Tabula Rasa: A Crime Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  Tilla said, “This is very wrong. I will speak to him.”

  “I know it is terrible about his little brother,” Virana said, “but it’s not my fault. Is it?”

  “Of course not. He has no reason to hurt you.”

  “Anyway, he was nasty before that.”

  He had never been anything but gruff to Tilla, either. She had seen a different side of him during the search—hardworking, determined—but he was still stubborn and rude. No wonder Enica’s friends thought her stepson was a miserable offering.

  Virana gave another sniff and scrubbed the cloth across her mouth as if she were trying to scrape away the humiliation. “I am not surprised nobody will marry him. Branan was much nicer. I liked Branan. I used to look forward to seeing him.” She looked up. “Is there any—”

  “No,” said Tilla. “No news at all. But Enica needs to know who started the story about the body in the wall. Can you remember who brought it to the bar?”

  Chapter 42

  Getting the old man under cover was not easy, but Ruso finally managed to persuade Senecio that nobody would see his protest in the dark. The deep arch of the east gateway was not exactly indoors, so he could honorably shelter there from the rain and wind. This led in turn to an argument with the watch captain, who was afraid the old man might open the gates to hordes of murderous tribesmen under the cover of darkness.

  Ruso’s “Not unless your lads go to sleep” did not go down well.

  With Senecio installed under the glare of the torches and of the watch captain, Ruso went to raid the hospital stores.

  It seemed Doctor Valens had arrived earlier, dealt with a couple of casualties, and headed over to the centurion’s house to introduce himself. Ruso went down to the office to get the key to the bedding store and check for messages, took one look at Nisus still stoically pounding leaves into green pulp by lamplight, and remembered, “Figs!”

  “Figs, sir,” agreed Nisus in a tone that suggested he might as well have asked for the golden apples of the Hesperides, because he would have stood about as much chance of getting them.

  “I’ll go for them in a minute,” Ruso promised. He needed to try Fabius’s kitchen anyway. The hospital cook, having been told that Doctor Ruso was no longer on duty, had fed his dinner to a friend’s dog.

  Nisus went back to pounding.

  Ruso was less of a disappointment to the new clerk. Gracilis looked pleased to be complimented on the reduction of the former shambles to two small piles of documents on the desk and one large one propped against the wall behind Pandora’s cupboard. Observing that the door handles were no longer tied shut, Ruso wondered if the man had removed half the contents and burned them, and noted with mild interest that he no longer cared.

  “If you have a moment, sir? Just one or two queries.”

  “I’m not really on duty here now,” Ruso told him, reaching up to where the key hung on a nail. “You need to ask Doctor Valens.”

  Gracilis, a man who could wrestle order out of chaos, was not going to be put off that easily. “He won’t know the answers, sir.”

  “I’m on the way to see the tribune,” Ruso explained. “But I’ll have a quick look.”

  Gracilis’s one or two queries turned out to be only a fraction of the large Ask the Doctor pile behind him. Apart from the usual difficulty in deciphering handwriting, he needed advice on how to deal with one man who seemed to have three different names, three men with the same name but different conditions, and several conditions with no name at all or some tantalizingly useless piece of information such as Bed XI. Had they not been in his own handwriting, Ruso would have sworn he had never seen most of them before. Some wax tablets contained two sets of records: the top one apparently created by Candidus and below it the remains of the one he had half obliterated in order to have something to write on. If any of them held the name of the mystery man Candidus had set out to meet, it was impossible to know which. Ruso set aside four difficult questions, resolved three easy ones, deduced that Bed IV Wobbly Legs was carpentry rather than medicine, and promised to take a proper look before long.

  His raid on the hospital stores produced a couple of clean blankets and a reasonably clean straw mattress, which he lugged over to the east gate. “You gave me hospitality,” he explained. “Now it is my turn.”

  Senecio made no attempt to take them. “Why should I have a comfortable bed when my son has none?”

  “Because,” Ruso said, his patience giving way, “if you do not stay warm, your son will have no father, either. Use the mattress and put those blankets around you. We have enough to worry about already.”

  Accius need not have worried about his dinner: His cook was indeed at the fort and was now in Fabius’s kitchen, poking at something that crackled and spat back at him over the hot coals. Meanwhile Fabius’s cook had his back to him and was hacking up carrots with a force that suggested they had just insulted his mother. Both glanced up to see who had come in, ascertained that it was nobody important, and went back to the tasks of sharing a kitchen and ignoring one another. Ruso was put in mind of two cats pretending not to notice each other rather than fight. He was wondering how best to scrounge both figs and dinner when he heard a familiar voice saying, “Allow me!” To his left, the door swung open and revealed a beaming Valens. Tottering in beneath his outstretched arm was Fabius’s kitchen maid clutching a tray of dirty crockery.

  “Lovely girl,” Valens observed as the crockery was placed on the table. “Just served me the most marvelous spiced pork. I had no idea you lived so well over here.”

  “We manage,” Ruso told him, wishing he had arrived earlier.

  “Any news about the boy?”

  “None.”

  “Your centurion’s offered me a very decent room. Come and see.”

  The reason Valens wanted to show him a very plain bedroom with a damp stain under the window and a dead wasp on the sill only became clear when they were alone. Valens heaved one of his bags of luggage off the bed and indicated a trunk for Ruso to sit on. “I saw the father out there. I’d say his mind’s going.”

  “He’s desperate.”

  “If somebody took one of my boys . . .”

  “He’s too lame to go out searching,” Ruso explained. “He’s exercising the last freedom left to him: the freedom to be bloody awkward. Have someone keep an eye on him overnight, will you?”

  Valens nodded. “You need to make sure somebody knows about the patients I saw just now. One’s a Ninth Batavian with a broken nose and bruising. He’s gone back to his quarters.”

  Ruso waited to be told why anyone should care about a Ninth Batavian’s nose.

  “He was taking a shortcut to join up with the Epiacum road and got stopped by a bunch of natives who wanted to search his vehicle in case he had the missing boy in there.”

  “Why didn’t he just let them?”

  “Some of the load was his own. He thought they were thieves.”

  Ruso sighed.

  “I’ve also admitted a blow to the left temple who started vomiting. That was a Briton-on-Briton fight. Somebody looked at somebody’s wife the wrong way over a water fountain.”

  “They’re fighting each other?”

  “Different tribes,” Valens explained. “Three locals against a lad from somewhere in the south who’s serving with the Legion. From what I can gather, the Southerners hold the view that the tribes here are like herds of wild animals.”

  “I believe so.”

  “The locals accused him of being soft and collaborating with child stealers. I’m told the locals are going around armed with sticks, allegedly for beating down vegetation while they search for the boy they think we’ve stolen.”

  Ruso shook his head. How had things got so out of control so quickly? It was like the landslide: The underlying situation must have been far more unstable than anyone suspected.

  “Oh, and your centurion wanted to tell me about his palpitations.”

  Ruso looked at him blankl
y. Palpitations were one of the few symptoms he could not recall Fabius ever mentioning.

  “He also said that you don’t listen and just tell him there’s nothing wrong with him.”

  “What’s wrong with him,” Ruso explained, “is that he reads medical books.”

  “I thought so.”

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “I gave him an examination that left no possibility unexplored.”

  “I’m sure that pleased him.”

  “Then I told him he was a fascinating case and in the circumstances he’s lucky to be alive at all.”

  Ruso said, “Considering the amount of medicinal wine he’s drunk, that’s true.”

  “He thinks I’m marvelous.”

  “You won’t feel so marvelous when he drops in for a diagnosis in the middle of the night. Why do you think I refused to share this place with him?”

  “Ah, but he won’t. I’ve told him that the latest thinking is completely different to anything he’s heard before. His only hope is to build himself up with lots of fresh air and exercise during daylight and rest in his bed throughout the hours of darkness. For a man like him, indoor air during the day is poison.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He did look a bit stunned,” Valens confessed. “But he said he was very grateful and he wished he’d consulted me before.”

  “If that fails, try putting him in a room with your father-in-law. That should buck him up.”

  Valens grimaced at the mention of Pertinax. “I’ll go and see him in a minute,” he promised. “Incidentally, in between symptoms, Fabius told me how difficult it was to find out where all his men were yesterday now that some chap called Daminius has been confined to working in the quarry.”

  “He’s Fabius’s optio,” Ruso explained, “and he’s confined for his own protection, in case the natives get hold of him. He’s a useful man. That’s how Fabius has got away with doing next to nothing for so long.”

  “The optio’s fallen out with the natives?”

  Ruso explained about the search party and the list of alibis.

  “It must be this Daminius. You’ve discounted everybody else.”

  Ruso scratched one ear with his forefinger. “If I were intending to commit a crime, I’d make sure I could prove I wasn’t there at the time.”

  “Perhaps he did it on the spur of the moment.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t him. And perhaps he genuinely didn’t stop to talk to anyone.”

  “So if it’s not him, who is it?”

  “If I knew that,” said Ruso, getting to his feet and feeling a sudden pang of hunger, “I wouldn’t be here. In fact, I shouldn’t be here anyway.” He paused in the doorway. “It’s good of you to come over. I appreciate it.”

  Valens grinned. “Just occasionally, I like to confound the wife’s low opinion of me. Meanwhile, if there’s anything else I can do, just say.”

  The loss of the boy seemed to have brought out a sudden generosity in Valens. Perhaps the impending arrival of his wife had helped. It occurred to Ruso that he might as well benefit from this magnanimous mood while it lasted. “Our pharmacist’s running short on figs for cough mixture,” he said. “And I haven’t had any dinner. Do you think you could charm something out of the kitchen?”

  Chapter 43

  Aedic had eaten everything Petta had offered him for supper and the hunger had almost gone away for a while. Now she wanted the unbrother in bed and out from under her feet. For once, Aedic carried him behind the partition without arguing. He took the unbrother’s boots off and slid below the blankets with him. Petta wanted to know why Aedic didn’t do it like that every night. See? There was no need make a fuss about it, was there? Aedic, who was not the one making a fuss, took no notice. He cuddled the wriggly unbrother in the darkness, even though everything was mostly the unbrother’s fault for making too much noise and getting on Matto’s nerves and scaring away the fish so there was a fight.

  In the end the wriggling stopped and the soft breathing told him the unbrother was asleep.

  Aedic did not sleep. Instead he curled up tight and poked his fingers into his ears, trying to shut out the sound of the unbrother snuffling and the adults talking about the boy who had been kidnapped. But it was hard to keep his fingers rammed far enough into his ears all the time, and when the sounds drifted back he could hear his aunts still going on about how terrible it was. Who would do such a thing? And he thought, I know who would do it. I said he would come and get Branan, and he did. I made it happen.

  It was not really the fault of the unbrother. Aedic himself was the one who had told them Branan’s name, even though he knew Matto would never keep it quiet. When the man found out that Branan knew nothing after all, he would cut Branan’s throat and bury him in the wall too, and then start hunting for the one who really had seen what happened.

  Aedic.

  He pulled up the blankets where the unbrother had thrown them off, and put a hand on one warm chubby leg. The unbrother was all right when he was asleep. Sometimes even when he was awake. When he laughed, it made you want to laugh too. He was all right when Aedic threw him up in the air and he shouted, “Again! Do it again!”

  Aedic wished he was still two winters old like the unbrother. The unbrother didn’t have to know anything about dead bodies and keeping secrets and telling lies and getting other people into terrible trouble. He didn’t know about the man who would murder Branan and find Matto and then come after Aedic and bury him in the wall. All he had to do was run about and shout and try not to fall in the fire or break things.

  If only Mam were here. He could have told her all about it, and she would have known what to do. He might as well tell the dog as tell Da. He could hear Da now, over by the hearth, saying the things everyone had heard a hundred times before. You couldn’t trust the Romans and you couldn’t trust your own people, either. One of the uncles told Da to give it a rest: This wasn’t about him, it was about a missing kid, and why didn’t he think of somebody else for a change? And Da said, “It’s all right for you! They didn’t steal your farm!”

  Aedic stuffed his fingers tighter into his ears and put his head down under the blankets until he could hardly breathe.

  By the time he came up for air, the argument had stopped. He could hear the scrape of the fire being banked up, and the musical trickle of wee into the night bucket. One of the aunts said something about an early start, and the uncle said they would be searching over by Broken Crags in the morning, and the aunt said again that it was a terrible thing, and how must that poor family be feeling, going to bed knowing their boy was out somewhere in the cold?

  Aedic wished everybody would stop talking about it. It was as if they had heard about something exciting and they all wanted to be part of it.

  It wasn’t exciting. It was a snake that writhed inside your stomach and hissed that something very, very bad had happened, it was going to get worse, and it was all your fault.

  Chapter 44

  “I can’t make him go indoors, Tilla!”

  “You are the army!” She leaned forward in the bed and retrieved the pillow from behind her. “It is your job to make people do things they do not want to do!” As if to illustrate how this was done, she gave the pillow a couple of hefty punches. “Why else are you here?”

  Ruso’s left boot landed with a clump on the floorboards. “You complain when we don’t respect local wishes.” He tugged at the laces of the right boot and dropped it beside its partner. “And then you don’t like it when we do.” He aimed his socks into the dark beyond-the-lamp oblivion of the corner where he had stowed Candidus’s shield.

  “But he is an old man!” She dropped the pillow back into place. “It is cold even in here. He will be dead by morning!”

  “Perhaps.” It was not his fault that Senecio was a stubborn old goat.

  Tilla looked as though she were about to raise another objection, so he said, “The sky’s clouded over now. It’s not as cold as it could
be. Valens will make sure the night staff keep an eye on him.”

  Tilla gave the sort of exaggerated sigh that said this would never have been allowed if somebody sensible had been in charge, then asked, “Do you think the army would lend us horses tomorrow?”

  “ ‘Us’?”

  “Me and Enica. We need to talk to the man who told Virana about the body. We have other names to follow too. We may have to go a long way to find these people.”

  He pulled back the covers and slid in beside her. “I’ll ask,” he promised, doubting their efforts would lead to much, but having no better ideas to offer. “Light out?”

  Instead of answering the question she said, “It has been a bad day. Did Virana tell you she was insulted?”

  “Ah. She was looking a bit weepy when she let me in. She said she was upset about Branan.”

  “That too. She said she used to look forward to seeing him.”

  “Gods above. Branan?”

  “Not like that, husband.”

  From somewhere downstairs came the sound of raised voices. Female first, then the rumbling of male resentment. Tilla said, “Ria wants to pack up and move to Deva for the winter when the Legion goes. He wants to stay here where they have always lived.”

  More argument from downstairs, the tone clear but the words indistinct. Ruso, who had hurried past Ria with a promise that he would talk about a fee for using the bar in the morning, was not sorry to know she was fully occupied.

  “A man and a woman,” Tilla murmured. “It is not easy.”

  “Mm,” he said. It seemed the safest thing. “Who insulted Virana?”

  “Some local people. That is nothing new. But Conn let it happen.”

  He said, “When this is over, we ought to make him apologize.”

  In the silence that followed perhaps she too was thinking that if Branan was not found, there would never be a time when this was over.

  “If I didn’t think he was fond of his father,” he said, “I’d have Conn first on the list of suspects. Hiding his brother somewhere just to cause trouble.”