Medicus

by Ruth Downie

  "Thanks."

  "I'll do it if you like."

  Ruso scowled. "Just disappear, will you?"

  By the time men, dog, and puppies had eaten Valens's gleanings from the hospital kitchen ("This is just like old times, isn't it?"), it was time to light the lamps. Leaving Valens to cover his on-call duties, Ruso put a lead on the dog and went out to look for his servant.

  It was not as dark outside as it had seemed in the house. As he waited for the dog to finish sniffing around the shadowy nettle patch, Ruso's eyes adjusted to the gloom. He could pick but the rectangular shape of the next barracks block, the roof of the hospital, and, turning, the outline of the main wall at the end of the street across the perimeter road. As he watched, he heard the tramp of guards. Two shapes moved steadily toward each other along the top of the wall, crossed, and continued in opposite directions.

  A breeze plucked at the fabric of his spare cloak and suggested there was rain on the way. "That's enough, dog," urged Ruso, eager to move but not sure of his direction. He did not want to imagine what might have happened to Tilla, but imagination was his only tool in deciding a sensible pattern for the search. If she had run into the wrong man—and the gods knew, he had tried many times to warn her—she could be anywhere. Alive or dead. Inside the fort or out. Inside, he felt, was less likely. The men's lack of privacy and propensity to gossip would serve as some protection.

  He stopped at the hospital in case there was a message, but there were no notes at the desk. Decimus's assurance of "I'm sure she'll turn up soon, sir!" was bright rather than confident, and Ruso wondered how many people had said the same thing to him about Asellina.

  "Decimus, what do you know about a builder called Secundus—century of Gallus?"

  Decimus frowned. "Nothing, sir. Gallus's men haven't been back long."

  "Where from?"

  "I don't know exactly, sir. Somewhere in the north."

  "When did they get back here?"

  "Last week sometime, sir. They brought a couple of wounded in for treatment."

  "Oh."

  "I could find out which day if you like, sir."

  "No," said Ruso, "last week is good enough."

  In the end he headed toward the east gate. A couple of times along the way he called her name experimentally into the night air, as if he were calling a lost pet. There was no reply.

  There was a brief flash of hope at the gate when one of the guards said, "Ah, you mean Tilla, sir!" He and his comrade had seen her leave clutching a shopping basket at her usual time in the morning. He sounded as though they looked forward to these morning sightings. Disappointingly, they had been elsewhere since then and had only just come back on duty.

  "Have you lost her, sir?"

  "No," said Ruso. "She's just very late. If you see her, tell her to report directly to my house."

  He passed through the gates and made his way across the open area that separated the fort from the civilian buildings. At this time of night the town was little more than a huddle of angular shapes illuminated by the occasional glimmer of a torch. Somewhere among the buildings, a dog barked. There was the faint sound of a baby crying. He heard the approach of voices and stepped sideways onto the road's shoulder. Three men ambled past, too deep in a disagreement about horse racing to notice him. When they had gone, the street was empty. Ruso stepped back onto the paved surface and tried not to imagine what might be happening to a girl who was wandering the streets at this time of night.

  The entrance to Merula's was lit by the usual pair of torches. Someone was playing twittering flute music inside but a quick glance from the safety of the shadows across the street confirmed what Ruso suspected: There were few customers tonight. He wondered whether the security raid had frightened them off, and whether Merula had guessed as much as Bassus had.

  Stichus was leaning back against the bar with his arms folded, looking bored. Behind him, Daphne paused from pouring drinks to press her hands into the small of her back and stretch her expansive belly. A girl whom Ruso vaguely knew as Mariamne emerged from the kitchen with a loaded tray She carried it across to the table in the corner where Merula was mercifully busy with a couple of customers whom Ruso recognized from the early-morning officers' briefing. There was no sign of Tilla.

  A pair of heavy boots appeared on the stairs. Bassus made his way down to the bar, ordered a drink from Daphne, and emerged to drink it outside under the torch. Ruso crossed the street and stood beside him, out of sight of the bar.

  Bassus frowned. "I thought you weren't going to show your face 'round here?"

  "I came to ask if you'd seen Tilla."

  Bassus slapped at something on his neck. "Bloody gnats. You'd think they'd be gone by September. She's not run out on you, has she?"

  "Is she here?"

  Bassus took a long pull on his drink. "She was here," he said. "Dropped by this morning. Just before our visit from the lads. We had a nice little chat. You know what? I think she fancies me."

  "Did she say where she was going?"

  "You haven't gone and lost her, have you? What about our agreement?"

  "Not lost," promised Ruso. "Just—temporarily mislaid. Did she meet anyone here that she would have gone off with?"

  "You told us to keep her away from the customers, remember?"

  "Do you have men from the century of Gallus in here?"

  "Not at the moment."

  "Recently?"

  "Had a bunch of them in a few days ago. Just got back from the north. Celebrating."

  Ruso scratched his ear. Bassus had confirmed what he already suspected: Secundus could not have been involved with the death of Saufeia. Valens was right: He had been off-balance. The accident with the trowel had been a simple coincidence. As for the fire—he did not have time to worry about the fire now. He said, "Would any of the girls know where she was going?"

  "The girls didn't see her. I did. And then she left. And if you don't want to get me into trouble, you'll do the same."

  Tilla had still not returned when Valens and he went to bed. Ruso heard the third and fourth watch sounded. Once he got up to investigate a noise that might have been someone knocking, but when he opened the door there was nobody there. He called her name into the darkness. The only reply was a blustery spatter of rain.

  He woke with an uneasy feeling that there was something he should remember. When he remembered it, the unease blossomed into an anxiety that lifted him out of bed before dawn to pace about in a house where her absence was almost tangible. He tried to silence his imagination by telling himself she had chosen to leave. Her arm was recovering: She didn't need him anymore.

  Instead of being worried, he should be pleased. He owed it to his family to sell her, but he had not been looking forward to it. Now she had solved his dilemma by running away. The tale about Phryne had been a cover for some sort of primitive good-luck potion she was cooking up for herself. Tilla had fled from Deva and was safely on her way to the hilly lands of the Brigantes.

  Valens came wandering into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. "No breakfast, then?"

  Ruso shook his head. "Can you manage without me this morning?"

  Valens's eyes squeezed shut and his mouth widened in a lopsided and unstifled yawn that displayed a couple of missing teeth and distorted his agreement into something like, "Yuhhhh."

  Ruso wished the girls who called him "the good-looking doctor" could see him now.

  "Wretched girl might have bothered to send a message," remarked Valens.

  "I think she might have run off," confessed Ruso.

  "Even so."

  Ruso nodded. His relationship with the girl had been awkward, hesitant, and frequently bad tempered, but he thought they had developed some level of mutual respect.

  "You did fix her arm for her," Valens continued, voicing Ruso's own thoughts.

  "And paid money for the privilege," he grumbled. Damn it, if he hadn't rescued her from Innocens there might well have been a third dead girl found in Deva.
/>
  Immediately he wished he had not brought to mind the image of those bodies: the one strangled and bloated and the other barely recognizable as human. Why would Tilla have chosen to leave before her arm was healed? He had no evidence that she was on her way back to the Brig-antes. Her soul could already have begun the journey to a darker place. If that was true, then he wanted to know. He wanted to bury her himself. And then he would not only hunt down whoever had killed her: He would seek out the people who should have investigated the previous deaths, and hadn't. The trouble was, he was one of them.

  He turned abruptly. "I'm going out," he announced.

  In the gloom of his bedroom, he pulled on his overtunic without thinking once about scorpions. He flung his old cloak around his shoulders and paused to run a finger over the smooth, cold hilt of his knife.

  63

  ONCE HE HAD passed the cemetery,Ruso urged the borrowed horse into a canter. It was a broad-backed beast, recently retired as the mount of a tribune, who, according to the groom, was not the steadiest of horsemen. It was mild-tempered, comfortable, and too staid to be in great demand. It was the ideal horse for a man who needed an animal that could carry an extra rider.

  He slowed it to a trot to pass a string of heavy carts, then wove around a road gang and a couple of mounted men leading a string of shaggy ponies. A local family was heading into town carrying baskets of vegetables. Half a dozen legionaries were heaving against the tilted side of a vehicle that had one wheel in the ditch, evidently determined to right it without unloading it first. A couple of them glanced hopefully up at him, realized he was an officer, and bent back to their task.

  Farther out, the traffic grew lighter. Sheep were grazing beside the road, watched over by a small boy with a large stick. Ruso concentrated on the opposite shoulder, looking out for the path that led across to the woods.

  The horse seemed surprised at being asked to jump the ditch—evidently the tribune had demanded very little of it—but it landed on the other side in a reasonably tidy fashion. A couple of birds flew up from the trees in alarm as it approached. Apart from birds, the woods appeared to be deserted. The horse slowly picked its way forward along the narrow path, apparently unperturbed by its rider's occasional lurch forward to lie along its neck as they passed under overhanging branches.

  There was no smell of smoke among the trees: only that of damp earth and rotting leaves. A better tracker than Ruso would have known whether anyone had passed this way recently. Unable to read the signs, he concentrated on making his way safely through the undergrowth and strained to catch any sounds beyond the brush of leaves, the creak of the saddle, and the warble of distant birdsong.

  He emerged from the woods picking twigs out of his hair and circled the horse around the clearing, trying to look into the trees and over the bracken to the muddy patch where the spring originated. There was no sign of her.

  "Tilla!"

  His shout died away into silence. The birdsong had stopped.

  "Tilla! Can you hear me?"

  He tried several times, twisting in the saddle to call in different directions, waiting each time for a response that did not come.

  He swung down off the horse and left it to graze while he pushed his way through the bracken to the spring. The remains of a small fire lay in the grass, sodden and cold. The fire could have been lit on her last visit or last night: He had no way of knowing. What was certain was that it had not been active this morning.

  Ruso got to his feet, took a deep breath, and shouted, "Tilla! Where are you?" one last time.

  He turned to face the spring. He raised one hand in the air as he had seen his servant do. Glad that no one but the horse could hear him, he offered a prayer to the goddess of the spring, asking her to keep safe her faithful servant whose name was . . . he pulled the document from his tunic and read out, "Dar . . . lugh . . . dach . . . a," and then added, "but who is known to me as Tilla."

  His approach to the native houses was announced by several excited dogs. As he drew closer, chickens scuttled to safety under a gate on which a small boy sat staring with his mouth open. A couple of squawking geese made experimental runs at the horse. It flattened its ears but plodded forward.

  Ruso dismounted and led the horse toward the gate. The boy scram bled down the other side of the gate and fled into the houses. Women appeared in the doorways. An old man emerged from behind a haystack and shouted an order. The dogs, which to Ruso's relief were tethered, fell silent.

  When he turned after fastening the gate, the occupants of the houses had all gathered in a silent line. Several women had their arms folded. One, white up to the elbows with flour, rested a reassuring hand on the head of the small boy, who was now hiding behind her skirts. To the right of the people, swinging gently in the morning breeze, Ruso saw the reason why the dogs were tied up. The carcass of a freshly slaughtered sheep dangled, still dripping, over a tub of thick blood. As the natives stared at him in silence it struck him that the outer skin of civilization was very thin here. He had no doubt that not so very long ago, these people would have slaughtered him with as little compunction as they had killed the sheep, and cheerfully nailed his severed head to the gatepost.

  Surveying the eight pairs of eyes watching his every move, he wondered where the men and the rest of the children were. The girl whose appearance had distracted the First Century on its training run was nowhere to be seen. There must be people still hiding in the houses. He wondered if he should have unlatched the safety strap on his knife.He wondered if he could vault onto the horse before they reached him. He wondered whether the horse could clear the gate. Then he began.

  "My name," he announced, "is Gaius Petreius Ruso, Medicus with the Twentieth Legion. I have come here to look for a woman." He stopped. It was, he realized, an unfortunate start. Worse, his audience showed no sign of understanding it. Faced with impassive stares, he asked, "Does anyone here speak Latin?"

  The small boy blinked. There was no other response.

  "I am looking for the woman who is my servant," he said, pulling out the sale document. "Her name is. . ." He read out the complicated name again, suspecting that he was pronouncing it all wrong. "She is missing. She has curly fair hair"—with a twirling motion he indicated his own, which was indeed hair, but entirely the wrong color—"and her arm is—" He made a chopping motion with his left hand on his lower right arm, and then mimed winding a bandage around it. "Her arm is broken." Although by now they probably thought he was threatening to chop it off. "I want her to know that if she comes home she will not be punished." Even though, he wanted to add, she very much deserves it.

  He cleared his throat. "I am anxious to know that she is safe," he said.

  A cockerel strutted across the mud that separated him from his audience. The small boy tried to stuff a fistful of his mother's skirt into his mouth. Without taking her eyes off Ruso, the woman crouched and gathered the child into her floury arms.

  "I want to know that she is safe," Ruso repeated. He surveyed the blank faces. "If I had any money," he continued, "I would be offering a reward. But I don't, so I can't. And if I thought any of you understood a word I was saying, I would tell you that even if I can't find Tilla, I'd like to find out what the condition is underneath that splint. I'd like to find out because I want to know whether there's anything I've done since I came to your miserable country that has made it worth the bother of coming here. So. There you are. Well, thank you all for being so tremendously helpful."

  As he tramped out through the mud in the gateway—he was not going to pick his way around the edge as if a Roman officer were afraid of getting dirty—the dogs began to bark again. This time no one tried to stop them. A few yards beyond the gate he looked over his shoulder.

  They were still watching.

  64

  THERE WA S N O sign of her at the house, where he only stopped long enough to clean off the mud before going to the hospital.There he found two messages: Albanus was trying to track him down, and Pris
cus wanted an urgent meeting. Ruso managed to find Albanus first. As they entered the surgery the clerk asked,

  "Any word on your housekeeper, sir?"

  "Nothing. What did you want me for?"

  "Officer Priscus says—"

  "Yes, I know. Urgently Was that it?"

  "No, sir, not entirely." Albanus checked to make sure the surgery door was closed. "It's about that delicate matter, sir," he began. "I told them at HQ that I'd lost a document and it was all rather embarrassing, and they let me have a private hunt through the post records. You'd be amazed at the volume of correspondence, sir."

  "And?"

  "I've been through every list for the last two months, but I can't find a letter from a Saufeia anywhere."

  "Damn," muttered Ruso.

  "Would you like me to go back any farther, sir?"

  Ruso shook his head. "There's no point."

  "If there's anything I can do to help you find your housekeeper, sir . . ."

  Ruso settled himself on the corner of his desk and folded his arms. There were things he needed to know, but he was more likely to acquire a broken jaw from the second spear than any information. Valens had offered to sound out his friend in civilian liaison, but the only sounds forthcoming were negative ones. Ruso was going to have to consult a source he despised: army gossip.

  "Albanus," he said, "who or what do the men think was responsible for the deaths of those two girls?"

  Albanus's eyes widened. "Do you think the same person might have taken your housekeeper, sir?"

  "I hope not. But I'm running out of other ideas."

  Albanus thought for a moment. "To be honest, sir, nobody seems to know. Most people just think there's a madman around who likes killing women."

  "I've been through that. Why two from one bar?"

  "It could be a very important customer. Somebody the management is scared of."

  "How important?"

  Albanus scratched his head. "I can't see the legate or any of the tribunes frequenting there, to be honest, sir, can you? It's more likely somebody with a grudge against the management."