In the Shadow of the Wall by Gordon Anthony

really only hills. The mountains they crossed into Hispania were jagged peaks, which towered to dizzying heights above them, the summits often lost in the clouds, their tops covered in snow even though winter had not arrived. The Roman road forged through the passes and the soldiers kept them moving at a wicked pace, fearful of being caught by snow. Fortunately, they made it through the mountains before the first snowfall of winter, eventually reaching a hilltop town on the coast that the soldiers called Saguntum.
    After only a few days’ rest they pushed on, now heading westwards, through more hills and valleys, following the Roman roads that Brude was so used to now. What he had also learned on this march was that the small stone markers he had thought marked holy places were actually called milestones. When he counted the paces from one to the next he was astonished to find that the distance was exactly one thousand paces at the soldiers’ military pace and that the markings on them indicated how far it was to the next town or city. It was a revelation that staggered him and brought home to him just how organised and uniform the empire was. The Romans seemed to build everywhere. Roads, towns, cities, they stamped their mark on the countryside wherever they went.
    Pressing on through the chill of winter, they reached Asturica, footsore and weary, early in the new year, before spring had started to turn the land green. The slaves were handed over to another group of soldiers. The guards who had accompanied them on the long journey from northern Gaul went off without a word; another lost farewell in the growing line of separations Brude was experiencing.
    They found themselves in an enormous, strongly guarded camp which held over six thousand slaves. They soon discovered that they were there for a purpose and that purpose was to build. The town needed a new queduct so the new emperor was going to give it one. Army engineers and skilled masons would oversee the work but the manual labour was to be done by slaves and animals, which were treated much the same by the Romans.
    The aqueduct had to cover a distance of twelve miles from a hillside spring to the city. The engineers had already plotted a route, the owners of the land the aqueduct would cross had been removed, either voluntarily or by force, and the stone was to be quarried from nearby hills then dragged into position by the slaves.
    It was backbreaking work. Brude was assigned to the transportation teams. They used wagons, mules and oxen and he was shown how to use the incredible devices of rope and wood that the Romans used to lift heavy stones. Yet even with these, a lot of the work involved human muscle power to shift the huge blocks. His days turned into an agony of pushing, pulling, heaving and lifting, always walking a slightly longer distance as the weeks passed and the aqueduct grew longer and longer, closing on the town. He saw that the blocks were only the outer facing of the huge foundations and walls of the aqueduct. The Romans used what they called concrete to give the structure its strength, the stones being laid precisely around a central core of concrete, constantly watched by the engineers who had to make sure that the final result was a smooth gradient for the water to flow down at a regular speed for mile after mile.
    A part of Brude recognised it as a brilliant piece of engineering but at the same time the greater part of him was usually too exhausted and concentrating on doing his own job well enough to avoid punishment to appreciate what they were achieving. The main object in his life was simply to survive.
    He worked on the aqueduct all through the baking heat of the summer, all through the cold and snow of winter and then through the following summer. Men died from exhaustion, from exposure or from accidents when blocks fell or ropes gave way. Nobody paid much attention to the losses; slaves were plentiful.
    By the end of the following winter