by Ruth Downie
"I'll keep looking," said Ruso.
"Did have," said the next one. "We did have a room. Somebody should have rubbed the notice off."
The third room was still having its walls plastered, but the owner's wife promised it would be ready by nightfall.
"How much?"
She told him. Ruso laughed and walked away, and she let him go.
As the morning wore on and his boot studs wore down, it became clear to Ruso that he had a problem. He was here because Rome had decided that Britannia was worth the trouble of holding on to and had stationed just about enough troops here to crack together the skulls of any Britons who refused to cooperate. Side by side with the stick, however, went the carrot. Civilization. Not only the fort, but Deva itself was undergoing a massive modernization project. Every man not currently engaged in keeping an eye on the hill tribes had a trowel in his hand or a hod over his shoulder. It seemed the legion's orders were to hack out all the available stone, saw up all the local trees, and pipe water to every conceivable outlet. Until the last dog kennel had under-floor heating or the new emperor came up with a new plan, the Twentieth Valeria Victrix was to keep on building.
It was not the soldiers themselves who were causing Ruso's difficulties: They were either off skull-cracking or living in the barracks that they were slowly working their way around to modernization. It was the women and children, widowed mothers and spinster aunts the men collected around them. The women and children and mothers and aunts-not to mention the veterans with nowhere else to retire to, who had women and children of their own-all needed beds to sleep in. Then there were all the hangers-on who congregated wherever there were soldiers to be separated from their wages. Hangers-on needed beds too.
The wail of a trumpet from the other side of the fort wall announced that the morning was almost at an end. Ruso was on duty in an hour and he was still no nearer to keeping his promise to the girl. He was going to have to try Valens's suggestion after all.
Earlier that morning, he had pointed out that he had no intention of lodging his slave in a bar that was effectively a brothel.
"Ah, but it isn't," Valens had explained. "Not technically. We had a tax collector in here the other day. Broken wrist: fell off his horse.
Anyway, he said lots of those sort of places don't register their girls so they don't have to pay the tax on their earnings, and when anybody official asks why there's so many bedrooms then, they say that it's because that take in lodgers. It's worth a try. Just don't let her eat the oysters."
"A tax-dodging brothel. Marvelous."
"You could always have a nice chat with Priscus. I hear his new place is rather spacious. Perhaps he'll find you a spare room."
"Maybe I will," agreed Ruso, just to see the expression on Valens's face.
As Merula swayed across the empty barroom in another stylish silky creation, Ruso mused that this was not the sort of landlady he had envisioned.
The elegantly plucked eyebrows rose at his question. Evidently he was not the sort of tenant she was used to either.
"It's not for me," he explained.
"For a friend?"
"Not exactly." He was aware that he was scratching his ear again. He really must try to stop that. Claudia used to say she knew it meant he was lying, which showed how little they understood each other. He lowered his fist onto the barroom table just below the initials of one CLM, who had felt it necessary to carve not only the first letters of his name but a majestic phallus as well, and said, "I have a female slave whom I can't use at home and who is in need of lodgings. One of my colleagues suggested you might be able to find somewhere for her."
"Ah. An officer at the hospital?"
"Yes," said Ruso, suddenly seeing a way forward. "I believe you know him. He was here a short while ago and he had to have some time off work as a result."
Merula managed to look surprised, as if virulent food poisoning were something she could have hoped to keep secret. "So you know about, uh…?"
"I suggest we say no more about it."
Ruso was satisfied to see relief on the woman's face. He was right: She had been afraid Valens would sue. When she said, "I think we can find a place for her," his problem appeared to be solved.
His problem appeared to be solved until Merula asked, "Is the girl experienced in this kind of work?"
Ruso shook his head. "She can't work. She's sick."
"She can't work?" The painted eyes met his. "So why did your friend tell you to send her to me?"
"I can't have her at my place, she needs to recuperate, and I can hardly billet her in a barracks room."
Merula pursed her lips. "This sickness. Is it fever?"
"She's recovering from surgery on an injured arm."
"And before long you expect her to be fit to work."
"I see no reason why not. In the meantime all she needs is a quiet room and regular meals. You do rent out rooms?"
"Oh, yes!" After this confident assertion she paused. "We don't have anything very comfortable just at the moment…"
"But you do have a private room?"
"We do, but-"
He followed her up the open staircase and along the creaking wooden landing that looked down over the bar. Several of the upstairs doors were ajar, revealing small cubicles with beds covered in bright blankets and cushions. It all looked reasonably clean. Ruso consoled himself with the thought that at least he was doing business with the best possible class of tax-dodging brothel.
In the gloom at the end of the corridor was a closed door. Merula scraped a key into the lock.
The room was bare except for a bench against one wall and a mattress in the corner. Merula glided forward and unlatched the shutters.
Before he could remark on the bars across an upstairs window, she said, "We sometimes use this room for secure storage." The light revealed the rings of old drinks and drips of candle wax on the surface of the bench. Underneath, one leg had been replaced with a new chunk of yellow wood that was much too heavy and the whole thing had been clumsily nailed to the floorboards. Ruso crouched and turned over the stained mattress. The straw was even lumpier than the one he was borrowing from Valens and it didn't smell good.
Merula started to explain that the room had not been used for a while. He interrupted her.
"Do you have mice?"
She frowned. "The girl is on a special diet?"
"I don't mean on the menu. I mean running around. Wild mice."
As soon as she told him they didn't, he said, "Put in a clean bed and I'll take it."
19
She was pretty. Old women said so to her mother, and her mother always laughed and replied, "And she knows it." Her brothers knew it too, although they would die before they said so. Sometimes her father came into the house smelling of beer, roared, "Where's my beautiful girl?" and lifted her onto his shoulders while her mother shouted at him to mind that child's head on the door. And for a few moments she would be a giant, lurching around the houses, reaching for the edges of the thatch, taller than the horses, and seeing right over the tops of people's fences until he put her down and ignored her pleas for "More!" because parents had things to do and because being pretty did not make you important.
When her mother muttered and sighed and tugged at the tangles with the comb, it was because shiny golden curls needed a lot of looking after. She tried not to smile. Her mother would want to know what she was smiling about, and she already knew it wasn't her cousins' faults that they were ordinary little girls whose hair fell down in straight brown lines and she had to remember to be nice to them and…
And the smell was wrong.
Somewhere outside, a man's voice was making ugly, solid sounds that fell like rough logs.
Someone was trying not to pull her hair. Someone was-
She remembered the stink of the bathhouse. The glint of metal blades.
"No!"
Her eyes snapped open as her free hand lashed out and clouted a crouching girl across the fac
e. A jolt of pain shot through her injured arm as the girl squealed and fell backward in a flurry of brown skirt and dirty bare feet.
She had managed to pull herself up and lean against the wall by the time the other girl, who was dark and heavily pregnant, had managed to maneuver herself onto all fours and then haul herself up to sit on the wooden bench.
She remembered the bench. She remembered the room. She remembered what her name was supposed to be. She looked at the girl's hands, which were empty, rough, and red with work. Then she looked around the floor. There was no sign of any shears. She said, "Who are you?"
The girl shook her head and pointed to her mouth.
The question in Latin produced exactly the same gesture.
In Latin again: "Are you dumb?"
The girl nodded, raised her eyebrows in a question and pointed at her, but she did not answer. A name, even one you had only acquired yesterday, should not be so easily given.
"Did they tell you to cut my hair?"
The girl shook her head with a look of alarm. The hand pointed again, this time at a section of hair that had now been untangled. At the far end dangled a comb, trapped in a knot. The girl had been trying to help.
"My name," she said in Latin, "Is Tilla." This produced a welcoming smile, but the traditional request for help in her own language-"I am a stranger here"-was either not understood or ignored.
The girl heaved herself up from the bench, took the one pace necessary to cross the room, and lowered herself to sit next to the mattress. She had begun to attack the tangle again when the door burst open and two men walked into the room.
One had gray eyes and cropped iron-gray hair above a thick neck. The thinner one's hair had once been ginger. The deep brown of his eyes added to the impression that the rest of him was fading into middle age. Tilla had time to observe this while both men stood calmly examining what they could see of her. She also observed that the dumb girl had stopped work and shrunk back to sit beside her with her back to the wall. Instead of staring back at these men who had not had the manners to knock (and whose muscle, Tilla noted, was running to fat around the belly), the girl had her eyes firmly fixed on the gray one's heavy army sandals.
"Stand up," ordered the gray one.
When Tilla failed to move, the girl tapped her arm and translated the order into a hasty scoop of one hand toward the ceiling, at the same time nodding encouragement.
"You want to listen to Daphne," suggested the gray one. "She don't say a lot but she knows what's good for her."
Tilla, noting the girl's anxiety, pulled her knees up and managed to get to her feet on the mattress. Slowly, she forced her trembling legs to push her upward. Her head felt as if it were full of dry sand that was draining away down her body as she stood. Fighting to stay upright, she slumped against the wall. With her eyes closed, she did not see him approach. She was only aware of the sudden cold as the hem of the tunic was lifted, the struggle to keep her balance as the hands groped and probed, and the urge to vomit as the hands withdrew and a voice whispered in her ear, "Show us your smile."
Clenching her teeth, she managed to open her eyes.
"Smile," repeated the gray man, who was not smiling.
The other girl was on her feet now, moving around to where Tilla could see her, nodding eagerly and grinning, making upward gestures at the corners of her mouth.
As Tilla's eyes drifted shut she thought, Whatever you do to me here will speed me on my way to the next world, and it was this thought that made her beam with pleasure.
By the time she was alone again, the light through the barred window was fading. Food had been brought, but no one had offered a light. The rattle of the lock had confirmed that she could not leave this darkening room until someone came to let her out.
Tilla fingered the long braids that now held her hair under control and listened to the many voices downstairs. She heard the tramp of feet on stairs. The creak of the floorboards. The false laughter. She understood what sort of place the Roman healer had brought her to. She understood too that none of this mattered, because she had lost all sense of hunger now, surely a sign that she would be in the next world very soon. But she had matters to attend to here first. The gray one had said he would come back.
She reached for the bowl and balanced it against the bandaged arm. Then she picked up the spoon. The lukewarm soup slipped down her throat, sending the strength of the slaughtered ox into her body She closed her eyes and promised her mother and brothers that she would see them in the next world very soon. In the meantime she would not be shamed in this one. It seemed she was, after all, destined to die in a fight.
20
The kitchen boy took Ruso's message to Merula, who paused with the kitchen door half-open, reached up to a shelf inside, and handed over a heavy iron key.
Ruso frowned. "My girl is locked in?"
The painted eyes widened. "You don't want her locked in?"
"I appreciate your caution," he said, understanding that a business that had lost two girls in a few months would be nervous, "but she's not in a fit state to run away."
"It's for her own protection," said Merula. "Some of the customers like to go exploring."
Ruso clattered briskly up the wooden stairs with a lamp in one hand and a medical case in the other, trusting it would be apparent to the idlers lolling at the tables beneath that he was not a customer going exploring, but a doctor come to treat a patient. He strode along the landing, passing two cubicles with their doors closed. From behind one came a male voice and a female giggle that sounded like the girl Chloe.
He had to probe with the key before it engaged and he could push the bolt out of place, swing the door open, retrieve his case, and enter the room.
His greeting died as something hard smacked against his head. The case fell from his hand. His foot exploded in pain. He was staggering sideways, trying to keep his grip on the lamp, when something shoved him off balance and he crashed onto the floorboards.
For a moment he lay stunned, blinking at the wavering flame of the lamp, which had somehow remained upright. Cutting through the reverberations inside his skull was a pulsing agony in his foot. He managed to lift his head. The girl was squatting behind the door, wide-eyed, hands to her mouth.
He rolled over. The big toe of his right foot, which should surely have been a bloody pulp, looked pale but otherwise surprisingly intact. He rubbed the back of his head. A lump was developing already, and blood was making a sticky mess of his hair. Ruso brought his hand forward and squinted at the damp fingers. The blood seemed an odd color.
The girl was still in the corner, apparently too frightened to move. Ruso sniffed at the blood, diagnosed soup, rubbed his head again, curled forward, and sat up to clutch his injured foot. His case lay on the floor, undamaged after his toe had broken its fall. Scattered across the floor were the shards of what appeared to be a bowl. It occurred to him that the bowl must have been what she had used to hit him. It also occurred to him to ask himself whether he was seeing double, whether any dancing lights were appearing in front of him, or whether he felt sick. He was disappointed to note that despite deserving all these symptoms, he did not seem to have any of them.
He heaved himself up on one leg and hopped to the doorway. No one seemed to have noticed that he had been attacked. He closed the door and leaned against it, keeping one eye on the girl as he unlaced his sandal and made a closer assessment of the damage. The toe was turning crimson now. When he put the foot back on the floor it felt as though someone was boring into the toe with a hot fire iron.
He sensed a movement and glanced across to see the girl crawling toward him. He made a grab for her wrist just as she pulled the medical case out of his reach. The lid fell back. The pain banged at the back of his skull. He watched the girl's hand hovering above the neat rows of sharpened instruments. It occurred to him that perhaps she was mad. The unlovely Claudius Innocens might, after all, have been sorely provoked.
He was tensed, ready
to kick the scalpel out of her hand, when he saw that what she had picked up was a white roll of wadding.
The girl dipped the wadding into a cup beside the bed. Then she reached up and stroked it across the back of his head, exclaiming as she felt the lump.
Ruso snatched the wadding from her. "I'll do that."
The girl retreated to sit on her bed. He pressed the cool damp wadding against the back of his head and rested his head on his knees. There was some water left in the cup. He splashed some of it across his toes. It made cold trails inside his sandal but no difference to the pain.
He could make no sense of it. He had done everything in his power to help this girl.
He sat up straight. The girl shrank farther back into the corner, eyes darting between his face and his hands, evidently waiting for the beating to start. He noted for the first time that her hair now hung in two long braids that left wispy curls around her temples.
"Well?" he demanded.
"Master?" she whispered, twisting the end of one of the braids around her finger.
"Are you insane, or do you have a good reason for wanting to murder me?"
"No, Master." Her Latin, he noted, seemed to have undergone a sudden improvement. He wondered in what other ways she had tried to deceive him.
"Do you know what happens to slaves who attack their masters, Tilla?"
The braid twisted tighter. Her lower lip began to tremble. "No, Master."
He hoped she wasn't about to cry. "Well let me tell you," he growled, his head and his toe throbbing in grim unison. "First every slave in the household is arrested. Then the questioners are sent for. It is the questioners' job to extract the truth, and they will carry on their work for several hours, whether their victim talks or not"-in fact it felt as if they were currently in action in the area of his big toe-"because nobody believes that a slave will tell the truth without torture. And because it is not enough to punish the guilty. A message must be sent to all the other slaves who might be thinking of knocking their masters and mistresses on the head. An example must be set." He glared at her. "Is that what you want? To be an example? Or can you explain yourself?"
