Napoleon's Roads by David Brooks

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