by Ruth Downie
“Do us all a favor, Doctor,” said Geminus. “Leave the lad alone. He’s only doing what he’s told.”
Ruso felt his heartbeat quicken. He wanted to ask, How long have you been standing there? What he said was “Why did you send him off to inspect the sewers?”
“And the drains, and the water supply,” said Geminus affably. “Can’t have the Sixth thinking we’re dirty.”
A section of the fire collapsed, sending out a fresh gust of smoke. Geminus stepped round it. His henchmen moved to reposition themselves on either side of him. “I hear you’ve been inviting young Austalis’s pals in to visit him.”
Ruso had hoped to be better prepared for this discussion. “Just one,” he said. “It’ll do him good to have a visitor.”
Geminus shook his head sadly, as if such ignorance was a disappointment to him. He gestured for Ruso to follow him. “You and I need to have a word,” he said. “In private.”
Chapter 23
When a centurion lived with female relatives, entering the house on the end of his barrack block was like visiting a family home where a couple of rooms were set aside for the work of keeping eighty legionaries in order. Geminus was a single man. The corridor was empty apart from scuff marks on the limewash. The office into which Ruso followed him bore no personal touches beyond the smell of dog and Geminus’s parade uniform with its white-crested helmet looming over them from a stand.
Geminus made a sign to a junior seated behind a plain desk, who hastily set down his abacus. His boots made a hollow sound across the floorboards as he went to join the two shadows outside.
Ruso heard the latch fall into place behind him and stifled the foolish thought that nobody could rescue him, because nobody knew where he was.
Geminus did not waste time with niceties like sitting down. From the middle of the room he said, “If you don’t like my orders, come and see me. Don’t cause trouble behind my back.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I’ve enough to do here without being undermined by some smart-arse fresh out from Deva. You need to listen to your men. Austalis was on his own because if I give the recruits half a chance to get together and stir each other up, we’ll have a whole lot more trouble. And before you ask, I do know why he took a slice off his arm.”
Ruso swallowed. Austalis might have been cheered by the visit, but Geminus had a point: Marcus had certainly been stirred up. Still, there was a principle at stake. “Where I come from,” he said, “the medics decide what goes on in the hospital.” If they were lucky.
Geminus appeared ummoved.
“I had a morning’s work lined up for Pera, and instead he went off looking at drains.”
“I was trying to keep him away from you.” The gray eyes traveled slowly over Ruso, who was reminded of times when he had been summoned to his father’s study. Geminus gave a “Hm,” as if he had just reached a decision. He reached for a stool and nodded toward another. “I was hoping to keep you out of all this, but now that you’ve insisted on poking your nose in, you’ll have to know too.”
Ruso sat. He felt as though he had shrunk since he entered the room.
Geminus let out a long breath and began. “You want to know what happened to Tadius.”
“What people are saying doesn’t make sense.”
“What’s it to do with you?”
“I’m concerned about what’s happening to the men.”
“And you think the rest of us aren’t.”
Ruso shifted position on the stool. “You didn’t seem keen to defend them at dinner last night.”
Geminus grunted. “You saw what they did to Tadius.”
Ruso stared at him. “Tadius was killed by the other recruits?”
“Who did you think it was? Me?”
The question hung between them, unanswered.
“There was some native festival a few nights back. I forget what; you’ll have to ask your wife.”
Ruso did not ask how Geminus knew about his wife.
“A bunch of my lads take it into their heads to play this tribal hunting game. They name one man as the stag and then they chase him all over the fort. Things get out of hand. I get there with Dexter and a couple of my men and find the stag dying from a beating in a back street and the rest running away in the dark.”
He paused, perhaps to let Ruso imagine the scene.
“There could have been fifteen or twenty of them; we could only pick out two. One was a lad called Victor. We think he hid out somewhere and then went over the wall.”
“Ginger hair?”
“Silly bugger should have worn a hood if he wanted to get up to mischief.”
“I ran into him just outside Calcaria,” admitted Ruso. “He escaped into the woods.”
“Did you report it?”
Ruso said truthfully, “I didn’t realize he was one of yours.”
“The other one was Sulio.”
So that was why Dexter had not cared whether he jumped.
“And now you’re wondering why I haven’t chained the rest of them up and flogged the truth out of them.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“And then what?”
Ruso scratched one ear thoughtfully.
“I can’t kick that many men out of the Legion without authority from higher up.”
“Can’t they be tried at Deva?”
“We’ve got to get them there first. Five days’ march at least. Do your arithmetic, Doctor. Forty-seven Brits, fit young lads who’ve just had a bloody good training in the use of weapons. Then count the men we can rely on if they turn ugly and divide it by four, because the auxiliaries are staying here and a lot of the maintenance crews are going north in a day or two to help with the wall. Between you and me, they’re a bunch of lazy lard-arses anyway. Whatever happens, there’ll be plenty of stitching practice for your boys afterward.”
It occurred to Ruso that, being Britons, the recruits were unlikely to agree amongst themselves for long enough to organize a full-scale mutiny. But they could certainly cause trouble if they turned violent, and the opposite problem—a mass desertion—would be seriously embarrassing.
“Nobody’s going to send us any help,” continued Geminus. “We need to keep them calm and get them to Deva.” Geminus was a tough man, but he was no fool. He was not going to sacrifice himself for a legion that he would be leaving behind in a matter of weeks. “Once they get there they’ll have a shock coming, but they’re not bright enough to guess and nobody’s going to tell them, are they?”
“I see.”
“See lots of things now, don’t you?”
“Did the hospital clerk alert you to the postmortem report?”
“Young curly was trying to be too clever,” said Geminus. “You medics need to know when to stop. Leave it to us.”
Ruso was rapidly reassessing his understanding of what was going on here. If what Geminus said was true, then he had contradicted and undermined a centurion who was already in a difficult position. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Yes. Stay out of it, and keep your mouth shut.”
Chapter 24
Virana said, “It was here.”
Tilla stood on the edge of the landing stage and watched the river drifting past the heavy oak posts below her. At the moment it would be a tricky jump down into the little flat-bottomed boat moored up with its ropes at full stretch. The ferryman assured her that in a few hours the boat would have risen and it would be an easy step.
Leaving Virana to chatter to the ferryman—both seemed flattered by the attention—Tilla tried to picture the scene when the centurion had ordered two of his men to swim across. She had been nervous when the wagon driver’s mules had stopped on the ford in mid-river. The two recruits would have been contending with much deeper water and no animals or vehicle to hold them steady. What had the centurion been thinking? That a man thrown into fast-flowing water would suddenly discover that he could swim? It might work with dogs, although even
that was doubtful. It had not worked for Dannicus.
She was pondering the stupidity of the order when shrill screaming cut across her thoughts. It was not a scream of anger or excitement. It was the relentless, terrified, out-of-control shrieking of a child in serious trouble.
Tilla hitched up her skirts and ran toward the sound, with Virana following her up the street toward the east gate, shouting, “Wait for me!”
People were already clustering around the shop. A sheep’s carcass swung wildly beneath the awning as a mostly female crowd elbowed past the cheeses and cabbages. From somewhere inside, the child’s cries rose above a woman’s wailing and shouts of “Put him in the river!” and “Fetch a healer!”
“The washing cauldron,” a woman was announcing as Tilla pushed her way toward the front. The listeners gasped in sympathy. “Boiling linen all over himself, poor little beggar. Scalded like a pig.”
Tilla stopped. She was not a medicus. She was just someone who delivered babies as best she could for women who knew they were in danger anyway. She had thought that nothing could be worse than the sight of those warriors hacked apart by the army. She had been wrong. Boiling linen all over himself. Scalded like a pig.
She was not a medicus, and she did not want to be one.
“The doctor’s woman is here!” cried Virana.
Other voices took up the cry. “The doctor’s woman!”
“Let her through!”
Hands reached out to seize her. She was hustled forward.
She opened her mouth to explain that she was not what they needed, but nobody was listening.
This is like helping to bring out a baby. Stay calm. Keep your mind on what needs to be done. Do not be put off by the screaming. And never, ever show that you are afraid too.
“Corinna, the doctor’s woman is here!”
Tilla paused in the doorway, glimpsing a small struggling form between the cluster of women gathered around it. She took a deep breath. She was not what they needed, but for the moment she was all they had.
“Everyone out!” she yelled over the din.
Nobody moved.
She seized two of the women who had been pushing her forward. “You, clear the room except for the child’s mother. You, send to the fort for Medical Officer Gaius Petreius Ruso and tell him his wife needs help with a scalded child.”
“I’ll go,” insisted a third woman. “She’s too fat to run.”
“What?” demanded the plump one. “I’m not—”
“Water,” Tilla told her. “We need lots of cold water—quickly. And then the whites of eggs.” And then a miracle.
She began to shake only when it was all over and she was sitting on the faded red cushion back in their quiet room in the mansio.
“You did well,” he said.
She watched the surface of the water tremble as she lifted the cup. “I wanted to run away.”
“So would anyone.”
She let him think he had said something comforting. She did not tell him about her wavering resolve to become a medicus. He would have stayed no matter what he felt like doing. She had only stayed because she’d had no choice: Virana had announced her. She said, “If he really had been scalded all over, what would I have done?”
“Exactly the same as you did.”
“He would be dying now.”
He said, “Yes.”
“That neighbor needs a good slap for telling lies.”
Her husband did not seem to share her outrage. “People panic.”
In a better light Tilla had been able to see the angry red scald down one side of the struggling child’s leg, and secretly rejoiced at the healthy skin everywhere else.
She knew her husband had worried about putting too much poppy inside such a small body, and then about not giving enough to dull the pain. Whatever he did, the child would not feel as lucky as he undoubtedly was. The mother, who lived next door, had been baking and did not want him near the oven, so she had left him playing in the yard. He had crawled under the gate into the back of the shop and tried to stir the washing cauldron.
She put the cup down. “I do not like this place.”
“I don’t think anybody likes this place.” He pulled off the tunic that was splattered with water and the egg white they had smoothed over the angry red skin.
“Your Jupiter has not defeated the curse.”
“There is no curse, Tilla. Just a mother who didn’t know her child could get under a gate.”
“Corinna has many things on her mind,” Tilla explained. “She is the wife of Victor, who deserted.”
“That explains it, then. She’s distracted.”
“Did you know people are saying your centurion drowned one of his men?”
When she had finished telling him, he carried on buckling his belt in silence. Then he said, “Your secret informer—it wasn’t the scalded-like-a-pig woman, was it?”
“No!”
“But this person didn’t see it happen.”
“Lots of people saw it. My informer says they are too scared to talk.”
Instead of answering, he pulled the tunic straight, then bowed his head and ran both hands through his hair several times as if that would improve it.
She said, “Why would somebody make up things like that?”
“Why,” he said, “would a centurion deliberately drown his own man in front of witnesses?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say that. But they might not have understood what they saw. And it’s none of our business. I’m not an investigator now.”
“Be careful of that man.”
He picked up his case. “I need to get back. I’ve got a critical patient to keep an eye on.”
“I will pray for him.”
“Tell the gods his name is Austalis.” He leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. “You did well with the boy.”
“What will you do about the centurion?”
“I’ll think about it.” He paused in the doorway. “What festival did you miss while we were on the road here?”
She frowned. “Festival?”
“Some native tradition, or a god of some sort? Might have something to do with hunting?”
“I have not heard of it.”
“Ah. Just for men, perhaps.”
She wanted to say, And you think that means a woman would not know of it? but he was gone.
Chapter 25
Austalis’s face was the color of porridge, and a sheen of sweat lay on his skin.
Resting his fingers on a cold wrist with a pulse that was too weak and too fast, Ruso told him that Tilla was praying to the local gods on his behalf. The lad’s cadaverous attempt at a smile of thanks was interrupted by a hiccup. Ruso exchanged a glance with Pera, who had just entered the room. Hiccuping might sound trivial, but for a man in Austalis’s condition it was a bad sign.
Ruso observed him for a few minutes, checked the dressings, and promised to return in a couple of hours, not adding that there would still be enough light to perform the amputation. He had no idea whether anything would have changed in two hours. He was just putting off the decision, and he knew it. Geminus had shaken his confidence. How could he have been so wrong? Why had he listened to the recruits but not to the medics? Why had he believed every word he had been told?
Because he liked the recruits, and he didn’t like Geminus. Because Geminus and Dexter’s blame-the-natives attitude had annoyed him from the moment he’d arrived here. Because they would have said the same things about Tilla, and even if they were partly right, he would still have wanted to punch them.
“Sir?”
Ruso realized Pera had been talking to him since they set off down the corridor.
“Say that again. I wasn’t listening.”
“A word in private, sir?”
“Is it urgent? I’ve had enough words in private for one day.”
Pera conceded that it wasn’t, but his expression said something different.
>
Ruso owed the lad an apology anyway. “Come on,” he said, taking him by the arm and skirting past a squeaking trolley loaded with linen baskets into one of the unused rooms. He closed the door. The squeak faded into the distance. He said, “I’m listening now.”
“Sir, I apologize for that excuse about the man falling off the stretcher.”
“It wasn’t very convincing.”
“I’m usually much better at lying, sir.”
“Perhaps you’d like to tell me the truth now?”
“I’d rather try for a more convincing lie, sir.”
“I’ve had a conversation with Geminus,” Ruso said. “He’s explained some things I didn’t understand about the situation here.”
“Yes, sir.”
You should have listened to your staff. “So is there anything else you think I ought to know? Anything you haven’t just invented, that is.”
“If the centurion has explained everything, sir, then I have nothing to add.”
“Good,” said Ruso, noting the odd formality of the response. “That’s all right, then.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“That’s all you want to say to me?”
For a moment he thought Pera was going to offer something new, but all that came out was another bland “Yes, sir.”
Ruso opened the door again. “You can go.”
Alone in the empty room, Ruso leaned back against the wall. Conscious of the distant bellowing of orders and the steady tramp of boots, he found himself wondering how many of the healthy recruits being drilled up and down the parade ground had been involved in the killing of Tadius. He closed his eyes, imagining the broken body lying in the street and the guilty men fleeing away into the night. Someone—the centurions, perhaps—had gathered Tadius up and carried him to the hospital, where Pera had recorded the details of the injuries straight away in the postmortem report.
Ruso frowned. He was not an investigator now. He never wanted to be one again. He just needed to satisfy himself about one thing, then he would be able to concentrate on Austalis.
