Caveat Emptor

by Ruth Downie

  Dias’s handsome face was twisted with anger. “She’s a jealous bitch. Take no notice of her.”

  Why was Serena standing in the doorway of the carriage, waving and pointing toward the road south? Why was Valens hurrying back toward her?

  Tilla stood on tiptoe to crane past the riders and around the slaves’ hut, but she heard them before she saw them. Everyone did. The rumble of horses at full gallop. Before anyone could move, streams of cavalrymen in glittering armor swept through the cemetery and surrounded the graves, the hut, the mourners, the pyres, and the startled Iceni.

  72

  D IAS’S GUARDS LOWERED their weapons. The Iceni had bunched together around the unlit pyre, spears raised. Ruso was appalled to see Tilla among them, clutching the baby.

  “Nobody move!” yelled the decurion in charge of the cavalry, surveying the scene and evidently trying to make some sense of the disparate groups of natives. His men circled their horses, their own spears ready to impale anyone foolish enough to argue.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  A bass voice sounded from somewhere among the guards. “I am, sir. Verulamium’s guards are at your service.” Gallonius stepped out into the clearing and gestured toward the Iceni. “These people came to disrupt a peaceful funeral. They should be arrested for carrying illegal weapons.”

  “And who are you?” demanded a familiar voice. Ruso looked up to see a shortsighted squint almost hidden beneath the peak of the cavalry helmet.

  “Sir, that’s young Firmus! Firmus, sir!” Albanus waved one hand high in the air before the nearest cavalryman made a jab with his spear to remind him not to move. “We’re over here, sir!”

  The squint was turned toward Albanus. “Let them approach.”

  Glancing at Tilla, Ruso made his way across to where a very cheerful-looking Firmus was stationed next to the decurion. “I’ve always wanted to do something like this,” he whispered to Ruso. “We heard there was an Iceni war band on the move. And since you hadn’t come back when you were supposed to, I persuaded Uncle to let me come and look for you. Why are we at a funeral?”

  “You by the pyre!” bellowed the decurion to the Iceni. “Drop your weapons.”

  One of his men repeated the order in British just in case they had not understood.

  The Iceni glanced at their leader, who remained motionless.

  The decurion repeated the order. Still the Iceni refused to move. They were vastly outnumbered and had only their padded jerkins for protection. Tilla, crouched by the pyre trying to cover the baby, had no protection at all.

  “Sir,” murmured Ruso, “their sister’s been murdered. They came to her funeral looking for justice.”

  Firmus craned to see the pyre between the Iceni riders. “I can make out red—that’s not Camma, is it?”

  “Drop your weapons!” repeated the decurion.

  Across the clearing, Ruso could see Dias gesturing to his men to take up position behind the unsuspecting Iceni. Gallonius was sidling away, keeping himself out of range.

  “Stop!” Caratius was still standing by his dead wife. “Stop, everyone! This is not what any of us wanted!”

  “Drop your weapons and you won’t be hurt.”

  Ruso noticed that one or two of the cavalrymen seemed to be having trouble carrying their shields in the same hand as their reins. He spotted another familiar face beneath a cavalry helmet. Then another. Gods above: That was the clerk who had issued his travel warrant. This was not a proper cavalry unit. This was a handful of professionals bulked out by a hastily assembled crew of office workers dragged into active service. They might once have been highly trained military men but they were out of practice and out of condition. The Iceni, on the other hand, looked as though they would put up a good fight. They would inflict a lot of damage before they were overpowered by cavalry on one side and Dias’s men on the other. Tilla, caught in the middle, would not stand a chance.

  “Sir,” he murmured to Firmus, “the leader of the local guards can’t be trusted. Let me talk to the Iceni.”

  Was that relief on the decurion’s face? He must have known even better than Ruso that his men were not fit to fight.

  Ruso raised his empty hands into the air and stepped forward across the grass to address the leader of the Iceni, deliberately keeping his voice low so he would not be overheard.

  “He is a friend,” Tilla assured them from her position on the ground. “Listen to him.”

  The Iceni put on a good show of being reluctant to abandon a skirmish, but finally they agreed to put down their weapons in exchange for a place at the funeral and a cavalry escort back through Catuvellauni territory in the morning.

  There was disappointment in Dias’s voice as he ordered his men to stand down. Gallonius, suddenly brave again now that trouble had been averted, repeated that the Iceni should be arrested for carrying illegal weapons.

  “I haven’t seen any illegal weapons,” declared Firmus, a statement which was truer than most of his audience knew. “You can send your guards back to town: We’ll keep order here. Now is somebody going to light that pyre, or not?”

  The wails of the Iceni rose with the crackling of the flames as the fire blazed once more, sending Camma on the way to whatever kind of next world awaited her. Ruso adopted a respectful silence. He itched to explain to Firmus that Dias and Gallonius were the ones who should be arrested, but the attempt would stir up the trouble they had just managed to avert. Yet again, Dias had slithered out of his grasp.

  Dias knew it too. He directed a practiced salute at Firmus and the decurion, then smirked at Ruso before turning his men to march them back toward the road. Gallonius went with them. Ruso was still wondering how he was going to explain any of this to the procurator—let alone to Metellus—when Valens appeared and announced that he and his wife wanted to get the boys home by nightfall. Firmus decided the cavalry could escort the Iceni tomorrow without his help, and turned to Ruso. “I’ll ride back with you,” he said, adding ominously, “You can explain everything to me on the way. I can inspect the milestones at the same time.”

  Tilla had not been included in any of these conversations. She had produced the feeding bottle from somewhere and was sitting on the grass, wailing with the Iceni women. After several attempts Ruso managed to catch her eye and point toward the carriage that was still waiting over by the road. She said something to the redhaired woman next to her, and got up to leave. The woman stood too, and Ruso realized there was some sort of argument going on. Tilla began to walk away. The woman went after her.

  Firmus was still talking, but Ruso was not listening.

  There was some sort of struggle. The feeding bottle fell and landed in the grass.

  He ran across the middle of the clearing, crouching to shield his face from the heat as he ran.

  “Stop!”

  The Iceni woman was tugging at the baby. Tilla was trying to kick her away. The baby was crying. The funeral wailing ceased as the other Iceni tried to intervene.

  “Leave her alone!” he shouted. The struggle paused, but neither woman let go. The baby was still crying. He had never seen Tilla look so desperate.

  “My wife has looked after this baby since he is born,” he explained in awkward British over the noise to anyone who would listen. “He knows her. She likes him very much.” He looked around. The Iceni were grimfaced. “We can give him a good home,” he promised. “We will teach him and look after him and—” What else could he promise?

  “He will never go hungry,” put in Tilla.

  “What will you teach him?” demanded the redhaired woman.

  Tilla’s chin rose. “I will tell him the story of his beautiful mother,” she said, wresting him out of the grasp of the woman and patting his back to console him. She leaned her cheek against his swollen red face and his cries began to die away. “Little one, I will tell you about your father from the Dobunni and your mother from the Iceni and your ancestors who were wronged by Rome and how they took a terrible re
venge. And when you grow up, I will tell you about an old woman who was still afraid of them sixty years later and about her son who tried to make things better by a marriage, and how it did not work, and how your family came to this place afterward to make sure you were safe.”

  “We will bring him to visit his people,” added Ruso, putting an arm around Tilla and gazing around at the fierce faces of the family who had come here to rescue a sister and did not look as though they were inclined to leave empty handed.

  “What will you teach him, Roman?” demanded their leader.

  “Medicine,” said Ruso. “Healing.” What the hell was the word in British? He switched to Latin for “Surgery.”

  “In Latin?”

  “He will speak Latin and British, like you.”

  “How to give orders and demand tribute?”

  “My wife was a friend to your sister,” Ruso tried. “She delivered this baby. Camma trusted her.”

  “She trusted both of them,” put in another voice. Ruso had forgotten that Grata was there. “They are good people.”

  “Another foreigner!” declared the redhaired woman. “What does she know?”

  “More than you,” retorted Grata. “And I’m not foreign.”

  “Don’t argue with them!” pleaded Tilla. She turned to the leader. “I am begging you, sir, let me look after this child. Do not take him away from us.”

  “We want to—” Ruso stopped. How did the Britons say adopt? He didn’t even know if they had a word for it. “We will make him our son.”

  He knew from the man’s eyes what the answer was going to be. He barely heard the words: just Tilla’s anguished cry and a brief and rapid exchange in British. The leader seemed to be asking Tilla something. When she did not answer, the woman stepped forward and took the baby out of her arms.

  73

  M EDICINE, LIKE INVESTIGATING, was an occupation fraught with failure. Still, back in Londinium, it was a relief to retreat into the relative simplicity of covering out-of-hours calls so that an unusually hesitant Valens could spend more time with his family. In quiet moments, Ruso carried on working his way through a stack of writing tablets, contacting everyone he could think of who might care to recommend him for a job.

  There was no shortage of quiet moments. Tilla seemed to have very little to say to him or to anyone else. He had said he was sorry about the baby, but the only response was, “Yes.” He had asked what the Iceni man had said to her, but she refused to tell him. Since Serena had now reinstalled a full complement of servants, there was little for her to do. Instead she spent long hours sitting in the bedroom by herself. Asked what she was doing up there, she said, “Thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Things.”

  Not sure he was welcome upstairs, Ruso took to spending his evenings helping the apprentices practice their stitching on ox tongues and testing them on the medicinal properties of flavored wines. When the short one offered to take his teetering stack of letters, he realized with a jolt that he had no desire to send them. A new job would mean leaving Londinium. It would mean being on his own with Tilla. He was not sure either of them wanted that. “I’ll sort them all out when I’ve finished,” he told the apprentice, doggedly carrying on writing requests and leaving them to accumulate on the new table in Valens’s hall.

  At night he lay awake regretting the demise of the cockerel. It would have been some sort of company as he waited for the trumpet from the fort to sound the change of watch and hoped for an emergency to give him something to do. In the mornings he slept late.

  Tilla’s was not the only frustrating silence.

  It was three days since he had delivered his report to the procurator’s office along with a claim for his expenses. Neither the procurator nor Firmus had been available to speak to him at the time, and there had been no message since. He had used the excuse of his expenses to visit the Residence, but again no one was around. The gap-toothed expenditure clerk told him his claim was being processed and that he would be contacted. The travel warrant clerk—last seen on horseback in the cemetery at Verulamium—had refused to discuss his emergency reinstatement into the cavalry. It was, apparently, “a military matter.”

  Was his report so comprehensive that the procurator didn’t need to question him? Did nobody here care what went on up the road as long as the tax was paid? Maybe it had been a mistake to admit the truth about his coerced speech to the Council. Being honest about one’s failures was not a trait much prized among the powerful.

  Ruso was even beginning to wish Metellus would get in touch. He had left a note in the Room Twenty-seven pigeonhole, but there had been no response. It had begun to dawn on him that he might never find out the end of the story. He was not important enough to be told. Nor, it seemed, was he competent enough to be given any more work as an investigator. For that, at least, he was grateful.

  Thus it was with mixed feelings that he finally received a message ordering him to report to Firmus.

  “Ruso!”

  Was it his imagination or had the youth grown in the few days since they had last seen each other? His surroundings had certainly improved: no longer a dingy back room but a bright office with sun streaming through the window. Pyramus was perched on a stool just behind his master and a couple of scribes were hovering, waiting for instructions.

  Verulamium, Firmus explained with obvious pride, had just delivered its tax along with a large consignment of forged coins for destruction.

  Ruso offered congratulations and waited to find out why he was really here.

  “And the procurator’s read your report and wants to see you. You weren’t entirely straight with us about Metellus, were you?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Ruso, wondering how much they knew.

  “We’ve been in touch with the governor,” said Firmus. “My uncle will explain.”

  On this ominous note Ruso was ushered out by one of the scribes and escorted to the procurator’s office.

  The great man was sufficiently recovered to be seated at his desk in another crisp white linen tunic, but Ruso barely noticed him. What drew his attention was the very ordinary-looking man silhouetted in front of the window. It looked like … Surely it couldn’t be?

  “Come in, Ruso,” said the procurator. “Metellus and I have some things to say to you.”

  74

  T HE GOVERNOR AND the procurator’s departments are cooperating,” explained Metellus, perhaps sensing Ruso’s bewilderment.

  Was that a faint expression of distaste on the procurator’s face, or just the discomfort of breathing inside cracked ribs? He said, “The governor has kindly offered Metellus’s help with some of the tidying up after this Verulamium business.”

  Ruso swallowed.

  “Metellus and I have both read your report,” the procurator continued, “which leaves us reassured about relations between the Catuvellauni and the Iceni, but unfortunately since you let the presence of your wife compromise your inquiry, we’re now in a rather delicate position.”

  Ruso said, “She happened to be working there as a midwife, sir,” but neither man seemed interested.

  “The Catuvellauni are trusted allies,” said Metellus.

  “They demonstrate to the other tribes the rewards of cooperation with Rome,” added the procurator.

  As if they had rehearsed their parts, Metellus said, “The governor wouldn’t like to take any action that might upset them, or look as though we’re threatening the independence of Verulamium.”

  “However,” continued the procurator, “since you’ve brought this forgery business to our attention, we can hardly ignore it.”

  It seemed that Ruso’s uncovering of a capital crime had caused them a major inconvenience. He said, “The men called Dias and Rogatus have murdered four people between them, sir. And I’m willing to bet that the magistrate Gallonius knew all along. He was definitely providing the silver for the false coins.”

  “As I said, we have read the report.�
��

  “The murders aren’t anything to worry about,” said Metellus. “Just the natives quarreling among themselves. I know they tried to suffocate you with a brazier, Ruso, but there’s not enough credible evidence to make a case.”

  “But if you interview the mansio staff—”

  “We don’t want to be accused of interfering.” The procurator winced as he reached for the notes on his desk. “We might have executed the three of them for forgery, but according to your report, you’ve already informed the locals on my behalf that the forgers were”—he ran one finger down the notes—“two men called Asper and Nico, who are already dead.”

  “I didn’t tell them that directly, sir, I only said—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you said,” put in Metellus. “What matters is what they think they heard.”

  “If we start arresting other people now,” said the procurator, “it’s going to look as though we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “And if you don’t deal with them, sir,” put in Ruso, “they’re going to think they can get away with anything they like.”

  “Apparently they can,” said Metellus. “All they have to do is appear to threaten our investigator’s wife, and he’ll do whatever they want.”

  Ruso felt his fists clench. He addressed the procurator. “I did my best under the circumstances, sir.”

  The procurator sighed. “I’m disappointed in you, Ruso. When you had the sense to tell me you weren’t an investigator, I assumed you were an intelligent man.”

  Metellus glanced up. “Why did you say you weren’t an investigator, Ruso?”

  “Because I wasn’t!” snapped Ruso. “And I’m never doing it again, either. It’s nothing but lies and deceit and making people even more miserable than they are already. Now if you’ll excuse me, sirs, I have patients to attend to.”