Terra Incognita

by Ruth Downie

  “What’s the matter with you people? If you think he did it, what the hell did you let him out for? Surely you’re not really so frightened of the natives that you dare not arrest a murderer?”

  “We have to tread softly at the moment, Doctor, since one of our own men is widely known to have confessed. But having Rianorix out there may work to our advantage. We may just catch a few bigger fish.”

  “Tilla’s not a big fish! She’s not a—” Halfway through the sentence he realized how ridiculous it sounded, but he finished it anyway. “She’s not a fish at all.”

  “No, it’s often surprising what you find when you pull the net in.”

  “It’s ridiculous. Lock him up. His rebel cronies aren’t going to go near him anyway while you’re sniffing around.”

  “That depends on how obvious we are. My informers are very discreet.”

  “Well, so far they haven’t been much use, have they?”

  Metellus shook his head. “Frankly, Doctor, I didn’t expect a man of your standing to be so attached to a native slave. Although she does have a certain rustic charm. I can see why you’re so disappointed.”

  Ruso gritted his teeth.

  “I’m afraid she’s let us both down.”

  Ruso realized he was pacing up and down Metellus’s office floor. Part of him wanted to rush off and confront Tilla. Part of him wanted to stay and prove Metellus wrong. About everything.

  “Well, Rianorix hasn’t led you to the Stag Man,” he said, “And Tilla doesn’t know who or what he is either. In the meantime, do you realize what effect seeing Rianorix free is having on the men—not to mention the rest of the natives?”

  “It’s not an ideal situation, I agree. As soon as you clear the path for us with Thessalus, I’ll persuade the prefect to have him rearrested.”

  “You don’t think he did it!” surmised Ruso suddenly. “You’d never have let him out if you thought he could tell you where that head was.”

  Metellus smiled. “Well done, Doctor. You’re right: I’m not sure that he did it. He may well just be a loudmouth. But he’s a rebel sympathizer. And he was making public threats against one of our men. In fact, you’re quite right, we are considering the possibility that it was one of his cronies seizing a chance to cause trouble. For all we know there may have been several of them: We can’t really control who’s in the streets out there after dark. I’ll try and get some names from him when we pick him up again. But someone will have to be put before the governor in three days’ time. It won’t be a local god and it certainly won’t be Doctor Thessalus. Now. You need something to take your mind off all this. Are you sure you’re not interested in hunting? Rumor has it the governor might—”

  “No,” said Ruso. “Definitely not.”

  “Pity,” said Metellus.

  50

  RUSO BURST OUT of Metellus’s office with an energy that made the sentries guarding the headquarters shrine grab at their weapons. He strode across the torchlit courtyard, then turned on his heel and scrunched down the graveled street in the direction of the infirmary. He was going to see Tilla. He just needed to collect a few things on the way.

  The sword swung against his thigh as Ruso shrugged on his body armor. His fingers fumbled with the buckles and thongs that joined the iron plates together. He lowered the heavy helmet onto his head and tied the strips of leather beneath the cheek pieces. He was not going to put up with any nonsense from anyone out there tonight.

  Valens wandered out of one of the wards just as he was leaving his room.

  “Goodness, Ruso, where are you going looking like that?”

  “Out,” said Ruso, without breaking his stride.

  The guard on the east gate saw the medical case in his hand and opened up for him immediately.

  The sound of his boot studs rang out in the quiet night, and he was conscious of the brass belt fittings jingling with every step. As he passed the shrine, a dog began to bark in one of the houses. It set off a yappy, irritating reply farther away. Ahead of him, a window squeaked open. It closed again as he approached.

  A rat scuttled across the shuttered entrance to We Sell Everything. Ruso kept to the main thoroughfares and to the center of the street. Nobody, antlered or otherwise, was going to creep up on him and drag him into one of those dark gaps between the buildings. Not without a fight.

  He approached the last house along the east road. He knew he was in the right place. The air was thick with the smell of the brewery next door.

  By the third attempt, he was thumping on the door with the hilt of his sword. A muffled voice from somewhere down the street shouted, “Hey! Clear off!”

  That was when he noticed that the shutter on the small window nearby had swung open. A woman with an accent like Tilla’s demanded to know what he wanted. As soon as he stepped left to address her, the shutter slapped back into the frame.

  “Is this the house of Catavignus the brewer?” he asked the shutter, hoping that she was still listening behind it.

  “The brewery is closed,” came the reply. “Come back in the morning.”

  “I’m looking for a girl called Tilla.”

  “Well, look somewhere else.”

  He tried, “I’m a doctor.”

  “Nobody is ill.”

  Were all the women of Tilla’s tribe—whatever it was called—this difficult? Why couldn’t she at least open the shutter to talk to him?

  He was not going to bawl his name down the quiet street. He leaned closer and said in a hoarse whisper, “I’m an officer with the Twentieth Legion. Ruso. Catavignus invited me here. Tilla is my . . . Tilla knows who I am. I have to talk to her.”

  There was a pause, then a reply of, “There is no girl called Tilla here.”

  “Darlughdacha,” he corrected himself, trying to remember how Tilla had taught him to pronounce it. “I’m a friend.”

  “I thought you said you were the doctor?”

  “I am,” he said, adding, “she has two names,” lest the woman should wonder why someone claiming to be a friend had got it wrong the first time.

  “No Darlughdacha either.”

  “She told me she would be here,” he insisted. “She will be expecting me.” This was not strictly true, but he felt it would lend weight to his case.

  Silence.

  “This is the house of Catavignus the brewer?”

  The voice confirmed that it was. Then it wished him good night. After that, he might as well have been speaking to a wall. As indeed he was.

  Curled up together like kittens. Metellus’s words seemed to echo around the empty streets as Ruso strode back past the deserted bathhouse, the shrine with a lamp flame wavering on it, We Sell Everything, and the alleyway where most of Felix had been found. The murder was something Ruso felt he should care rather more about than he did at the moment. And the fact that he did not care was Tilla’s fault. He had behaved perfectly reasonably. More than reasonably: generously. He had traveled to the very edge of the civilized world out of consideration for her: something most men would not do for their wives or mothers, let alone for a slave. He had even tried to help that arrogant bastard Rianorix with the black eye and the gappy tooth and the silly horsetail hair. What a naïve fool he had been.

  Unless Metellus was lying. But why would he do that?

  He would give Tilla a chance to tell her side of the story. He was a reasonable man. He would ask her, calmly, to explain where she had been last night. Where she was now. That was the point. She had expressly said she was going to her uncle’s house tonight. He had hinted that he might visit. So why wasn’t she there?

  Perhaps there was an innocent explanation. Perhaps Tilla had been called to . . . no. The woman behind the shutter had not said, “She has gone out.” She had said they did not have a girl with either of Tilla’s names.

  He should have let Ingenuus cut Rianorix’s throat at the clinic. It was too late for that now. Instead, he was going to leave him to Metellus.

  Back at the infirmar
y, he found his bed already occupied by Valens. He woke him for a brief altercation, which revealed that Valens had assumed this to be the on-duty bed, while Ruso’s proper quarters were somewhere else. “I did say I’d cover night duty for you,” Valens reminded him. “Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Never mind,” said Ruso, shedding his armor and kicking it under the bed. “Just go back to sleep.”

  51

  THESSALUS’S GUARD MIGHT have thought it was an odd time for a doctor to be visiting a patient, but it was not his place to say so. Within minutes Ruso was wrapped in a blanket on Thessalus’s floor, staring up into the black space where the rafters would have been if he could see them. His mind refused to sleep. All the words. Jumping around like frogs. Ruso forced himself to listen for the breathing of his unsuspecting host over on the couch, and for a moment he understood the feeling Thessalus had been trying to describe.

  Where was Tilla? Had she betrayed him? If she hadn’t, why would Metellus lie to him?

  What would he say to her when he found her? Worse, what if he didn’t find her? She could have run off somewhere with Rianorix. She could have been planning it ever since they left Deva, and like a fool he hadn’t seen it coming. She could be mocking him to Rianorix right now, just as she had mocked Trenus. The body of a bear, the brain of a frog, and he makes love like a dying donkey with the hiccups.

  Surely she would find something better than that to say about him?

  Curled up together like kittens. The thought made him shudder.

  He rolled over. He must think about something else.

  Despite his bold assurances to Albanus, he did not know who or what the strangely invincible Stag Man was, nor how long the army could keep on playing down the subversion he was raising.

  Who had murdered the trumpeter? He didn’t know that either. Tomorrow, if he couldn’t get Thessalus to retract his confession, he would declare him insane. The way would be clear for Rianorix to be arrested and questioned again about the names of his fellow rebels. It was no worse than he deserved. If one believed in curses, then logically cursing a man was as bad as doing him physical harm.

  Tilla’s voice came back to him. I know this, my lord. But he did not do it.

  Then he should have kept his mouth shut at the bar. And he should have kept his hands off Tilla. Metellus had investigated everyone else. Rianorix was the only logical suspect.

  There was, however, the illogical one. Thessalus, the man who had been out all night and could not explain where—but did know how the murder had been committed.

  Ruso had never met anyone quite like Thessalus before. He gave up his time to run a free clinic for people who largely didn’t do what he told them. He was a good doctor but was so doped up with poppy that he was incapable of defending his patients against the laziness of his staff. He put up with a ghastly deputy and even took him out on his birthday, and then—according to him—committed a grisly and apparently motiveless murder in a back alley. It made no sense. Yet like a lot of his apparent nonsense about triangles and fish, there might be some sort of meaning if one could piece together the background.

  Ruso rolled back, put his hands behind his head, and stared at the invisible rafters.

  Thessalus had not chosen an easy calling. Only the sick would be truly eager to meet a man who spent his days with the ulcerated and unlovely, poking about in the dark and stinking recesses of humanity that most people would prefer to forget about. Ruso sometimes wondered why he had taken it up himself, since he frequently found his patients drove him more to exasperation than compassion.

  Thessalus had evidently found it too much of a strain. Working with Gambax would not have helped. Unable to bring about the miracles demanded of him daily and possibly asked to collude in torture, a kindly and well-meaning man could easily find himself unable to sleep. So he would take a carefully controlled dose of something to lift himself above his worries. He would tell himself it would steady his nerves. Indeed, it would do so. He would take another dose the next night, believing he needed the rest and would wake refreshed and a better healer the next morning. He would tell himself he could stop at any time, and would always be on the verge of stopping. But knowing that “any time” was receding farther into the distance, he would come to distrust and despise himself. He would also begin to need more and more medicine to achieve the same effect. In fact he might need it merely to achieve the levels of calm he had enjoyed before he had started down this path.

  All the time, beneath the false calm of the medicine, a worm would be burrowing. A little worm of doubt and shame, one that would whisper in his ear that he was not quite in control of what he was doing. Indeed, there might well be inexplicable gaps in time when he could not remember what he had done. Sooner or later his confused and guilty mind, already filled with gory images from surgery, would latch onto some terrible deed and convince him that he had carried it out. That he had come home with Felix’s blood on his hands. That the only way to avoid execution was to pretend his mind was completely gone and he was not responsible for his actions.

  Thessalus had already ended his contract with the army because he knew he could not resist the poppy and he knew he was not fit to practice under its influence. In a way, that was an honorable course of action. Many other men in the same position would have hung on as long as possible and pretended all was well.

  But how did he know about the head? Only four people knew about that. Audax, the prefect, Metellus, and himself. Five people including the murderer.

  Ruso sighed. In the darkness, everything was too tangled. He wished he could talk it over with— No. He was not going to think about her.

  “Is that Ruso?” said a voice from the direction of the couch. “Please. I need poppy.”

  He said, “Tell me where the head is.”

  “Haven’t you found it?”

  Ruso sat up. “Tell me where it is, and I’ll believe you did it.”

  “I remember looking into his eyes.” The voice was unsteady. “I remember asking him where he wanted me to put it.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “After that, nothing. Until I was back here with the blood—”

  “Yes, we’ve been through that. You don’t know, because you didn’t do it. Who told you what happened?”

  “No one. I only know what I can remember.”

  “I have been trying to think this through logically,” said Ruso. “I realize poppy tears might confuse you. I suppose too much might give you bad dreams, or make you frightened or sick, and a big overdose would finish you off altogether. But I can’t find any record of poppy making patients violent. You were sensible enough on that night to bring Gambax back from Susanna’s. I imagine you were sensible enough to know that he wasn’t fit to be left in charge of the infirmary. But despite that, you went out. You explained quite clearly to the gate guards that you’d had a call to a civilian emergency. Emergency calls are the sort of things people remember. They like to think they’re helping. Yet I haven’t been able to track that message down.”

  “I’ve told you—”

  “I know what you’ve told me. Let me pass on what I’ve been told by somebody else. That Felix deserved to be punished and you were the instrument of the gods.”

  Thessalus let out a long sigh of relief. “That explains it!”

  “Of course it doesn’t explain it!” snapped Ruso. “I’m tired of being made a fool of, Thessalus.” He threw back the blanket. “Apart from thinking you’re Julius Caesar, you’ve demonstrated just about every symptom of madness in the book. Of course you have. You’ve read the books. What was it you said to Ingenuus that persuaded him to sneak medicine in here for you?”

  “Please. Poppy is the only thing that works.”

  Ruso sprang to his feet. “Enough of this don’t-touch-me rubbish about curing people by talking to them. You’re going to get up, and I’m going to fetch a couple of lamps. Then you’re going to get undressed and we’re going to have a proper look
at exactly what’s wrong with you.”

  “There’s no need,” came the reply. “I can tell you. But you must swear not to tell anyone else.”

  By the light of the feeble lamp Ruso measured out a dose of poppy in wine and handed it to Thessalus. “That should ease it a little.”

  Thessalus nodded his thanks. When he had downed the drink, he rested back on the couch. “When I was an apprentice,” he said, “I discovered I had quite a few fatal diseases.”

  “So did I.”

  “But then you learn to stop looking, don’t you? So when this began—” he indicated his emaciated body—“I told myself I was just tired.

  Overworking. Out of balance.”

  Ruso nodded. There was no need to comment on the injustice of it. Thessalus was only twenty-four years old. He had already tried every treatment Ruso would have suggested. “If you’d told me the truth in the first place instead of babbling on about fish and triangles, I might have been more helpful.”

  “I kept it quiet because I was afraid they would discharge me, and I needed the money. Gambax just thinks I’m in love with the poppy tears. I had to tell Ingenuus because I was not brave enough to face the pain.”

  “He won’t talk. He wouldn’t even tell me.”

  “Have you ever thought,” continued Thessalus, “how useful it would be if each of us was born knowing the time of our death? How many different choices we would make?”

  “We might waste our lives trying to change our fate.”

  “I think we might spend them more wisely.”

  “You have done a great deal of good,” Ruso assured him. “Men are alive now who would not be. The clinic patients speak highly of you.”

  “All of them?”

  “Most. You know how it is.”

  Thessalus chuckled, then eased himself into a more comfortable position. “You have been good to me,” he said. “Do me one last honor. Make them believe me.”

  “But I don’t believe you. Nobody does. You didn’t do it.”