The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  Postumus approached Lollius Urbicus at the first unobtrusive moment he found, and relayed Tertius’s message to him, but the governor merely nodded and said, “Thank you, Surgeon Corvus, I was aware of it,” and offered no further information. As Postumus saluted and turned to go, he added quietly, “A word to the wise, Corvus—don’t form an attachment there. Those who travel that road can’t afford them; and it almost always ends with someone being stupid and a danger to himself and the Army.”

  “Yes, sir.” Postumus held himself at attention, seething.

  The governor continued, not unkindly, “She is, to the best of my knowledge, still alive, although the Picts have a long reach. The situation we suspected has been confirmed. And that is more than you have any business knowing, so let it rest at that.” He rubbed his stiffening fingers together to warm them, his angular face dark and preoccupied.

  Of necessity, Postumus forced himself to be content with that, while the wall crept on, until on the last bleak day in February, the last block of turf was dropped into place and the last sharpened stake driven into the palisade. And then, as if the Fates had granted them so long and no longer, the leaden skies drew back from the pale sun, and the enemy in the north came howling down out of the hills on a wind that blew straight across the Styx.

  The top layer of snow had frozen to a solid crust and they streamed along it like the crest of a tidal wave, half-naked even in the frozen air, the blue of their war paint and the scarlet of the feathers on their spears brighter than any colors Postumus had ever seen, while the signal fires burned along the wall. The Picts concentrated their attack where the frozen river cut the wall above Castra Damnoniorum and the cohorts of the westernmost forts came stumbling along the frozen road to join with the Damnoniorum garrison. The snow had filled and frozen in the ditch outside the wall, and the legion had been unable to clear it in time. The Picts and a handful of pale-haired warriors of the Selgovae came across it to hurl themselves against the ramparts of the wall and the frozen, wretched army that guarded it.

  The legion fell out to the rampart stairs and through the gates, wracked and coughing, their feet swathed in bandages and leggings, and the wrecks of their hands closed painfully around pilum shaft and bow. And then, as the first blue-stained figure flung itself at the defending army, a madness seemed to seize them that was more deadly than all the centuries of Roman discipline that stretched across the years behind them. This was their wall. They had fought for it and died by the hundreds for it, and it was theirs!

  They were up on the ramparts before the trumpets could sing out, gaunt and snarling as winter wolves, and their pilums took down the first line of the enemy in a red rain of death before the wall. Where the Picts had slipped through the river gap, they stumbled through the snow to meet them, first with flung pilums and then with swords.

  “Hold them! Steady and hold them!” Aelius Silanus shouted, but they were lost to him, their haggard, unshaven faces turned to the men who would rob them of their wall.

  Appius Paulinus, below the wall at the head of his cohort, felt them dissolve around him, rushing the enemy like berserkers, while he shouted at them to re-form. His standard-bearer dropped the cohort standard and took a Pict by the hair, slicing his dagger across the man’s throat. Then he picked it up again and swung it like a club at the next man who came at him.

  On the ramparts they took the Picts in the throat or the chest with reddened swords as they rose above the parapet, or flung them with bare hands down into the scarlet snow below, and their madness seemed to rise with the heavy smell of blood that clung to the cold air.

  “Mithras God,” Aelius Silanus whispered. He signaled to the trumpeter beside him, but the notes of the trumpet call went unheeded as his army fought and clawed like demons with the enemy. He seized the trumpet from the awestruck soldier beside him.

  “No! Let them be!” Lollius Urbicus scrambled up the rampart stair behind them.

  “If they break—”

  “It is only the madness that keeps them going,” Urbicus panted. “Break that, and they will break. They built it, let them hold it their own way.”

  Dumbly, Silanus let the trumpet fall, and together they watched the battle for the wall they had laid down across the edge of the world.

  The Picts gathered for a final charge and with one last scream of fury, the gaunt and bandaged army threw itself against them and hurled them out and down. Half the Pictish front line went down into the carnage in the frozen ditch.

  And then they were gone, and the bandaged soldiers along the wall stood shaking and bewildered as the bright unaccustomed sun lit the blood-stained snow.

  Numbly, like men coming out from under a drug, they gathered their dead and their wounded. Lollius Urbicus leaned on his general’s staff in the trampled snow and looked up at his wall, and the billowing black cloud that rose beyond it where they were burning the Pictish dead. After a moment, Silanus joined him, his helmet under one arm, and his gray hair plastered against his forehead. Their breath made little clouds of steam in the cold air.

  Silanus drew his cloak more closely about his shoulders. To his last breath, he would carry the memory of the Sixth as he had seen them that day.

  “The Sixth is a good legion,” Urbicus said softly. “One of the best—they proved it today. You mustn’t blame them for what happened. They have been pushed past the point of breaking most armies. And in any case,” he added, “they put Ahriman’s own terror into the Pict.”

  To the east outside the fortress walls another cloud of smoke began to rise, the funeral pyre of the dead of Rome, accompanied on their journey by the prayers and sacrifices which the Pictish dead had burned without.

  * * *

  “You are to be commended for the zeal with which you have defended this wall, which was built at what cost no men know better than you.” Aelius Silanus paced up and down before the paraded Sixth Victrix the next morning. “I commend you, as does Governor Urbicus.” He took a wreath of dried winter grasses from the governor’s hand and presented it to the standard-bearer of the Sixth. “It will be exchanged for one of gold when gold is more easily come by,” he said, and then they understood him, and raised a cheer that rang exultantly across the empty reaches of snow, as the standard-bearer hung the wreath around the Eagle’s wings.

  “However,” Silanus said, his voice pitched to sound above the cheering, and they fell silent. “There must never—never—be another day that your commander speaks and you do not heed him. The Fates looked on you gently yesterday. An army too far gone in fury to take commands generally reaps bare bones in the heather instead of wreaths of honor. The next man who disobeys me in battle for whatever cause will not live to learn whether the battle is won or lost.” He fingered the hilt of his sword. “I trust I make myself plain.”

  They kept silence in parade formation, eyes front and beginning to look ashamed.

  “Your performance yesterday was as foolhardy as it was brave, and the foolhardy soldier gets little comfort from glory when he is dead of his own stupidity. There is no place for that man in the Eagles.” He paused again, eyeing the assembled legion, barely recognizable with bandaged hands and feet, and faces winter-thin. “But never think that I am not proud of you,” he added softly. “You are dismissed.”

  * * *

  “Wily old bastard,” Valerian said afterward in the hospital while Postumus was re-dressing his sword-cut leg, always the hazard of the cavalryman. “They almost cheered him for chewing them out. That man knows how to command. Him and old Foxy Urbicus.” He gritted his teeth as Postumus dabbed on more salve.

  “I am not sure which army I was most afraid of,” Appius Paulinus said. His pale hair was shaved on one side where Flavian had treated a gash from a spearpoint that had gone up inside his helmet.

  Valerian shook his head. Even his beloved ala had got loose from him, chasing the retreating Picts until the horses were floundering in snow and they had no choice but to stop. “We have the winter to see
that that never happens again,” he said. “They’ll be back come spring. They were just trying it out, to see how far we’d gotten.”

  Back come spring. The specter of a war host massing in the hills for an attack on the weaker western end of the wall was uppermost in everyone’s mind now that the shock of the battle had worn off, leaving them no longer numb, but determined and infinitely wary. They all knew that news of that winter battle, and the state of the wall garrisons, was spreading like a ripple through the north.

  Valerian swung his legs off the table and tested his weight on them gingerly. “The governor’s called a commanders’ council,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to faint in his lap.” He put some more weight on the bad leg and nodded. “I think I’ll do.”

  “You will if you keep off it,” Postumus said, “and don’t show off.”

  Valerian grinned and gave him a rude salute, exiting with as much swagger as his stitches would allow. Postumus turned to his next patient, a legionary with a bellyache that so far had responded to none of the potions hopefully poured down him. He winced as he flexed his hands. They were beginning to heal, but in truth the surgery staff wasn’t in much better shape than the rest of the legion. It would be a long time before the army of the wall was fit again.

  He mixed yet another potion and stood by while the legionary with the bellyache drank it down. The man’s face was flushed and hot to the touch and he seemed to be in much pain. Postumus was beginning to get worried. There was no sign of the flux, only the constant twist of pain in the belly, accompanied by nausea and vomiting. He had eaten nothing suspicious that Postumus could discover. Nor could he find any sign of tumor. There had been another man, in Syria, another surgeon’s patient… Vainly he wracked his memory, but nothing more came forward. He had heard of him only secondhand, and all he knew was that there had been a man with a bellyache, and in the end, it had killed him. But how? And what? Aesculapius let that potion work. But he knew, in truth, that it was far too low in the belly to be an ulcer.

  He signaled to Tertius to take the man and put him to bed in the ward next to the surgery. “I want him where I can watch him,” he said. He went to the hospital office and began pulling his library from the shelves. What he wanted apparently didn’t exist, and in any case, interruption in the form of an optio cut short his search.

  “The commander’s compliments, sir, and you’re wanted in the Principia.”

  Now what? Postumus thought in exasperation, pulling a comb from a compartment in his desk and running it through his hair. He pulled his surgeon’s apron off, checked his tunic for stains, and followed the optio, by the direct route this time, to the Principia.

  In the commander’s office, a serious-faced gathering warmed its hands around a brazier: Lollius Urbicus, his weathered face sharp-featured and thoughtful; Aelius Silanus, fingers drumming on the red leather skirt of his harness and his eyes intent; Claudius Charax, the legate of the Second Augusta at Isca Silurum, most of which was now attached to the northern army; the commander of the detachment of the Twentieth Valeria Victrix from Deva; a smattering of tribunes assigned to the three legions, earnestly absorbing strategy at the old generals’ knees; and Valerian—one flyaway eyebrow still quirked in surprise—handed the cavalry command of the army, with a sardonic comment from the governor that he hoped Valerian could hang onto this honor longer than his predecessor had. Since the man in question would now be remembered only by a gravestone set into the northern wall, Valerian had said that he hoped so too.

  At the governor’s invitation, Postumus drew up a stool by the brazier, and they shifted a little to make room for him. Lollius Urbicus rubbed his hands above the fire, his signet ring glowing orange in the flame. “One of these days they’ll stiffen up on me and stay that way,” he said, curling and uncurling his fingers; businesslike hands with large knuckles and neatly trimmed nails. He turned to Postumus and said abruptly, “Very well, Corvus, what kind of shape is this army in?”

  “Frankly, sir, they got by on nothing more than sheer temper,” Postumus said. “I don’t think they can do it again.”

  Urbicus nodded. “How long?”

  “To get them fit? By the thaw, I think, if we can keep them decently fed. They need rest more than anything—time to mend.”

  “And a quiet back gate,” Silanus said. “Corvus, I’d like you to repeat your opinions of the Brigantes, so that the rest of the command may have it firsthand.”

  The Brigantes. That whole late summer passage and the conversation in Isurium had faded before the snowbound reality of the wall, and Postumus brought it back with difficulty at first. But slowly the images grew brighter in the fire’s glow as he called them from memory: Bran, an implacable, unimaginative enemy with a possibly dangerous blind side; Galt, more clever than his king, and with a clearer view of things-as-they-are; Dawid, unquestioning and faithful, but warily friendly.

  Britain’s generals listened intently while he spoke, and afterward there was no sound but the crackle and hiss of the brazier, and the soft creak of a breastplate as someone shifted in his seat.

  “And what is your overall opinion of their stability?” the commander of the Victrix detachment asked finally. The firelight glinted on his burnished armor and the gold-bordered scarlet of a First Centurion’s cloak.

  Postumus hesitated, wishing he could find some other answer than the one he had first given Aelius Silanus. “Galt has a good deal of influence, but it’s not endless,” he said at last. “There’s no love lost there, I think. The High King will make a war if he sees the chance that the rest will follow him.”

  “The High King would do well to remember that the Victrix is not the Ninth Hispana,” Aelius Silanus said shortly, and Postumus flinched, but the rest seemed not to notice it.

  “It was the war with the Hispana that killed his father,” Postumus said, carefully noncommittal. “He has no love for any legion that garrisons Eburacum.”

  “Talk of a dead legion is an ill omen for a new war,” the legate of the Second said, and there was an uncomfortable silence.

  “It is my fortress their souls are caught in,” Silanus retorted, his words hanging like an echo in the still room. “My fortress and these hills, perhaps. Or did you notice nothing when you re-garrisoned Castra Pinnata?”

  “The signs of an old burning, no more,” Urbicus said. “I am a practical man and raise no ghosts.” He leaned closer to the fire. “We must see to it that the Britons leave theirs to lie as well.”

  “Catapults are always persuasive,” Valerian murmured, and a chuckle went around the room. The tension dissolved and Postumus eyed his friend admiringly. Valerian would have a yet higher command someday, if he lived, that was plain. Postumus wouldn’t have been surprised if he did end up emperor. Valerian would wear the purple better than many a sword-made Caesar.

  After that, talk turned to the immediate goal of final pacification of Valentia, and containment of the troublesome Brigantes in the south. There was neither the manpower nor the desire to conquer the highlands, but they were going to have to, somehow, put a dent in them, for the peace of the frontier.

  “With the thaw comes the Pict,” Urbicus said. “If we can’t demonstrate the error of his ways then, we may spend years trying to do it, and the price will come high. I would like to hear your suggestions, gentlemen, before I reach a decision.”

  “Send a strike force north and kill him where he lairs.”

  “If you can find him. The Pict is the man who isn’t there, even when he is.”

  “Let him come to us. Burn him south of the wall, for a lesson.”

  “And maybe have the Selgovae come rustling out of their holes and help him? We must take them first.”

  “Find them first, you mean. The better part of them are lairing with the Picts already. The rest are skirmishers, left for our annoyance. Turning out a legion after them is like hunting rats with a catapult.”

  “And what of the Brigantes? Half the forts in their hills are unmanned now.�
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  “They are under treaty.”

  “They’re going to break it.”

  “If we break it before they do, we’ll push them into rebellion. We can’t afford that until Valentia is nailed down.”

  “We’ve still a strong base in the south, and the Twentieth can move up fast enough if they look like trouble.”

  Urbicus sat quietly and let them gnaw on the problem. When each of the commanders had had his say, he folded his arms and stared thoughtfully into the coals for a moment. “This wall is more than a barrier,” he said when he looked up. “It is a force in itself. Its purpose is to guarantee absolute peace below it and excellent behavior above. We cannot do that by holding it as a defensive line. So our first priority becomes the Picts—and to drag a net through Valentia for the Selgovae skirmishers that we missed last fall. With the wall closed up, there are only two ways those can slip north around us. See here.” He pulled a sheaf of maps from a drawer in the legate’s desk and spread them on the map table.

  “We are at the narrowest neck of Britain, and the wall cuts clean across it. To get past us, the enemy must break the wall or cross water. Here, at the Bodotria, or here, across the Clota.” He indicated the wide river mouths at either end of the wall. “It is a narrow stretch on either side, but dangerous for a man who doesn’t know those waters. They can take only a few across at a time, that close to the wall—our farthest forts sit right on the bank at the only fords. To move an entire army across either water unseen would take months and our scouts would spot them long before that. And the farther out from our forts, the wider the water and the greater the danger. They have the ships to do it, but we have fleets in harbor at both ends. In the east we have reoccupied the forts north of the wall as far as Castra Pinnata. So. For the Pict in the north, the only way is through the wall.” He unrolled another map and laid it half across the first, pinning the edges with a set of bronze weights. “And first they have to get past the forts above the wall. These block the glens that are the Picts’ roads south. The garrisons there couldn’t stop a massed army but they can reduce their numbers and give us warning before they have to let them through.