The Wall at the Edge of the World

by Damion Hunter

  The garlanding of the standards at the Rosaliae Signorum perplexed her. With Postumus, she watched the Eagle and the cohort standards brought out from their chapel in the Principia as the junior officers handed wreaths of roses to the legate and First Centurions. The standard-bearers, in parade armor beneath their wolf and lionskin hoods, dipped their poles to receive the garlands and planted them upright again.

  “Are they your gods?” she whispered to him.

  “They are the heart of the legion,” he whispered back.

  “Gods, then.”

  “No.”

  “They have just sacrificed a pig to them,” she pointed out.

  “That’s for the god Mars. And for the shades of the ones of us who have died.”

  They watched the rest of the sacrifice as the garlanded bull and the sheep followed the pig. Postumus was silent, his own lost ones on his mind, until he saw that she was weeping.

  “You are missing your own kind,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  “I am not,” she said. She scrubbed her fist across her eyes. “I am crying for the pig.”

  At least, he thought, he had had, and still did have, someone he could miss. That did not seem such a bad fate, compared with Teasag’s. The only person for whom she had ever expressed an affection was Claudia Silva, in her guise as Aifa. Which was a thought.

  To my good friend, Claudia Silva,

  This is Teasag. I bought her from the battle spoils because she asked after you and dosed the trackers who were on your trail with your purgative. Also my dog knows her.

  Claudia read the message again while Teasag, delivered by a wagon driver from Eburacum, stood before her, staring about at Claudia’s private reception room. It was furnished with cushioned wicker chairs and couches upholstered in silk, with elaborate scrolled arms at each end. The floor was made of tiny pieces of glass arranged in a picture of winged babies riding a big fish, and the walls were painted to look like open arches with gardens beyond them, so much finer work than Teasag had marveled over in the surgeon’s quarters that at first she thought she could step through them. An ebony table held a silver animal rising open-mouthed from silver waters. It took a moment for Teasag to realize that it was a lamp.

  Claudia read the message a third time and appeared to be trying to decide what to do about it.

  “If you don’t want me,” Teasag said morosely, watching her, “you can send me back again. I was learning to make salve for the surgeon.”

  “Were you? And what were you doing following Dergdian’s army?”

  “I belonged to Maon High Priest, who is dead.” Teasag’s expression indicated her satisfaction at that. “I went where he did.”

  Including into battle where she would be no use at all, just so that he didn’t have to lift a finger for himself. “It is possible to be both a priest and a fool. Druid or not,” Claudia said.

  “That was what I thought,” Teasag said. “I threw my amber drop into the tarn to make him die.”

  Not perhaps what one wanted to hear from a new slave, Claudia thought, although she had a good deal of sympathy for her. She read Postumus’s letter a fourth time. He had sent Teasag’s sales contract with the note. Was he wooing her with unsuitable slaves? Or did he just not know what else to do with the girl?

  “I think you had better stay with me,” she said, and Teasag’s face lit up while Claudia thought, Oh Juno. “For the time being, at any rate. As it happens, I have need of a new maid.” That was conveniently true as the current one had recently married one of the grooms from the stable and was now pregnant and throwing up every morning. Teasag offered an excellent opportunity to assign Coventina to more suitable work, such as not throwing up in the mistress’s bath. Except for the fact that she spoke no Latin, had none of the knowledge a lady’s maid required, and was fourteen.

  Claudia sighed. “We’ll try it.”

  * * *

  Postumus, my friend,

  The girl is very bright. I am teaching her Latin and to read because after I explained that it was not sorcery that told me that Dergdian’s wall might collapse, she asks so many questions about how things are built and how they work that she is driving me mad. I allow her one question a day in the morning while she dresses my hair, which by the way she is very bad at.

  You were wise to get her out of an army camp. She has never learned to negotiate a large household where the female slaves have any say at all over their own persons. She came to me half in tears and asked if she absolutely had to go with the head groom when he wanted her to. I informed her that she did not and she was free to dissuade him in any way she saw fit. Whereupon she took her new cloak pin (I have given her some decent clothes since she arrived wearing what I took to be your undertunic) and said that the mistress had told her to stab him through the balls if he touched her. The stable boys are terrified of her now.

  Postumus smiled and laid the letter down. It seemed he had done the right thing, which was something pleasant to keep in his mind while he watched the new king of the Brigantes come to pay the tribe’s taxes. Dawid, like Galt before him, had negotiated the best peace that he could, and now he came to kneel before Lollius Urbicus and Aelius Silanus, not at the court at Isurium Brigantum, but in the Principia of Eburacum Fortress. To make his vassal state entirely clear, only ten warriors were allowed to accompany him. To make it even clearer, they were allowed to bring their weapons because such weapons would be useless in the face of Rome.

  The Sixth Legion formed up on either side of the Via Praetoria while Dawid’s men marched between the Roman ranks, followed by the wagons of grain and gold that would leave the Brigantes nearly impoverished. They were either old or frighteningly young, Postumus saw, boys barely out of their initiation. He wondered sadly what had happened to young Evan, and Colin. Dawid gave no sign of recognition as he passed ten paces away. He simply looked straight ahead and disappeared into the Principia.

  Maybe, Postumus wrote to Claudia, it would stick this time. Maybe they wouldn’t just wait until they had enough young men and horses to do it all again, and again, and again, beating their heads against the Roman occupation. Maybe.

  “I’ll have the blue gown today, Teasag.”

  “Yes, Mistress. Mistress, what makes the water come out of the pipes in the bath?”

  “In Latin, please. Gravity, mostly. That force in the earth that pulls everything toward it. And pumps.”

  “What is a pump?”

  “I don’t think your Latin is ready for pumps and I also don’t think I can describe one in British. My gown, if you please. And then I want you to take this to Brys and tell him that it is to go to your surgeon at Eburacum.”

  “That is many messages to him,” Teasag observed.

  “That is not your business,” Claudia said repressively.

  You did not ask me what I think, but what I think is that you cannot help Dawid and were right not to try to speak with him. He must know that you were behind the governor’s decision.

  In happier news, I hope, your Aunt Felicia, with whom I have become fast friends over roses, has invited me to her daughter’s wedding to your brother next month. I am looking forward to showing you how Teasag is progressing and hope that you will explain catapults to her, which is beyond me.

  Postumus found himself unexpectedly lighthearted at that. There was, for the moment, peace, and he had leave. He headed south to the Silure Hills of his childhood with Finn at his heels, to watch Justin get married.

  * * *

  “I have had your toga cleaned and pressed,” Gwytha informed him. “It’s laid out in your old room.”

  “And don’t even think of trying to weasel out of wearing it,” Justin said. “Your doom is sealed. Papa has been trying to teach Marcus how to wear his without losing control of it all morning.”

  Postumus didn’t think any of the boys had worn a toga since their coming of age. “Mother, we’ll trip over our own feet. Why not our parade uniforms? I brought mine.”

  Justin
grinned at him. “You can blind us all with that Corona Aurea afterward. Congratulations, by the way.”

  “It cemented my desire to remain a surgeon,” Postumus said. “Is Uncle Licinius putting on a toga?”

  “Indeed he is, as is Felix, over protest,” Gwytha said. “If Felicia didn’t make them, Theodore would have. Theodore, as you can imagine, is beside himself. He’s ordered a wine that Licinius says will require him to sell half the horse herd to pay for, and acquired a peacock from somewhere. Cook is determined to compete since the guests will eat again here, and I have had to put my foot down on the subject of peacocks. ‘A flamingo! That would put him in his place!’ she said, and I had to go lie down. I am counting on there being no available flamingos in Isca.”

  “I think you’re safe,” Justin said. “She doesn’t have Theodore’s connections.”

  Postumus and Justin shared a room for the last time that night, as in the morning Justin would go to be married and bring his wife back to the newly decorated guest chamber. Their mother seemed to have adopted this one as a sewing room in their absence, and Constantia as a place to stash assortments of dried, pressed plants, preserved insects, and whatever else had lately caught her eye. Constantia showed no sign of wanting to get married herself yet but was compiling a Natural History of West Britain. Marcus, on the other hand, was courting a girl from the village, although listening to him extol her virtues at dinner, Postumus had concluded that her main charm for Marcus was the fact that she “understood goats.”

  In the morning they set out for the bride’s house, toga-clad and respectable, in a carriage hired for the occasion. Gwytha and Constantia both had new gowns of bright diaphanous silk and new mantles. Januaria, as Justin’s old nurse, had a place of honor in the carriage with them, and a new gown of her own. Multiple prayers against rain had prevailed and the sky was clear.

  A small slave waited beside the flower-decked gatepost of the bride’s house to direct them. Carriages and litters filled the grassy meadow below the barn, and at the house another slave welcomed the wedding guests and directed them to the inner courtyard, while Justin and Constantia, who was to serve as bridesmaid, were taken off to meet with the priest for last-minute instructions.

  In the courtyard, a small flower-draped altar under an arbor supported statues of Juno and Jupiter, with stools before it for the bride and groom, and a ring of chairs for the guests. Slaves circulated with trays of nuts, shrimp, and small pastries, and cups of wine. Postumus saw Claudia among the guests, the sleeves of an elbow-length undergown covering the marks he knew she still bore on her arms. Over it she wore a deep blue gown caught at the shoulders and sleeves with pearl and silver pins and a mantle of pale green silk with dark leaves embroidered along the hem above green kid sandals. Her ruby ring glinted on her finger and she wore matching drops of ruby and pearl in her ears.

  “You look very fine,” he told her.

  She inspected him. “So do you.”

  “Not like a man fighting his own bed linen?”

  “A little bit. Loosen your death grip on the folds a trifle and just use your left arm to hold them in place.”

  “This is why I joined the military, to wear clothes that don’t fall off if you let go of them. Have you forgiven me for sending that child to you? I didn’t know what else to do with her.”

  “Of course. She actually did my hair this morning and made it stay up.”

  “Did you bring her with you?”

  “Yes. I was rather afraid to leave her to her own devices.” Claudia gestured to the far end of the courtyard where the household servants were gathering to watch the proceedings. He saw Teasag among them, looking remarkably Roman in a pale blue tunic and the silver armband of Claudia’s household. Her red hair was pinned on her head in imitation of Claudia’s.

  A trio of flute players emerged from the house and circled among the guests, herding them politely toward the altar. The bride’s parents and brother followed, Felix uncharacteristically cowed by the folds of his toga, and then the priest and Justin with a wreath of roses in his hair. Constantia came next, carrying a silver plate of honey cakes for the offering, followed finally by Aurelia in a trailing white gown with a wedding knot at the waist. A diaphanous veil anchored by a wreath of roses to match Justin’s covered her face and bright yellow shoes gleamed like little bursts of light as she walked.

  “She’s lovely,” Claudia said, and Postumus thought she looked wistful. Aurelia was enchanted to be getting married, whereas Claudia, in a far more elaborate ceremony than this no doubt, must have had a different outlook.

  The ceremony itself began with the bride giving her consent to the marriage. Justin took her hand, vows were said, and they sat facing each other on the stools while the priest offered the cakes to Jupiter and lengthy prayers for domestic harmony to the imperial deities, as represented by the Emperor Antoninus and his wife. He called upon the parents of the bride and groom to bless the union and then opined at some further length on the institution of marriage as the foundation of the Empire. Just as an elderly guest was beginning to snore, he offered the final prayers and Justin put Aurelia’s veil back from her face. The two of them ate the honey cakes, and they turned to be congratulated by their guests.

  They went in together to the dinner where extra couches and tables had been arranged throughout the dining room. Theodore had indeed acquired a peacock, which had been roasted and then placed on a silver platter with its tail plumes reinserted. It was dressed with apricots and three different kinds of lettuces trimmed to look like feathers. A pastry temple of Venus held tiny figures of the bride and groom, surrounded by an “ocean” of veal aspic and billows of whipped cream. There were larks, eels in more pastry, stuffed hare in white sauce, stewed fruit with violets, a hollowed-out melon stuffed with cheese and olives, and on another silver platter the molded Capricorn emblem of Justin’s new command, made of sausage and goose liver.

  “Cook isn’t going to outdo this unless she found the flamingo,” Constantia whispered to Postumus.

  When the last dish had been consumed, it was late afternoon and the entire party began the journey to the groom’s home. Household slaves followed the wedding guests with villagers who had gathered outside the farm gates, amid much laughter and singing and throwing of nuts. Justin rode in a carriage with his bride but most of the rest of the party elected to walk.

  “This is lovely country,” Claudia said, as they made their way down the lane, through a grove of aspen and birch and then past Hilarion’s pear orchard.

  “Come out on the river with me tomorrow and I’ll give you a tour of my childhood,” Postumus suggested.

  “I should like that.”

  At the house, Justin lifted down his bride, with her veil draped over one arm and clutching the ceremonial spindle and distaff that was indicative of her new status. His roses hung over one eye as he dodged the spindle to carry her over the threshold. Everyone cheered while the wedding party and houseguests followed them in and Theodore expertly filtered out everyone else with the exception of a few of Hilarion’s old comrades from Isca Fortress, including the legate of the Second.

  More wine and small biscuits in a digestive sauce were passed around to settle the stomach for the next meal, while the entertainers hired for the occasion trooped into the atrium: a trio of jugglers and tumblers, two dancing flute players, and an animal trainer with a tame leopard on a leash.

  A wedding celebration was an all-day affair, but the second, private meal was not as elaborate, despite Cook’s ambitions, and a time more conducive to actual conversation. When the entertainment ended, Justin and Aurelia said suitable prayers before the family altar, ate some of Cook’s roasted goose and turtle soup for form’s sake and then quietly disappeared.

  “How long until your boy’s leave expires?” Claudius Charax asked Hilarion.

  “They have two days before they sail,” Hilarion said, signaling to a slave to pour more wine. “Do you know something?”

  “On
ly that there’s another shakeup coming, I think,” the legate said. “He tells me they are short of troops on the Rhenus, so naturally I am extrapolating to Britain, Britain being my business. The thinking may be that we have settled the north, so now of course we won’t need all those cohorts.”

  “Do you expect they’ll recall the governor?” Postumus asked him. “Now that the emperor has his victory.”

  Charax wiped his fingers on a napkin. “You’ve met the governor. What do you think? Yes, I expect so, he’s much too popular with the legions, and that always makes an emperor nervous.”

  It had been over sixty-five years since the last sword-made emperor, or only fifty if you counted the assassination of Domitian by his own court. Neither was long enough to reassure an emperor who was without military experience and who had powerful generals holding his territories for him.

  “And there’s a revolt brewing among the nomads in Mauretania, I hear, that has the Senate worried,” Charax added.

  “Plenty of senators with farms in Mauretania,” Hilarion said.