by Ruth Downie
“I did not say it was.” Wearily, Tilla eyed the path that led back toward the fort. If she hurried, she could make it down to her uncle’s new house before the lamps were lit. She finished the milk and reached for her bag of damp clothes. “I thank you for the drink,” she said, getting to her feet. “There will be no need to talk to Catavignus. I shall see him myself.”
“We could make you up a bed,” said the woman, suddenly seeing a new reason to be anxious. “You must not tell the master we turned you away. Of course it would be a poor bed compared to what you are used to—”
“I am used to many things,” Tilla informed her. “And now I shall need to get used to having come back from the dead. But you have orders not to invite people in, and I will not ask you to disobey.”
“But—”
“There is no need to worry,” said Tilla. “I shall say nothing about you to my uncle.”
“But mistress—”
“I am not your mistress,” pointed out Tilla. “I am not anybody’s mistress anymore. But if I were, I would tell you that the thatch needs mending, those tools should be put away even if they are not yours, and someone needs to hoe the vegetable patch.”
“But what will the master say if he knows we let you wander off by yourself at sunset?”
“I don’t know,” said Tilla, swinging her bag onto her shoulder and heading for the gate. “Perhaps I shall be eaten by wolves on the way back, and then nobody but you will ever know, will they?”
22
THE SKY WAS orange above the silhouette of the western hills by the time Ruso left Lydia in the infirmary with Postumus. The shutters of We Sell Everything had been pulled across. The barber’s shop was locked and there was no sound from the bathhouse. The awning outside the snack shop rose with a brief gust of wind, then collapsed again. It seemed everyone had gone to pay their last respects to Felix.
Ruso arrived at the small cemetery on the road out of town and slipped in at the back of the crowd gathered around the bier, glad of the approaching dusk. Distracted and late, he had not thought of changing into better clothes. Audax, easily distinguished by the centurion’s plume across his helmet, was standing at attention among the ranks of Batavians whose full formal turn-out displayed a polished range of antique but fearsome-looking weaponry. Over the heads of the crowd he saw the prefect move forward and step up onto some sort of platform.
As Decianus announced that every man was born mortal, Ruso was distracted by the gaggle of young women in front of him. Several were clinging to one another and sniffling. All seemed to have spent much time inconsolably wrecking their fancy hairstyles, and had he been closer, their torn mourning clothes might have revealed some interesting sights.
Decianus moved on to extol the virtues and the necessity of good military trumpeters, while Ruso craned to look around at the rest of the civilians. He wondered if Tilla had come to watch the funeral before delivering his supper. He would have asked her to visit Lydia, but in the fading light he recognized only Susanna from the snack bar and the barber’s wife.
Decianus was commending Felix as a true Batavian, a man of four years’ loyal service to Rome and to the Tenth and a man who would be much missed, when he was interrupted by a stray wail from one of the young women. There was an audible intake of breath from the crowd. Decianus ignored the intrusion and went on to explain that Felix was now freed from the pains and difficulties of life, and that we must all prepare ourselves—
Another wail rose into the air, followed by sobbing and furious hisses of “Sh!” Decianus was still talking, but quite possibly no one was listening as a plump and bedraggled female howled, “Oh, Felix!” The ensuing commotion suggested that either she had collapsed, or one of her wiser friends had wrestled her to the ground. Ruso sighed. Since everyone knew he was the doctor, he supposed he had better step forward.
Catavignus got there first. Evidently this was Aemilia, the daughter who was not well. Grabbing the apparently unconscious girl under the arms, he dragged her away from the mourners onto the grass beyond the gravestones. The angular woman Ruso had seen haggling with the butcher separated herself from the crowd and limped across to kneel beside her. Catavignus waved Ruso away. “We’ll just get her home, Doctor. This has been a very difficult day.”
As Ruso walked away from them he heard the slap of a hand on human flesh, and a wail of pain. Catavignus was administering his own treatment.
Ruso rejoined the funeral just as the speech came to an end. There was another blast of the trumpets. Decianus stepped up to the bier, raised a staff of office, and sprinkled something on the corpse, reciting a chant in what Ruso now recognized as Batavian. A fat man who had been blocking Ruso’s view shifted and for the first time he could make out the full shape of the body. Either the head had been found, or a convincing dummy placed under the shroud. A command was yelled, the troops saluted, the horns blared, and flames began to lick up around what remained of Felix the trumpeter.
Decianus stepped back and stood at attention. A couple of men moved the platform safely away from the flames. The fire cast a flickering light on the impassive features of Audax, who was watching the disappearance of the body that he had been guarding since early morning. Perhaps he was hoping that the fire had been well set, so that the flames would obscure what lay beneath when the shroud burned away. It took Ruso a while to spot Metellus. In the end it was not his face that betrayed his identity beneath the anonymous shell of the helmet, but his stance. All other eyes looking out from under the polished brims were trained on the pyre as Felix’s comrades oversaw his departure to the realms of the dead. Only the prefect’s aide was more interested in watching the crowd.
23
RUSO WAS ON the way back to the infirmary for his first evening in charge, when he heard a familiar voice bawling orders. Exactly what the orders were was a mystery, since half of the syllables seemed to have been swept away in the tidal wave of sound, but the infantrymen tromping down the street understood the need to wheel right, march forward a few paces, and then halt.
“Dismissed!”
That was clear enough.
Ruso was threading his way through the crowd of men heading for their barrack rooms when the same voice called, “Hey, Doc! I want a word!”
Audax’s office displayed a predictable lack of interest in home comforts. The furniture looked old, hard, and lonely. Around it, a selection of notices hung from nails that had cracked the plaster. The only extravagances, all the more striking because of the plain surroundings, were the crested helmet and scarlet cloak that Audax was now unloading onto the wooden frame in the corner.
Ruso assumed he had been called in to hear the latest news about the search for the missing remains of Felix the trumpeter, but he was wrong.
“I’m telling you this,” announced Audax, kicking the door shut and not bothering with a greeting, “Since you don’t seem to be as much of an idiot as some of the others. You want to keep an eye on that lazy smear of grease that works over in the infirmary.”
“Gambax?” suggested Ruso, reflecting that Audax was not a man one would choose to lead a stealth mission.
“That’s him. The other one never got him under control. Don’t suppose you’ll do much in a few days, but I thought you ought to be warned.”
“Thank you.”
“He’s another one who thinks he can do what he likes.”
“Another one?” queried Ruso.
Audax snorted. “The other one was my problem. Still is. Problem alive, problem dead. Typical. Should have done what he was bloody told for once and come in before curfew. None of this would have happened.”
“Felix.”
Audax shrugged. “Ah well. Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Specially not under the circumstances.”
Ruso glanced around to confirm that the door was firmly shut and murmured, “That head on the corpse . . .”
“Fake.”
“I assumed from his funeral that he was pretty popular.”
This did not seem to explain the distress of the disheveled girls. “Felix was a moneylender?”
“He was a trader. Buying and selling. Everybody’s mate.”
“Can you think of any reason why Doctor Thessalus would have a grudge against him?”
“No more than anybody else. Thessalus wouldn’t harm a fly. No wonder being in the army’s driven him crackers.”
“You don’t happen to know where Thessalus was called out to on the night of the murder?”
Audax did not.
“What did you mean by ‘no more than anybody else’?”
Audax glanced around the shadowy corners of the room. “You believe in spirits?”
“You’re not speaking ill of him,” Ruso assured him, curious. “You’re telling the truth.” It was a distinction fine enough for a prefect’s aide.
“Hmph.” Audax pondered that for a moment, and fingered the charm around his neck. Finally he said, “When I got here six months ago, Felix was paying other men to toot his horn for him so he could wander off doing his fancy business deals. You wanted it, Felix could get it. At a price, and no questions asked. Now, my lads don’t get paid as much as you boys in the legions and I don’t mind them making a bit extra, but they’ve got to do it in their own time. And the minute I put a stop to Felix skipping off duty, he took to going sick with invisible ailments.”
“Bad back?” suggested Ruso, familiar with the list of conveniently unprovable disorders. “Headaches?”
“That sort of thing. Sets a bad example to the others.”
“And he was seen at the infirmary by Thessalus?”
“Gambax.”
Ruso was beginning to see why the medical service commanded scant respect among the Tenth. “You really excused him from duty on Gambax’s say-so?”
“Twice,” said Audax. “Then I cured him myself. Sent him on a twenty-mile run. And d’you know, he was never ill again. Felix was a lazy bugger, Doc. But he was my lazy bugger, and he didn’t deserve to go like that.”
24
IN THE RAPIDLY fading light the sensible thing to do would be to hurry straight back to—no, the sensible thing would have been to accept the woman’s grudging offer of a bed for her first night back at home. The second most sensible thing would be to hurry back to her uncle’s house by the fort. Tilla did neither of these sensible things. Instead, she set off up the path to a place she had not seen for three winters and where there would be nothing to welcome her except memories. The woman had made it clear that even if any others had survived, they were not there.
She glanced back at the paddock with the strange ditches cut into a rectangle. With the Votadini for neighbors, this was probably a stupid place to build any sort of a house. She shook her head. Her uncle had always had some very odd ideas. Like giving his daughter a Roman name and insisting that she learn to speak fluent Latin. Her own father had always said it was pointless: The Romans had finally abandoned their attempts to control the northern tribes a few years ago and any fool could see that it was only a matter of time before they gave up here too.
Time, had they known it, was the one thing her family would not be given.
The Votadini had come in the dark. Bandits, thieves—perhaps they too called themselves warriors. Warriors who were too cowardly to show their faces in daylight. She had imagined their approach countless times since that night. Threading their way up through the woods, crouching behind the field wall and listening to Trenus whispering last words of encouragement. Clambering across the ditch and creeping silently over the bank. Excited, perhaps, by their own daring. Slinking across the yard in the dark to surround the house where the family lay dreaming by the warmth of the dying fire.
The dog alone had sensed the danger. He had raised the alarm, but there were too many of them, and this time they had not just come to steal a few cows.
The walls were in poor repair, as she had expected. Yet one paddock was still properly fenced, and a shaggy pony, nothing like the fine horses Trenus had stolen from her family, lifted its head to watch her as she passed.
Someone was living here.
Whoever had built the small round house had set it on the same patch of level ground as the old one. She scanned the earth at its feet for the scars of the burning. Instead the gods had sent new growth. She saw only spring grass, with a couple of chickens pecking for food. The land, it seemed, had a shorter memory than those who tilled it.
She called a soft greeting but there was no reply. Not even a dog. She unlooped the twine and pushed the gate open.
Her ancestors had fought alongside Venutius in the failed struggle for freedom, and her father kept an ancient sword oiled and hidden in the thatch, ready for the day when a new leader would rise up and call them to victory. But the thatch had been ablaze before they realized it. The sword could not be reached.
In the light of the flames she had seen her mother struck down in the doorway. She knew then that the raiders would show no mercy. She had expected to die herself. Instead the knife had been torn from her hand and she had been dragged away into the darkness, still screaming threats she could not carry out.
For the first days and weeks among the Votadini she had waited. Ready to run. She had closed her eyes and her mind whenever she lay crushed beneath the grunting mass of Trenus, and told herself it would not be for much longer. When she was alone, she watched the woods for any sign of the warriors from the south who would come to help her escape. Or even of the army, come to enforce the law they claimed to uphold. But the weeks had turned into months and autumn hardened into winter, and still there was neither a raid nor even any word of anyone offering a deal to buy her back. The melting of the winter snows and the opening of the roads had brought no news. Gradually, deliberately, she had buried all hope of seeing her family again. If they were alive, they would have come for her. She had comforted herself with thoughts of them waiting for her in the next world. But perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps someone was still waiting here.
A lone blackbird was warbling his evening song. The dark bushes behind the house shivered in the breeze. Tilla told herself not to hope too much. Hope would mean disappointment. She looked around her. The sun was gone behind the black skeletons of the trees on the horizon.
That family are all dead.
Dead. As if a family could be summed up and done away with in one word.
She pulled the knotted shawl tighter around her shoulders. Surprised to realize she was trembling, she put her bag down on the stone outside the door—the stone where the water bucket used to rest—and called, “Who is here?”
There was movement from behind the house. Someone was limping toward her carrying a horse harness. A man. A man she had known from childhood . . .
But the hair was too fair. The frame was too broad.
The walk— The walk had stopped. He was standing there with his mouth open. There was dried blood on his upper lip. Bruising around one eye. He reached one hand out toward the wall as if trying to steady himself.
She said, “Are they all dead, Rianorix the basket maker?”
“All dead, daughter of Lugh,” he whispered. “Have you come to haunt me?”
“No,” she said, pushing the door open. “I have come home!”
25
SHE HAD DONE her best to treat what the soldiers had done to him at the bar last night, but he had no herbs in store and it had been too late to search for any growing around the house. She had cleaned up the cuts and put cold compresses on the vicious bruises, struggling to see what she was doing in the uneven light of the fire and the smelly rush taper that was almost burned out. “I could do better with some herbs,” she assured him. “I will go and see what there is outside tomorrow. Mam used to grow lots of things. They might have seeded themselves.”
He eased himself into a more comfortable position on the bracken bed, closed his eyes, and murm
ured, “Your touch is healing, daughter of Lugh.”
“Your flattery is still as clumsy, I see.”
“I am out of practice.”
She said, “You should have gone to your sister. She would have medicines.”
“I have no sister.”
She sighed. “You are still not speaking to Veldicca?”
“She is still not speaking to me.”
She shrugged his spare overshirt back up over her shoulder. Her own clothes were at last put out to dry, draped across a chair by the fire. Running the cool damp rag down the small of his back, she said, “I am surprised you have no wife to do these things.”
He gave a tentative smile: a careful move to avoid reopening the split lip. “If you had been here, things would have been very different.” The faint lisp reminded her that he was still learning to form his words without the shattered tooth.
“I suppose Aemilia would not have you?”
She felt his body stiffen.
“How did you know?”
“I am not a fool, Rian. I used to see how you looked at her when you thought I was not watching.” It was the way all men looked at Aemilia. Tilla had frequently thought that if men were obliged to choose their partners with their eyes closed, they would make far more sensible decisions. She said, “I did not expect you to mourn me forever. But I could have told you Aemilia was not interested in marrying a basket maker.”
“If you had been here, I would never have tried.”
“So tell me. Has she married an officer?”
“Not yet.” He gave a snort of disapproval. “No doubt Catavignus is eyeing the legionaries who marched in this afternoon.”
“And nobody else suited you?”
“I am a busy man with a business to run. Have you not noticed the stock of baskets over by the door? I shall go to sell at the market in Coria tomorrow.”
