The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  The Wall at the Edge of the World

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. Home Posting

  II. Childhood’s Close

  III. The Peace of the Frontier

  IV. Rutupiae Light

  V. Eburacum Fortress

  VI. Galt

  VII. The Corn King

  VIII. Claudia Silva

  IX. Trimontium

  X. Samhain Wind

  XI. Beltane

  XII. The Wind in the Heather

  XIII. Beann Caledon

  XIV. Wolf Winter

  XV. The Horned God

  XVI. Galt Again

  XVII. Dis Manibus

  XVIII. Epona’s Mare

  XIX. The Carrion Birds

  XX. Otters

  Author’s Note

  Also by Damion Hunter

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  For Tony

  Wherever the Roman conquers, there he dwells.

  —Seneca

  I. Home Posting

  “It appears that you are behind on your drill, Surgeon Corvus.” The camp optio bent to wave a records tablet in front of Postumus’s nose in the dusty surgeon’s quarters next to the fortress hospital. A bugler on the mud and stone rampart sounded Change of Sentries, and a smell of burning cereal drifted lightly on the wind from numerous cookfires. The Roman fort at Palmyra, on the emperor’s service in Syria, made ready for the morning.

  “I’ve been sewing up the results of yesterday’s outing,” Postumus protested.

  “If you mean the one who got rolled on by his horse and the one who stabbed himself with his own pilum, they seem to be alive at the moment.” The optio’s stance indicated he had no intention of moving until some agreement was made. He had records to keep and the medical officers were always trouble. Surgeons held rank equivalent to a centurion and were supposed to earn it with regular weapons drill and marches. They generally considered evading that an ongoing sport.

  “Tribune Balbinus is taking a patrol out this morning. You can catch up by going along. It’s a lovely day.”

  “Won’t that be nice,” Postumus muttered but he got up and collected his armor and let the optio tut at him because it needed polishing. He shrugged on his tunic and harness skirt and then the segmented plates of his lorica, fiddling with his scarf until it kept the plates from rubbing his chest. He fastened his greaves, inspected his helmet for scorpions, and jammed it on his head. He picked up his sword and shield, a long flat oval bearing the wave insignia of the Ulpia Dacorum, and glared back at the optio. One of the few privileges of the Medical Corps was not having to wear armor except on the march or on parade.

  Tribune Balbinus was mounted and waiting at the Dexter Gate with three centuries of the Ulpia Dacorum who garrisoned the fort. Postumus saluted him, fist to chest, and thought, On a horse. Of course you are. Tribunes generally came from senatorial families, destined for careers in politics after a stint with the Army. They were not career soldiers and not inclined to travel by foot.

  Balbinus gave the signal and the men lined up behind the standard-bearer, Postumus beside the centurion of the First Century. The optio was right; it was a nice day. A march would blow the dawn cobwebs out of his head, no doubt. They headed out of the gates at a standard pace, rising sun glinting off pilum points and the century standards. To one side they could admire the gardens and columned grandeur of Palmyra, and to the other the lion-colored hills of the Parthian Empire.

  After centuries of on-again, off-again warfare, Rome and Parthia were ostensibly at peace, a peace maintained by frequent border patrols on either side. The oasis city of Palmyra itself was prosperous, a stop on the Silk Road to the East, traded back and forth between Rome and the Parthian Empire for centuries and generally content with either as long as no one was laying siege to the city.

  Once past the city the land was drier, shading into desert hillside. Smaller tracks led through dusty scree upward from the stone-paved Roman road. One of the Palmyra patrols’ functions was to discourage the bandits that preyed on travelers along the border. Goods from the east were a mainstay of Palmyra’s trade and a sore temptation to the thieves of the hills.

  Tribune Balbinus signaled to the standard-bearers to turn the column southeast onto an unpaved track and the centurion beside Postumus swore, ducking out of line to trot beside the tribune’s horse. He spoke too softly to be heard, but Postumus was reasonably sure he knew what he was saying. This was too close to the border and they hadn’t enough men.

  Balbinus shook his head. “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? All right then. Column right!”

  They swung onto the track into the hills, dust rising from mailed sandals that slipped a bit in the scree. The centurion slid back into line, his mouth grim. “He’s likely to get more than bandits, the fool,” he said and then snapped his mouth shut. Criticizing a senior officer, no matter how misguided, was never a good idea.

  Postumus found that he was wide awake now. He had not managed to get out from under the optio’s eye without bringing a pilum along to carry and was beginning to think better of his objections. He could feel the tension in the officers next to him, and feel it run along the column. They were moving farther up the track, farther into hills that hid their line of sight, farther toward the Parthian border with its own patrols and maybe no more sense than the tribune had.

  The chink and rattle of their own armor blocked the sounds of the horsemen until they were on them. At least a hundred Parthian cataphracts, men and horses, both plated with coats of scale, and fifty more horse archers poured over the ridge above them.

  “Form up!” The patrol scrambled to form battle order, the signifers at the front with their centurions, the tribune’s horse dancing under him as he shouted orders.

  The cataphracts made the first charge, with their mounted archers on the wings. The Roman front ranks locked their shields together, Postumus with them, and hurled a simultaneous flight of pilums, the deadly spears whose iron heads went halfway down their length. The pilum tip was tempered but the mid-length of the iron head was not, so that it bent as it pierced its target, heavy enough to drag a man from his horse if it lodged in his shield. The Ulpia Dacorum centuries formed up with a shield wall on three sides and backed up slowly as the leading cataphracts went down under the rain of iron. Only the hillside terrain kept them from being completely surrounded. Loose horses began to careen through the Parthian ranks and the cataphracts struggled to close up again. Postumus, fighting desperately with a dismounted Parthian commander, thought that the Parthians might have been surprised as well. The cataphract had lost his spear along with his horse, and swung a vicious straight-bladed sword at him. Postumus blocked it with his shield and closed to slide his own short sword under the man’s guard, trying to pierce the coat of plates. The cataphract went down and another took his place as a loose horse galloped by them, streaming blood. It leaped over the wounded man and collided with the tribune’s mount. Both horses went down. Postumus, fighting frantically in the front line, could only take note from the corner of his eye before another cataphract, this one mounted, was on him. Postumus ran his sword into the horse’s belly, the only vulnerable place, and stumbled back as it went down too.

  The cataphracts were trying to regroup, and the horse archers on their wings were keeping their enemy pinned down as much as possible while they did so. In a momentary breathing space, he saw Tribune Balbinus writhing under the weight of a downed Parthian horse and all its armor. As Postumus watched, he went still.

  “Help me!” Postu
mus grabbed an auxiliaryman by his chain-mailed shoulder. He stumbled toward the tribune with the infantryman behind him, shields over their heads, and they heaved at the horse’s flank. Around them the Parthian archers were raining arrows down on the patrol.

  “Lift!” The horse was dead, which was better than alive and kicking, but armored it was almost immovable. “Just try to lift it long enough for me to get him!”

  Two more soldiers took it by the hooves and began to heave and Postumus, abandoning his shield and sword, reached under the belly to drag Balbinus out. He got him clear just as an arrow took the soldier at the horse’s head in the thigh and he felt another go into his own arm below the shoulder plates. It had just caught the flesh, protruding from the opposite side, and he yanked it all the way through in a flurry of bloody feathers rather than pull backward on the barbed head.

  “I have him!” Postumus gasped. “Get to the rear!” He lifted Balbinus, trailing blood, and stumbled backward through the Roman ranks while the wounded man limped behind him. The three centurions had collected their men into formation again and the Parthians were drawing off, under cover of a final deadly rain of arrows.

  “Form up! Stay sharp!” They stood gasping, waiting to see if the Parthians would attack again.

  Postumus set the tribune on the ground before his grip gave out. His arm was pouring blood now.

  “Mithras god, is that the tribune?” The centurion of the Third Century bent over him.

  “It is.” Postumus pulled his scarf from under his breastplate and knotted it around his arm with the other hand and his teeth. “Give me yours.”

  The centurion handed it over. Postumus rolled the tribune carefully onto his back and worked the scarf around his leg, tying it in a loose knot. The leg was scored and bloody and very clearly broken. “That’s where you don’t touch him, got it?”

  The centurion nodded. The First Centurion shouted the order to Fall Back and they began to move down the track, four men with the tribune’s limp body between them. Halfway down they found his horse, unhurt but reins tangled in a thicket of scrub. Postumus collected him and they put the tribune across his saddle.

  In the Palmyra hospital, Postumus set the tribune’s broken leg and taped his broken ribs while his own arm dripped blood. Afterward he lay down and gritted his teeth while his surgeon’s apprentice poured vinegar through the wound and tied a clean cloth around it. That night he slept in the surgery where he could watch Tribune Balbinus, who miraculously did not die.

  * * *

  Six days later Postumus sat in the open door of the surgery office with the surgery cat on his lap. There was nothing he need do this evening. The tribune’s leg had not become infected, also miraculously, and most likely would not require amputation. Palmyra’s new surgeon would make the rounds tonight. Postumus had packed his kit, his baggage and library, introduced the cat to his successor, and made his farewells among the men of Palmyra Fort. He was twenty-four years old and he was going home.

  There had been little enough to pack, he thought, to mark six years in the Army—spare tunics and undertunics, a game board and counters and a pair of green glass cups, a folding instrument case, tattered copies of Celsus and Dioscorides, and a small store of Eastern drugs that might be hard to come by in the North.

  And the silver Valorous Conduct bracelet on his arm, as brightly new as the waxing moon, his ticket home—home and a fat promotion. A well-earned honor, the commander had said, when he snapped the silver band on Postumus’s arm: senior surgeon and a post in Britain, at Eburacum Fortress. Postumus had saluted, the commander had saluted, and Postumus had turned at parade quickstep back to his place.

  * * *

  The Valorous Conduct band winked in the last glow of sunlight, and Postumus polished it gently with the hem of his tunic, while the cat yawned, stretched, and pricked up his ears as a brisk little wind came up with the falling twilight. A moment later he was gone, trotting purposefully past the hospital, tail erect and eyes wide at whatever scent came blowing along on the night wind. Postumus watched him as he walked out of sight and then swung his legs down from the desktop. Perhaps there were farewells to be made after all, if only to the relatively tranquil contentment of his Palmyra posting. It would keep him from thinking about how much he wanted a home posting and how little he wanted it to be at Eburacum.

  II. Childhood’s Close

  Postumus Justinius Corvus had been named, after the manner of his people, on the ninth day after his birth. If the slight-framed, sandy-haired centurion who had come home on leave occasionally to bounce him on his lap and applaud his first tottering steps bore a name totally unrelated to his, no one saw fit to mention the fact. He was eight years old before it occurred to him that his name didn’t match his father’s, and then the idea terrified him nearly into incoherence. Roman children always took some form of their father’s name. That was how you know who was whose—and who you were.

  “That’s because he’s not your father, dummy,” his brother Justin said as they sat on the blue-tiled edge of the atrium pool and dabbled their bare feet in the water. “Or mine either, of course. Not really. Here, don’t cry,” he added. “I thought you knew. I’ve known for ages.”

  Postumus, his whole safe, orderly world pulled from under him, scrubbed at his eyes with the hem of his grubby tunic. “N-no,” he managed to say. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “Probably because they thought you weren’t old enough,” Justin said, with the superiority of nine-and-a-half. “That’s why Papa is Marcus Constantius Hilarion, but I’m Marcellus Justinius Corvus and you’re Postumus Justinius Corvus, and our real father was Somebody-Else Justinius Corvus. He died just after I was born and just before you were. Why d’you think you’re called Postumus anyway? You were the last. That’s what it means.”

  “B-but Mama—?”

  “Oh, she’s our mother all right. Don’t be silly. Did you think the fairies left you under a cabbage?”

  “I don’t know!” Postumus wailed.

  “Well, if I’d known you were going to take on like that, I wouldn’t have told you,” Justin said. “If you don’t shut up, Januaria will hear you and then we’ll get smacked for putting our dirty feet in the pool. They are, too,” he added, wiggling his toes and observing the small brown cloud that drifted around them. He cast a wary glance over his shoulder but there was no one there, only the household cat in a cushioned chair, cleaning her ears in the shaft of sun from the skylight. They weren’t to play in the pool or put frogs in it. There were probably other things they weren’t to do, but they hadn’t thought of them yet.

  Postumus sniffled and was silent. Justin didn’t seem to mind, so maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. “Who was he?” he asked finally.

  “He was a cohort centurion, like Papa. In fact, he was a friend of Papa’s, and Papa married Mama after he was killed because he’d said he would take care of her. I think that’s kind of nice.”

  Postumus wondered if Papa and Mama had thought it was nice, but he didn’t say anything. But you could tell they liked each other, he thought, and they’d had Marcus and Constantia together.

  “He had a cohort in the same legion as Papa,” Justin went on.

  “In the Second?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Justin said, considering. “And it wasn’t the Sixth or the Twentieth either, because Papa’s never been in them. I heard Papa say something to Uncle Licinius once about the Ninth. And then they saw me and shut up.”

  “But there isn’t any Ninth Legion,” Postumus said.

  Justin looked thoughtful. “No, but I think there used to be.”

  * * *

  Postumus mulled this information over in private for the next few months, hesitant to ask any more questions for fear of getting even more frightening answers. He wasn’t who he had thought he was. And if he wasn’t, what if nobody else was either? Mama, for instance. Postumus knew she was British; not just native-born like himself, but really British, although of cours
e she was Roman now—you always were if you married a Roman, and Mama, it seemed, had married two. But that was all he knew about her. Up until now she had just been his mother, not really a separate person at all. And what if there was something else awful there too, that nobody had told him about?

  In the end he worked up a full-fledged case of nightmares that woke him screaming, and half the household along with him. Justin, who always slept like the dead, was still snoring obliviously in the next bed, but his mother came flying down the corridor with an oil lamp, Januaria two paces behind her.

  “My darling, what is it?” Gwytha, his mother, scooped him up and cuddled him in her lap, while Januaria, their nurse, clucked about them, her bulk encased in a voluminous nightshift and a hastily caught-up cloak pinned sideways.

  Postumus rubbed his eyes and tried to remember what he had dreamed, but it was fading fast in his mother’s comforting embrace. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think—everybody went away.”

  “Hush now, nobody’s going anywhere,” his mother said softly. “Januaria and I are always here, and Papa too, even when he’s with his legion.”

  “Me too.” There was a pit-pat of small feet on the tile floor and five-year-old Constantia slipped her hand into his. “Was it an awful dream?” she inquired solicitously. She ignored Januaria’s cluckings about the dangers of night air and snuggled up onto the bed beside him in her nightshift.

  “I think so,” Postumus told her seriously, pulling the checkered woolen blanket around her, “but I can’t remember it.”

  “Well, you mustn’t have it again,” she said firmly, and then, taking a good look at her mother and Januaria, began to giggle. Both women had their long hair neatly braided for the night, but their front hair, cut short, was rolled and tied with rags which stuck out wildly in the lamplight, like starfish.

  Postumus, his nightmare receding before their female solicitude, started to laugh too, and in a moment both children were clinging to each other and laughing hysterically.