The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  The figure in the shadows leaned on a spear, muffled in a heavy cloak and woolen trousers, with thick wolfskin boots. The voice, however, was Claudia’s.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “How long have you been watching me?” And why did everyone he knew seem to think that he needed watching, as if he might be doing something foolhardy, particularly Claudia, who was almost bound to be doing something foolhardy, dressed in breeches?

  “Long enough to see it was you and give Fortuna thanks for it. We are camped to the south there.” She pointed through the woods behind her. “We’ve been watching the paths between us and the fort to make contact with the governor when we could. You are fortuitous.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I have something I want you to take to the governor.”

  “Which you cannot take yourself?”

  “Not just now, no. Will anyone miss you if you don’t go back to the fort tonight?”

  “As it happens, no. They’ll miss me if you get me killed, though,” he added.

  She gave a small low laugh that was not entirely reassuring, and beckoned him to follow her into the shadow of the woods, where a pony stood stamping its feet in the icy air. He did, and she swung herself up on its back and motioned for him to get up behind her. Lucian had said to go do something besides bang his head against the wall, he thought. This appeared to be something.

  When he had mounted, Claudia turned the pony’s head to the south and it stepped out surely on some track that only it could see. After an hour it began to snow, and he wrapped his cloak more tightly about him, envying Claudia’s wolfskin boots. His own boots and leather leggings were sodden and the dismal scraps of fur clinging to them looked as if they might have been made of Theodore’s dormice.

  The woods were silent and Claudia seemed disinclined to talk. She looked over her shoulder once to see, he thought, how quickly the snow was filling in the pony’s tracks. The moon was up, making black and white shadows of their prints.

  “Is something following us?” he whispered in her ear. He thought it was. He had the same feeling he’d had in the guest chamber in Dawid’s hold. And if so, where was it following her from? Or to? And what was he doing riding behind her without his lorica on and nothing but a belt knife?

  “I think so.” She put her heels to the pony’s flanks, not trying to be silent now. “There are three of them, or there were, and a dog. They must have just picked up my trail again. They don’t dare go too close to the forts.”

  “Three of what?” he asked as they flew under an overhanging branch, snow spurting from the pony’s hooves.

  “Dergdian’s men. They started on our trail just as we were coming out of the highlands. We’ve been playing catch-me-not with them ever since.”

  He could hear the sound of hooves not far behind them. Whatever it was wasn’t trying to be silent now either. Claudia’s pony, laboring under the double weight, staggered and scrabbled in the dark up a steep track of snow-covered scree. The moon turned the snow and bare black trees to a nightmare landscape until he could easily image the Wild Hunt on their trail and no mortal pursuers.

  The pony slid and slithered down the far side of the ridge they had just climbed and they could hear the hunt closer now, and the baying of the dog.

  “Not far!” Claudia said, leaning forward to urge the pony on. “If I get you killed, I am sorry.”

  They came at a gallop past the wooded overhang of a low hill, and Claudia dropped the reins and put her fingers to her mouth, making a screech that reverberated over the silvered landscape. She drew rein and they slid from the saddle as the hunt came on them, three horsemen, as she had said, and a dog, a lean gray hound that bayed at the sight of its quarry. Claudia leveled her spear at them, fox-haired men with tribal marks across their faces, clothed in brown and white that melted into the snowy landscape. As they came, Postumus pulled out his belt knife, for what use that would be.

  The scrub at the base of the hill shuddered and a flung spear from behind Postumus’s back took the nearest of the hunters in the shoulder. The other two drew rein, cursing. Someone put another spear in Postumus’s hand, and he saw a burly blond man in a rough leather shirt and a smaller one with a braid of black hair down his back, spear-armed and circling the hunters. They danced, feinting until one of Claudia’s men closed and took the leader in the groin with his spearpoint and the black-haired one came at him with a sword as he fell from his pony, nearly taking his head from his shoulders while the first pulled his spear back and blood poured onto the snow.

  The first of the pursuers was dismounted now, yanking the spearpoint from his flesh in a spray of blood, and Postumus lunged at him. The ground underfoot was icy scree, and he stumbled more than once trying to balance the unfamiliar spear, heavier than a hunting spear and lighter than a pilum, its unaccustomed weight throwing his arm off. The Pict faltered, blood dripping, and Postumus prayed the spear in his shoulder had hit a vein. By reflex he ticked over what you would do to stop the blood and then reversed it, seeing what would make it worse. He feinted with the spear, jabbing to his left so that the Pict would have to use that arm. Each time the Pict parried, he was a fraction slower.

  Claudia had lost her spear in her fight with the third man, also dismounted now, and her arm was bleeding. More red splotches on the white snow. Her men turned their attention that way as the Pict dropped his spear to grab Claudia by the wrist, knife in hand. Her men would kill him easily now, but it was clear that his whole goal was to kill her first.

  Postumus’s adversary staggered, the blood loss finally telling, and dropped, not dead but no longer fighting. Postumus spun to drive his spear into the back of the last man as Claudia struggled in his grip. She had her own knife out now, and plunged it into the man’s face, deep in the eye socket so that he fell back howling on the spear and Postumus put his belt knife through his throat. He looked up to see the blond man now cutting the third Pict’s throat for good measure. It was clear that no one was interested in prisoners.

  “Mother of All, that was close.” Claudia put her bloody hands to her forehead. “And you, I am sorry.” She turned to Postumus. “I truly thought we had shed them. Brys, take these and bury them, please.”

  Brys looked disinclined to bury people in the snow in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t want the wolves scattering their bones for anyone to find. Alan, you help him. And catch the ponies.”

  “What about that?” Brys jerked his thumb at the hound, sitting in the snow beside the dead.

  The dog appeared perplexed but not overly unhappy. Postumus took a step toward him and he didn’t growl. Postumus whistled experimentally and snapped his fingers and the hound trotted to his side, looking relieved that someone was telling him what to do.

  The dark-haired man shook his head disapprovingly but Brys said, “He didn’t go after us, now did he? He’s a tracker, that’s all.” A dog was a dog and he was just as glad not to have to kill one.

  They disappeared into the curtain of winter-torn scrub at the base of the overhang and reappeared with shovels. Postumus wondered what else was in there. The night had taken on a dreamlike quality somewhere between hallucination and ancient myth that might reveal anything—the Isle of Apples or a portal to the Minotaur’s labyrinth. He looked at the dog, which had sat down on his foot.

  “Come.” Claudia beckoned to him. “Bring the hound if you will.” She pushed the undergrowth back and stood away for him to enter what proved to be a portal not to the Otherworld but to a deep cave. Its damp, rocky chamber stretched back into a dim distance behind the glow of the campfire at its mouth. In it, Claudia and her drivers had pitched their tents and used its bramble-choked entrance to guard them from both the bitter wind and from human sight.

  Farther into the shadows, Postumus could see the bulk of loaded wagons, and hear the stamp of tethered ponies. He crouched by the fire, grateful for the warmth. Outside, the snow had begun to fall thicker and presumably Brys
and Alan were digging a grave.

  “You are soaked.” Claudia pointed him toward a tent, a sturdy affair of tanned leather with piles of native blankets on beds of straw. An oil lamp burned on a small folding table, and a pack saddle in the corner apparently served as a clothes press. Of the trappings of a prosperous contractor, Postumus could see no evidence. Those would be stowed in the wagons. Claudia had nothing in use now that could not be packed in a hurry. She had obviously meant it when she had told Tertius that the winds blew somewhat chancy.

  She pulled a bundle from the pack saddle, breeches and shirt and cloak, and wolfskin boots like her own but considerably larger. Postumus wondered which of her drivers she was robbing for him.

  “Get into these. And if you’ll give me your wet ones, I’ll hang them by the fire.”

  She dropped the tent flap and waited tactfully outside while he stripped off his sodden tunic and leggings and handed them out to her. The new clothes were probably Brys’s, several sizes too big, but clean and blessedly dry. The hound, which had followed him in, leapt onto one of the beds, turned around three times and lay down. He took up most of it. Postumus was lacing the breeches when Claudia reappeared.

  “Here.” She handed him a cup of hot wine and a bowl of stew and motioned to him to sit and eat.

  “They wanted to kill you,” he said, while the hound watched him hopefully, thumping his gray feathered tail on the blanket. “They were willing to die to do it.”

  “Yes, and before I could get to the governor. After, it would have been vengeance only, although I am sure they would have taken it.”

  He couldn’t think of anything useful to say to that, other than to hope there were no more of them.

  “Who were you mourning in the graveyard?” she asked him again after a silence. “The battle dead? Do you always do that?”

  “No.”

  “A friend? If so, I am sorry.”

  “A man I couldn’t save,” he said. And then, because he knew her secret, he told her his. “He had a bellyache that nothing would cure, and I tried everything I know. But we know so little. He died screaming anyway, or would have if I hadn’t drowned the pain in opium and henbane. When he finally did die, I wanted to cut him open to find out why. Fortunately, my friends have more sense and they stopped me.”

  Claudia looked honestly horrified.

  “Are you shocked?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking the gods might have asked a high price for that knowledge, if you had done it.”

  “You stood to pay a high price for your own knowledge,” he pointed out.

  “There is something I want to show you.” She took the oil lamp from the table.

  He followed her past the fire at the cave mouth, and the dog accompanied them into the shadows beyond the wagons. The cave was high-ceilinged and deep, and at the back it had been enlarged by the hand of man—a hand that had wielded a rough stone chisel. The rear of the cave had been cut out to form an altar, knee-height from the main floor, and on the stone wall behind it in the flickering light danced a painted form whose antlered crown reached into the shadows. Postumus felt the back of his neck prickle again.

  “The tribes know him as Cernunnos,” Claudia said. “But the Horned One is older than that, and this place is older. Older than us or the Selgovae or the Brigantes. Older than the ancestors of the Painted People. Maybe it was the old dark people’s once, but even what’s left of them don’t remember. And yet it was once the meeting hall of a great people—kings in the land.”

  Postumus stared at the naked dancer with the deer’s mask. There was an unsettling power in that form, as if the god was still in it but the people he had danced for, his own people, were no more.

  “If we do not hold this country,” Claudia said, “we and the tribes both will be like the Deer Men. Gone, with nothing but paint in a cave to show where our altars were. If you do not believe me, ask the Fleet about the pirates in the Channel, or the coastwise farmers about the sea raiders.”

  Postumus nodded. He had heard his mother say the same, and Hilarion, and Licinius, and any of Britain’s adopted or native-born who could see how the wind would blow here if Rome was gone.

  Claudia moved away from the dancing figure to lean against a wagon wheel. “We left these here when we went north,” she said, patting the wheel rim, “for a hiding place and provisions to fall back on. It was as well.”

  Postumus leaned against a wagon opposite and they faced each other in the oil lamp’s dim light, with the Horned God at their back. “How was the hunting?”

  “None so ill at first,” she said. “I traveled as a witch woman, a dealer in eye ointments and small cures. They were genuine, too, in case you are wondering. I do have some small knowledge. I took Brys with me, and left Octavius here with the wagons.”

  “That sounds something more than foolhardy,” Postumus said.

  “I carry a long knife.” She smiled. “And I am not so brave as that sounds. There are few among the Painted Ones who will cross a witch.”

  “What were you going to do if you were found out?”

  “I was,” she said flatly. “Or at least there was a priest who had his suspicions. Myself, I think he merely did not care for the competition, but he may have had more powers than I think. Also, Dergdian’s hold is somewhat the worse for wear but I didn’t do that. There was a leak in his walls and a cave underneath and the expected thing happened just after I left. I heard it in the last hold that I visited and left in a hurry. I had thought about warning him, but I was afraid he would think I did it. He probably does anyway. At all events, it became known in the hills that I was not what I seemed, and they began to trail me. I am little use to the governor now beyond the frontier.”

  “I said you were a fool,” Postumus said, still leaning, arms crossed, against the wagon wheel. “You’ve scarred yourself for life, and for what? To nearly lose your hide and learn nothing.”

  “You’re wrong,” Claudia said. She crossed her own arms and stared back at him, stubborn-eyed. “I know how many horses the Painted One has, and where they are pastured. I know where his brood mares graze, and where his king’s hall is, and how many warriors can take a war trail at the thaw. My scars have been bought with a fair price.”

  “Perhaps. But you haven’t taken this to the governor yet?”

  “No. We knew we were followed. Arriving at the wall in midwinter when no one has a right to be traveling is conspicuous, and I do have some concern for my own skin left. That and the fact that if I’m seen in the fort, I won’t be much use south of the wall again either. I came tonight to see what I might do, but I was beginning to worry.”

  “You want me to carry your tallies to Urbicus, I take it.”

  “Those and a letter from me. Some of the knowledge gained is more, shall we say, nuanced than will fit on a tally stick.”

  “I am, apparently, at the governor’s service.” Postumus touched his fist to his chest. As they made their way to the mouth of the cave, he turned to look again at the horned figure on the wall. It moved, he thought, in the last glow of the oil lamp’s dim light, but only from that. Probably.

  At the cave mouth, her drivers were now stamping the snow from their boots, shovels propped against the rock wall. She gave them some low-voiced orders and they nodded. They settled around the fire and dipped bowls into the stew pot. A pan rested in the coals of the banked fire and Claudia gingerly pulled out a few pieces of barley cake. An earthen jug and cup sat on the floor beside it and she picked those up also and turned to the tent where Postumus had changed his wet clothes for the driver’s dry ones. He suspected that the two drivers had been evicted from it for his sake. The dog stayed beside the fire, where Brys had given him a bowl of stew.

  Claudia put two of the barley cakes into Postumus’s hand and motioned for him to sit again on the piled rugs and straw. She curled herself up catwise across from him, her feet tucked under her, and poured two full measures of wine from the jug. She handed him back his cup an
d raised the other to him.

  “To the pursuit of knowledge.”

  “Wisely or otherwise,” he said but he drank. He took a bite of the barley cake and stretched himself full-length on the straw. It was soft and smelled faintly but not unpleasantly of horse. Tomorrow, presumably, she would send him back to the fort to deliver her package to Governor Urbicus and the gods knew how that would be received, considering that Urbicus had explicitly told him to stay away from her. But tonight, he had food and wine and straw to lie on, and he was suddenly content. The oil lamp glowed between them and threw magic and shadows across the tent walls.

  Claudia stretched out on the second bed and propped herself on one elbow, her wine cup in the other hand. She had taken off her cloak and her dark braids tumbled over her shoulders. He thought she was beautiful as a wild briar, and of the patterns that coiled along her breasts and thighs, underneath the rough woolen shirt.

  “Have you healed?” he asked.

  She seemed to think for a moment, and then she said, “Come and see.” She pushed up the long sleeves of her shirt.

  He rose and crossed the tent to sit at her side. The patterns were still bright, but the skin was clear. “And the rest?” he asked her.

  She tilted her head at him. “If you want to see those too, you should close the tent flap,” she said.

  He did, before she could change her mind, or he could regain his. When he sat back down, instead she pulled the thongs from her braids, shaking the long hair free. He wrapped his hands in it. It spilled about them like dark smoke and the blue-green eyes caught his and held them like a green sea-tide. He thought of a nursery tale of the man who had gone into the hollow hills with a woman out of a sidhe.

  “Are you real?” he whispered. “If I lie with you in this cave tonight, will I wake up to find a hundred years gone by?”

  Her voice was husky. “I don’t know. Try it and see.”

  He slipped his hands over the rough woolen shirt and felt her breasts upturned beneath them. She shivered as he drew the laces free, and held up her arms for him to pull the shirt over her head, whispering something he couldn’t hear as he traced the fragile spirals at the tips, healed now and as if they had been a part of her always. Her skin was very white against the dark blue lines of the tribal markings, white as the White Horse of the south downs and he could almost imagine her as one of the Old Ones, British entirely, the Horned God’s people, maybe, who had first cut that into the chalk hill and set the standing stones that dotted Britain. The motion of the world slowed as he slipped open the buckle of her belt, and pulled apart the thongs that laced her breeches close on her hips. He slipped those free too, holding one small blue-veined foot in his hand for a moment while she lay naked before him. Slowly, he saw desire outweigh uncertainty in her eyes.