The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  “Everyone from the Maghreb has one of these,” Domitius said. “It’s for strength, same as that.” He pointed to the small winged phallus that hung from Cannius’s neck. “Just more seemly. The Amazigh are a polite people, and we believe in euphemism.”

  Cannius waggled it at him, then tucked it down his tunic.

  “I believe in a sharp scalpel and a bottle of vinegar,” Sabinus said. “Decorate it with what you will.”

  The Watch went by, marking the third hour of the night. They could see Valerian’s cavalry riding the perimeter beyond the camp rampart, and the bob of a lantern as an optio from the Victrix came around with the evening’s password.

  Postumus nodded at the little shrine of Aesculapius set up behind them in his tent. “I believe in anything that works.”

  XIX. The Carrion Birds

  Urbicus’s army continued to move steadily north, a seemingly endless stream of infantry and cavalry and wagons, the great gilded Eagles and gold-fringed vexilla of three legions at its heart, and before and behind them the cohort and auxiliary standards and the bright, bronze-headed draco banners of the cavalry that filled with wind to snap back and forth like live dragons. Closer to the new wall, there was opportunity to hunt while the column inched forward, and forage parties had no compunction about raiding local farms, so meals improved. Scouts fanned northward from the main column, and back with such news as they gleaned in the heather. The military post from Eburacum caught up with them there as well.

  “Quintus said he thought you’d want this,” the courier said to Postumus, handing over a cloth-wrapped package. “So I said I’d bring it along. Don’t tell the governor. We’re supposed to be military only. He sent you a note with it.”

  “Thank you.” Postumus turned the package over in his hand and unknotted the strings that held the cloth. Inside the cloth was a wooden box, sealed with wax. He pried the seal loose with his thumbnail. Inside the box was a leather bag. Someone had wanted whatever it was well hidden. He almost knew before he shook the thing out into his hand: a gold arm ring, enameled in blue and silver in a pattern of running horses, head to tail, their silver hooves forever above the ground.

  * * *

  “He’s dead. I don’t know how long.” Postumus stood in the governor’s field tent, the enameled arm ring in his hand. The tent was crowded with the governor’s staff. “It came into Eburacum a week ago, by a boy of the Brigantes, Quintus says.” He handed the governor the note that had been tied to the package.

  Urbicus inspected the tablet and handed it round to the rest.

  “If it was Dawid who sent this, I suspect he may have thought about it for a while first,” Postumus said. “I don’t know how much time we’ve lost.”

  “Too much, very likely,” Urbicus said.

  In a day’s time, signal fires from the south and then returning scouts, changing horses at every post, confirmed that. Men of fighting age had been steadily draining out of the Brigantian Hills for a month. The men who had been seen plowing or herding cattle had been women, in men’s clothes, breasts bound and even with hair on their faces for good measure.

  Urbicus swore at that. “A lovely detail to embellish my report. ‘Imperator, I regret to inform you that we have been played for fools by a set of false whiskers from a provincial farce.’” He looked disgusted. His generals and staff remained steadfastly expressionless, although Valerian, standing behind him, put a hand over his face. “The question remains as to where they have gone.” Urbicus waved a hand and his optio produced a sheaf of pertinent maps from a trunk. “Thank you. Now then.”

  Postumus, having set the current emergency in motion, had not been invited to further council, and was in his own tent brooding over the arm ring when Valerian found him later.

  “You liked him, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Very much. I think he liked me. But we’re the invaders here. It makes it hard to gauge that sort of thing.”

  “What was personal versus what was best for his tribe? I suspect they coincided here.” Valerian pointed at the arm ring. “You should wear that,” he suggested, turning to the practical. “It might scare the Brigantes when we find them.”

  “And where does the governor think we’ll find them?”

  “We’re working on that. Most information at this point suggests they went west and then north, possibly by sea. If they sailed far enough out to sea to skirt our forts south of the old wall and then around the coast of the Novantae, they could come ashore in Epidii lands. There are reports—now—of ships going around Monavia Island and north past Novantarum Head. The villagers there ‘didn’t think we’d want to know about that.’ They’ve now been forcefully informed that we do.”

  Furthermore, the scouts reported, as soon as the governor’s army had passed through Brigante territory, the Brigante women had vanished too, with the children and the mares from the horse herd and anything else that was valuable, into the high mountains where presumably they had some dwelling but not anything that vengeful Romans with questions to ask could find in a hurry.

  Certain movements of the Pictish clans now seemed clearer in their purpose, and the consensus was that Dergdian would not back off again, but would close with the Brigante allies from the south and try to envelop the Roman army between them. Urbicus’s intent was to repeat his tactics of the previous year, this time taking out the Picts first, before turning on the Brigantes. While Urbicus’s scouts were hunting the Brigantes, a Brigante spy was found in the Roman camp by the simple expedient of sounding “To Quarters.” Any man not in his tent immediately afterward was an obvious interloper. This particular one, in a Roman tunic and armor that Valerian and Postumus both thought had clearly come from the deserters at Trimontium, gave very little information before he died. They burned his body with the armor and Governor Urbicus made sacrifice for the shade of the man who had worn those charred remains first. When Aelius Silanus asked him why, he said shortly, “He’s had twenty-five years of whatever it is the gods inflict on you for betrayal. He was ours once.”

  * * *

  Teasag crouched on the stony headland behind Maon as he raised his arms to the sky, chanting, and thought evil thoughts at his back. He had beaten her again this morning for no particular reason. She watched as he raised an iron cauldron that was worth more than the king’s gold torque, staggering under its weight, and willed him to fall. The cauldron was as large as his torso, adorned around the rim with leaping beasts and gold overlay. Maon braced himself and heaved it out over the cliff edge to plummet into the dark tarn below them. At his side the king untied the braided thongs from a bundle wrapped in a dark hide, and lifted out a great sword. The naked warrior that formed the iron hilt stared out at the sky with round gold eyes. Dergdian lifted the blade above his head and threw it after the cauldron into the water.

  Behind them, Dergdian’s warriors raised their spears and shields to the gray sky and shouted. Maon turned to face them. “The Mother has taken your sacrifice. Now it is your work that her birds may feed on the Roman dead. There must be no thought of turning back or the crows will feast where they will. I have seen this in the sky.”

  Teasag wondered what the Roman gods thought of that, and what sacrifices were being made to them. And also whether the spy had got free, something she had been wondering since the trackers hadn’t come back, and that cave had fallen in as Aifa had predicted. She stopped wondering as Maon kicked her to her feet. While his back was turned, she pulled the thong that held her amber drop over her head and flung it swiftly out into the dark water. Then she picked up his bundles and followed him, stumbling over the rocky ground to where his ponies and driver waited, hitched the bundles onto her back with straps, and fell in line with the rest of the human pack beasts.

  * * *

  Urbicus’s army fanned into separate columns to pass through the new wall as swiftly as possible, reforming beyond the ditch like a scarlet tide, waves glinting with the silver of polished plate and scale. The wicke
d little scorpion catapults lifted their heads over the column as it flowed north.

  “My brother Justin claims that Hannibal used catapults to heave jars full of live snakes into the Pergamenes,” Postumus said as the scorpions rumbled past the hospital wagons, on their second morning past the wall. “Have we thought of that?”

  “Poisonous snakes?” Lucian asked.

  “What would be the point if they weren’t?” Flavian said, tightening his saddle girth.

  “According to Justin, poisonous snakes,” Postumus said. “But I expect any kind of snakes would do the job. Would you stop and check?” The Third Trumpet cut through the conversation. “We’re moving!” He swung up on Boreas and fell in beside the other medical officers, grouped with their charges at the center of the column. Ahead he could see Urbicus and his generals on a knoll above them, conferring with a trio of couriers.

  From the center of the column it was impossible to tell what was going on ahead. Couriers and optios flew back and forth as it inched north, with orders to shift formation, to halt, to move, to bring the heavy infantry up.

  They halted again at mid-morning and the order came abruptly to set the hospital up, and at speed.

  The medical staff, from senior surgeons to orderlies, pulled the packs from their wagons and erected the hospital tents with swift, practiced efficiency, one large combined space to house them all. When they had tied the tent poles down and unrolled the canvas floor, they positioned cots and surgery tables, baskets of bandages, and the compartmented cases of pharmacy supplies. They laid out their instruments, each surgeon to his particular liking, tied canvas aprons over their military tunics, and waited itchily for what was coming.

  The army had halted on a flat ridge that sloped gently to a valley through which flowed one of the small tributaries of the Bodotria, the ground along its length strewn with tumbled river stone and clumps of trees. In the rear the land sloped downhill again, unevenly, a “stepmother” surface that no soldier ever liked. The Twentieth Legion cohorts, in reserve, dug in a rear guard ditch there. Behind the auxiliaries of the front lines, Claudius Charax and the Second Augusta were at the center, with Aelius Silanus and the Sixth on the right. The left flank was protected by a deep bend of the river, giving breathing space there.

  Along the length of the valley on the far side, a faint impression of movement coalesced into a dark cloud and the vibration in the ground of thousands of men and horses on the march. The governor raised his hand and couriers moved from his vantage point to the generals in the line below.

  The Caledones and their allies saw the Romans on the ridge and raised a howl, punctuated by the eldritch shriek of Pictish war horns.

  Valerian brought his heavy cavalry up, prepared to hit the Pictish flank on the right, and rode for the front of the line, making sure that they could see him, his signifer’s draco banner screaming as it filled with air. With the horse archers circling farther out to harry the Caledones’ flanks, the auxiliary infantry positioned themselves to take the first brunt of the charge and the legions behind them to move forward on command.

  The Picts streaming through the shallow ford in the river were hampered somewhat by the crossing and by the stones that caught at chariot wheels, but there were thousands of them. Over their tattooing they were painted blue and red and ocher like riders out of Annwn, and naked above the waist save for the shields that caught the mid-morning sun like dragon’s treasure, heavily embossed with gold and silver. Half a Pictish man’s wealth might be on his shield. A man Valerian recognized as the rumored Druid priest by his white robe and gold sun disk rode among the front lines, his driver threading between the other chariots, urging them on. Behind the chariots marched thousands upon thousands of warriors on foot, and they too threw themselves screaming toward the Roman lines.

  Scorpion bolts whistled over his head and Valerian said a quick prayer for the accurate calibration of the little monsters as he led his cavalry down the hill into the Pictish flank. A riderless chariot with a broken wheel careened past the cavalry lines, its panicked horses wild-eyed and frantic, the chariot disintegrating as they ran. Valerian paced his horse beside them, leaned down and cut the traces with his dagger before they brought anyone else down. A Caledone warrior dived among the iron-shod cavalry mounts, knife out, and Valerian leaned from his saddle again and caught him across the back of the neck with his sword. They were abandoning the chariots now, having caused what chaos they could with them among the Romans. The Caledone riders ran out along the poles to leap into the fray on foot, pushing into any gap in the Roman lines, while the drivers retreated to the rear.

  None of which Postumus knew. In the hospital tent they could only go by the trumpet calls and wait for the wounded to come in to know what was happening. Postumus pushed Galt’s bracelet up his arm, out of the way. He wasn’t sure why he had worn it, but it felt like a talisman of sorts.

  The first casualties were not long in coming, from among the auxiliaries who had taken the first charge. Postumus eased the splinters of the trooper’s own shield out of the chest of a decurion of the First Dacians and prodded gently to see whether the horse that had trampled him had broken ribs. Beside him, Lucian was frantically tying the bleeding artery of one of the decurion’s men.

  Legionary and cavalry casualties followed the auxiliaries; belly wounds, punctured lungs with spears still embedded, an arm nearly severed through, all the ghastly detritus of war. They worked steadily, sorting the worst out first, leaving the lesser wounded to wait, which they did with military patience. As orderlies took each man from the surgery table, another took his place, endlessly. Postumus had learned that you didn’t look to see how many were waiting, you kept your focus on the man in front of you, and then the one after him.

  He was stitching the thigh wound of one of Valerian’s heavy cavalry when a trumpet call too close by to have come from the front startled them all, followed by frantic shouting.

  “In the rear!” A bloodied legionary from the Twentieth, which was supposed to be the rear guard reserve, laid a wounded companion on the canvas floor. Another trumpet rang out no more than a quarter of a mile away, the Fall Back and Regroup.

  It was difficult to operate while wearing armor plate and most surgeons discarded it in the hospital tent. Now Postumus dived for his lorica and helmet, stacked in the tent corner with his sword and shield, as did every other surgeon and orderly.

  “Buckle up! Now!”

  To the rear they could hear the sound of furious fighting, a clamor of battle howls mixed with the steady shouts of command from the Roman officers. And how in Typhon’s name had the Picts got around behind them?

  “Brigantes,” the legionary from the Twentieth said as Tertius knelt to assess his condition. “Foot and horsemen.” Tertius tied a tourniquet around his thigh. “Out of the fucking sky, so far as we could tell.”

  Postumus took stock of the hospital tent. All he could see to the rear were the wagons of the baggage train, and the tent was full of wounded from the front. As more wounded began to come in, now from the rear as well, he picked up his sutures again. “Keep at your work until we have orders.”

  * * *

  The courier worked his way through the press of infantry massed on the right. “The governor’s compliments and he wants four cohorts back to reinforce the rear.” He saluted Aelius Silanus and rode for the governor’s vantage point on the ridge again. Urbicus had seen the Brigantes but too late. They had come out of the trees below the rearguard’s posts, from the gods knew where, and now they were no doubt up and over the ditch-and-wall before they could be stopped. They had been ahead, rather than behind as assumed, of the Roman army, with the Epidii and then the Caledones for their guides, and had waited, it appeared, in one of the numerous nameless glens that cut through the Pictish highlands. Now Silanus began the delicate maneuver of detaching half of his legion from the right flank to the rear while the Twentieth Legion tried to hold on, and the Second at the center moved over to fill the gaps
he was leaving while the Caledones kept swarming through the ford to swell their front ranks.

  The governor’s orders to Postumus were to hold. There really wasn’t much else that the hospital could do. It couldn’t be moved in a hurry. Postumus tried to concentrate on digging out the spear in the patient before him. The soldier had snapped the shaft off himself where it had broken with the blow, and it stuck out a jagged foot beyond the place where it had pushed through the plates of his lorica into his ribcage with the force of a charging horse behind it. It took metal shears to cut away the lorica from around the embedded shaft while the soldier swallowed the poppy tears an orderly brought, and grimaced and tried to hold still.

  “Almost there.” Postumus eased away the last piece of plate and inspected the wound. Not in the lung, with luck. The plate had blunted its force. He slid the spoon down the shaft’s length until he felt it catch the spearpoint. The legionary drew his breath in and bit his lip. Postumus just had it out when shouting from the rear grew louder and he jerked his head up to see a baggage wagon on fire.

  “Shields up! Keep them out!” He took a quick look to be sure that blood wasn’t pouring out of the spear wound, and snatched up his sword and shield.

  Beyond the hospital tent a wavering line of the Twentieth were holding off the attacking Britons, whose obvious intent was to destroy the baggage train and then go through it to the rear of the main army. Flames were already spreading from the first wagon to another and the drivers were pouring out water from the supply barrels on them. A handful of Brigante warriors were already through the defending lines and the main body was pushing hard against the outnumbered Twentieth. If flames caught the hospital tent, it would go up.

  “Lock shields and hold them!” Postumus and his handful of forty surgeons and orderlies formed up in a half-circle around the hospital tent, swords out, pushing back against the Brigantes who had got through the Twentieth’s line. The wagon drivers had the fire out and it didn’t flare up again but the Brigante warriors were streaming through the baggage train, using the wagons for cover. If they got through, they would catch the whole army between their forces and the Caledones.