The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  “And for Brendan’s skirmishers, the only way north is across the Bodotria in the east or the Clota in the west. They have no boats left, we saw to that. If you, Commander,” he nodded at Valerian, “take a cavalry sweep from the southern wall north to us here—” he fanned his hand across the top of the first map “—you will drive the Selgovae before you to either end of the wall, and with luck you may split them. If not, in my thinking, they will make for the west and the mouth of the Clota.

  “In the east, we have two forts garrisoned along the coast and outposts beyond the wall to stand between them and the main army of the Picts. And also ships of the Fleet, patrolling from Horrea Classis.” He shifted maps again to show the naval station at the newly reopened warehouses above the northern forts. “And while the Votadini south of the wall in the east do not love us, they cast their lot with us a long time ago and are afraid of us enough to be reluctant to shelter fugitives under Rome’s nose.

  “In the west, they will have to go through the territory of the Damnonii, with whom we are at peace but who might be persuaded to give them boats anyway, if they thought we wouldn’t find out, to make a safer crossing into the country of the Epidii.” He tapped the map. “The Epidii are a small tribe and much under the Caledones’ thumb. Moreover, we have no forts among those hills, and only one small post at the southern edge of Clota-Mouth. They could even—” he drew his hand parallel to the wall and westward beyond it— “cross here, where the Epidii lands jut south into the Hibernian Channel, and work their way north with the Epidii to guide them. You must remember that there are more tribes of the Picts than the Caledones, but the Caledones are the strongest. How many march against us depends on how many Dergdian of the Caledones can draw under his banner.”

  “So we harry the Selgovae north to their brother wolves,” Valerian said, studying the maps. “And you wait for them—where?”

  “Here above Bodotria with the Fleet.” Lollius Urbicus tapped his finger on the eastern coast. “But mainly here, before they can cross, west and south along Clota-Mouth, in small units well linked by courier. I intend to pull in the Frontier Scouts for that. I want no beacon fires or obvious patrols to give them suspicions.”

  Charax, the legate of the Second, studied the maps. “Can you be sure that the Selgovae won’t simply go underground again and wait it out?”

  “Not according to the latest information,” Urbicus said. “And the source has so far proven true. If Brendan’s wolves can’t run at will to harry our backs, they will head north to join the main war host. And here is where we will catch them.” He drew his hand again across the northwestern edge of Valentia.

  “Will they fight while we hold Brendan for their good behavior?”

  “If it comes to that, they will let Brendan die, on Brendan’s orders,” Urbicus said. “By information from the same source.”

  Postumus, watching this war council, remembered Hilarion depicting Julius Caesar’s Gallic campaigns for an enraptured audience of himself, Justin, Marcus, and Constantia with the aid of two toy soldiers and a clay horse on the nursery floor. It had all looked very simple, as it did now, when one could compress an entire army into one clay horse and maneuver it at will. Only now Postumus knew the odds, and the number of other clay horses that might be waiting beyond the next line of hills. He hoped that the governor’s source of information knew as much as it said it did.

  “And how good is your source?” the legate of the Second asked, unconsciously echoing Postumus’s thought, and the commander of the Valeria Victrix detachment leaned forward. It was plain that that question was in his mind also.

  Lollius Urbicus considered the fire for a moment. “The source is excellent if somewhat unorthodox,” he said. “How long it will last, I cannot say. I suggest we use it while we can—and shut up.”

  Valerian, Postumus noted, was looking intrigued, his relentless curiosity piqued by the governor’s reticence. Aelius Silanus, on the other hand, maintained an expression of blank composure. After another brief discussion of logistics and provisioning, Urbicus dismissed them, saying only, “Corvus, you stay.”

  Postumus halted, anxious to get back to the belly case.

  “Are the rest of the wall garrisons likely in the same shape as this one?” Urbicus asked. “I need your assessment and I didn’t want to push it in front of the commanders. Commanders always insist that their men are prepared to fight Carthaginians on elephants.”

  “I expect so,” Postumus said. “Of course, Chief Surgeon Aquila will want to make his own assessment.”

  “Chief Surgeon Aquila has a bad hip and is too old for this kind of goings-on,” Urbicus said, “whatever he thinks. You’re in charge of any assessment that needs to be made out here.”

  “Well then yes, sir, they’re a mess. Am I to report that to Chief Surgeon Aquila as well? Frankly, he terrifies me.”

  “He was the ranking senior surgeon when I was in Judaea with the Tenth Fretensis,” Urbicus said, grinning. “When you see him, ask him if he remembers killing the cook’s cow.”

  “Killing the—”

  “The legate’s cook wangled a cow somehow from one of the locals, and he used the cream to whip up elegant little trifles for the legate’s table,” Urbicus said. “The cow was no spring chicken and she’d been leading rather a full life on open pasture before she joined the Army. She kicked down the door of her stall one day and went looking for something to do and found a whole crate full of melons. The next thing anybody knew, the legate’s melons were inside the legate’s cow and the cow was bellowing the place down with bloat.” Urbicus smiled reminiscently. “It’s a simple enough procedure. You make a little nick in the belly and the gas comes shooting out and the cow goes on her way looking much relieved. Almost any farmer can do it. I can do it. But it doesn’t work on horses and the cavalry vet wasn’t farm-bred. So Aquila stepped in and offered to do the honors.” Urbicus chuckled. “Turned out he’d never done it before, just watched his dad’s old cowman a couple of times. Anyhow, he either jabbed too deep, or he jabbed in the wrong place, because the cow’s eyes glazed over and she went down with a crash right on his foot, dead as a stone. It gave poor Aquila the shock of his life. He worried for about six months after that that he might be fallible.”

  “He’s gotten over the notion, I assure you,” Postumus said. “I know two senior surgeons who’d give a month’s pay for that story.”

  “Just moo at him if he chews you out. Dismissed, Surgeon.”

  Postumus strolled back to the hospital, savoring the tale, and found Valerian waiting for him. It was snowing lightly, a lazy drift of flakes fluttering in the lantern light, and to the north a pair of hunting wolves called to each other.

  Valerian shivered, twitching his skin like one of his troop horses. “A fine night to sit by the fire with a gameboard. Providing, of course, that I don’t have to play with young Lucian. That lad could make his fortune in a place like Corinth or Alexandria.”

  Postumus chuckled. “He keeps the patients amused, and lets them win enough to feel encouraged.” He was about to retire to his office with his friend and the small store of good wine, which he kept hidden from the depredations of his patients in a locked records chest, when Tertius hustled into the surgery and saluted.

  “We were just wondering whether to send for you, sir. Trebonius is worse. Lucian’s with him now, but he’d like it if you’d look in, sir.”

  Postumus hurried after him, with Valerian following somewhat dubiously behind. Like many of his kind, hospitals, when fulfilling their prescribed function, made Valerian nervous. You could, as he had once said to Postumus, tell yourself all you wanted to that spear wounds were not contagious, but there remained a feeling of ill luck all the same, and that might be just as dangerous the next time you had to fight someone.

  Trebonius had been isolated in a four-bed ward, one of a series of identical rooms that ran the length of the corridor. He lay doubled up on his cot, his hands to his belly and his skin fiery t
o the touch. Lucian was with him, helplessly trying to do something, anything, and looking unnerved. He welcomed Postumus with relief. “I was getting ready to send for you, sir,” he said. “Nothing’s done any good and I think that last potion made him worse.”

  Postumus ran his hands over Trebonius’s abdomen. The soldier’s eyes were becoming glazed, but he gritted his teeth and tried to answer the surgeon’s questions. The pain, agonizing now, seemed to have centered itself on his lower right side.

  Postumus stood up. This man was going to die. He looked again, helplessly, at Trebonius’s belly. Something in there was wrong, horribly wrong, and he didn’t know what. And because of that, Trebonius was going to die.

  He beckoned to Lucian. “Give him some opium,” he said softly. “And henbane. Enough to kill the pain.”

  Lucian started to protest, then closed his mouth again. He went to fetch the drugs stored in a locked cabinet in the dispensary.

  Postumus touched Trebonius’s forehead gently with his hand and turned from the room. Valerian looked appalled. Opium mixed with henbane would knock Trebonius cold, and he might not wake up. Even the cavalry commander knew that much.

  Postumus turned a weary face toward him. “He’s going to die anyway. At least let him have some sort of peace.”

  Two days later Trebonius died. Postumus tried vainly every remedy he could think of, but he knew from the start that none of them were going to work. Under Tertius’s horrified gaze, and Lucian’s sympathetic one, he administered whatever it took to still the agony, and Trebonius spent those days in a dream-filled trance, murmuring of strange visions and unknown creatures that frightened the life out of the orderlies.

  Postumus also felt that he himself traveled in a strange country where all his knowledge and his skill were as nothing in the fearsome face of the unknown. Trebonius died at the eighth hour of the night. Postumus saw him bathed and wrapped in a winding sheet by the orderlies, and then sat beside his bier in the mortuary.

  XV. The Horned God

  A single lamp made one pale splash of light over Trebonius’s cold belly, just below where Postumus had pulled the winding sheet back. He wasn’t sure he could do this, or if he wanted to do this. The ivory statue of Aesculapius that he kept in his kit stood on the table beside him where he had affixed it with a glob of wax.

  “What do I do? Tell me, Lord.” Aesculapius said nothing. The shade of Trebonius, if it was actually there, said nothing either. They would come for him at dawn to light his pyre.

  “Have you lost your mind? Sir.” Lucian, in the doorway, took in the scalpel on the table beside the lamp.

  “I don’t know,” Postumus said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Tertius said you didn’t look well.”

  “Tertius should mind his own business.”

  Lucian looked cautious but determined. “Tertius said you locked yourself in the mortuary. You’ve lost your mind. You’re about to commit sacrilege and I’m not going to let you. Sir.” He snatched the scalpel away, and hid it behind his back, as if it was the only one available.

  “Don’t you want to know?” Postumus asked him.

  “Not like that,” Lucian said, horrified.

  “How do we learn, then?”

  “I’ve sent for Commander Valerian,” Lucian said.

  “What in Death’s name for? He doesn’t know and I don’t want him here. I don’t want you either.”

  “To make you see sense. You haven’t slept.”

  Valerian, in an undertunic, cloak, and boots, strode briskly across the mortuary floor and yanked the sheet back up. “Is this why you sent an orderly to roust me out of bed?” He put his hands on Postumus’s shoulders and made him look at him. “You’ll get cashiered. Or worse. I don’t know what they do to people for this.”

  “You heard the governor,” Postumus said. “He doesn’t believe in ghosts. Neither do you. You told me.”

  “That doesn’t mean everyone else doesn’t. If you do this and it becomes known, the troops will all think we’re cursed. Then you’ll have trouble.”

  “I believe in ghosts,” Lucian said firmly. “What if you do cut him open, and you find out what was wrong? And let’s just say that no one notices it when they burn him, which is not possible, but we’ll assume it.”

  “Then maybe we save the next life,” Postumus said, but he knew that was unlikely too. It was just the not knowing that drove him mad, possibly quite literally, according to Lucian.

  “How many men survive a wound that goes clean through the guts?” Lucian demanded.

  “Almost none. None, really.” Postumus’s head was beginning to ache.

  “So no one is going to survive surgery for whatever this was either,” Lucian said.

  “I can’t think clearly,” Postumus said. “Go away.”

  “And leave you here with a scalpel?” Valerian inquired. “You have battle nerves. It doesn’t matter that you haven’t been fighting. I’ve seen this in my men. Go to bed. You can’t do this now anyway because Lucian and I know about it, and we’ll be guilty too, and I’m not planning to get stoned to death or whatever the punishment for sacrilege is, which I don’t want to find out.”

  Postumus rubbed his temples. Maybe he had a fever himself. Valerian took him by the arm and nudged him away from Trebonius. “I’ll see him back to quarters,” he said to Lucian.

  “I’ll just wait here till morning,” Lucian said. “Outside the door, maybe.”

  * * *

  When Postumus woke up, the sun was low in the winter sky, almost sunk beneath the hills to the west. His head ached and his mouth felt as if he had been drunk. His hands, when he tried to pour water from the jug on the table, shook. He lay back down, looking at the ceiling. A chair scraping in the next room informed him that he wasn’t alone.

  “You ought to buy a housekeeper,” Tertius informed him. “The commander told me to keep an eye on you till you were awake, so I tidied up a bit.”

  “I haven’t had time,” Postumus said. “And I don’t want a housekeeper.” He sat up again.

  “I’ll tell the commander you’re awake.”

  “Don’t.” Tertius went anyway, and Valerian appeared with a bowl and spoon, and a jug.

  “Here. I brought you some food. Tertius is right. You need a housekeeper. Or a cook. What have you been eating? There’s nothing here.”

  “I’ve been busy. You’re not my nursemaid.”

  “They burned Trebonius this morning,” Valerian said.

  Postumus sighed and rubbed his hands over his forehead. “I wasn’t going to go back. I don’t know what I was thinking. Just that we’ve lost so many and we don’t know anything. I’m sorry.” He stuck the spoon in the bowl and ate. “I know better. I would have pulled any man in my state off the line.”

  Valerian nodded. “It’s been calm enough today. Lucian says to tell you that he and Flavian can deal with anything that comes up and please to sleep and then go do something to amuse yourself besides beating your head against the wall.”

  “Is that a direct quote?”

  “It is.”

  Postumus finished the stew in the bowl and the watered wine in the jug. “Very well, then. I’m going to go and make sacrifice for Trebonius’s shade, since we’re all so convinced he has one. I owe him that.”

  Valerian nodded. He paused in the doorway. “Don’t think I don’t understand. Trebonius might even have appreciated it, for all we know.”

  Postumus wondered if that was true. Would your shade want to know why it had died? He expected it would. Something to tell the boatman. However, he was beginning to feel more of this world after sleep and food, and the urge to risk his career had faded. And in any case, as Valerian said, they had burned the body. He found a clean tunic while deciding that Tertius was right. He didn’t want a housekeeper, but he needed to clean the mess. He ferreted through the worst of it, tossing clean and dirty clothes at the appropriate containers, and taking the bowl and jug to the water barrel to wash them.
He set out for the fort baths in the dusk, and then, clean, by lantern light to the graveyard outside the walls.

  By now a faint glow of night lanterns illuminated the sentry walk and the graveyard was in shadow. He left the fort by the Dexter Gate and skirted the ditches that overlaid the remains of an elaborate bathhouse from Agricola’s day. Rumor said that it had been the general’s own. A stray tile with a cat’s toes clearly printed in it caught his eye. Castra Damnoniorum had been a frontier post with the beginnings of a civil colony then. Now that the wall was built, the civilians would come back—at first the tarts and tinkers, and later, if the wall held, wives and honest shopkeepers with cats; the solid, settled folk of civilization.

  For now, there was only a little biting wind whistling through the stones and ditch. The graveyard lay just past Agricola’s bathhouse. A fresh wooden marker identified the place where Trebonius’s ashes had been interred. DIS MANIBUS, to the shades… SEXTUS TREBONIUS SEJANUS, OF THE SIXTH LEGION VICTRIX, OF EIGHTEEN YEARS’ SERVICE, LIES HERE. Beside him the fresh grave of the dead of the last battle had only a single marker with their names and years of service. Later, friends and wives might pay for stones.

  Postumus brought out the flask of wine he had carried under his cloak and poured it over the grave while an owl hoo-hooed from the woods to the south. The wine made a dark splash on the cold earth. He broke the clay flask over the wooden marker.

  “Who are you mourning?” a quiet voice said behind him and he jumped, scattering the shards on the grave.