The Wall at the Edge of the World: an unputdownable adventure in the Roman Empire by Damion Hunter

Author:Damion Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

She came to him two days later to say goodbye and to get from him a promised pot of salve; the pricked skin would have to be treated several more times until the infection had subsided. Postumus was at his desk reluctantly coping with the hospital accounts when she came in. The wild blue patterns were covered and she looked much as he remembered her from their last meeting in Corstopitum. (If it had been her in Londinium or Isurium, she wouldn’t tell him.) She wore a traveling gown of plain but finely woven wool, and her fine-boned features were accentuated at the eyes and lips by the ladylike use of a paint pot. The dark hair was coiled into a knot at the back of her head, and the ruby ring gleamed on her finger. He saw that she wore a long-sleeved undergown beneath the looser short-sleeved folds of her traveling clothes.

“I am here in my own name as supplies contractor for the new wall,” she said quietly as she saw his glance light on her arms. “The woman with the tribal scars isn’t me.”

But she was there all the same, beneath the multiple layers of clay-brown woolen, in the blue spirals encircling her breasts, and pricked into belly and thighs. “You’re insane,” Postumus said. “What in Mithras’ name do you hope to gain?”

“Knowledge.”

Postumus slumped back in his chair.

“And you’re not such a fool that you need to ask that,” she said. “The Army needs all the knowledge that it can come by.”

“Why you? Surely the Army breeds enough spies of its own.”

She looked annoyed. “I am native-born also, of a chieftain’s house of the Trinovantes on my mother’s side, and I speak almost every dialect of Britain. I want more from my life than to spend it selling roof tiles, or as someone’s dutiful wife and mother. And the Centuriate, as you have no doubt noticed, does not take women.”

He thought of saying that it wouldn’t take him or his brother either, but that was beside the point. “For the adventure of it all?” He was skeptical and let it show. “No one with half a brain risks their neck for that.”

She glared at him. “You mean no woman does. Every single man in this fort has done exactly that.”

“Well, that and for Rome,” he said.

“Precisely. I am good at being unnoticed, and I listen carefully.”

“The wind in the heather,” Postumus said. “Where did you spend last summer?”

“Exactly where you think,” she said, looking him in the eye, “so you needn’t ask.”

Her eyes, he noticed, had a tendency to shift their color, and now they were the deep shadowed green of well water. Brendan of the Selgovae might have seen her eyes when they were that color, he thought, and not known what he saw.

“May I sit down?” she asked quietly. “Or are you going to throw me through the window?”

“Because you betrayed Brendan? It saved our hides, so don’t be an ass.” And how was that different from his own excursions? “And yes, of course, sit down.

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