by Ruth Downie
“No! Really? The man who murdered his wife is a doctor?”
“My cousin met him, you know. On the night of the fire. Pretending to help people. And all the time—”
“The priests left two little boys in there with a wife killer?”
“Somebody ought to do something.”
“They’ll bring bad luck on all of us.”
“They ought to break the doors down!”
They were enjoying this. Tilla was weary and exasperated. She wanted to walk away. But if you did not correct people, how would the truth ever be known? She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Doctor Valens did not murder his wife!”
Everyone in the cold room stopped talking and turned to look at her. The woman who deserved to have her hair set alight raised her eyebrows. The little smile said she had wanted an argument, and Tilla had fallen for it.
Too late, she remembered that a mother should never get into a fight with her baby looking on. Not unless she was confident of winning. “Doctor Valens has every right to take his own children wherever he wants,” she said. “And the man with him is my husband. He is a good man. They are only hiding in there because stupid people chased them.”
The woman said softly, “Are you calling us stupid?”
She said, “What would you call a person who refuses to hear the truth?”
“A Northerner!” shouted someone. The laughter that followed was not kind.
The woman stepped closer. “You want to watch yourself, coming here, insulting people.” A fleck of spittle landed on Tilla’s cheek.
Remember to breathe.
“And she has steal vegetable!” cried a voice from somewhere.
The woman smiled. “A thief too, eh?”
They were all closing in around her now, pushing her toward the edge of the cold plunge. Tilla looked around for Neena and Mara, but she could not see them anywhere.
The woman put her face up so close that Tilla could not only smell the wine-laden breath but feel it on her neck. “I reckon,” the woman said, “that some people ought to mind their own business and go back where they came from.”
“Perhaps they should,” Tilla agreed, determined not to be the first to look away, because if she did, she was lost.
“Perhaps we’ll have to help you.”
The stone rim of the cold plunge was pressing into the backs of her calves. There was nowhere left to retreat to. In a moment someone would give her a push and she would topple in. But if she could get a good grip, she would take the woman with her, and then it would be one-on-one.
“Ladies!” cried a voice from the doorway. A couple of people turned to glance at the skinny little Roman standing there, clutching a tray, and the slave with the baby who had slipped into the room behind him. “The dancing is about to start. But first, who would like to try our special festival apple pastries? Flavored with real cinnamon!”
“We’re busy,” growled the woman.
“Freshly baked this afternoon, spiced with cinnamon all the way from India, the land of tribes where people live to be two hundred years old! Just one each, ladies, please. Absolutely free for the festival. Try one and tell me they aren’t the best apple pastries you’ve ever eaten.”
The woman with the wine-laden breath continued to glare at Tilla, then muttered, “Next time!” before turning smartly on her heel to join her friends snatching up the pastries from Albanus’s tray. Tilla felt Neena dragging her away, and this time she did not resist.
53
“Someone’s coming,” Ruso said, squinting out through the gap between the doors.
Valens swung round to face him, ceremonial sword in hand. “Who is it?”
“Sh!” Ruso, who had only caught a glimpse of movement beyond the divine armpit, pressed his ear against the door.
From outside came “… and don’t let him give you any nonsense about omens.”
Ruso recognized the voice. The speaker must be at the top of the steps, and he sounded out of breath.
“I’m not having him shifting the blame,” the man continued. “If that wood had been stored properly, in the dry, we’d have had no trouble.”
“Dorios,” Ruso whispered to Valens. “High priest.”
“You men,” continued the voice, “wait outside until I give the order. And remember, the children are not to be hurt.”
Footsteps. The door vibrated against Ruso’s ear. Dorios meant business.
Valens put down the sword and shield and stepped forward to haul on the handle. The door slowly swung open. It let in a gust of cool damp air and the strains of native musicians playing the pipes, and it revealed the broad silhouette of the chief priest. The four slaves who had been holding a dripping canopy above his head stayed outside with Sulis Minerva. To either side of her, not quite out of sight, stood more temple slaves carrying clubs.
Pausing on the threshold, Dorios called out, “Doctor Valens!” as though he were summoning the dead. He was visibly startled when Valens appeared from behind the door, dipped down onto one knee, and declared, “Sir! My boys and I can’t thank you enough.”
Dorios stepped inside, looking down at him with an expression that suggested he hadn’t expected this. Then he gazed around the orderly temple with its display of gleaming treasure, at Ruso, standing unarmed in a bloodstained tunic, and at the bed where two identical small boys sat wrapped in a temple blanket and blinking at the sudden intrusion of the last rays of daylight.
Ruso hoped he and Valens had put everything back more or less where they found it. With luck those dents on the back of the door had always been there, and the scratches on the polished chair would not show in the dim interior of the temple.
“You were an answer to prayer, sir!” Keeping at a distance that the priest could not possibly interpret as a threat, Valens rose to his feet. “When I saw the steps open up in front of us and your men holding the crowd back, it was as if the goddess herself had offered her protection.” He shook his head, as if he could still hardly believe what had happened. “You and your men saved all of our lives.” He turned to his boys. “Say ‘Thank you, Master High Priest,’ boys.”
The boys’ chorus of thanks would have done credit to the choir.
The priest took in Valens’s black eye and the blood on Ruso’s tunic and managed, “I hope the children weren’t injured?”
“Saved by the arm of the goddess, sir,” Valens assured him, stepping across to stand behind his boys. “What sort of offering do you think I should make as thanks for sanctuary? Do you think an actual ox would be acceptable, or would the value in money be better?”
Faced with this surprisingly generous choice, the priest appeared lost for words. Out on the temple porch, someone sneezed.
Ruso realized he was holding his breath.
“I think,” Dorios said, “the monetary value would be preferable.”
Valens was profoundly grateful and eager to pay up. So it was fortunate the chief priest did not know that most of Valens’s savings would be back in the strong room of the Second Augusta over in Isca—a place from which a man who was currently absent without leave could not possibly retrieve them. Nor did he know that Valens’s best friend had spent most of his own money bringing his household to Aquae Sulis and had little spare to lend. Certainly not the value of an ox, whatever that might be.
“I suppose a testimonial plaque wouldn’t really be the thing, would it?” Valens was asking, glancing around the walls. “I shouldn’t think the people out there will want a reminder once they find out I was with my own children.”
Dorios, the man who had stirred up the crowd in the first place by announcing Valens as a child thief, grunted.
“The veterans must regret calling him a child thief now,” put in Ruso, seeing a way for Dorios to save face.
“Outrageous,” Dorios agreed. “Causing a disturbance in the middle of the night, telling the whole town someone was stealing children. I’ve already complained in the strongest possible terms. If I’
d been told they were your own boys, we’d never have supported any move to bring them back. Frankly, I think the veterans owe you an apology.”
Ruso had to admire the way the man had neatly distanced himself from all the blame. Valens, meanwhile, was apologizing for the disturbance and asking if the priest could recommend a safe place for him and the boys to spend the night. “We’ll be gone in the morning,” he promised. “I’ll carry on with my original plan to take them to Isca.”
If Dorios understood the game Valens was playing, he pretended not to. After giving the matter some thought, he suggested that as there were no supplicants sleeping in the temple that night, and as he himself had to hurry away and entertain the governor, perhaps Valens and the children would like to remain here? “We have beds, as you see. My people can fetch you some food.”
Valens professed himself delighted with the brilliance of this solution. Ruso, meanwhile, found himself torn between admiration and anxiety. Anyone who could manipulate people as neatly as Valens just had could lie about anything. Including whether or not he had murdered his wife.
“And will your friend be staying too?”
“No, thanks,” said Ruso. “I need to get back to my family.”
And some sanity. Even Tilla was straightforward compared to this.
54
Now that the rain had stopped, the crowd seemed to have forgotten the child thief altogether. The people clustered under the torchlit porticos appeared to be enjoying the beer and the music. Others had formed a big unwieldy circle that enclosed the temple and the altar and were doing a cheerful and splashy dance through the puddles. In the near darkness nobody paid any attention to the man following the priest out of the temple and hurrying down the steps.
Waiting at the foot of the steps for a chance to pass through the circle of dancers, Ruso caught sight of a bald-headed veteran prancing about with a cluster of children as if he had always been a Briton underneath the armor. He felt a faint stirring of envy.
When the dance finally broke up, he bent to pick up an abandoned straw hat and pushed it back into some sort of shape. Thus disguised, he went in search of Tilla.
The chances of her listening to “Wait there!” had been slim, and even if she had waited, he could hardly expect her to be standing there still. Skirting the edge of the crowds under the portico, he went to search for Virana, who might know where Tilla had gone. He needed to find his family. He had no idea what to do after that.
What had Valens said? Come on, man. You’ve done this sort of thing before. You know what to do much better than I do.
But Ruso had been trying to think what to do ever since they had arrived in Aquae Sulis. He was tired and he was disillusioned. His injured head hurt, and none of his efforts so far appeared to have done Valens the least bit of good. If it weren’t for the children, he would have given up before now.
It was strange how many diametrically opposed actions could be justified by insisting you were taking them for the sake of two small boys.
“Whoops. Sorry!”
He staggered sideways. The hat fell off. As he regained his balance, the laughing woman who had collided with him grabbed the hat, jammed it onto her own head, and danced off arm-in-arm with her friends, all of whom seemed to be holding each other up.
He was making his way across to the bathhouse when the last voice he wanted to hear growled in his left ear, “Was it you who put the priest up to that, then?”
Ruso stopped. “Up to what?”
“You’re wasting your time,” Pertinax told him. “I’ll get my boys back anyway when your pal’s convicted.”
“Good,” said Ruso, stepping away from the nearest group of partygoers lest anyone should recognize him as the friend of the child stealer.
“You can tell him that from me: I’m putting the request for trial in tomorrow.”
“You can tell him yourself,” Ruso said. “I’m not your messenger.”
When had he stopped calling Pertinax “sir”?
If Pertinax was offended by the lack of respect, he made a good job of hiding it. “They won’t let him stay up there in that temple tomorrow, you know. They’ll throw him out. They want the doors open for the visitors.”
“I’m looking for Tilla,” Ruso told him. “Have you seen her?”
“These priests can’t be trusted. I know what they’re like. And if you think I’m falling for a deal like that, you’re more of a fool than I thought.”
“I doubt that’s possible,” Ruso told him. “And I don’t know anything about a deal.” He put one foot onto the base of a pillar and pulled himself up to see beyond Pertinax and over the heads of the crowd. “Have you seen Tilla?”
“So it wasn’t you who put him up to it, then?”
Ruso’s gaze followed a gleam of blond hair in the lamplight. The woman turned. She was a stranger. He sighed and stepped down. “Put who up to what?”
So Pertinax explained the deal he had just rejected. And exactly as Ruso had said in the first place, it had nothing to do with him.
55
Tilla was one of a row of three women and a baby behind a stall in the main bathing hall. All of them looked pink-faced and sticky in the heat from the pool, and the table in front of them had only a couple of unsold pastries and four empty trays left on it. Which was just as well, because although Ruso found it very gratifying that all three women leapt to their feet when they saw him, Virana’s pregnant bulge caught the loose top of the table. The remaining pastries and the trays all slid onto the floor at his feet, and then nobody was paying him any attention at all.
When the mess had been cleared up, he assured them that Valens and the boys were fine and so was he. He did not need stitches. Neither did he need beer or a reconstructed and slightly dusty apple pastry. Just in case anyone was about to ask, he added that he didn’t need to dance, either. What he wanted was to go somewhere quiet and think.
Virana looked at Tilla and sighed. “My husband is just the same. I tell him, ‘You will enjoy yourself once you try it,’ but he won’t try.”
He said, “You stay and dance with Virana if you want.”
Tilla shook her head. “I want to look after you.”
He restrained an urge to wrap his arms around her and rest his weary head on her shoulder.
Shortly afterward, sitting rigid on the trunk of Terentius’s things in the maintenance stores while Tilla stood over him and seemed to be gouging out the cut on his head with her fingernails, he was feeling less grateful for being looked after.
“It must be clean now,” he insisted, trying not to sound like a man talking through clenched teeth. “Valens has done it once already.”
“I think so,” she agreed.
At the sight of her draping the cloth over the side of the bowl, the worst of the pain from the vinegar began to ebb. His clenched muscles began to relax at last.
She said, “It needs stitches.”
The muscles tightened again until he remembered his case was safely over at Pertinax’s house. “I shouldn’t worry,” he assured her. “Valens says it’s only superficial.”
“Wait there.”
“But the kit is—”
Too late. He heard the rise of voices outside as she opened the door, and then it faded and he was left staring at a row of chisels hung on the wall above a stack of spades and sledgehammers.
She returned in triumph, holding up a needle case. “From that doctor in the baths.”
He tried telling her that the cut was not deep, that the light was no good, that head wounds always bled a lot—“I know that,” she told him—but to no avail.
“Ready?”
He fought down the words No! Get off me! “Yes.”
“I cannot do this if you do not sit still.”
“I am sitting still.”
“So, what did Pertinax say to you?”
It was the continuation of a conversation they had started before the vinegar began to eat its way into his skull. “He said the
chief priest met him on the temple steps,” he said. “Dorios actually offered to hand over the boys to him if—ow!”
“What is the matter?”
“Nothing. I just didn’t know you were going to start.”
She said, “You tell me I must talk to the patient and take their mind off it.”
“You have to give a warning first. You can’t just jab people out of nowhere.”
“It was not out of nowhere,” she pointed out. “I said, ‘Are you ready?’ and you said yes.”
“But then you asked me about—ow! Do you have to stitch it? I’m sure a bandage would do.”
“You cannot see it,” she reminded him. “I can. Try to think about something else. The chief priest offered to hand over the boys to Pertinax if what?”
Ruso attempted to concentrate on the proposed deal that had outraged the old centurion. “Dorios offered to get the boys out of the temple and hand them over to Pertinax if Pertinax agreed not to insist on a trial—ow!”
“You are a terrible patient.”
He said, “Nobody else has ever complained.”
“Then somebody else can treat you next time,” she told him. “Last stitch going in now. How can the priest—”
“Watch the needle, wife! Never mind the priest.”
The hand in his peripheral vision stopped moving. She said, “How can anyone take the boys away from Valens? He is their father. Is it not against your law?”
“I doubt Dorios cares. He’s got Valens trapped, and he’s clearly desperate to avoid a trial.”
She said, “But you heard him give his word to keep Valens and the boys safe.”
“He did.”
“Perhaps this Dorios is in league with Gleva.”
Given the stark way that priest and priestess ignored each other during the ceremonies, it was hard to imagine. But then, it was hard to imagine Gleva and Pertinax together too. It was hard for a man with a needle being pushed through his skin to imagine anything.
Tilla said, “Perhaps Pertinax told Gleva that Valens was hiding in the Repose, and she told the priest, and he sent that man to attack him.”
