The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  “We are glad to have afforded you so much amusement,” Gwytha said when they had finally subsided, and Constantia began to giggle again. Her own sandy blond braids were parted in no-nonsense fashion down the middle and no such adult vanities adorned her freckled brow.

  “Bed for you, miss.” Januaria picked her up and draped her firmly over one shoulder. Constantia grinned conspiratorially at Postumus and waved one small pink hand as she was removed from the room.

  Gwytha lingered for a moment, her eyes grave, watching her son. “You were talking about your father when I woke you,” she said gently. “Do you want to hear about him?”

  * * *

  Postumus learned a lot that night, which at least put him one up on Justin, who had slept like a pig throughout the whole story, as Postumus informed him the next day as they collected eggs from the flock of speckled chickens that clucked and muttered in the farmyard.

  Besides Papa’s mother, they had another grandmother who had died the year after Postumus was born, and who had lived at Antium, which was very fashionable and near Rome itself, and her husband, their grandfather, had been an Army officer too.

  “The Corvus family goes back at least seven generations in the Eagles,” Postumus said proudly, and Justin nodded. That would stand them in good stead when they came of age for the Centuriate, which Justin was already planning on.

  “But I don’t much mind not having known her,” Postumus added, looking in the hedgerow where the black hen insisted on hiding her eggs. The reason that Mama hardly ever mentioned her was that she had been furious when her son had married Mama, because Mama had been a freedwoman, a former slave, and not good enough for the family. Looking at it from a Roman point of view, Postumus could see that, but it didn’t seem fair all the same, because Mama had been a chief’s sister’s daughter, which meant highborn in her tribe, when a slave trader had caught her out alone one day. (That was illegal, Mama had explained, but it happened all the time anyway, if no one powerful enough to do anything about it took your side.) And the reason that they never saw Mama’s people was that her tribe was the Iceni and they had hated Rome and anything to do with it since Boudicca, the last of their great leaders, had rebelled and slaughtered a legion and three cities before Rome, which never forgives, had come with an avenging army and burned their land from one end to the other. An Iceni woman who married a Roman, for whatever reason, would find small welcome. And so she had never gone back. The black hen appeared and pecked at his ankles and Postumus broke off a branch and waved it at her.

  Justin, with small Marcus and Constantia, who had followed to hear the tale, listened wide-eyed. Mama had led a far more exciting life than any of them had realized. In the Iceni chief they had less interest. Almost all Army families had tribal blood somewhere along the line, in these days when new citizens were created in each new conquered territory. The imperial policy for many years had been to settle its veterans on grants of land in the provinces to further the stability of the government (Papa’s family had Rhenish blood). But it was generally the Roman men who married foreign women (there were always too many women among the losers in a war) and gave to them and their children a Roman name and Roman customs. Gwytha’s children had never thought of themselves as anything else.

  But it was what Postumus had learned about his father’s old legion that he saved for last, and to this only Justin paid much attention. Constantia was really too young to understand how you could have two fathers anyway, and Marcus, as Justin said disgustedly, must have been a changeling because he spent his time naming the chickens, and didn’t seem interested in playing Army at all. So while the young ones sat quietly under the hedgerow and tried to behave themselves under Justin’s glare, Postumus told him about the Ninth Hispana, which had come to Britain with Claudius Caesar’s invasion force more than eighty years ago, and had been the garrison legion at Eburacum in the wild lands to the north, before the Sixth Victrix. It was the legion that Boudicca slaughtered before her rising was put down and it was said that she had cursed it before she killed herself. The legion had been reconstituted but the shame of that defeat had marked it.

  In their father’s day, the Ninth Hispana, by then undermanned and too long from Rome, had finally gone down in another tribal rising that had spread to mutiny in the legion itself, and swept the few loyal cohorts into the whirlwind with it. One of those cohorts had been their father’s, and he had died when the last of the legion had made its desperate stand at the abandoned fortress of Castra Pinnata at Inchtuthil in the far north, where now Rome didn’t even patrol. And the Senate had considered and spoken, and the Ninth Hispana had become a dead legion, with even its number blotted from the master Legionary List in Rome.

  It seemed that everyone they knew had somehow paid for the wreck of the Hispana. Mama, who had loved their father so much that even Postumus could see it when she spoke of him (although he didn’t say that, because of Marcus and Constantia); Uncle Licinius, who was really a courtesy uncle and had been Senior Legionary Surgeon to the Ninth, and was invalided out with a bad knee and a criminally small pension when the Senate broke the legion; his wife Aunt Felicia, whose own father had been the Ninth’s last legate; Papa, fuming because they had taken his cohort and left him behind to command Eburacum’s handful of troops, transferred and demoted, tarred with a guilt by association that had continued to follow him and stalled his career, so that even now after fifteen years’ service he hadn’t risen farther than command of the Fifth Cohort. And of course their father, dead at Inchtuthil.

  “He was called Justin too,” Postumus said, when he had finished. “Mama says we look like him.”

  “Mithras god,” Justin said, and didn’t even look around to make sure that no one heard him swearing a grown-up oath.

  That was the day on which Postumus and Justin began to grow up. In Justin, the story of the lost Hispana seemed to make him even more determined to follow in his father’s and Papa’s footsteps and make himself a career in the Eagles that would give the lie to the emperor and the Senate that had broken their legion. But in Postumus it marked a turning point of another sort, and the road marker was Licinius.

  * * *

  “Take these to Aunt Felicia, dear, please.” Gwytha handed Postumus a wicker basket of eggs. “The young ones are starting to lay and with Papa at the fort, we’ll never eat all these.”

  Postumus suspected that meant the older ones were going to be soup, but that was the way with chickens. He took the basket and set out carefully (“Don’t run!” Gwytha called after him) across the meadow that ran between their house and Uncle Licinius’s farm, skirting the pond where Cook was raising carp and frogs. The sun was out and it wasn’t raining for a change and the new grass felt lovely so he took his sandals off and put them in the basket with the eggs. He stopped along the way to peer into a badger’s burrow—carefully—and pat a black horse that stuck its nose over the pasture fence, and feed it a handful of clover, and then went in the kitchen door of Licinius’s house, stopping to make his respects to the household snake who lived under the sill. He gave the eggs to the cook and looked at her hopefully.

  Cook produced a piece of cake from the cupboard. “Thank your mother for us. This is for you. And take your sandals out of the eggs, please.” She glanced over her shoulder at the gridiron on the hearth where something was boiling furiously. “I need to pay attention. No more children in the kitchen, please. Mistress has taken ours to the village to buy new boots but if you go down to the barn, I think you’ll find that the master has a new foal you could look at.”

  Postumus nodded and put his sandals on again. The children of the two families were much of an age and had run tame in each other’s houses since Postumus could remember. He went down the path to the barn, cutting through the kitchen garden and then through the buzz of bees in the apple orchard to the stone and timber barn below the house.

  Licinius was in the barn, but the foal wasn’t there yet. The sorrel mare lay on her side in the str
aw, flanks heaving and foamy spittle coming from her mouth. Licinius, in just an undertunic, was flat on the stall floor behind her. He looked up when he heard Postumus, his face dripping sweat and covered in blood and muck from the stall.

  “Should I go away again?” Postumus asked him, a little frightened because Licinius looked so grim. His graying dark hair was plastered to his forehead.

  “Yes! No. No, wait. Come here.”

  Postumus edged closer.

  “Get down here with me.” It was clear that it was a command. “You have little hands. One foreleg is bent and it’s stuck. It’s caught on her hip bone. We need to push the foal back in until the leg comes loose. See if you can get your hand in there and shove.”

  “Inside the horse?”

  “Yes! Inside the horse! I need help. Like this, only my hands are too big.” Licinius pushed his hand in beside the one small hoof that appeared from the mare’s back end. “I can’t get far enough up.” The mare’s flanks heaved again and she tossed her head wildly. “We’re going to lose them both if I can’t get it loose soon.”

  “All right.” Postumus knelt down and slid his hand up inside the mare where Licinius showed him. It was warm and sticky and felt so alive it startled him. He had never thought about what was inside of things before. What felt like another soft unformed hoof pushed against his fingers. “I can feel it. I think.”

  The mare strained again and the muscles contracted around his arm like a vise.

  “Push it back in,” Licinius said when the muscles relaxed.

  Whatever he was touching wasn’t a leg. It had two small holes and he realized it was the foal’s nose. He could feel the mouth working. There was another horse in there, inside, alive, if he could just help it out. The thought was overwhelming. He shoved against it and felt it move. A little more. Between the mare’s straining, he let his hand do the thinking—that seemed to be the way, since his eyes couldn’t see inside the mare. A little more. Suddenly two tiny hooves were in his palm. Then the mare gave a huge heave and the whole foal slid out almost into Postumus’s hands.

  “Good boy!” Licinius sat up and began to clean the foal while the mare lay breathing hard. Postumus sat in the straw, staring at his hands and at the foal. It was a sorrel too, with a huge white blaze down its nose and one white sock. After a moment the mare heaved herself up as the afterbirth came out too. She settled, forelegs bent under her chest, to nuzzle the foal. Licinius reached behind him for his surgical kit, tied off the umbilical cord and cut it. Then he rolled over in the straw and lay on his back, panting. Postumus stretched out beside him and they lay there silently watching the swallows building a nest in the barn roof and listening to the mare murmur horse things to her foal.

  “We had better get you a wash and a clean tunic,” Licinius said finally and sat up, and Postumus followed him, ready now to do pretty much anything that Licinius suggested.

  Afterward they sat in Licinius’s surgery office, Postumus in the visitor’s chair in an old, much-too-big tunic of Licinius’s, with a plate of buttered buns and a green glass cup of very watered wine beside him.

  “You have a good touch,” Licinius said. “I owe you for that. She’s my best mare.” He pointed at the green glass cups. “I don’t bring these out for just anybody.”

  “Mama said you were a surgeon in a legion,” Postumus said.

  “I was.”

  Postumus wondered if he should have asked that. Was there something else awful no one was telling him? But he had had his hands inside an actual horse and now there was a live foal when there mightn’t have been one, and that had somehow opened up an entire new world, where you could make things live instead of killing them or ordering them around, which seemed to be what the Army did. For the good of Rome, of course.

  Licinius fiddled with a stack of meticulously kept records folders, the ingrained habit of his Army years, and some scent of the old days came back on a little sigh of the wind.

  “I was,” he said. “I understand you’ve been wanting to know things.”

  Postumus nodded. He wanted to know more things now, like how you knew what was inside of something and how to fix it. People, horses.

  Before he could ask anything, there was a light tap on the doorframe. “There is a person to see you, master.” Theodore, who was the house steward and had belonged to a legionary legate’s household before Licinius married Aunt Felicia, had certain standards and it was evident that the person did not meet them.

  Licinius sighed. “Very well, youngster. I’ll answer any questions you can think up, but you’ll have to squeeze them in between my other crises. In the meantime, you can play fetch-and-carry. My knee’s giving me trouble after this morning’s adventure and Theodore feels that an orderly’s work is beneath his dignity.”

  Licinius walked with a slight limp, testimony to the bad knee that had kept him from marching out with the Hispana on its last campaign. He had been one of the best surgeons in the Eagles, Gwytha had said, and a medical Unfit for Service had been an easy road for the Senate to take when it broke the legion. Now he was a civilian physician and the villages surrounding the fort at Isca Silurum brought him everything they couldn’t treat themselves, from wolf bites to lung fever and the occasional sick pig.

  The current specimen was a local of uncertain age and cleanliness who had laid his leg open with a scythe and then nursed it himself until it was properly inflamed.

  “Old bastard brought me his damn cow the same day when she cut her hock,” Licinius muttered. “And then he lets himself get like this. This is the third time I’ve dressed this, and it’s finally coming along.”

  He cleaned and re-dressed the wound, pointing out to the fascinated Postumus where the flesh and muscle were beginning to knit together, and the infection subsiding. The old man sat stoically throughout the process and when Licinius had finished, nodded his thanks. “I’ll send my woman with some eggs,” he announced, and departed.

  “I just brought you eggs,” Postumus said indignantly. “Mother sent them over. Don’t they pay you?”

  Licinius washed his hands in the surgery basin and grinned at him. “Sometimes they don’t even pay eggs.”

  “Why do you let them do it?”

  “I can’t let the old fool die of an infected leg because he’s too pigheaded to pay me. And he paid for the cow.”

  Postumus thought that over.

  “It gets bred into you in the Army,” Licinius said. “Half the time you’ll spend treating the natives. They’ll bring you their wounded—some of whom got that way fighting your lads—and their babies, and even their livestock. Anything their priests can’t touch, they’ll hand to you and stand back and wait for a miracle. Sometimes you can even give it to them.”

  Postumus took a bite out of his bun and a sip—very carefully—out of the fragile green glass cup.

  “And if you can’t manage it,” Licinius added, in case Postumus was giving him too much credit, “and whoever it is dies, they’ll spread it around the local beerhouse that you poisoned their grandfather.”

  That was the day that Licinius became a real person to Postumus, a three-dimensional being rather than merely the misty figure of another grown-up; a man with a whole world’s knowledge to offer, who could see what was wrong with someone and make it right, or at least know why he couldn’t. Even the fact that Licinius had known and loved his father took second place to that.

  Thereafter Postumus spent every minute that Licinius would allow him in the surgery, grinding herbs and patiently scraping verdigris for ointments, learning to make a proper distillation, and best of all, discovering the wonderful intricacy with which the gods had fashioned all living creatures. After a while Licinius showed him how to kill a frog and then dissect it.

  “I can’t bring myself to murder anything besides frogs, or a fish,” Licinius said. “But if you find a dead bird or we have a barn cat meet an untimely end, I’ll show you those too.”

  They inspected the insides of chicke
ns bound for the pot, to Cook’s dismay, and a lamb that died at birth. They always poured a bit of wine into the grave—or the pot—afterward to thank the shade of the creature for its help.

  “What about people?” Postumus asked. “How do we know about people?”

  “The gods forbid that,” Licinius said. “Or so the priests tell us. That is a thing you cannot do.”

  “What, look inside dead people?”

  “Precisely. For fear of offending the gods or stirring up a vengeful shade. So we learn by looking at live people who have had the misfortune to have already been cut open by somebody else.”

  Postumus suspected that Licinius would have cut up a dead person at the soonest opportunity if he thought he could have gotten away with it, but Licinius also made it clear that this was a frightful crime and the punishment would be equally frightful.

  “Go into the Medical Corps and you won’t find a shortage of things to look at,” Licinius informed him. “The Army provides the best anatomical research you’ll find.”

  Postumus thought there was a note of sarcasm in that, but also that he was probably right. If there was another war in the north like the one that had destroyed the Hispana, there would be plenty of material to study.

  In the meantime, Licinius began lending him his medical texts to stumble through, with many questions, and they had a fine time with the bones of a dead cow, which the vultures had obligingly cleaned for them, reassembling it—the foxes had gone off with a few pieces—and naming all the bones in reference to their human counterparts. Licinius’s son Felix was showing no interest in anything but the horses, although he was fearless there, so Postumus had him to himself.

  All of this Postumus explained in lurid detail to Constantia, who was the only one in his own family who showed any inclination to listen. She would cheerfully have let him bore her to death on any subject for the sheer pleasure of his presence.