Terra Incognita: A Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  “And did you?”

  “No.”

  “Heard you didn’t have much luck pinning down who killed that barmaid, either.”

  “I don’t investigate dead cats,” said Ruso, who knew far more about the barmaid than Postumus suspected. “I’ve got better things to do.”

  “Well, perhaps you can track down matey with the antlers.” Postumus was scanning the horizon, presumably looking out for the scabby little Brit so he could carry on ignoring him.

  Ruso let the centurion ride on ahead before making another futile attempt to scratch his back. There was a suspicious tickling sensation on the lower right-hand side of his ribcage now. Almost as irritating as the itching was the fact that he had not noticed any of this until after they had set out this morning. Otherwise he would have cornered that lying innkeeper and demanded a refund.

  For a moment he had been alarmed by the way Postumus’s stories echoed Tilla’s. Now, thinking about it logically, he realized that Tilla must have heard those same stories from other travelers. Her vision in the yard last night had not been an apparition sent to inspire her or to terrorize the army, but the result of frightening rumors working on the uneducated native imagination. The only mysterious creature at the inn had been the common but strangely invisible bedbug—and if she did not mention the bites, neither would he. She would only gloat.

  OFFICER METELLUS WAS able to name Felix’s murderer by the start of the third watch. It was a native. His identification had not been difficult, since he was not the brightest of men. Plenty of people had heard him pick a quarrel with the victim in a local snack bar only hours before the body was found. Several of the witnesses could remember the exact wording of the threats he had made.

  Unfortunately, as Prefect Decianus of the Tenth Batavians observed over his lunch tray, naming the murderer did not solve the problem.

  “We’ll pick him up soon, sir,” promised Metellus, who had not been invited to share the frugal offering of bread and black olives. “All our contacts know who to look for, and I’ve got men watching the house.”

  Decianus tore a chunk off the bread. “Audax wants to round up twenty natives and execute one every watch until someone tells us where he is.”

  Metellus frowned. “I don’t think the governor would approve, sir. His orders are—”

  “I don’t need you to tell me what the governor’s orders are, Metellus. Obviously we aren’t going to do that. Not without approval. I’ll send a message down and see what he says.”

  “I’ve already done that.”

  Decianus glanced at him. “I don’t suppose we’ll get much of an answer till he gets here to see for himself. And I want to have this cleared up by that time anyway.” He dropped the bread back onto the tray. “Where’s the body now?”

  “In the mortuary. Audax is guarding the door. Nobody else has been allowed anywhere near it.”

  Decianus pondered that for a moment. “What are the men saying?”

  Metellus said, “We’re putting it out that it was just a quarrel in a bar, sir.”

  “And do they believe it?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I want it made absolutely clear that we’re dealing with a simple backstreet brawl. There’s nothing mysterious about the way the native cursed our man, and there is no connection between this business and anything else they may have heard.”

  “I’ll do my best sir,” agreed Metellus. “But judging by the number of civilians lining up to make devotions to the gods, it’s not going to be easy.”

  Decianus sighed. “Tell me this isn’t happening, Metellus.”

  “It’ll be better when we arrest the native, sir.”

  “It’ll be better when you find our missing item.”

  Metellus said, “It’s nowhere in his house. I’ve got two men covering the road between here and there, and another three covering the streets, spreading out from where the body was found.” He raised a hand to silence the objection the prefect was about to make. “It’s all right, I haven’t told them anything. Their orders are to search for evidence of anything the native might have stolen from the victim, then bring it back and say nothing.”

  Decianus picked up an olive, examined it for a moment, then flung it back into the bowl. It bounced off the rim, missed the desk, and skittered across the floorboards. “We should have seen this coming.”

  “My people can’t be everywhere, sir. The native wasn’t on our list as anybody important.”

  As Decianus was saying, “Well he’s found a way of making himself important now,” there was a knock on his office door. Apparently the fort doctor urgently wished to speak with him.

  Decianus frowned. “I suppose he’s come to complain about having a centurion keeping him out of his mortuary.”

  The young soldier in the doorway hesitated, evidently not sure whether the prefect was always right or whether his staff were expected to warn him when he wasn’t. Finally he said, “Not exactly, sir.”

  Decianus brushed breadcrumbs from his tunic. He had not been impressed by Doctor Thessalus’s recent performance. The man was due to be replaced in a few days when the governor arrived, and Decianus was not sorry. “Very well,” he said, sliding the tray aside. “Send him in.”

  The state in which Thessalus appeared before him did nothing to improve his opinion. “Stand easy,” he ordered.

  Thessalus, who had not been standing as straight as he might, relaxed even further. The glare of the guard who had marched him in suggested that he would very much like to seize this excuse for an officer and straighten him up again.

  Thessalus seemed to be having difficulty staying awake. He squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them again. Decianus followed his gaze and saw that a fly had settled on the tray and was now busy cleaning its back legs. Decianus dismissed the guard and waved away the fly. Metellus, who had retreated to sit in the corner, said nothing.

  “So, doctor,” said Decianus, “Tell me what’s so urgent.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed the doctor. “Right away, sir.” The silence that followed was broken by a hiccup. “Oops,” he said, a faint grin creasing his thin face. “Sorry, sir.”

  Decianus reflected that it was very early in the day to be drunk. He nodded to Metellus, who approached the doctor and leaned close to repeat the order into his ear.

  Thessalus’s smile faltered. He blinked several times. His mouth opened, closed again, and then, in an accent that betrayed a better education than everyone else in the room, offered the words, “I’ve come to confess to a murder, sir.”

  Decianus leaned his elbows on the desk, placed his fingertips together, and eyed the unsteady Thessalus over the top of them. “You might want to reconsider what you’ve just said, doctor.”

  The young man rubbed his unshaven jaw and appeared to be pondering this question. Then he said, “No, sir. I have to tell the truth. I was the man who killed Felix.”

  Decianus sighed. “We already know who killed Felix, Thessalus. It wasn’t you.”

  The dark eyes widened. “Holy gods! That wasn’t Felix?” The fingers that rose toward his mouth were trembling. “This is even worse than I thought. Is there another man missing, sir?”

  A swift glance at Metellus assured Decianus that there was not. “What,” he said, “exactly, do you think you did to Felix?”

  Thessalus swallowed. His eyes attempted to focus on the edge of the desk. Finally he said, “I think I may have, ah—I may have . . .” The words had failed but the meaning of the collision between the outer edge of the hand and the back of the neck was unmistakable.

  Decianus glanced at Metellus again, then returned his attention to the doctor.

  “Tell me what you did with the body.”

  Thessalus appeared to be pondering the meaning of this question. Finally he said, “The local people believe the soul resides in the head, sir.”

  “I see. So where is the soul of Felix residing now?”

  “They take the enemy’s head home with
them. They keep it on display as a trophy. Sometimes they make a cup out of the skull and drink from it.”

  “That was years ago,” put in Metellus. “Even the northerners don’t get up to that sort of thing now.”

  Instead of replying, Thessalus swayed alarmingly and grabbed hold of the desk for support.

  “Stand up straight, man! Why on earth would you want to murder Felix?”

  Thessalus’s eyes closed. His knees buckled. His body slumped to the floor.

  “He’s relieved of duty,” said Decianus, leaning over the desk. “He’s to be confined to quarters until further notice. And he’s not to talk to anyone.”

  When the semiconscious doctor had been dragged out, Decianus turned to Metellus. “Search his rooms.”

  “It can’t have been him, sir. He’s not the type.”

  “Then how does he know?”

  There was a soft tap at the door. A servant scurried in and removed the tray. When he had gone Metellus said, “Audax must have talked.”

  “That doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you either.”

  Decianus looked him in the eye. “It might have been better to tell the truth in the first place.”

  “You’re doing the right thing, sir,” Metellus assured him. “We’ll keep Thessalus quiet, arrest the native, and it’ll all blow over.”

  “It had better blow over before the governor gets here.”

  “Do you want some ideas for the funeral speech?”

  Decianus scowled at him. “No,” he said. “I want you to concentrate on keeping this thing under control.”

  When he was alone, Decianus walked across to the small wooden shrine on the side wall of his office, sprinkled some more incense in the burner, and prayed that this mess was not about to get considerably worse.

  5

  JUST AS POS TUMUS had predicted, the lone rider reappeared— on a low rise to their right this time—just after the column had stopped for water. The officers continued to ignore him. When everyone moved on, he disappeared.

  Ahead of Ruso, Postumus was berating a marcher for some misdeed or other. Ruso found it difficult to see how anyone could get into trouble simply by putting one foot in front of another, but some remarkably creative men seemed to manage it. Indeed, a man on a long journey could begin to think and do all manner of bizarre things. He could start to wonder if his housekeeper truly had seen something strange in the yard at the inn. Tilla was no fool: perhaps he should have been more sympathetic. He could wonder what he should do with the rest of the stolen money. He could even, after he had exhausted all other possibilities, begin to wonder if he should have listened to his ex-wife. Certainly, since he had discovered the true extent of his family’s debts, Ruso had begun to see—too late—the sense of Claudia’s plans to expand his business.

  “I’m not a businessman,” he had objected. “I’m a doctor.”

  “But you never try to make yourself known, Gaius. Do you? I keep telling you!”

  “I don’t want to be known. I’ve plenty of work already. If I make myself more known, I’ll have more patients than I can cope with.”

  “Of course you will! That’s the idea. Take on an apprentice to deal with the easy cases and—”

  “But if people want me, they want me. Not some apprentice.”

  “Oh, Gaius, for goodness’ sake! All you have to do is hire somebody who’ll be nice to people! You said yourself that lots of patients get better by themselves and all you have to do is try not to kill them while they’re doing it!”

  “I said what?”

  In the course of the argument that followed, it became clear that some unguarded and long-forgotten remark of his had been horribly mangled on its journey through the space between his wife’s ears and her mouth.

  Finally, unable to shake her belief that she was repeating his exact words, he said,

  “I hope that’s not what you go around telling people?”

  “Of course not! I care about your career, even if you don’t!”

  Ruso scowled at the ears of his horse. He needed a promotion. Distracted by Tilla and entangled in that business about the barmaid, he had failed to impress the right people in Deva. He could not allow that to happen a second time. In the future he must avoid dabbling in matters that were none of his business. And he must make it clear to everyone at this temporary posting that Tilla was not the troublesome sort of native who met gods in stable yards or spread rumors about men with antlers, but a respectable housekeeper who was under proper control.

  It was starting to spatter with rain again. Ruso leaned back in the saddle as the horse began to pick its way down a long slow drop that had been cut into the side of the hill. To his right, a bank loomed above the road. To the left, a grassy slope fell away into a thickly wooded valley.

  The column must have been descending for at least half a mile when he drew the horse to a standstill. For some reason the pace had slowed to a crawl, and there seemed to be a line of stationary vehicles ahead. He heard Postumus bellow the order to halt.

  It was not a wide stretch of road, and the cavalryman coming up the hill had to weave his mount through the queue of men and carts.

  “What’s the holdup?” asked Ruso.

  “The river’s burst its banks,” explained the cavalryman. “Taken part of the bridge with it. They’ve got a team patching it up, but—” He broke off, distracted by shouting farther down the hill.

  Stationary and bored, soldiers who had had nothing interesting to look at for some miles were craning to their left and yelling abuse. A rider was galloping at full tilt along the margin of the woods not 150 paces below the road. Ruso blinked. He rubbed his eyes. The rider definitely had the head of a stag. And the stag had antlers.

  The cavalryman wheeled his horse around and plunged headlong down the hillside to join his comrades in pursuit. Ruso was wondering whether to follow them when over the shouting he heard someone farther back in the line roar, “Clear the road! Out of the way!”

  What happened next was over in seconds and seemed to take hours. Ruso urged his own horse aside to the sound of screams and the bellowing of frightened animals. People were trampling over one another in the rush to escape the path of a heavy wagon careening down the road out of control. The axles were shrieking, the oxen galloping and skidding in a vain attempt to outrun the vehicle to which they were still yoked.

  Ruso grabbed a fistful of mane as the terrified horse reared beneath him. One of the front oxen fell. The others were dragged down around it. The wagon collided with the thrashing tangle of black bodies. It slewed off the road, crashed onto its side, and rolled down the hill. For a moment there was a terrible silence. Then came the sound of men screaming.

  Finally bringing the trembling horse to a standstill, Ruso surveyed the chaos. Further back, two carts had tipped off the road. One had a pair of mules still struggling and kicking in their harness. A boy had slid down from the bank above them where he must have leaped for safety, and was wiping the mud from his hands. A woman was comforting her sobbing children. People were calling the names of friends and of gods, gathering their scattered possessions or sitting dazed at the roadside while drivers set off toward the woods in pursuit of fleeing animals.

  Legionaries were running to form a guard as two men with bloodied swords stepped away from the carcasses of the oxen. Down by the stricken wagon, Postumus was barking orders and a squad was struggling to heave the cargo of lead out of the wreckage.

  He could not see Tilla.

  He dismounted and put his hand on the shoulder of a pale boy who was standing motionless with his fingers in his mouth. “Are you hurt?”

  The boy shook his head, still staring at the scene.

  “Hold her steady for me,” ordered Ruso, pressing the reins into the boy’s hand. The child looked relieved to have something to do.

  As he strode up to retrieve his medical case from one of the stricken carts, Ruso glanced down at the woo
ds. The Stag Man, or Cernunnos, or whoever he was, had vanished.

  6

  THE GRAY-FACED CARPENTER laid out on the grass gave a moan of pain. Ruso had not revealed the severity of his injuries to the man, nor to his hysterical girlfriend, who turned out to be Lydia, Tilla’s patient from yesterday. The tiny bundle of cloth she was clutching had the sort of persistent rasping cry that set one’s teeth on edge. Finally the man himself had summoned the strength to tell her to go away and see to the child: He would be fine. Ruso, knowing the state of the leg hidden beneath the blanket and suspecting further internal injuries, could not imagine that he really believed it.

  “We’ll get you down to the sick bay at the fort,” he promised, relieved to see that the man he had dispatched with a message to the fort by the river was already weaving his way back up through the jammed traffic on the road.

  The news was not good. The sick bay had flooded during the storm. The patients had been evacuated. The building was full of orderlies padding about in mud with mops and buckets.

  Ruso checked the state of the leg again. The bleeding was more or less under control, but the man would not survive the journey across the hills to Coria without surgery.

  He helped the stretcher bearers maneuver the carpenter across the slippery remains of the damp bridge, then strode ahead up the road, examining the line of vehicles waiting to cross in the opposite direction. Picking out an empty carriage that had the luxury of suspension, he commandeered it with the optimistic promise to the driver that the army would pay the owner well for his trouble. The vehicle was maneuvered out of the line and parked farther up the hill away from the traffic. One of the stretcher bearers lit a fire at the roadside.

  Ruso began to lay out the instruments: needle and thread, hooks, scalpel, cautery. . . . Finally alerted to the enormity of what was happening by the appearance of the bone saw, the driver had to have his objections quieted by the promise of more cash and an imminent flogging if he refused to cooperate. The carpenter was in turn quieted with mandrake and held steady by two less-than-confident stretcher bearers as Ruso cleaned up the mess that had been a leg and prepared for the drastic surgery that might save its owner.