The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  “Papa?”

  The figure at the gate paused to sheathe a businesslike short sword, all too visible in the lamplight, and Postumus chuckled.

  “I’m not a sea raider.”

  “I was thinking more of a fox in my henhouse,” Hilarion said. “But you’re more welcome than either. You didn’t tell us you had leave.”

  “The letter would have got here when I did.” Postumus slid from the saddle and dropped his voice as they walked toward the barn. “It’s not leave, exactly.”

  “I do presume you haven’t gone Unlawful Absent?” his stepfather inquired.

  “No, of course not. I’m posted here. Promoted, too.” He stripped off the saddle and set about rubbing the horse down while Hilarion took a bucket to the grain sacks stacked against the wall. He emptied a measure in the livery horse’s manger, and his own animals stuck their heads over the loose box doors and whickered hopefully.

  “That’s gratifying,” Hilarion said as he returned the bucket to its hook. “What’s your posting?”

  “Senior Legionary Surgeon. Eburacum.” Postumus waved his right arm at his stepfather so that the silver bracelet caught the light and then, pick in hand, concentrated on the horse’s off rear hoof.

  Hilarion took the bucket off the wall, turned it over, and sat on it. “Congratulations. I know that was well earned.” He was clad in an undertunic and an old and much-patched military cloak, his graying hair tangled about his ears.

  “It’s why I didn’t write,” Postumus said. “It didn’t seem the news for a letter.”

  “The Army was never known for its sensitivity.”

  Postumus snorted a half-laugh at that. “It was an honor,” he said ruefully. “I really don’t think they knew.”

  “Maybe not,” Hilarion said. “Once they got through rerouting Justin’s career into the auxiliaries. They’ve tried hard enough to forget us. Bureaucracy so often depends on the bureaucrat. Someone retires and the next man doesn’t know because no one talks about it, so he doesn’t bother to check your name against the roster of the Ninth. If it’s even in existence.” Hilarion studied him. “Have you ever been to Eburacum?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. We’ve avoided even setting foot in it, all of us—your mother and Licinius and Felicia and me. Maybe it’s just as well you’re posted there. It’ll lay a few ghosts to rest for the lot of us. And maybe answer a few questions of your own.” He stood up and dropped a hand on Postumus’s shoulder. “Come along. Your mother will be thinking it was sea raiders after all. Let’s go and gratify her maternal heart with the V.C. Then you can tell her about the posting.”

  They picked their way across the moonlit terraces and through the shadowed kitchen garden to the house. As they came into the atrium, Gwytha appeared in the corridor opposite, a lamp in one hand, brushing the sleep from her eyes with the other. She held the lamp toward them. “J—Justin?” The moonlight through the atrium skylight washed her face with silver.

  “No, darling, it’s me.” Postumus came forward and took the lamp, which was in danger of spilling, and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Postumus dear.” She smiled at him sleepily. “I am sorry. But you’re very alike in the dark… and I wasn’t expecting you home.” Justin was also stationed out of Britain, and Postumus wondered briefly if it was really his brother that she had mistaken him for. In any case, she seemed awake enough now, and she slipped an arm about each of them, drawing them back down the corridor with her to the chamber she shared with Hilarion. She climbed back onto the bed and sat with Hilarion’s faded red military cloak about her shoulders while Postumus stretched himself out in a chair by the brazier and Hilarion set about warming three flasks of wine.

  There were wide bands of gray in Gwytha’s chestnut hair, over the temples and in the braids that hung past her shoulders, and her face was marked with the lines that the birth of four children had left on it, but she was still beautiful, he thought. Her eyes were the clear bright blue of a summer pond, and her skin a soft buttermilk white that even Aunt Felicia couldn’t match. She smiled at him across the bedcovers as Hilarion handed each of them a flask of hot wine. “If you’re going to try to tell me you were sent home in disgrace, I think I should mention I saw the V.C. when you kissed me,” she said affectionately. “We’re very proud of you, darling. How did you get it?”

  Postumus explained with as much modesty as he could muster while they nodded approvingly. “The only fly in the wine cup,” he murmured, peering into his own, “is the posting. I’ve been shipped home, Mama. To the Sixth.”

  He saw a sort of shadow slide across her face, but only briefly. “To what rank?” she asked.

  “Senior surgeon,” he said. “Strange. I’ll have Licinius’s old hospital.”

  She sighed and drew Hilarion down on the bed beside her, her head resting on his shoulder. “You must go over and tell Licinius in the morning,” she said, and then the talk turned to other things, the new crop of lambs, and the need to mend a wall in the lower pasture, how Justin did with his cavalry troop and how he had had another promotion too, and Marcus’s plan for raising goats, which everyone else in the household regarded as a dubious idea, and how best to spend the precious ten days left of Postumus’s leave. No one mentioned Eburacum or the war that Governor Urbicus was fighting in the north. Time enough for it later. Homecomings in an Army family were brief and precious.

  Contrary to his expectations, Postumus slept well into the morning in the room he had shared with Justin from boyhood. When he arose in search of breakfast, and to pay his respects at the shrine of the household gods, he found Marcus coming in from the pasture with sheep on his mind and fire in his eye because a herdsman had let three of the fools stray and the wolves had been out and about this year.

  “Which means I’ve got to go tramping all over Lower Hades looking for them,” he said disgustedly while the mottled brown hound at his heel waved his tail happily at the prospect. “Hello, Postumus, it’s good to see you.” He gave him a brotherly hug. “What do you mean, skulking home in the middle of the night? Come out with me tomorrow after you’ve done the polite with the family, and take the rust off your hunting spear. We’re going to have to put the fear of the gods in that wolf pack or we won’t have a lamb left. Oh, and congratulations,” he added. “Mother told me about the V.C. See you at dinner no doubt, if I’m not still counting sheep.” He snapped his fingers to the dog and headed for the kitchen in search of a portable lunch.

  Marcus was an anomaly in a family that went back generations in service with the Eagles, and it was probably just as well. A farm never prospered without the landholder there to take the reins. Postumus suspected that all that had saved the place in the beginning had been his mother, a woman strong-minded enough to cope with crises as they came, and British-born. But she had had no more knowledge of farming than Hilarion at the start, and it had been touch-and-go for a while. Fortunately, as Marcus got older, it had become obvious that this farm was bred in his bones in the way that the Army was in Justin’s, and the place had begun to prosper as soon as he was old enough to take charge.

  Postumus foraged in the kitchen for a breakfast of honey cake, kissed his mother, got under the feet of the cook who was masterminding that night’s celebratory dinner on short notice, and stopped to pay his respects to Januaria where she was sewing winter leggings for someone in a chair in the courtyard. Constantia, who had also heard the news, came up from the henhouse and hurled herself at him in an undignified fashion and then had to put her hair up again. “I’m to help with dinner,” she said, a red chicken feather drifting about her ears. “Cook is having a spell over the sauces.” She trotted off toward the kitchen.

  From there Postumus set out across the meadow that marked the boundary between their land and Licinius’s. It was a glory of a day, the meadow painted with daisies and buttercups and springy with grasshoppers zinging from under his feet. A lark wheeled in loud, joyous acrobatics on the updraft above him
. He remembered carrying eggs through the meadow on the day he had helped Licinius deliver the foal. If people had individual days they would remember forever, he thought that was one of his, more than the day he had rescued the tribune and earned a Valorous Conduct. The foal seemed far more valuable to him than the tribune. It was like a second homecoming to top the rise on the far side of the meadow and see the white lines and red tiled roof of Licinius’s house bright against the valley floor. Aunt Felicia was in her vegetable garden on the edge of the apple orchard, shelling peas into a bowl in her lap. She handed the bowl to a boy pruning shrubbery when she saw Postumus and said, “Take this to the kitchen and then tell Master that Surgeon Corvus is here!”

  The air was clouded with the scent that drifted from her rose garden and she had tucked a knot of them into her black hair. Postumus complimented the effect as he kissed her.

  “Aurelia will be glad to see you,” she said as Licinius and his daughter appeared. Aurelia had the delicate grace of a flower carved from onyx and ivory, in a grass-green gown, and Postumus inspected her with pleasure. “No wonder Licinius is worried. You’d better marry her off fast before she starts a riot.”

  Aurelia laughed and hugged him, and Felicia looked at him hopefully—she liked Postumus—but it was obvious that his admiration was mostly aesthetic. He patted Aurelia on the cheek, ruffled her dark curls, and turned away to greet Licinius.

  In his surgery office, Licinius handed Postumus a cup of wine, leaned back in his chair and observed the Valorous Conduct with the flick of one raised brow.

  “Are you going to tell me about it or does modesty prevail?”

  “Not in the least. I was heroic, I can tell you,” Postumus said. “Killed fifty of ’em with my bare hands. Actually, I hauled a tribune out of a bad spot because he looked like he’d be dead before his troops finished fighting their way out of the mess he got them into in the first place. I got a home posting, a V.C., and this.” He exhibited the healing puncture in his arm. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, Postumus could feel the whirr in the air as the arrows went past his ears and the unpleasantly gelatinous feel to the tribune’s leg as he dragged him from under the horse.

  “Useful to have a tribune pleased with you, all the same,” Licinius said.

  It was clear to Licinius that over the past years, like all the rest of his kind before him, Postumus had left his youth on a surgery table. But when Postumus said, with an odd inflection in his voice, “I got more out of it than a nice shiny bracelet, too—Senior Legionary Surgeon, or I will be when my leave’s up.”

  Licinius looked at him suspiciously. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Sixth Victrix,” Postumus said briefly, and Licinius said, “Oh, Typhon,” and after that there wasn’t much else to say, so they drank another three cups of wine each while Licinius harkened to whatever ghosts fluttered at his ear, and Postumus solemnly contemplated his own achievement in gaining senior rank at an earlier age than most men came by it, and thereby plunging everyone else into a nightmare of remembrance. He was one step shy of a fine state of self-pity when Licinius looked up and said with some surprise, “D’you know how long it’s been since I really tied one on? Gives you a sort of perspective. Come along, let’s go and get sober and I’ll give you the run-down on Eburacum. The Sixth is a good legion. One to build a loyalty to. They just should have sent it to us sooner.”

  Felicia, pottering among the new lettuce in the kitchen garden, was startled to see two figures weaving unsteadily through the onion beds, and to hear her husband’s voice, off key but enthusiastic, raised in a tune she remembered dimly across the years.

  Come you bold fellows and join the Ar-mee,

  To slaughter the Pict and the heathen Parsee,

  And maybe, just maybe (the chances are small)

  But maybe you’ll rise to be emperor of all!

  Roma, far Roma, we list to your call,

  Townsmen of Italy and farmers from Gaul,

  We’ve bought you an Empire from Britain to Crete,

  With the boils on our backsides and the sores on our feet.

  Some of us turn home with twenty years’ pay.

  At the end of the long march and—some of us stay.

  So when you have climbed to the emperor’s throne,

  Remember the Eagles who’ll never fly home.

  * * *

  Into the next ten days Postumus put all the homecoming he hadn’t had in four years. He hunted wolves and counted lambs with Marcus, talked late into the night with his parents, lounging beside the pool in the atrium, and coped with the everyday crises of country life with Licinius in the surgery. Tired of the mounts assigned him by the Army, which inevitably turned out to be iron-mouthed and rattle-gaited specimens that the cavalry troopers didn’t want, he bargained for a horse from Licinius’s stock, a red roan named Boreas.

  On his last night they dined with Licinius and Felicia, setting out in the gold-washed light of a summer dusk and returning in full dark to the bob and swing of lantern light and the call of a nightjar somewhere in the meadow.

  There was another guest that night, Claudia Silva, a woman of about Postumus’s own age, the widow of, and now successor to, a dealer in architectural and landscaping supplies. She had come from Lindum personally to supervise delivery of Licinius’s birthday gift to his wife, a half dozen rare rose bushes. As her firm also supplied the army of Governor Urbicus with the little building material that wasn’t legionary-made, the talk turned naturally to the campaign in the north.

  “So we open up the old wall for the building of the new,” Hilarion said. Governor Urbicus was stringing a series of frontier forts across his new lines from Credigone in the east to the mouth of the Clota in the west. The wall which would join them would complete the fencing-in of Valentia.

  “That still leaves the Picts on the far side,” Gwytha said. “And the Painted People have never paid much heed to a wall. Will it hold?”

  “I think it can,” Claudia Silva said as Theodore passed a plate of small pastries. She took one and bit into it appreciatively. “These are lovely. The forts will be closer together than the southern wall—no more than two miles, and with no other gates between. Also it will be shorter, almost by half.”

  She had evidently accompanied her own supplies on at least some of their journey north and Postumus pricked up his ears. He would be posted wherever the bulk of his legion went, and right now that would mean the northern lines. He took a better look at the visitor.

  Claudia wore her dark hair pulled up into a plain knot at the back of her head, a severe style that accented the fine bones of her face. Her rust-colored gown was of good material but of a plain style suitable for traveling, while one of the finest rubies Postumus had seen gleamed on the finger of her right hand, dark as the wine in her cup. She was handsome enough, although in the same room with Aurelia’s flower-petal beauty and Constantia’s urgent vitality, no one was likely to notice. There was an observant look in her blue-green eyes, and self-assurance in her low voice. She looked, Postumus decided, like someone who knew what she was doing. At the moment she was engaged in kindly squelching Felix, who was making flamboyant overtures to her while his father watched with mounting irritation. Felix was obviously merely stirring things up for his own amusement, and Theodore paused to fix him with a knife-like glare. Postumus heard Constantia whisper, “Shut up, you ass!” and Felix subsided with a grin. Claudia appeared unruffled.

  “Do you go north often?” Postumus asked her. “What is the talk in Valentia? I’m posted to the Sixth Victrix, but I’ve been out of Britain so long…”

  “Half the rebels in Valentia appear have taken refuge with the Picts, to bide their time,” she said. “They can strike when it suits them, from there, you see. They’ve lost more men in the building camps than I like to think about.”

  “And the Selgovae who are left?”

  “They stay to harry the Army’s back in the hope that the rest of the tribes will rise behind them
,” Claudia said. “No one travels in Valentia unguarded even now.”

  “Why do you go then, if it’s that dangerous?” Aurelia asked.

  Claudia was silent a moment, polishing off her pastry and licking her fingers. Thinking, Postumus decided.

  “The trade prospers when I keep an eye on it,” she said finally. She stretched out her hand for a peach from the silver bowl that Theodore presented and took one of the small knives that were offered.

  Interesting, Postumus thought, watching her peel it with quick graceful movements. And what do you know that you aren’t saying?

  The subject dropped as the wine and water pitchers came around again and the mood lightened to the silliness of a family gathering. Constantia presented him with a wreath of privet and guelder rose from the hedgerow, which he wore rakishly over one eye, and Aurelia also made much of him, questioning him eagerly about Army life and demanding to know when Justin would also be coming home.

  It had been a fine leave, he thought, as the family rode home by lantern light, even if Aurelia’s attentions had been largely motivated by the hope of news of Justin. He wondered if Justin had any idea. He doubted it.

  V. Eburacum Fortress

  In the morning he was back to the Army again, trotting out of Isca on Boreas’s back with a troop of auxiliary cavalry bound for the troubles in Valentia. Six days later, they left him at the Praetorian Gate of Eburacum Fortress with a mocking salute of cavalry horns (embarrassing the regular legions was one of the cavalry’s main amusements) and were on their way with a flourish and a cloud of dust. Postumus sheepishly gave his name to the grinning sentries and headed for the Principia to report. All Roman camps, from single cohort frontier posts to stone-built monsters like Eburacum, housing a full ten cohorts of 480 men each and their attached auxiliaries, were laid out on the same grid, so that no soldier was ever lost in an unfamiliar camp at night. A marching camp could be built in an afternoon and dismantled as easily next morning, but the pattern remained. In Eburacum, sprawled over some fifty acres of granaries, drill field, armorer’s shed, hospital, and baths, the pattern formed a city in itself. All it required from the town that lay beneath its walls on the banks of the adjacent rivers were the amusements of its off-duty hours—wine stalls and fishmongers, shops peddling love potions and cure-alls or liniment for aching muscles, unofficial “married quarters”, and temples to gods imported from every outpost in the Empire. It had been settled long enough that the six roads that converged there were lined with cemeteries. Roman law decreed that the dead be laid outside inhabited areas and their grave markers stood like milestones, not of distance but of time.