Tabula Rasa: A Crime Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  Chapter 27

  The hyssop had arrived not a moment too soon. A couple of the gate guards were pink-eyed and sniffing, and the watch captain’s voice had slid down several tones to an impressive growl. He too had heard the horn, and Ruso could tell from his expression that he knew what it meant. The guard had been put on alert, and remote work parties had been recalled, but so far nothing seemed to be happening. Certainly nothing that warranted Fabius putting in an appearance.

  On the way back to the hospital Ruso reminded himself that there was a vast expanse of countryside out there within range of the horn, and the chances of anyone he knew being in the wrong part of it at the wrong moment were slim. Or they would have been, had the person not been Tilla.

  Dodging an orderly carrying a stack of malodorous bedpans, he slipped into Pertinax’s room and closed the door behind him.

  The prefect lay motionless, facing the wall. Holding his breath, Ruso stepped across to the bed and placed a hand lightly on the prefect’s ribs. He was reassured to feel a rise and fall, but it was not the steady rhythm of sleep. He bent closer and saw something glinting in the wrinkled skin around the man’s eyes. There was a faint damp patch on the pillow.

  The food and drink brought in this morning had not been touched. Leaving the water jug and cup, he put the tray outside to be taken back to the kitchen. When he closed the door again, Pertinax must have thought he had gone. Otherwise there would never have been that low moan from the bed.

  Ruso said, “Sorry if I woke you, sir.”

  “I heard the horn.”

  “There’s nothing much happening out there, sir.”

  Without moving, Pertinax said, “You should have let me go. No bloody use to anyone now.”

  Ruso had been expecting something like this. Pertinax had clung desperately to talk of his duties as if nothing had changed. Now the illusion had faded. He had begun the long struggle to adjust to a new reality.

  “Are you in pain, sir?”

  “No.”

  “We can help if you are.”

  “I can put up with a little pain, boy!”

  “Can I take a look at the wound, sir?”

  Ruso examined the stump. The swelling was no worse. He wondered how best to comfort a man who was no easier to console than the struggling cavalry stallion that had impaled itself on a fencing stake last month. The first vet who went to help had ended up in a hospital bed himself.

  At least you could—allegedly—reason with a man. But the rational comfort offered by philosophy never seemed as useful in the face of real suffering as it did when you were reading about it at home after a good dinner. Reminding Pertinax that things could be worse was unlikely to help, and might well earn him a punch on the nose. In the end he said, “This is a very different challenge from anything you’ve faced before, sir.”

  “Always thought I’d die with my boots on,” mumbled Pertinax. “Can’t even stand up to take a pee. And now the natives are playing up again.”

  Trying to think of something encouraging, Ruso remembered the large newcomer in the office. “The clerk you asked for has arrived, sir. We all appreciate you putting in a word with the tribune.”

  Pertinax grunted.

  There was a soft knock on the door and a bald head appeared. “Visitors, sir,” it croaked.

  Before the man could reply to Ruso’s “Who is it?” Pertinax growled, “Tell ’em to bugger off.”

  The whisper of “The legate’s physician, sir” was not soft enough.

  “I’m not bloody deaf,” Pertinax told him, “even if you are. I said, tell them to bugger off. All of them. Especially that one.”

  The orderly shrank behind Ruso and croaked, “And your wife is waiting in the treatment room to speak to you, sir.”

  “I’ll come and talk to them both,” Ruso promised, glad to hear that Tilla was safe from whatever was brewing outside, and wondering how she had managed to get past the gates. No doubt she believed that her reason for coming here was urgent enough to justify whatever disturbance she had caused, but he could not deal with civilian matters until he had finished work. He turned to the figure on the bed. “Sir, if you want anything, just ring the bell.”

  Pertinax stretched out an arm. The bell tinkled. “I want my foot back,” he said.

  The legate’s physician did not look pleased to be refused entry. Ruso considered offering a tactful excuse and then decided he was not going to take the blame for Pertinax’s decision, so he told the truth and was accused of being territorial.

  “I wasn’t,” Ruso told him. “But I am now. I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip, but he’s my patient and my superior, and I promised him his wishes would be respected.”

  Something about the physician’s nostrils seemed to tighten. “I shall have to report this to the legate.”

  “Good idea,” said Ruso. “He and the prefect can fight it out between them.”

  He passed several members of staff as he strode down the corridor to the treatment room. There was something unusually respectful in the way they acknowledged him. He squared his shoulders and lifted his head. It was, he decided, good for morale to be heard standing up for one’s patients.

  Tilla’s news was indeed urgent, and deeply worrying. He understood now why the horn had been sounded, and his plans to ignore whatever she said until later had to be set aside. Putting his head round the office door, he asked, “Has anyone heard anything about a native boy being brought in?”

  Gracilis’s eyes appeared above the wall of writing tablets. Nisus twisted round on his stool. Neither had heard anything. “I want to know straightaway if you do,” Ruso told them, aware that he had been asking the same sort of question about Candidus just now. Gracilis must be wondering what sort of outfit he had joined. “If anybody wants me, I’m going to see Fabius.”

  As he was about to leave, Gracilis said, “We were sorry to hear the news from your wife, sir.”

  “Yes,” said Ruso, surprised that Tilla had told these two strangers about Branan before she spoke to him. It showed just how desperate she was. “It’s very worrying.”

  Chapter 28

  “You can be the one to tell him,” Ruso told his wife as they approached the little building that served as the fort HQ.

  “Me?”

  “You’re a native. He’ll be frightened of you.”

  Passing the guard, Ruso was surprised to hear, “Sorry about your father, sir.”

  He stopped. “My father?”

  “It is a great shock,” said Tilla, seizing him by the arm and moving him on.

  When they were in the cramped entrance hall waiting for Fabius, he hissed, “What about my father?”

  “I had to get in here to tell you about Branan. His family are desperate. Imagine if it is our son.”

  It was bad enough to have no son—impossible to make the next leap, and to imagine the pain of losing one. Instead he said, “What’s this got to do with my father?”

  “I said to the guards, ‘I have to see the Medicus. I have bad news. His father is dead.’ ”

  He slumped back against the wall as understanding dawned. Mercifully, no one here was likely to know that his father had died before he and Tilla had even met.

  “I did not lie to them,” she insisted.

  “Oh. Well, that makes everything fine, then.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That is what I think too.”

  Fabius looked alarmed when he was told that there was another missing person and that a soldier was to blame, but Tilla gave him no time to feel sorry for himself. “I am thinking, sir, that this is a good chance for you to be a friend to the local people.”

  “A friend?” He looked incredulous. “They are accusing one of our men—”

  “That is why they will thank you for making a search,” she said, interrupting, “just as you did for your own man who is missing.”

  Fabius glanced at Ruso as if hoping he would get his wife under control. Ruso remained impassive.

  F
abius said, “We get malicious rumors all the time. How do we know this isn’t another one?”

  “I know the family, sir,” Tilla assured him. “And I have spoken to the boy who saw it happen.”

  Again Fabius looked to his fellow officer. “If your wife has been implicated in this alleged kidnapping, Ruso, she has a good reason to shift the blame onto my men.”

  “My wife doesn’t lie.” Too late, he remembered how she had got past the guards.

  Tilla straightened her shoulders. “I am here to find the missing boy, sir.”

  Fabius rubbed the side of his nose. “This so-called soldier was probably some native dressed up, wanting to cause trouble.”

  “The witness saw a man from this legion, sir,” she insisted. “Not a centurion, just an ordinary soldier. If he was a local man, the boys would know him and know it was some sort of trick.”

  Fabius sighed and muttered, “Why me?” as if he were the one in trouble.

  From somewhere outside, Ruso thought he could hear shouting.

  “If you send messages to the other forts, sir,” said Tilla, “and ask them to question their men and make a search of their buildings and land, and stop all vehicles on the road and look inside, the local people will think you are on their side.”

  “Why would I want to—”

  “Otherwise they will be wanting to come in and search themselves. I am thinking you will say no, which is your right, and then there will be complaints to the tribune and the legate and—”

  “I know what will happen,” Fabius groaned. “One thing the natives are very good at is complaining.”

  Someone was knocking on the door. “We do not want another Regulus,” put in Tilla, who had no way of knowing that she had already frightened him with the threat of a fresh reprimand from the tribune.

  The new arrival brought a message to say there were angry natives gathering outside the south gate, and all the gates had now been barred. Two natives were demanding to speak to the commanding officer. “They say they’re the boy’s family, sir.”

  “They’ll find a more senior officer over at camp.”

  Apparently the watch captain had already growled that at them. “They don’t want to go the camp, sir. They want to come in here.”

  Fabius’s head slumped into his hands. “Let them in. Just the two of them. Make sure you search them properly. And fetch Daminius. All this is giving me a headache.”

  “It is giving everyone a headache, sir,” Tilla told him. “The only cure is to find the boy safe and well. Until then, my people cannot trust yours. Any man in the Legion could be the kidnapper.”

  To Ruso’s relief, she decided to stop there and let Fabius mull over her demands. Outside, the shouting resolved itself into a chant.

  Fabius’s irritable “What’s keeping them?” was answered when Senecio and Conn entered very slowly, the older man walking with a stick and leaning on his son’s arm.

  Afterward Ruso always remembered the start of that meeting with shame. It was not the way father and son looked like cornered animals, caught between defiance and desperation. It was not the way Fabius turned to Tilla and demanded, “What is he saying?” after Senecio had abandoned his principles and asked in thickly accented but clear Latin, “Where is my son?” It was not Fabius’s insistence on pointing out that he personally had no idea where Senecio’s son was—something that left Conn observing aloud in British, “We are wasting our time with this one.” What left him angry and embarrassed was that the only seat in the room was occupied by a Roman centurion while an obviously lame old man who had suffered a terrible loss was left to stand under escort as if he were about to attack his hosts with his bony fists.

  Ruso ordered one of the guards to go and fetch a seat and some water for the visitors. Fabius glared at him. Ruso pretended not to notice.

  The old man’s eyes met his own. “My sons are my life,” he whispered.

  From outside the gates—at least, he hoped it was outside—Ruso could hear the continued chanting of angry locals.

  “Those are our neighbors out there,” Conn said. He pointed in turn to Ruso, Fabius, and the guards. “If you sons of whores will not give my brother back, our people will come in and find him.”

  “We’re as keen to find him as you are,” Ruso told him, glancing at the guards, who looked as though they would like to take Conn outside and explain a few things to him.

  “I doubt this. You sent one of my brothers to the next world. Now you have the other one.”

  Tilla leaned close to Conn, lifted the straggly hair with one finger, and whispered fiercely in his ear. Ruso thought he caught the British words for insult and trying to help.

  Conn scowled at her but reserved his contempt for the Romans. “We are not fools. We know how you can tell who my brother is. We know it must be one of the men from in here.”

  Fabius was still determined to argue. “Your brother’s name has been associated with a malicious rumor.”

  “Yes. You spread a lie about him, then you take him away. Where is he?”

  “Are you denying that he claimed to witness an illegal burial?”

  Conn hesitated, perhaps making sure he had unraveled the Latin correctly before deciding how to answer. He said, “My father’s people know nothing of this. We do not speak of a burial to anyone.”

  Fabius sat forward. “Then who did?”

  Someone knocked on the door as Conn demanded, “Why do you ask me? Look to your own men. Give us Branan back.”

  The chair and Daminius had arrived at the same time. Instead of sitting, Senecio clung on to Conn’s arm and hissed in British, “That is one of them!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I know it!”

  While Fabius began to explain the situation to Daminius, Conn was whispering urgently to Tilla. Nobody was bothering with the old man. Ruso stepped forward and urged him into the chair before he fell. Senecio clutched his arm, still very agitated, and insisted in British, “He is one of them! He came to the farm!”

  “Silence!” ordered Fabius. He sounded more petulant than authoritative. He turned to his deputy. “Optio?”

  “I’ll have the men account for their movements yesterday, sir,” Daminius promised. “And we’ll have all the buildings and the quarry searched.”

  “Wait!” Tilla cried. “Not yet!”

  Ruso frowned. This was going too far. He reached for her arm. “A word in private, wife,” he urged, excusing them both and propelling her toward the door. Out in the entrance hall he whispered, “You can try telling Fabius what to do when nobody else is listening, but you can’t order his optio about in front of everyone. Daminius is a sensible man and he’s trying to help. What’s all the fuss about?”

  “Daminius is the man who searched the farm.”

  “Gods above, don’t your people ever let go of a grudge? He was only obeying orders! Now he’s been ordered to help find Branan.”

  “This is not a grudge! Listen!” Tilla glanced around to make sure they were alone before putting her arms around him. To anyone passing through the hall, they might have been snatching a moment of un-Roman intimacy. Her breath tickled his ear as he heard, “Senecio has been thinking. What soldier will know to say to Branan, ‘The Roman lady wants to see you?’ He has been asking himself, ‘What Roman could know that Branan has met the Daughter of Lugh?’ Who has seen me and Branan together?” She paused, letting him think about that for a moment.

  “The search party who went to the farm,” he said.

  “Yes. And Daminius is one of them.”

  Chapter 29

  One of the many disadvantages of having a minuscule HQ building was the lack of privacy. A bemused Daminius was sent to wait in the clerk’s office and the three Britons were left under guard in Fabius’s room while Ruso and Fabius glanced around the corridor, agreed that they might be overheard, and banished themselves to the middle of the street outside to hold a hurried conversation. The air was still pulsating with the angry chant fr
om the Britons beyond the walls. Ruso tried to shut it out of his mind. “We have to take this seriously,” he said. “What the old man is saying makes sense.”

  “This is absurd!” Fabius kept glancing over at the gates as if he was expecting wild natives to burst through them at any moment. “Why would Daminius have anything to do with stealing a child?”

  “They’re not saying it’s him personally,” Ruso pointed out. “They’re saying he’s one of the eight men it could be.”

  “I should never have left the Sixth,” muttered Fabius. “The gods have sent me nothing but bad luck ever since. Terrible weather, bodies in the wall, men kidnapped and tortured, natives complaining. No wonder I’m ill. I should never have listened to you about that missing clerk.”

  “We need to check up on all the men who’ve met the boy,” said Ruso, wondering if he had been deliberately paired with Fabius by some senior officer whom he had managed to annoy.

  The centurion lifted his head. “Can you hear that? Thanks to you, we’ve become a target for native revenge!”

  “If you’d been sober enough to discipline Regulus properly in the first place, none of this would have happened!”

  “It was you who prescribed the wine, Doctor!”

  They stood glaring at each other in the street. Finally Ruso said, “This is getting us nowhere. We need the names of everyone on that search party straightaway, and we need to check where they were yesterday afternoon.”

  “This is beyond our level. I’m not doing anything without authorization.”

  “You don’t need authorization to talk to your own men. Get Daminius to give you the names, keep him here, and have the others rounded up.”