The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  Grateful for her quiet interest, Postumus talked to her about his father and the strange, unquiet feeling that still lurked at the back of his mind of not quite knowing who he was.

  Oddly enough, Justin, once he had absorbed all the relevant information about their father, seemed unaffected by it, other than to regret that Hilarion, whom he adored, would never rise higher than a mid-level cohort command and a retirement on the family farm, and all because of the wretched Ninth Legion. Hilarion was an able commander, but there would be no legate’s post for him, no chance for glory and a famous name. As far as Justin was concerned, he was Hilarion’s son, accidents of birth aside, and the one qualm he had harbored was laid to rest the day he somewhat hesitantly asked Hilarion why, when he had adopted them, he had not also given them his name, as was the custom.

  “I thought your father should have that much monument,” Hilarion had said, putting his arm around him. “Rome has done its best to bury even the memory of the Ninth and anyone who served in it. The least I could do was leave him his name.”

  Justin, after thinking it over, had decided that seemed fair, and had ceased to trouble over it. But for Postumus, it went deeper than that.

  “Maybe it’s because Justin knew our father,” he told Constantia. “Even if he was too little to remember. But I was born after he died, and sometimes I feel like I don’t belong to anybody.”

  “You belong to me.” His sister slipped a small, slightly grubby hand into his. “Would you like to tell me about the insides of a frog again?” she asked hopefully, searching for some way to comfort him.

  III. The Peace of the Frontier

  In the end, it was the Army that gave him a home, not so much a place as a calling, a work to be done regardless of location or blood tie, despite the fact that the Army had also done its best to keep anyone associated with the tainted Ninth out of its legionary ranks. Justin, for instance, who found when he was of age for the Centuriate that despite letters of recommendation from both Hilarion and Licinius, or perhaps because of them, that there was an excess of applicants that year and while Justinius Corvus the younger was of course excellently qualified, there just did not seem to be a place for him. He would, the Army was certain, find a suitable spot in one of the auxiliary regiments. Postumus, too, was posted to the auxiliaries, but medicine was much the same in any fort.

  After the terrors of his training year at a field hospital in Dalmatia where, upon his arrival, a short-lived local rebellion provided more than sufficient bodies on which to learn his craft, he served a second season as a surgeon’s assistant in Achaea, arduous mainly for the boredom of what was essentially a bureaucratic outpost rather than a military occupation. After that, a long leave and enough left of his pay, supplemented by the bonus paid the Empire’s soldiers on the accession of its new Emperor Antoninus, allowed a first visit home. The journey made part of a circuitous route to his next posting with a Gaulish cavalry regiment in Germania, if the posting wasn’t changed in the meantime, and he would not have been surprised if it had. The Emperor Hadrian had died only a year ago and no one knew then quite what Antoninus was going to do.

  As it happened, he and Justin had leave at the same time, and Gwytha invited Licinius and his family to a celebratory dinner. Constantia had touched up the dining room mural of herons and carp in a lily pond with fresh color in their honor, and Januaria had recruited the gardener’s boy as well as Theodore and Licinius’s cook to pass trays of pastries, fish, tiny roasted birds, and cups of Hilarion’s best Falernian wine. Justin and Postumus wore their uniform tunics, the blue and brown of the auxiliaries, and Justin’s belt buckle identified him as the new commander of the First Thracian cavalry, currently stationed on the Rhenus.

  Now that they were grown, Postumus and Justin looked much as their father might have, according to Januaria, including the light brown eyes, almost amber, the sharp angled brows, and the nose that Marcus claimed made them look like someone on a coin. Tonight Postumus wondered if there were times when their mother looked right through them and found their father somewhere on the other side.

  She reclined on a couch opposite theirs and beamed at them impartially, content in their homecoming. Constantia was beside her with a tame hedgehog curled in the folds of her gown. Marcus, on her other side, had maintained his utter lack of interest in the Army other than as a market for meat and cavalry horses, and was a stocky nineteen-year-old with Gwytha’s red-brown hair and a no‑nonsense look about him that made Postumus think of a herd dog.

  Completing the circle, through the center of which the servants passed tray after tray, were Hilarion, Licinius, and Felicia, with Felix and his little sister Aurelia. Felix looked like his father but Aurelia was a beauty, somehow favored by the best aspects of both her parents. She didn’t seem to notice it yet, but everyone else did.

  “Do you two have any sense of what Antoninus is likely to do?” Hilarion asked, as a tray of prawns in lovage and pepper went around—the question that had been on everyone’s mind. When Trajan had died and Hadrian succeeded him, he had consolidated the provinces, pulled back troops from an ill-fated campaign in Parthia, and brought the British legions up to strength, just a little too late. The worry in everyone’s head was that Antoninus might undo all that.

  “The whole Empire has been bubbling since Hadrian died,” Justin said. “But what it will come to is anybody’s guess. There are a lot of opinions, most of them constructed of wishful thinking.”

  “Or nerves,” Postumus said. “I wish we knew which was which.”

  “There are always bubbles for a new emperor,” Licinius said. “In the most part they bubble back down again.”

  Postumus lifted a pastry-wrapped bundle from the tray offered to him by Theodore. “Mother, what is this?”

  “Dormice, Surgeon,” Theodore said in a tone that might as well have been addressed to the small Postumus of twenty years ago.

  “They’re lovely, dear,” Gwytha said. “Try one.”

  “They’re very fashionable,” Aurelia said. “Theodore has been fattening them since we heard you were coming home. In jars,” she added. “Theodore chased the snake out of the kitchen with a broom and Cook said that was bad luck.”

  “The snake was probably confused,” Licinius said. “His job is to eat mice.”

  “The snake and I have an understanding,” Theodore said, and Cook made a hissing noise and the Sign of Horns. Theodore gave her a look that plainly said that her opinions were not required.

  Postumus took a bite, wondering if there were bones or not, while across the circle Felix mimed slipping something into the folds of his tunic.

  Theodore had belonged to a senatorial household and had opinions on suitable menus for dinner parties, which he didn’t get many chances to exercise in West Britain. Postumus had thought him stiff-necked when he was small but had learned that Theodore had followed the legate’s household across the Empire and was capable of producing a four-course dinner on a camp stove.

  “See what you’ve been missing?” Constantia asked him, feeding bits to her hedgehog.

  “It’s quite good,” Postumus said, swallowing, still not entirely sure what else had been in the bundle besides dormouse.

  “Ooh, spiced lamb!” Aurelia stretched a white hand out as the gardener’s boy came around with another plate. She helped herself while he gazed longingly at her until Theodore took him by the ear and turned him in Hilarion’s direction. Januaria came around with the water and wine in silver pitchers while Felicia kept a careful eye on the proportions in Aurelia’s cup.

  Hilarion smoothed the folds of his white woolen tunic as if wondering what he was wearing. The civilian clothes of retirement still sat uneasily on him. “The new emperor has sent a good man here, at least,” he said, circling back to what was on most people’s minds. Lollius Urbicus had been appointed Governor of Britain the year before.

  “We may need him,” Licinius said.

  “This is the first real news of home we’ve h
ad,” Justin said. “What has been happening here?”

  “The Selgovae have been making trouble north of the Wall.”

  “I thought we’d given up on Valentia,” Postumus said of the billowing acres of heather and moorland that swelled unendingly above the Wall. The Wall was the late Emperor Hadrian’s work, a massive 73-mile-long fortress cutting across the midsection of Britain, fencing off the rebellious tribes of the Selgovae from their equally dangerous kin, the Brigantes. It was those two tribes who, with the Picts from the north, had staged the tribal rising that had wrecked a legion; and for the past twenty years the Wall had stood between them, and marked the farthest reach of Roman rule. Beyond it the Selgovae, in the old abandoned province of Valentia, were bound to Rome solely by treaty and a dubious promise of good behavior. They did not seem to have been extending this behavior to their neighbors.

  “The Votadini have formally requested our help,” Hilarion said. “Brendan of the Selgovae has been raiding rather hard into their territory and they’re afraid he’s got his eye on more than just the occasional head of cattle.”

  “Does he?”

  “I don’t know. I do know he’s unsettling the North, though, which may be his plan. He’s getting up in years and he may be trying to consolidate some power for his heir’s sake. At any rate, Governor Urbicus is putting affairs in order to show him the error of his ways—and it looks like he may open up the Wall to do it.”

  “Open up the Wall!” Constantia sounded shocked. Since any of them could remember, the Wall had been there, solid, defensive, a line between civilization and the halls of the barbarians.

  “You forget, my dear, that the Wall isn’t much older than you are,” her father said. He looked down at his hands. “I helped build it. And there is fort after silent fort beyond it.”

  Forts that had once housed troops of the Eagles, Postumus thought, before the wreck of the Ninth. He watched a wave of pain go across the faces of the elders, including the servants. And now Brendan, one of the leaders in that long-ago war, was threatening to stir it all up again.

  “Will they open up Valentia again, do you think?” he asked.

  “I rather think Valentia will open itself up,” Hilarion said.

  The dormice and spiced lamb were followed by a stuffed hare and a fricassee of pork with apricots, and then stuffed dates and an egg sponge with honey. The conversation wandered to the prospects for selling the new cavalry remounts at a better than usual price, given the governor’s plans, to the new crop of lambs on the farm, to the midsummer festival in the village and whether Aurelia was old enough this year to go to it with only her brother for escort. It was clear that no one but Felix and Aurelia thought so.

  After dinner Licinius had invited him to ride home with them in the lingering twilight, all gray-green shadows and owl hoot. Postumus had forgotten how much he missed that landscape. “There’s a foal with a quarter-moon-shaped mark I want you to see. My head groom thinks it’s an evil omen and the cook’s girl, who claims her aunt was a sorceress, says it’s lucky. I’ll let you vote.”

  The foal, a filly, licked his hand when he offered it, so Postumus voted for good luck. “Call her Imperatrix,” he suggested, “in honor of the new emperor.”

  * * *

  He put in two more years as a junior surgeon, the second of them with an auxiliary cavalry ala in Syria, followed by a series of small Syrian surgical commands—all single cohort forts of cavalry and auxiliaries—learning his craft the way all military surgeons did, half by what he’d been taught, half by what some new skirmish or training mishap forced him to devise.

  He came of a letter writing family, and Constantia as well as his mother and Hilarion kept him abreast of affairs in Britain, news that he read always with the tug at the heart of the native-born. He had expected to miss his family, but he had not known how much he would miss the Silure Hills. He saw Licinius once when he came East to look for breeding stock to improve his horse herd, and Postumus showed him proudly around the mud-walled hospital, the first to which he had been assigned as senior—and sole—medical officer. They sat in a pair of decrepit camp chairs in Postumus’s office and drank bad wine together from the green glass cups that had been Licinius’s commissioning gift to him, and Licinius filled in the gaps between letters from home.

  Governor Lollius Urbicus was pushing the Selgovae hard to the north of Britain. He had opened up the Wall, and spanned the ditch that paralleled it with bridges broad enough for a cavalry troop to cross. The supply depot at Corstopitum south of the Wall was being enlarged, and the old fort of Trimontium in Valentia was a legionary base once more.

  “Can we hold Valentia, do you think?” Postumus asked.

  “Well, we couldn’t the last time we tried it,” Licinius said. “That’s why they built the Wall. But it’s caused more frontier problems than it’s solved. It cuts right through some tribes’ land. And we can’t keep control beyond it. They’re going to have their hands full reoccupying Trimontium.”

  “You and my father were there once, weren’t you?” Postumus asked.

  “Yes, the year before the rising. I remember the camp surgeon’s office was filthy and half the drugs had been pilfered. I was going to make his life a burden to him for it—and they told me he’d gone Unlawful Absent a week since.”

  Postumus glanced at the dusty office with its collection of military trappings—standard issue supply chest and desk, records shelves, his instrument case with the Medical Corps insignia—all the things that made one military surgeon’s office much like another the world over. Licinius’s office in the legionary fort at Eburacum would have been a bit grander than this one, but still much the same.

  “Will Urbicus make a peace that lasts this time?” Postumus asked.

  “Maybe.”

  How many times had that question been asked on the edges of the Empire, including after the wreck of the Ninth, when the Wall was built? It was supposed to be a permanent frontier.

  “Apparently not everyone wants to walk in our footsteps.” Postumus picked a small gnat out of his wine. “Why are we surprised by that every time?” His mother’s people, for instance, who wouldn’t let her come back to them. Her own mother might still be alive. He found that notion unutterably sad.

  “Well, to be fair, I don’t think we are,” Licinius said. “That’s the public line. Every empire claims it’s all for the benefit of the people being ruled. It’s the nature of man, I suppose, to justify what he wants. And there are, of course, a few times when it’s true.”

  “In the long run, I suppose. After we’ve changed them in ways they can’t undo. And how are the children? I should have asked sooner.”

  “Aurelia, as you may have noticed, is turning out to be a stunner and I am falling over her suitors daily, from the reasonable prospects to the utterly unsuitable. Felix is turning my hair gray as usual, but he has a miraculous hand with a horse. He can ride anything Neptune Equester ever put breath in.”

  Postumus remembered Felix as a carefree grin, curling dark hair like a faun’s, some four years younger than himself. “I take it he’s not militarily inclined?”

  “He’d be cleaning latrines on half-pay within five minutes of joining the Army.”

  Postumus’s amusement was cut short by shouting from outside.

  “Surgeon Corvus!” A breathless cavalryman halted in the doorway, saluting briefly. “It’s Sergius—kicked bad!”

  “I told him that accursed horse would kill him!” Postumus pointed at the orderly, already hovering in the doorway. “Get the surgery set up. And send someone with me to carry him!” He turned out the door with Licinius jogging at his heels, conversation forgotten.

  Sergius lay facedown in a pool of his own blood just inside the schooling ring. A dun mare, wild-eyed and foam-flecked, trotted nervously back and forth at the far end of the ring with two wary cavalrymen in pursuit.

  “Everyone from the commander on down warned you about that she-demon,” Postumus murmured, turni
ng the still form over, “but you wouldn’t listen, would you?” He wiped the dirt from the boy’s face. “Oh, Typhon!”

  The dun mare’s hoof had turned Sergius’s face to a mangled wreck. His nose was flattened and twisted sideways, and one eye hung horribly from a bloody strand of tendon. A gaping cut ran from his temple to his chin. Postumus ran a hand down the boy’s chest and winced again. There were three broken ribs, jagged and deadly, enclosing the fluttering lungs and the faintly beating heart. She had trampled him as well.

  “Help me get him on the stretcher,” he said to Licinius. “You’ve just been conscripted for the duration.” And to the orderly and a white-faced cavalryman, “When you get to the surgery just put the whole thing on the table. Don’t try getting him off again.”

  In the surgery, they set the stretcher on the operating table and pulled the poles from the pockets in its sides. Postumus cut Sergius’s tunic off and wrapped his ribs, lifting him carefully and making as certain as he could that none of the organs had been punctured by a jagged end of rib bone. (“Lucky,” Licinius said briefly.) Then they turned to the boy’s shattered face.

  “He’s left his beauty under that devil’s feet,” Postumus murmured. “I’ll be glad if we can save the eye.” If they couldn’t he would be invalided out, Unfit for Service and half-blind in the bargain.

  “Ever put an eye back?” he whispered to Licinius.

  “No, but I know the principles involved. And I did it on a dog once.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Postumus worked as gently as he could, washing the dirt from the slashed face with vinegar and clamping the larger vessels to stop the bleeding.

  “Ephedron,” he said to the orderly and the man handed him a small vial. “I want to be able to see what I’m doing.” He dusted the wound with the powder and the blood which seeped up from the smaller vessels began to slow.