Semper Fidelis: A Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  She washed her face and pulled a comb through her hair before twisting and pinning it tight at the nape of her neck. The pleasure of a proper wash and dry clothes would have to wait: she must face the weather again to catch the shops and the shoemaker before they closed, and perhaps have a quiet word with the bar staff before Lucina and her friends were busy selling their wares in a language that all men understood everywhere.

  She hurried around the covered walkway that enclosed the courtyard garden, patting the purse slung from her belt. She was reassured by the chink of several large but not very valuable coins. They would be enough for bread and boot grease and whatever else she would need to buy to get into conversation. With luck, the tradespeople would spread the news that a very experienced and skilled army doctor was staying at the mansio for a few days, along with his wife who was a midwife. Both would be available for consultation when his military duties allowed, and their fees were very reasonable. In amongst the curious, the desperate, and the ones who had fallen out with the local healers, there might be people they could actually help, and who would be willing to pay.

  Two matching slaves emerged from one of the doors ahead of her. They paused to let her pass and bowed at exactly the same time. She was wondering whether they held bowing rehearsals in spare moments, when she heard a voice inside the entrance hall that was familiar but not welcome.

  “And a private kitchen!” it was saying. “A proper kitchen, that is, not just a brazier in a corridor somewhere. The cook needs space to prepare the tribune’s food. He is very particular about his diet.”

  It seemed Accius’s staff had not been impressed with the housing inside the fort, either.

  Tilla glanced round the courtyard. There must be a way out that did not pass through the entrance hall. One of those doors must lead to the street, but which? Now that she needed them, the bowing slaves had disappeared. She wondered whether to go back to the room, then realized how ridiculous it was for an officer’s wife to be hiding from someone else’s slave. Pulling her hood up over her head as if it were blustery indoors as well as out, she stepped into the entrance hall. The tribune’s housekeeper was still in full flow.

  “Ah! There you are, madam!”

  Tilla clenched her teeth. She had spent most of the journey listening to Minna and the driver competing to see who could find the most to complain about. She had silently added Must understand about speaking only when spoken to to the list of qualities their future slave must have when they finally got around to buying her. Or him. The disagreement was one of the reasons they were still paying the neighbors back at Deva for the services of a borrowed kitchen slave. The other was that most of her husband’s earnings went back to his family in Gaul.

  “Here I am,” she agreed politely. Minna might be a slave, but her master was a powerful man—as she never tired of pointing out.

  “I was just explaining, madam,” Minna continued, “that house over in the fort is a disgrace. I’ve never seen anything so filthy in my life.”

  Tilla bit back Then you are a very lucky woman.

  “I see you weren’t prepared to put up with it, either, madam.”

  “I am staying here,” said Tilla, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of agreeing.

  “You see?” Minna demanded of the manager, as if the state of the military accommodation were his fault. “It’s not even good enough for the natives!”

  As Minna carried on (“My master is a tribune, not just some passing centurion!”), Tilla felt the blood rising in her cheeks. Not even good enough for the natives? One of the local staff—who were probably listening somewhere out of sight—ought to hide a frog in the wretched woman’s bed. Better still, a cow pie. Perhaps she would do it herself.

  Instead of telling Minna to go away and use the servants’ entrance, the manager was promising her that the very best suite was being prepared at this moment.

  “Well, I hope they’re doing it properly. I know what you people are like.”

  Tilla paused in the doorway to give the manager a sympathetic glance, but his face was still a mask of politeness. She said, “I shall be out for a little while, and I may have some visitors later.”

  The manager bowed. “Yes, madam.”

  “I will come back for dinner.”

  “We shall look forward to it, madam.”

  She made her way down the steps outside, leaving Minna complaining that it wasn’t as if the soldiers hadn’t known her master was coming. Perhaps she thought the poor man might feel sufficiently outraged to go up to the fort and berate the Twentieth Legion for negligence.

  Chapter 7

  “Doctor Ruso, sir?” The voice echoed around the empty benches in the entrance hall of Eboracum’s hospital.

  Ruso would have been hard-pressed to recall many faces from the ever-changing trail of young hopefuls who had followed him around the wards back at Deva, supposedly watching and learning. But standing before him was an older, thinner version of a short curly-headed youth whom he remembered only too well.

  “It’s Pera, sir. I was—”

  “You were at Deva,” said Ruso, grateful for the reminder of the name.

  “We got your letter, sir,” said Pera. “Welcome to Eboracum.”

  “Thank you,” said Ruso, trying to remember anything Pera might have done to distinguish himself apart from that unfortunate prank in the mortuary. The awkwardness of the pause that followed suggested Pera might be trying too.

  “So, who’s in charge here?”

  “I am, sir.” He sounded as if he was expecting this mistake to be rectified at any moment.

  “Really?” said Ruso, recalling the disciplinary hearing where Pera had explained how, instead of leaping out from beneath a shroud to terrify his fellow students, he had made the catastrophic blunder of doing it in front of half a dozen relatives grieving for the man on the next table. “Excellent,” he said, realizing Pera had heard Really? as an expression of disbelief. “Well done.”

  Pera looked relieved. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Perhaps you could explain the setup here. I’d imagine the camp prefect’s rather busy welcoming the tribune.”

  It was one of those conversations that reminded Ruso of all the things he liked about military medics. Pera, his confidence restored, did not waste time with rambling discourses on why all his rivals were fools, or praising his own secret medical recipes, or blaming the patients for his failures. Within minutes Ruso had a clear picture of the varied needs of two centuries of experienced but aging legionaries, a small auxiliary unit, and forty-eight recruits in basic training who were barely out of their teens. “Sorry. Forty-seven now, sir.”

  What Pera did not say did not need saying. There was no need to elaborate on the usual struggle to impose ventilation, cleanliness, and sobriety upon men who would happily spend their off-duty hours drinking the local beer and their nights huddled in a warm fug of unwashed bodies. Nor did he need to explain that Eboracum, like much of Britannia since the uprisings in the North, was chronically undermanned. Pera’s small team was rattling around in a hospital built for a garrison ten times the current size. It was just as well the rebellious tribes had retreated to lick their wounds and bury their dead. Hadrian, who seemed like a sensible man, was seizing the chance to bring reinforcements and a fresh legion.

  Pera was ushering Ruso through the side door and into the corridor when an orderly came to ask for guidance about a diet and a bandager wished to report that he thought a sprained wrist might be fractured.

  Pera settled the diet question and promised to have a look at the wrist shortly. Turning to Ruso, he said, “What would you like to inspect first, sir?”

  “Let’s start with the wrist.”

  Pera looked pleased. Clearly the last thing he needed was to waste time escorting visitors around. By the time he pushed open the door of one of the treatment rooms to reveal a woebegone young man clutching his right arm, three more men had come to ask him for help or instruction, two of them
wanting orders about what should be cleared out and what should be packed for the impending move to Deva.

  “Why don’t I see to this chap?” Ruso suggested, making a mental note to talk to Pera about training and delegation.

  “He’ll be honored, sir.”

  “Then we’ll both be out of your way.”

  When Pera grinned, he looked almost as young as the recruits.

  Sulio had confounded Dexter’s attempts to clear the area by leaping beyond the straw mattresses, and several men had fallen awkwardly in the rush to get clear of the plummeting body. As Ruso splinted and strapped up the wrist and congratulated the orderly on spotting the symptoms that might indicate a cracked bone, he went through the usual speech about the bandaging being loose enough for swelling. “Come straight back if your fingers start to tingle or go numb. We’ll splint it properly in a couple of days, then you’ll have it held in position for about six weeks.”

  “Will I be discharged, sir?”

  Ruso looked up from the wrist, surprised. “Gods above, no. It’ll probably be fine in a couple of months. I’ll give you a chit to show your centurion at Deva, so he won’t undo all my good work with sword drill.” He turned to the orderly. “Could you organize that straightaway, do you think?”

  The orderly turned to leave. One of the men who had been on the roof limped out ahead of him on a bandaged foot.

  When they had gone Ruso said, “You can do any training that doesn’t involve the arm. Keep the wrist in a sling during the day for at least a week, and don’t use it until we say you can.”

  The youth said, “Thank you sir,” with all the gratitude of a man who had just been handed a bagful of snakes.

  Ruso said, “How’s the pain?”

  “Not too bad, sir.” The youth seemed almost disappointed.

  “You’ll be excused from carrying your kit back to Deva.”

  Most men would have been pleased to hear that, but this one seemed not to care. Ruso was tempted to point out that, compared to the dead man, he had little to complain about. Instead he said, “I’m sorry about your comrade. Did you know him well?”

  “It’s all right, sir,” said the youth, staring at the floor. “You don’t need to pretend. We know nobody wants us at Deva.”

  Ruso frowned. “What’s given you that idea?”

  “We’re an unlucky unit, sir.” The youth’s weary gaze met his own. “They say we’re—”

  Before he could finish, a voice from the doorway called, “You there! Get a grip!” The youth gulped and fell silent.

  Pera appeared, clutching a bottle of green fluid. He crouched down beside the youth and hissed in his ear, “Sulio chose to take his own life. The others were accidents. Any more talk like that and you’ll be on a charge. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is that understood?”

  The youth straightened his back, squared his shoulders, and stared into the middle distance. “Yes, sir!”

  Ruso wondered who “the others” had been, and reflected that the prankster from the mortuary was much changed.

  Chapter 8

  The occupied rooms of Eboracum’s hospital were at the front by the entrance hall, while the kitchens were in one far corner and baths in the other. Kitchen staff and bathers were thus obliged to traverse long corridors lined with gloomy wards whose shuttered windows would have offered a fine view of native weeds strangling the herbs in the courtyard. Ruso waited until they were alone in such a corridor before he asked Pera to explain The others were accidents.

  “This way, sir.” Pera looked both ways before ushering Ruso through the nearest door and closing it behind him. “Is that why you’ve come to inspect us, sir? Because of the accidents?”

  “No, this is just routine.” It was true. A routine invented only last week was still a routine if one had plans to stick to it. “But since I’m here, can I help?”

  Instead of answering, Pera opened the door and stepped back into the light of the corridor. “Sorry, sir. Wrong room.”

  Ruso stayed where he was. “Tell me about the accidents.”

  At the sound of distant voices, Pera flattened one arm against the door as if to hold it wide for his old tutor’s exit. “We’re not using this ward anymore, sir. I forgot.”

  “The accidents, Pera?”

  Pera glanced back along the corridor, but no help came. Still Ruso did not move. Eventually Pera’s arm dropped. With the door safely closed again behind him, he went across to peer through the cracks in the shutters before saying, “We’ve been ordered not to talk about it, sir.”

  “Not in front of the men,” Ruso agreed. “That’s understandable. But if any of this has involved the medical service, I need to know.”

  Pera massaged the back of his neck with one hand, as if it would ease his obvious reluctance to speak. Finally he said, “It’s all nonsense, sir.”

  “Nonsense or no,” said Ruso, “the lad’s right: If word reaches Deva that they’re an unlucky batch of recruits, they won’t get much of a welcome. What happened?”

  “You’d have to ask Centurion Geminus, sir.”

  Ruso sighed. “Pera, if you invite someone into a private room and close the door, he expects something interesting to happen.”

  “But I can’t tell you anything, sir.”

  “So it seems. Although anyone who’s watching will think you have.”

  There was a silence, and Ruso guessed Pera had not thought of that. “Never mind,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll go and ask the patients.”

  “No!” Pera sidestepped to block his exit. “Sir, there was a recruit who drowned when he was crossing the river.”

  “When was this?”

  “About six weeks ago. And then two days ago a man had an accident during training. You know how superstitious the Britons are, sir. Once they get the idea of a curse—or anything, really—into their heads, it’s hard to knock it out again.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.” Pera must have picked up something from his tone. “Sir, I didn’t mean to insult your—”

  “I know,” said Ruso, who was frequently baffled by Tilla’s intransigence himself.

  “The ones whose fathers were in the Legion have more of an idea, sir,” continued Pera hastily. “But some of them are full-blooded natives. They’re only citizens because their fathers are officials. It’s not like the old days.”

  “True,” observed Ruso, wondering whether Pera really imagined he was ancient enough to remember the days when most recruits were sent out from Italy. He was right, though: it was not like the old days. Nobody had explicitly stated that standards were to be relaxed, but Ruso was not the only doctor to end up arguing with the recruitment officer when a medical board rejected more men than was convenient.

  That, however, was a battle for another day. In the meantime two fatal accidents in six weeks was unusual, but he was not an investigator now. He was not going to start imagining curses and conspiracies around every corner. He had seen the difficulties of crossing the river for himself, and deaths in training were not unknown. Men had nasty encounters with the moving parts of heavy weaponry. They wandered across a firing range, or got too close to a sharp edge, or were trampled by horses. Sometimes a man simply succumbed to a physical weakness that had revealed itself under the pressure of the demands upon him. Once the facts were clear, even the Britons might begin to grasp the concept of coincidence. “What happened to the lad in training?”

  “He was dead before they got him here, sir.”

  “Is there something wrong with your neck?”

  Pera retrieved the hand. “Sorry, sir. I was told he fell and hit his head.”

  “But presumably the lad this afternoon went up on the roof of his own accord. Do we know why?”

  Pera’s hands were clamped behind his back. He glanced down as if he could not remember where he had put them. “I think Centurion Geminus might be the best person to ask, sir.”

  “I see,” said Ruso, curious to kn
ow what Pera was hiding and wondering whether he was more wary of the curse than his official position would allow. So far he had revealed nothing that Ruso could not have found out by asking around the barracks.

  “Well, we can’t do anything for dead men,” he said, hoping he would get more sense out of Geminus later. “Let’s go and see what we can do for the rest.”

  None of the half dozen men occupying hospital beds was suffering from anything that was of great interest to anyone except himself. All appeared well kept, adequately fed, and appropriately treated. The couple of recruits amongst them appeared subdued to the point of sullenness, but Ruso supposed that, after losing two comrades in two days, it was only to be expected.

  There was one remaining patient: a youth with haunted eyes and a heavily bandaged upper right arm. His name was Austalis and he was being kept in isolation between two other vacant rooms, presumably in an attempt to provide peace and quiet. His response to “How are you today, Austalis?” was a worryingly weak “Very good, sir.”

  “I hear you had a knife injury. Mind if I take a look?”

  The patient appeared indifferent. Ruso lifted the edge of the bandaging with a finger and did not like what he saw. “That looks painful.”

  “A bit, sir.”

  Ruso glanced at Pera. “What are you giving him for pain?”

  Pera looked at the two junior medics who had crowded into the room behind them. One of them said, “He hasn’t complained before, sir.”

  “Did anybody ask him?”

  Nobody answered.

  “What’s in the compress?”

  “Elm leaves and vinegar, sir.”

  Ruso nodded. “We’ll give you some poppy tears for the pain in a minute,” he promised, surprised that Pera had not seen to it before. There was no stool, so he sat on the edge of the bed, feeling a pulse that was thin and too fast.