Tabula Rasa: A Crime Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  Chapter 2

  Ruso had picked his way crablike across several feet of debris when he put his weight on a stone that slid away under his foot. For a heart-stopping moment there was nothing beneath him; then the rope jerked taut around his chest. Now he was suspended, helpless, one side of his face pressed against cold rock. He forced himself not to claw against the sides and bring down more debris as he heard the stone skitter on down the slope. Praying that the men holding his rope would stand firm, he hung like a creature playing dead, feeling the cut of the rope and the thud of his heart. Somewhere miles away, voices were asking if he was all right.

  Was he? He didn’t know. In what way could a man who might be about to bring tons of rock down upon himself—as well as his patient—be said to be all right?

  He lifted his head and glanced across to where Pertinax was lying head-down, eyes closed, just out of reach. The face was gray even under the grime.

  It was not too late to grant the mercy of an honorable suicide. The man had already enjoyed a long life and reached the pinnacle of his career. Now that he had assessed the situation from close quarters, Ruso could decide that Pertinax could not be saved. With opened wrists, the prefect would have a much quicker and cleaner death than he might have to suffer in the aftermath of dirty wounds. And everyone would say Ruso had done the right thing.

  Daminius was calling, “Are you all right, Doctor?”

  “Wait a moment!”

  If only he had been given time to prepare for this. If only he had not wasted the morning dealing with trivia: trying to find reasons not to eat supper with his wife’s dubious acquaintances; complaining about the odd disappearance of his new hospital clerk; hearing a long trail of petty grievances from men who imagined he could do something about them.

  He muttered a prayer to Aesculapius for the surgery and one to Fortuna for a lucky escape, and took another look. The trapped leg was visible just above the ankle. There seemed to be a second boulder beneath it, pinning it in place. The foot was probably crushed beyond repair.

  Only a few more inches and Pertinax might have tumbled down the slope to safety. Now if he were to be rescued, Ruso would have to work his way up under the overhang of rock and crouch there, slicing flesh, carefully sealing off delicate blood vessels and wielding a bone saw while he tried not to think about the weight precariously balanced above his head. Even the patient thought it was not worth the risk. As for what Tilla would say . . .

  It was usually best not to think about what Tilla would say.

  He thought instead about Valens’s wife, and their boys, and how he would no longer be an honorary uncle but the man who had helped their grandfather to die rather than try to save him.

  “I’m all right!” he called. Stretching up to the left, he managed to get a grip on the root of a tree that was buried in the mound of debris. “It’s Ruso, sir. Nearly there now.”

  He hauled himself up and across, feeling the muscles burning in his arm and shoulder, and tried a tentative foothold on a broken scaffolding pole.

  When he got there, Pertinax’s eyes opened for a moment and then closed again. His face was oddly striped where trickles of water had washed the mud away.

  “It’s Ruso, sir,” he repeated, scanning for other injuries. “Can you tell me where it hurts?” He could see nothing else apart from scrapes and bruises, but then he could see very little under the muck, and he wasn’t about to start cutting clothing off. “Let’s get you out.” He untied the rolled cloak from around his waist and draped it over the prefect’s body. “I expect you’re a bit cold?”

  Faintly, without opening his eyes, Pertinax mumbled, “Go away.”

  The prefect’s skin was clammy. The man was deteriorating fast. Ruso looped the spare end of rope around the handle of his case before balancing it on the slope. He felt as clumsy as a child’s dancing doll suspended on the end of a wire. “Sir,” he said, opening the case and grabbing the probe that always slipped out of its clip, “your foot’s trapped between two rocks. I’m going to get you free now and then we can go back to the fort.”

  “Uh. Too late.”

  “No, sir. If we do this, there’s a very good chance—”

  “Kill me.”

  It was possible Ruso was about to do exactly that, but not in the way his patient wanted. “I can’t do that, sir.”

  “Bloody useless. All of you.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ruso blew away some loose grit from the skin of the unfashionably hairy leg. Searching for a topic to distract the patient, he discarded the weather as too trivial, the landslide as too frightening, and any mention of supervising the hospital as more likely to depress than inspire him. What Pertinax thrived on was challenge. “Sir, if you die, your daughter and your grandsons will be left in the care of your son-in-law.”

  “What?”

  “Valens will be looking after the family, sir.”

  “Man’s an idiot.”

  Ruso grinned. “You‘re absolutely right, sir.” He glanced up, inadvertently clunking the borrowed helmet against the rock above him. He held his breath. Nothing happened. He let the breath out again.

  As if the gods were being deliberately perverse, the light changed. The sun went behind a cloud, making it even harder to see what he was doing down here under the gloom of the overhang.

  The foot would be safely clamped in one place while he worked, even though it was at a difficult angle and he couldn’t get underneath it properly. But if Pertinax thrashed about, he could set the whole slide in motion again. Ruso scooped away some of the muck from beneath the man’s calf, then swabbed the skin with diluted vinegar. He needed an assistant up here to hold the patient. He didn’t have one. He set the dirty cloth aside, wiped his hands on a clean one, and reached for the scalpel.

  “Keep absolutely still for me now, sir. This might sting a bit.”

  It was even more of a lie than usual, but what else could he say?

  Pertinax gasped and cried out.

  “Sorry, sir. Well done.” He must keep him talking. “You can’t go killing yourself, sir. You can’t leave Valens in charge.”

  “Unreliable.”

  “Exactly, sir. Here we go. Keep still now.” Because if you don’t, I can’t tie this off and you’ll bleed to death as soon as you’re the right way up. “Nearly done.”

  “Dunno what she—agh!”

  “Well done, sir. Not long now. Have you seen your grandsons lately?”

  He wiped the blood again, trying not to get mud in the wound. Trying to see exactly what he was doing.

  A voice called, “Shall we come up, sir?” The stretcher had arrived.

  “No, keep clear.”

  He took out the bone saw, swore under his breath, and wrenched off the helmet that had tipped forward over his eyes. He flung it as far behind him as he could manage, safely away from the slide. “Nearly done now, sir. You’ll be free in a moment.”

  Pertinax was rigid. His body was shaking with the effort of keeping unnaturally still when his every instinct must be to struggle and scream. Ruso felt the saw bite against the bone, and prayed.

  Chapter 3

  It was lucky the leaves were still on the trees or the soldiers would have seen him by now. They had been so busy running around and shouting orders that nobody had noticed a boy creeping along beside the stream until he could get near enough to see the whole of the amazing thing that had happened in the quarry.

  The one tied to the rope had made it across to the one who was stuck under the rock now. He moved very slowly, as if he were frightened. Aedic had never seen a soldier frightened before.

  The one on the rope was . . . Aedic stretched out and parted the leaves with the tip of his finger. The one on the rope was hunched up right underneath the big rock, trying to do something to the other one’s . . . What was that in his hand? Surely he wasn’t going to cut the other one’s leg off? Aedic felt his mouth fall open, closed it again, and swallowed.

  First the dead body, and today a Roma
n having his leg sawn off. It was the most exciting week he could remember since the day the soldiers turned up and threw everything out of the house and called it “helping.” This made up for not being able to tell the others about the body. Almost.

  He still wasn’t sure he believed in the body himself.

  He had been hiding in the tunnels his family’s sheep had made through the thick clump of bushes. In the middle the ground still smelled faintly of sheep, even though the flock was long gone, but around the edges was the sharp stink of wee. He didn’t like it, but you got used to it after a bit and at least it meant the soldiers who were building the wall had left these bushes here to use as a latrine instead of chopping them down along with everything else. Farther down the hill, the bramble berries were finished; everyone said you mustn’t pick them past the end of September and it was true—they were dull and shriveled—so he was even hungrier than usual. He had eaten all the cheese he had taken when Petta wasn’t looking, sucking it slowly to make the taste last longer, just like Mam used to tell him. It was nearly dark now, and it was starting to rain again, and still nobody had come to look for him. The patrol had gone past and wouldn’t be back for ages. He supposed he should get up and go home before Petta gave his share of supper to the dog.

  He was rubbing his foot to get rid of the pins and needles when he heard . . . a gasp? A grunt? At the time he wasn’t sure what it was, but it wasn’t the wind in the leaves, and it was much too close.

  So he had shifted carefully to one side, trying to get a better view out between the tangle of rough stems. The thing grunted again. A shape was moving up the hill away from him. If it had picked up his scent, it wasn’t interested. It wasn’t afraid, either. Too big to be a man; too upright to be a pony or a cow. He lost sight of it, and then it reappeared up by the black line of the wall. He could see its shape against the remaining light in the sky. Two legs. A man, then. But he was not tramping along, carrying a shield like the men on patrol. He was carrying something big and heavy on his back—something that he now let fall onto the ground.

  Over and over again since then, Aedic had closed his eyes and pictured that moment, trying to decide if he really could have seen a human head and an arm that flopped down as it fell. Whatever it was, it blended into the ground. The man stretched up into the rain, loosening his muscles after the strain of the carrying. Then he bent down over the new length of wall and lifted off the covers.

  How could he be inspecting the work in the dark?

  Perhaps he had lost something.

  He must be a soldier, because nobody else . . .

  But Aedic wasn’t a soldier, and he was there, so perhaps the man wasn’t a soldier either.

  If it had been daylight, he might have run up and offered to help. It was all right to go near the troops as long as you were careful. Some of them wanted messages delivered in exchange for an apple or a taste of honeycomb, or they asked which way to go or who could sell them things. Some of them were even glad to see the local boys because they missed their own sons at home, wherever that was. Sometimes when nobody was looking they let people travel in the ox wagons. If you said you had a big sister, you might get offered a ride home on one of the pack ponies, but Aedic kept quiet about the girls at his cousins’ house. He wouldn’t have dared to let Da see him with the soldiers. Not after they had turned the family off the farm and dug great trenches across the grazing. They had set fire to the houses and hacked most of the trees down for scaffolding and firewood. When one of Grandfather’s tottery old friends came to sing a song to the dying trees, the soldiers shouted and threw clods of earth at him until their centurion told them to stop.

  Sometimes, when Aedic saw the soldiers tearing the land apart, he thought that was what was happening to him too.

  The man up by the wall seemed to move about as if he were working in daylight. He was bending to pick up filling stones from the pile.

  Usually the soldiers built up both sides of the wall with rows of the big square stones that they had cut out of the hillside, and then they filled the gap in the middle with things nobody would see: rough stones and clay and sand and sometimes, when the officers weren’t looking, lumps of turf. But that day the rain had got worse. When it rained like that, it washed the wet mortar out and left white streaks down the outsides of the stones, so the centurion had come and told them to stop before they filled the middle in. Aedic had watched them pack up their tools and heard the centurion telling them to make sure they covered the sides up properly before they marched back to the camp. Then he had stayed up there and seen the man carrying the thing that looked very much like a body, and when the wind dropped he could hear the familiar thump and clunk of stones being thrown onto a pile. Up there in the dark and the drizzle, all on his own, the man was filling in the middle of the wall.

  The filling-in seemed to go on for a long time, and Aedic’s thoughts had drifted to his dinner and the dog when he realized the man wasn’t there anymore. This time he heard the footfalls. He held his breath as they came down the hill toward his hiding place. Then a cry and a curse and all the bushes shuddered and spattered raindrops. There was the pale shape of a hand, so close that he could have reached out and touched it. Aedic narrowed his eyes and kept as still as a hunter.

  The hand lifted, the bushes shook again, and the man was back on his feet and away much too quickly for anyone carrying anything heavy. Whatever it was, he had left it up there.

  Even after days of thinking about it, Aedic did not understand what he had seen. But when he thought about telling anyone, the squirming in his stomach told him not to.

  This was the first time in days that he had managed to sneak away from his chores for another look, but he was not even sure where the body was now. The soldiers had built up lots more rows of stones and filled in the gap between them. This stretch of wall was too high to see over. He had been about to run back to the cousins’ house before anybody started to wonder why he was taking so long to find firewood, but then came the terrible noise from somewhere down in the valley, beyond the soldiers’ road. And now here he was, seeing the rock all tumbled down and a bloodstained and muddy old man struggling and crying out as the other one was trying to cut his leg off while all the others watched.

  “Hey!”

  Aedic jumped at the sound, and grabbed the branch to steady himself.

  “Yes, you!” the voice shouted in Latin. “What are you doing up there?”

  But by the time the soldier got there, Aedic was down the tree and gone.

  Chapter 4

  The patient’s family had given Tilla two hard-boiled eggs, fresh bread, and a cup of warm milk with the usual warning about not drinking the water from the stream. It was kindly meant, but she had been here for most of the summer and heard it a dozen times before. If you wait long enough, the muck from the building work all sinks to the bottom, but no matter what the soldiers tell you, everyone knows they piss in it.

  That was the trouble with soldiers, Tilla thought, stepping aside onto the grass verge to let a couple of carts rumble past, and glancing up to where small figures were moving around on the scarred hillside. You couldn’t trust them.

  Her anger rose again as she remembered the plump girl’s anxious insistence that her injuries were nothing: She had tripped and banged her head on the doorpost, and then fallen awkwardly. She did not need a healer. She just needed to rest for a while. She was sorry for all the fuss.

  Tilla had done her best to be gentle as she set the broken fingers straight, but Cata still cried out in pain.

  “Your mother tells me this sort of thing has happened before.”

  Cata sniffed. “I am very clumsy.”

  Tilla laid the compress over the grazed and swollen cheek. “You are lucky none of the bones of your face are broken.”

  The girl kept her eyes closed, like a child who wanted to be invisible.

  “You may not be so lucky next time.”

  No reply.

  “You must sta
y close to your family,” Tilla told her. “And they must put in a complaint to his centurion.”

  Still no reply.

  “Do not go near him,” Tilla continued. “Do not waste a single moment hearing how sorry he is, because it will mean no more this time than it did the last.”

  Just when she thought she might as well have been speaking to a deaf woman, Cata said, “You don’t know him.”

  “No,” Tilla agreed, “but I am older than you and I have met men like him.”

  The girl’s swollen lips trembled. “I thought you would understand.”

  “My husband does not beat me.” Did she imagine this was what all soldiers’ women had to put up with? “If he did, I would leave him.”

  “Sometimes he is very kind.”

  “I am sure he is. Drink this.” Tilla handed her the cup. “I am sure he is fond of you, in his own way. And after he has killed you, he will be sorry he did it, and he will miss you very much.”

  But the girl showed no sign of having heard.

  Tilla did her best to be patient with these girls. It was not so easy to leave when your man knew where your family lived, and he had friends who could have people arrested and searched. Only last week a soldier had come to her demanding to know where his woman was and blaming Tilla for encouraging her to run off. Tilla, who had seen how cowed the girl had become, was secretly delighted. Her family did not know where she was, either, but a small boy had arrived with a message to say that she was safe. Tilla had to go back and tell the soldier that it was no good pestering the family for information: They knew no more about where the girl was hiding than he did.

  So much of being a trainee medicus, she now saw, was not about medicine at all but about the complications of people’s lives.

  She passed the south wall of the little fort and turned the corner into the huddle of civilian buildings. For once there were no off-duty soldiers lounging about and ogling girls, or carrying their children on their shoulders down the street, or haggling with the shopkeepers. They must have been kept in. It happened sometimes, usually for reasons that were not interesting enough to be worth the bother of finding them out.