The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  “Ah, come on, commander. Buy a flower for your lady.” The child gave him a pleading blue-eyed stare that somehow made him think of small Evan, and Postumus gave in and reached for his purse.

  The child pocketed the coin and trotted off in search of a new customer, leaving Postumus to contemplate his purchase. Now what was he supposed to do with it, stick it behind his ear?

  He moved on, and at the end of the street found himself at the gates of the Corstopitum arena. There was evidently a show in progress, judging from the jostling crowd outside the gates, and the shouts of approval from within. Ordinarily he had no taste for arena games, having been brought up with the conservative notion that pitting two men against each other to the death for amusement was a barbarity unworthy of a soldier. But gladiators were hard to come by in frontier towns and it was unlikely that there would be any death-matches unless someone had paid well for them. He shrugged and went in, pushing his way through the throng to a seat near the magistrates’ box in the first tier. The arena attendants were raking the sand smooth for the next combat, and the crowd had begun to chat among itself while the food-sellers made their rounds. A crew who were probably time-expired sailors from the Fleet scrambled about overhead in the rigging of the red and green canvas awning, adjusting it for the angle of the sun. A banner across the arena wall announced that the games were made possible by the generosity of Rutilius Paulus.

  Postumus saw a woman in the magistrates’ box beside him turn to signal to a man with a tray of spiced pears, and realized that it was Claudia Silva, the contractor’s widow who had dined with them in Isca Silurum. He caught her eye and she nodded in recognition.

  Postumus stood and edged a few seats down to lean an elbow on the box. “Greeting to you, Lady. You’re a pleasant sight to see so far north.” As an afterthought he presented her with the rose. “Here. I’ve been looking for someone to give this to.”

  Her mouth twitched as she introduced him to her companion, who proved to be the generous Rutilius Paulus, senior magistrate of Corstopitum, but she made no move to prolong the interview. Postumus had the impression that he was somehow an embarrassment to her.

  She was dressed more finely than he had seen her before, in a gown of canary-colored silk and a gray-green mantle worked along the borders in gold thread. She wore the same dark ruby he had seen on her hand in Licinius’s house, and pearl drops in her ears and on pins in her hair. All in all, a fairly extravagant outfit to pack for a business trip. It couldn’t be to impress the senior magistrate, who was twice her age and unprepossessing as a toad. At least he hoped not. He was mulling over the additional question of why his presence seemed to discomfit her when the arena trumpets sounded and the gladiators’ gate at the far end swung open. Eight men emerged, blinking in the sunlight, each with his horsetail crested helmet beneath one arm. The crowd caught its breath.

  They were paired two-and-two, four sword-and-buckler men and four with net and trident, moving with a practiced swagger toward the magistrates’ box to give the salute. And then Postumus also caught his breath and swore, because the third sword-and-buckler man was Tertius. He marched across the fresh sand in the cocksure style of the arena, strutting a bit for the benefit of the crowd, while the spectators cheered and pelted their favorites with flowers and a little rain of coins.

  Claudia and the magistrate had turned their attention to the arena, and Postumus slipped back to his own seat, cursing. A woman in a blue gown and an improbable cluster of red ringlets tossed a gold and amber brooch to Tertius, who caught it neatly in his upturned helmet with a rakish salute of thanks. She settled back in her seat, contentedly sucking a sweet, and made ready to cheer on her favorite. How many times had he done this, Postumus wondered. And how many more times before the inevitable happened?

  They raised their arms in a salute to the magistrate, and the inevitable reached out its hand for Tertius. The upraised sword thudded in the sand at his feet and he toppled down across his shield.

  The crowd was silent for a moment and then its voice swelled in outrage, cursing the fallen man, the woman in blue as loud as any. The arena mercuries came running with hooks and chains to drag him away, and the magistrate was furiously calling for a replacement.

  Postumus was on his feet before the mercuries in their winged caps were halfway across the field. Pushing his way to the retaining wall that supported the tiers of seats, he swung his legs over it and dropped onto the sand. Tertius was limp as he turned him over and he was pale and sweating, but he was breathing. So far.

  “Go away, damn you, he’s not dead yet!” The mercuries halted uncertainly. That generally didn’t matter.

  Above them, the senior magistrate was losing ground and the crowd was throwing things. Rutilius must have been disinclined to let the mercuries manhandle a senior officer to whom he had just been introduced, but the crowd was turning nasty. He shouted again for a replacement, but he signaled the mercuries to stay where they were.

  Postumus got Tertius half upright and staggered to his own feet. “Get him out of here,” he said to the mercuries. “And carry him! If you touch him with those hooks, I’ll skin you!”

  At a nod from the magistrate, they took Tertius by the shoulders and feet, and Postumus followed across the hot sand, ducking as a ripe peach sailed by his ear. The arena master charged through the gate at their approach. A rotten plum caught him on the back of the head and he retreated into the passage.

  “Get him inside and set him down!” Postumus snapped to the mercuries. He turned to the arena master. “He’s no more fit for this work than he is to fly! Who’s the jackass who let him in the arena?”

  “And who are you?” The arena master glared at him furiously and Postumus pulled rank.

  “I’m the senior surgeon of the Sixth Legion Victrix, where this man was enrolled, and if you weren’t too cheap to hire one who knew anything…” The mercuries dragged Tertius into an ill-lit room off the passage under the stands and Postumus trailed off as his temper dissipated. “Oh, never mind. You take what you can get, I expect.”

  The mercuries set Tertius down, none too gently, on a bench. Postumus crouched beside him. Tertius’s breath was still ragged but some color was coming back to his face. The arena master picked up a bucket of water and threw it over him, and then he glowered at Postumus.

  “Now look here—”

  Postumus was regaining his composure. “I’m a surgeon,” he said again. “I certified this man Unfit for Service a month back. He’s no business in the arena.” He felt for Tertius’s pulse. “Was he fool enough to sell himself in, or is he under contract?”

  “Contract,” the arena master said shortly. “We prefer to purchase in—makes them more contented, like—but he wouldn’t have it.”

  “How long did he contract for, and what was his fee?”

  “We don’t contract for more than three months at a time,” the arena master said. “It doesn’t pay.”

  “How much?”

  The arena master named a sum. “And now I’m out all that silver. I reckon the Army owes me for that.”

  “The Army owes you a kicking with hobnailed sandals for being a thieving fool.”

  “Half of that.” The halting whisper came from Tertius.

  The arena master, at a disadvantage now that his employee was conscious, conceded that he might have miscalculated the price.

  Postumus considered. “I’ll give you a quarter of it to buy him back out.”

  The arena master protested indignantly.

  “He’s no use to you now,” Postumus said. “He’ll just have another attack and spoil your games all over again, and probably die. Listen to those ghouls out there. They still haven’t settled down.”

  There was a bit more haggling while Tertius, breathing more easily now, watched them with curiosity. In the end the arena master capitulated at a third of the original contract price, after pointing out that he could still use him “to clean up and such,” and stomped disgustedly out to the are
na to see that no further disasters occurred.

  Tertius lay flat on his back. “It was just another fainting spell,” he said, and Postumus considered just taking him back out to the arena and letting the crowd have him.

  “I warned you, you know. We don’t certify a good solider Unfit for Service on a whim. You may be good for years yet if you lead a quiet life.” Probably not, but there was no point in saying that.

  “I can’t pay you back, you know,” Tertius muttered.

  “I didn’t ask you to, you know,” Postumus said.

  A mercury ducked through the arena doorway. “You’d better clear out. The lads are coming back in for the intermission, and the fans won’t be far behind. Get him out of here before they spot him.” Arena spectators had little mercy for the fallen.

  “Can you walk?” Postumus stood up and gave Tertius his hand.

  “I’ll have to, won’t I?” Tertius said. He gave the mercury a salute, arena fashion. “A short career and sweet. Keep my place warm for the next poor bastard.”

  The mercury laid a hand on his shoulder. “Head up, man.” He propelled him into the corridor that led from the arena gate, with Postumus following. It ended in an immense chamber located beneath the highest tiers of the arena seats. The walls were lined with racked weapons, and life-size wicker targets leaned drunkenly on their support posts. Tertius looked around him for a moment. “It was almost like the legion,” he murmured. The double doors swung closed behind them, leaving them blinking in the sunlit street.

  Postumus put Tertius’s arm around his shoulders. “Lean on me. There’s an inn not far down the way, and you need rest and sleep more than anything.”

  “And if I don’t want it?”

  “Then I will hit you on the head with a rock and see that you get it.”

  Tertius managed a wry smile at that. The missing tooth made it wolfish and not altogether friendly. “Aye, that would set me up fine, wouldn’t it?”

  The inn was appropriately called the Net and Trident and Postumus paid the proprietor, a grizzled man with the look of an ex-legionary about him, for a week’s meals and lodging.

  “I told you, I can’t pay you back,” Tertius hissed. “I spent my contract money.”

  “And I told you, no one’s expecting you to. I’m the one who certified you unfit and then didn’t chase you down when you talked about the arena. Allow me to salve my conscience with this at least.”

  Tertius considered this. “Aye, well somebody somewhere owes me something. It might as well be you. Now go along back to where you were going. I’ll do well enough.”

  “And no more arena?”

  “How do I know what I’ll be doing when the money runs out?” Tertius said, suddenly angry. “Go on, get lost! Thank you very much but get lost!”

  The last sight Postumus had of him was his thin, wiry figure hunched against the doorpost, eyes focused bleakly on the world that strolled past the inn door and that now had precious little use for him.

  * * *

  The transit barracks at Corstopitum had been built to hold no more than a cohort at a time—an army on the march carried its own camp with it—and they were full past bursting. Overflow officers not traveling with their units had been quartered about the town, to mixed reception from the residents, while the troops and mule drivers being funneled through raised their camps outside the walls. As a senior officer, Postumus had been given his choice of a tent with the cavalry escort or a billet in a small town house that had been commandeered for the duration. Foreseeing a future all too full of tents, he had opted for the town billet and now found himself the possessor of a down-at-the-heels chamber adorned with the flaking remains of an old mural and a mosaic floor that was missing every other tile. A straw mattress was laid on a bed which appeared to have one leg shorter than the rest and the only other furniture was a single precarious-looking chair. His fellow residents, absent when he had left his kit there in the morning, proved to be a fleet officer bound for Credigone, a legionary cohort centurion newly posted to the Second Augusta, and an officer of the Frontier Scouts returning from a month’s leave—a hard-won one, judging by the healing scar on his left calf.

  They had been there for several days, left like Postumus to cool their heels until an escort was available heading in the right direction; no one traveled the northern roads alone those days.

  The house had been untenanted for at least a year, they informed him—that was why the Army had got it cheap—and the hypocaust was clogged with debris and wasn’t working.

  “But there’s a brazier in your chamber,” the frontier scout said, “and it doesn’t smoke too badly if you leave the window open. Unless, of course, you’ve a mind to dig the dirt and dead rats out of the furnace, in which case we’ll be glad to come and cheer you on.”

  Postumus declined, saying that if they hadn’t seen the need for it, neither did he, and retired to his room, leaving them to their interrupted dice game in which the frontier scout was eagerly fleecing the young centurion while the fleet officer watched with detached interest.

  The day’s ride and the arena episode had taken their toll, and Postumus was asleep almost before he touched the bed, which didn’t give him time to worry about what might be living in the straw. He slept late into the morning and was awakened only by the frontier scout, who poked his face, bleary-eyed, through the doorway to inform him that he had a visitor. “And not bad either, for your first day in,” he added, shaking his head in admiration.

  Postumus shrugged his tunic on over his head and ran his hands through his hair, and over his chin. He was looking vaguely around for his comb and razor when the door opened again and the frontier scout executed an elaborate salute before disappearing.

  “I told that drunken idiot not to wake you up, but he seemed to think we had an assignation,” Claudia Silva said. “Are you awake?”

  “Close enough,” Postumus said, wondering what she wanted and how on earth she had found him.

  “I asked your whereabouts of the fort commander,” she said, apparently reading his thoughts. “I came to ask how that man is, and why on earth you jumped into the arena after him. Rutilius Paulus thinks you’re mad.”

  Postumus explained his bout of conscience. “The policy on men invalided out is brutally unfair. I only hope he doesn’t do something worse next time.”

  “Poor man. Is his condition chronic?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is.” Postumus was trying valiantly to wake up.

  “If he wants a job, you may send him to me. I’m camped outside the walls with our wagons. We shouldn’t be hard to find.” She pulled off her mantle, a cloak of gray-green edged with a finely embroidered russet band. “May I sit?”

  “Of course, if that thing doesn’t collapse under you. Camped with your wagons?” There were much better lodgings available and she could clearly afford them.

  “Since my husband died, I have had to learn to run a business in earnest, and one of the great principles of that is that the boss must be in evidence. You have no idea how much stock loss and general hanky-panky that puts an end to.”

  Postumus was impressed, and curious. Generally, the law didn’t give women property rights as such, not to run a business; there would have to be some sort of male guardian. On the other hand, that was a bit more loosely enforced in Britain, where women of the tribes had given up their earlier rights grudgingly or not at all.

  “I’ll pass your offer to him.” He hesitated, looking for a tactful way to ask the next question. “Can you hire him? On your own, I mean?”

  “Do you mean do I have a guardian?” She smiled. “I do not. My husband was much older than I was and I realized quite early on that I was likely going to be a widow. If I wasn’t going to have my life hobbled with trustees and guardians, I had to be able to convince a court that I could manage my own affairs. It also allows me to give the boot to the men who every month or so kindly offer to take all this off my shoulders.”

  Postumus considered t
his. “If I told you that trying to run your business ranks right up there with having all my nails pulled off, would you trust me enough to dine with me tonight?” She was bound to be better company than his housemates. He ran his fingers through his hair again in an attempt to subdue it without the aid of a mirror.

  “Thank you,” Claudia said. “I should be charmed.” She settled her mantle about her shoulders once more. “You may call for me at my camp at the twelfth hour. The tent with the ram’s head banner. Until this evening, then.” She smiled pleasantly and rustled out, her thin slippers whispering against the ragged floor.

  Postumus located his comb, repaired his hair and knotted his scarf around his neck, deciding to go to the public baths and get a better shave than he could give himself in honor of the evening. An interesting woman, but there was something that either she wasn’t telling him, he thought, or that he wasn’t seeing, some kind of imbalance between Claudia’s public face and whatever wasn’t public. And also not his business, of course, although she and Tertius would be material for a letter home.

  Another knock rattled the door and Postumus turned around exasperatedly. Like most of his family, he was never fully functional when first awakened unless there was an emergency, in which case he was, and irritable into the bargain, and he was not in the mood for a second visitor.

  “You’re a popular lad this morning,” the frontier scout said, poking his own unshaven countenance around the doorframe yet again. “I’da sent this one on his way, but seeing as the lady’s left—but the next visitor is yours, whatever it is. I’m going back to bed, and not all the fiends of Ahriman, or anybody’s light-of-love, is going to get me out again.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Postumus said. The frontier scout gave every evidence of a man in pain. If he was that hung over, Postumus could only imagine the state of the centurion. “Mix this into a little beer, if you can stand it. It may help.”