The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  The frontier scout focused his eyes with effort on the packet of herbs that Postumus handed him. “Thanks. It can’t hurt.” He managed a sketchy salute and withdrew as a second figure pushed in behind him.

  “I’ve come to take you up on what you said a month back,” Tertius said. “That is, if you were meaning it.”

  “Meaning it…” Postumus tried to remember what he had said a month back. “You mean about a non-combat posting? Here, for the gods’ sake, sit down. You shouldn’t be running about loose.”

  Tertius sat. He was still pale. “I thought you’d likely be gone north by the time I’d had some rest.”

  “You’re in no state to travel now.”

  “I’ll serve in your hospital or not at all,” Tertius said, “so you’ll have to arrange it.”

  Tertius was beginning to feel like a complication growing more unwieldy all the time. The hospital laundry orderly had seemed disapproving of the fact that Postumus didn’t possess a slave to do his wash, and Postumus had replied that if he wanted extra nuisance and responsibility trailing after him on a campaign, then he’d be sure to purchase a slave. Tertius seemed to be filling the same role without the advantage of laundry.

  “I got you the promise of a job you could do with someone in Corstopitum already,” Postumus said hopefully.

  Tertius was silent.

  “Are you sure you want to go back in the Army?”

  Tertius regarded him stonily. “Yes, sir.”

  Postumus sighed. “Very well. But only if I have your oath you’ll stay here a full week, and stay out of trouble. After that, you can catch the first escort going north to Castra Damnoniorum, but if I see you any sooner, I’ll pack you right back south again. I mean that. And you realize that once you’re back in, you’re in. You can’t change your mind.”

  “You can’t change your mind when you carry a pilum in a cohort, either,” Tertius said. “Sir.” He stood up. “The Army’s all I know. I didn’t want out in the first place.”

  Postumus sighed. “Yes, I remember. You were a fine introduction to a new posting. Very well, I’ll talk to the legate, and square it with payroll until your orders come through. I expect we’ll need every man we can lay our hands on in the hospitals.” All the same, he gave him directions to Claudia’s camp in the event that he suddenly developed good sense.

  * * *

  Claudia said much the same thing that night in one of Corstopitum’s overflowing inns. Unlike the basic bed and fare that Postumus had bought for Tertius, the menu painted on the wall outside the Dolphin offered hare in pastry, fresh oysters in brine, and wine from Gallia Narbonensis—Postumus doubted that was true, but it would probably be respectable. Corstopitum was enjoying the late daylight and the long summer twelfth hour, and there were tables set on the street outside as well as crowding the lamplit interior. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of the ovens and of cauldrons of stew, and the aroma of too many bodies, perfumed and otherwise. Claudia’s chair was pushed right against the wall under a painted scene of Bacchus enjoying the Dolphin’s fare, and the table had to be moved to allow her to sit down. Jammed against Postumus’s back was a merchant with a wig of pale curls. He was buying dinner for a dark-haired boy who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, and their arrangement was revoltingly obvious. On their other side a pair of legionary officers were arguing tactics, demonstrating their respective theories on the table with pieces of bread and a pepper pot. The innkeeper’s slaves circulated, grumbling, with pitchers of beer and plates of food, threading their way among the tables. Every so often the crash of breaking crockery and a muffled curse cut through the jumble of voices. Postumus and Claudia leaned across the table toward each other to be heard.

  “It’s probably just as well that your man chose the Army,” Claudia said. “I doubt that what I could offer him would have held him for long.”

  “Tertius is a born fighter,” Postumus said dubiously. “I’m not sure I admire that temperament, but I do have a respect for it. I wonder what he’ll do the first time he sees his legion march off without him. I don’t think he’s thought of that yet.”

  “Where are you posted to?”

  “A secondary field hospital. They’re calling the place Castra Damnoniorum, since it’s in their territory. One of Agricola’s old forts, I think. I don’t know what it used to be. There are camp hospitals in all the forts, of course, and a main hospital at Credigone, under the governor’s field surgeon, but the camp hospitals can’t cope with everything and they were losing men carting them to Credigone, so they’ve opened up another one now. My junior surgeon’s in charge of it at the moment, I believe.”

  “I hope there’s a good garrison at Castra Damnoniorum then,” Claudia said. “The Damnonii are half-kin to the Selgovae, and probably half Pict, and those western forts with no outposts beyond are prime targets.”

  “You’re comforting,” Postumus said, poking a knife at his hare and finding it edible. She was right, though. The western forts were open to any rebels hiding out in the north, as well as any southern forces of the Selgovae.

  “You were born in Britain, weren’t you?” he said. “Where are you from?”

  “Lindum.” She smiled. “My father was an aedile, and managed the city drains and water supply. I was his only child and my mother died when I was young. There is very little about aqueducts and plumbing that I don’t know.”

  “Is he still living?”

  “Alas, no. He had a wasting condition of the lungs and so made sure first to marry me to a situation that would suit us both—for him, a prosperous match, and for me—”

  “One that might leave you widowed?” Postumus suggested.

  “Am I that obvious? Yes, I fear so.” She fished out a small moth that had dropped from the oil sconce above their heads into her wine. “My husband wasn’t dreadful, but he treated me as if I was five, all the while leaving me responsible for managing a hundred slaves and freedmen. When something went wrong, I was to blame for it, being female, and when things ran smoothly, as they generally did, it was due to his sound judgment and superior knowledge.”

  “No wonder you don’t want to marry again.” Postumus finished his hare and pushed the bowl away from him. He wiped his fingers and eyed her empty plate. “If you have eaten, let’s get some air.” The room was growing progressively stuffier.

  She nodded. He dropped a coin on the table and they edged their way to the door. Claudia took a deep breath in the purpling dusk. “I find that my tolerance for my fellow man increases greatly with my distance from him. And if we had stayed longer, I would have wanted to stab the man with that poor boy.”

  Postumus offered her his arm and they strolled through the twilight into the courtyard of the basilica and perched on the fountain’s edge. A marble fish with a small imp on its back spouted water from its open mouth and Claudia dabbled her fingers in it idly. It was a moonshot night with rolling clouds above them. A troop of the Watch paraded once around the square, lanterns swinging, and were gone.

  They watched the pattern of the water in the fading dusk, and Postumus watched his companion with more curiosity than was probably polite. “Where do you go from here?” he asked her after a silence.

  “Oh, north to Credigone with my supplies,” she said lightly.

  “No farther?”

  “Farther? What in Cybele’s name would I be doing going farther, even if the governor would let me, which he wouldn’t?”

  “I don’t know whether he lets you or not,” Postumus said quietly, “but you do go, don’t you?”

  “And what makes you think that?” Claudia’s face was shadowed by the folds of her mantle which she had drawn up over her hair, and her eyes shone almost silver in the moonlight. He could feel a growing tension between them, like a tautened wire. Perhaps not surprisingly, it carried with it a more physical urge as well. Postumus wondered if Claudia felt that too, but her silvered eyes gave away nothing. “And also what makes it any affair of yours?” she as
ked.

  “I’m a soldier. When I suspect someone of slipping through the lines, it becomes my affair.” He remembered the magistrate, a Briton, with whom she had sat at the games. The rebellious tribes of Valentia had sympathizers south of the old wall as well.

  “I assure you, I am no spy for the Painted People.” Like Postumus, she spoke in Latin, but she gave the Picts their British name.

  “Then what are you?”

  “A woman with a business to see to.” She stood up. “And we move north in the morning, so you had best take me back to my camp.”

  Postumus escorted her without comment to the ring of wagons encamped by firelight south of Corstopitum’s walls, but he drew her up short before they reached the first guard. “Now listen to me.”

  She stood, head thrown back, and waited.

  “I don’t know what you’re up to but I’m beginning to have an idea, and I’m going to give you a piece of military advice: always have a backup plan, and then back that up. And that’s straight from Julius Caesar.”

  Suddenly she smiled at him, a smile that made him think unsteadily that Helen must have had a smile like that, before he got a grip on himself.

  “I’ll remember,” she said, “and thank you for dinner.” Then she was gone into the firelit circle of her caravan.

  IX. Trimontium

  Postumus saw her the next morning standing in the rutted road, her brown gown girdled up above the mud, briskly giving orders to her drivers. The silver-shadowed figure had vanished with the sunrise and Claudia seemed again a prosperous merchant, despite her sex, businesslike as any who passed through Corstopitum. He waved as he strode past on his way to the baths, and she waved back but seemed intent on her wagons.

  Postumus and his housemates got their own orders the next morning and departed gratefully from Corstopitum. A mile beyond loomed the great Wall of Hadrian, eighteen feet high and stone-built, topped with a parapet walk broad enough for two men abreast. Below it on the southern side was a flat-bottomed ditch, the vallum, thirty feet wide and seven deep, with embankments on either side made from the upcast from the ditch. They crossed the vallum on one of Governor Urbicus’s newly widened bridges and passed through the Wall itself by the gate of Onnum Fort. Beyond the bulwark of the Wall was another ditch, even broader than the vallum and V-shaped, and here too the roadway had been widened and the ditch filled in to a width a cavalry troop could cross. At each milecastle between the forts the gates had been taken from their hinges. The Wall, which had been a solid barrier for most of Postumus’s life, no longer marked the northern frontier of Britain. It had become a gateway through which flowed the traffic of reconquest.

  Beyond it, the abandoned province of Valentia, now reclaimed, wore its new status with sullen acquiescence. Across the wild undulating landscape that stretched beyond the Wall, there was no sign of extant human habitation except the hand of Rome. There were fresh scars in the turf where the engineers had built their bridge and repaired the old road to Trimontium, but as they clattered along its newly paved surface, the only other sound was the sigh of the wind in the tussocky grass and the cries of the curlews overhead. They passed scattered empty holdings, some with the dark scars of burning; and once a ring of standing stones circled above a pair of ancient barrows, hollow chambers built by men now lost in the mists of history; but no living human of the Selgovae or the few clans of Brigantes whose holdings lay north of the Wall. They had vanished as completely as if they had disappeared into those hollow hillsides.

  Or more likely into the halls of the Picts, Postumus thought. Those who were left would be lying low, but they weren’t gone. The size of the supply train’s escort testified to that. They would reappear soon enough if they saw the chance to take payment for the burned steadings and ravaged fields that Lollius Urbicus had left behind him.

  Pacing themselves to the precious supply wagons, it took three full days to reach Trimontium, a fifty-acre fort of red sandstone built beneath the three peaks that gave it its name. Remembering Licinius’s description of the last time he had seen Trimontium, Postumus looked about him with curiosity. Everywhere there was evidence of new repair. Trimontium was a fortress of the Eagles once more, polished and humming with military efficiency. Lollius Urbicus had indeed swept clean, including through the nearby hillfort of Brendan of the Selgovae, now standing empty, its outer walls tumbled by the stone-throwers of the artillery.

  Postumus was grimy from the march and he headed gratefully for the baths, accompanied by most of the cavalry escort. The one luxury to which a Roman soldier was most addicted, and which a marching camp could not provide, was a proper bath. They scraped themselves clean and then soaked contentedly in the hot pool. Sounds of a brisk game of water tag floated over the partition from the adjoining cold bath, but as the senior decurion remarked, sinking blissfully into the hot water until only his nose and eyes showed, he’d bathed in enough cold rivers lately to last him a lifetime.

  Afterward, scrubbed and brushed, Postumus went with a handful of other officers to make his sacrifice at the Temple of Mithras outside the fortress walls, as Hilarion and Licinius and probably his father had done before him. Mithras was a soldier’s god and he commanded a soldier’s strongest loyalty in a time of war.

  The temple, built by a long-ago commander of Trimontium who had set his name and rank into the cornerstone, also showed signs of recent repair. Others had paused to make sacrifice on the road north and had paid their respects by restoring the dignity of the place. It was small and cave-like, so that the head must be bowed to enter, and two rows of benches lined the nave. At the far end, one small window in the roof lit the double altars of the Bull-Slayer, and between the twin torchbearers shone the carved relief of a great bull with the figure of the god astride his back—Mithras, the guide and mediator, whose word was Light.

  Those who followed Mithras formed their own priesthood, and in the absence of formal ritual, they mimed the pouring of the wine and pricked their fingers over the altar for the sacrifice.

  Postumus stepped forward into the pool of light. “Mithras, Unconquered Sun, Redeemer…” The others took up the invocation in turns.

  “Grant us your aid and intercession…”

  “And take our pleas before the Lord of Boundless Time…”

  “As you slew the Bull…”

  “For our sake…”

  “Take now our sacrifice, freely given…”

  “And grant us strength.”

  Postumus rubbed the blood from his pricked finger into the altar stones and as he did so, instead of the usual sense of kinship and comfort that always came with the sacrifice, he felt a cold cloud on his skin. It was so startling that he almost gasped. There was a dark splash of old blood across the altar where he knelt and as he touched it, it seemed to grow wet again. He knew, suddenly and surely, that it belonged to the last man who had made sacrifice at Trimontium in the old war, and that there had been something unspeakable in his soul then.

  Postumus shuddered and pulled his hand away but the cold, dark cloud still clung, and it seemed to him that he was alone in the Mithraeum and it was his own blood that poured out across the altar. If there were ghosts anywhere, they were here at Trimontium, seeping up through the new stone of the rebuilding.

  “Mithras, Lord of Armies—” his voice had become urgent and panic-stricken— “grant us peace and lift the desolation from this place.”

  The face of the god wavered before him in the shadows, and the shadows too pushed in around him until he was fighting for breath. He forced his eyes to those of the god and for a moment, he thought that two living eyes looked back at him from their smooth stone depths. And then the cold began to ebb away and the shadows drew slowly back to their accustomed places.

  About him his fellows were completing their worship, and he rose and followed them out into the bright sun. He stood leaning against the outer wall until he felt the pounding in his heart subside. “What happened here?” he whispered, shaken.

&
nbsp; “I thought you looked like something was getting to you,” a gray-haired centurion from the Twentieth said. “You mean you didn’t know? The whole garrison went over the wall one night in the last war. Bolted the gates on the inside and went—the whole garrison. They never found them. They were auxiliary troops, of course, but that was just before we lost the Ninth and I’ve always thought it had something to do with it. Trimontium’s accounted unlucky now. The Senate wanted to pull it down nail by nail when they found out, but fortunately someone with more sense got hold of them.”

  “Or we’d all be busting our asses to build it back up again,” a young auxiliary officer said, grinning. He looked at Postumus. “You don’t look so good. You’d best come and eat something. You’re right about that temple, though. There’s a nasty feel to it.”

  So Trimontium too had gone into the pit that undermanning and neglect had opened up for the Ninth Hispana. Postumus wondered how enduring the lesson of that horror would be. “We’re at the edge of the Empire,” he remembered Licinius saying. “When it’s a choice between us and the southern provinces, it’s our troops that are drained off first.” Would the troops that Lollius Urbicus had brought with him be allowed to stay this time, to see that their work endured?

  * * *

  In the morning they were on the march again, on the northwest road to the western edge of the old frontier—and the far edge of the Empire. Postumus, the soldier son of a long line of soldiers, was not easily unnerved, but he turned his back on Trimontium gratefully.

  As they pushed north, the traffic on the road grew greater, and newly built signal stations rose less than a day’s march apart along their way. Couriers, also heavily escorted, passed them in both directions and twice they were overtaken by mounted troops in the flamboyant armor of the auxiliary cavalry, heads thrown back and singing as they went. For now, at least, the best that Rome could send was traveling the roads that Agricola had carved into the highlands over sixty years ago.