The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  The Twentieth was falling back in formation, giving ground slowly, waiting for the cohorts of the Sixth. There was no place to carry the wounded—they were fighting nearly on top of the hospital.

  Galerius, breathing hard and his mouth set in a grim line, was on one side of Postumus, and Lucian and Flavian on the other. Tertius was the only professional among them, but even he looked to Postumus for orders. That was how the Army worked. Postumus had never commanded a fighting unit, except in mock battle during his training days, but they were all soldiers by training and he was Chief Surgeon. It was up to him. There was no time to think about whether he could do this or not.

  They held their shield wall as long as they could and when it finally broke through the sheer weight of the numbers, they fought hand to hand, the battle narrowing to the three feet of space around him, to the blue-painted Briton who dove at him with a long sword and staggered back as Postumus blocked it with his shield, grateful in the moment for the weapons training and drill they had spent so much effort attempting to avoid. The Briton came at him again. Postumus parried the blow and hooked his shield under the edge of the Briton’s smaller one and pulled. He raised his own sword, Galt’s arm ring still high on his arm. The Briton saw it, hesitated an instant, and went down under Postumus’s blow. Maybe Valerian had been right, he thought, turning to face the next one who came at him.

  Beside him he saw Lucian, with the same concentrated look he gave to gambling, swing his sword into a Briton’s shield arm at the shoulder, and then when the shield dropped, into his collarbone.

  The gold and purple vexillum of the Twentieth waved above the melee around the wagons beside the standard of the detachment’s Fifth Cohort. The standard disappeared as its signifer fell, the cohort wavered, and then the standard rose again.

  “Valeria Victrix!” the man who had raised it shouted and Postumus saw that it was Tertius. The cohort’s First Centurion snatched up the wolf’s-head hood of the signifer and put it on Tertius’s head, shouting at his men to regroup.

  “Valeria Victrix!”

  Still they were being pushed steadily back, almost into the hospital itself. Postumus saw the cavalry trooper whose leg he had stitched, shieldless, fighting off a pair of Brigante warriors with a long cavalry sword and a pilum he had acquired from somewhere. The Brigantes swarmed everywhere now, into the hospital and through it. They didn’t bother to try setting it on fire—whatever torches they had carried had been abandoned—but they cut tent ropes as they went. By now Postumus’s makeshift century had attached itself to Tertius and the Twentieth’s Fifth Cohort, still falling back in formation, holding the Brigantes as long as they could. A few got through to wreak havoc before the Romans in the rear of what was now a separate battle with its own front cut them down, but mostly the line held, inching backward and thinning with each Fall Back command.

  The baggage train was chaos, most of the tethered horses were loose or stolen—Postumus saw a Brigante warrior ride by on what he recognized as the governor’s spare mount—and the baggage mules and the oxen that pulled the heavy catapult wagons had kicked their traces loose and scattered, trailing harness behind them. The grain bags had been split open and wine jars broken wherever they sat within reach on the wagons, and the armorers’ stores had been overturned amid furious shouting from the Brigante lords to leave the spoils for afterward.

  The cohorts of the Twentieth were heavily outnumbered and only the precision of the Roman formation was holding them at all. They had retreated past the hospital now, fighting grimly for every foot, and Postumus watched as the leather sides buckled in when a tent pole went down. Then he was fighting off a screaming warrior with the gold torque of a Brigante lord around his neck. He recognized the man as Rhys in the moment before he slammed the Briton’s sword arm with his shield and dug his sword into his ribs. Bran would be somewhere in the thick of it, he supposed, but he couldn’t see him. He could only see the chaos in the few feet in front of him as the cohort backed up again.

  And then the push slowed. At first it was hard to tell, but the Brigantes’ momentum slackened. In a few minutes he was sure of it. A trumpet called the Advance from beyond the wreckage of the baggage train. The battle began to move in the other direction, the Brigantes falling back to meet the reinforcements of the Sixth now at their rear.

  * * *

  Dergdian had counted on the surprise of the Brigantes at the Romans’ rear, and to some extent it had worked. But the Brigantes had attacked too soon, without waiting for the signal from Dergdian. The High King, as he made plain, took orders from no other lord that he was not to be in the forefront. As a result, Urbicus had been able to pull the cohorts of the Sixth out before the front was sufficiently enmeshed in the chaos of the Pictish charge. Rather than catching the Romans between the Caledones and their allies on one side and the Brigantes on the other, the Brigantes were caught between the Roman rear guard and its advancing reinforcements. And the Picts, with the Roman rear unbroken, were being slowly pressed against the river on the Roman left, where the banks grew increasingly steep and rocky, as the Roman center and right wing slowly encircled them.

  And that, Valerian thought, gasping for breath as the Pictish forces began to fall back under the weight of the heavy cavalry, was why Rome won wars. A screaming charge into the enemy’s front lines won you honor, but also death. The Romans, solid behind their shield walls and their catapults and the discipline which forbade any soldier to so much as twitch without orders, were a match for far greater forces of undisciplined heroes.

  * * *

  The army had taken substantial casualties all the same. British dead far outnumbered Romans but Urbicus had still lost several thousand men, with more wounded. The historian Tacitus had claimed that 11,000 Romans under Agricola had beaten 30,000 Picts at Mons Graupius with only 360 casualties. Postumus, surveying the carnage while the carrion birds gathered overhead, suspected Tacitus of cooking the numbers in Rome’s favor.

  While the army was still in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, they had put the hospital to rights and begun the process of assessment and treatment over again. Galerius, who had taken a spear wound to the shoulder, had it cleaned and bandaged by Domitius, and went back to work, exchanging his armor for the bloody apron he had been wearing at the start of the battle, with the remark that he was not a lobster. The hospital’s only other casualties were Gemellus, who had a deep cut on his sword arm, and Tertius.

  The First Centurion of the Valeria Victrix’s Fifth Cohort had brought Tertius to the hospital over his own horse in the aftermath.

  “He handed off the standard to one of my men and then just dropped,” the centurion said. “Right when we had them on the run.” Tertius bore no mark on him, and it was clear that his condition had caught up with him at last. But Tertius had died where he wanted to be and under the circumstances, Postumus thought the gods had been kind. “I’m thinking that this should go with him,” the centurion said, and gave Postumus the wolf’s-head hood.

  They camped where they had halted to fight, and it took into the darkness to sort the dead and catch the loose horses and mules. Postumus, relieved, found Boreas cropping grass in a meadow on the near side of the river, plainly waiting for Postumus to come and get him. Finn had fled the hospital when the tent came down and taken refuge under one of the catapult wagons. Postumus found him and whistled him to heel just before dusk as he made his way across the camp to the Headquarters tent, where the governor had requested his assessment of casualties.

  The chaos left by the Brigante raid was mostly cleared, and the enemy dead collected for identification. Dergdian was dead, and the Druid High Priest as well. The Druid had been captured to be brought to the governor, but, the governor’s tribune said, white-faced, the Druid had said something no one understood, put a hand to his chest and simply died on the spot. Then everyone had been afraid to touch his body and the governor, clearly irritated, had personally put it on the pyre himself. The Army would burn priests and kings
lest their bodies hold some power afterward, but the rest would lie where they had been stripped of their weapons and wealth.

  Bran was dead, as were most of his ill-fated Council, although Dawid was slumped among the chained prisoners being guarded by the Headquarters sentries. Postumus caught sight of him as he passed and a wave of unexpected despair washed over him. So many dead just because they—the Romans, his people—were here. Not even invading the highlands, just here. Building their wall under their noses. Digging in. Sending down roots. Changing things in ways that would not be undone even if they left.

  Having made his report, he whistled again for Finn and found him among the Pictish prisoners, fawning on a Caledone woman, someone’s slave by her iron collar and threadbare gown. She was bent over Finn’s head, arms around his neck. Postumus whistled again and Finn looked up happily, but he didn’t move.

  “My dog seems to know you,” he said to the woman in the British of the lowlands, and she seemed to understand him. Was she the woman of one of the trackers? He would have even worse news for her than the chain around her ankles if so.

  “I gave him scraps,” she said, “when he would beg at the kitchen.” She ruffled his fur. “He is a great beggar.” Her face was bleak but the warmth in her voice for the dog was plain, and almost heartbreaking under the falling light and the sweep of black birds across the sky. The sentries started to cuff her into silence, but Postumus waved them off.

  “Who do you belong to?” he asked her.

  “Maon High Priest, but he is dead.”

  “I’m afraid so,” he replied gently.

  “I asked the Goddess for it,” she said. “I gave her my amber drop.”

  Postumus digested this.

  “Will you please tell me if the lady is well?” She dropped her voice with a glance over her shoulder at the other prisoners.

  “The lady?” The conversation seemed to have taken an abrupt turn and her highland accent was confusing.

  “The spy you sent. It must have been you. The dog was with the trackers they sent after her.”

  “Why do you wish to know?” he asked warily.

  “She was kind to me. Maon turned Dergdian against her after she left and then they hunted her. She gave one of the kitchen slaves some medicine for stopped bowels and I put it all in their porridge that they took with them. To slow them down,” she added, as if it might need explaining.

  Postumus studied her. “That was enterprising,” he said finally. “She is well and she would be grateful to you if she knew that.”

  “What will your governor do with us now?” she asked him, although she must have known. Conscription or the slave market.

  He told her that, and thought a little longer as she sat stoically on the hard ground and stroked Finn. Then he gritted his teeth and went back into the governor’s tent.

  “I want the Caledone woman,” he informed Governor Urbicus, who was conferring with Aelius Silanus over wine and maps. They both raised their eyebrows at him.

  “She’s hideous,” Aelius Silanus said.

  “She isn’t washed yet,” Urbicus pointed out. “You never know.”

  “Not for that,” Postumus said. “She was the Druid’s and thinks she killed him. Or at any rate she asked the Goddess to do it. My dog knows her.”

  “Surgeons are all a little mad,” Aelius Silanus informed the governor. “It comes of spending all that time looking at people’s insides, in my opinion.”

  “This one has had a long day,” Postumus said, aggravated to the edge of insubordination. “She helped your spy and that may be why the spy managed to stay ahead of the hounds on her trail. She deserves better than the slave market. And you know she’s not worth much,” he added, reviewing his banked funds.

  “What are you going to do with her?” Lollius Urbicus asked and they both cocked their heads at him with curiosity.

  “I have no idea,” he said, because he didn’t. All the same, he emerged with a scrap of papyrus hastily scribbled by the governor and the cheerful comment that at that price he should consider her his share of the spoils. She was still leaning against Finn’s shoulder.

  “What is your name?” he asked her.

  “Teasag, Lord.”

  “Not lord. Sir.”

  She repeated it after him, stumbling a bit over the Latin as there was no British equivalent.

  “Well, Teasag, I have bought you. I have no idea what to do with you, but you won’t go to the slave market. I think the lady would be very angry with me if I let that happen. You can begin by looking after the dog and keeping him out of other people’s dinner.”

  She was silent as he showed the bill of sale to a sentry with a look that advised no impertinent questions and the sentry unlocked the chain. He took her by the arm, not quite sure whether she might run and get herself into further trouble.

  A pile of gleanings from the battlefield was being sorted by the governor’s staff and cast a jagged shadow in the now lantern lit camp. Shields and chariot adornments, jewelry taken from the enemy dead, all would be handed out at morning parade to the victorious troops. Anything useful from the baggage trains would be adopted by the Army as well, and anything else left to rot with the bodies.

  “You understand that there is nowhere for you to go now if you run from me,” he told Teasag gently. “I must go and certify my legion’s Dead List before our dead are burned. I don’t quite know what to do with you.”

  “I won’t run,” she said, craning her head up to look at him. “You will not be worse than Maon.” She added a wicked little motion with her fingers that he took to be some curse to follow the High Priest into the next world.

  “Very well then.” He took her to his tent, made her a bed of sorts with two rugs and Boreas’s saddle pad, and went with the Victrix optio to certify death as each name was crossed off the legion’s rolls, while the carrion birds waited hopefully in the trees. There were too many for individual pyres, but each legion’s ashes would go home to their respective fortress for burial in the graveyard outside the walls. The moon was up but they bent low over each one by lantern light to be certain. When they came to Tertius, Postumus spilled out the small flask of wine he had brought for the purpose and ordered the wolf’s-head hood and cloak burned with him, testament to a return to his rightful place.

  XX. Otters

  In the morning, the army bathed in the river, in preparation for parade and the sharing out of spoils. Postumus woke Teasag from what was clearly the sleep of exhaustion and gave her a spare undertunic for a gown. Then he took her to the armorer to have the slave collar cut off and led her to a decently secluded spot to wash, both kindnesses that seemed to surprise her. The procession of half-naked soldiers was still filtering back into the camp and she looked afraid, so he stayed, back tactfully turned, while she bathed. It occurred to him that a female slave was going to be a lot of trouble.

  The governor and his generals made the rounds of the hospital tent in full parade dress, congratulating the wounded on their valor and distributing such honors as their commanders had suggested. Afterward the medical staff followed the rest of the army to form up on the parade ground within the camp. In the valley below them, the smoke of the Roman pyres still lingered, and the carrion birds had already come for the enemy dead.

  Lollius Urbicus, resplendent in his purple cloak and gilded breastplate, praised his army for its valor, its discipline, and its tenacity, and presented the awards of a successful campaign in the same fashion as the grass crown given after the winter battle for the wall—now embodied in a gold wreath on the standard of the Sixth—as promissories to be redeemed later in gold and silver. They cheered him while one by one commanders and individual soldiers were called before him to receive honors, Postumus among them.

  “For your impromptu audition for the Centuriate, Surgeon Corvus,” Urbicus informed him. Instead of a grass or evergreen wreath from the basket on the table beside him, he slipped a gold circle from the honors on his own breastplate. “You
may give this back to me when your own arrives,” he said. “I think that Rome lost a natural commander when you opted for the Medical Corps. Inform me, please, if you should change your mind about that.”

  Postumus turned the gold circlet over in his hand. A Corona Aurea, given to an officer who had held his ground. He smiled. “I will, sir, but I doubt it.”

  * * *

  The Sixth Legion Victrix marched home to Eburacum and its senior surgeon returned to his usual assignment. The Picts would likely be no more trouble for a generation. The peace imposed on the Brigantes was harsh: conscription of men and of horses, and hundreds of time-expired veterans settled on their land. Postumus had suggested to Lollius Urbicus that if he wished to install a vassal king of Rome’s selection among the Brigantes, Dawid was cousin to Bran and would be a good choice. He had no idea whether Dawid would be willing. Dawid was perfectly capable of telling the governor to fly his Eagle up his ass and let himself be conscripted into the auxiliaries instead, but Postumus suspected that like Galt, Dawid might shoulder a burden he didn’t want to keep the remnants of his tribe intact. And, perhaps, not to leave Brica. It was a pity that this foster son of Galt had not been king rather than Bran.

  Teasag, however, was a more immediate problem in Postumus’s life than whatever the governor decided about Dawid and vice versa. For one thing, she was much younger than she had looked with filthy hair and tattered clothing, probably no more than fourteen. She had red-gold hair and green eyes and a small, sharp chin that made him think of a fox. Clean, she attracted more interest from the men than he liked. He taught her to say “I belong to Chief Surgeon Corvus” in Latin, and had her take Finn about with her but she was a constant worry. She was also a troubling combination of curiosity and ignorance. She thoroughly cleaned his quarters and polished his armor until it shone but he really didn’t have enough for her to do to keep her occupied. Her belief that Claudia as Aifa had employed some form of Roman magic to bring the stone tower down prompted her to investigate the catapults’ mechanisms, trying to figure out the spell that worked them, and nearly got her hand snapped off. She climbed up to drop offerings of small stones and flowers into the hot air ducts on the roof, which clogged the hypocaust. Postumus tried to explain the difference between magic and engineering but it was heavy going. She didn’t have the vocabulary in her own tongue.