Napoleon's Roads (7 page)

We Are Standing at the Low Stone Wall …

We are standing at the low stone wall of a churchyard, in a village high on a ridge overlooking the border. The church is at the edge of the village and the view from the wall is panoramic, although that word does not seem to fit the time of day – near dusk, the darkness approaching – or the chill in the breeze coming in up the valley from the sea. Nor the stories that my friend is telling me, of the partisans who used to hide on the ridges opposite, the German killings, the reprisals, the raids that have lately been happening so much more. Over the border they are probably saying similar things about the people on this side, and on the far side of that country, on each side of another border, there are things being said that are almost the same. In this light the ridges look like great whales surfacing, in an already-mountainous sea.

THE WALL

It is Moon Sector 17 of what has already come to be called the Great Wall. Seven men to cover a two thousand metre stretch from the Quarter Moon guard house, westward eleven hundred metres to the gorge of the Eel River – down there, a hundred metres or so upstream, is another contingent of men, three or four, to watch for any who want to invade by water – and eastward almost nine hundred to where guards can wave at the guards of Sector 16, on the other side of the (guarded) staircase. In all weathers. Seven days a week with a half-day off each fortnight, during which the men are free to go down to the local villages – in fact to go anywhere they like – though most of them don't want to, since it's Imperial policy to send troops into provinces far away from their own, amongst unlike people, to reduce the risk of desertion. Though not, of course, of suicide, which has been known to happen. In all weather, but most often in winter, when the days are so short and so cold that seven-tenths of a guard's life is lived in the dark, or half-dark.

There is little for the guards to do but walk up and down the battlements, looking out every seven or eight metres when they come to a break just wide enough for one man to lean into and look out at more or less the same thing he looked at before, and think about jumping. Sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs (yes, the jumping, too). In the winter it's most likely to be alone, since no-one wants to leave the guardhouse, which though not exactly warm is still a great deal warmer than the outside, and has the fire, food and drink. They can't drink outside, not on duty, though in Moon Sector 17, as probably in most other sectors, no-one cares about that.

In all weathers, seven days a week. Nothing happening. Nothing ever changing, except the day of the week, the weather. No enemies visible. No-one remembering when any were. The thought coming to everyone at some time or another that the Wall was not built to keep anyone out – how could it in any case with so many gaps in it? – but to convince those on the inside that they had enemies in the first place. After all, if there is a wall, there must be something that it divides. And if it is a Great Wall then there must be a very substantial reason.

Here and there a hut is visible, a shepherd's hut, or a farmer's. And here and there a bit of track. Sometimes someone walking along it. Here and there a little human contact. Hardly a day, in fact, without human contact of a sort. It might be a wave, a shout, though most of the time the shout can't be heard properly anyway. Unless the wind is right. Walls too high, and the air too damp, winter and summer. A shout could be almost anything, and they could shout almost anything back. Up to them to decide whether it's polite or not. Only one of the seven soldiers speaks any of the local language. Not much need to, since the provisions – the food, the drink, the tobacco – are all pre-arranged, logged in by the staircase guards. And sometimes a woman, who will set herself up for a day or a night in the guardhouse before moving to another sector. Seven days a week no doubt; no doubt, like the rest, in all weathers. The frost on the ramparts, or the rain making them slippery, or the heat beating up from the stones. But mostly the frost and the rain, the stones greasy with cold. Nothing to do but walk up and down, drink, sleep, talk, fuck when they can. Think. After a year or so all arguments are argued out, all stories told. With a bit of luck there's some variation in the repetition, or they weren't listening the first time, or they've forgotten, or there's a last little coin still rattling around in someone's imagination. Every now and then someone is summoned to the staircase between the sectors and told to go home. For no apparent reason. Average time on the sector four years, give or take a year. That is, as far as anyone can tell. Four or five people sitting around comparing guesses is not much to go on. Any real idea of time requires watching it, and that only happens with new arrivals. It's just that they think, Here's summer again, how many summers is it now? Three? Four?

A bleak place. Wind, rain, ice, snow, or a summer that's so hot and dusty they long for them back again; mist for the mid-seasons. Sleep, eat, drink, fuck when they can (that's a joke: what, once every month or so, with a rough woman who talks with the rest while they do it, with another guy breathing down one's neck?), patrol the wall, think, although it's hard to tell when they're thinking and when they're not. Almost everyone gets to the point where they think that the Wall is doing their thinking for them, or at least giving them the thoughts, telling them how to think them. Almost everyone has got to the point where it occurs to them that they've had it wrong, that the side they thought was the outside, towards the enemy, is really the inside and vice versa. Almost everyone's thought that they are totally forgotten, totally abandoned. Almost everyone's thought that anyone seriously intent on being an enemy would not spend much time attacking the Wall. And if an enemy did come what would the guards do? Fight? Surrender? Offer them green tea and noodles? Wait for instructions? If there is a Headquarters anywhere it's certainly not in this province or the next, or the one after that. The Wall could be taken and it might be weeks before Headquarters knew, if anyone ever took a message in the first place.

You long for the enemy, to make sense of things.

But there is no enemy. Not in living memory anyway. Though now and again someone out there not friendly to it will try to do something to the Wall itself. Paint something on it, say – though given the way it curves there are some parts the guards themselves could never lay eyes on (and who else could the painting be intended for?) – or steal the stones. Most of the time it is stone stealers. A hundred years ago the Wall itself took all of the stones from the fields, for a thousand metres on either side, leaving nothing for the locals to build with. Now they use the wall as a quarry. Coming by night with a horse and cart, prising away at it, getting a load of stones to build their own much smaller wall somewhere, or a stall for the cow, an outhouse. And what's a guard to do? Fire an arrow down into the dark? Drop
stones
on them? Once or twice, bold as brass, some shepherd or hermit or leper has actually tried to attach their shelter to the wall itself, though it has never been anything a little bombardment couldn't get rid of – that, or the guards depositing a few faeces on its roof.

That is, until this. But what
is
this? Ruins of a stone hut someone tried to build decades ago. Either that, or a shelter for the original builders of the wall. But ruins, of three walls, with the fourth wall the Wall itself. All fallen in, hardly more than an outline of stones, a bare place where the door must have been. No-one ever saw anyone there, let alone planks. Yet planks there must have been. Thick ones. Very thick ones. Brought in overnight, working fast. Overnight, or maybe over a couple of nights. No-one is admitting to not having looked, not having guarded everything, for any more than two nights at the most. But suddenly there are planks, and no-one can say for certain (to themselves: they're not giving anything away to anyone else) how long they have been there. And overnight, or over a couple of nights at the most, a roof, or lean-to, made of the planks. That perhaps a stone or two, prised from the battlement, might shift, but they don't, since the angle of the lean-to's roof is so steep there's a chance they'd just bounce off and roll into the trees. And no movement, no sign of anyone coming or going.

And yet someone is, at night, obviously. Disguising their light, if they are using one, making no sound loud enough to be heard at the top. But there, somehow; working, somehow. For after the fourth night – no-one can explain it; no-one has heard anything – the lean-to is higher, the roof just that fraction further up the wall. And so it happens, and continues to happen, very gradually. At first there is a lot of talk about it and then not much at all. Just nervous watching. Tacit agreement that if there has been no message then it's as likely to be something organised or approved by the authorities as it is to be something they don't know about, and so as likely a friendly as an enemy construction, an indication, perhaps, that they'd had their sides wrong all along, that the enemy was in fact on the side they'd thought friendly and vice versa. And there has been no message. In fact, at least while any of these soldiers have been there, there has never been a message. If they requested instructions from Headquarters it would probably be months before they heard, and by then the issue would have resolved itself or gone away. And what would they hear anyway? That they'd had it all wrong and were summoned for court martial? That reinforcements were on the way (when they might have been dead for weeks!)?

And so they watch. And, when anyone has an idea, engage in cautious, measured resistance. Until they know otherwise, they should treat it as unfriendly, for their own sake if for nothing else. Then, at least, if they are wrong, they might be alive to find out.

They pour a small vat of boiling oil. Almost half of what they have, and will have to conserve for the rest of the year. But for the time being – the roof rising a little further each week, wooden sides appearing atop the old stone base – it seems a good idea. To pour the boiling oil and then shoot flaming arrows to ignite it, burn the whole thing down. But it rains. They have been so busy with the project that they haven't noticed the clouds. A few drops at first, with the first of the arrows appearing to catch, and then a steady downpour, the oil seeming to have done nothing but help waterproof the thing (that is part of the problem, what to call it: lean-to? house? tower? thing).

A mystery. An utter, incomprehensible mystery. Sure that they can solve it, convinced that there must be some explanation, guards on night duty – especially when the moon affords some visibility – spend all night in the shadow of the battlement, watching, listening. And as first light replaces the extinguished moon find the house/lean-to/tower taller, if only by inches. What has happened? Have they fallen asleep? Have their minds wandered? Perhaps the intensity of watching can create its own illusions. When you watch something long enough it can seem to be moving, whether it's moving or not.

And then it stops, indisputably, beyond the shadow of doubt. No growth for a few weeks, even months. They watch, forget to watch, remember, watch, each in their own rhythm. Talk about it when they remember, compare notes. Someone thinks that it has grown again and gets the others to look. Sometimes they agree, sometimes not. At other times the growth is clear. How long has it been going on now? A year? A year and a half? And still no message to explain it, still nothing from Headquarters. Indeed it seems, when they think about it, that nothing has ever arrived from Headquarters except orders for replacement followed by the replacements themselves, but the replacements themselves always come from different places and there is no reason to think that someone's replacement is heralded by anything other than a message, from further down the Wall, that a replacement is on the way. If arrival from Headquarters is the only evidence that Headquarters exists, then there is no real reason to think that Headquarters exists at all, other than that people speak about it, presume that it does.

This thing, on the other hand, while far less plausible, is here. Its walls, though timber, look very solid, are made of a hardwood that resists the sharpest arrows. Sometimes an arrow sticks for a while, if they're lucky, but only for a while, always blows off in the wind. No windows; nothing to get an arrow through; and it is built – if it can be said that something is being built when there is no evidence of builders – at such a point on the Wall that no-one can see whether there is a door at the front through which the invisible builders might come, though of course there has to be. And no-one coming or going. At one point the sergeant sits bolt upright in his bed in the middle of the night and shouts out an idea, a realisation: the tower/house/lean-to is being built from the inside. Someone far below them has tunnelled along through the foundations of the Wall itself. The door is on the inside, not the outside. They are being under-mined. For a while the Wall feels different. It is one thing to watch and wait while something encroaches from a place they can keep watch over, even if they never see anything, but an encroachment from below, within, under the very thing they're standing on, is something different again.

They renew their efforts, work on a number of plans. Lowering someone down, while the most logical thing to do, has never really been an option, since rope of any appropriate length or thickness is forbidden for fear of escape attempts. Soldiers can be allowed off the Wall one by one as their entitled half-day leave comes due, but a rope might allow all of them off at once, precipitate a group desertion. Now that the house/tower/lean-to is almost two-thirds of the way up the Wall, however, sheets and pieces of clothing might be tied together, a man might be lowered. They draw lots, send down the victor. No outside door as far as he can tell, but it is hard to see. Certainly no path anywhere, no building rubble. And the roof-planks themselves – better to call them beams – are too thick, can't be budged, even with something to prise at them. Perhaps, if he could hammer thick nails into the lower part of the lean-to roof, give himself something to stand on, make a platform, then he could hack, saw, chip his way in, but where to get the nails, the planks for a platform? Requisition them? Explain? They have left it too long, in all their indecisiveness. Now, surely, all they would get would be court martial for incompetence. Better to try to handle it themselves, since that's the way they have started. Instead of hacking their way in they could go back to burning. This time the soldier – another soldier, since they are taking turns – could set a fire, but how to do so on the steep slope of the roof?

There is a replacement. The departee is sworn to say nothing. The newcomer – always good to have a fresh mind – comes up with another idea. Wax burns, fiercely, if the heat that starts it is strong enough, and they have a good supply of candles. And it is nearly summer, and the long dry period. Let the sun dry out the wood until it is at its most burnable and then lower a man again, fix balls of wax to the sides – not the roof; fire is wasted on the roof – and light them with burning arrows or a hand-held brand. That way the flames will move upwards along the wood, have a better chance of purchase. But the man sent down, after the months of waiting, sets only himself alight, is barely brought up before the sheets burn through, spends a week moaning in the guardhouse, keeping everyone awake, before they can get him taken away.