by Ruth Downie
Ruso glanced around the shadowy walls of his small but relatively private bedroom, and knew he was lucky Do not forget our arrangement. Lucius was in charge of four children, a wife, a farm, a stepmother, and two goose-brained half sisters, and now there was another baby on the way. All Ruso had to do was carry out his work and send home all the money he could muster every quarter to help keep a roof over his family's head.
Outside, the trumpet sounded the change of watch. It was getting late. Ruso stood to put the box away. Then he lifted the unconscious slave girl and carried her to the kitchen, where he laid her on a rug beside the warm embers in the hearth. She hardly stirred as he slid a cushion under her head and put his own cloak over her for a blanket.
He leaned against the wall with his arms folded and gazed down at her. The surgery had been the easy part. If she perked up, she would have to be fed and sheltered through a long—and possibly unsuccessful—recuperation.
It was not difficult to see why some people threw out useless slaves.He had wondered briefly whether that was what Merula had done with Saufeia—the girl who "wasn't really suitable for this kind of work"— but that would not have made sense. Merula had not suggested that the girl was physically incapable of working, just that her attitude was poor. There were all sorts of jobs that a fit slave could be coerced to do, whatever her attitude. The girl would have been salable to somebody, and her flight and subsequent death must have meant a financial loss to the business. Merula had received the news calmly not because she was indifferent, but because she had expected the worst and prepared herself.
Merula had made one effort to claim compensation—the complaint about the hair—but when that had failed, it seemed she had given up. Since the army provided most of her income, he supposed it was a wise decision. In fact the only person who had shown any interest at all in the question of who had murdered Saufeia was the girl with the ankle chain, the one they called Chloe. He had wished he could promise her that the army would find the culprit and punish him. But if Merula was not going to make a fuss, it was unlikely anyone else would make any effort to narrow down the suspect list from the several thousand men currently in Deva. Besides, now that he thought about it, the murderer might have been a woman.
The girl shifted and murmured something in her sleep.
Ruso's collecting women.
He was glad he didn't have to explain any of it to Lucius.
18
THE GRAY LIGHT of dawn was making its way around the shutters of a house that contained three people. Two were asleep.The third was grappling with the problem of women's underwear. Where could a man get hold of some? Discreetly? As if that were not bad enough, there would be the monthly business to deal with at any moment.
Ruso wished, not for the first time, that he had been blessed with a useful sort of sister. According to Claudia, a man's only role in the mystery of feminine hygiene was to purchase a capable maid and then stay out of the way. So, although his training had covered the theory, in three years of marriage Ruso had evaded the practice so diligently that he had never really been sure what arrangements were necessary. Valens, of course, was bound to know, but he was not going to ask Valens.
Ruso stared at a cobweb that was trembling in the draft from his bedroom window and thought: landlady. The girl couldn't stay where she was much longer anyway. The obvious answer was to find a room in a house with a sympathetic landlady. A dispenser of nourishing meals and womanly advice who didn't charge too much. A landlady was the thing. He would go out this morning and find one. In the meantime, he would wander into the kitchen and see if his property had woken up yet.
He had grasped his overtunic between finger and thumb and was about to give it a good shake when he remembered again that this was Britain, where there were no scorpions to creep into dark crevices during the night. Buckling his belt and wondering if he would ever entirely break the wary habits of Africa, he made his way toward the kitchen. The couch, which would have been the obvious place for the girl to sleep, was still being shared by one of Valens's cronies and the dog.
He opened the kitchen door quietly. Something ran across his foot and shot into the corner. He sighed, then started as his eyes adjusted to the shuttered gloom and he realized the hearth was empty. Instead, there was a figure curled up on the table.
"Good morning."
The girl stirred. A tangle of hair slid across her cheek. She blinked sleepily and stretched her good arm above her head. Ruso had a sudden urge to seize her and take her to his own bed, where she would be warm and sleepy and—since he owned her—obedient. He swallowed hard and pushed the thought aside, not wishing to ponder the level of desperation it revealed.
He said, "Why are you on the table?"
She stared at him for a moment, as if trying to remember who he was, and then gave a heavy sigh of recognition. She slid her good hand forward to grasp the edge of the table and leaned forward, surveying the floor.
Ruso followed her gaze. "Are you afraid of the mice?"
He saw her fist tighten. She looked up at him. "Mice do not hurt."
"No," he agreed, "but falling off the table will."
It was a question of simple economics. The longer her recovery took, the longer it would be before he saw his money. "You won't spend the night here again," he promised. "I'll find a proper room."
It was a promise he would regret by the end of the morning.
Several would-be landlords had chalked up advertisements on the amphitheater walls.
The smell of urine and old cabbage stew, which hit Ruso as soon as the first door opened, failed to mask the personal odor of the toothless crone who announced,
"He an't here, I dunno where he is, and he an't done nothing."
"I'll keep looking," said Ruso.
"Did have," said the next one. "We did have a room. Somebody should have rubbed the notice off."
The third room was still having its walls plastered, but the owner's wife promised it would be ready by nightfall.
"How much?"
She told him. Ruso laughed and walked away, and she let him go.
As the morning wore on and his boot studs wore down, it became clear to Ruso that he had a problem. He was here because Rome had decided that Britannia was worth the trouble of holding on to and had stationed just about enough troops here to crack together the skulls of any Britons who refused to cooperate. Side by side with the stick, however, went the carrot. Civilization. Not only the fort, but Deva itself was undergoing a massive modernization project. Every man not currently engaged in keeping an eye on the hill tribes had a trowel in his hand or a hod over his shoulder. It seemed the legion's orders were to hack out all the available stone, saw up all the local trees, and pipe water to every conceivable outlet. Until the last dog kennel had under-floor heating or the new emperor came up with a new plan, the Twentieth Valeria Victrix was to keep on building.
It was not the soldiers themselves who were causing Ruso's difficulties: They were either off skull-cracking or living in the barracks that they were slowly working their way around to modernization. It was the women and children, widowed mothers and spinster aunts the men collected around them. The women and children and mothers and aunts—not to mention the veterans with nowhere else to retire to, who had women and children of their own—all needed beds to sleep in.Then there were all the hangers-on who congregated wherever there were soldiers to be separated from their wages. Hangers-on needed beds too.
The wail of a trumpet from the other side of the fort wall announced that the morning was almost at an end. Ruso was on duty in an hour and he was still no nearer to keeping his promise to the girl. He was going to have to try Valens's suggestion after all.
Earlier that morning, he had pointed out that he had no intention of lodging his slave in a bar that was effectively a brothel.
"Ah, but it isn't," Valens had explained. "Not technically. We had a tax collector in here the other day. Broken wrist: fell off his horse.
; Anyway, he said lots of those sort of places don't register their girls so they don't have to pay the tax on their earnings, and when anybody official asks why there's so many bedrooms then, they say that it's because that take in lodgers. It's worth a try. Just don't let her eat the oysters."
"A tax-dodging brothel. Marvelous."
"You could always have a nice chat with Priscus. I hear his new place is rather spacious. Perhaps he'll find you a spare room."
"Maybe I will," agreed Ruso, just to see the expression on Valens's face.
As Merula swayed across the empty barroom in another stylish silky creation, Ruso mused that this was not the sort of landlady he had envisioned.
The elegantly plucked eyebrows rose at his question. Evidently he was not the sort of tenant she was used to either.
"It's not for me," he explained.
"For a friend?"
"Not exactly." He was aware that he was scratching his ear again. He really must try to stop that. Claudia used to say she knew it meant he was lying, which showed how little they understood each other. He lowered his fist onto the barroom table just below the initials of one CLM, who had felt it necessary to carve not only the first letters of his name but a majestic phallus as well, and said, "I have a female slave whom I can't use at home and who is in need of lodgings. One of my colleagues suggested you might be able to find somewhere for her."
"Ah. An officer at the hospital?"
"Yes," said Ruso, suddenly seeing a way forward. "I believe you know him. He was here a short while ago and he had to have some time off work as a result."
Merula managed to look surprised, as if virulent food poisoning were something she could have hoped to keep secret. "So you know about, uh . . . ?"
"I suggest we say no more about it."
Ruso was satisfied to see relief on the woman's face. He was right: She had been afraid Valens would sue. When she said, "I think we can find a place for her," his problem appeared to be solved.
His problem appeared to be solved until Merula asked, "Is the girl experienced in this kind of work?"
Ruso shook his head. "She can't work. She's sick."
"She can't work?" The painted eyes met his. "So why did your friend tell you to send her to me?"
"I can't have her at my place, she needs to recuperate, and I can hardly billet her in a barracks room."
Merula pursed her lips. "This sickness. Is it fever?"
"She's recovering from surgery on an injured arm."
"And before long you expect her to be fit to work."
"I see no reason why not. In the meantime all she needs is a quiet room and regular meals. You do rent out rooms?"
"Oh, yes!" After this confident assertion she paused. "We don't have anything very comfortable just at the moment . . ."
"But you do have a private room?"
"We do, but—"
He followed her up the open staircase and along the creaking wooden landing that looked down over the bar. Several of the upstairs doors were ajar, revealing small cubicles with beds covered in bright blankets and cushions. It all looked reasonably clean. Ruso consoled himself with the thought that at least he was doing business with the best possible class of tax-dodging brothel.
In the gloom at the end of the corridor was a closed door. Merula scraped a key into the lock.
The room was bare except for a bench against one wall and a mattress in the corner. Merula glided forward and unlatched the shutters.
Before he could remark on the bars across an upstairs window, she said, "We sometimes use this room for secure storage." The light revealed the rings of old drinks and drips of candle wax on the surface of the bench. Underneath, one leg had been replaced with a new chunk of yellow wood that was much too heavy and the whole thing had been clumsily nailed to the floorboards. Ruso crouched and turned over the stained mattress. The straw was even lumpier than the one he was borrowing from Valens and it didn't smell good.
Merula started to explain that the room had not been used for a while. He interrupted her.
"Do you have mice?"
She frowned. "The girl is on a special diet?"
"I don't mean on the menu. I mean running around. Wild mice."
As soon as she told him they didn't, he said, "Put in a clean bed and I'll take it."
19
SHE WAS PRETTY. Old women said so to her mother, and her mother always laughed and replied, "And she knows it." Her brothers knew it too, although they would die before they said so. Sometimes her father came into the house smelling of beer, roared, "Where's my beautiful girl?" and lifted her onto his shoulders while her mother shouted at him to mind that child's head on the door. And for a few moments she would be a giant, lurching around the houses, reaching for the edges of the thatch, taller than the horses, and seeing right over the tops of people's fences until he put her down and ignored her pleas for "More!" because parents had things to do and because being pretty did not make you important.
When her mother muttered and sighed and tugged at the tangles with the comb, it was because shiny golden curls needed a lot of looking after. She tried not to smile. Her mother would want to know what she was smiling about, and she already knew it wasn't her cousins' faults that they were ordinary little girls whose hair fell down in straight brown lines and she had to remember to be nice to them and . . .
And the smell was wrong.
Somewhere outside, a man's voice was making ugly, solid sounds that fell like rough logs.
Someone was trying not to pull her hair. Someone was—
She remembered the stink of the bathhouse. The glint of metal blades.
"NO!"
Her eyes snapped open as her free hand lashed out and clouted a crouching girl across the face. A jolt of pain shot through her injured arm as the girl squealed and fell backward in a flurry of brown skirt and dirty bare feet.
She had managed to pull herself up and lean against the wall by the time the other girl, who was dark and heavily pregnant, had managed to maneuver herself onto all fours and then haul herself up to sit on the wooden bench.
She remembered the bench. She remembered the room. She remembered what her name was supposed to be. She looked at the girl's hands, which were empty, rough, and red with work. Then she looked around the floor. There was no sign of any shears. She said, "Who are you?"
The girl shook her head and pointed to her mouth.
The question in Latin produced exactly the same gesture.
In Latin again: "Are you dumb?"
The girl nodded, raised her eyebrows in a question and pointed at her, but she did not answer. A name, even one you had only acquired yesterday, should not be so easily given.
"Did they tell you to cut my hair?"
The girl shook her head with a look of alarm. The hand pointed again, this time at a section of hair that had now been untangled. At the far end dangled a comb, trapped in a knot. The girl had been trying to help.
"My name," she said in Latin, "Is Tilla." This produced a welcoming smile, but the traditional request for help in her own language—"I am a stranger here"—was either not understood or ignored.
The girl heaved herself up from the bench, took the one pace necessary to cross the room, and lowered herself to sit next to the mattress. She had begun to attack the tangle again when the door burst open and two men walked into the room.
One had gray eyes and cropped iron-gray hair above a thick neck. The thinner one's hair had once been ginger. The deep brown of his eyes added to the impression that the rest of him was fading into middle age. Tilla had time to observe this while both men stood calmly examining what they could see of her. She also observed that the dumb girl had stopped work and shrunk back to sit beside her with her back to the wall. Instead of staring back at these men who had not had the manners to knock (and whose muscle, Tilla noted, was running to fat around the belly), the girl had her eyes firmly fixed on the gray one's heavy army sandals.
"Stand up," ordered the gray one.
When Tilla failed to move, the girl tapped her arm and translated the order into a hasty scoop of one hand toward the ceiling, at the same time nodding encouragement.
"You want to listen to Daphne," suggested the gray one. "She don't say a lot but she knows what's good for her."
Tilla, noting the girl's anxiety, pulled her knees up and managed to get to her feet on the mattress. Slowly, she forced her trembling legs to push her upward. Her head felt as if it were full of dry sand that was draining away down her body as she stood. Fighting to stay upright, she slumped against the wall. With her eyes closed, she did not see him approach. She was only aware of the sudden cold as the hem of the tunic was lifted, the struggle to keep her balance as the hands groped and probed, and the urge to vomit as the hands withdrew and a voice whispered in her ear, "Show us your smile."
Clenching her teeth, she managed to open her eyes.
"Smile," repeated the gray man, who was not smiling.
The other girl was on her feet now, moving around to where Tilla could see her, nodding eagerly and grinning, making upward gestures at the corners of her mouth.
As Tilla's eyes drifted shut she thought, Whatever you do to me here will speed me on my way to the next world, and it was this thought that made her beam with pleasure.
By the time she was alone again, the light through the barred window was fading. Food had been brought, but no one had offered a light. The rattle of the lock had confirmed that she could not leave this darkening room until someone came to let her out.
Tilla fingered the long braids that now held her hair under control and listened to the many voices downstairs. She heard the tramp of feet on stairs. The creak of the floorboards. The false laughter. She understood what sort of place the Roman healer had brought her to. She understood too that none of this mattered, because she had lost all sense of hunger now, surely a sign that she would be in the next world very soon. But she had matters to attend to here first. The gray one had said he would come back.