The Ice Museum by Joanna Kavenna Page B

oval-shaped ruin a few feet high, which might have been a temple, or a village hall, or a burial chamber. To the eerie song of the gate, I stood at the edge of the building, finding I was reluctant to walk inside. The external outline was almost complete, the shape of the building preserved in the ruined walls. All the forgotten worshippers, dancers, villagers, or farmers would have seen were the matted green hills, stretching away. The sea was invisible, making the site unusual in Shetland, where the sea is never more than a few miles away. But the significance of the location was lost, and nobody knew for certain what the building had been used for, what forgotten protocol or practices it had embodied. These islands were covered with these low walls of stone, the moss-coated debris of thousands of years ago. The people lived quietly along the coasts, and the winds blasted symphonies across the rocks and the waves drummed on the sands.
    Later, I went back to the Thule Bar, running into the bunker building as the rain fell in sheets. I sat on a chrome stool by the bar, my clothes dripping on the floor, but no one minded. The locals were jovial and polite, speaking in their thick Scots-Scandinavian accents, but even after a few beers, they still weren’t sure that Shetland was Thule. Like a consortium of pedants, they were careful with the past, refusing to leap to a conclusion.
    â€˜But what about the Romans?’ I said, speaking above the sound of the bar. ‘What about the Romans arriving two thousand years ago, saying that the north of Britain must be Thule?’ They were nodding politely, looking blank. ‘The Roman historian Tacitus,’ I said, causing a Shetlander to upset his glass, ‘said that Thule was Shetland.’
    â€˜Tacitus!’ someone bellowed across the bar, as if he were proposing a toast.
    Tacitus placed Thule north-east of the Scottish mainland, and gave the credit for finding it to his father-in-law, Agricola. Agricola sent out the fleet which found Thule, wrote Tacitus, on a mission to circumnavigate Britain, and his fleet had seen Thule across the torpid waves of Ocean. Britain, wrote Tacitus, was the largest land known to the Romans: its northern shores had no lands opposite them, but were beaten by the wastes of a vast empty sea. In A.D. 77, Agricola became governor of Britain, taking up the post at a time when the land remained uneasy. In the years after he arrived, Agricola moved his armies north. The soldiers, wrote Tacitus, were prone to bragging, claiming that their battles against the local tribes were as mythical as the conquest of Ocean.
    There were skirmishes between the Romans and the Caledonians, and then the armies faced each other for a major battle. Tacitus reports the speech one of the Caledonian leaders made, a speech curiously laden with a Roman sense of Britain as the last land to the north: ‘There is no land beyond us and even the sea is no safe refuge when we are threatened by the Roman fleet,’ he said, according to Tacitus. ‘Today the furthest bounds of Britain lie open—and everything unknown is given an inflated worth. But now there is no people beyond us, nothing but tides and rocks and, more deadly than these, the Romans . . . They have pillaged the world: when the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea.’
    And Agricola’s rallying cry to his troops drew similarly on notions of remoteness, invoked in order to emphasize Roman supremacy: ‘The furthest point of Britain is no longer a matter of report or rumour; we hold it, with forts and with arms. Britain has been discovered and subjugated . . . And it would not be inglorious to die at the very place where the world and nature end.’ The Roman Army had found out the coward Britons, he said, the Britons who hid in the furthest reaches of their remote country: ‘They have not made a stand, they have been trapped.’
    Tacitus