Memento Mori

by Ruth Downie

“Who started the fire at the Little Eagle?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Take a guess,” Ruso suggested. “I won’t quote you.”

  The landlord cleared his throat. “I don’t want to speak ill of my own people, sir, but there are one or two old-fashioned types who don’t approve of building over the springs.”

  The local man who had invited Ruso to share his pool had seemed cynical rather than angry. “They disapprove strongly enough to burn down a building with people asleep inside it?”

  “That part might have been an accident, sir. They could have been aiming for the builders’ toolshed. I heard the timbers for the crane were stacked beside it.”

  “You don’t think the ill feeling between the temple people and the veterans had anything to do with it?”

  “Oh, no, sir. They do all their arguing in the magistrates’ meetings.”

  “I see.”

  “These are decent Roman citizens we’re talking about, sir.”

  “Of course.” It wasn’t much, but for the first time today Ruso, who had spent most of his life among decent Roman citizens, felt like laughing.

  37

  Ruso’s decent Roman citizen family were no longer sitting in the bar when he returned from the landlord’s office. One of the elderly women who had been admiring Mara called out to tell him they had gone upstairs. Her sister put a hand on her arm. “Are you sure, dear? I thought the young lady went out.”

  “At this hour?” demanded her sister.

  “I’m sure I saw her go past, dear. You weren’t paying attention.”

  “Me? I haven’t closed my eyes once since breakfast. You’re the one who keeps dropping off to sleep.”

  Ruso thanked them and left them to bicker. He went upstairs to discover that, indeed, only two of his family were in the room. Predictably, those two were Neena and Mara. According to Neena, Tilla had gone for a walk.

  “By herself?”

  “She said to tell you she was going to see how the lettuces are doing, master.” Neena’s tone was carefully neutral, as if this message made no sense to her and it wasn’t her fault if it made no sense to him, either.

  Unfortunately it made far too much sense. “It’s dark out there!”

  Without asking, Neena stepped across to the door and unhooked his cloak.

  “Thanks.” He swung it around his shoulders, bent to kiss Mara on the forehead, and clattered back down the stairs.

  The click of hobnails on stone marched down the street with him, but died abruptly as he passed the stable and the paving gave way to mud. He stopped, squinting at some sort of movement caught in the dim glow of a lantern out in the middle of the vegetable patch. He could hear the soft murmur of voices and see shapes, but the figures all seemed to be draped in heavy clothing and it was impossible to make out the sex from this distance. One of them had arms raised in prayer. None of them moved in any way that reminded him of his wife.

  Something shifted in front of the lantern, blocking it from his view. Then the light died altogether and he was left with only the moon.

  If Tilla was out there somewhere, the last thing he wanted to do was to betray her presence to anyone else. He stepped cautiously back until his outstretched fingers felt the rough timber of the stable wall. A faint whiff of incense and roast mutton mingled with sewage drifted past him and was gone. He pressed himself up against the wall. With luck, as far as any watcher was concerned, his own shape would blend in with it. Thus hidden, he began to survey the scene again. He could make out the line of the river parapet on the far side of the patch now, and the swell of the hills across the valley, black against the moonlit sky. He stared at a couple of suspicious shapes, but they soon transformed themselves from hunched, silent watchers into harmless bushes.

  Out in the vegetable patch, the shrouded figures had finished whatever they were doing. They were heading straight toward him. He held his breath, not daring to move.

  If his wife was out there somewhere, he had no idea where.

  The soft padding of footfalls on mud grew closer and then three figures were tramping past him, heads down, silent. Two of them moving fast, the third, heavier, limping behind them. All intent on getting back into the town.

  There was no sign of Tilla.

  If she wasn’t out there, where was she? Gods above, what was the matter with her? Was it not enough that one woman had been killed after going out alone in the dark?

  “What do you think?” The words were softly spoken and followed by “Did you see anything?”

  He sidestepped along the wall toward a shrub that was standing up and reshaping itself into his wife. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “You were busy.”

  “But—”

  “I thought if they find that Terentius, one of us must be here to listen. Is a spirit summoned not bound to tell the truth?”

  “If they—” He stopped. Perhaps he should have been more forthcoming about this ceremony. He should have seized the chance to set her straight. To explain the difference between literal and figurative. Ritual and reality. For Tilla, the gap between the world that could be seen and the world that could not was never very wide. Evidently she had thought there was a real chance that Terentius might be out there amongst the vegetables. That they would dig up his body. Or that he would pop up out of the ground. Or float down from the sky. Or perhaps just return as a disembodied voice to chat to the curious and the gullible.

  He slipped his hand around hers, feeling her cool fingers tighten around his own. Holding on across the vast gap between their ways of thinking. He said, “Let’s get back indoors before they see us.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” she said, disappointed. “It was too dark.”

  “I shouldn’t worry. He didn’t come.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because if he had,” he said, “they’d all have yelled in fright and run away.”

  38

  Ruso rolled onto his left side, swore at the pain in his arm, rolled the other way, and then seized the end of the pillow and pulled it over his head. These days, the sound of someone pounding on a street door was no longer the signal to crawl out of bed and grope for his clothes in the dark. Whoever was making a commotion down there, it wasn’t a worried relative come to summon him to a patient. In a moment his mind would float back to wherever it had been, drifting around the islands of his dreams.

  The moment was longer coming than he had hoped. Whoever was responsible for answering the door was taking their time. He could hear the indistinct sounds of men shouting despite the pillow clamped to his ear. Probably a drunken gang of off-duty soldiers, arriving late and finding themselves locked out of the bar across the road.

  He clutched the pillow tighter, but it didn’t block out the angry voices. Now he was annoyed with both sides: the idiots causing the fuss and whoever should be dealing with them and wasn’t. This wasn’t what a man hoped for in such expensive lodgings.

  He restrained an impulse to reach out for Tilla. If he did not disturb her, there was a chance she might not wake. He would tell her about the noise in the morning and she would say, “Really? I heard nothing,” and he would say, “You slept through it all,” and be secretly proud of not waking her to keep him company.

  There was a new sound in the darkness now. Louder. He lifted the pillow, alarmed. The drunks had somehow got into the Mercury. Footsteps were thundering up the stairs. A woman’s voice was calling after them. The straggle-haired wife who had not wanted Valens to hide in the Repose. He was glad he had secured the latch on the bedroom door. Then it struck him that he couldn’t hear the voice of the landlord and that he should probably go out there and help the wife, and just as all this came to him the door crashed back against the wall and someone was in the room.

  “Get out!” he yelled, flinging himself across the bed to shield his wife.

  Pertinax was there, in the dark of the bedroom, shouting something about the boys, and Ruso was sla
pping at an empty bed, calling, “Tilla! Tilla, where are you?” and in the next room Mara was crying.

  Ruso felt a body crash into his own. He rolled onto the floor, but his attacker’s weight followed and held him down. Hands were closing around his throat. He felt Pertinax’s spittle on his face as the old centurion roared, “Give me my boys!”

  The knee in the groin wasn’t dignified, but it worked. In the old days Pertinax would have been too fast, but these were not the old days. By the time Kunaris appeared with a lamp and several burly slaves in creased night tunics, Pertinax was curled up on the floor, moaning in pain. Ruso was standing guard in front of Mara’s room, clutching the only object he had been able to find that might serve for a weapon: a hobnailed sandal. The light revealed Serena’s uncle Catus over by the bed, convulsed with coughing, and clutching the cupboard for support.

  From behind the door, Ruso could hear Neena trying to shush Mara’s frightened crying. “Tilla?” he shouted.

  No reply.

  With his face against the door now: “Neena, do you know where Tilla is?”

  If there was an answer, it was lost beneath Pertinax’s groan of “Lying bitch has taken my boys!”

  “What?” was all Ruso could manage. Then, in British: “Neena, answer me. Is Tilla with you?”

  The reply he was dreading came in the same tongue. “No, master.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  Neena did not. She too had thought the mistress was asleep in bed.

  “My boys!” Pertinax was still writhing on the floor. “What’s he … done with … my boys?”

  The landlord’s wife appeared in the doorway beside her husband, clutching another lamp. Ruso said, “I can’t find Tilla. Have you seen her?”

  The landlord said, “I’m going to have to ask you all to leave, sirs.”

  “My wife’s missing!”

  From the floor: “My boys have been stolen!”

  Kunaris turned to Ruso. “You too, sir. We can’t have the other guests disturbed like this. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m the victim here,” Ruso pointed out. “Again. I was asleep in bed. These men broke in.”

  Ignoring him, the landlord beckoned over his shoulder. Four more slaves moved forward and lined up on either side of their master. One of them lit the lamp in the bracket on the wall, illuminating a row of broad shoulders and grim faces.

  Kunaris had not taken his eyes off Ruso. “It always seems to be you that’s attracting the trouble, sir.”

  “Where’s my wife?” Ignoring the landlord’s pleas to keep quiet, he yelled, “Tilla? Tilla, can you hear me?”

  “You’d be wise not to make a scene, sir. I think the other guests have suffered enough.”

  As if on cue, a man with just-out-of-bed hair shambled up behind him in the doorway and demanded to know what was going on. Without moving, Kunaris assured him it was all under control.

  “No it isn’t,” Ruso said. “My wife’s gone missing.”

  Kunaris put a hand on the guest’s shoulder and assured him once more that it was all being dealt with. The man looked from one to the other of them, caught sight of the row of slaves, and blundered away into the dark, muttering to himself.

  The room that had seemed spacious was crammed with people now. Catus regaining his breath over in the corner. Ruso clutching a shoe as if it might protect his daughter and her minder next door. Gray-bearded Kunaris standing with his henchmen blocking the exit. Pertinax still doubled over, swearing, clawing his way up to sit on the bed.

  No Tilla.

  Outside, Ruso could hear the landlord’s wife fussing about, apologizing to more grumbling guests, offering to light them back to their rooms and promising them that it was all over.

  A muffled female voice called out, “Is it him? That one with the two wives and one baby?”

  “It’s all right dear.” It was the voice of one of Mara’s elderly admirers. “No need to get up. The landlord is dealing with him.”

  “I told you there would be trouble!”

  Pertinax had recovered enough to converse now. Addressing Kunaris, he said, “That murdering bastard you were sheltering has kidnapped my boys.” He jerked his thumb toward Ruso. “And his wife’s in on it.”

  Ruso said, “No, sir,” and wished he could say the words with greater conviction. Helping Valens to steal the boys would have been an act of insanity. On the other hand, if Tilla wasn’t with Valens, where the hell was she?

  “I’m sorry about your boys, sir,” Kunaris replied evenly. “But they’re not here.”

  Pertinax turned to Catus. “Call out the veterans. Tell them to meet at the house.”

  Catus stumbled toward the door. The slaves parted to let him through, but one of them followed him down the corridor.

  Pertinax turned his glare on the landlord. “I’ll be searching every room in the place. You can come with me or you can get out of my way.”

  Kunaris’s head rose. “This is the last time I’m asking nicely, sir. Your grandsons aren’t here. My men will escort you into the street.”

  The slaves glanced at him, as if they were not used to hearing their master bargaining before throwing a customer out.

  “Neena?” Ruso called through the door. “Pack all our things and wrap up the baby. We’re leaving.”

  Was that gratitude in the landlord’s glance? Whatever it was, it was swiftly gone. Ruso did not envy him trying to defend his other guests from Pertinax, but wherever Tilla was, she was plainly not there, and he could not help her if he were caught in the cross fire between the leader of the veterans and a landlord in the pay of the chief priest. He put the shoe down, stepped past the old centurion, and pulled an empty bag out from under the bed. Then he opened the cupboard, dragged out the contents and began to ram them into the bag.

  “Coward,” hissed Pertinax.

  “I don’t know where your boys are, sir.”

  “And you don’t know where your wife is, either?”

  He did not. But he could think of one person who might.

  39

  Ruso had expected to have to rouse the sleeping residents of the oil shop and explain himself. Instead the bolts rattled within moments of his knock. As a riot of perfumes assaulted his nostrils, a familiar voice said, “Have they found them, husband?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Virana gasped. “Doctor! What are you doing here? Where is Albanus?”

  “Isn’t he here?” For a moment he had a horrible fear that Tilla had persuaded Albanus to join in some crazy scheme to get the twins out of Pertinax’s house.

  “The centurion came for him,” Virana explained. “He’s very upset. The boys have gone missing. He’s gone to wait at the house in case they come back.”

  “I can’t find Tilla,” he said, feeling helpless. “I woke up and she wasn’t there.”

  “Why have you got all those bags?”

  “This is all I could manage: I couldn’t carry the trunk. Do you know where she is?”

  But Virana did not. Only when he asked to come in did she lift the lamp higher and exclaim, “Oh! My baby!” Mara was in Neena’s arms, peering out from beneath a shawl with a mild interest that suggested this sort of escapade happened every night in the Petreius household.

  “We’ve been thrown out of the Mercury,” Ruso explained. “We’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  “But where is—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Pertinax came looking for trouble. Can we come in?”

  Virana glanced behind her, then reached for one of the bags and confided in a loud whisper, “We must creep like mice. The landlady is already very cross.”

  They tiptoed in, Ruso trying not to crash into any furniture or knock over jars of expensive oil as he hauled the luggage through the shop and up the stairs. He avoided the third step on Virana’s warning that it creaked.

  Finally up in the modest attic room that Virana and Albanus called home, he
lowered the bags and boxes gently to the floor and uncurled his stiff fingers from the handles. Then he leaned close to Virana to murmur, “Did Albanus say anything about the boys earlier? About getting them out of the house?”

  “He was very worried about it,” Virana told him. “But he said if you said it was all right he would try and help.”

  “Of course it wasn’t all right!”

  She looked puzzled. “But Tilla said she had asked you and you said it was a good idea.”

  “Tilla said what?”

  Virana shrank away, putting a finger to her lips and turning to glance at the door. “Sh!”

  He forced himself to lower his voice. “Tilla told Albanus that I said it was a good idea to steal the boys?”

  Virana frowned. “Something like that. I think.”

  “Oh, holy gods.” Ruso sank down onto the narrow bed. “Do you know where they’ve gone?”

  “Albanus has gone to the centurion’s house,” she said, misunderstanding the question. “I don’t know where Tilla went. Or where the boys are.”

  He would almost have preferred it if Albanus had gone with Tilla. At least one of them would have had some sense.

  “But you think she’s with the boys?”

  She pulled forward a strand of hair and began to chew it. “I don’t know. I thought it was all right. I thought you said—”

  “Think, Virana! What did she say, exactly?”

  A faint crunching sound came from Virana’s mouth: the sound of teeth grinding hair. Then: “Do you know where I can borrow a spade?”

  “What?”

  “That is what she said: ‘Do you know where I can borrow a spade?’ ”

  40

  At first it was exciting. She was trembling at the thought of what she might find. It would be gruesome, of course, especially after a whole month. But the thought that she might learn the truth at last—or at least part of it—helped her push her fears aside. She squatted beside the crushed plants in the moonlight and shoved her hands into the cold earth she had loosened with the spade. Small roots and stones dragged at her fingers. Grit rammed itself in under her nails, and once she felt something smooth and yielding that might be a worm. She pushed that thought aside too.