by Ruth Downie
Rumors that would associate the town not only with accidental death and murder but with unquiet ghosts and dubious magic practices. “Just as I’d rather you didn’t spread gossip about my wife,” Ruso said. He looked from one head to the other. “I think we all understand each other now?”
“Perfectly.” Dorios’s smile was unconvincing.
“Good.” Ruso leaned forward between them and propelled himself into the middle of the pool, leaving them to ride his bow wave. He was going to have to have firm words with Tilla. Meanwhile, he shut the world out by taking a deep breath and plunging beneath the surface of the sacred water. But instead of offering peace and healing, the warmth closing over his head felt cloying and sour.
33
Leaving the baths, Ruso strode past the souvenir sellers and the drink stalls and didn’t wait to see the eager smile die on the face of a disappointed pimp. He only stopped when he reached the table at the bar opposite the entrance to the Mercury. He was in the mood to deal with things: He might as well deal with this too.
The whiskery old drunk carried on staring into his half-empty beer, apparently oblivious to the newcomer standing in front of his table. Ruso was about to remove the cup when a bony hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. “Thief!” declared the man in British.
“Spy!” retorted Ruso in the same tongue.
The man looked up in surprise and moved the beer farther away with his free hand before releasing Ruso’s wrist.
Still in British, Ruso said, “Is my wife in?”
“How would I know?”
“Because you’re watching the door of the Mercury. Who’s paying you?”
The man shook his shaggy head, sending a delicate shower of dandruff onto the table and into the beer. “Nobody. I’m just visiting. Lodging upstairs. I come down here for a quiet drink.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The leer said the man knew full well there was no way to get the truth out of him without causing a disturbance.
Ruso stepped away, wiping his wrist on his tunic as if to erase the memory of the grip. He was halfway across the street when the man called, “She went that way!”
He turned to see the bony hand pointing toward the vegetable plots and the river, and nodded his thanks, but no sooner had he taken a couple of paces than the man called out again, “And then she came back.”
Feeling foolish, Ruso turned on his heel without replying and strode back into the Mercury. By the time he had found out for himself that his wife was indeed there, alone in their room, demurely spinning a section of fleece like a good Roman wife, he was in an even worse mood than when he had set out from the baths.
“Tell me,” he said, reaching out to still the twirl of the spindle, “what the chief priest knows about you that I don’t.”
Tilla put the wool down beside her on the bed and laid the spindle on top. “And greetings to you too, husband.”
“Illegal activities,” he prompted. “Involving a scribe.”
The words “I did not do anything” were less than reassuring.
“So what was the thing you didn’t do that the scribe has been sworn not to mention?”
“I did not put a curse on Gleva.”
“You didn’t put a curse on Gleva,” he repeated. Tilla had never had any problem with cursing people before. It was not clear why not cursing them should require the help of a scribe.
“I did not even want to put a curse on her,” Tilla said, as if this might help.
“Oh. Good.”
“I wanted to find out if she had put one on Serena.”
He slumped down on the bed. “And?”
Tilla gave a small shrug. “I think we asked the wrong scribe.”
We. So Virana was involved too. That explained the mention of the “young friend.” “So the only people definitely known to have been making inquiries about cursing an enemy are …?”
“People do it all the time here!” Tilla insisted. “Even just for things that have got lost and stolen. You pay the scribe to write the curse and then you throw it in the spring and ask the goddess for justice. Virana knows somebody who did it and got her bracelet back.”
“So, what made your particular curse such a problem that the chief priest is still talking about it?”
Tilla cleared her throat. “I expect they are nervous about speaking of murder since Serena died.”
“You asked someone else to help you put a curse on Gleva for murder?”
“No!”
“No?”
“Not exactly. We never said her name. And I told the priest it had happened a long way away in the North.”
“Really? I can’t think why that didn’t reassure him.”
“And I never did it! He advised us not to and I said thank you. I told him he was very wise and I am not going to do it.”
He was not sure whether “I am not going to do it” meant she had still been contemplating it up to this moment, or whether his wife was mixing up her Latin tenses, as she sometimes did when she was agitated. He chose not to ask, on the grounds that the answer might only annoy him further. “The problem is,” he explained, mustering as much patience as he could manage, “that the man who happens to be in charge of two of the most powerful groups in the town is threatening to tell people that you’ve been going around slandering Sulis Minerva’s priestess. Even if it doesn’t come to anything legal, insulting Pertinax’s woman is another way to upset Pertinax, and he’s the only other person apart from us who wants to see justice.”
“But I was only—”
“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”
She reached up to finger the pale wisps of hair that had escaped from the plaits.
“Tilla, I want to help Valens’s boys just as much as you do. If you don’t like the way I’m doing it, say so. Don’t go around undermining me.”
She picked up the abandoned spindle and wound the loose thread around the spool. “I saw Albanus this afternoon,” she said. “I told him to be careful because Gleva might want to hurt the boys, and he should look out for trouble.”
He closed his eyes and took in a slow breath, not pleased to be proved right. “Did you say this to anyone else?”
“Of course not. And he said he will talk to you.”
“Good.” At least Albanus had some sense. “Does Virana know she has to keep this to herself?”
“Albanus said he will tell her.”
Ruso silently thanked the gods for that long-gone day when Albanus, a man of education and good sense, had been assigned to be his clerk. Then he glanced at his wife, who was looking crestfallen, and felt guilty for hounding her. At least, he felt guilty until she said, “And what have you found out that will help the boys, husband?”
The question seemed designed to probe his own failure. He had learned nothing that would help Valens’s boys. In fact he had taken a step backward; just how far back would only be determined when he had a chance to find out what the problem was with the witness who could place Serena at the fire. He said, “Did you go down to the river this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Then the drunk over the road is still watching us even though he denies being a spy.”
“You asked him if he was a spy?” She sounded incredulous.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he admitted. “And I’ve also found out that, whatever they tell you, the locals aren’t looking for Terentius anymore, if they ever were. Well, not in any real way.”
She said, “Is there another way?”
“They’re going to make one last plea to the gods before they give up and move on to build a new suite of baths and a brighter future, for the sake of the majority who haven’t had any relatives murdered. Apparently our only part in it is to shut up and accept a free passage home.”
Tilla said, “Ah,” as if he had just explained something.
He glanced sideways at her. “I told them I wasn’t interested. You haven’t agreed to anything, have you?”
“The black ewe,” she said, not answering his question. “So that is what they were doing.”
He blinked. He had seen desperate relatives try the ancient method of searching for an unquiet spirit after the terrible earthquake in Antioch. He always assumed that the custom was confined to the East and that a Briton would neither recognize nor understand it, but he should have guessed. Tilla had an unhealthy fascination with anything that combined the religious, the optimistic, and the slightly mad. The last thing he wanted to do was encourage her. Fortunately he had the perfect excuse. He said, “I promised not to talk about it.”
“Do not worry!” The hands she placed either side of his face smelled of lanolin. “In a place like this I am sure I can find somebody to tell me all about this searching for the dead.”
He had used more or less those same words—I’ll find somebody who can tell me—earlier this afternoon, and he had meant them as a threat. Now Tilla seemed to be using them in all innocence, not wanting him to break his vow of silence. “They want the search kept secret,” he said. “The whole business is nonsense, obviously, but the fact that they’ve resorted to it proves they genuinely don’t know where he’s gone.”
“I will say nothing,” she promised, adding, “The ewe ended up down by the river, sitting in a lettuce patch.”
So that, he supposed, was where Terentius’s spirit was believed to be lingering. He said, “How old were the lettuces?”
She frowned. “Full-grown. Some gone to seed.”
“Which means … how long?”
“Husband, you are the son of a farmer, and you make medicines from plants yourself, and yet you do not know this?”
He reminded her that his father had not been a farmer: He had been a man who owned a farm, which was not the same thing at all. Then she told him the lettuces she had seen must have been growing for at least one and a half moons. He was proud of his instant deduction that “Terentius only disappeared three weeks ago, so he can’t be buried underneath them, can he?”
“I suppose not.”
At least they had agreed on something.
“We need to be careful of the Sulis Minerva people,” he told her. “That includes the bath manager and all the temple staff. They’re desperate to keep all the bad news away from the tourists. We’ve only been given such a long rein until now because they were hoping we’d manage to calm Pertinax down and get him to give up the idea of a trial.”
Tilla’s snort of derision summed up his own feelings on the likelihood of that happening.
He explained about the bad blood between the officials and the veterans. “There were rival schemes to build new baths,” he told her. “Pertinax rammed through an agreement for the veterans’ scheme, but it ran into all sorts of problems on site. From what I can gather, the investors decided to cut off the funding until they saw some progress, and the builders walked away. Then the fire at the Little Eagle took what there was of the site with it, and that seems to have finished the whole thing off.”
“Do you think the fire was started on purpose?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whoever started it,” she said, “deserves to be haunted by the spirits of those poor men who were burned in their beds.”
“Precisely,” he said, admiring the seamless way his wife had moved from suspicion to outrage. “If someone did start it, they’ll be desperate not to be found out.” Suddenly he saw the obvious next step. “Maybe it was Terentius.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To get himself out of a failed project,” he said, thinking aloud. “I think quite a few of the veterans had put money into it. If it was ruined by accident, he would avoid the disgrace. When the flames got out of control and he realized there were casualties, he panicked and ran.”
“Serena would never be part of anything like that.”
“No,” he agreed. “Especially since her father was one of the investors. But if she’d found out, Terentius would have to keep her quiet.”
Tilla picked up her spindle. “That is all very complicated,” she said, teasing out some fresh strands of fleece.
“That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“So”—Tilla set the spindle twirling and played out more wool—“this Terentius was bad at his job, he lit a fire that killed people, then he murdered Serena and ran away.”
Put that baldly, it did not sound likely.
“How will we catch him?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we won’t get any help from the priests.”
“You think they will try to stop us?”
“They’re definitely watching us,” he told her. “Sometimes it’s the old man across the road, sometimes it must be somebody else.”
Tilla stilled the spindle in mid-twirl. “Perhaps it was you they meant to attack all along.”
Ruso, who had been considering the same thing, said, “I’ve told them we’re as lost as they are, which is pretty much true.”
“And if we start to be not so lost?”
“Things could get difficult,” he said, running his fingertips lightly over his bruised arm. “How far would you go to defend the honor of your goddess?”
Tilla lifted her chin. “If she is a powerful goddess, she will defend herself.”
The fleeting thought that perhaps Sulis Minerva had already defended herself by sending the mysterious assassin told him that he had been spending too much time listening to his wife.
“Neena will be back soon with Mara,” she announced, winding up the spun wool and securing the shortened strand around the spindle. “Then we can go downstairs for dinner. Perhaps the food will help us think.”
“I’ve got to go out first.”
“Where?”
“I need to talk to a young woman in a bar.” Seeing his wife’s expression he added, “Why don’t we all go and eat over there? They need the business.”
34
“You are right,” Tilla murmured to her husband, glancing down the rutted street to where a bedraggled woman was hanging out washing and shouting at several unkempt children to clear off or she would set the dog on them. “This is not a place where strangers will want to come and eat.”
The welcome at the bar was warm enough, though. The cheerful young woman greeted Tilla’s husband like an old friend and seemed to find nothing unusual about Tilla’s hairstyle, which was a relief. The place itself was well-kept and brightly painted. Tilla supposed there was little anyone could do about the lingering smell of burning, or about the lack of other customers. But there was further disappointment to come: They were no longer serving food. “Not until we get into the new place.”
He said, “New place?”
The smile grew even broader. “We’re moving! We’re taking over a bar by the temple.”
A wiry, gray-headed man approached from the kitchen with two small children in his wake. This must be the veteran her husband had spoken of. Much older than his wife, as they often were. Mara, catching sight of the children, scrambled to stand on Neena’s lap for a better view. Tilla commented on it in British to Neena: The baby was not so shy now.
Ruso was saying, “I hear you’re moving.”
“I’ll believe it when it’s all signed and sealed,” the man said. “Not before.”
“Oh, you!” The woman gave him an affectionate rub on the shoulder. “It will be all right, Gnaeus.” She turned to Tilla’s husband. “Didn’t I tell you he’d think of something?”
The man called Gnaeus said, “I didn’t think of this.”
“He’ll be fine once we’re there,” the woman assured them. “We’d move tomorrow, only it’s the Sulis Minerva festival and we don’t want to miss it.”
“You don’t want to miss it,” put in the husband.
The woman turned to Tilla and said in British, “You’ll enjoy it.” She switched back into Latin for “Once they’ve done all that business at the temple, there’ll be free food, and proper music, and dancing by torch
light in the courtyard.”
Tilla saw Ruso exchange a glance with Gnaeus. “You do not have to join in with the dancing,” she told him. “Neena and Virana and I will dance while you and Albanus look after the baby.”
From the way he looked at her, anyone would think she had suggested eating his grandmother. The young woman looked amused. “What can I get you to drink?”
Tilla and Neena both chose beer. Mara was given some milk, but, to Tilla’s embarrassment, instead of drinking it, she decided to spray it out of her mouth and all over the table. For a moment even Mara looked amazed at what she had done. Then she saw that the watching children thought it was very funny, and her face lit up into a broad grin.
Looking back on it, Tilla saw that this was the moment when she should have asked Neena to take the baby out. But they had come here as a family and, besides, her husband was trying to hold a serious conversation with the bar owners about the night of the fire, and getting Mara out would have meant asking him to move. So she wrestled the spouted cup out of Mara’s protesting grasp before she could do it again, and wiped up the mess. Meanwhile, seeing the baby was in need of distraction, Neena took out an apple she had bought from a stall earlier and cut it into slices.
“I wouldn’t have noticed her,” the young woman was saying, “I mean, there was lots of shouting going on. But she was different, you know? She wasn’t shouting about the fire. It was like she was pleading with him.”
“What did she say?”
“Something about not going back there. ‘Don’t confront him’—I think that’s what she said.”
Mara had grabbed a slice of apple in each small hand and was now waving them in the air, squealing with delight at the mirth this caused the owners’ children.
“ ‘Don’t confront him’?” asked Ruso, ignoring the excitement going on beside him. “Are you sure?”
“ ‘Don’t confront him. Not now.’ I thought it was a funny thing to say. I mean, the Little Eagle’s ablaze, people are screaming, there are men tearing another building down with their bare hands, and that Terentius is off to pick a fight with somebody.”
