The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  The tribune listened to this reckoning of old feuds and blood ties with a certain amount of confusion, and Postumus gave him a sympathetic glance. “The situation up here is nothing like what you’ve seen in the south,” he said. “I was born in the south and it might as well be a different country. The southern tribes have been part of Rome since Agricola’s campaign and they’ve lost a lot of their territorial distinctions. They’re urbanized, modernized. They’re Roman. Mostly.”

  “It’s the civilian influence that does that,” the legate said, “once the Army has made it possible. The tribes here in the north have very little civilian influence to alter their structure. Even the colonia at Isurium Brigantum has made little difference. They’re a warrior people and strongly independent. Their way of life is fighting. If there’s no common enemy, they fight each other.”

  “Shouldn’t that make it easy enough for us to pick them off one at a time?” the tribune asked.

  “It does and it doesn’t,” Silanus said. “That’s exactly what we have done, but occasionally a king comes along who’s powerful enough to fight the lesser tribes around him and overrun them completely. Then he draws all those tribes under his standard as well, and becomes a force to be reckoned with.”

  “I’ve been told their warriors are highly undisciplined,” the tribune said.

  “As a general rule they are,” Postumus began. “But—”

  “There’s always a ‘but’ when you’re dealing with Britain,” Frontinus said. “The most you can be sure of is that most things that happen will not be what you were expecting.”

  “I’ll remember that,” the tribune said. “That in itself is a useful piece of information.”

  The legate rose. “Now I am going to perform the unexpected, in the form of a short-notice inspection of my legion’s garrisons between here and the coast. The governor’s headed this way, which should terrify all of us.”

  X. Samhain Wind

  As if the legate’s visit had signaled some change in the wind, the tempo of life in Castra Damnoniorum picked up from then on, even while the casualties decreased. It was the changing time of year when summer gave way to autumn and dark clouds scudded across the sky, driven on an increasing wind. Postumus, waiting for Tertius to appear, was concerned when he did not, but there was no way to do more than wonder if he had decided after all that he could not bear to be an onlooker when his legion marched.

  Couriers came and went daily and the Frontier Scouts shifted back and forth like smoke across the lines. Troops were shifted and re-shifted according to the latest reports, and suddenly, for reasons best known to the generals, the main army moved westward away from Credigone, to camp just slightly to the south of Castra Damnoniorum. With them came Aelius Silanus and the Sixth Victrix; the Second Augusta, Hilarion’s old legion, most of which was also attached to the northern army; and a sizeable detachment of the Twentieth Valeria Victrix out of Deva. The governor was also with them, but all anybody saw of him was his angular form and purple cloak riding beside Silanus as the army marched in.

  Appius Paulinus, the centurion from aboard the Nereid, arrived with the rest of the Sixth and found his cohort assigned the unenviable task of helping to calibrate the catapults. The governor had brought an onager, the monstrous stone-thrower designed to break walls in a siege, and two bolt-throwing scorpions that could wreak havoc among an attacking force. It would take a whole day to set them up, calibrate the right and left tension to an equal force, and make note of range and impact for each trajectory. The torsion springs were made of animal tendon and varied in their elasticity, and unequal tension could throw the stone or bolt off-center. Paulinus was less than delighted—catapults often had a mind of their own and could easily take a finger, or someone’s head, off. Lucian, on the other hand, was enthralled, and hung about in the open plain below the camp while the torsion springs were wound up, offering advice and annoying the engineers. The legate also had a tendency to get in the works and everyone was terrified of killing him by mistake.

  Valerian’s cavalry wing had also made its appearance, along with two others, and Valerian rode up to the hospital at Damnoniorum in the evening to renew his acquaintance with Postumus and see if anybody there knew anything more than his lot, which was not much.

  Postumus, grateful for a break in the waiting, which was beginning to stretch everyone’s nerves thin, took him off to his quarters and produced a hoarded jug of good wine.

  “You can’t know less than we do,” Postumus said. “I’ve had orders to get this hospital ready to be moved—but where I’m to move it to, no one has seen fit to mention.” With the arrival of Silanus, his hospital command was formally transferred back to the Sixth Victrix.

  “Knowing Urbicus, you’ll have an hour to do it in, when you are told,” Valerian said, taking an appreciative sip out of one of the green glass cups. “He’s holed up in his tent, interviewing scouts. There were two who looked like rag-and-bone sellers, one that I would swear was either a Pict or a man who’d had an argument with a vat of blue dye, and tonight a Briton who turned up with his cloak over his face and a governor’s pass in his hand, and nipped off again an hour later. It’s all a matter of where the Selgovae are, of course. I expect he’s got wind they’re in this part of the woods somewhere, but there are so many paths through the heather you’d think they had the fay folk on their side.”

  Postumus considered that. “If we don’t catch them by the end of autumn, it’ll all be to do over in the spring, won’t it?”

  “Most like,” Valerian said. “And then there’s the matter of the Pict. We’ve played will-he-won’t-he over him for so long, we’re all sick of the subject.”

  “Ally with the Selgovae, you mean?”

  “Mmm. The Pict is a wily beast. Just because he’s let some of the Selgovae take refuge in his hunting runs doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll cross the frontier to fight for them. On the other hand, of course, he might, if the mood strikes him and there’s something in it for him. Still, if I was Brendan, I wouldn’t hang my hopes on the Picts without a damned good assurance. And then I’d move in a hurry. Alliances with the Picts don’t often last very long. There’s too much old enmity there.”

  Postumus poured them both another cup of wine and then sat looking at his. Brendan’s last alliance with the Painted People had lasted just long enough to destroy a legion. He was obviously still negotiating this one or he would have moved before now. “Well, let’s hope we can find him before he gets it settled,” he started to say when there was a hurried tap at the door and Lucian stuck his head in.

  “We’re moving, sir!” he said, excitement in his dark eyes. “They’ve just sounded Turnout for Parade and it looks like the governor’s camp sat on an anthill.”

  Valerian stood up and jammed his helmet on his head. “Any bets we’ve found Brendan?” He grinned. “It looks like that Briton had more in his hand than a governor’s pass. See you in the wars, friend.” He caught up his cloak and was gone.

  Outside, the whole fort was astir. The speech that Aelius Silanus gave the Sixth was brief and to the point: They moved out in the morning, all upcoming leaves were cancelled, and any man who wasn’t ready to march by first light could expect awful retribution. He ended with the usual evening prayer before the legion’s Eagle and the cohort standards, but tonight it took on a more urgent meaning. Afterward each man went to pray to his own gods against the morning, and Postumus, with Frontinus and Paulinus, made his prayers to the God of Soldiers at a makeshift altar in the camp commander’s quarters.

  Optios, mule drivers, and quartermasters hustled back and forth through the fort and the extended camp beside it. Civilian hangers-on were shooed away. Officers delivered last-minute speeches to their troops. Frontinus’s sentries at the Dexter Gate dragged in a trio of cavalrymen who had been located in one of the wine stalls that trailed the Army. The night was clear and cold as jet and trailed with stars, but to the north Postumus could see a thicker charcoal tone to the s
ky—and no stars. There was a storm building somewhere in the north, over the hunting runs of the Painted People. He wondered if it would bring that mysterious enemy with it on its heels.

  Then he was caught up in making ready for battle, as so many times before in so many other provinces, and the familiar stomach-twisting uncertainty as to how many men would be beyond his help at the end of it, and how many of them would be his friends. He stood briefly before the little statue of Aesculapius that he kept in his kit and said a prayer there too.

  In the morning, with the field hospital packed into its wagons and the remaining patients left behind in the charge of one unnerved apprentice, they moved out to the south in the wake of the Sixth to swell the ranks of Lollius Urbicus’s avenging army. They marched in battle order, auxiliaries to the front and rear, the hospital and baggage wagons tucked under the protective wing of the three legions that formed the bulwark of Urbicus’s troops. The staff of the eastern field hospital, consisting of the surgeons of the Valeria Victrix and the Second Augusta, with Governor Urbicus’s field surgeon in command, marched with them. Postumus, with Lucian and Flavian in attendance, sidled up beside the Chief Surgeon’s horse and made introductions, while Cinnamus waited a respectful few paces behind. Calpurnius Aquila, the governor’s surgeon, was a squat, balding man with a paunch and one wildly skewed eye. Postumus, who knew him by reputation, saluted him with some awe while he glared at them from the saddle. Aquila was generally credited with the highest surgical skill and the vilest temper in the Empire. The other two senior surgeons, Postumus noted, seemed well under his thumb.

  Aquila looked Postumus up and down with the steely eye of a quartermaster inspecting a side of meat and finding it wanting. He eyed the insignia on his belt and snorted. “How did you come by seniority while you’re still in swaddling bands?”

  “The wisdom of the Army, which I do not question,” Postumus said. “I’m accounted a fair surgeon by such of my patients as survive,” he added.

  Aquila lowered a pair of brows like hedgerows at him. “Don’t frighten you, do I? Well, brace yourself, sonny, because I’ll scare the shit out of you later.”

  “Yes, sir. I don’t doubt it, sir.” Postumus saluted and backed Boreas away.

  Lucian and Flavian, sticking to his side like glue, looked utterly unnerved.

  “Good gods, sir, is he always like that?” Lucian asked.

  “From what I’ve heard of him,” Postumus said, “he’s a good deal worse.”

  “What do we do?” Cinnamus whispered, fixing a terrified eye on the substantial bulk bouncing in the saddle ahead of them.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to,” Postumus said. “And learn everything you can from him. The old bastard’s accounted the best surgeon in the Army.”

  They pushed on until evening at half-quick march. The assembled catapults loomed over the baggage line, strapped in their wagons. The light cavalry fanned out ahead of them, Valerian’s heavy troops guarding their flanks. They circled wide once to avoid a holding of the Damnonii. The Damnonii might be at peace with Rome, as the Augusta’s surgeon remarked, but they wouldn’t like having their fields trampled and it wouldn’t do to encourage some helpful soul to go inform Brendan that Rome was on its way to make mincemeat of him. When the scouts found ground to the governor’s liking, they made camp.

  A Roman marching camp duplicated the plan of every fort in the Empire. Before the tail of the marching army had even approached, surveyors had laid out the streets and the spot for the commander’s quarters in the Praetorium tent where the Via Praetoria and Via Principalis crossed at right angles. It was immediately surrounded by ditch and rampart on all four sides, dug under the eye of the engineers while the cavalry and half the heavy infantry kept guard, pulling back century by century, as the rampart went up, to work on the remainder. In the morning it would all be pulled down again and even the ditch filled in so the enemy couldn’t circle behind them and make use of it.

  The next day they were on the march again, this time at full double-step, before the weird light of dawn had given way to the true paling of the eastern sky. Dawn, when it came, was closed and ominous, the dull steel gray of a winter sea. The air was oppressive, as if the gods were out and about in it, and Postumus tied his cloak to his saddle back and twitched uncomfortably at his scarf. His skin itched under his helmet and breastplate.

  A scout on a lathered horse dove through the ranks of the vanguard and they halted with a suddenness that almost sent the troops behind them crashing into their rear. The scout wove his way unchallenged through the First Cohort of the Victrix and halted before the legate and the tall angular man beside him.

  “Coming from the south,” he gasped, pointing. “They have scouts in front. We killed four but I think there was another one who got away.”

  “Well, I expect it will save us the trouble of announcing ourselves,” Lollius Urbicus said. He turned to an aide beside him. “Every commander, up here to me now.”

  The governor’s standard-bearer swung his banner overhead and they came at a gallop, saluted, and sat at parade rest, awaiting the orders that most of them could have predicted. “The Selgovae are a mile to the southwest,” Urbicus informed them. “They know where we are too. By my best information, the chances are nine in ten that the Pict is not on our tails. You will remember that other chance, however, and act accordingly.”

  The commanders saluted and dispersed, and soon the whole column of the army began to shift itself into a new pattern. The hospital was to stay where it was, with the baggage carts forming the outer perimeter and the reserves circled around that. Postumus, as usual, was left to watch his friends march out and to wonder how many of them would march back again with a whole hide. He saw Appius Paulinus at the head of his cohort, his shield newly painted with the bull and thunderbolt insignia of the Sixth. Valerian gave a mock salute and whistled “All’s Well” as he cantered by, the horsetail crest on his helmet flying, and Frontinus grinned and gave the thumbs-up sign when his cohort swung past. Calpurnius Aquila, rendered even more irascible than usual by the impending battle, was ordering the set-up of the hospital and Postumus turned hastily to help him. They had the tents up and half the supplies out before they heard the first trumpet sound the Advance. Around them the reserves were erecting their own ditch-and-wall amid much grumbling about playing nursemaid to the baggage train. Calpurnius Aquila dispatched an orderly with arms like an ape to request their silence, and quiet fell.

  They were in open country bordered by a low wooded ridge, beyond which, according to the scouts, lay the war host of the Selgovae. A wide track through the woods showed signs of recent use, and on the scouts’ advice Urbicus had decided to take advantage of it, and beat them to the best ground, counting on the unexpectedness of their arrival as insurance against ambush.

  The army moved forward into the green-gold dapple of the trees, a sea of steel and scarlet following the gilded Eagles of three legions and the Eagle-bearers in their lionskin hoods. The great catapults towered over them as they rumbled up the track. The dragon banners of the cavalry filled with air as they rode, and snapped open, writhing above their bearers. As the vanguard came out of the woods on a slope above a rolling moor, Valerian, on the flank with his Dacian horse, saw the assembled war host of the Selgovae gathering. They numbered in the thousands, with more warriors on foot behind the massed front line of chariots. The chariots were freshly painted, their ponies hung with gold and silver trappings that caught the rising sunlight, their drivers’ bare chests blue with war paint. Valerian narrowed his eyes.

  “Go back and tell the governor that Brendan has women in his battle line,” he said to the trooper next to him and the trooper spun his horse around.

  British women were warrior-trained along with the men. They could fight and drive as well as the men. But no war leader put either his women or his mares into battle without desperate need. This was Brendan’s last stand.

  It was clear that the Roman excursions of the las
t few years had diminished Brendan’s numbers only somewhat, but if there were women in the line, then this was all he had. The sun danced on the pony trappings and the wicked little knives that extended from each chariot wheel. When they saw that the Romans were going to halt on the high ground, they came forward with a rush, howling like wolves up the slope, each eager to be first in the battle line. The auxiliaries in the Roman front line greeted them with a rain of flung pilums and then knelt, locking shields in a solid wall from shoulder to knee, while the men behind them flung theirs in a second deadly rain of iron. The heavy points drove through shields and chariots and the untempered shafts bent, embedded, pulling shields away and tangling wheels. The Roman line rose again and braced itself behind the shield wall, men behind moving up to fill any gaps as the chariots came on. A chariot charge was a terrifying sight, but the infantry had learned that if they put up their shields in an apparently solid barrier, the horses would mostly stop before it. It was difficult to force a horse to crash into what looked to it like a solid wall. The front chariots tangled and their horses reared and struggled through the chaos, running loose as riders fell.

  The bolt-throwing scorpions on the ridge flung their iron missiles over the Roman heads into the middle of the Selgovae war band. The chariots came on, buffeting themselves against the Roman line, breaking through in places, before the next man stepped up to lock shields with those beside him. The scorpion bolts tangled men and chariots until the scythe blades on the wheel hubs were as deadly to the chariot ponies as to the enemy. They abandoned their chariots then, the warriors leaping down to fight on foot, pushing against the Roman lines with the massed foot warriors behind them. As the auxiliary line began to buckle, the scarlet weight of the legionary troops behind them moved up, step by step through the wreckage, and the cavalry came flying down the slope on either side to hit the enemy flanks.