Tell Anthonius We're Building a Wall

...not making a tessellated pavement.

I meant to go home. I was going to go home. But I got stuck at the office. I help my mother-in-law run her business, and I was putting in my hours on Thursday, same as always. But when my husband came to pick me up after having the oil changed in the car and having the tire patched and replaced, our afternoon was shot to pieces by the fact that the mechanic had not put the wheel on right. My husband and his father spent upwards of an hour on the thing while I kicked about looking to entertain myself.

On this particular occasion, I had neglected to bring Veiled Rose with me, thinking I wouldn't have time to read it between having lunch with my mother- and sister-in-law and the little ones, and having to work. Gee, was I wrong. Thankfully I had brought along an armload of books for my homeschooling sister-in-law to look at for my niece, and I had Everyday Life in Roman and Anglo-Saxon Times on hand. I wanted to read it, and a dead afternoon seemed like as good a time as any.

La dee da, introduction, Rome has had a great impact on Western Civilization, Britain was nothing before Rome came, the whole shebang I've heard it before, and then...Chapter Two. Chapter Two: Calleva Atrebatum. (Oh, and other towns.) But Calleva! You may know it as Silchester. I know it as Calleva, seat of the Atrebates, a fluidly Romano-British town, and the home of some of my very best friends. I was perched in a nice folding chair, very Roman itself, in a patch of sun, staring in a kind of paralyzed delight at the aerial view of the town. She was laid out on a grid pattern, but somehow comfortably haphazard for all that. I said, "Hello, old friend," to myself, so that no one else would hear, and for a while I kept reading.

But by the time I was led around to the West Gate and shown up by the authors to the entrance, I had to get up. There was an ink illustration of the gate with its timber bridge over the ditch under the shadow of the looming stonework wall, and in the text were all the dimensions. I'm bad with numbers, they simply don't speak to me, but when I was given the dimensions of the ditch I found something I could work with. I jumped up and ran for the garage where I was hoping my father-in-law kept a spare measuring tape. I found one. It was for twenty-five feet. With a little disapproving grunt that would have sounded better coming out of Eikin's nose and not mine, I shuffled around the gravel driveway for rocks. I could do this. It would be primitive, but primitive was my style.

Doing some exceedingly awkward math in my head, I chose out four of the larger rocks and trekked with no explanation to anyone up to the road. I stood at the head of the drive and set down a stone, and stared down the length of the street.

Eighty feet.

What did that look like?

I began marching, doling out tape as I went. It was a ticklish business, rattling out the steel measurements on the asphalt, catching the steel tongue of the tape on the littler rocks, trying always to keep the darn thing straight. I measured out twenty-five feet, dug a rock out of my pocket, and put it down at the twenty-five feet marker. Then I began again, careful not to dislodge my marking rock from its place as I went. Cars drove by, keeping warily to the far side of the road. "Hello!" I muttered. "Don't mind me. I'm a writer." Twenty-five feet, fifty feet, a third stone gave me seventy-five feet and I had a little length of five feet to go. With a gesture of triumph I dropped the fourth stone in place and yanked up the tape, and turned to gaze at my marked-off length of eighty feet.

The ditch around Calleva bloomed before my eyes. Eighty feet across, and there I stood on the brink of it, the asphalt and white marker-rocks shifting dream-like in and out with the image of the timber bridge and the stone- and earth-work walls of the town.

I'm afraid my first thought was, How many bodies would it take to fill that ditch?

I stepped on the end of the tape and ran it up as high as I could. Another two cars drove by, and this time I was feeling more than a little foolish waving ten feet of measuring tape in the air, but I didn't want to let on about it. Unfortunately, my just-barely-five-foot frame can't maintain a measuring tape at ten and a half feet, let alone the height of twelve feet that was the depth of the ditch. I let the tape fall over on my head, content with the general idea that the ditch was rather deep.

Trotting back across the yard to deposit the measuring tape in its accustomed living space, I wondered if you could take the average volume of a human body and the whole length of the ditch to figure out how many bodies it would take to fill it. I don't think the grimed and oily men working on the three-legged car appreciated my proposal. I decided that was math for another day.

What do you do for research?

Uncle Aquila lived on the extreme edge of Calleva. One reached his house down a narrow side-street that turned off not far from the East Gate, leaving behind the forum and the temples, and coming down a quiet angle of the old British earthworks - for Calleva had been a British dun before it was a Roman city - where hawthorn and hazel still grew and the shyer woodland birds sometimes came.
The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff