The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  Rome had invested heavily in northern Africa once the nomads—relatives of Lollius Urbicus, ironically—were under control, which meant driven off, and it had become the Empire’s main source of staples. There would be trouble without African grain and olives.

  “We mustn’t let the local inhabitants get to thinking that they own the place,” Licinius said. He picked a stuffed plum from a dish as it went around.

  “Certainly not,” Hilarion said. “There might be a shortage of hippopotami for the circus, not to mention a number of senators’ personal fortunes.”

  Claudius Charax snorted in amusement but remarked pointedly that it was as well that they had both retired, since they were so clearly lacking in the appropriate attitude toward both Africa and the dignity of the Senate.

  * * *

  The meal went on well into the night, and Postumus called for Claudia at mid-afternoon the next day wondering if she would even be awake yet, but found her sitting in Felicia’s rose garden in a plain linen gown and well-worn sandals, with a wicker hamper by her feet.

  “Felicia says I am bound to get wet, and so she lent me these,” she said. “And Theodore has packed up the remains of last night’s feast in case we are marooned.”

  Postumus hefted the hamper. “I shall decrease the chance of both by leaving Finn here with your unsuitable lady’s maid.” He whistled and Finn stopped nosing at a burrow in the grass and came to heel. Postumus deposited him with Teasag and they set out down the path that cut through Licinius’s pasture, where a black mare and a gray stood nose to tail, switching flies. The river ran along the edge, just below the pasture fence. A series of weirs and channels formed the water supply for the house and outbuildings here, and a small currach was drawn up on the bank below the weir. It was a flat-bottomed affair of willow rods and tarred hide, and Postumus stepped in first and handed Claudia carefully in after him. They settled the hamper at their feet and Postumus pushed away from the bank with the oar.

  “My brothers and sister and I ran tame on this farm when we were children,” he told her. “Partly because this is the best place to get onto the river. It’s often too shallow where it runs past our farm.”

  “Is this the Isca?”

  “It’s a side branch. The water is calmer here, and good for trout.” A man in a straw hat and a tunic hiked to his thighs was fishing just downstream, knee-deep in the current. He glared at them as they paddled past, and Postumus made apologetic motions.

  Willow and alder overhung the banks past the landing and the air beneath them was cool and smelled of mud. A fishing heron stood motionless in the shallows as they slid by, and a family of otters popped whiskery faces up at them from the tangle of scrub willow outside their den. Claudia trailed her hand in the water, the edge of the currach pushing her sleeve up so that the tattoos showed against her white arm. She saw him looking at them and smiled. “They have healed nicely,” she commented. “All of them.”

  He recalled her earlier invitation in the cave to inspect them for himself, and laid the paddle across the currach’s frame. They were close enough together that he only had to bend his head to kiss her. The currach rocked wildly, taking on water.

  “Be careful! You’ll have us in the river.”

  He grinned at her. “As predicted.”

  “I should prefer to get in of my own accord.”

  A small island rose in the middle of the water and Postumus edged the currach onto its shore. Willows screened the spot and an impressively engineered beaver dam downstream made a still, secluded pool. “We used to swim here,” he said, “when we were children. Probably the same beavers. The otters come here too. They like to fish around the dam.”

  Claudia stepped out of the currach and tested the water with her foot, sandals in her hand. She smiled at him. “There’s quite a depth. Let’s swim.”

  “It’s cold,” he warned her.

  “It’s lovely. We’ll be otters.”

  They stripped off tunic and gown and Claudia hesitated only a moment before also discarding a pair of minimal silk breeches and her breastband. “I think I prefer to come home in dry underthings.”

  Postumus shrugged and followed suit, aware that his interest was becoming more than evident. They dove in naked, and it was indeed extremely cold. Postumus surfaced, spouting water, and reached for her. They clung together, shivering under the willows, until their skin adjusted to the temperature.

  “I am most glad to see you again,” he told her. The water was clear and he could see the marks on her breasts and thighs, shimmering and distorted by the current as if they were live things.

  She turned in his arms and he kissed her, sliding his hands down her hips. He wasn’t entirely sure how far this would go, but knew from a youthful experiment with Licinius’s kitchen girl that it wasn’t going to go very far in the water. She slid out of his arms and dove, a quick fluid motion like the otters, and he followed her, exploring the pool above the dam. Then they floated on their backs, watching a red kite overhead.

  “I suppose Antoninus is bound to recall the governor,” she said.

  “You guess is as good as mine, maybe better. But it’s probably inevitable. Every successful campaigner gets recalled.” He thought about what Urbicus had said about settling in. “In the long run, I think it won’t matter. I don’t know if this peace will last, most likely not, but Rome has put down too many roots and they keep growing deeper.”

  She paddled a bit with her hands to keep from drifting downstream. “We are the roots, I suppose, however the leaves turn out. And our great-grandchildren will still be Roman, in their fashion.”

  “Grandchildren?”

  “Hypothetical ones. Generic ones. Someone’s grandchildren.”

  “If we were careful not to make grandchildren, would you get out of the pool with me?”

  She smiled at him over her shoulder and he caught her under the ribs and boosted her up onto the bank. Behind the curtain of the willows was a grassy patch nearly invisible from the river. He spread his cloak on it and she stretched out and held up her arms for him to come to her. He put his hand between her legs and she made a contented little sound like a coo that made his heart turn over.

  Afterward, belated good sense crept over them both in the realization that they might not be the only ones inclined to swim in this pool, and they regained their clothing and inspected the contents of Theodore’s hamper.

  “There’s a cloth in here,” Postumus said ruefully. “We could have lain on that.”

  “I’d rather not take it back to Theodore in the state your cloak is in,” Claudia said.

  “Theodore has impeccable manners,” Postumus said. “He would never call attention to the fact that the guests have been making love on the picnic cloth.”

  He swirled the mud-stained cloak in the slow current above the beaver dam and hung it on a bush before they unpacked a box of small meat pies, a loaf of bread, the remains of the Capricorn mold, olives, a jar of apples in honey, and another of the wedding wine.

  Claudia handed him a piece of bread spread with the apples and licked her fingers clean.

  “I may be transferred to Africa, you know,” he said. It was more than likely. The Army tended to move its officers about as often as its generals.

  “Possibly.” She cut a piece of the Capricorn mold and nibbled it. “This is clever, but it isn’t any better the second day. Would the otters eat it?”

  “Otters eat anything.”

  She rose and laid what was left of the Capricorn’s tail under a willow on the bank. “Augury by otter. We shall come back and read the pattern of the crumbs.”

  Postumus wasn’t sure whether the otters knew anything, but the little island had always given him the feeling of possibility. Whatever the future held, it was no doubt already on its way.

  When they walked back through Licinius’s pasture in the dusk, a trio of girls in the next field were cutting wheat stalks with a bronze knife to make a Corn King. They would be lighting the L
ughnasa fires in the village tonight. The residents of the combined households were already streaming down the road between the farms, toward the flames, and they followed. A little scuttering wind rustled the trees and they could hear a nightjar in the woods by the river.

  By Roman reckoning, it was the Kalends, the day for payment of debts. Postumus couldn’t help hearing an echo of the Corn King in that. He remembered again that a king from his own west country was supposed to have died that way, to seal a treaty. That was a generation before Postumus’s parents had been born and so it was all firelight tale and gossip, as history tended to be.

  The flames sank to ember in the dark field, and Justin and Aurelia ran toward them, laughing, wearing yesterday’s rose wreaths, to leap the coals for luck. They had grown up watching these same villagers light these same fires, always somehow on the edge of things, too Roman for the village and not quite welcome in the Army, but it hadn’t galled Justin the way it had Postumus. Now he thought that if he had sewn together more than he had taken apart, that might be a good enough equation.

  He whispered in Claudia’s ear, “We could go jump the fire.”

  She cocked her head up at him. “So I can bear you many children?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You don’t like what I do.”

  “You don’t do it anymore.”

  “Possibly.”

  He was silent at that. How much was he willing to risk?

  “Should we consult the otters first?” she asked him.

  “No.” He held out his hand.

  She took it and they walked through the rustling night wind toward the fire.

  Author’s Note

  This novel is a sequel, of a sort, to a book written many years ago, and I owe considerable thanks to the people who helped me venture back into the Roman Empire, and particularly into the weirdly counterintuitive world of Roman medicine. Dr. John White kindly walked me through all the symptoms of lung cancer and how to describe its process without ever actually saying what the patient had, because my hero didn’t know. The Romans knew a lot but because they were forbidden to conduct autopsies, they knew how to operate for cataracts, for instance, but didn’t recognize cancer or appendicitis. Regarding the pharmaceutical remedies contained in this novel, I don’t recommend trying any of them, but they are all genuine, and I have attempted to use mainly the ones that might actually have worked.

  I would also like to thank the fine people at Canelo Publishing, in particular Michael Bhaskar, Kit Nevile, and Iain Millar, who decided that my earlier Roman novels deserved another appearance, and that this one should follow them.

  And finally my husband Tony Neuron and son Felix Crowe, for general support and for putting up with the three-by-four-foot rolling corkboard and map of Roman Britain that seemed to appear wherever anyone wanted to walk.

  Also by Damion Hunter

  The Legions of the Mist

  The Centurions Trilogy

  The Centurions

  Barbarian Princess

  The Emperor’s Games

  Find out more

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo

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  Copyright © Damion Hunter, 2020

  The moral right of Damion Hunter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788637152

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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