by Ruth Downie
Dorios jumped as Valens grasped his shoulders from behind and growled, “Who killed my wife?”
The priest wriggled, and Valens tightened his grip. He bent closer. “I’m waiting.”
“It was all Catus’s fault—ow! If the fool hadn’t lit that fire, everything would have been— You’re hurting me! Doctor, make him stop! This is a holy temple!”
“It is,” Ruso agreed, glancing up at Sulis Minerva and hoping that Dorios really did believe in her power. “So in this sacred temple,” he said, “just between us and the goddess, who suggested to Catus that he should light the fire?”
“It wasn’t like that!”
“Wasn’t it? The goddess is listening. Who promised him Sulis Minerva would heal him in return?”
“It was necessary!” Dorios cried. “Someone had to bring an end to that disastrous building project. It was a blight on the town.”
“And when you found out that Terentius knew who’d done it …”
“I begged him not to make a fuss. Catus only did it to help him.”
“And if Catus was exposed, he’d have implicated you too,” continued Ruso mildly. “So. Now are you going to tell us, in front of the goddess, who killed Serena and Terentius? Or shall we just ask her to strike the killer down?”
For a moment Dorios was still. Then he wrenched himself out of Valens’s grasp and ran for the statue. He tripped on his toga and skidded full-length on the marble floor, his hands grasping toward his unseeing goddess and his cries echoing around the shadowed corners of her temple. “Blessed goddess, holy Minerva, save me!”
Valens was on him before Ruso could intervene.
Dorios’s voice rose to a scream. “Save me!”
“Why”—Valens punctuated his words by banging the priest’s head on the floor— “did you kill my wife?”
“She was going to tell everyone! Ruin the town! I had to— Help! Save me, mistress! Save—” But Valens’s hands had closed around Dorios’s throat, and now the only sound was the feeble drumming of the priest’s feet on the marble as he struggled for breath beneath the unrelenting gaze of his holy mistress.
72
The morning sun was doing his best to creep around the shutters of the bedroom window. Tilla could hear Valens’s boys shouting to each other as they raced around the courtyard, then Albanus’s voice as he shepherded them back to their room. The household was in mourning for Catus now as well as Serena, but their grandfather had declared that what the boys needed was to get back into their routine, and he was probably right.
There was not much space in the bed that had been Serena’s. That suited Tilla nicely, because it was a good excuse to cuddle up close to the warmth of her man and feel the steady beat of his heart and the lift of his chest with every breath.
Neena had taken Mara out to play so they could catch up on their missed sleep, but Tilla was not sleepy now. She could tell from her husband’s breathing that he was awake too. So at last there was a chance to ask her question.
“When you made that long speech at the governor’s dinner,” she said, “did you already know it was Dorios who killed them?”
“No,” he said. “But Catus implied that he was behind the fire, and that gave him a motive.”
“But why make a speech?”
“I was trying to put him off guard.”
“That was clever.”
His arm squeezed her tighter, as if he was pleased at the compliment. “There was no way to catch him unless he confessed. He had an answer for everything. Even when he turned up to sacrifice that cockerel, he found a way to blame the slave.”
“So, did he tell the truth to the governor just now?”
“Not exactly. He says he’s the loyal servant of the emperor and the goddess, everything that went wrong after the murders was Gleva’s fault because she cursed him, and if I hadn’t interfered, he would have had the whole scandal under control. He had to silence Terentius to save the honor of—oh, Catus, the town, Rome, the gods … I can’t remember. The governor just let him go on and on until he’d run out of excuses.”
“What did he say about Serena?”
“She went to him for help that night because she’d lost touch with Terentius in the dark. He didn’t want to hurt her, but when he found out she knew who’d lit the fire, what else could he do?”
She stiffened. “What else?”
She felt, rather than heard, the long sigh before his “I know.”
“I think,” she said, “he killed her so that he could make up a story about Terentius doing it and running away. Perhaps Pertinax’s lawyer will make him confess at the trial.”
He shifted in her arms. “There won’t be a trial,” he told her. “Dorios was right about one thing: Aquae Sulis is too important to fail. The governor’s done a deal with Pertinax. The lawyer’s stood down, we’ll be sworn to silence, and Dorios will be given a new job in Londinium.”
Tilla jerked her head up from the pillow. “Surely not? People are dead, you could have drowned, and they have done a deal? I thought Pertinax wanted justice?”
He yawned. “It’s not up to us, wife.”
“Are you not angry?”
The murmur of Neena’s voice drifted in from the courtyard, followed by their daughter’s squeal of laughter. He said, “Being angry won’t change anything.”
“It is all wrong!”
Whatever he thought of that, he said nothing. Finally she settled back into the bed. “I wish I had never let Neena take Mara into that water.”
“It was clean by then,” he told her. “And the women who bathed in it when it wasn’t will never know.”
When he put it that way, she could see the sense of keeping quiet. She said, “So, the goddess has saved her honor and the honor of her shrine in spite of her priest.”
“She had some help. I made up that business about the cockerel.”
She said, “I know.”
“I was afraid you might believe it.”
“Not for a moment,” she told him. “But I knew it would work. It was inspired.”
“Thank you.”
“My mother used to say,” she said, realizing he had misunderstood, “that sometimes the things we think are our own thoughts and desires are put into our minds by the gods.”
He said, “I’m sure that’s exactly what Dorios has been telling himself for years.”
Had he? If you looked at it like that, Mam’s words were not as comforting as they had always seemed before. How could you tell if your ideas were your own or not? It was all faintly unsettling, and she did not want to think about it now. Or perhaps ever. Nor did she want to think about Dorios enjoying his new job in Londinium. So, instead of replying, she lay silent, feeling her breathing drift in and out of step with her man’s until she was no longer aware of anything at all.
73
The old centurion stumbled on the uneven hillside. Tilla saw her husband put out a hand to steady him, but Pertinax shook it off. “Still as proud as ever,” she murmured, glad that he was recovered enough to manage the walk. Ahead of him, Valens was striding down toward the house with one boy on his shoulders and another holding his hand, and Gleva was walking up to meet them. “I know what you would say,” Tilla said, turning away to address the little door set in the blank tomb. “I reminded him to be careful with your precious boys, but I don’t think he was listening.”
She settled herself on the rug and carried on speaking to the tomb as she reached across to pull Mara’s socks up. “Your father is going to take Valens back to the fort at Isca after Catus’s funeral,” she said. “He will ask the legate to give him his job back and not punish him very badly for being absent. And Valens is leaving the boys here, just as you wanted, and they will be a big comfort to everybody.”
She paused, wondering if the dead needed time to think about what they heard or whether you could just rattle on. It must be very annoying to be told lots of things all at once and have no chance to reply. But the breeze was gettin
g up now, and there were gray clouds moving in across the western hills; so if she were to tell Serena everything, she would have to hurry.
“Virana has given birth to a boy,” she said. “He is very small, but he is feeding well, and Albanus is beside himself with excitement. I expect you can imagine. So now all three of them are fathers, and none of them is really sure what he is doing, but they are all doing their best.”
She stretched out and retrieved a sock from where Mara had thrown it onto the damp grass. “Our slave Esico has gone to work for the ostler in the town, because at last we have found something he is good at; and his father has gone away, because there is no money to be made from him.”
The breeze tugged at her wrap. As if the fingers of Serena were tugging at her, wanting to make her listen to something. “The priest?” Tilla guessed. What should she say about the priest? Was it fair to leave Serena angry and disappointed that there had been no justice? “The truth has come out at last,” she said, “and the priest said that he never meant for you to fall into the goddess’s water, and fate has been very cruel to him.”
After a moment’s pause she said, “Yes. That is what I think too. And I have been thinking that perhaps when you knew you were dying, you threw yourself into that spring as revenge on him. And if you did, it was very clever of you. And if you didn’t, it served him right anyway.”
She waited a moment for Serena to enjoy that, but the dark clouds were closer now, and there was not much time to say the things that needed to be said.
“I think your Terentius must have been a good man,” she said, “and I am sad for you both that there was nothing found of him to bury. But my husband was down there to say good-bye to him before the river took him away, and yesterday some nicer priests did the ceremony above the place where he was found. And now I have thought about it, he was right under the place where the black ewe said he was all the time, but my husband still says—” She stopped. There was no reason Serena should know how hard her husband found it to listen to the gods, and neither would she care. You had to be careful to talk to the dead rather than at them. You did not want to be like one of those people who visited the sick and left them feeling worse than before. What if the dead wished you would stop talking and go away? How would they tell you if they had had enough?
“Tilla!” The voice came from lower down the hill. Her husband was striding up toward her, waving an arm to indicate the clouds. “Don’t hang around up there! It’s going to rain!”
Tilla scrambled across on all fours and restrained Mara before she could grab the vase of flowers propped outside the little door. “We will be staying in your house for a while,” she told Serena. “My husband does not want to go near any water for a long time, and anyway, he says he wants to make sure your pa is all right after all the pills he took. See, we were all wrong about Gleva and the love potion. My husband finally got it out of him yesterday. The silly man was worrying that he is too old and not as much of a man as Gleva needs, so he was buying special pills from some women who work the vegetable plots, and he took too many and poisoned himself.” She could not resist a smile. “So now he is very embarrassed.”
“Tilla!”
The breeze was ruffling Mara’s hair. Tilla wished she had brought a hat for her. “We could have been better friends in life, you and I,” she told Serena. “But this Roman-and-Briton business is not easy, even in a town like Aquae Sulis. In the years we knew each other, I wasted much time wishing your people would go back to where they came from.”
“Tilla!”
She raised a hand to him and turned back to the tomb. “And I still do,” she said. “But perhaps not quite so soon.”
By the time he reached her, she was on her feet with the rug rolled up.
“Pertinax has just had a message from the governor,” he told her. “There’s been a horrible accident on the road to Londinium. Dorios is dead.”
She stared at him in confusion. “Dead?”
“Miraculously, nobody else was hurt.”
“So,” she said, handing him the rug. “The gods have brought justice.”
He grinned. “Pertinax didn’t seem at all surprised.”
“You think the governor arranged—”
“Pertinax and the governor go back a long way. Old soldiers stick together.” He glanced around. “But I expect you’re right: Fate will get the blame. Have you finished talking to Serena?”
Tilla took a last glance at the little house. “I think she has heard everything she would want to know now.”
Her husband was holding out the palm of his hand to the sky. “Rain,” he told Mara.
“Come, daughter,” said Tilla, bending down and lifting Mara’s hands high so she could raise her knees as if she were stepping through long grass. “It is time to go home.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Aquae Sulis is one of the most visited sites in Roman Britain, perhaps because it combines a lovely setting with spectacular remains and over 130 curse tablets deposited in the waters by past visitors.
From floor level down, the Great Bath is much the same today as it was when Ruso swam in it. The sacred spring still fills it with over two hundred thousand gallons of hot water every day, and it is possible—though not permitted to visitors—to walk through the original tunnels that still carry the wastewater away to the river. The river, incidentally, is no longer tidal, but the structures that control it were not built until many centuries after this story is set.
The moustachioed face on the temple pediment can still be seen, as can the tombstone of Memor the haruspex and the golden head of Sulis Minerva, although if she had a feast day, we don’t know the date. The Mercury, the Traveler’s Repose, and their competitors are my own invention, as is much of the street plan of Aquae Sulis, whose finer details are lost to us. While the struggle of Pertinax and his veterans to create a new shrine at one of the other hot springs in the town has left no trace, there is a small amount of evidence to suggest that one of their successors had better luck.
Testimonies to miraculous cures seem to have been a common feature on the walls of temples at healing shrines, but as none survives from Aquae Sulis, the ones that Ruso sees are inspired by finds elsewhere. Cursing also seems to have been a popular activity all over the empire, although, disappointingly, most of the requests so far found in Aquae Sulis relate to petty theft rather than anything that suggests a murder mystery. Still, much of what lies below the spring remains unexcavated, and who knows what might be hidden there?
Looking at the scale of the remains, it is easy to forget that the Roman development of the hot springs did not take place in the midst of peace and prosperity but during the decade that followed the insecurity and violence of the Boudican rebellion. Perhaps we are seeing a bold attempt at a new start: evidence of money being poured in from Rome to help a struggling young province get back on its feet.
It is still possible to bathe in the waters of Aquae Sulis. The ancient facilities are no longer suitable for use, but after a hard day’s sightseeing, it’s only a short walk to the modern spa, fed by another of Sulis Minerva’s springs. At the time of writing, this is where to find out more: https://www.thermaebathspa.com/
FURTHER READING
Memento Mori is a work of fiction and therefore contains lies, inventions, and possibly mistakes, for which I am entirely responsible. Here are some sources of more reliable information:
Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook by Daniel Ogden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Travel in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Books on Roman Bath abound: The Roman Baths Museum produces an elegant guidebook and there is much to enjoy on their website: https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/. For more detail, any of the several books on Bath by Professor Barry Cunliffe will be helpful.
Readers interested in re-creating Roman hairstyles will enjoy the series of videos by Janet St
ephens currently available on YouTube.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks, as ever, go to Araminta Whitley and George Lucas for timely guidance and for taking care of the complicated stuff; to Lea Beresford, whose editing is both perceptive and tactful; to David Chesanow for sorting out the fine detail; and to the folks at Bloomsbury who do the many other mysterious things that turn words into books.
For comments on early drafts and for general encouragement, I’m grateful to the Barnstaple Library “WIP” Group, Bill Wahl, and Ernesto Spinelli. For checking the Latin translations at the front, my thanks go to Richard Sturch. Either Aidan James or Helen Robinson—none of us can remember—came up with the title. For everything else I am grateful, as ever, to Andy Downie.
Finally—my thanks go to all the readers who travel with Ruso and Tilla. The journey has only been possible because of you.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Ruth Downie is the author of the New York Times bestselling Medicus, as well as Terra Incognita, Persona Non Grata, Caveat Emptor, Semper Fidelis, Tabula Rasa, and Vita Brevis. She is married with two sons and lives in Devon, England.
Don’t miss the other books in the bestselling Medicus series:
Medicus
Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of prostitutes in Deva when he rescues a slave, Tilla, from a brutal beating by her master. As Ruso adjusts to Tilla’s presence in his life, he must summon all his forensic knowledge to find a killer who may be after him next.
Terra Incognita
In Britannia, Ruso must try to prove that the former lover of his British slave Tilla is innocent of the murder of a Roman soldier—and that the Army is wrong—by finding another suspect. Soon both Ruso’s and Tilla’s lives are in jeopardy, as is the future of their burgeoning romantic relationship.