The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  “And what would there be here for them to stay?” a woman asked him. The basket over her arm held a few scrawny turnips, the remnants of her kitchen garden. The corn in the fields had all gone to feed the army, first Brendan’s and then the Romans’. She spat at him and walked away.

  By late spring it was becoming clear that Lollius Urbicus’s tactics had resulted in the remnants of the Selgovae massing south of Clota-Mouth, according to the scouts. They had been harried steadily northwest, any diversion hindered by the unwillingness of tribes south of the new wall to shelter fugitives who had Rome on their tail. Word was that the Caledones and an unknown number of the Eastern Pictish tribes were massing in the north, presumably to meet them. The Picts were, just now, two separate bands and it would take them time to join. The mountainous river-laden country in the west made travel directly to the east difficult for a war band. If they rode south toward the Epidii lands, a substantial auxiliary detachment blocked their path. The eastern tribes would have to move south through the glens that led to the lowlands near Castra Pinnata and the naval station at Horrea, where they could be stalled by the glen-mouth forts. Urbicus intended to rid himself of the intractable Selgovae completely and then, if the Picts were still interested, he would be happy to settle their ambitions for the next two generations.

  The morning that the governor gathered his forces from their scattered and hidden encampments below Clota-Mouth, the air was still with the wary silence that an alien presence makes among the sky and forest creatures. They waited on a ridge above a valley cut through by a small tributary of the Clota, well back in the trees, like a hawk, Postumus thought, waiting for lunch.

  The Selgovae band came up the valley on the near side of the river, a cluster of chariots and horsemen and men on foot, loaded wagons trailing them. They looked to Postumus desperately weary, like hunted creatures stumbling up the uneven ground.

  Urbicus and his generals conferred, the sacrifices for victory were made, and the first and then the second trumpets sounded. The Selgovae could hear them if they wished, because it was too late.

  Besides the bulk of the Victrix, there were six cohorts of the Second Augusta and nearly half of the Twentieth, supplemented by auxiliary units of archers and horse. Valerian’s main cavalry units were behind the Selgovae on their path north, pushing them toward the waiting legions. There would be no prisoners, no treaties this time. Brendan had already been executed when his tribesmen’s ragtag army had re-formed to overthrow the last treaty.

  Postumus, watching the Britons streaming through the valley, thought that they must know by now, but there was no way to turn back at this point, driven before Valerian’s cavalry. With Lucian and Flavian and the surgeon of the Twentieth, he made a last inspection of the hospital tents. Most of the medical staff, including Postumus and his juniors, had been pulled from the wall forts to join Urbicus in the field. Postumus had tried to leave Finn with the garrison at Castra Damnoniorum but Finn wasn’t having it, and when Postumus had chased him back twice, he had given up. He could only imagine what Calpurnius Aquila would have to say about that, but Calpurnius Aquila’s bad hip had forced him into retirement. The other two legionary detachments had their own surgeons and hospitals, combined for the campaign into a single unit, and they amicably sorted out duties between them.

  “We’re all glad not to have old Aquila breathing down our necks,” Lucian said. “I’ve never been so terrified of anyone in my life.”

  “You will be,” Tertius informed him. “What I saw of the Picts the last time was enough to last me the rest of my life.”

  “I was there,” Lucian said tartly. “I remember.” Tertius had a habit of regaling the surgical staff with gory reminiscences of his days as a fighting man. “And I expect I’ve seen more blood than you have.”

  “Settle,” Postumus said.

  Tertius regarded Lucian’s ability to beat nearly anyone at any game as sinister, and Lucian’s mathematical explanations made his head swim. He invariably countered with the thing that he knew best, which was how to kill people.

  The third trumpet, the Order to March, cut the morning air and the massed army shook itself like a hound turning to the hunt.

  The battle was short and bloody. The last of the Selgovae, on foot or horseback but with few chariots among them, and with the cavalry at their rear, hurled themselves furiously at the Roman auxiliaries as they streamed down the ridge. The auxiliaries responded with a rain of pilums and arrows and then raised their shields, moving back slowly, until the momentum of the Selgovae charge broke. The trumpets sounded again and the legionary troops moved out of the trees from either side before they could regroup, and clicked shut around them like a lock. Brendan had freed his people of Rome only in the sense that the dead are free.

  * * *

  “Are there no prisoners?” Flavian asked, pushing his bloody hair out of his eyes. The casualties on the Roman side had been minimal and when that was the case, there were generally prisoners brought in to be seen to.

  “No,” Postumus said.

  “None?” Lucian looked surprised.

  “None.” Not for the slave market or for a treaty exchange. Urbicus’s orders.

  “They’ve been allowed to take their own wounded off, then?”

  “No.”

  “Use your heads,” Tertius said. “If they weren’t dead when they fell, they are now. Old Urbicus isn’t bothering with anyone who’s not in one piece, and they’re bound to wish they weren’t.”

  “Clean up and then eat,” Postumus said shortly. The governor’s tactic might give any other rebellious tribe a thing to think about. Or not.

  They made camp for the night when the scouts had found a spot that met the governor’s requirements, which were many, beginning with a water supply that could not be easily tampered with, and awoke in the full expectation that having dealt with a mosquito, they were about to engage a hornets’ nest.

  Instead scouts reported that the Pictish war bands which had been riding to join forces above the wall had both pulled back. Couriers from the northern forts confirmed it, and the governor took the counsel of his generals over breakfast.

  “They’re hoping we’ll chase them up into their glens where every hillock looks the same and they can come round behind us,” Valerian said, peeling a peach. A military governor’s tent was palatial and included a wooden floor and three of his personal slaves who passed bowls of porridge, fruit and olives, and filled the general’s silver cups with watered wine. Valerian mimed a circle with his knife blade.

  Claudius Charax, the legate of the Second, snorted. “We’re not such fools, I trust.”

  “Julius Agricola was,” Urbicus said, “and he got everything short of an actual triumph for it.” (Triumphs went only to emperors, no matter who had done the fighting.) He waited while they absorbed that idea. No one who had reached their rank was without further ambition. “However, Agricola went up by sea, thumped them and took hostages, and stopped trying to hold the highlands afterward. My opinion is that it can’t be held, and I have no intention of trying.”

  “The whole point of the new wall is to guarantee good behavior below it, and to keep anyone above it where they belong,” Aelius Silanus said. He ate an olive and looked unappreciatively at the porridge. “That seems to be what they’re doing, for the moment.”

  “Will they stay clear?” the commander of the Twentieth detachment asked.

  “Do fish have wings?” Urbicus shook his head. “But they’ll see if they can’t tease us into chasing them first. Without Brendan’s warriors, they don’t have an ally. They’ll be back talking to the Brigantes again, I’m thinking.” He nodded at Silanus. “In your back garden.”

  * * *

  “And so we’re to do a tour of the northern glen-mouth forts and Castra Pinnata,” Valerian said when he stopped by Postumus’s tent to offer his assessment while Postumus polished his armor. “To reinforce those garrisons and make sure we’ll know about any force that’s on the m
arch out of the highlands before it gets here.” Scouts and couriers had been coming and going all morning and rumors were flying: The Picts were on the march and had fired a fort of the wall. The Picts had come up the Clota by ship and were at their backs. The Picts had called down a fog by Druid magic and retreated under its cover.

  Postumus scrubbed at the cheek piece of his helmet. A large part of a soldier’s life involved polishing armor, which rusted again immediately if not attended to. He was accounted mad by most other officers for not having a slave to do it. He had found, though, that a number of surgeons shared his aversion to having another responsibility to see to. There were enough of them on the operating table.

  “Castra Pinnata,” he repeated after a moment.

  Valerian nodded.

  “Do you know who he’s taking?”

  “Three cohort detachments from the Second and the Twentieth. Two from the Sixth because he wants most of them back in Eburacum to keep an eye on the Brigantes. Half the attached legionary cavalry—most of the auxiliaries are going into garrisons on the wall. And you.”

  Postumus held the cheek piece to the light, concentrating on it as if to see if he’d got it clean.

  “It mightn’t be a bad thing,” Valerian said gently. “Sacrifice to the shades and clear them out of your head.”

  “I’m that transparent?” Postumus put the helmet down and scratched Finn’s ears.

  “You’ll get your orders in an hour or two, I expect,” Valerian said. “When I left, he was madly making lists. I suppose I should go and do the same.” An army on the march was made of lists: lists of Fit for Duty, lists of horses in reserve, lists of numbered catapult parts, of extra pilum points, harnesses, spare cart wheels, and tent pegs.

  Postumus occupied his mind with lists of bandages and cots, painkillers, wound dressings, bone saws, spoons, and forceps, and thus avoided making a list of reasons a perfectly healthy surgeon should not ride north with the governor.

  Otherwise left to make his own choices, Postumus sent Lucian back to Eburacum with the assurance that Calpurnius Aquila was now safely installed on his farm in Gallia Narbonensis. Lucian was accompanied by Flavian, Quintus, and a protesting Tertius, and Postumus took Cinnamus north with him. With a little more practice, Cinnamus would be ready for a junior surgeon’s posting and it wouldn’t hurt to get him under the governor’s eye as a likely young officer.

  In the morning they were on the march, Postumus on Boreas with Finn at his heels, east on the military road along the wall to where the old Agricolan road led north to Camelon and the glen-mouth forts. Governor Urbicus had sent Aelius Silanus and Charax of the Twentieth back to their respective fortresses to make their presence felt, and rode with the senior centurions of the legionary detachments, and with Valerian, in command of the cavalry. When they left the wall on the second day, the detachment from the Augusta, which had been posted to the Bodotria Estuary, joined them and the detachments re-formed in hostile-country marching order, despite continuing reports that the Picts had retreated to their highland fastnesses. North of Camelon, they passed a few small farms in the lowland river valleys, neat steadings with hayricks and ponds and geese in the yard, but no one seemed inclined to take notice of them. These were still mainly villages of the Damnoni and they were disinclined to trouble either the Romans or the highland Picts. Once they stopped to sacrifice at a roadside shrine to Epona, the Gallic-British horse goddess who carried the souls of the native dead and was patron to most of the Empire’s cavalry. The road was recently repaired, with fresh stones set where the old had been uprooted by weather or by some farmer for his cow byre. Urbicus, at the center of the march, in consultation with his scouts and with a watchful eye for signal fires from the north, kept to a standard pace, and pitched camp at midday on a tributary of the Bodotria.

  The next day they made their way up the valley to ford the Bodotria itself. Cavalry stationed themselves in the relatively shallow water on either side of the ford to break the current above and rescue anything that fell in the water below, and the main army crossed in between. Finn happily swam at Boreas’s flank and shook himself off on the other side in a shower of muddy water. The riders downstream retrieved floating pilums, packs, baskets, cookpots, and a helmet. These items being restored to their owners, the column marched on, singing insults to the Picts now that the governor had relaxed his order for silence.

  Valerian’s voice carried nearly the length of the column and the song was infectious. Postumus found himself singing along under an accommodatingly sunny sky, carefully not imagining the Ninth Legion on this road and almost succeeding. At midday they camped outside the walls of the southernmost of the highland forts at Alauna Septentrionalis. Garrisoned by a cohort of Batavian infantry, Alauna had a small but extremely serviceable hospital with a surgeon named Domitius in charge. Domitius was young and, like the governor, he was from Libya. It was how Rome built its Empire, scattering its offspring from one side of the world to the other. He promptly invited Postumus and Cinnamus to hunt deer the next day.

  “The commander says you’re to stay two days,” he told Postumus, “and that dog of yours looks like a deerhound.”

  Postumus had no idea whether he was or not, but they set out in the morning, with the governor’s permission and borrowed hunting spears, from the Alauna garrison. Domitius led them up a steep track into the hills to the east, pointing over his shoulder at the Alauna watchtower. “Just keep that in your sight if we get separated and you won’t get lost.”

  Valerian, drilling the cavalry below, watched them with a wistful eye.

  The hills were threaded through with little glens carved by the mountain streams that bubbled over rocky escarpments and wooded slopes to feed small villages along their downstream banks. Finn demonstrated his ability to catch a hare if not a deer and Postumus took it from him, gutted it, and hung it on his saddle horns in case a deer was not forthcoming. At midday, they stopped at a spring to water the horses and to eat a meal of dried fruit and the ubiquitous military biscuit.

  “What’s this?” Cinnamus knelt down, pointing. Where the spring bubbled out of the earth was a little bowl cut from living rock over which the water flowed into a natural basin below before trickling away downhill to join whatever tributaries led, smaller and then larger, through the network of waters to the Bodotria and the North Sea.

  Inside the little bowl someone had left a white stone, a silver coin, and bronze figure the size of a nut.

  “I’d as soon eat somewhere else,” Domitius said. “This place has a dark feel to it.”

  Postumus could sense some power there, but it didn’t feel sinister. Just something not his, to leave alone. He whistled Finn away from it as soon as he had had a drink, although he thought a dog would probably be welcome.

  “It belongs to the Mother,” Postumus said. “The Picts give their first worship to the Goddess, and this is one of her shrines.”

  “One of our men found one of these in an oak grove once,” Domitius said, “and came back with a suppuration on his hand that still won’t heal. It cracks open again just when I think it’s gone, and oozes pus.”

  “If he stole from it, he got off lucky with just a blistering rash,” Postumus told him. He shed his lorica, helmet, and greaves, and laid his sword and dagger beside them, well away from the spring, before he pulled a coin from the purse at his belt and left it beside the other things in the bowl. He touched his hand to his forehead. “In thanks for your woods, your hills, your creatures, Lady,” he said in British, “the hooved and the footed who belong to you.”

  Domitius observed him admiringly. “You might be a native,” he said.

  Postumus grinned at him, once he was away from the spring. “I am. I’ll do something about your soldier with the rash if you like. If anyone had seen him, he’d have had the whole local populace down around your ears.”

  Domitius winced. “Tell your Goddess that we’d appreciate it if that didn’t happen,” he said.

  Finn
proved to be an admirable deerhound, although once they brought it to bay, he sat down and wagged his tail. He apparently just liked to track things. Postumus thought of him sitting in the snow outside Claudia’s cave, waiting for someone to tell him what scent to follow now.

  Before they gutted the deer, Postumus said another prayer to the Mother and to the Horned God too, because all horned creatures belonged to both. At Alauna, while Domitius and Cinnamus put the deer on a spit, Postumus looked at the hand of the auxiliaryman who had trespassed in a grove, and treated it with the same salve that Domitius had no doubt used.

  “What did you steal from it?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you and it doesn’t look like the Goddess does either.”

  “Nothing!”

  “What else did you do then? You’d better tell me.”

  The infantryman looked sullen. “Pissed in it,” he muttered.

  “How long have you been in Britain that you don’t know better than that?” Postumus gave him a disgusted look. “You’re lucky this is all you got. And that it’s on your hand.”

  “How was I to know it was sacred? There ought to be a sign, like.” The man was beginning to look frightened. “What do I do? Domitius says he’ll invalid me out if this doesn’t heal.”

  “Go back to the grove and make sacrifice. Give the Goddess a gift—some silver, something valuable, a flask of wine. And take your armor and your knife off. Don’t take iron in.” He paused. “And don’t go hunting there, particularly not for anything with horns.”

  Afterward he told Valerian, who looked honestly horrified. “What you absolutely do not want to do is get the natives in a taking over their gods. I’ll just have a word with his commander.”

  When they rode out the next day, Postumus observed the infantryman cajoling his horrified commander into letting him go back into the hills. The hand might or might not heal, but none of the garrison would defile a shrine again.