The Wall at the Edge of the World
Page 23
He stood and stripped off his borrowed clothes then and stood, naked himself, above her. She lay with one knee drawn up as if in acquiescence, and one arm flung out across the straw. Then she held out the other hand to him. He knelt over her and felt her shiver again under his hands as he traced the tattooed patterns on her thighs. He put his arms around her and felt her hands come up to tangle themselves in his hair as she wrapped her legs around him.
* * *
Postumus woke in the morning as the faint dawn light that penetrated the cavern mouth softened the dark air outside the tent. Claudia was still curled in the crook of his arm. Her hair was tangled and knotted with straw and she was still naked under the cloaks that he vaguely remembered having pulled over them. He lay still, now wondering what evil genius had prompted last night’s adventures, telling over in his mind the possible consequences, not the least of which was what they were going to do if he proved more potent than her husband and she found herself with child. There were ways around that, of course, but he had always done as most men did and assumed that the woman in question had taken care to deal with the problem. But Claudia was no tart. A point, he now thought, that should have occurred to him last night.
Claudia stirred and opened her eyes. She lay comfortably against his arm, but didn’t look at him. Instead she seemed to gaze into the darkness at the far wall.
“Wondering how we could have been so stupid?” he said at last, gently.
At that, she turned toward him. “No,” she said frankly. “Only why no one ever told me it was supposed to be like that.”
Postumus watched as she sat up and rummaged in the darkness for her clothes. “I’m flattered, but your husband must have been a fool,” he observed. And was he her first lover since then? That gave somehow even more weight to his worries. And then, thinking again of that, he said bluntly, “What if you are with child?”
“It seems to me unlikely,” she said, lacing the thongs of her breeches, “or I wouldn’t have done it.”
It was all the answer he could reasonably expect, but he said, “Will you at least let me know if I’ve done anything irreparable?”
“I will,” she said, picking the straw from her hair.
What they would do then, he had no idea. “And what will you do now? When I have taken your tallies to Urbicus?”
“Go south for the winter, or what’s left of it, like the gray goose.”
Leaving him with only a feather by his bed to mark her presence in it, he thought.
“Do you become respectable again then?”
“For this war, at least. I have given the legions all I could learn. It is their turn to make use of it. I shall go home and tend to my roses.”
And he had a hospital, likely soon to be overflowing with men sent to act on that hard-earned information.
She rose in the dim light, motioning for him to stay, and returned in a moment with his uniform tunic and leggings, with the dog at her heels. She lit the guttered oil lamp and the dog hopped onto the bed beside him. “Brys and Octavius were still snoring,” she said. “I have kicked them awake somewhat rudely but it is just as well. I have no wish to be a scandal to my honest drivers. I think this is your dog,” she added.
Postumus stood up, shoving the dog aside. “I don’t recall asking for you,” he told it. He pulled the white linen folds of his undertunic over his head, and then the scarlet uniform tunic, and drew on the close-fitting woolen breeches that ended just below the knee. “I hate these things,” he said, cross-lacing the stiffened leggings over his calves. “They are completely inadequate.”
“I asked Lollius Urbicus why the Army doesn’t adopt British dress for British winters,” Claudia said, “and he told me it was a matter of national pride.”
“And so it is,” Postumus said. “It’s hard to think yourself better than the other fellow when you look just like him. Trousers are for barbarians. Romans wear tunics. Even if they have to wear leggings under them.”
“And so we preserve our national superiority,” Claudia said. “With tunics over our trousers.”
“Exactly.” He fastened his belt, with the double caduceus insignia of his trade, and they emerged from the tent into the drafty hall of the cavern where Brys was burning oat cakes over the fire. Two saddled ponies were tethered by the cavern mouth. It appeared to be the next morning, and not a hundred years gone.
XVI. Galt Again
Still, when she had bidden him goodbye and put the leather-wrapped parcel for the governor in his hands, and Octavius had guided him back though the dawn mist to the edge of the wood below the fort, he felt a certain unreasonable relief to see Castra Damnoniorum apparently as he had left it.
Wrapped in mist, the fort walls and the remains of Agricola’s bathhouse appeared unchanged. Trebonius’s grave, as he passed it with a small salute, was still fresh, although snow-covered now. The sentry who passed him in through the Dexter Gate, with the dog at his heels, appeared to still know him. All he had acquired from a night with the fay was a dog. His relief at that amused him although it left him still inclined to question his sanity. He made for the governor’s office before anyone could ask him where he had been.
“Sit,” he said experimentally to the dog, outside the Principia. The dog cocked an ear at the strange word. Postumus tried British and it hesitated a moment and then sat. “You’ll have to get used to the accent,” Postumus told him and he thumped his tail. What in Diana’s name was he doing with a dog? He didn’t have time to hunt, which appeared to be what it was trained for.
The governor’s optio also passed him in without question. Postumus had thought it a fortunate coincidence that the governor was still in residence, but it occurred to him now that the governor had more likely been waiting for his spy’s report.
Lollius Urbicus looked up from a breakfast of olives and boiled eggs when Postumus entered. Postumus saluted and the governor raised an eyebrow and waited.
Postumus handed over the leather-wrapped parcel from Claudia and Urbicus raised the eyebrow higher. “I do seem to remember telling you to stay away from a certain person,” he remarked, cracking an egg.
“The certain person came to me,” Postumus said, wondering uncomfortably if Urbicus somehow knew what else he had done with the person. The governor’s staff generally considered him to have the second sight.
Urbicus unwrapped the leather bindings. The tally sticks fell out in his hand, and a stack of wax tablets with them. He didn’t tell Postumus to go away, so Postumus waited as he read the sticks, and then the tablets, and watched him scrape the wax carefully clean with a stylus when he was through. “Perhaps you are fortuitous,” he commented.
Postumus stayed at parade rest and waited to see what that meant. It was the same thing that Claudia had said.
Urbicus arranged the tally sticks in a neat row on his desk, pushing his breakfast dishes out of the way. “Men, stores, horses. More than I hoped. Not so many as I feared. The situation is promising if the Brigantes stay clear.”
Postumus nodded, wondering if that was more uncertain than it had been.
“What I am telling you will not leave this room, Surgeon. Do I make myself clear?”
“Of course, sir,” Postumus said, also beginning to wonder uneasily why he was telling him in the first place.
“Sit down, Surgeon. You make me twitch standing like that.”
“Yes, sir.” Postumus sat in the visitor’s chair opposite the governor’s desk.
“It appears from this person’s information that the Picts do not trust the High King of the Brigantes. This is not news, exactly. None of them trust each other. But—Bran has apparently made a drunken vow, while the Pictish emissary was in his court, to fight the Roman occupation to the death. His and everyone else’s, of course. Does that sound likely to you, Surgeon? You met him.”
“I’m afraid it does, sir.” An image of Bran, simmering with fury at practically everything, crossed his mind. Anger seemed to be his natural state.
“He was coughing when I saw him by chance in Isurium at Beltane,” Postumus said. “I put it down to a cold, and so did he, but…”
“It isn’t. He was spitting blood.”
Postumus closed his eyes briefly, grieving. That would kill him. He didn’t know why; only that it would. He thought of Trebonius and wanted to scream.
“You are distressed,” Urbicus said, not unkindly.
Postumus looked up. “I liked him. And he has held Bran in check.”
“I’ve never met him and I like him for that reason,” Urbicus commented. “We need to know how long he is likely to live.”
“I can’t tell you that,” Postumus said. “Lung disease has a lot of variables. He was only coughing when I saw him.”
“You will contrive to renew the acquaintance.”
Postumus balked. “I am needed here, sir.”
“I am aware that if you wanted to be a spy, you would have joined the Frontier Scouts,” Urbicus said.
“I would, sir.” The thought of repeating the dismal experience of watching Trebonius die left him feeling rebellious.
“You are native-born, aren’t you?” the governor said. “Like her.” He waved his hand at the tally sticks. “Your world won’t endure without Rome, Surgeon. Not unless Rome continues to settle in, marry in, breed in, produce more families like yours and hers, several generations down.”
“I had the same conversation with her last night,” Postumus admitted.
The governor gave him an irritated look. “I shan’t inquire what other conversations you had last night. But you take my point. We must deal with the Picts in the spring and we’ll have to pull nearly every man out of the Brigantian forts to garrison the wall. I must be sure we aren’t leaving a nest of adders behind us. The Picts will lick their wounds for a while, but come spring they’ll have a go at pulling it down. We’ll have to be quite sure there’s no one behind us pushing while they’re pulling. And their High Priest is apparently a Druid.” Urbicus looked exasperated. Druids were forbidden and were executed anywhere that Rome could find them because they fomented rebellion, and not even a king would go against their word.
Urbicus shoved the tally sticks into his desk drawer. “As soon as the weather clears, I expect you to contrive a way to visit Lord Galt.”
That was apparently the end of the interview. Postumus rose and saluted, collected the dog, which was waiting for him outside the Principia, and made his way across the fort to the hospital. Someone had drawn a buck-toothed caricature of his centurion, identifiable by the transverse crest on his helmet and the vine staff in his hand, on the outer wall and Postumus expected that someone would also be out there shortly with a brush and bucket, afterward to use them on the latrines as well, but it was good to see they had enough energy to be troublesome.
His staff greeted him cheerfully, apparently under the impression that he had spent the night innocently sulking in his quarters.
“You’ve got a dog with you,” Tertius said.
“It was supposed to be a goat, but they cheated me,” Postumus told him. “Get to work.”
Sick parade presented him with several cases of healing frostbite to be re-checked, one bad cough which worried him and made him think unhappily of Galt, a broken nose and split knuckles on the respective combatants of a drunken disagreement, and one case of outright malingering with which he could thoroughly sympathize.
The men were only beginning to recover from the battle with the Picts and the exhaustion of the push to close the last gap in the wall. When the weather held, their officers took them out for slowly lengthening drills, to keep them out of trouble as much as get them back in shape, and Valerian’s cavalry conducted sweeps up and down the wall. Now that it was complete, dedications began to be installed along its length, commissioned by the troops who had bought it dearly. At Castra Damnoniorum, a brightly painted relief of Roman soldiers with bound captives on one side and the governor conducting a pre-campaign sacrifice on the other flanked an inscription declaring that for the Emperor Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius, Father of his Country, the Seventh Cohort of the Sixth Legion Victrix had built 4793 paces of the wall.
When the governor, making ready to conduct his inspection of the frontier forts, informed Postumus that a supply train now making its deliveries to the wall would be going south again toward Eburacum the next day, and that its hospital and those in the Brigantian Hills were due for inspection by a senior surgeon, it was clear what he meant: Go with it and find Lord Galt.
And see if you think he’s going to die, Postumus thought miserably. On the other hand, maybe the intelligence was wrong. It was thirdhand, from Claudia from a Pictish lord who had seen Galt in the winter, with probably someone else in between as well. He packed the gold and blue enamel arm ring that had been Galt’s gift to him into his kit. Show it to a man of the Brigantes, Galt had said, if he should ever need to. He doubted that Galt had meant for him to use it to spy on him, but perhaps he had. Postumus thought that Galt would do a good deal to stop a war. Galt had no love for Rome, but he was a man who could see farther into a millstone than most. Certainly farther than Bran.
He handed off to Lucian and Flavian, mounted Boreas and fell in beside the wagons heading south. The dog seemed determined to come with him, so he let it.
“Do you have a name?” he inquired. When it didn’t answer, he thought it over and settled on Finn. There had been a similar great gray dog in his babyhood with that name and it seemed comfortably familiar.
It was cold, with a little spit of snow still on the wind, and he thought wistfully of the straw bed and the fire in Claudia’s cave, and of Claudia herself for that matter, naked and warm under the blankets. At night he slept in a wagon bed, in the company of Finn’s bulk and a large and hairy driver, both of whom snored, and it was not the same at all.
At the old wall, he parted with the supply train and made an inspection of the hill fort hospitals at Longovicium and Vinovia for verisimilitude. Was it true the governor was going to pull all the troops from the hill forts and send them north, the junior surgeons in charge wanted to know, and all Postumus could say was that no one knew what was in the governor’s head, even when they thought they did.
None of the Brigante lords were likely to be in Isurium until the Beltane council more than a month away, but there were families of the Brigantes who had settled into town life. Someone would know someone who could reach Galt. Postumus took his dinner at an inn called the White Mare and made friends with the serving girl, not a slave but the daughter of the household, over lamb stew.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said, turning the arm ring in her hand and widening her eyes a bit at the pattern of running horses. Postumus had not seen it elsewhere and it dawned on him that it was probably Galt’s family mark. “But my brother, he trades in the hills often, pony trappings and copper pots and glass, and cloak pins and fairings, the sort of thing that people are happy to see after a nasty winter. He’s going out tomorrow. I could send it with him. Anyone up there will recognize that”—she clearly did— “and send it along the way.”
“Thank you,” Postumus said, handing over a silver denarius for encouragement, although he doubted now that anyone would steal that arm ring. “The message that goes with it is that Surgeon Corvus of the Eagles would like to visit with Lord Galt and see how that healed leg of his is doing.”
She nodded. “We heard that a surgeon of the legions had done him a kindness. He is much loved. I’ll give this to my brother. Will you be staying in Isurium to hear an answer?”
“I’ll be at Eburacum Fortress,” Postumus said. “Earning my pay.” He smiled at her and left another coin on the table above the cost of his meal. “Thank you.”
* * *
&n
bsp; Find Galt, Postumus thought as he rode south toward Eburacum. Oh certainly, that will be easy. Perhaps you’d me like to rediscover Atlantis while I’m at it? It’s bound to be around here somewhere. He arrived, grumpily, at Eburacum, his expression unnerving the junior surgeon in charge until he realized that the senior surgeon had not come down from the new wall just to tell him that he was Doing It Wrong. In fact, Gemellus appeared to have improved his skills considerably.
When he arrived, Gemellus was taping the ribs of a cavalryman who had been kicked by an ungrateful troop horse, and lecturing him on the subject: “If I find you’ve been beating that horse again, I’ll prescribe a course of purge and see that you’re made to take it. They’re living beings, these animals, not some practice dummy you can pound on. Treat them kindly and they won’t kick you, you fool. Go on as you’re going and you’ll see the error of your ways the first time you take that horse into a fight. I’m writing a report for your commander.”
He jumped when he saw Postumus in the doorway as the trooper departed and Postumus rearranged his face to look less like a man about to bite someone. “I hadn’t thought of threatening them with purge,” he said, grinning. “I’ll file that one away.”