Week 3 - Ecco
Jul. 9th, 2025 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marjoricaRome has one million people in it.
Lucius went there as a lad, or so he says. True or not, we often tell stories to pass the long shifts on the wall. None of the rest of us have been to Rome, of course. The place where I grew up had maybe twenty people in it altogether, under the totem of the hare. Each wall fort has five hundred soldiers under the eagle. One million people is something that I can scarcely envisage.
It’s the smell that strikes you first, he tells us. One million souls dwelling cheek by jowl all breathing, sweating, excreting, living, dying. The workshops reek of brimstone and saltpetre. The markets smell of spices and cooking. The docks stink of tar and of fish drying in the sun.
You can’t look anywhere without seeing so many people. The tenement blocks all but block out the sky, with shops below and families above. There are religious processions and theatrical spectacles, shrines and carts full of barrels. You could walk down a street and see a person as fair as an angel talking to one as black as onyx.
As for grandeur, there are plenty of buildings clad in marble. There are statues, fountains, gardens, temples. Lucius would not have been surprised to see the gods themselves on the streets.
We nod sagely and adjust our cloaks against the freezing wind. Rome, the cradle of our civilisation, has everything. Just everything. It is a dream that one may visit.
This describes every place ever built, I decide, as I hear eagles shrieking overhead.
***
The stone wall snakes its way across the hilltops with a solidity of purpose. On one side lies all of civilisation and on the other, anarchy, chaos and barbarity. It is the End of the World, beyond which humanity can not prosper. I sometimes wonder which side of the wall is really which.
It is rare that those of us on watch have anything to report. I like it that way, as stultifying as that can be. We have all patrolled the other side and been fearful of our lives ending at the point of a spear or the blade of an axe. From my wall top eyrie I am somewhat safer.
At places along the wall, the barbarians are friendly and come and trade. Some even stay. Titus’ wife is one. He tells us he first saw her at the bath house in the village attached to the fort. He had thought that she was a water nymph, a demigoddess walking amongst them.
By that time, of course, the bath house owner had scrubbed her up nicely, for to be civilised one must be clean. Gone was the rough woollen robe and the tangles in her red-gold hair. They had even scraped away the evil-smelling salve of rancid animal fat that her people cover themselves with.
Her people paint and prick themselves with designs of bright blue. On her arm is a blue hare. I would like to ask her about that, for my own people have the hare as a symbol. Yet she is another man’s wife, her Latin is limited and her temper as stormy as her beautiful sea-coloured eyes.
So many things to ask, but Titus has had us swear on the eagle to take care of her should anything happen to him.
***
At the foot of the wall, on the outside, there is a pit filled with spines and spikes. A little further down the mound is a deep ditch with steep sides that has been dug into the earth. If Rome and its infinite delights draws us in like some celestial lodestone, this arrangement is designed to repel.
The eagles of these hills pay no heed to the defences and wheel from one side to another as the wind takes them.
Beyond the earthworks is the End of the World proper. It starts with an expanse of scrubby grassland that soon melts into dark and ancient forest. That is all that is to be seen from the wall to the next range of hills, an impenetrable array of tree canopy. It reminds me of my childhood home, right down to the drizzle.
Within those trees, hidden from my sight are settlements of brochs and squat, round shacks. On occasion I have reported the light of camp fires or torches wielded by the purported horrors within. I thank Jove that they have come no closer.
Sometimes game comes out of the woods and if it is in our reach, we hunt it for our stewpot. Occasionally smaller creatures make it onto the no man’s land between the fences and these we are permitted to retrieve using our ladders and due caution. Some men refuse to eat so much as a berry from that side. Most will happily accept the gift of a coney or a pigeon as a supplement to rations. One creature that our band will never hunt is a hare.
It is bad luck to take a hare, Marcus tells us. He had been garrisoned to the west and been told the same thing. We certainly should not take a hare from that side of the wall.
A legionary at his last fort told how a man had thrown a spear at a hare and it had caught it a glancing blow on the rump. Next day a young woman had come to the gate, limping from a wound to that leg. When the soldiers wouldn’t let her in, she cursed at them in her strange language. All of the fort’s provisions and the very well went foul.
I scoffed at this idea, for the hare would never hurt me. Yet he was adamant and us soldiers are a superstitious lot. He was backed up by Lucius who told us that back in his home village, his own grandfather had once seen a white hare coming out of the forest. It had stopped dead still, staring at him, and then transformed into a woman with red-gold curls. Naked as the day she was born and her feet left no prints in the snow. A witch.
Me? I have never seen Rome and I have never seen a creature transform, but I still find myself assessing whether an animal is natural or not when it comes out of those trees.
###
Vote here by Tuesday 15th July https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1188979.html
Lucius went there as a lad, or so he says. True or not, we often tell stories to pass the long shifts on the wall. None of the rest of us have been to Rome, of course. The place where I grew up had maybe twenty people in it altogether, under the totem of the hare. Each wall fort has five hundred soldiers under the eagle. One million people is something that I can scarcely envisage.
It’s the smell that strikes you first, he tells us. One million souls dwelling cheek by jowl all breathing, sweating, excreting, living, dying. The workshops reek of brimstone and saltpetre. The markets smell of spices and cooking. The docks stink of tar and of fish drying in the sun.
You can’t look anywhere without seeing so many people. The tenement blocks all but block out the sky, with shops below and families above. There are religious processions and theatrical spectacles, shrines and carts full of barrels. You could walk down a street and see a person as fair as an angel talking to one as black as onyx.
As for grandeur, there are plenty of buildings clad in marble. There are statues, fountains, gardens, temples. Lucius would not have been surprised to see the gods themselves on the streets.
We nod sagely and adjust our cloaks against the freezing wind. Rome, the cradle of our civilisation, has everything. Just everything. It is a dream that one may visit.
This describes every place ever built, I decide, as I hear eagles shrieking overhead.
***
The stone wall snakes its way across the hilltops with a solidity of purpose. On one side lies all of civilisation and on the other, anarchy, chaos and barbarity. It is the End of the World, beyond which humanity can not prosper. I sometimes wonder which side of the wall is really which.
It is rare that those of us on watch have anything to report. I like it that way, as stultifying as that can be. We have all patrolled the other side and been fearful of our lives ending at the point of a spear or the blade of an axe. From my wall top eyrie I am somewhat safer.
At places along the wall, the barbarians are friendly and come and trade. Some even stay. Titus’ wife is one. He tells us he first saw her at the bath house in the village attached to the fort. He had thought that she was a water nymph, a demigoddess walking amongst them.
By that time, of course, the bath house owner had scrubbed her up nicely, for to be civilised one must be clean. Gone was the rough woollen robe and the tangles in her red-gold hair. They had even scraped away the evil-smelling salve of rancid animal fat that her people cover themselves with.
Her people paint and prick themselves with designs of bright blue. On her arm is a blue hare. I would like to ask her about that, for my own people have the hare as a symbol. Yet she is another man’s wife, her Latin is limited and her temper as stormy as her beautiful sea-coloured eyes.
So many things to ask, but Titus has had us swear on the eagle to take care of her should anything happen to him.
***
At the foot of the wall, on the outside, there is a pit filled with spines and spikes. A little further down the mound is a deep ditch with steep sides that has been dug into the earth. If Rome and its infinite delights draws us in like some celestial lodestone, this arrangement is designed to repel.
The eagles of these hills pay no heed to the defences and wheel from one side to another as the wind takes them.
Beyond the earthworks is the End of the World proper. It starts with an expanse of scrubby grassland that soon melts into dark and ancient forest. That is all that is to be seen from the wall to the next range of hills, an impenetrable array of tree canopy. It reminds me of my childhood home, right down to the drizzle.
Within those trees, hidden from my sight are settlements of brochs and squat, round shacks. On occasion I have reported the light of camp fires or torches wielded by the purported horrors within. I thank Jove that they have come no closer.
Sometimes game comes out of the woods and if it is in our reach, we hunt it for our stewpot. Occasionally smaller creatures make it onto the no man’s land between the fences and these we are permitted to retrieve using our ladders and due caution. Some men refuse to eat so much as a berry from that side. Most will happily accept the gift of a coney or a pigeon as a supplement to rations. One creature that our band will never hunt is a hare.
It is bad luck to take a hare, Marcus tells us. He had been garrisoned to the west and been told the same thing. We certainly should not take a hare from that side of the wall.
A legionary at his last fort told how a man had thrown a spear at a hare and it had caught it a glancing blow on the rump. Next day a young woman had come to the gate, limping from a wound to that leg. When the soldiers wouldn’t let her in, she cursed at them in her strange language. All of the fort’s provisions and the very well went foul.
I scoffed at this idea, for the hare would never hurt me. Yet he was adamant and us soldiers are a superstitious lot. He was backed up by Lucius who told us that back in his home village, his own grandfather had once seen a white hare coming out of the forest. It had stopped dead still, staring at him, and then transformed into a woman with red-gold curls. Naked as the day she was born and her feet left no prints in the snow. A witch.
Me? I have never seen Rome and I have never seen a creature transform, but I still find myself assessing whether an animal is natural or not when it comes out of those trees.
###
Vote here by Tuesday 15th July https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1188979.html
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Date: 2025-07-09 04:07 pm (UTC)Dan
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Date: 2025-07-12 08:39 am (UTC)I didn’t feel like things ‘came together’ this week, but I really didn’t want to take a bye.
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Date: 2025-07-11 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-12 08:40 am (UTC)The hare folklore exists everywhere that there are hares, so people are certainly taken by them at the very least.
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Date: 2025-07-16 12:07 am (UTC)Blame the Romans!