The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  Postumus shed his lorica and helmet and knelt beside him in the light. Galt put a hand out to his shoulder, turning him round to face him. “What are you called?”

  “Postumus Justinius Corvus. My mother came from the Iceni, but we take our fathers’ names.”

  “Yes,” Galt said. “So I had heard.”

  “You aren’t likely to find an Army surgeon who’s all British,” Postumus said shortly. “Count yourself lucky to get half a one.” He unwrapped the strips of linen as gently as he could—they were stuck to the wound in places. Galt kept silent but it was obvious that he was in some pain. The wound was badly infected, a deep gash that began just above the knee and ran upward for nearly a foot, deepening as it went. The surrounding skin was an angry red, and it was suppurating badly. There was no evidence of gangrene, although, Postumus thought grimly, that could well be next. And other complications were alarmingly possible.

  “How long ago did this happen?” he asked.

  “Some fourteen days,” Galt said.

  Well, at least if the patient were going to get lockjaw, he would have it by now. “What has been the treatment?”

  “It was washed and medicinal herbs were put in. What they were, I couldn’t tell you. I am not a healer.”

  “Many of your healers have much skill,” Postumus said truthfully. “And many herbs are beneficial. The problem is the nature of the wound. It deepens at the top, and becomes more a puncture than a gash. Whatever it was washed with may not have got clear inside, and there was probably Aesculapius-knows-what on the end of the boar’s tusk. I’m going to clean it again and then treat it with something a little stronger. I’m afraid you aren’t going to like it,” he added apologetically.

  Galt shrugged. “I don’t much like it the way it is, either. And I like even less the idea of having my leg taken off at the hip.”

  Postumus rocked back on his heels and looked him in the eye. “There is always the chance of that. If it becomes gangrenous, it will be necessary.”

  Galt nodded. “That is why I have sent for you now. We are a horse people and I have been astride or behind one from the day I could walk. For thirty years I have commanded the High King’s household warriors.”

  Postumus realized what the loss of a leg would mean to him even in times of peace. And he likely wouldn’t survive the amputation.

  “Very well,” Galt said. “And after you have dressed the wound?”

  “Then we leave it alone for a little, and let it drain. After that, treat it with honey to prevent a new infection, put some stitches in, and hope that it will heal without further trouble.”

  “And if it does not?”

  “If it does not, it comes off,” Postumus said. “If you wish to go on breathing.”

  “I have every intention of it,” Galt said. “Get on with it.”

  “I shall need someone to help me. To hand me things when I need them and keep my instruments out of the dirt. Someone who won’t get hysterical and decide I’m trying to poison you,” he added.

  “Rhys!” Galt called out. The warrior who had brought them north from Eburacum appeared in the doorway. He had obviously been stationed just outside it. “Bring me Dawid. What else will you need?”

  “A bowl of clean water, and another one empty. Vinegar. A clean cloth for the bed. And some clean bandages.”

  “Very well. Rhys, do as he says.”

  The warrior vanished again and in a few minutes a brown-haired man with a pleasant, worried face appeared carrying the water, a ewer, and a dry bowl filled with strips of linen, a folded cloth under one arm.

  “This is Dawid, cousin to the High King, and also my fosterling,” Galt said.

  “I would like to take Lord Galt to his own quarters, if that is possible,” Postumus said. “He should not be walking around on that leg for some days yet.”

  “And have I not been saying that?” Dawid said. “Bring the bowls and your instruments. I will carry him.”

  “Never yet have I been carried like a fainting maiden to my bed,” Galt said. “And I do not propose to start now.”

  “Then you may thrash me when your leg is healed,” Dawid said. “I expect you still can. In the meantime—” He scooped Galt up from his chair and ducked through the leather flap of a doorway at the far end of the hall, while Postumus followed. It was obvious that the two held each other in some affection, a bond noticeably absent when Galt was with the High King.

  Galt’s chamber was a chaos of broken harp strings and harness straps, with a jumble of hunting spears piled in one corner. The half-eaten remains of a meal lay on a low table. A beautifully worked harp case of soft gray leather stitched in gold lay on the closed lid of a carved chest. The bed was piled with furs and Postumus spread the linen cloth over them.

  Dawid laid Galt gently on the bed and began fishing in a clothes chest for a clean shirt. “We may as well put you in this now. Then, when the surgeon has done with you, you may sleep. Which is what you should have been doing before now.”

  “You act like a mother sparrow with one lone cuckoo chick,” Galt said disgustedly, but he held up his arms and let Dawid draw his shirt over his head. His arms and chest were crossed with scars, Postumus saw; thin, pale lines that cut across the faded blue spirals of the Spear Pattern. Clearly the man was a warrior, despite the fine-boned face and the taste for gaudy jewelry. And a good one, if he had held the king’s household troops, the elite of any tribe, in check for thirty years. Bran couldn’t be that old. Galt must have served the old king as well.

  “My nursemaid allows us to begin,” Galt said, when Dawid had slipped the clean shirt over his head, and unfastened the arm bands and torque and put them away.

  “I will need wine also, or a cup of beer.”

  “Here.” Dawid poured a cupful from a pitcher on the table. Postumus tipped the contents of a small vial into it and handed it to Galt, who eyed it suspiciously.

  “Drink it, please.”

  “I do not need poppy, or whatever that is, to have a wound cleaned out.”

  “You sent for me,” Postumus said, “so do as I say. You are weak enough already from the infection in that leg. I’m not going to have you go into shock while I’m cleaning it.”

  Galt shrugged and drained the cup. “Do you always drug your patients?” he asked, settling back on the bed.

  “When at all possible,” Postumus said. “They are more cooperative.”

  “We are taught that enduring pain teaches a man familiarity with it, and hence contempt for it,” Galt said.

  “You’ll have a chance to do your enduring later. That leg’s going to hurt like Hades for a while, and I can’t keep you doped up very long. This stuff will make you sick when you stop it if you take it for too long.” What he had given Galt wasn’t the wild poppy tears he had dosed the cavalryman’s tooth with, but a dose of the far stronger cultivated poppy. He waited until he could see that it had taken effect, and then began methodically to clean the wound, dropping each reeking swab into the empty bowl as he finished with it. He could see Galt gritting his teeth even in the dreamy trance of the drug, but he took his time—there wasn’t going to be any third chance for Galt’s leg. At the top of the wound he found it necessary to make a small incision in the infected flesh in order to clean it properly, and he could feel Galt’s whole body quiver as he drew the scalpel blade across. Behind him, Dawid flinched in empathy with each touch on the wound but continued with stoic concentration to hand him scalpel and swabs as soon as he asked for them.

  When the cleaning was finished, Postumus rocked back on his heels and pushed the hair from his forehead with his arm. “Bring me a clean bowl of water and then take these out and burn them.” Postumus indicated the bowl of used swabs. While he waited, he kept a wary eye on Galt—he was still flushed but he seemed to be breathing easily enough. Despite Galt’s opinion, the fact remained that great pain was a danger to a weakened body.

  When Dawid returned, Postumus washed his hands and began to apply
a greenish dressing composed mainly of verdigris in an excipient mixture of resin, oil, and vinegar. That done, he set small stitches in the incision he had made near the top of the wound and covered it lightly with a clean cloth. He eased the now bloody sheet out from under Galt. “I don’t want to bandage this further until it has had a chance to drain and the infection has subsided somewhat. The cloth is mainly to keep the flies away. He’ll have to stay lying down and I want both him and this room kept spotless. Now burn those swabs, and scrub out the bowls I’ve used and set them in the sun for at least a week. Wash the sheet and hang it out too.”

  “What then?”

  “Then we wait,” Postumus said tiredly.

  Dawid, his arms full of bowls, turned round at the doorway. “Why do you do this?”

  “Because I was sent for.”

  “No other reason?”

  “Many others. But let that one suffice you.”

  In a few minutes, the boy who had taken charge of the chariot ponies came to show Postumus to the quarters allotted him, and he followed gratefully.

  “What’s your name, child?”

  “Evan, lord. I don’t live here all the time. I’m one of the High King’s hounds,” he said proudly. “He brought me with him when he came to take council with Lord Dawid—this is his holding. We’d have been on to the next one long since if Lord Galt hadn’t been hurt. Is he going to be all right?”

  “I hope so,” Postumus said gravely. “I think so.”

  “He’s just got to keep that leg,” Evan said, frowning. “He couldn’t drive without it.”

  “I’ll do everything I can, I promise you. Now tell me, small hound, what have you done with my escort?”

  “They’re in the Guest Hall. I sent one of Lord Dawid’s hounds to see to their dinner. I shall bring you yours myself.” The hounds were the boys of the tribe, apprentice warriors who took their training in the halls of their chieftains. Apparently the social strata of the tribe was reflected in the hounds, since Evan ordered Dawid’s about with a free hand.

  “Thank you. And would you tell Lord Dawid, please, that someone should sleep in Lord Galt’s room with him, and that I am to be sent for if he shows any sign of complication?”

  When Evan had gone, Postumus lay back on the bed. The frame was wood, and the mattress straw, with some scented herb—rosemary, he thought—mixed in, covered with a native rug. He was tired, but his impression of the Brigantes ticked over in his mind regardless. Bran was a conscientious king who made regular rounds of his chieftains’ holdings. He seemed to feel a sense of duty toward Galt, who had apparently been his foster father, but whether any real affection lay in the bond between them, Postumus couldn’t tell. Bran, he thought, hated Romans with something bordering on a mania. Oddly enough, Galt did not. All of which would no doubt be interesting to the legate. Unlike the peoples of the south, the Brigantes were much as they had been before Claudius Caesar’s invasion force had begun to wipe out the old ways in front of the twenty-mile-a-day march of the new; they were only nominally Roman. The Silures of West Britain had been like that seventy-five years ago, before Agricola, when Valerian’s grandfather was decorating his hall with enemy heads, some of them almost certainly Roman.

  The old ways appeared abruptly in the person of young Evan bearing a platter of steaming pig’s meat and a hefty two-handled jug of native beer. To one several years accustomed to an Army diet, or even his mother’s household cooking, this was heady stuff. Postumus ate hungrily and then lay back again with the uncomfortable sensation of having eaten far too much of something his stomach wasn’t used to.

  He left the pig’s meat to argue with the beer and settle down of its own accord while he studied the room around him. It was a pleasant chamber, the timbers smoothed and darkened with age, the plastered walls painted a pale yellow. The walls and doorway were covered with hangings of soft leather adorned with graceful leaping beasts and borders of interlocking knots. How did they work out the pattern, he wondered, following the baffling pathways with his eyes. The floor, packed earth rather than tile or stone, was strewn with dried grasses and herbs that gave off a pleasant scent underfoot. There was a small, smoke-stained hearth, a table and two stools with legs of carved shale, all decorated with the bronze heads of an animal that only an artist could have thought of, a clothes chest with ivory inlay and bronze hinges and hasp, and a small bronze mirror affixed to the wall. The furniture was that of someone well born among his people, bought from traders rather than home-fashioned. The Brigantes were a wealthy people even if most of their gold had once gone to buy weapons in the last rebellion. Now some twenty-five years later, they again bought lavishly of the luxury goods that came from the south. But the air was thick with woodsmoke and the heady smell of many bodies. In all, it was as alien an environment as the landscape had been. He closed his eyes and tried to will his mother’s half of him to take over and find familiarity in these surroundings. The end result was that he went to sleep.

  He awoke some four hours later in the gray-gold summer dusk, and someone was tugging urgently at his shoulder.

  “What?” Postumus groped automatically for the dagger at his belt and small Evan’s voice said exasperatedly, “If I’d been the Painted One, I could’ve cut your throat with a rusty spear blade by this time. Will you wake up! Something’s wrong with Lord Galt!”

  Postumus sat up and shook the sleep away at that. He straightened his tunic and grabbed for his kit just as Dawid also appeared in the doorway, his face chalk white and close to panic.

  Galt lay on the piled wolfskins of the bed just as Postumus had left him, although his chamber had been aggressively tidied to the point that he probably wouldn’t be able to find anything. But the slim, inert form was burning hot to the touch, and although the pale lashes fluttered occasionally, there was no sign of true consciousness.

  “Get me some cloths and cool water,” Postumus said. “And an extra hanging for the doorway. I’m going to try to bring the fever down, and I don’t want a draft.” When Evan had hurried away, he knelt and put his ear to Galt’s chest.

  “What is it?” Dawid asked.

  “His body is fighting the infection in that leg, and maybe one or two more as well.” He picked up Galt’s wrist and found the pulse. “When a man is weakened by one illness, it lets the door open to others. His natural resistance has no strength to keep them out.” Or so he had been told at his training. As usual, he wondered if they actually knew.

  “What do we do?”

  “Pray,” Postumus said shortly. He didn’t know who the Brigantes worshipped, besides Lugh Shining Spear. The Mother, of course, and no doubt various local spirits, some left over from the Old People who had been here before them. “To anybody you can think of.”

  VII. The Corn King

  It was almost dark-of-the-moon and what little light there was flickered from the tallow dips set in bowls by the bed. The night sounds came clearly through the stillness—the lowing of a cow; the stamp and whuffle of the cavalry ponies on their picket line and the chariot ponies in their barn, speaking horse talk to each other; the sharp bark of a fox; all punctuated here and there by voices in the main hall and once an aged grumbling in the corridor outside the door, cut short by the sharp voice of Bran. The healer priest, no doubt, Postumus thought, convinced that the Roman was murdering his patient.

  He only hoped he wasn’t. Not enough was known about infection, he thought, sponging cool water across Galt’s face and chest. He had managed to get a decoction of willow down him, even half-conscious, in the hope that it would help. And why didn’t they know? After all this time, why was medicine still half guesswork and half prayer? He felt as if he was pounding his head against a stone wall, in the hope of leaving enough of a dent for the next man to carry on. He touched the back of his hand to Galt’s neck. The fever seemed to be dropping, if only a little.

  If Galt died… Postumus wondered if the legate had sufficiently considered the possible consequences when he had decide
d to use him as a medical spy. And if he himself had, setting out on a mad trip to acquaint himself with the people who had broken his father’s legion, Galt most likely among them. The Brigantes were half-kin to the Selgovae, and with a long history of rebellion. And the forts in their lands were empty, and possibly waiting for a good excuse.

  Galt stirred. Postumus looked at his flushed face and the tangle of flaxen hair spread on the gray wolfskin and desperately willed the man not to die.

  “Aesculapius, healer, help me,” he prayed, one hand on Galt’s pulse. And then, because Galt was a warrior, and so was Postumus, surgeon or not, he said another prayer to Mithras, the Lord of Light, the god of the soldier.

  And then, practical, he wrung out a clean cloth in the cool water and wiped it over the fevered body. Neither god looked kindly on the man who sat back and tried to let the god do his work.

  The thin moon made its brief rounds and the sun was beginning to steal into the chirruping of birds when Postumus laid his hand along Galt’s forehead and then sat back. He was cool to the touch and sweating. The fever had broken.

  Postumus flung the cloth into the bowl of water and rubbed his knuckles across his eyes. Galt shifted—for the first time, voluntarily—and, turning somewhat to his side, burrowed deeper into the wolfskin bed covering. Postumus drew a light blanket up over him. He sat for a long time watching the sleeping form.

  Finally, he got up and pushed back the heavy hangings in the doorway. The room was stuffy with the smell of sickness and a little air would do no harm now. He stretched, rubbing his eyes. Small Evan was curled outside in the corridor, and Postumus sent him to say that Lord Galt was better and should be left to sleep. Then he made his way back to his own chamber and, like his patient, slept the day through.

  After another meal delivered by Evan and eaten in solitude, he received a visit from the decurion of his cavalry escort—just to be sure, he told Postumus, that his head hadn’t become part of the chieftain’s household decorations. The decurion’s helmet and riding crop were tucked under one arm, and he looked like a man who wanted to be on a horse and gone.