The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  The governor, from his vantage point on the ridge, took note of Valerian’s message. “They won’t surrender,” he told his tribune. “Not with women in the line. That’s a last-ditch tactic. We’ll have to fight them till they drop.” He looked up grimly and a raindrop hit him in the eye.

  The sky above had darkened as they first crested the ridge and now it was ashen. Another drop fell and the governor swore.

  Valerian, slashing his way through a tangle of broken chariots and Selgovae warriors now on foot, saw the field turning to mud as the skies opened. A boom of thunder shook the air. His standard-bearer’s horse skidded in the slop and went down and a Briton ran his spear through the standard-bearer’s chest. The next man in line snatched the standard up. In the infantry lines, the shield wall was moving forward now in lockstep, the dogged formation that made use of the wicked Roman short sword that could reach inside a longer sword’s arc and make it useless. Stab and take a step; stab and take a step, the formation that was the core of Roman military discipline.

  * * *

  In the hospital tents, all they could see of the battle was the faint haze of dust in the heavy air, which was growing thicker by the minute, the sky ominous. Calpurnius Aquila stuck his head out of the main tent, glanced up briefly and spat with disgust. Postumus refrained from comment, but the old surgeon’s thoughts were plain. The prospect of operating in a late summer thunderstorm was daunting. It could well work to the Army’s advantage, however, if the Britons’ chariots got mired in the mud. They waited tensely for some word of the battle, the hospital staff with their breastplates and helmets discarded and heavy canvas aprons over their tunics, the reserves at parade rest before the outer wall. A fly landed on Postumus’s neck and he slapped at it jumpily. The Advance sounded again beyond the hill, and once the sharp notes of Fall Back and Regroup. The dark clouds rolled in above them and faintly through the woods they could hear the roar and swell of two opposing armies locked in desperate battle for far more than one wooded hill.

  Then the roar of the battle was drowned in a roar of thunder and the heavens opened like a waterfall as the first of the wounded came streaming back through the trees with a light-armed escort pushing its way through the torrent that fell around them.

  The orderlies scrambled out to bring them in, heads down through the driving rain, and Postumus saw one of the escort flash a thumbs-up and then make an encircling motion with his hands before he plunged back into the trees again. The incoming wounded confirmed it—the governor’s army had broken Brendan’s war host but they were fighting like demons.

  “Women! Selgovae witches,” the legionary on the table before Postumus said through gritted teeth while Postumus tried to save the tendons in his leg. He had been caught by a chariot’s wheel blade and had taken the driver through the throat with his pilum as he went down, but he had been carried to the hospital across a cavalryman’s saddle and it was likely he would never march out with his legion again.

  Postumus stitched him up and then turned to the next, another leg wound, this one past saving. Postumus doped the cavalry trooper up as stiffly as he dared and proceeded to take the leg off above the knee. Calpurnius Aquila, probing a spear wound at the next table, glanced up now and again but offered no comment. When Postumus had finished, the hideous sound of the bone saw still grating across his mind, he nodded at the orderly to take the man away. The memory of those empty sockets in the wheel hubs of Galt’s blue and red chariot rose in his mind. He washed the blood from his hands in the basin the orderly held out, and looked up to catch old Aquila’s jumpy eye on him.

  “Pretty fancy job,” the chief surgeon said. Postumus couldn’t tell whether it was a compliment or not. He picked up a pot of wound salve and went back to work, grateful that the soldier awaiting him, another cavalryman, had nothing more than a nice clean sword cut on the fleshy part of his thigh.

  After that they came too fast for further thought, and the rain that was still pouring down began to run under the tent walls, turning the canvas floor beneath them into a sticky mess through which the walking wounded and the hospital staff squelched miserably. The senior surgeon of the Twentieth had begun to sneeze, while outside the thunder boomed and rolled and the surgeon of the Second muttered a brief prayer against lightning.

  There was another crack of thunder, and then, as if in echo, the triumphant sound of a cavalry horn singing the Pursuit. A minute later an optio of the reserves ducked his head into the hospital tent, rain streaming from his helmet.

  “The commander’s compliments, sir,” he said to Aquila, “and we’ve got them on the run, what’s left of them.”

  Aquila jabbed a pair of forceps at the optio. “Spare me your compliments, you damn fool, and get the wagons out there for the rest of the wounded before they drown!”

  * * *

  The wind in the heather to which Lollius Urbicus had listened had spoken the truth. The Selgovae, with their hapless allies the Novantae, had staked everything on this battle and lost. And the Picts had not ridden to join them. They had sat instead in the fastnesses of their highland holdings and watched an old enemy go down before the swords of a new one, knowing that whichever side emerged the victor would also emerge weakened by the battle.

  Only a score of chariots out of all the thousands had clawed their way out, and Brendan’s had been one of them, only to have the chieftain dragged from it alive on order of Valerian, who had recognized the gold fillet around his head and the seven-pointed flower of the Selgovae lord on his forehead. He was now, hands tied behind him, in the governor’s red leather tent while the governor thought about it. But the Novantae’s chieftain lay flung across the front of his broken chariot, his head against the haunches of his dead horses, and blood thick in his hair, his daughter dead beside him.

  The Selgovae and Novantae had paid in full for trifling with rebellion, but in one thing the Picts had miscalculated. The whisper that had come down from the heather had given Rome the advantage of surprise, and her losses had been minimal. Even considering the men killed mopping up fools who should have surrendered, the Dead List was short. Two days later, when the Roman bodies had been gathered and burned and the Britons stripped of gold and left to the reivers of the forest, the governor’s army marched out. The legionary troops, with the auxiliary infantry and the hospital staff, marched north for the frontier again, while the governor, with Valerian’s cavalry wing and a few other mounted detachments, swung south to put the iron grip of a Roman peace on the rebellious territories. The day they left, the first pale gold leaves were showing in the woods on the ridge above the battlefield, and they rode in some haste, with winter on their tail.

  The forests of Britain had begun their yearly dance with death, the leaves warming slowly to fire and drifting on the autumn wind. In the south, Postumus’s family would be putting up the shutters and laying the garden down under straw. The Army, on the other hand, oblivious to the slow charm of the year’s end, gloomily stocked its storehouses and braced itself for the stifling boredom of winter quarters. The merchant ships and the quinqueremes and triremes of the Fleet came in to ride out the coming storms in harbor.

  The governor’s troops swept south along the coast and then eastward through the Selgovae lands on the edge of Votadini territory, ripping the fortifications from such hill forts as had been rebuilt since the closing of the southern frontier along the old wall. Rome wasted very little. Any men of fighting age found were conscripted for the auxiliaries in the East, the cattle and grain taken to feed Rome’s army, anything yet unharvested trampled or burned in the fields, and the youngest and strongest of the women marked for the slave market. They left little behind them but burned holdings and old men.

  Brendan also was old, his flaming hair almost blanketed with gray and the bitterness of defeat lying heavy on him. He had been allowed to retain his chieftainship for that reason, being deemed more useful to the governor in that guise than as a prisoner in Rome with a strong young chieftain in his place
in Britain. Let him stay, shamed, to rule over what was left him—it was not much.

  Brendan sat in the remains of his home hold on Eildon Hill, that the Eagles called Trimontium, amid the rubble of stone and timber which the Romans had further pulled apart with teams of draft oxen, and made his last council.

  The Novantae woman had gotten past his Roman guardians with a tale of being a dealer in small cures, she said. Everyone’s eyes hurt, or their head, or their genitals. She had sold eyewash to the legionary in charge.

  Now she told him, “We are few. My father is dead and my sister beside him. Now before we decide our course, we must know yours. The Romans keep you as surety, do they not? Your life for the peace of the frontier?”

  “My sons are dead,” he said. “Cadal is of the chieftain’s line. He will take what is left of my people north to the Picts if he can. I have told him this, before we fought.”

  “You would die, then?” The woman cocked her head at him, dark braids over her shoulders and the gold drops in her ears glinting in the firelight. He had a square face like an old bull and arms that had been powerful once but she could see the muscles beginning to slacken with age. “They will kill you if the rest break the peace. And not easily.”

  “It comes often enough for a chieftain to die,” Brendan said. “I would prefer it not be at the Romans’ hand. I will forestall that if I can. But if the chieftainship has gone to Cadal, and they will not be able to put their lapdog in my place. We will not be vassals, and when I ride Epona’s mare into the night, I will ride as a free man. The Novantae must do as they please.”

  “I will tell them.”

  * * *

  It was the end of October and almost Samhain when the governor’s vengeful troops came riding back to winter quarters at the new frontier. The governor, who was not a superstitious man, as regarded British superstitions anyway, made a push nonetheless not to be on the march that night, when the spirits of the Otherworld were free in the land and the dead returned to the paths they had walked in life. The tribes would be keeping to their halls, and no one but the wolves would be out after sunfall, and they were half-kin to the Otherworld anyway.

  Valerian, who loathed this kind of mopping up operation, returned in no very good frame of mind, although as he admitted to Postumus, sitting by the brazier in the surgeon’s quarters at Castra Damnoniorum on Samhain night itself, it had been necessary.

  “They had to be broken,” he said sadly, “or they’d have been raising another army in a few months. Brendan’s been a thorn in our side for years. We couldn’t hold Valentia without crushing him. I wonder, though, if we got them all, and I think the governor does too.”

  Postumus’s brows rose in surprise.

  “Well, we never could get a good count of his army to begin with,” Valerian said, “although we had a pretty fair idea. Most fought to the death. We knew they would, if he had women in the lines. But there were some who hadn’t ridden in yet or he’d have been on the march already. They may well have nipped back to Pict country ahead of us, or just dodged us in the heather.”

  Or ridden south to their kin, the Brigantes, Postumus thought, but he didn’t say it. Valerian, let alone the governor and Aelius Silanus, was sharp enough to pick up on that unassisted. There wouldn’t be enough of them to make trouble unless they enlisted some other tribe in the making of it.

  “A good heavy draft went to the auxiliaries, though,” Valerian said, “and I don’t envy the commander who gets the training of them. It’s a point of honor to be in the first charge, and if you get killed, which is likely, you’ll get a grand reception in the Otherworld. And these already tried to get killed once fighting us. The only prisoners we took we chased down. None of them would surrender even with a spear at their throat. Britons like to fight—when they aren’t fighting us, they fight each other—but they don’t like waiting for commands.”

  The cavalry commander, whose own troops never twitched a hair without orders, looked so disgusted that Postumus laughed and reminded him that they were both half-British themselves.

  “Ah, but we had Roman fathers,” Valerian said, stretching his booted legs closer to the brazier—the night was cold and the hypocaust channels under the stone floor weren’t keeping up with it. “We were brought up right. My mother’s father, now—the old boy with the heads in his hall—he was just such a one. He was killed in a local war, the silly old fool, when my father was stationed in Gaul and not around to keep an eye on him, and all because some other old fool told him he was too old to carry a spear. It wasn’t even his own clan that was fighting. My mother was furious, but I think even she was rather proud of him, and she’d been married to a Roman officer for fifteen years.”

  “Old ways don’t die out right off just because you’ve passed a law against them,” Postumus said. “Look at the Druids. They’re still around, just with a different cap on. The old boy who’d been treating my Briton’s leg, for instance. Every time I crossed his path, he muttered something that I would swear was a curse and it made the back of my neck itch every time.”

  Valerian laughed. “See now, if you’d been all British, it would have got you.”

  “Valerian’s theory of the relative efficacy of curses, moderated by relative distance of bloodline. Lucian would like that. How long does it take, I wonder, to absorb and change a whole culture?”

  Valerian looked up suddenly at that and this time it was he who raised one flyaway black brow. “I’ve wondered that myself,” he said, his dark eyes thoughtful. “Give me some more of that disgusting wine and I’ll tell you a ghost story.”

  Postumus refilled his cup without comment and drew the oil lamp closer. A feeling of unease had crept into the night air that wasn’t just the Samhain wind. Valerian ran his fingers over the leaves of the Corona Civica that dominated the medals strung across his chest. It was the first time Postumus had seen him take any notice of his decorations at all, other than strapping them on with the rest of his gear like so many pieces of his uniform. Valerian tapped the wreath with his forefinger and seemed to study it as he spoke.

  “How long would you say to absorb and change us… how long for the death of all this?” Valerian brushed a hand lightly across the gilded honors.

  “I don’t know,” Postumus said slowly. “As an individual, or as a nation?”

  “I don’t know,” Valerian countered, his eyes still downcast and his face shadowed by a fall of black hair, longer than usual after two months’ campaign. He took up the poker and jabbed moodily at the coals in the brazier.

  Postumus, having taken about as much of this as he could stand, abruptly said, “Spill it!”

  Valerian tossed the poker into its stand with a clatter and sat up straight. “Right, sorry. Nobody’s talked about it, because nobody wants to think about it, but I saw something this tour that’s enough to bring the Deified Augustus gibbering up out of his grave. It was the Selgovae dead and the ones we conscripted—this is the first time we’ve laid our hands on them in large enough numbers at a time for it to show—but, Mithras grant them peace, there were men among them who were wrong. Young men, and born to the tribe—tattooed and all. They don’t do that unless you’re born to it. But wrong. Shorter than the rest, a few of them, but all of them too dark. The Selgovae are of the Golden People, fair-skinned and blond or fox-haired mostly, like your mother, I expect.” He glanced at Postumus’s chestnut hair. “The Silures, now, a lot of us are dark—there’s old blood in the Silures. But not the Selgovae.”

  Postumus shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Young men, born after the last rising. “Go on,” he said, although, with a creeping horror, he found that he knew what Valerian was going to say.

  “They carried Army swords, a lot of them. Cavalry long swords mostly.” He glanced at his own. “Too many to all come from a reived battlefield, and too many of them among the dark men. But the worst thing was the torque on a man I killed at the tail end of the fight. I took it because it had a familiar look to it someh
ow, and when I got a good look, I almost threw it back.” He slipped a silver circle from his own harness and held it out to Postumus. “I don’t know why I put it on… to see if anyone would notice, I suppose. No one did. He had it round his neck, of course.”

  Postumus took the proffered torque gingerly. No one would be likely to notice it among Valerian’s other decorations—it was standard Army issue, silver capped with gold knobs at the ends.

  “Look inside,” Valerian said, his face shadowed again, although Postumus could see the grim twist to his mouth.

  Postumus held the torque to the lamplight. To his disgust, his fingers were shaking. He gritted his teeth and steadied them. The incised lettering was worn but legible. Ulpius Reburrus, of the Third Cohort of Asturians, won this for distinguished conduct in battle in the Nineteenth Year of the Emperor Trajan. He handed the torque back to Valerian as if it had burned him. “Trimontium,” he whispered. “So that’s where they went.”

  Valerian nodded. “I think so. I wasn’t sure you knew about Trimontium,” he added. “I served with the Asturians in Dacia, and of course we all knew. It was the family disgrace, so to speak.”

  Postumus was silent, staring blindly at the inkpot on his chamber desk. Trimontium, the great red sandstone fort in the lowlands whose entire garrison had gone Unlawful Absent in the space of one dark night twenty-five years ago, while the flames of the rebellion had flared around them. Trimontium, where the Mithraeum was haunted. “Yes,” he said at last. “I knew. My father… had a cohort in the Ninth Hispana.” There was a short, startled sound as Valerian drew in his breath. “He died at Castra Pinnata,” Postumus said, and Valerian let out his breath again.

  “I didn’t think—”

  “Of course you thought,” Postumus said, picking up the wine jug from the floor again. “I would have, too. There were enough who did run. It’s the first thought anyone has for a man who served with the Ninth. That’s why I’m a surgeon and Justin’s in the auxiliaries. We weren’t welcome in the Centuriate.” He set the jug down again. “They sent a burial party up there, afterward. They found his body in the fortress. Someone had laid his cloak over him. One of the Brigantes maybe. They are odd that way.” Hilarion had told him that, years ago, and Postumus had found it oddly comforting.