Brambles

Brambles

The pilum head came up first.

Marchetti brushed the dirt back and left it in place while he photographed the trench. Iron, square-sectioned point, socket collapsed where the wood had gone. The kind that went through a shield and through whatever was behind the shield.

He had been at the site three weeks. The valley east of Uccellina had been written about and walked over and metal-detected, and the men who came through with the detectors had taken what they wanted and left the rest. He was working the rest.

Brambles grew along the disturbed ground above the trench, low and wiry, and by the second week they had opened three lines across the back of his left hand. He cut a path through them each morning with a hand scythe and by afternoon the new growth had already started closing it again.

He bagged the pilum head and labeled it and went back to the wall.

The first torc came up on Thursday. Cervical vertebra, the bronze ring still around the neck where the cloth and the leather and the man had been. He sat back on his heels and looked at it. Then he photographed it and bagged what the lab had asked him to bag — the ring, the neck, nothing more than the assemblage would tolerate moving — and labeled it and did not separate the metal from the bone. The lab would do that.

He found the second on Friday. The third the following Monday. By the end of the second week he had nine, all in the same stratum, along a sixty-meter line running east to west across the slope he believed corresponded to where the Gaesatae had stood. The wounds on the bones came in from the front. The men had not turned.

He worked the last of them out on a Friday evening. The light was going off the hills. The lab van would not come until Monday. He bagged what he had and labeled it and walked the line one more time before he left, the brambles catching at his trouser legs the whole way down.

He carried the bag down to the truck and set it on the passenger seat and drove down to the hotel.

The room was on the second floor at the back, away from the road. He turned on the lamp at the desk and set the bag from the truck on the chair by the window. He washed his hands and forearms in the sink — the bramble scratches stung under the water — and dried them on a towel that was already gray from three weeks of dirt.

The Polybius was on the desk where he had left it. Book Two, open at Twenty-Eight. He had marked the page with a strip torn from a receipt. The Gaesatae, proud and confident, had gone naked into the line, nothing but their arms — the brambles would have caught in their clothes, Polybius said, and slowed them down.

He had read this passage a dozen times over three weeks and it had never once occurred to him to wonder whether the sentence was true, or only defensible.

Beside the book were the others. A Roman fascinus in bronze, two inches long, the cord loop worn smooth — he had bought it at a market outside Naples in 1994 for almost nothing because the seller did not know what it was. A medieval pilgrim badge, lead, the phallus walking on its own legs in the blunt comic style the pilgrim badges favored. A nineteenth-century Italian charm, silver, made for a child to wear against the evil eye, the same sign Rome had carved over its doorways still doing the same work eighteen centuries later. Three small things in a row beside the book. He had been carrying them for years and had never quite put into words what he was carrying them for.

He sat down at the desk and picked up the fascinus. It was warm from the lamp.

Polybius did not merely say the Gaesatae went without armor. He named the garments they discarded. He described the torcs at their throats and the weapons in their hands and nothing else. Marchetti had read that as an aside for thirty years. Tonight it read like a man being careful about exactly how much he was willing to say.

He took a sheet of paper from the drawer.

The legionary was carrying the same image on his belt, he wrote.

Roman public life kept returning the naked body to protected spaces — the athlete under Olympia's truce, the god raised in stone on the pediment, the small bronze charm carried against harm. Rome had not banished the image. It had shrunk it. Miniaturized it into something you could carry.

And then the thing came down the slope at full size, alive, armed, and screaming.

He wrote for a while in that direction and then stopped and read it back and thought: this is a beautiful sentence and I have no way to know if it is true.

He kept writing anyway, because writing it privately cost him nothing.

The bronze lay across his palm, ridiculous and solemn at once. On the page the Gaesatae stood naked with their torcs and weapons. He looked from the little bronze phallus in his hand to the word naked on the page and understood that he had begun supplying details the sentence did not contain.

What if the erection was not obscenity and not merely intimidation, he wrote, but the visible sign of a transformation — the god, or something like the god, entering the body at the edge of battle. He had no way to know if any of the nine men below the trench had wanted that condition, believed in it, or simply gone into it because the man beside him had. The bones could tell him where the pila had entered. They could not tell him the condition of the flesh before impact.

He wrote that sentence twice, the second time slower than the first.

Polybius knew, he wrote first.

Then: or perhaps he only suspected.

Then he sat with the pen down for a while and wrote the harder version: or perhaps he had refused to write what the evidence would not bear, and brambles was the only sentence he could defend.

He put the pen down.

He opened the laptop and began the field report.

Nine adult male individuals. Associated bronze torcs consistent with La Tène typology. Single stratigraphic horizon along a sixty-meter transect. Predominantly frontal skeletal trauma. Probable association with the engagement described by Polybius. No posterior trauma identified in the recovered remains.

He typed the next line and then sat looking at it.

Clothing cannot be reconstructed from skeletal remains.

Polybius said they were naked. Marchetti believed he knew something true about why. The report, honestly written, could hold none of it.

He tried anyway.

The Gaesatae did not come down the slope without protection. They carried on their living bodies the same sign the Roman line had reduced to bronze.

He read it back. It arrived too easily.

He deleted the paragraph. He did not delete the file it had been in.

He copied it into the private pages, and at the top of those pages he wrote nothing — no title, no date, because he had not decided yet whether this was scholarship, or only the thing he had needed to say once, to somebody.

In the report he wrote instead: The significance of the reported nudity of the Gaesatae warriors cannot be established from the surviving material.

He looked at the sentence for a long time. It was true. He could no longer tell whether Polybius's brambles had been cowardice or discipline.

He closed the laptop.

The three objects were still in a row beside the Polybius — bronze, lead, silver. The bag from the truck sat on the chair where he had left it.

From where he sat, the bag completed the line. Bronze, lead, silver, and then the bag, as if it were the next thing he had collected.

He got up and moved the bag to the far side of the desk, away from the others.

He turned off the lamp.

Outside the window the hills were black. In the morning he would go back to the trench.