Dear Mom,
As I write this letter, I am since a few weeks on guard duty at Hadrian’s wall, at the limes with Caledonia. At the other side of the wall live people called the Picts. Perhaps, you have heard already of them. Their tribes have a reputation of being rough, warlike and uncivilized. At the moment however, we mostly have a situation of live and let live here. We have no intention to invade these cold, rainy impenetrable northern forests, just to go catching some undernourished cattle as war loot. It was a very wise idea of the great emperor Hadrian to stop our advance here.
Picts, men and women, are rough people. They feed themselves with awful stuffed sheep stomach (another reason to stay out of their lands). Picts have these weatherworn faces, typical for people used to live in a harsh climate. They are all long haired redheads, they all wear heavy sheep’s wool skirts, named ‘kilts’, men and women alike, of which the fabric pattern allows to distinguish their different tribes. And since some of the toughest women even sport beards and moustaches, it is sometimes difficult to discern Pict man from Pict woman. Even lifting up their kilts does not always help to make the difference, particularly since they have the uncivilized habit not to shave down under, and I can assure you, a Pict has a lot of (red) hair down there! Furthermore, since they never seem to wash these kilts, they spread a terrible smell. A veteran has told me that, with the prevailing northwestern winds in northern Britannia, they could smell an approaching Pict army from ten miles away, so our troops were always prepared in advance, and even the Pict’s most cunning surprise tactics were doomed to fail!
Pict tribes are very hostile against each other, so, as long as there is a relative quiet here on the border, and since they have discovered that they cannot cope with our superior military, they have returned to their old habit of smashing each other’s heads, thereby helped by the liquid courage provided by some fermented grain drink that tastes, they say, very racy and bitter.
Nevertheless, the Picts sometimes play games with us. Women regularly approach, the wall, topless, making fancy dances, while lifting their skirts and exposing their genitals. It is probably a folkloric habit here, or maybe a consequence of the women surplus created by ongoing tribal fights. Our centurion has warned us to ignore them, because it could be a trap. Pict males are anyway very jealous, and they could be hiding just behind the hill. You never know what would happen if one of us would fall in their hands. Picts, we heard, castrate their bulls, by squishing their balls between two granite cobbles! It said they also do it with their prisoners! Some nasty prospect!
In case we get tired of these dances, we assemble a storm trooper squad, make a quick dash outside the wall, and grab a few o these women, before their men can react. We then strip them, give them first a bath, then a good whipping and finally we crucify them on the wall, facing north. Usually, their stupid games then stop for some two weeks. The strange thing is, that some of these Pict women seem to get excited from being whipped and crucified.
So, Dear Mom, in case (as usual), you would be concerned about my well-being, there is not much appetite to date these Pict women, and I can reassure you, that any chance I would return home with a red-haired daughter-in-law is out of the question.
Soon, I will get a leave and go to Londinium. Time to return to civilization. Give dad my greets, and Lucia too.
Your beloved son,
Marcus Tullius
XXI Legio
