Quite a lot of what I write in the original drafts of my books doesn't make it to the final version. Not because it's not interesting, but because sometimes description and reflection gets in the way of the flow of the story. I thought it might be interesting to my readers if I put a few setpieces I cut from The Wall up here. The first one is from Marcus's visit to King Corvus of the Selgovae at Bremenium (High Rochester) and it provides an insight into what the abandoned fort might have been like.
MARCUS'S mind took time to respond to the urgent summons after the night of feasting and drinking at Bremenium. His head throbbed and his mouth tasted as if something had died in it. All he wanted to do was turn over, but the enormous paw shaking his shoulder would not be denied.
‘What is it?’ He struggled to his feet, stretched and scratched an itch under his armpit, a gift from the fleas that infested the straw they’d been lying on. A single lamp nurtured a swiftly dying flame and King Corvus of the Selgovae replenished its oil with the dregs of a second. It struck Marcus as odd, because the nearest window showed signs of the first dull rays of the dawn. Caradoc entered through the open door tightening the belt on his braccae. He stirred the ash of the fire to produce a faint glow that ignited the fresh moss and twigs. The flames looked inviting, but Marcus picked up his cloak and followed Corvus to the door.
‘We found it when we were searching the place,’ Corvus led the way from the barrack into the chill morning air. Marcus shivered and wrapped the cloak tighter about his body. ‘Somebody had piled rubble around the entrance, but a little of it had fallen away, enough to see the wooden door. It made me suspicious because every other piece of timber in the place had been burned.’ They passed a ruined granary on the right and Marcus saw their destination was the derelict remains of the principia, once the largest building in the fort. ‘I thought they might have left their treasure behind,’ Corvus grinned over his shoulder, ‘but I was disappointed.’
They passed through the remains of the gate and crossed the cobbled courtyard. A wing of ruined buildings flanked them on either side and another faced them to the north. The northern building had consisted of three separate rooms, but the front wall had collapsed to reveal a pair of partitions, charred beams and scattered heaps of roof tiles. Marcus immediately recognized their destination. The rooms to the right and left were where the commander of Bremenium and his clerks had administered the running of the fort, but the central one was different. His heart quickened as they approached what had once been the most sacred place in Bremenium.
Debris cracked beneath their feet on the stone flagstones as they approached a rubble pile appreciably larger than the others. Corvus’s warriors had cleared the blackened stones and burned timbers to reveal a wooden door. The door was the entrance to a sunken stone chamber hurriedly covered up when the fort was abandoned. This room was the sacellum, where the standards of the garrison had been kept in honoured isolation. Once, it would have been a shrine, almost a place of worship. More recently the increasing influence of the Christian faith had blurred the lines between glorification, idolization and devotion. Many commanders now combined the sacellum with a chapel, as Marcus’s predecessor had done at Hunnum and Arrius at Vindobala. Yet the military was an essentially conservative organization and the distinction was ignored as often as it was honoured. However, the primary function of the sunken chamber persisted. It was the fort’s strong room.
The rubble had protected the sturdy wooden door from the flames that devoured the rest of the building, but Corvus’s men had little trouble in forcing it open. Corvus ducked beneath the lintel and manoeuvered his massive bulk into the cramped entrance. Marcus followed as well as he could to where the chamber opened out beneath a vaulted ceiling, illuminated by the Selgovae king’s lamp.
‘It seems to me these must have been important,’ Corvus lowered the lamp to throw light on an object lying on the stone floor. ‘I would be interested in the meaning of the symbols.’
Marcus knew the Selgovae, like the other northern tribes, were neither interested nor tutored in the art of writing. Corvus had educated himself enough to speak a rough form of Latin common on the frontier that allowed him to communicate with Roman officials. He was capable of being understood, more or less, and he could absorb a simple answer. But the knowledge he retained, prodigious though it was, had only been passed from generation to generation in story and song through men with memories like Marcus’s spy.
Marcus looked down at the object at his feet, a worked slab of stone about a sword blade in length and about half that in width. The letters CDN ET were clearly visible across the top portion of the slab. He had to squint to make out the message on the main part and he read the words aloud as their substance revealed itself. ‘It is an altar and it says: To the Genius – that is the guardian spirit – of our lord and of the standards of the First Cohort of Vardulli and of Gordianus’s unit of scouts based at Bremenium, Egnatius Lucilianus, Emperor’s propraetorian legate, set this up under the charge of Cassius Sabinianus, tribune.’
Corvus frowned. ‘So an Emperor visited this place?’ The notion clearly impressed him.
‘Not then,’ Marcus shook his head. ‘Though they certainly passed through Bremenium more than once. It was ordered on his behalf by Lucilianus, his general in Britannia, perhaps even the governor of the province, and carried out by the commander of the fort, Sabinianus.’ It struck him that Sabinianus might be the one time commander of the Ala Sabiniana, but it was a common enough name. He knew of no link between the Vardulli, who had their origins in a Gaulish tribe, and the Pannonians of Hunnum.
Corvus’s light shifted to show a second slab placed carefully beside the first. Marcus blinked when he realized what it was. ‘This looks like a stone set up to commemorate the building of the fort and it mentions a genuine Emperor, Antoninus Pius, Conqueror of Parthia, Conqueror of Britannia and Conqueror of Germania, and a list of other titles. It says his First Loyal Cohort of Vardulli, Roman citizens, part-mounted and a thousand strong, called Antoniniana, built this.’
A bark of laughter escaped Corvus. ‘If this Emperor Pius conquered all of Britannia he did not keep it long.’
Marcus acknowledged the truth of it with a smile. ‘You know of the outer wall far to the north, that once separated this part of Britannia from the Caledonian Picts?’
‘Of course,’ Corvus said. ‘All men know of it. My father once told me it had been whispered in his own father’s time that when the Romans walked the ramparts of the north wall the Selgovae were the sworn allies of Rome, aye, and more than that, even citizens of Rome. What do you think of that Marcus Flavius Victor?’
‘I think it’s possible,’ Marcus admitted. The little he knew of Rome’s Emperors was confined to their contacts with Britannia and, like Hadrian, Antoninus Pius had more impact than most. As part of Marcus’s education his blood-father decreed he spend time in Londinium learning about the province’s administration. He’d been thirteen or fourteen, and when he wasn’t being flogged for ogling the pretty, but always inaccessible, city girls, he had spent time with a clerk learning the history of the island. ‘When Pius built his wall, the lands of the Selgovae, the Votadini, the Damnonii and the Novantae became part of the Empire. The earthen wall was manned for more than twenty years, long enough for your chiefs, if not their people, to learn Roman ways and become Roman citizens.’
Corvus looked thoughtful for a moment. He took a last look at the two stone slabs and nodded. ‘It is time we talked’
This time he led the way to the northern rampart where the flagstone walkway remained largely intact. Corvus placed a hand on the dressed stone of the wall and ran a finger along the mortar. ‘This Emperor Pius, he built to last,’ he turned to look across the fort and down towards the valley where the smoke from scores of cooking fires marked the location of Marcus’s force. ‘A thousand men, eh?’
Marcus nodded. Both men were thinking the same. A thousand soldiers in a single cohort seemed impossible in these days when the manpower of many units could be numbered in the low hundreds. Yet Marcus knew the building slab didn’t lie. The First Vardulli would have had an infantry contingent of just under eight hundred men, supported by two hundred and forty cavalry. This fortress and their presence here also told him something else. Antoninus Pius or his advisers had been wary of the threat from the Selgovae.
Before its abandonment this remote outpost had undoubtedly been one of the most heavily defended forts in Britannia, manned by a military unit with the fighting power of a present-day legion. The platform where they stood had been built to hold an onager a catapult capable of throwing a boulder the size of Corvus’s great head four hundred paces. Any barbarian force foolish enough to attack Bremenium would have been battered to pieces in a welter of smashed bone and flying limbs long before they reached the walls. That extension of Roman power was here for a reason. Whatever the legalities of their status, Corvus’s Selgovae ancestors had never bent the knee to Rome.
‘An ambitious man could do a great deal with a thousand well-trained and well-armed men, the Selgovae suggested. ‘Whole kingdoms could be ripe for the plucking.’ Marcus sensed Corvus studying him, but he kept his eyes on the valley below. ‘But a thousand men is a lot of shit,’ Corvus continued, ever mindful of the practicalities. ‘We’ve only been here two days and the stone shit pits in the outhouse are overflowing.’
‘They’d have diverted a stream from up there,’ Marcus pointed to the northern height in the distance, ‘to carry it away. The pipes will have broken underground.’
‘You have the silver?’
‘Of course,’ Marcus smiled. ‘We have an agreement.’
‘But not here?’
‘Of course, not.’ Do you take me for an idiot?
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