Terra Incognita: A Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  “My last wish is that I should be found guilty of this crime and that the life of an innocent native should be spared.”

  “But—”

  “My liver is diseased—which I forbid you to tell them—but my mind is quite sound. If you testify otherwise, you will be lying.”

  “Everyone I meet here seems to want me to tell some sort of lie. And always for the best possible reasons.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruso. I know you mean well. But you’re so determined to do the right thing.”

  “What’s the matter with that?”

  “You don’t understand what the right thing is. Which makes you dangerous.”

  “And you’re a man with nothing to lose. Which you seem to think gives you the right to make a fool out of me and everyone else.”

  “Nothing to lose?” repeated Thessalus. His hands rose to cover his face. His shoulders began to heave. For a moment Ruso thought he was crying, then he realized the movement was silent laughter. “Nothing to lose!” repeated Thessalus. “The gods have given me all I ever wanted, and now you’re trying to help them snatch it out of my grasp!”

  “Then don’t just lie there, man!” snapped Ruso. “I’m the only one who’s in a position to help you. Tell me the truth!”

  52

  WHAT WOULD YOU think,” Thessalus asked Ruso, “if a man were taken sick and died, and you discovered the doctor who failed to cure that man had been secretly visiting his wife?”

  Ruso winced. “I would think that doctor should have referred the case to a colleague.”

  “Even if that colleague were Gambax?”

  “Even Gambax. He’s not bad at his job, just lazy.” The far end of Thessalus’s blanket began to slide onto the floor. Ruso reached across to the couch and rearranged it. “How’s the pain?”

  “Easing,” said Thessalus. “You’re right, I should have sent for Gambax. Everything is so obvious now. But I thought people would wonder why I was sending for help to treat a simple fever.”

  “Even so.”

  Thessalus’s smile was bitter. “Do you know, Ruso, even as he was slipping away, I really managed to convince myself there wouldn’t be a problem? I had genuinely done my best. I wrote up all the notes afterward. I thought if nobody knew that I had been seeing his wife . . . it was Gambax who worked it out. I think he must have wondered why I insisted on sourcing the herbs myself instead of letting him do it.”

  “You’ve been seeing the herb woman? That’s where you went that night?”

  “I’ve been seeing the herb woman,” agreed Thessalus. “Veldicca. Rianorix’s sister.”

  Ruso stared at him. At last something made some sort of sense. He said, “You’re dying anyway. You’ve confessed to save your girlfriend’s brother.”

  They had met at the clinic, where Thessalus had guessed that his patient’s “accidental” injuries had been inflicted, not by a fall as she claimed, but by a fist. It was not her first visit, and it would not be her last. His fury had risen with each successive “accident”: each fresh crop of cuts and bruises meted out by a husband to whom he dared say nothing lest he make the bullying worse.

  He claimed he could not remember how it had started. Perhaps a look. Perhaps a brushing of one hand against another as she laid out the herbs she was now delivering weekly for his clinic, and for which he was overpaying her out of his own salary. He did not ask what she did with the money. She did not tell him until much later that the man she called her husband was demanding the coins from her at the end of each market day.

  The secret she kept from Thessalus, though, was as nothing compared to the secret she kept from her husband. And when the child was born with dark hair and its eyes turned the color of peat, she and Thessalus celebrated in secret. In secret, because although the husband was dead by this time, they were still in danger.

  “Gambax is lazy, but he’s not stupid. He saw Veldicca at the market one morning with our daughter and came straight back and told me he would do me a favor and keep quiet about my so-called murder of her husband.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “He never made that entirely clear. He just started taking time off whenever he wanted. Ignoring orders when it suited him. That’s why I didn’t ask to renew my contract here.”

  “You were planning to make a fresh start together?”

  “We had to. I knew that even if I could prove I hadn’t killed the husband, Gambax would say Veldicca had poisoned him with her herbs.”

  “Did she?”

  Thessalus yawned. “Of course not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Ruso, don’t you trust anybody?”

  “Not women.”

  “Well, she didn’t, I promise you.” Thessalus tried to shift into a more comfortable position. “Of course, the irony is that we made all these plans expecting to live forever. Or at least for the foreseeable future. We would move south and marry in a town where nobody knew us. It wouldn’t matter that Veldicca’s family had disowned her for mixing with the army, because I would be setting up a practice that would support us both. But it matters now.”

  “She’ll be left here with no family and no support.”

  “And possibly no infirmary to supply, either. You’ve seen what’s going on around here. The governor will report back to Rome and Hadrian will have to do something. He might well pull out like he has in the east.”

  “Or he might send a lot more troops.”

  “Whatever happens, Veldicca and my daughter will need friends. I don’t want her having to take in some other lout in a uniform just to survive. And actually her brother isn’t a bad man.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Seriously. They have a different way of looking at things, Ruso. They had a whole system of law before we came, and we’ve interfered with it. Rianorix’s girl and her whole family was wiped out in a tribal raid a few years back, and instead of letting him demand a blood price or take revenge, we told him to leave it to us. And of course we did absolutely nothing. You can understand why he’s angry.”

  Ruso did not respond.

  “I imagine when his girlfriend’s cousin Aemilia came to him for help, he saw the chance to redeem himself. And do to Felix the things he wanted to do to the raiders who took his girl. The same traditional punishment he threatened me with until Veldicca told him not to be so silly and stop listening to his daft friends. Are you still awake down there, Ruso?”

  “Yes. So that’s how you knew about the head.”

  “That was the difficult part.” Thessalus yawned again. “When I heard they’d hidden the body I knew there was something badly wrong. I had to take a bit of a guess when I confessed to the prefect, but as soon as I dropped a hint about the head I could see I was on the right track. Have they really not found it yet?”

  “No. Where would he have put it?”

  Thessalus shook his dark curls. “I’ve no idea. I hope he hasn’t passed it on to the Stag Man.”

  “So do we all. The four of us who know. It’s being kept secret.”

  “I pretended to be confused so I didn’t get tripped up by the details. Then you came along, and I had to be even wilder to keep you at bay in case you found out I was ill and the whole thing would start to unravel. It was a gamble, but it’s worked, hasn’t it? They’ve released him.”

  “For the moment. But they don’t believe you did it.”

  “I felt terrible leaving Gambax in charge that night,” continued Thessalus, oblivious to Ruso’s caution, “but I had to go and warn Veldicca about what her brother was getting involved in. I thought perhaps she could go and talk to him. It might even help to reconcile them. She’s quite amenable to a reconciliation, actually. But she’s doing her best to dissociate herself from him until all this is over.”

  “Gambax went out as well,” said Ruso. “But he came back before you did.”

  Thessalus gave a weak smile. “I was supposed to come right back, but I was too exhausted to get up on
the horse. And then the storm broke. Veldicca made me stay the night.”

  “So you are at last admitting that you didn’t do it?”

  “I suppose I am, but if you ever report this conversation I shall deny every word.” Thessalus reached down to retrieve the blanket, which had slid off his feet again. “Uh, that’s nice. The pain’s going.” His eyes drifted shut. “I’m starting to float.”

  “And all this is to persuade Rianorix to look after his sister when you’re gone? Couldn’t you have found a simpler way?”

  “Not if he was executed,” mumbled Thessalus, his voice muffled by the pillow.

  Ruso said, “His lost girlfriend wasn’t killed, you know. She came back with me.”

  “Mm?”

  “She told me Rianorix didn’t do it.”

  “Mm.”

  “But she’s been sleeping with him,” added Ruso. “So she’s probably lying anyway.” He glanced across at the couch. Thessalus was asleep, floating on the poppy tears.

  53

  AEMILIA! ” CALLED THE voice. “Ut vales, filia mea?”

  Tilla paused with one arm inside her overtunic, and frowned. Even in their own home, Catavignus was asking his daughter how she was feeling this morning in Latin. Perhaps her father’s old taunt was right: Perhaps her uncle really did have a toga stashed away somewhere, ready for the governor’s call to wrap himself in it and strut about as a citizen of Rome.

  Tilla opened the door a crack and replied in her own tongue, “She is asleep, uncle.”

  “Child!” He slipped back immediately into the language of his ancestors. “Welcome home!”

  Catavignus was grayer, and perhaps heavier, but otherwise unchanged. For a moment she wondered why he was not surprised to see her. Then she realized that Ness must have told him she was here. He had had time to prepare himself.

  “I am sorry not to have welcomed you yesterday,” he continued. “I was away on business. If I had been told you were coming—”

  “No matter, uncle,” she assured him. “Aemilia made me welcome.”

  “Aemilia, yes.” He dropped his voice to a murmur. “How is she?”

  Tilla glanced over her shoulder at a pile of jumbled blankets: all that was visible of her cousin. “Still asleep.”

  “Come to my office when you are dressed, child,” suggested Catavignus. “We have much to talk about.”

  When she was dressed Tilla wandered along to the kitchen and moments later found herself enjoying not only soft bread and warm milk, but the luxury of knowing someone else had risen at dawn to fetch the water and sweep out the hearth and get the fire lit. She sat with her elbows resting on the scrubbed table, watching Ness’s quick fingers checking supplies and seeing her lips move as she limped around the kitchen memorizing a shopping list.

  She would have liked to speak freely with Ness, but what could she say? I know now how it is to be a slave? Of what help would that be to either of them? They had embraced last night, genuinely glad to see each other again, but today they had returned to their roles. The only useful thing she could do would be to get up off the stool and help, and that would embarrass both of them.

  Ness finished counting and began to grope her way along the line of laundry, checking for dampness. “Were you expecting a visitor last night, mistress?”

  “A visitor?” said Tilla, realizing she had forgotten to explain to anyone here about the medicus.

  Ness slapped a dry pair of socks down on the table. “I knew he was lying!”

  “Who was he?”

  “Some drunken soldier. Did you not hear the banging on the door?”

  “I must have been asleep,” said Tilla. The family bedrooms were farther back in the house. Ness slept in the little storeroom facing the noise of the street, so that Catavignus did not have to feed a doorkeeper as well as a cook. “What did this soldier look like?”

  “Like a man in a helmet in the dark. I got rid of him.”

  “Did he leave a message?”

  “No.”

  “There is an officer I know,” she confessed. “A medicus. It might have been him.”

  “It was very late.” Ness was sounding defensive now.

  “He is sometimes delayed by his patients.”

  “I am not here to let men in and out late at night. What sort of a house do you all think this is?”

  Tilla grinned, drained her milk, and made her way out of the back door into the gray of a drizzly morning.

  The yards of the house and the brewery were linked by a tall gate that was not locked. Pushing it open, she entered the brewery yard and paused to marvel at how much her uncle’s business had expanded in just three years. Instead of a few sacks of homegrown barley and a collection of buckets and fat-bellied cauldrons beside the hearth, he now had a whole building devoted to the production of beer. Not only that, but at the far end of the yard, well away from the main building, the rain was dripping off the thatch of a little square house that had a narrow blackened tunnel disappearing under one wall. The soldiers must be drinking so much beer that her uncle had built a special hot floor to dry the sprouted barley.

  A surly-faced boy emerged from the back door of the brewery with a bucket in each hand. He stared at Tilla for a moment, then dunked the buckets into the water trough. When he lifted them out, the trickle of water of which she had been vaguely aware became louder. She looked on in amazement as she realized that the sound came from a metal spout over the trough. Clear water was trickling out of the spout and refilling the trough. When the boy had carried the buckets back in, she went across to examine what she had seen and found another pipe leading away from the trough in the direction of the house latrine. She thought of the endless trips down to the stream on days when her mother told her to go and help Ness. The aching shoulders on the long climb back up to the house. The fingers numb with cold. The effort not to tip the buckets lest she should waste the water and have to traipse back down and fetch more. Now, her uncle’s servants did not even have to leave the house. The hot floor was nothing compared to this. Catavignus had his own water pipe in the yard and a latrine that cleaned itself.

  “Niece!” exclaimed a voice from the back door of the brewery. “Come in out of the wet.”

  She made her way across the damp paving stones and into the gloom. The surly boy was pouring the water into a hissing cauldron set over a charcoal fire. Her uncle did not introduce them.

  The surroundings had changed, but the smell of the boiling mash was still the same. The smoke and steam made her cough as Catavignus led her down through the building past stacks of barrels and grain sacks. A gnarled old man who looked as though he had worked there for centuries paused from hooking down a bunch of dried flowers from the rafters when Catavignus yelled in his ear, “My niece, back from a long journey!”

  The man nodded and grinned at Tilla, exposing both of his teeth.

  “We just add the meadowsweet for the flavor these days,” explained Catavignus, indicating the brittle bunches of flowers above her. “Demand is so high that everything is drunk before we need to think about preservation.” He pushed open a side door. “We can talk in my office.”

  The only light slid in on a cold draft from a window that was open onto the wet street. Office, Tilla observed, was a grand name for a cramped storeroom with a desk that looked suspiciously like a military castoff under the window. She seated herself on the proffered stool and pointed to a glossy orange inkwell sporting a feather quill.

  “Have you learned to read and write, Uncle?”

  The crease between her uncle’s brows deepened. “Of course. But I rarely find the time. I have a man who comes in to deal with that sort of thing.”

  “You are doing very well,” she observed. “You have . . .” she counted on her fingers. “Ness, a boy, the old man, a man who does the writing you are too busy for, the woman and her husband up at the old house—”

  “You have been to the old house?”

  “Yesterday. Six servants, two houses, an
d a brewery with a hot floor and a water pipe!”

  “The gods have been kind to me.” The bow of acknowledgment was modest. “Coria is a good place to do business. I have formed a guild of caterers. Things are moving forward.”

  Forward. The word he had used in all those shouting matches with her father. You must move forward. Seize the opportunity. Rome is the future. As if the wisdom of the ancestors were of no value. Now, with Da gone, there was nobody to disagree with him.

  She said, “I see you are trying to build a grand Roman house in a place that will never succeed.”

  For a moment he hesitated, then his face split into a warm smile that reminded her painfully of her father. “You have your da’s directness,” he said. “He would be proud.”

  Tilla wondered if that were true.

  “If only we had known you were alive! But there was no ransom demand. We thought you were lost in the fire. Then last year we heard a rumor that you had been seen in the southern plains. I went down there to look for you. They told me a girl with your name had gone back to Deva to live with a soldier.”

  The words hung in the air, innocent enough, but clad in the armor of old arguments.

  “I said nothing to your cousin,” he added. “In case the rumors were not true.”

  She said, “They were true.”

  He nodded. “We all have to make changes, child. Your father was a fine man, but he was not always right about everything.”

  “The man I lived with is not a proper soldier,” she insisted, conscious of evading the gaze that reminded her of Da. “Not really. He is a healer.”

  “I see.”

  “The family would have learned to like him.” Perhaps. Or perhaps they would have refused to have anything to do with her, just as Rianorix’s family had shunned Veldicca when she had rejected their chosen blacksmith and set up home with a soldier who had more patience with his bees than his woman.

  Catavignus said, “Is this healer traveling with the Twentieth Legion?”

  “Medicus Gaius Petreius Ruso.”

  Her uncle nodded approval. “I have met him. A good man. An officer. You have done well.”