The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  They were both silent while the coals in the brazier popped and sank, and the wind came up with a rustle of dead leaves outside the window. Valerian picked up the torque again, but he didn’t slip it back on his harness with his own honors, turning it instead in his hands while he thought. Postumus refilled their wine cups, the green glass cups that had come from Licinius, another who carried the scars of an old war and a dead legion.

  “How many years for the death of a world?” Valerian whispered.

  How many years before the men who had served at Trimontium could forget that they had ever followed the Eagles? How many years before they could give their sons a Roman cavalry sword to fight Rome with, and their sons could wear an Imperial Distinguished Conduct torque as if it were a piece of jewelry?

  “The old men?” Postumus asked uneasily. “Did you see the old men?”

  “By and large, we saw them in plenty,” Valerian said. “But none that could have fathered those boys, no. Maybe there was enough of the old loyalty left to keep them out of the battle. Or Brendan didn’t trust them.” Valerian drained his wine and set the cup down on the table, with a hand also somewhat unsteady. “And maybe they ran, in case we thought of Trimontium.”

  Postumus let out his breath, relieved. If Rome had found them, Rome would have to notice them, and he knew all too clearly what Rome would have done to them.

  Valerian nodded. “I think the governor was relieved not to have to face that. The Ninth is dead. Better let it lie.”

  They sat in silence while the Samhain wind came up again with the uneasy ghosts of Trimontium on its wings.

  XI. Beltane

  In a month it was winter on the frontier, the dank kind that ate into the bones. Postumus felt as if his feet would never be dry again and his fingers were constantly cold and he dropped things. And he couldn’t get Trimontium off his mind. The hospital was peopled by a parade of lung disease and chills and general winter malaise. Valerian, Frontinus and the other commanders dealt with the sulks and grumbling and occasional outright insubordination of an army in winter quarters on a hostile frontier. When the first signs of spring poked their green noses from the ground, it was an almost overwhelming relief.

  Postumus, who had accumulated more leave than he had been allowed to use between his Syrian posting and his appointment to the Sixth, promptly put in for it, and, discovering that Valerian apparently had never taken leave at all and had enough coming to him to make a world tour if they had let him, suggested he come along.

  “Londinium,” Valerian said, his mood brightening.

  The minute the first road was clear enough, they were packed and saddled, with strict instructions not to overstay their time. As soon as the ground was thawed, the new wall would begin to rise.

  At Credigone, on the east end of the frontier, they wangled passage on a trader optimistically named the Zephyr going south along the coast to the mouth of the Tamesis and upriver to the provincial capital. For Postumus this meant a chance to prowl the Londinium potion-sellers’ stalls and the cluster of dubious warehouses by the docks where the Eastern medicine merchants had their stores: cavernous, shadowed buildings thick with the scent of poppy cake and pungent herbs. The drug-sellers’ domain gave Valerian much the same uncomfortable feeling that hospitals did and he looked dubiously at Postumus, deep in conversation with a cadaverous Alexandrian merchant who rattled spiderlike among the shadows of his baled wares. In the end they parted company with an agreement to meet at the horse market in two hours’ time.

  Afterward they visited the city baths and lounged comfortably in the steam room while attendants scraped their skin clean and rubbed it with sweet oil, then spent the rest of the afternoon unashamedly cheering a naval spectacle in the arena and exploring the city’s bustling market district. They bought raw oysters from the fishmongers who hawked their wares up and down the streets, and Postumus posted two flasks of Arabian perfume by messenger to his mother and sister. With Constantia’s, he included a souvenir stylus that bore the message A GIFT FROM THE CITY: A POINTED REMINDER TO WRITE TO ME.

  They stayed in the best inn they could afford, which boasted a courtyard with a cherry tree, tolerable plumbing, and a mosaic on the floor of Ethiopians hunting lions. At night from their window they could see the lights of Londinium Bridge strung like dew on cobwebs across the Tamesis. A crowd of laughing theatergoers passed by, and then a lady shielded behind the curtains of her litter, and a troupe of jugglers. Somewhere off to the right came the sounds of a cither and a drum and the jingle of coins from a dancer’s belt. At night the city glowed as golden as a new-minted aureus and seemed to Postumus almost a dimension in itself, a strange jumping-off point between civilization and the bloody realities of the frontier.

  Valerian knotted his neck scarf with a practiced hand and twitched the gold-bordered folds of his parade cloak into place. He inspected his reflection in the little mirror from his kit and turned to Postumus. “Dinner first, I think. After that, there’s a pair of dancing sisters at the wineshop two streets over that are worth watching. In fact, I just had a word with one of them this afternoon and she seemed to think her sister might take a liking to you. Especially after I promised her you were rich as Croesus and handsome as the Sun God.”

  Postumus suspected that the rich as Croesus part was the enticement, although that was relative, but he followed Valerian cheerfully down the stairs. After that the evening passed in a haze of lobsters, fresh asparagus, and good wine, and dancers who flew like gaudy birds through a veil of drifting, sandalwood-scented smoke. He awoke in the morning to find one of the dancing sisters curled against him in the rushes of her bed. She had wrapped herself in all the covers like a cocoon (it was the cold that had wakened him) and she snored softly, but she looked cute and he gave her a kiss and left her enough money, Valerian said afterwards, to keep her in finger-cymbals for the rest of her life.

  They took the sisters to the theater that night, to see a farce by Plautus, and bought them dinner afterward, followed by a late breakfast the next morning. When they left, neat and relatively sober in riding kit, the sisters watched them wistfully, with earnest wishes for their speedy return. Gentlemen who were handsome and open-handed were rare in their experience.

  They returned overland on cavalry mounts to let Postumus inspect the hospital at Eburacum while Valerian descended on the undermanned forts in the Brigantian Hills, with the intention, he said, of shocking the liver out of anyone foolish enough to assume that a war on in Valentia was an excuse to get sloppy in Brigantia. Trimontium had been on his mind too.

  On the road north, spring unfolded behind them as they rode. The air softened, the land greened, and the fenlands around Lindum were dotted with sheep on the higher ground. An otter poked its head up from a streambank as they passed and a heron picked its way through the marsh, each foot lifted with slow deliberation like a pantomime dancer.

  Postumus found the Eburacum hospital in reasonably good order, and Gemellus, the junior surgeon he had left in command there, seemed to be doing all right. Fortunately, there was very little for him to do.

  He rejoined Valerian at Isurium, which had been the tribal capital of the Brigantes in the days before Agricola’s army had razed its walls. These days it was a Roman colonia, supervised by togaed magistrates and policed by civil cohorts of the Watch. The walls that had risen since guarded against little more than wolves, and the city’s defenses were the strength of Roman civil law and the soldiers stationed in the great fortress of Eburacum less than a day’s march away. It remained, however, the nominal capital of the Brigantes and to it their king and his Council were required to come to dispense such justice as Rome allowed them, from the marbled halls of its basilica. Where the question before the court was purely a native matter and touched only on such tribesmen as held lands outside Isurium, Rome stayed clear. The presence of the king and his Council in Isurium, where they could be observed occasionally, was the point.

  Valerian was bringing another of his
Dacian cohorts north to the new wall forts and he and Postumus trotted through the open gates of Isurium accompanied by their scarlet and yellow splendor. It was Beltane and obvious that a court was in session. Clusters of hillmen were gathered on the basilica’s marble steps while a clerk wove back and forth among them, taking statements and checking cases against the tablet in his hand.

  Postumus leaned forward as a figure emerged from the basilica and stood blinking in the sunlight. It caught the white gold sheen of his hair and the bright gold and glass bracelets that clustered at his wrists. The slight limp did not disguise the catlike gait, and the long eyes and fine-boned face beneath the blue spirals of his tattooing were unmistakable.

  “Hold a minute.” Postumus reined in his horse and pulled his helmet off.

  Valerian threw up a hand to halt their escort, with a glance at Postumus as he swung down from the saddle.

  “I’ve seen someone I know.”

  Valerian nodded at the escort to stay where they were and dismounted also, throwing the reins to a trooper behind him.

  Postumus was tall for a Roman, half a head above Valerian, and Galt spotted him almost immediately, his face breaking into a smile as he came forward. He limped but it was obvious that the leg was as sound as Postumus could have hoped for, and he said so.

  “Well enough to beat the puppies at the Spring Races,” Galt said. He coughed and turned away for a moment.

  Postumus could see his shoulders shake with the cough. “Are you ill?”

  “Winter cough. Old Talhaiere’s herbs and steam haven’t chased it off, but now that spring is here…”

  “That often cures it,” Postumus said. “I spent all winter treating the same. Woodsmoke makes it worse. Stick your head out the door when you can.”

  Galt nodded and Postumus saw him eyeing Valerian with interest, so he introduced them.

  “Does the High King hold his court this Beltane?” Valerian asked, nodding at the activity outside the basilica.

  “Yes, we smooth out old quarrels and try to avert new ones,” Galt said, with another cough. “The day the Briton learns unity is the day Rome may begin to beware.”

  “If, for instance, the Brigantes had answered Brendan of the Selgovae when the call came,” Valerian suggested.

  “I grow too old for such hostings, Wing Commander,” Galt said lightly, turning it to a joke. “I am become an elder statesman, an old hound kept to cuff the pups into good sense.”

  “The High King is still a pup, perchance?” This also, softly, from Valerian, and Galt stiffened.

  “Perchance,” Postumus said, putting one mailed sandal down hard on the cavalry commander’s toes, “but a pack leader since he was weaned, I think.”

  “Indeed,” Galt said, and they talked carefully of the weather and the spring crops for a few minutes until a young hound appeared from the basilica and bowed to Galt.

  “The High King sends me to tell the Lord Galt that the court is ready to hear the next case.”

  Galt nodded. “I must go and decide whether old Anwen was entitled to steal Cormac’s cow because Cormac stole Anwen’s three goats after Anwen stole Cormac’s wife. Or some such. There will be much shouting and threats but after we decide, at least they won’t feud.” He held out a hand to Postumus. “It was fine to see you again. If you should stay for the Beltane fires tonight, we may talk.” He nodded politely at Valerian and strode back into the basilica, the pale hair that fell down his back bright against the white and russet pattern of his cloak.

  “I liked your harper,” Valerian said, “although I would walk warily of him if I commanded here.”

  “For which reason you decided to dig at him about the High King?” Postumus asked.

  “Essentially.”

  “And did you gain anything useful?”

  “No more than you’ve told me already, but we should stay for the fires tonight. It’s late to be on the road again and I haven’t danced at a Beltane fire in years. I’ll leave him to you.”

  “And you think he’ll tell me something while you’re off getting drunk on native beer?” Postumus asked.

  “Quite possibly.”

  * * *

  Beltane was another of the great festivals that marked the wheel of the year in Britain, midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, when the land began to grow green again. Household fires were doused and the New Fire kindled with a fire drill. From it, one child in each house took the New Fire home, and two great bonfires were lit for the cattle to be driven through to make them fruitful. Couples hoping for the same might run between the fires as well or jump the embers.

  In a colonia like Isurium Brigantum, not everyone followed the old ways, but the festival itself attracted most of the citizenry with food and drink and general carousing. Postumus stood on the edge of the crowd around the dark circle where the New Fire would be kindled by friction. In the colonia, there were still a few lights burning but outside the east gate, on the gentle slope above the river, there was pitch darkness. Two men knelt above a small twist of tinder and spun the fire drill in it and Postumus could feel the held breath of the crowd, waiting for the spark, the New Fire, entwined with the old fear that this year, this time, the light might not come again, there might be no spark. It would be easier to fear that in the hills than outside a colonia where the more Romanized inhabitants were eating their dinner by the light of oil lamps, and no one would think of putting out the fire that fueled the hypocaust, but the darkness here discouraged disbelief. Not for the first time in his life, Postumus felt one foot in some other world.

  The crowd let out its breath as a spark rose in the tinder, and then another. The keepers of the flame fed it small bits of kindling, shielding it from any stray breeze. If the New Fire went out and had to be rekindled, it was a bad omen. The fire grew to a handful of flame, and then enough to shed light on the faces around it. Postumus was startled by a woman’s face that came suddenly into the light and then flickered away. It had looked like Claudia. He could have sworn he had seen her at the theater in Londinium too, in the seats to his left, beside a tribal-looking escort with an impressive mustache. If it had been her, she had made it clear that she did not want to see him, and turned away so that her veil hid her face. The little dancer beside him had taken his attention, bouncing in her seat with excitement and wheedling him for sweets, and when he looked back, the woman was gone. Postumus wondered if it had been her either time, or if he was developing an unhealthy fixation.

  The New Fire blazed up and a group of boys clustered around it with torches to light from the flames. They set out at a run toward their homes, the light streaming behind them.

  “A time of new beginnings,” said a voice beside him, which was definitely Galt. “It always gives me hope.”

  “What do you hope for?” Postumus asked him.

  “For this to last for a while, perhaps. Our old world, our old ways.”

  How many years for the death of a world? Without thinking it over, Postumus said, “I know where the men from Trimontium went. The deserters from the last war.”

  Galt coughed and said, “My people would have killed them. I thought then that Brendan was asking for ill luck.”

  They watched the bonfires being lit, and then the cattle running between them, lowing, chased by small boys with sticks. Sellers of meat and beer began to appear and the solemnity of the fire ritual faded into merrymaking.

  “Valerian told me,” Postumus said. “After the governor’s mopping up campaign last Samhain.”

  “Did any of them come back to you?” Galt asked, and Postumus couldn’t tell whether he was serious or not.

  “After I heard that, I was British enough not to go out in the night.”

  Galt nodded. “It’s odd. Once I wished that someone would come back. I waited each year for three years, for some sign, some feeling in the air, the touch of a different wind. I wouldn’t have been afraid of him. He was the other half of my soul.”

  “The High
King?”

  Galt nodded again.

  “And you don’t wish for war now, to avenge that?”

  “Even if we could win, when Rome is beaten, she waits. Your foothold is too strong here.”

  “Is that what you told him, the first time?”

  “No,” Galt said slowly. “But I was younger then, and he was my spear brother, my blood brother—some things I could not see clearly.”

  “And if you had?”

  “Would I have said as much to him—to see him alive still, growing old with honor, among his people? Yes, I would have spoken.”

  “And would he have listened?”

  “No.” He watched the boys dodging among the cattle, driving them between the fires. “We were too young then.”

  XII. The Wind in the Heather

  From Isurium, they rode northwest to Luguvallium and across the old frontier into Valentia, coming on a mid-May evening to the far side of the divide between home and service—the raw scar across the land where the new wall would run.

  The wall would rise from east to west, as the forts had, and here, more than halfway down its length, the only sign as yet to be seen was the turned ground where the surveying crews had marked its path. Valentia was reasonably well pacified now, except for isolated raiding bands of the Selgovae who had fled into the heather to the north after last autumn’s battle. But they were making a wonderful nuisance of themselves, and it was now strongly suspected that there might be more of them lairing in Pict country than had at first been thought. In addition, the Picts showed ominous signs of movement to the north. The western garrisons had orders to hold their ground at all costs until the last gap of the wall was spanned.