The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  Sergius’s good eye fluttered open suddenly and he started to sit up.

  “No!” Postumus held him down. “Lie still, it’s all right.”

  The eye widened, panic-stricken, but he subsided.

  “You have broken ribs. Don’t move. And I have to work on your face, so you must lie still and not fight me. Can you swallow if I give you something to drink?”

  The boy nodded, and Postumus carefully measured poppy into a cup of wine, added a curved metal straw, and held it to his lips.

  Licinius watched as the boy managed to get it down. Like all painkillers, poppy was tricky stuff, and its results were erratic. It was also addictive, although less dangerous than henbane, providing it need only be administered once. Some surgeons held to the theory that pain was necessary to healing, and it was better to let the patient simply grit his teeth and endure. “That,” Licinius had said once to Postumus, “is because they aren’t doing the enduring, and they’ve never had a man die in their hands because he couldn’t endure.” The poppy that Postumus had given Sergius would not erase the agony of having his broken face repaired, but merely make it possible to bear it.

  They waited while the drugged wine took its effect, and Postumus spoke softly to the boy, telling him what he was going to do. He nodded at the older man. “This is Gaius Licinius Lucanus, and he was the best surgeon in the Eagles. Can you be still for us, do you think?”

  “Yes, sir.” The boy licked his lips, and the fear in his eyes was apparent through the haze of poppy.

  They worked slowly, searching for the right edge of the torn flesh to suture to the next one, while Sergius quivered in a cloud of poppy and pain. They shifted the broken nose gently to where it should be, and mercifully he fainted with the last movement of the nose before they had to tackle the eye. Postumus looked at it dubiously. He scanned the tray the orderly had set on the stand beside him, muttering, “We should be allowed to learn, not experiment on some poor bastard that’s the first one to come our way.” The orderly looked mildly shocked and Postumus snapped, “Get some more light over here!” He poured clean water over the eye, having no idea what vinegar might do to it, and selected the smallest forceps and a fine suturing needle with a length of human hair attached. Licinius also took a pair of forceps.

  “Aesculapius help me. I should have gone into the cavalry.” While the orderly adjusted the lamp stand and brought up another one, Postumus maneuvered the eye and the bloody mess it hung from slowly into position, praying silently as he did so, while Licinius kept the surrounding tissue retracted.

  What seemed like eons later, he laid down the suturing needle and wiped his brow. “If this works,” he said to Licinius, “and Charon ever asks me of what use I was in this world, I shall have something to tell him.”

  He nodded to the orderly to clear up, and gently spread a clean blanket over the sleeping form. “Get the stretcher poles back in and put him on a bed.”

  Licinius sailed the next week from Tyre with a string of Arab breeding stock, and Sergius survived with his eye intact, at least to all intents and purposes. It had an odd cast and if he couldn’t actually see out of it, he didn’t mention that. The last Postumus saw of him, as he left for a new hospital two months later, was his slight form, rope in hand, crooning softly to the murderous dun mare.

  And then one spring day he ran in under a rain of enemy arrows to drag out a man whose life was ebbing away too fast to wait. For which Rome praised him, saluted him, fastened a Valorous Conduct around his arm, and named him senior Legionary Surgeon, assigned to the Sixth Legion Victrix at Eburacum.

  IV. Rutupiae Light

  “Wake up, sir! The troop’s ready to ride and their decurion says if you’re going with them you’ve got till he counts to two hundred.”

  Postumus opened one eye, and then the other, and focused reluctantly on the figure before him—a youthful orderly with jug ears and a worried expression. “You’re a rude awakening,” he murmured, running a hand through his hair and sitting up to feel with his bare feet on the floor for his sandals. Maybe he had said a bit too much goodbye the night before, sorting out how he actually felt about going home with a flagon of mid-level wine.

  “How long, did you say?”

  “Till he counts to two hundred, sir, that’s what the decurion said, and he wasn’t too happy about it.”

  “Go tell him that if he doesn’t exercise a little more respect toward the Medical Corps, the Medical Corps will refuse to treat his saddle boils, and then his ass will fall off.” Postumus splashed cold water from a pitcher over his face, and then with a grimace stripped off his undertunic and poured the rest of it down his body. He doubted that the decurion was actually counting. He rubbed himself dry, pulled on the undertunic and the scarlet folds of his uniform, shaking it carefully first, and the skirt of red leather strips that went under his lorica. He buckled the segmented plates of his lorica, knotted his sandals, which had somehow tangled their laces in the night, and strapped on greaves, groping for his belt and sword. The orderly found them and held them out, along with the plain, uncrested helmet of the Medical Corps. Postumus gingerly shook a scorpion out of his parade cloak, jabbed home the point of his cloak pin, adjusted his helmet and picked up his rolled-up kit. The fort optio would send his trunk along after him. It might even catch up to him before Saturnalia.

  “Thank you.” He nodded at the orderly. “Behave yourself and mind the new surgeon, and you’ll rise to be emperor someday.” He stepped blinking into the sun and regarded the cavalry troop outside his door with distaste. “Do I have time to take a piss, Naevius,” he inquired, “or shall I just hold it until we get to Tyre?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, left his kit on the ground and turned down the alley toward the latrine. When he returned, the kit had been strapped behind the rear saddle horns of a led horse and Decurion Naevius proffered the reins with a touch of malice. “Careful. He’s a bit frisky, like.”

  The horse, a chestnut with a white blaze, rolled one demented eye and pawed the ground, and Postumus laughed. “I remember this one. He’s the one you use to terrorize recruits. I’ll be lucky if I can get him into a trot.” He swung into the saddle and jabbed his heels into the chestnut’s flanks. The horse slewed its head around and regarded him with surprise.

  Naevius nodded and the man next to him raised a curved cavalry trumpet to his lips. It rang out clear against the morning air as the troop swung around at a trot, behind Naevius and the standard-bearer in a wolf’s-head hood, the green silk of the troop’s dragon banner snapping in the breeze of their own making. Postumus jabbed his heels authoritatively into the horse’s flank and they swung down the Via Principia, drawing up with a flourish before the Principia itself to salute the cohort standards. The trumpet sang again and they clattered down the Via Praetoria and through the Praetorian Gate onto the Tyre road, helmet and harness catching the rising light. After a moment someone started to sing, a rude ditty about a tribune and his horse, to the rhythm of the hoofbeats on the road, and Postumus lifted his head and caught, faint on the wind, the sharp familiar scent of ocean.

  * * *

  The last leg home was aboard the liburnian Nereid, out of Gesoriacum on the Gaulish coast, and she pitched and rolled on the sort of malignant sea that often boiled up in the Channel in spring. Postumus watched as a huddled figure at the port railing moaned once and threw up his breakfast into the slimy green depths below.

  “Is the bastard gonna pitch like this all way to Rutupiae?” the dripping figure inquired of the unsympathetic marine standing watch beside him in the rain beneath the reefed sail, and the marine shrugged.

  “Like as not.”

  “Oh, Mother.” The legionary closed his eyes to the heaving seas. “What do you do for the sickness?”

  “Not much. You’ll get used to it after ten or twelve trips.”

  Nereid heaved once more and the legionary abandoned further comment to clutch the railing. Postumus crossed his arms on the starboard rail,
watching the approaching coastline and the wheeling shapes of the gulls. Their sharp thin cries made counterpoint to the hortator’s mallets setting time below deck while the oars dipped and rose. There was much to be said for having grown up close enough to Sabrina Channel to have acquired his sea legs young, and he could have as easily gone below and out of the wet. But as the twin pharoi on the headlands at Dubris came into view through the rain, the pull of home kept him on deck. The sky began to clear and he could see Rutupiae Light rising in the distance. Rutupiae Light, and the beacon that had preceded it, had guided ships into harbor in Britain for a hundred years, ever since Claudius Caesar’s time.

  By the time Nereid came waddling into port, sidling her way between quinqueremes and triremes of the Fleet and harbor boats, the legionary had recovered somewhat although he was still the color of bad milk and his pale hair hung over his eyes like dispirited moss. Nereid backed her starboard oars to come alongside the jetty, and he jammed his helmet, adorned with a centurion’s crosswise crest, onto his head.

  “Where are you bound?” Postumus asked him as sailors in naval green let the plank down and they disembarked. A flock of gulls squawked and fought over the detritus on the docks. The air was heavy with the scent of pitch, and the noise of the naval yard where the masts of new ships rose like trees was deafening. Rutupiae was home port for a sizable portion of the Fleet.

  “Eburacum, Sixth Victrix, Seventh Cohort,” the centurion shouted over the noise. He introduced himself as Appius Paulinus. “If I live till tomorrow.” He nodded at Postumus. “Surgeon?”

  “Postumus Corvus, and bound for Eburacum too, once I visit my family.”

  “This is a home posting? Lucky you. Mine are at Moguntiacum. I got an hour with them on the way here. The new emperor seems to be stiffening up the troops in Britain. I was told to catch the next coastwise ship up to Eburacum.” He winced. “I’d rather just go Unlawful Absent.”

  “There are bound to be troops going north you can ride with,” Postumus said, taking pity on him. He looked as if the prospect of another sea journey would do him in. “Ask the port commander.” He watched another ship, a cavalry transport, unloading hysterical horses onto the dock.

  Beyond the port proper they passed beneath the Agricolan Arch that spanned the road northwestward to Londinium, adorned with marble facings and bronze statues of Julius Agricola and the Emperor Domitian, a commemoration of the victory at Mons Graupius and the campaign that had taken the north of Britain. For a while at least.

  “You are now in the province of Britain,” Postumus told him. “There are other ports, of course, but under Agricola’s Arch is the official entrance.”

  “Don’t suppose we’ll get an arch for our efforts,” Paulinus murmured.

  “Doubtful. But you can have oysters—Rutupiae is famous for them.” A man with a barrel of them in sea water was hawking his wares beside the road, and a sign on an inn wall advertised oyster stew, fresh raw oysters, and oyster fritters. The town beyond Agricola’s Arch was a thriving bustle of inns and shops and housing for the port officers. Postumus pointed at a squat tile-roofed compound. “You’ll probably find the port commander in there.”

  Paulinus saluted his thanks, fist to chest. “Until Eburacum,” he said, looking marginally less morose at the thought of oysters.

  * * *

  The boar had been running since midday, through the scrub and woods of the wild hills, pursued by yelping hounds and men on foot and horseback. Galt, reining his horse slightly around a clump of thorn, thought that he would be brought to bay soon. He was nearly done. The High King’s men and the warriors of Dawid’s hold had taken it in turns to harry him, and now the king’s men would bring him down, most likely with Bran at their front. Bran needed to kill something, Galt thought. He rode up beside the king, because he was still leader of the king’s household, a heavy boar spear and two light throw-spears lashed to his saddle.

  It was late in the long summer day, the shadows like fingers across the slate blue moorland below and a cloud of starlings undulating across the graying sky. Bran looked over his shoulder as Galt brought his horse up even with the king’s. Bran’s corn-colored hair was bound back with a braided leather thong and the gold torque around his neck gleamed dully in the slanting light. He rode easily on a roan pony, one hand clasping the boar spear, bound below the blade with strips of red leather and tied with hawk feathers.

  “He will turn soon, I’m thinking,” Galt said. A clean kill would take the king’s restless mind off other things, perhaps, and they would move on to the next hold without a quarrel in Dawid’s.

  The boar crashed through the brush, snorting, foam-flecked now, with the riders crashing behind, the spearmen on foot abreast of them now, and the hounds circling, baying. Where an outcrop of stone and a lone contorted elm blocked the path, he turned. He was a thick, humpbacked beast, with vicious curving tusks. The king moved up to take him, Galt and his men behind him, spears in hand now. They went gingerly because there is always some price to be paid for a life, and with a boar the price was often uncertain.

  The king leveled his spear and as he did a young hound streaked between the ponies’ hooves, his master shouting after him. Dawid’s gray stumbled on a stone, staggered against the king’s man Rhys and Rhys went down in the trampled brush and last year’s leaves. The boar fixed its eyes on him. Rhys tried to get up and his ankle folded under him.

  The hounds held the boar back, barely, until the hunters could close around Rhys. The ground was uneven, studded with stones and fallen branches of the elm. The boar feinted left and right, uncertain, exhausted and furious. The air was rank with its scent. The king drove his spear into its right flank and it staggered left, gathered its haunches under it and charged at the closest of its tormentors. Galt’s spear went into its ribs at the same time that the boar’s weight took him off his horse and its tusk went into his right thigh, halfway up its length before the boar fell away and lay bloody and twitching in the leaves.

  * * *

  They brought him back to Dawid’s hold riding double, clinging to Dawid and blood dripping from the rag tied around the wound. Dawid’s wife Brica cleaned the wound and said firmly that they were to send for the High Priest. “I have washed this out, but it needs more than that. I don’t like the way it goes in so deep. I want Talhaiere.”

  Galt, gritting his teeth, didn’t argue with her, as he had no intention of being a hunt sacrifice just now, and so one of Dawid’s human hounds, the boys of his clan who were in warrior training, was sent with Dawid’s best chariot team to the king’s hold for Talhaiere while the king paced.

  “You could leave me,” Galt said. “Dawid was my fosterling. I will do as well here.”

  “That is not fitting. I do not leave the chief of my household. These are Council matters that we talk of with the clan chiefs.”

  Galt was silent. They would all say, What does Galt think? He knew that, and the king wouldn’t like it, particularly not when the issue was the Romans at the fort of the Eagles to the south. “Talhaiere is ancient,” he murmured. “He will take days to get here, even in a chariot, and complaining all the way.”

  “Nonetheless,” Bran said.

  “And what’s more,” Brica said, fussing over him when Bran had gone, “you need bathing. You smell like the boar. I will do that since you haven’t ever had the sense to marry.” She rolled up the woolen sleeves of her gown and took the thong out of his pale hair. “We’ll wash this too, since you’re so proud of it.”

  Galt smiled. He was accounted the best warrior in the tribe still, and so could afford to be vain. His hair and mustache he bleached regularly to white gold and his taste for jewelry was legendary. “There was a reason for that,” he said, “that I didn’t marry, that there be no temptation not to give over power when the king was of age. And how is Rhys?”

  “He has sprained that ankle, I think, but it will mend well.” She paused.

  “I, on the other hand?” Galt said.


  “I have asked the Mother and the Sun Lord both,” Brica said. “But we need Talhaiere.”

  When she had left him, washed as well as she could with a basin and a clean cloth, and with a bandage over the thigh wound, he lay back on the bed in his chamber and thought. This room in Dawid’s hold had been Galt’s since Dawid was of age, furnished for him and kept for his visits alone. It was pleasant here, more of a home than his own holding or the High King’s. He moved his right leg a little, to see how much more that made it hurt. A lot. But he hadn’t been killed outright so it wasn’t his fate but only bad luck. A man making the hunt sacrifice knew what he was doing, and his death bought something. Galt had thought of it once, when the drought went on and on and there was sickness and the children began to die. But he had been regent then, and held that power for the clans of the Brigantes. Now the power was given over to Bran, with the King Mark on his brow, and if Galt had died when Bran was small, Bran might not have survived to be king, and so he had weighed the choice and made his decision. It hadn’t been an easy one.

  Galt lay back and closed his eyes and put certain memories away as he had taught himself to do.

  * * *

  It was late at night and a pale moon rode just above the trees by the time Postumus turned his horse through the stone gates of the family farm and set him at a trot up the road toward the house. The horse, a livery animal exchanged for his previous one at Aquae Sulis, caught scent of the other horses in the barn and lifted his head in a whinny. Where there were horses there would be grain and all stables were home to him. Postumus had thought of staying the night in a comfortable bed in Venta and pushing on the next day, but southern roads were safe enough even at night and after he had persuaded a grumbling ferryman to take him across the Sabrina to Venta in the dusk, he had ridden on from there. A light flared up outside the darkened house and then bobbed through the inner gate and steadied as a cloaked figure hung it on a nail in the gate post.