The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  Gemellus relaxed. “I was farm-raised, sir. I don’t like to see the animals abused. We rob them of enough as it is.”

  Postumus was liking Gemellus better by the minute. “I’ll have a word with his commander too, to back you up. I’ve left my horse in the stables, so I’ll be about there soon enough, I hope. I’m just waiting for a message to come through.”

  Gemellus looked curious but also knew enough not to ask, and Postumus settled himself into his old quarters, blowing the dust off the furniture, to wait and see what happened.

  He set about making himself useful in the surgery in the meantime and shortly discovered that the reason for his junior surgeon’s new skills was that Chief Surgeon Aquila was in residence and seemed to have taken Gemellus under his rather frightening wing. He had appropriated the senior surgeon’s office too, as Postumus discovered the next morning when he went to use it himself.

  “I wondered when you’d take the time to look in on your own hospital,” Aquila said.

  “First chance I’ve had,” Postumus said. “I’m glad to see you here, sir.” He was relieved that Aquila hadn’t appropriated his quarters as well. He was probably sleeping in the legate’s bed in the Praetorium.

  Aquila shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Arthritis in my hip. I can’t ride anymore, much less walk more than a bit. It must be someone’s fault, but I can’t figure whose. You left that idiot in charge here, so I’ve been teaching him.”

  Postumus blanched. Gemellus would probably fall on his own scalpel in a week.

  “I don’t know how they trained him. It must have gone in one ear and out the other. But he’s shaping up.” Aquila stood and Postumus could see how bad his hip had gotten. “Go make yourself useful and send him to me. We’re going to go over the herbal again before he poisons someone.”

  Postumus passed on the message, somewhat edited, and waited for Gemellus to flinch, but he didn’t. He pulled his apron off and washed his hands at the surgery basin. “He’ll look at them and if they aren’t still damp, I’ll hear about it,” he said cheerfully.

  Maybe the old demon was mellowing in his dotage, Postumus thought. Before he left, though, he’d tell Gemellus the story of the cow, just in case.

  To his surprise, it didn’t take more than a few days. Clearly the arm ring carried the power that Galt had said it did. A sandy-haired boy who looked barely past his warrior initiation arrived to announce himself to be Colin of Lord Dawid’s house, here to take the surgeon to Lord Galt.

  “Thank you. He’s with Lord Dawid, then?”

  “This winter past.”

  Galt had his own holding, but it seemed he was seldom in residence. As the High King’s war leader, he would sleep in the king’s hall. And when on outs with the king, apparently with his fosterling Dawid.

  Postumus buckled himself into lorica and helmet, strapped on greaves and sword belt, picked up his packed kit, and whistled for Finn. He hustled Colin to the cavalry stables and back out of the fortress as quickly as possible lest he note the bareness of its streets, although that must be common knowledge. If the Brigantes didn’t know that already, they were asleep. Colin had tied a small yew branch to his spear (tactfully left outside the gates) and he handed another to Postumus to hang from his saddle horns, a sign of peaceful intent to whoever was watching, and Postumus knew that someone would be.

  It had been summer when he had come last to Dawid’s hold, the hillside purple with heather. Now it was brown and splotched with snow and at dusk a white hare shot across their path ahead of the silent shadow of an owl.

  “How has Lord Galt’s leg held up?” Postumus asked as they rode through the bare woods with Finn at their heels. “I am hoping that I have done him lasting good.”

  “His leg is well enough,” Colin said. There seemed to be more and Postumus waited for it, but it didn’t come. Colin was not the chatterer that young Evan had been. He seemed to talk to the trees, however, or to something in them, short soft hoots and whistles that Postumus didn’t comment on. By the time they neared the hillside track to Dawid’s hold on the second day, there were at least five watchers behind them that Postumus had spotted and no doubt more that he hadn’t.

  As they rode through the gates, two men in the farmyard cast him a sidelong glance, and four girls bringing washing up from the river stopped to stare at him as a slave in an iron collar came out to take the horses, but no one made the Sign of Horns at him this time.

  The skull set into the lintel above Dawid’s door greeted him with a fierce grin and Postumus resisted the urge to salute it, thinking madly that it much resembled Lollius Urbicus in a similar mood.

  The woman who ushered him in, whom he remembered as Dawid’s wife Brica, seemed rather more welcoming than she had when the king had been in residence. He wondered how Bran’s drunken vow, assuming that information was accurate, had split the households of his tribe.

  “May the sun shine on your path, Lady,” he told her in British, heavily accented and with his mother’s voice and the dialect of the south, and she greeted him with a small smile.

  “And on yours, Surgeon. Lord Galt is pleased that you have come. Colin, take the surgeon to him, please, and see to it that they have food and drink. And something for the dog.”

  At the door of Galt’s chamber, Postumus knew that something was wrong, that it was bad, and that he couldn’t undo it. He said none of that but went to the man propped on the wolfskins on the bed, and sat in the chair beside him.

  “Surgeon Corvus,” Galt said, and waited for Postumus to tell him why he was there. He was wretchedly thin, and his chamber was so tidy that Postumus knew that someone else was straightening it for him because he didn’t have the strength to do it himself. And the smell that Postumus had inhaled at the door was like a cloak around his shoulders, the scent that the deathly ill give off no matter how clean their flesh.

  “Lord Galt.” Before he could say more, Galt began to cough, reaching for a cloth lying on the floor and pressing it to his mouth. The coughing wracked his body and when he put the cloth down, Postumus saw the blood on it.

  “It was… not a winter cold,” Galt said, taking a ragged breath. “As you can see. Is that why you are here?”

  “The wind in the heather said you were unwell,” Postumus admitted.

  Galt didn’t ask where the wind blew from. It didn’t matter. “I find that I am glad to see you,” he observed as if the notion surprised him. “I see you have acquired a dog.”

  “And I you. The dog was accidental. And I am most sorry that the rumors seem true. Does it pain you greatly?”

  “Did you think you would work some cure?” Galt inquired. “Or just tell your governor when I am like to die?”

  “If I had a cure, I would have brought it.” There was no point in mincing words. Clearly, Galt knew. “And the governor’s concerns and mine are not necessarily the same ones,” Postumus said. “But yes, we would both like to avert the war that your High King seems determined to start.”

  Galt muttered something under his breath that Postumus took to be a curse, and not one aimed at him. As he shifted position in the piled skins, Postumus saw that he was wearing the arm ring. It sat loosely around his wasted arm. “I have some weight in the Council yet. And there are elders who remember the last war.”

  “And the High King?”

  Galt sighed, a long, irritated breath. “The king has a need for vengeance and a stiff pride. He is not one who can look very far down a road, or change a path as his father could.” Galt’s face as he spoke of the old king made Postumus remember what Galt had said that Beltane night. He was the other half of my soul.

  “If his father had lived, would it have been different then?” he asked.

  “If he hadn’t died when we destroyed your legion, Rome would have seen fit to kill him, I expect.” Galt stopped to cough into the bloody rag. When he had his breath again, he said, “But if not, if they had left him his kingdom—yes, I think it would have been.”

 
; The door opened and young Colin appeared with a tray of meat and a small round cheese, accompanied by a pitcher of beer. He set them on a table and drew it near the bed. Galt smiled at him gratefully.

  “Lord Dawid says to see if there is anything else you will need,” Colin told him. He set a bowl of porridge and scraps of meat on the floor.

  Postumus smiled at him. “The household is most hospitable.”

  “If you would make up a chamber for the surgeon,” Galt said. “There is not much he can do for me, but we may talk a while.”

  When Colin had left, Galt motioned at the tray. “Eat. I find I can’t keep much down these days, but the beer does me good. Will you stay a day or so? How anxious is your governor to know the state of my health?”

  Extremely anxious, Postumus knew, but he said, “I will stay.” A day or two would make little difference, as long as Galt lived.

  He left Galt to rest, and slept himself, and the next day they slipped into the kind of conversation they had exchanged when Galt’s leg was healing. Postumus had shed his lorica and helmet and gratefully accepted a pair of trousers better suited to the smoky chill of Dawid’s hold than his own military tunic and short breeches, thinking with amusement of Claudia’s conversation with the governor. Dawid sat with them occasionally and Brica came and fussed about Galt, changing bedclothes and brushing his hair, but mainly they left the two of them alone.

  “It does him good to talk to you,” Dawid said when they passed each other in the doorway. “I don’t know why, but it does.” Postumus wondered what way Dawid would go, if the king began a war. He would follow, no doubt, as Galt would have, if it came to it.

  “And have you settled, yourself,” Galt asked him when Postumus slid close to asking that, “on whether you are a Briton or a Roman?”

  “There is always dual loyalty for the native-born,” Postumus admitted, “but it’s to the land of Britain and the government of Rome, not the other way around. When I was small, I simply thought of myself as a Roman whose home was Britain. When I found out what happened to my father’s legion and how Rome treated the ones who survived, I felt betrayed. But the Medical Service and the Army have taken the edge off that somewhat. I’ve seen enough of the calculations involved in holding an empire to see that we have tried to hold too much, and yet we have it, and if we abandon it, we abandon the citizens we have settled there.”

  “That has always been the push and pull, has it not?” Galt said. “When we saw fit to fight Rome last, it was because the emperor had left your forts too lightly guarded.”

  “Fortunately, neither the last emperor nor this new one have been so minded,” Postumus said, hoping it was true.

  “I understand that he has added ‘Pius’ to his name,” Galt said with a small smile. “For what is he known to be so dutiful?”

  That Galt understood Latin well enough to grasp the subtleties of the term was not lost on Postumus. It was said that the designation came from having compelled the Senate to deify the deceased Hadrian over its own objections. Or for Antoninus’s refusal to execute the senators whom Hadrian, in the bad temper of the ill, had condemned to death. “Since the Senate awarded him that title, I rather think it’s for being dutiful to them,” Postumus said.

  “I had hoped,” Galt said, “when the king was of age and I was less needed, to see that empire that Rome has made us a part of.” He smiled. “See if the tales the traders tell are true.”

  “Probably not,” Postumus said.

  “No cities made of marble, with streets of gold?”

  “Marble, yes. Rome is largely built of it. Golden streets, no.”

  “Have you been to Rome?”

  “No. You would be surprised by how many of us haven’t.”

  Galt took a careful sip of the beer in his cup, and lay back against the piled skins on the bed. “Tell me where you have been.”

  “In Syria most recently, before this posting.”

  “What is it like?”

  “Most unlike Britain. Very hot and dry, with palm trees. And scorpions.”

  “I have seen a painting of palm trees,” Galt said. “But not of scorpions.”

  “They’re rather like a cross between a spider and a cricket,” Postumus said. “Or a thumb-size lobster. With a stinger on the end of the tail. Very nasty.”

  Galt looked dubious and Postumus got out of his chair and knelt by the hearth. He drew one in the ash with his fingertip. Galt leaned on one elbow to inspect it.

  “They get in your bedding and your boots and into the roof thatch and drop on your head,” Postumus said. “I had a commander who slept with a parasol over his head.”

  Galt laughed. “So should I. Tell me more.”

  Postumus considered what to tell him of the things that he would never see now. Galt was the first Briton he had known who had shown any interest in the outside world.

  “There is Petra, that’s in Arabia, to the south. I went there once with a tribune’s family doing the grand tour. They wanted a medical man along for the mother-in-law, which really meant someone to play Tabula with her when she got bored, so my senior surgeon lent me to them. But Petra was worth it. A whole red sandstone city carved out of living rock—temples, houses, cisterns, offices, baths. When the sun hits it, it glows.”

  Galt raised his eyebrows. “My people would think twice about investigating a hollow mountain.”

  “There are no tales of ban-sidhe that I know of, although they do carve their tombs into the rock. The tribune’s family had money enough to be wasteful and the mother-in-law would take sheaves of papyrus and sit by the public fountain and draw the monuments and the temples. We paid camel drivers to stop and hold their animals still so she could sketch them. I carried her paint pots.”

  “An arduous posting to be sure,” Galt said.

  “It didn’t last long. I was back to chasing the scorpions out of the hospital dispensary soon enough. But I was glad to have seen Petra.”

  “What other wonders does your empire hold?”

  “The Great Pyramid at Giza and the Pharos at Alexandria are accounted to be among the requirements for any grand tour, but I haven’t seen them. My Uncle Licinius saw the pharos and described it as ‘large.’ I’ve been to Helike, though. You’d like that. A whole city under the sea—it sank in a tidal wave five hundred years ago, off the coast of Achaea. You take a boat ride out and you can look down on the temples and statues and such. They used to be more spectacular than they are now, but the ocean is slowly eating them away.”

  Galt lay back down. “I am tired now. Perhaps I shall dream of sunken cities.” His eyes closed.

  * * *

  In the morning, Postumus folded the borrowed breeches and tunic neatly on the also neatly folded blankets of his bed, like a well brought up houseguest. Then he took the vial of eastern poppy from his kit and slipped it into the pouch at his belt.

  Galt sat halfway up, taking in Postumus’s lorica and military cloak, and the helmet under his arm. “You are leaving.” Postumus remembered the same words spoken two years ago while they walked the ponies up a hillside track.

  “I must,” he said as he had said then. He fingered the callused spot under his chin, left by years of a helmet strap rubbing there. Not as thick as the ones the soldiers bore, of course—you didn’t wear a helmet in the hospital—but there nonetheless, mark of a loyalty to something besides just the idea of Rome.

  “I am glad that you came, for whatever reason,” Galt said.

  Postumus took the small cloth-wrapped bundle from his belt. “I imagine your healers have done all they can, and will. This is for pain; you can use it if it gets too bad. It’s all that I know to give you. A few drops in a cup of beer.” He didn’t say, Be careful, you can also kill yourself with it. Galt knew that, although Postumus doubted that he would.

  Galt took the bundle and laid it on the table. His hand and arm seemed even thinner and paler than two days before. He pushed the blanket away to show the blue enamel arm ring with its circle
of leaping horses. “Travel safely.” He paused. “If this comes back to you again, you will know that I am gone.”

  Postumus nodded. Dawid and Brica were waiting in the doorway to show him out. Boreas was tethered outside, saddled and hung conspicuously with green branches on both flanks. He thanked Dawid and Brica for their hospitality and rode away with Finn at his heels, down the hillside track into his own world.

  XVII. Dis Manibus

  The trees leafed out and the slow dance of spring spread across the countryside, and Postumus rejoined his legion with the firm intent to stay there. This was his job, his place to be. Moodily collecting his pay and grumbling at the stoppages (for his retirement account; for rations; for winter boots), he found a letter from Justin waiting. As a rule, Justin’s missives were short, cheerful accounts of his doings, but this time, aside from the usual felicitations, there was an exasperated tinge to his brother’s voice.

  I must envy you your post with a unit that is up to strength. Certain elements in Dacia Inferior and Germania are being troublesome and we are being shuttled about to patch holes while we build new fortifications in the Agri Decumates. We are to shove the Limes Germanicus fifteen miles forward, it seems. At the same time, we hear that Judea and Egypt are restless and need looking to. Presumably with yet another detachment of my troops, which I can’t spare. On the bright side, I have leave coming up and am going home to kiss the family.

  Postumus folded the letter up again, regretting that he had used all his own leave carousing in Londinium with Valerian. On the other hand, he was unlikely to be granted any just now anyway. He put his hospital to rights, played latrunculi (and lost) with Lucian, taught Finn Latin, and polished his armor. Lorica, helmet, and greaves restored to a suitable shine, he wrote back to Justin, to Constantia, and his parents, cheerful chatty letters that didn’t mention anything he had actually been doing beyond these harmless occupations.

  * * *

  Valerian, with a highly mobile army of cavalry, made another sweep of the south. He let it be known in each village that the house found to be harboring a fugitive would be burned, and worse happen to its inhabitants.