathering of his own war host and the armoring of his stronghold against us. And the warriors of his skirmishing bands had the advantage of knowing the country they fought over, while we were strangers to it. We had to fight through almost daily skirmishes in which the enemy appeared from nowhere, and even when beaten off, simply melted into the hillside again, leaving very few dead behind them to mingle with ours. We were attacked at any brown stream or blind turn of the track, shot at from behind every furze bush; stretches of road were torn up ahead of us just where the ground was softest, so that we had to spend whole days in getting the horses across maybe a mile of ground where the white silken tassels of the bog grass gave us the only warning of the worst patches; and almost always we were attacked while doing it, so that all the while, though not heavily, we lost men and horses. Indeed if the road had been a valley one or led through forest country, I think that it would have gone hard with us; but it ran for the chief part through heather moors, and in most places where it was not a natural ridgeway, it had been raised slightly above the level of the surrounding countryside by the engineers who built it — for which I blessed those engineers, praying ease on their long-departed souls in the names of all the gods I knew. But apart from men, the very land itself seemed in league with the traitors and the Sea Wolves, and twice smoked up dense white mists against us, which, since there would have been a certain unwisdom in marching blind through unknown and hostile country in a mist that could have hidden a war host within a spear’s length of us, held us captive for days at a time within the circle of the past night’s defenses, with the horses under strong guard outside. (We ditched the camp every night, and each man set his spear upright behind the ditch; it was as near as light-moving troops such as we were could come to the old “thorn hedge” of the Legions.) The picket lines were attacked on both occasions, and several horses killed and a few hamstrung by men who paid for it with their own lives.