The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  “Let me see.”

  Teasag pulled one reddened breast from her gown and grimaced.

  “You have an infection in the nipple.” And why hadn’t anyone treated that by now?

  “Maon the High Priest says it is because my womb wanders, and not to make a fuss.”

  “Maon the High Priest hasn’t got a womb, or tits, so how would he know?” she muttered. Druids were famous for only thinking about the stars. “Rub this on it and try to keep it clean. If you can find a bit of honey, that will help too.” She gave her a salve of the expensive frankincense in verdigris and tallow and told her to keep her bit of amber. It was probably the only treasure she owned. “Perhaps you don’t want to show this to Maon,” she suggested and Teasag nodded and hid the little jar in the folds of her gown. And if Maon had sent her to spy, she wasn’t likely to do so now.

  “Now go and see who is waiting.”

  Most who came to her had already tried most of Maon’s treatments, to some degree of success, or not, and what Aifa had to offer was similar, but bore the enticement of the exotic. She glimpsed him in the passage now and then, an irritable and suspicious wind blowing down the stone hallway. The priests of the Britons were a formidable force and their knowledge was vast and old, particularly among the Druids, who were banned in the south because rebellion sprang out of the ground like weeds wherever they were. Maon would not be someone to cross more than she could help.

  She offered wild leek in goose grease and olive oil for earache, cakes of soluble ointment for sties, plantain for toothache, and garlic and powdered cow horn in quicksilver for the miserable tribesman who had ridden with Dergdian’s envoy to the Brigantes, he told her proudly, and had apparently visited a brothel somewhere on their travels.

  “So you will fire the heather between you and catch the Roman in the middle?” she asked, distracting him from the embarrassment of a personal inspection of his troubles. “I shall go south to Calleva and wait that out, I think.”

  “Maybe. If the king of the Brigantes honors his word, drunken though it was spoken. They are an unreliable people. Ow!”

  “So I have heard. There. Use this as I showed you and it will help.” Probably. It often did. Or not.

  “Thank you.” He regained his dignity with his breeches and said seriously, “I would go south, Lady, truly. South of the old wall. When we have stripped this country of the Roman kind then it will be the time to come north again.”

  “I had thought as much,” she said. “And so thought to come this way now while I can. No one profits in a war but the winner and the ravens. I’ll visit Lord Dergdian’s clan lords and perhaps the Epidii on my path south again, and winter in comfort elsewhere.”

  In the morning she was on the track to the next holding in Dergdian’s mountainous kingdom. The pack ponies were saddled and re-loaded with her wares, her own mount dancing in the leaf-strewn wind. The rain had stopped but the ground was sodden and water dripped from eaves and thatch. Woodsmoke rose above the soaking roofs and a disheveled rooster, late to his job, crowed from the top of the gate. She saw Maon watching from the wall of the upper level while Dergdian’s household went about its morning business.

  “Faugh! That is an evil place!” Brys tightened the strap on the spotted pony, the one who always blew his belly up. He kneed him sharply and the pony exhaled. “I heard voices all night, like something come up from Annwn.”

  “What kind of voices?” Brys wasn’t usually hysterical.

  “Whispers and gibbers and squeaking. The kitchen slaves say it’s the shades of the dead come to speak to the living. They come when it rains.”

  “You were supposed to be quartered with Dergdian’s slaves. Where were you?”

  “In the storehouse, in the hillside there.” Brys jerked a thumb over his shoulder past the stone walls of the chamber where Aifa had seen her patients. “It’s a cave, really, but they use it for grain. I hate caves anyway. I asked why they’d put me there then and they said because they wouldn’t sleep in it.” He spat. “And I won’t either, not again.”

  Teasag hurried into the courtyard, stopping once to look over her shoulder. She held out a wrapped bundle from her apron: boiled eggs and bannock.

  “For the road, Lady.”

  “Thank you, Teasag.” Aifa stowed it in a pack saddle and paused. “Teasag, that chamber I was given to show my wares in…”

  “Yes, Lady?”

  “Don’t sleep in that tower, or in the cave where your people put my slave.”

  Teasag looked puzzled but she nodded. She looked up and caught sight of Maon on the wall. “I must go. Safe journey, Lady.” She fled into the keep.

  “None of them will go in that cave anyway,” Brys said. “I told you. They put me there to be funny.” He spat.

  She mounted her horse and took the spotted pony’s lead. “Best we’re on the road,” she said. “Now, I think.”

  She looked across the narrow valley dotted with the dark shapes of horses to the crest opposite, already snow-covered. With luck, the tower would hold until they were well out of Pict country. She wondered if that was why Maon had put her there, for a witch to blame when that cave collapsed.

  * * *

  To the south along the new wall, it was turning colder each day and they could see white draping the mountains of the far north. Governor Urbicus was far from satisfied with the Pictish situation and had no intention of moving his legions out until he was. The Army would winter on the frontier again.

  In the meantime, with the threat of winter, the tempo of life in Castra Damnoniorum redoubled. Every available man was put to work to close the gaps. The Picts, too, seeing their last chance to smash the wall before it could be completed, came down out of their northern mountains to harry the monster that Rome had created out of their own turf and stone. It was becoming evident that there were also more of the rebels from Valentia unaccounted for than had been thought.

  “Like trying to kill off an anthill,” Frontinus said. “You can’t. You just try to keep ’em out of the kitchen,” an oddly domestic analogy that summed up life on the frontier. “Somebody’s been cutting up our patrols and stealing horses and putting dead sheep in the water, and generally being a nuisance,” Frontinus said disgustedly, “and if it isn’t the fay, I rather expect it’s the Picts.”

  The building crews worked jumpily into the fall, while the main army, including Valerian’s Dacian cavalry wing, were held at the ready to meet whatever was coming out of the hills.

  And then, with the Picts and the die-hard rebels of the Selgovae gathering like a dark cloud to the north, and the Army grimly affixing new points to its pilums, winter dropped on them without warning, in a raging blizzard that toppled trees and howled like the Wild Hunt up and down the hills.

  “What in the name of the Mother is this? The sun was out this morning!” Valerian staggered through the door of the Principia and slammed it behind him against the raging white storm outside. “We barely got our horses inside before that thing buried ’em!”

  “This, Wing Commander, is the Fates,” a voice drawled from the opposite side of the room. “Making themselves a pest.”

  Valerian shook the snow off and saluted. “My apologies, sir, I didn’t see you.” He joined the other officers gathered around the commander’s desk.

  “Quite understandable, in the circumstances.” Lollius Urbicus looked grimly at the shuttered windows, and then turned back to the two Frontier Scouts who stood steaming damply before the brazier. “Is this going to let up, or are we stuck here till spring?”

  “I’d say we’re stuck till spring, Governor,” one of them said. “This is wolf winter, not normal weather for this country, so I wouldn’t trust it. It’ll let up for a while, of course, but then it may come down again and trap you the gods know where. And those painted demons in the north will have all the advantage. They know the country. I’ve heard their Druids can control the weather. Maybe it’s that.”

  Lollius Urbicus turned to study th
e windows again, which were leaking icy wind despite the shutters, hands rubbing the cold from his fingers and apparently much in thought. He was dressed in riding uniform and the purple folds of his cloak were of heavy wool lined with fur. He wore fur-lined boots and the scarlet brush of his helmet crest was somewhat the worse for the snowstorm. He turned his head finally, the gilded figures on his breastplate shining palely in the lamplight. It was nearly pitch dark outside in the center of the storm. He looked at the commander of the Victrix. “What are your feelings in this matter, Silanus, Druids notwithstanding?”

  The legate leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on his thigh. “I think,” he said after a moment, “that we would now be unwise to go out to meet them. But I think also that they may come to us, with the first break in the weather. As has been pointed out, they know their way home.”

  Lollius Urbicus nodded. “It seems we are in agreement. We will hold where we are and go after them in force with the thaw.” He looked around the room. “But that doesn’t mean we leave anything else till the thaw. I want every one of those gaps in the wall closed up if you have to tie the men to each other and tie the end to the Praetorian Gate. If we don’t close those gaps before the weather clears, we’ll have a lap full of Picts when it does. And you’ll have Typhon’s own time keeping them out with a nice half-mile hole in the wall every two miles.” He nodded at the officers gathered around him. “Dismissed.”

  * * *

  It stormed for three days, a suffocating white blanket that fell on the frontier and kept falling. Postumus, Lucian, and Flavian were faced with a succession of frostbitten toes and ears, and the veterinarians coped with an outbreak of thrush among the cavalry horses as the stables grew progressively wetter. On the fourth day, the storm lightened to drifting whorls of snow and every man in the Army went out with shovels to clear the road, with the building crews behind them. They worked furiously, one eye on the blackened sky, and they had closed another three hundred feet of wall before the wind came up again, driving the storm before it. They made it back to camp a scant minute before the outside world vanished behind a howling wall of snow.

  After that they worked when they could, wet, cold, and miserable, as the icy hand of winter took an ever stronger grip on the frontier. Great white frozen drifts stretched as far as a man could see, blanketing hills, masking the riverbeds, and even covering trees where the relentless wind piled the snow higher than their topmost branches. Only the frontier road showed clearly, scraped and shoveled each day that the weather held, by the sneezing, miserable soldiers whose forts it linked. The storm couldn’t hold forever and they worked desperately on the wall in each slight break in the weather, knowing that this might be their last, and on the next they might find the Picts there before them. That winter everyone served on the wall—cavalry, cooks, and legionaries, scribes and tribunes, and Postumus and his medical staff—digging the channel for the rubble fill at the base, and heaving the heavy stones into place above it. The snow had to be cleared now before the turf could be cut, and the mere cutting was almost impossible when the ground had frozen. They burned a line of bonfires from end to end of each unfinished section, but as soon as the storm came up again, they went out and it was all to do over.

  Postumus, on top of the rampart, was wearily stacking turf in overlapping lines like brick, as the wall rose beneath him, while Lucian sent empty baskets down the pulley line and raised the filled ones to the top. Beyond them, on a completed stretch, a second crew was building the parapet that would guard the outer edge. The bitter wind bit clean through cloak and leggings to the bone and the air was like broken glass. Postumus, coughing, thought that he would have more chest colds than his own to dose that night. Below him he could see Valerian, his Wing Commander’s uniform exchanged for a rough leather tunic, making part of the line that passed the heavy foundation stones from their pyramided stacks by the road up to their beds on the rubble fill. By evening he was exhausted, every muscle aching and his fingers scarred and split open from handling the frozen turf. Like everyone else on the frontier that winter, he fell into bed like a corpse and slept until there was enough pre-dawn light to see whether they could work again that day.

  Once when the weather held for three days, a supply train got through, bringing with it the few small luxuries that made that winter bearable—wine, olives, cases of earthen honey jars, and a load of apples from the south—with a note that said, “To the men of the frontier at Saturnalia, from Lollius Urbicus.”

  They cheered him that night, a cheer that rang the length of the wall. He was still in camp, of course, pacing up and down his wall, encouraging the diligent, bestirring the idle, and stacking turf himself. He must have sent a courier south with his orders when the first storm broke.

  Postumus, bandaging a legionary’s swollen fingers with his own bandaged hands, looked up as a shadow fell across his light. It was Tertius, in the uniform of a Medical Corps orderly.

  “I’ll do that, if you’ll show me how,” Tertius said, taking in Postumus’s haggard face and bandaged hands. “I may as well start learning.”

  Postumus blinked. For some reason he seemed to encounter Tertius only in circumstances that already had an otherworldly feel to them: on his first day in Licinius’s old hospital; in the arena; or when he was half awake; and now here, snowbound on the far edge of the world, racing a snowstorm to finish a wall.

  Tertius took a step forward. “Are you all right? You don’t look so good.” His wolf-toothed face was unaccountably concerned. “I wasn’t sure you’d have me now, but it looks like it was maybe a good thing I came.”

  “Where in Hades have you been?” Postumus managed to ask.

  “I won some money, you see.” Tertius looked embarrassed. “I’d been to see the lady you sent me to, but then I won on the races, so I didn’t go back.”

  Postumus noted that Claudia hadn’t mentioned that.

  “It kept me drunk a good long while, so I didn’t have to think about things, like. When that ran out, I was afraid to come round the legion. After signing up and then not showing, I thought I might be listed Unlawful Absent, so I took another job, sort of, but I couldn’t stick it. Then when we heard there was still trouble in the north, well, it seemed like maybe better to be with the legion somehow than not at all. So I went down to Luguvallium, knowing you were at the western end, and then I found out I’d missed a supply train out of Corstopitum by two days, and the last one out of Luguvallium by one. I’d about decided to try to catch up with it on my own when the governor’s wagons came through. You’d better let me do that, sir,” he added.

  Postumus made room for him beside his patient’s chair. “I, uh… did think you were long gone. In fact, I had your re-enlistment scratched, so you needn’t worry about that. But Aesculapius knows I’m glad to see you.” His calf and thigh muscles felt like hot irons had been run through them and the room was beginning to take on a vague, misty quality. He could leave Tertius in the hospital in the day while they worked, and then there wouldn’t be so much to do at night… “You… spread the salve over the whole hand and wrap the bandages lightly, just enough to keep the dirt out. He’ll have to take them off in the morning and get gloves on.” He staggered slightly as he spoke.

  Tertius began to gently wrap the legionary’s hands. “Is he fit for work, sir?” he asked, seeing the raw cracks along the fingers and the swollen knuckles.

  “No,” the legionary said tiredly, “but neither is anyone else. You picked a wonderful time to join up.”

  Postumus was still standing in the middle of the surgery, as if wondering what he should be doing.

  “I saw that lady again,” Tertius said. “The one who would have given me a job if I hadn’t gone off drunk. She didn’t seem mad about it. She was in a camp on the Clota not so far from here. I thanked her for wanting to help me and when I said where I was going, she said to thank you for the good wishes and to tell you that the wind blew somewhat chancy at the moment. Said you’d kn
ow what she meant.”

  Claudia? What in Hades was she doing camped on the Clota in this weather? And had she come out of Pict country with news or with a vengeful tribe on her tail? Only desperation could have driven her out in this white death. He tried to concentrate on that, but the question kept slipping away from him. Flavian was bandaging the last patient. Postumus pointed at him. “See him for quarters and be here in the morning,” he told Tertius. He got as far as an empty bed in the nearest ward and collapsed.

  In the morning he was back to work on the wall again.

  XIV. Wolf Winter

  All that long winter they worked on the wall, until for Postumus life became a succession of frozen, pain-filled days, evenings spent on an endless sick parade of broken, lacerated hands and lung disease, eased somewhat by the advent of Tertius, and nights of exhausted sleep too deep for dreams. He had little time to wonder further about Claudia. There was only the endlessly falling snow and the wall.

  For the men of the frontier it had become almost a living thing, and the focus of their existence. They slept in its shadow and spent their days along its snow-shrouded length. They died atop it, frozen, sick, and hopeless.

  In the space of one week, Postumus lost six men to lung fever, men too weary to even cough up the phlegm that choked them. And two more died when the storm came down and hid the lights of the fort before they could reach it. They found them the next day not a hundred feet from the gate—on the wrong side of the wall. They had tried to follow it back to the fort and blundered instead through one of the remaining gaps, into an endless, sightless void where the very ground rose up and covered them.

  But slowly, some days only a few feet at a time, the gaps closed up. Lollius Urbicus and Aelius Silanus were everywhere, like a pair of graying wolves, pacing, inspecting, working until they were ready to drop, and then sitting until dawn over the few intelligence reports that still came through. They rode the length of the western wall and back, quartering each night in a different fort, and these days the tribune assigned to the Sixth was much in awe of his commander.