The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  Agricola had fought his way around the Bodotria Estuary, secured his work with a naval station at Horrea and a legionary fortress at Castra Pinnata, and then pushed his army north along the eastern coast almost as far as Taezalorum Head before the Emperor Domitian had recalled him and Rome had begun to drain off troops from Britain to fight for more profitable conquests in the East. Now along the walls and ditches of Agricola’s deserted camps rose the new forts of Emperor Antoninus Pius and Governor Lollius Urbicus.

  The garrison at Damnoniorum was an auxiliary cohort of the Nervii out of Belgica, although as with most of the auxiliaries, their senior officers were Roman. It had been built on the remains of one of Agricola’s old camps and the present commander had even known where to dig for the supplies those long-ago troops had not been able to take with them when the evacuation order came. Like the building of a fort, its evacuation followed a certain pattern from which future garrisons might benefit. Their excavations had turned up a hoard of iron nails which the building crews had seized upon, but better yet, to Postumus’s mind, was the bundle of copper scraps, left by some long-gone surgeon to form the verdigris used to halt infection.

  The hospital was situated in its usual spot beside the Principia in the center of the compound, and Lucian met him in the portico, wiping his hands on a bloody apron and looking overworked. Postumus thought furiously of the time he’d spent kicking his heels in Corstopitum and then, guiltily, of the extra days he had remained beyond absolute necessity in the Brigantian Hills.

  Lucian saluted, bloody hand to the bloody apron covering his chest. “Disgusting way to greet you, sir. All the same, I’m glad to see you.” His thin face looked worried. Lucian was solitary by nature, Postumus thought. He wasn’t ready to command the frantic pace of a field hospital, but he had had no choice. Fortunately, despite Lucian’s bloody appearance they were, he said, in a lull at the moment. All the blood had come from a soldier who had cut his foot with a builder’s adze. “The commander will want to see you when you’ve settled,” he said. “I’m going to bathe.”

  The hospital itself followed the usual pattern of four wings around a courtyard, but it had been rebuilt in timber over the remains of the old Agricolan hospital, unlike the smooth stone and tile roofs of the hospital complex at Eburacum. Inside, the walls were plain Army whitewash and the floors were oiled wood. The dispensary cupboards were ample and well stocked, and their doors had been prudently secured by iron locks to which he was handed the key. The locks had been recently oiled and the key turned without protest. Postumus breathed in the familiar sharp scent of herbs and unguents and the sticky sweetness of the poppy cakes.

  Castra Damnoniorum, like its sister forts a few miles to either side, was overlooked by a stretch of hills still in Pictish hands, and a double row of ditch-and-rampart works had been raised around it, over the remains of what had once been an annex to the fort. Beyond this perimeter blossomed a field of “lilies,” sharpened stakes sunk in circular pits and masked with brushwood. Beyond that line, to the north, the ground was strewn with caltrops.

  It looked very much as if they were expecting trouble and indeed, they had already had trouble enough, as Centurion Frontinus, the battle-scarred Damnoniorum camp commander, informed him at his briefing. Frontinus had a graying brush of hair and a scar that ran from his brow down to the bottom of his mangled left ear.

  “The minute we lighten our guard or cut back our patrols by so much as half a mile, they come swarming down out of the hills like flies out of a carcass,” Frontinus said. “We haven’t the men to take out after them until we’ve finished settling the Selgovae’s hash at our backs, but we’ve got to hold till then, or there’s the whole frontier to retake.”

  “How big an army has Brendan got left to him?” Postumus asked.

  “That’s just the trouble. We don’t know for sure. Report has it that his army’s massing for a final push this season, but where is another matter. There’s a lot of Valentia to hide out in, and a Briton practically melts into the ground when you look at him.”

  Before they could go further, the commander’s briefing was interrupted by shouting outside the Principia and a wagonload of wounded, the ragged remains of a cavalry patrol sent out by the next fort to the west. They had beaten back their attackers, but only when a second patrol had crossed their trail and ridden to reinforce them. Makeshift field aid had been applied and they had left their emergency cases to the single surgeon at their camp hospital and sent the rest to Castra Damnoniorum. Postumus began checking them as the orderlies lifted them from the wagon.

  “Get a better tourniquet on this one until I can get to him,” Postumus said. “Lucian, start one of the apprentices on this one. I think it’s going to take a ‘spoon’ to get that spearhead out so tell him to go carefully.”

  The next man was covered with a light blanket, leaving only his sandaled toes exposed. “There won’t be much you can do for that one,” the man with the broken spear in his shoulder said tiredly, and Postumus almost gagged as he saw that the body had no head.

  He dropped the blanket down again. “Identify him before they burn him,” he snapped at the orderly standing at his elbow. “He’ll have to go on the Dead List with the rest. But don’t bring him in here.” The head, he knew queasily, would be tied to some Selgovae warrior’s belt.

  Postumus, Lucian, and Flavian, the other junior, plus the apprentices, worked for the better part of the day over the nine living bodies taken from the wagon, while the tenth was identified by a retching comrade from the troops that had ridden in with them.

  “It’s the head, sir,” he apologized to Frontinus, who also looked a little sick. “If it wasn’t… gone… it wouldn’t be so bad. Poor old Crispus. Do you suppose he’ll get his head back in the Otherworld, sir?”

  Frontinus scratched his own head, possibly at a loss for words for the first time in his career. “I expect so,” he said, and laid a hand on the trooper’s shoulder. “Now get along back to your camp. Take him and light his pyre with his own men around him.”

  Of the nine wounded, Postumus was cautiously hopeful that they had saved six, which as he said to Lucian afterward, wasn’t bad, considering. One had been dead when they got to him, one had a spear clean through his chest and had bled to death despite everything, and one was in shock and they had never been able to bring him out of it. He didn’t survive the amputation of the leg that had been crushed beyond repair by the iron-bound rim of a chariot’s wheel. Cinnamus, one of the two apprentices, had pulled the spear from his patient’s shoulder with the long-handled Spoon of Diokles, which encased the barbs of the spearhead and drew them out without tearing the flesh, and it looked as if the shoulder muscles were going to heal cleanly. But Postumus had spent three hours stitching the intestinal wound of a man who had taken a vicious spear thrust in the belly, and Lucian had worked himself to exhaustion over the man with the crushed leg, only to lose him in the end.

  Postumus, checking the man with the belly wound the next day, was grimly afraid they were going to lose him too, and three days later this foreboding proved right. Lucian found him outside the ward, slamming his fist against the wall.

  “You know if you keep that up, you won’t be able to operate at all,” Lucian said. “Do I remember you telling me, when that amputation case died, that I had better learn I couldn’t save them all if I ever wanted to make a good Army surgeon? Sir,” he added as an afterthought.

  “It never occurred to me that you’d throw it back in my face,” Postumus said truthfully. “Come on, let’s make the rounds and go get some dinner. Flavian has duty tonight, and he’s got Cinnamus and young Quintus. Unless there’s a night attack somewhere we should have some peace.”

  After a dinner of camp fare cooked over the fire in Lucian’s rooms, and left wakeful by the past days’ effort and the still, something’s-going-to-happen feeling of the frontier at night, they wandered into the room off the Principia that served as a communal gathering place for the officers
of Damnoniorum. Their numbers were not great—Frontinus, the camp commander, and four senior centurions of his cohort (the fifth had been killed the week before chasing a Pictish raiding party that had led them into a walled valley and then fired the heather behind them); four cavalry decurions posted from the elite Ala Petriana; Postumus, his junior surgeons and apprentices; and the occasional officer of the Frontier Scouts, who kept no regular post but went mainly where they could keep an ear to the wind in the heather and give the most annoyance to the Pict.

  One of the scouts was there tonight, busily teaching a British board game, which seemed to be compounded mainly of inspired cheating, to one of the commander’s centurions. “The bastards’ll slip your tunic off under your breastplate,” Frontinus muttered, watching his junior officer being expertly fleeced by the scout.

  “There’s not much else to do up here, sir,” Lucian said, with a fascinated eye on the game. He pushed his hair back from his face—despite all efforts it resolutely refused to curl, hanging instead despondently over his ears. He sat up as the beaten centurion threw up his hands. “Here, let me try. I think I’ve got the hang of it.”

  “Uh, Lucian… I wouldn’t,” Postumus said, but Lucian shook his head.

  “Don’t worry, I think I see how it’s done.” He took the centurion’s place.

  Postumus winced. The scouts doubled their pay on people like Lucian, he thought, remembering his housemate in Corstopitum. “Don’t gamble with the scouts” had been Hilarion’s parting advice on his stepson’s departure for the Army.

  Lucian smiled at the frontier scout. “Come, friend, show me the rules.”

  * * *

  “What in Fortune’s name are you doing in the Medical Corps?” Postumus inquired admiringly as they made their way back to their quarters, Lucian cheerfully jingling the coins in his purse. “You ought to be fleecing the tourists in Aquae Sulis.”

  “Actually, I thought about teaching mathematics at one point,” Lucian said, “but it seemed so dry compared to medicine. That game’s not particularly difficult. It’s a matter of getting the moves right, and then remembering them. That and knowing the odds, of course. It’s a lot like latrunculi.”

  Since latrunculi was a hideously complicated game of military tactics at which Postumus couldn’t have beaten an eight-year-old, he refrained from comment, merely making a mental note of his junior surgeon’s uncanny ability, for possible future use. No wonder the boy was so fascinated by research. A mind like that had to go somewhere. He really belonged in one of the old teaching hospitals at Alexandria, but these days Army medicine probably came the closest, although admittedly it was practiced in the face of much distraction.

  This was brought home to Postumus once again the next morning, when an optio hauled him out of surgery and, loudly protesting, off to the commandant’s office in the Principia. Postumus shucked off his bloody apron and found Frontinus, looking somewhat harassed, seated at his desk, and before him, in a cross-legged chair, his helmet with its eagle feather crest on a table beside him, Aelius Silanus, Legate of the Sixth Victrix. He had a young tribune in a purple-bordered tunic with him, a staff officer doing his year in the Army; he couldn’t have been more than nineteen, Postumus thought from his lofty vantage point of twenty-four.

  Postumus swallowed and eyed the legate warily, but Silanus appeared to be in a reasonably good mood. “Well, Corvus, you took your sweet time getting here,” he said briskly. “I hope your information justifies it.”

  Postumus blinked. “The Brigantes, sir?” Two-thirds of his mind was still on his surgery and how well young Cinnamus was doing with the feverish thigh wound that Postumus had turned over to him at the optio’s insistence.

  “Of course the Brigantes! Who do you think I sent you to spy on, the governor’s horse?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” Postumus said. “I’m somewhat distracted at the moment. The man I was working on—if that leg gets infected—”

  “He can die secure in the knowledge that his sacrifice has been of service to Rome,” the legate said. “Sit down, Surgeon Corvus, and stop blithering. Your junior surgeons are perfectly capable of handling that wound. I know, because I told the optio to wait, if you were engaged in repairing an essential part of anyone’s anatomy, and I’m not used to being disobeyed.”

  “Yes, sir.” Postumus sat.

  “Now tell me what you’ve been able to get on those demons.”

  “Enough to make me nervous, sir,” Postumus said frankly. “As well as one or two things that I found reassuring. Rather a mixed report, I’m afraid.”

  “Explain.” The legate folded his hands on the gilded metal of his breastplate and leaned back in his chair.

  “The man I treated was Galt.” Postumus struggled to put his memories in report form. “He was regent for the tribe for probably fourteen years after the old king was killed, and he was the one who signed the treaty with us.” Postumus paused. “And then there’s the High King, Bran. He’s about twenty-six, which means that he’s held his own power for a dozen years—boys in these tribes become men at fourteen. He doesn’t like Rome or anything smelling of it.”

  “But Galt does?” the legate asked.

  “Not like, no,” Postumus said, “although he is willing to make use of us when it suits him. He’s merely more practical than Bran. Also, I think that what concerns Galt most is that the tribe itself should survive.”

  “Whereas Bran would dance on our graves and let the future take care of itself,” the legate said. “Someone should remind him of what happened to the Iceni after Boudicca did that.”

  “I expect Galt has,” Postumus said, “but I doubt that Bran is thinking in those terms. If he wins, he assumes it won’t come up.”

  “His father didn’t win,” Aelius Silanus said, “not in the long run. And Bran won’t either if he tries it. I looked up the old records when trouble first started stirring. The only reason the Brigantes didn’t go the way of the Iceni was this Galt’s diplomacy, and there are a lot of people who still think we owe the Brigantes one. Rome gets very vindictive when we lose an Eagle.”

  “How much influence has Galt got?” Frontinus asked.

  “A fair amount in most things,” Postumus said. “He is well thought of in the tribe, he was the old king’s hound and leader of his household warriors, and he holds the same post for the new king. That may be only because as regent he kept the young king on his throne. I’m not sure there is any love between them, but it will take some strength of will for Bran to go against Galt’s advice. If it comes to starting a war, though, Bran will have the final say as long as his clan chieftains go along.”

  “And if the High King is muddleheaded enough to do that?” the legate asked. “What will Galt do?”

  “He’ll follow him, if the Council votes for war,” Postumus said. “He won’t go against the Council.”

  The legate muttered something irritable and indistinguishable, and then his questioning turned to the Brigantes’ weapons and how many men they could field in a war, which Postumus answered as accurately as he could, with no real certainty; and to Bran’s relations with Brendan of the Selgovae, on which subject Postumus could supply nothing more than a vague suspicion based on past performance. Which put him, as the legate said, about even with the rest of the Army.

  “The Brigantes and the Selgovae are kin to each other,” Silanus explained to the tribune. “And it’s the Brigantes who are sitting in our laps around Eburacum. If they go, we’ve got trouble.”

  “They’ve allied with the Selgovae before, of course,” Frontinus said. “That was one of the main reasons for the southern wall, to break that up.”

  “Which left the Selgovae free to keep up their acquaintance with the Picts.” The legate tapped his fingers on his breastplate. “Or at least with the Caledones, which means two-thirds of the most powerful Pictish clans. Fortunately, the Picts and the lowland tribes hate each other almost as much as they hate us.”

  “Why is that, sir?
”

  “The Picts give their first worship to the Mother and the lowland tribes to the Sun Lord. They’ll only ally when it gives them a good shot at Rome. When Galt and Brendan made treaty with us, the Caledones walked out of the council, and when our army went after them, the lowland tribes sat tight and waved us on our way. Lately they’ve been getting entirely too chummy again. That had more to do with our opening up the Wall than any amount of petitions from the Votadini.”

  “And what are the Votadini doing all this while?” the tribune asked.

  “Paying their taxes and behaving themselves. All they wanted was for us to get Brendan out of their hair. The Selgovae are a lot bigger and stronger than the Votadini and they’ve been encroaching on their territory for years. The Votadini decided a long way back that their best chance lay with Rome and they’ve stuck to it. When Brendan began lifting their cattle a little too heavily, it gave us a chance to show that we protect our own.” The legate’s voice was slightly cynical. “And, incidentally, a good excuse to tone down Brendan’s sphere of influence.” He flicked at the ends of the white general’s sash that was knotted about his spare middle. “We’ve a good idea that Brendan was after the Votadini to ally with him in an uprising, and when they wouldn’t go for it, he stepped up his raiding to put pressure on. The Votadini aren’t saying, for fear we might think they’d have gone along with it.”

  “And then there’s the Damnonii, the local folk around here,” Frontinus said. “They’re behaving for the moment, but then they don’t like the Pict, and they live a lot too close to him for comfort. And the Novantae in the southwest of Valentia might just as well be lumped in with the Selgovae. They’re more a subgroup of the Selgovae than a separate tribe anyway, and they follow the Selgovae Warlord when it comes to a fight.”