The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  The bulk of the Sixth Legion was some miles to the east, at work on the wall, and Valerian rode out to rejoin his cavalry wing and keep the Picts off their tails, while Postumus made a quick and unnecessary inspection of the Castra Damnoniorum hospital, which Lucian had kept in excellent order, and then a tour of the smaller fort hospitals to the west. There were few casualties to deal with as it was more profitable for the Picts to harry the vulnerable building crews, and the first part of the summer passed in relative tranquility. Centurion Frontinus and the other western commanders kept their forts lynx-eyed and watchful and the Pict kept clear.

  Lollius Urbicus rode through periodically and when he did, there were generally scouts about, cloaked in disreputable anonymity and passing in and out of the camp with little more than a password to mark them as men of the Eagles.

  Postumus was occupying the first hour of the night with answering a letter from Justin by the light of the dispensary lamp when an optio tapped on the door and informed him that the governor wanted to see the senior surgeon, please. Now, he added firmly, as Postumus glanced at the dark sky outside the window, if it was quite convenient.

  “If it’s convenient for the governor, I expect it had better be convenient for me,” Postumus said. “I didn’t know he was in camp.”

  “He’s not. So you’ll keep mum, sir, if you please. And you’re to bring your kit, sir,” the optio added.

  “All of it?” Postumus inquired, waving a hand at the stocked shelves and the array of surgical tools in their cases against the wall. “It would help if I knew what I was treating.”

  “I really couldn’t say, sir.” The optio’s tone was repressive.

  “How about a hint?” Postumus felt his irritation growing and squelched it. “Come on, man, it does make a difference if I’m going to pull a tooth or take someone’s leg off, and if the governor wants it kept quiet, I can hardly come traipsing back here for what I need.”

  “I believe, sir, that you are to treat an infection.” The optio resumed his parade stance and it was evident that no further information would be forthcoming.

  “Very well.” Postumus gathered everything that could conceivably be needed to treat anything from a hangnail to gangrene, stuffed it in a spare kit, collected his cloak, and doused the lamp.

  “We’ll go by the back way, sir, if you don’t mind.” The optio beckoned and Postumus shrugged and followed him.

  There was just enough moon to see by as they slunk from the back of the hospital to the back entrance of the Principia, where a disinterested sentry passed them through on the optio’s word, and then down an ill-lit corridor to the commandant’s office. Centurion Frontinus sat within, his hands wrapped around a cup of hot wine and his scarred face illuminated by the fitful light of a single lamp. He nodded to Postumus and gestured to the doorway beyond.

  Inside, Postumus found the small chamber that Frontinus used as a secondary quarters also lit only by a single lamp, and inhabited by Lollius Urbicus, a plain cloak of gray wool about his shoulders and his feet stretched out to the brazier whose coals glowed red in the gloom. He was a tall man, angular and heavily muscled, with dark skin, short curls of iron-gray hair cropped in a military cut, and a beard in the style of the late Emperor Hadrian. Behind him, on a camp bed, was a slight figure muffled in a dark-and-white checkered cloak that left very little to be seen but a pair of long dark braids. They were tied at the ends with enameled metal balls, a wholly feminine fashion even among the Britons.

  At the sound of Postumus’s footsteps, the figure stirred and sat up, pushing the straying tendrils of hair back from her eyes. Her face was devoid of the elegant makeup she had worn when he last saw her, and the ruby ring he remembered was also gone, but it was unmistakably Claudia Silva. The skin on his neck prickled when he saw that her upper arms were crisscrossed with fresh scars rubbed in with blue woad. His first thought was that it must have hurt like Hades at her age, and his second was that the Picts also tattooed their women.

  Lollius Urbicus nodded at the optio, who disappeared, returned with a second chair, and obediently disappeared again. “This is Senior Surgeon Corvus, of the Sixth,” the governor informed Claudia. He rubbed his fingers over each other as he spoke—a touch of arthritis, Postumus thought, momentarily distracted.

  “Thank you, Your Excellency, we have met before,” Claudia said. “And how is the soldier from the arena?” she asked Postumus.

  “Ducked it,” Postumus said. “I was afraid he might.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If you could spare a moment,” Lollius Urbicus murmured and Postumus flushed. “I want you to look at this damned fancy-work.” He nodded at Claudia, and Postumus saw that both her arms were badly inflamed.

  He pulled the bronze lamp stand closer to the bed. “How long since this was done?”

  “Some two weeks ago,” Claudia said.

  “And by some witch woman out of the hills, I expect,” Postumus said. “It’s a wonder you don’t have gangrene.”

  “I daresay,” Claudia said tartly, “but I had no opportunity to have it attended to earlier.”

  She couldn’t show anyone those scars, he realized, while they were still raw. He lowered his voice. “You realize these are permanent, you fool?”

  Claudia leaned back against the pillows. “Yes. I’m not as big a fool as you think,” she said tiredly. He saw that her blue-green eyes were bright and her face was flushed and hot to the touch where he put his hand to it. He began to sort out what was wanted from his kit.

  Lollius Urbicus withdrew to confer with Centurion Frontinus, remarking as he did so that he expected he did not have to tell Surgeon Corvus that after tonight he was to forget that any of them had been there.

  “Indeed, sir, no, sir, and I’m not the fool he takes me for either,” Postumus said when he had gone, “so we are even.”

  Claudia laughed softly and bit her lip as Postumus dabbed the woad-pricked patterns with vinegar and began rubbing salve into them. When he had finished, he looked around and found a flagon of watered wine and a cup on the three-legged table by the bed. He mixed a decoction of willow into it and handed it to her, watching as she took her first sip. “This will help.”

  She took another sip and gagged. “That’s vile.”

  Postumus retrieved the cup and set it back on the table. “All right,” he said, somewhat embarrassed, “how much more of you did they do?”

  Claudia’s eyes flicked down to her coarse woolen gown. “How did you know?”

  “You forget I’m native-born. I know where tribal tattooing goes. Although I’m not sure why you felt the need to be that thorough. Didn’t that hurt?”

  “Of course it hurt. And being thorough is important in these matters.”

  “It’s all going to have to be treated. Mithras knows how dirty those needles were, and woad is an irritant anyway.”

  Claudia also looked embarrassed but hers was apparently a practical nature. She sat up and without comment dragged the gown off over her head. The tattooing curved down from her collarbone into a pattern that spiraled around each breast to the nipple, and ended in a design like a five-petaled flower on her belly. Her upper thighs were tattooed in the same way as her arms, although they were less inflamed. The blue of the patterns made a bright contrast to her pale skin and the dark smoke of her hair, and Postumus caught himself looking somewhat overlong.

  “You’re lucky Pictish women don’t mark their faces,” he said brusquely, and set about soaking another piece of lint in the vinegar. He cleaned the patterns carefully, trying not to notice how the blue spirals accentuated the up-tilted curve of her breasts and the white lines of her thighs.

  The vinegar probably hurt enough to distract Claudia from any embarrassment, but when he had finished, she pulled the dark-and-white checked cloak over herself. Postumus pulled it firmly back down again and picked up the salve jar. “This will take out some of the sting.”

  “What is it? It feels sticky.”

  �
��Honey and healing herbs mostly,” Postumus said, smearing the concoction along her collarbone. “In a tallow base.”

  “Honey?” Claudia started to laugh. “If anyone had ever told me I’d find myself lying in the governor’s office stark naked, letting a man I’ve only met twice smear me with honey—”

  Postumus smiled back, and their constraint dissolved somewhat. “Infection doesn’t live in honey. I’d stay away from anthills for a few days, though,” he said, rubbing the salve into her breasts, and felt them move under his hands as she chuckled. The Pictish patterns gave her body a wild and beautiful strangeness. He wondered if she had a lover. If she had, he was going to get a surprise the next time he lay with her. This proved to be a dangerous train of thought, and Postumus herded himself back to his task with difficulty.

  When he was done, he pushed the stopper into the salve jar and Claudia pulled the gown back over her head.

  * * *

  She came to him two days later to say goodbye and to get from him a promised pot of salve; the pricked skin would have to be treated several more times until the infection had subsided. Postumus was at his desk reluctantly coping with the hospital accounts when she came in. The wild blue patterns were covered and she looked much as he remembered her from their last meeting in Corstopitum. (If it had been her in Londinium or Isurium, she wouldn’t tell him.) She wore a traveling gown of plain but finely woven wool, and her fine-boned features were accentuated at the eyes and lips by the ladylike use of a paint pot. The dark hair was coiled into a knot at the back of her head, and the ruby ring gleamed on her finger. He saw that she wore a long-sleeved undergown beneath the looser short-sleeved folds of her traveling clothes.

  “I am here in my own name as supplies contractor for the new wall,” she said quietly as she saw his glance light on her arms. “The woman with the tribal scars isn’t me.”

  But she was there all the same, beneath the multiple layers of clay-brown woolen, in the blue spirals encircling her breasts, and pricked into belly and thighs. “You’re insane,” Postumus said. “What in Mithras’ name do you hope to gain?”

  “Knowledge.”

  Postumus slumped back in his chair.

  “And you’re not such a fool that you need to ask that,” she said. “The Army needs all the knowledge that it can come by.”

  “Why you? Surely the Army breeds enough spies of its own.”

  She looked annoyed. “I am native-born also, of a chieftain’s house of the Trinovantes on my mother’s side, and I speak almost every dialect of Britain. I want more from my life than to spend it selling roof tiles, or as someone’s dutiful wife and mother. And the Centuriate, as you have no doubt noticed, does not take women.”

  He thought of saying that it wouldn’t take him or his brother either, but that was beside the point. “For the adventure of it all?” He was skeptical and let it show. “No one with half a brain risks their neck for that.”

  She glared at him. “You mean no woman does. Every single man in this fort has done exactly that.”

  “Well, that and for Rome,” he said.

  “Precisely. I am good at being unnoticed, and I listen carefully.”

  “The wind in the heather,” Postumus said. “Where did you spend last summer?”

  “Exactly where you think,” she said, looking him in the eye, “so you needn’t ask.”

  Her eyes, he noticed, had a tendency to shift their color, and now they were the deep shadowed green of well water. Brendan of the Selgovae might have seen her eyes when they were that color, he thought, and not known what he saw.

  “May I sit down?” she asked quietly. “Or are you going to throw me through the window?”

  “Because you betrayed Brendan? It saved our hides, so don’t be an ass.” And how was that different from his own excursions? “And yes, of course, sit down. It’s the governor I’d like to throw through the window.”

  “For sending me to Brendan?” she inquired, settling herself in the visitor’s chair with one foot drawn up beneath her. “Postumus, listen to me.”

  It was the first time she had used his first name and, startled, he paid attention, as he had with Galt.

  “When I was nineteen, I was married to a man more than three times my age, who had a certain amount of political clout and the ability to haul my family out of a financial bog. I think I told you he wasn’t a bad man, and he wasn’t, but his shade would be rising from his grave right now if he knew I was running the business by myself. His position was that my job was to come to bed when he wanted me to, look pretty, be his secretary, and have babies. Of this delightful list, I escaped only the babies, the one thing I wouldn’t have minded. But he was old and he drank too much and it never happened. That was the sum total of my life for the seven years I was married to him. If he hadn’t died, I would have gone mad.”

  Postumus was listening intently now. He reached a hand up to the shelf behind him for the green glass cups and took an earthen jug of wine from the chest at his feet. The green glass cups and the jug of wine were a practiced social ritual with Valerian and Frontinus and certain others of his cronies, but he had never brought them out for a woman. Nor, he realized, had he ever considered what women’s lives were like.

  Claudia accepted the wine and sat staring into it, as if the Oracle of All Answers lay somewhere in its depths. “I spent the year after he died fighting the Lindum magistrates for the right to administer my own inheritance, and then every man in my husband’s company for three minutes of his complete attention. Once I had that—” she smiled grimly— “and things were running smoothly, there was very little else for me to do. And a war had started. I have spent the last three years as Lollius Urbicus’s eyes and ears, and I find that my life has some shape to it now. I will be glad when peace comes and I can go back to knowing where I will sleep next, and no dreams of a knife in the dark. But for now, I am needed, and I serve. As you do.”

  She took a swallow of wine and leaned back in her chair, eyes open to his and candid, and Postumus realized where he had seen that look before. It was Justin’s look, or Valerian’s, pragmatic and dangerous.

  “Is it lonely?” he asked, curiosity getting the better of his tact.

  “No more than you are, I suppose, or any of us,” she said, seeming not to be offended. “I can’t marry again so long as I serve the governor, but then I’ve never wanted to. I am better off as I am, most likely.”

  “All men aren’t like your husband,” Postumus said, feeling somehow vaguely insulted.

  She gave a little laugh. “So I am told, but I have yet to have one show me the difference.”

  I could, he thought suddenly, and nearly rose from his chair before he caught himself. Clearly he was losing his mind. He had the uncanny feeling that she had read the thought, but her eyes were veiled again now, and she stood up, saying pleasantly, “Thank you for the wine, and the salve. I will use it faithfully, I promise you.” She held out her hand and he took it in his, slowly.

  “The gods go with you,” he said gravely, “and the wind blow you safe back again.”

  She smiled and touched his hand lightly with her other one. “Thank you.” It wasn’t until she had gone that he realized that he had spoken the old military farewell to an army marching out.

  He didn’t hear from her again that season, but by the end of summer he found himself with enough and more to occupy his thoughts as the new wall reached the territory commanded by Castra Damnoniorum. It was like a monster being hatched, Postumus thought, standing in the western gate and watching the building crews at work. The deep V of the ditch to the north had already been dug and set about with sharpened stakes and fields of “lilies,” and behind it the wall was going up in sections. Each building crew was assigned its own stretch of ground (shorter here than they had been to the east where there were fewer raiding parties loose in the hills) and each section was measured to a finger’s breadth to interlock where they met.

  The wall would rest on a foundation
some fifteen feet across, a base of small stones with boulders laid above them and drainage channels cut through at intervals. Above the stone rose the turf rampart of the wall itself, a towering, straight-sided barrier thirteen feet high, stair-stepped at the top to match the rise and fall of the hills it traversed and to connect with the forts that intersected it. To the northwest, both military road and wall bridged the small river that was the fort’s water supply and the riverbed had been made as inhospitable as possible to anyone trying to cross the wall along it. Unlike the southern wall, the wall of Antoninus possessed no milecastles along its length. Every gate opened from a fully self-contained fort, and those were spaced no more than two miles apart. It would have twice the military strength of its southern counterpart.

  The whole of the frontier seemed to be a solid mass of moving men: turf-cutters and carriers with wicker baskets on their backs, stonecutters who shaped the heavy river stones used for the foundation, and lines of sweating legionaries who passed them hand to hand to the builders. Surveyors with weights and tripods were everywhere, measuring and remeasuring and stretching lines to trip the unwary. At intervals, officers of the engineers paced along the perimeter, inspecting the work in progress and consulting with the centurions in charge over sheaves of papyrus plans. And above it all, the new wall rose, solid and impenetrable, a breaker of men and chariots that would toss an invading army back like a giant hand and leave them tumbled among the sharpened stakes of the ditch. To the Britons watching it rise from the villages along its length, it must have looked like a raw wound cut clean across their land.

  The military road that paralleled it to the south had been laid in Agricola’s day, and repaired at the start of this new campaign. Now it was crowded with wagonloads of stone and rubble, with surveying equipment, and carts with rations for the building camps whose cookfires rose on the far side of the road. Beyond the raw scar of wall and ditch, Postumus could see the dust of the cavalry patrols crisscrossing the land to the north like the shuttles of a monstrous, deadly loom. The Agricolan forts lying north of the eastern part of the wall had been re-garrisoned as frontier posts, but here in the west heavily armed patrols formed the only buffer along the edge of Pict country. Of Claudia and her supply wagons there was no sign, but Postumus caught himself staring occasionally at the bleak hills to the north.