by Ruth Downie
“Sulio must have been a brave man.”
“Oh, he didn’t jump in. He was there anyway.”
When Tilla looked puzzled, she said, “He hurt his knee while he was on one of those long marches they do, and Dann stopped to help him, and then they had to get back across the river. Well, that’s what they’re saying.”
Tilla frowned. “Why did they not use the ferry?”
The girl began to fiddle with the beads again. “I wasn’t there myself.”
“You can tell me the rest of the story while we walk back to town.”
The string had twisted and hooked over one bead, making a loop. Virana frowned as she tried to straighten it. “If I tell you, will you tell your husband?”
“My husband is a medicus. He understands about secrets.”
The bead was finally disentangled. “I only know what I heard.”
“That will be fine.”
“You must swear on the bones of your ancestors that you won’t say who told you.”
“I swear.”
The path was only wide enough for one. Tilla’s skirts brushed through the overhanging grass while Virana’s voice sounded in her ears.
“The river is always cold,” the girl said, “and it rises with the tide. It’s worse after a new moon. And it had rained a lot, so the water was almost at the top of the landing stage.”
Tilla could not remember much about the landing stage; she would have to go down and take a look. “So it was dangerous to cross?”
“Even the ferrymen don’t like it when it’s like that. Anyway, they were late back and the centurions were waiting for them and somebody heard Geminus shout across to them that he wasn’t going to send the ferry because it was their own fault. And he told them to swim.”
“Did he not see it was dangerous?”
“Dann was never any good at swimming.”
What had her husband said? I’m surprised more haven’t deserted. She was beginning to see why.
She did not need to ask why the recruits had obediently entered deep fast-flowing water. She had spent long enough in and around army camps to know that they would not dare to refuse an order, in case something worse happened to them.
Virana said, “They got sticks to keep themselves steady and they tried to cross hand in hand, but the current was pushing them, and then Dann lost his footing and they both went under. Then Geminus dived in on the end of a rope and they got Sulio out.”
“But not Dannicus?”
She shook her head. “The ferrymen found him washed up on the north bank the next day. He was a long way downstream.”
There was only one question left now. “Did the centurions know that Dannicus couldn’t swim?”
“Well, I knew,” said Virana. “And my friend knew. And I heard the other boys teasing him about it. So I should think everybody did, wouldn’t you?”
Chapter 21
Ruso was searching the office in vain for the postmortem report he had read only yesterday when he was startled by a rap on the door. He shoved the box onto the nearest shelf and turned just as a young man burst in wearing a sweat-stained tunic, exuberant tattoos, and an anxious expression.
“Can I help you?”
In Ruso’s experience, recruits were perpetually hungry, but this one seemed to have given up the battle with the chunk of tough barley bread clutched in his hand. He also seemed to have forgotten how to speak.
“The clerk’s gone to find some lunch,” continued Ruso, who had chosen this moment to visit the office for that very reason. “I’m the doctor.”
The man glanced down at the bread, then tried to hide it behind his back before more or less standing to attention.
“Are you looking for somebody else?”
“No, sir.”
“So,” said Ruso, wondering if his visitor was also on a mission to sneak into the records while the clerk was absent, “why are you here?”
“I was told to come and see Austalis, sir.”
“Ah,” said Ruso, helping himself to a seat. “Stand easy, er …”
“Marcus, sir.”
A man called Marcus who spoke Latin with that accent had probably been given one of the few Roman names his parents knew. Ruso guessed he was a full-blooded native son of some sort of local chief. “You’ll find him in the room opposite. Don’t stay too long: He’s very weak.”
“I have seen him already, sir. He looks terrible.”
Ruso said, “We’re doing everything we can.”
“I think he will die.”
“Not necessarily.”
Marcus ran a hand back through his hair, inadvertently giving Ruso a better view of the blue horse rearing up his right arm. “He was fine just a few days ago.”
“I’ve been wondering why a man who was fine would deliberately take a slice off his own arm.”
The young man hesitated.
“There are safer ways to remove tattoos.”
His visitor’s face brightened: Ruso had guessed well. “Are there, sir?”
“Nothing’s completely safe, but I’d suggest burning them off slowly with a caustic potion.”
“Can you do these?”
“Turn around and let me see.”
A serpent slithered down the other arm toward the left wrist.
“If you had a slave brand,” he said, “I could understand it. But as tattoos go, those are rather good. Marcus, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” Or his arms, at least.
“You were one of the doctors who said I could join the army, sir.”
“I imagine that seems a long time ago.”
“A whole life, sir. What is in the potion? Can you do it before we go to Deva?”
Ruso angled himself on the stool so that it was resting on the back two legs, and dismissed a distant echo of his first wife’s warnings about ruining the furniture. “First,” he said, dodging the first question lest the patient should decide to slap lime all over himself, “tell me why you would want to bother.”
Moments later he was recalling a conversation with a young lawyer in Antioch who had insisted that he was not ashamed of his own people. “I simply want to go to the baths and not be noticed, Doctor. It’s bad for business. Other men get Oh, look, there’s the lawyer. Or: There’s the man who won the Stephanus case. Or: There’s a man who looks reliable. I strip off and I get Oh, look, there’s a Jew.”
Ruso had explained the difficulties of the surgery, the inevitable pain, the possible consequences of serious inflammation at the operation site, and the fact that nothing would fully restore what had been lost. The lawyer, who seemed to think he was bargaining, begged him to reconsider and offered more money. That evening Ruso’s ex-wife, who had recommended him through an acquaintance, demanded to know why he had embarrassed her by refusing the case.
“Because it’s unnecessary, nasty, and dangerous.”
“But it must work or people wouldn’t do it.”
“True.”
“And if you get a good reputation for doing this epispasm thing, he’ll send all his friends, and—”
“I don’t want any sort of reputation for surgery people don’t need.”
“But he thinks he needs it! Now he’ll have to go to somebody who’s not as good as you. And when his thing drops off, it’ll be your fault.”
Sometimes Ruso thought it was a wonder he and Claudia had stayed married for as long as they did. They had still been arguing when the earthquake struck. The lawyer was only one of a great number of people he had never seen again.
Now he was facing a man with a similar problem. The trouble with tattoos, apparently, was that when legionaries of any rank saw them they thought, Oh, look, there’s a Briton, and lowered their expectations accordingly.
“It’s bad enough to be in an unlucky unit, sir, but if the rest of the Legion think we are no good because we are barbarians …”
“Do they?”
Marcus twisted the rough bread between his hands. A shower of crumbs fell to the fl
oor. “I am a Roman citizen, sir,” he insisted. “Just like the rest. My father has a copy of the citizenship order. Signed by the emperor Trajan himself.”
Ruso said, “To be chosen by the emperor is a great honor.” It was true, although Tilla would have said that any Briton chosen by the emperor had obviously done something to be ashamed of. “Are you the first legionary in the family?”
Marcus nodded. “Everyone’s very proud of me at home, sir.” He looked up. “How can I tell them what it’s really like?”
“It’ll be better when you get to Deva and you’re assigned to your century,” Ruso promised him. “It’s not all like basic training.”
“Austalis will never go to Deva now, sir, will he?”
“I don’t know.” Austalis would be lucky if he survived at all.
“It’s not right, sir. Me and Austalis grew up together. We had our first tattoos on the same day. We enlisted together. And now … now …” Marcus, unable to find the words, gestured helplessly with the bread. Then he raised the arm with the horse tattoo. A roar of fury and despair covered the sound of hard bread crashing against shelves. The British curse on the name “Geminus!” was clear enough, and so was the threat to kill him.
In the silence that followed, a stack of record tablets teetered, then clattered to the floor.
Marcus slumped back against the wall. As they both surveyed the chaos he had caused, someone knocked hard enough to rattle the door latch. “Are you all right in there, sir?”
“Fine, thank you!” Ruso called, glad the bread had not been aimed at him. “Just give me a few minutes.”
The Briton put his hands over his head. He slid down the wall until he was cowering on the floor like an animal expecting to be beaten.
Ruso shifted his weight forward. The front leg of the stool landed on the floorboards with a gentle thud. He said, “While we pick all this up, Marcus, I want you to tell me exactly what happened to Austalis.”
Once he had accepted that he was not about to be clapped in irons and flogged, Marcus made distracted attempts to tidy up, consisting mostly of stacking tablets vertically and then failing to catch them as they slid sideways along the shelf and fell over. Ruso, crouched on the floor, took his time retrieving the strays from under the desk, because the lad had started to talk.
Austalis, it seemed, had committed some minor offense. Geminus had discovered it and delivered one of those devastating streams of abuse that centurions were fond of serving up to recruits at high volume in front of anyone who happened to be around at the time. Geminus had scorned Austalis’s intelligence, his personal hygiene, his prospects, and his parentage before singling out the tattoo of a stag on his arm as symbolic of his inferior status.
“It was a beautiful tattoo, sir. Even better than mine. And Austalis, he decides this is enough. He says, ‘What is wrong with it?’ and the bastard with the two shadows hits him round the head with his stick, and shouts, ‘You might as well write up your arm, Look at me, I’m a barbarian and I’m stupid.’”
It was not hard to picture the scene. “So then what happened?”
“Austalis shouts back. Geminus calls it insubordination. They make him stand outside HQ for hours holding a clod of turf, sir.”
Ruso had seen this many times. It did not sound like much, but the heavy turf would have to be held at arm’s length, and before long the muscles would be screaming for relief.
“After they let him go, I think he went to find the beer supply—” Marcus stopped.
“This is why you aren’t supposed to have one,” Ruso pointed out, guessing they had stashed it somewhere in the unused buildings, and wondering how Geminus and his shadows had managed to miss it.
Marcus rammed the last of the records into a space on the shelf. “When we found him, he was drunk and bleeding, with the stag cut out of his arm.”
Ruso handed up the last of the record tablets. Somebody had to tell the truth around here. “Geminus probably didn’t mean it,” he said. “Centurions sometimes insult their men to test their self-control.”
Marcus stared at him. “Is that true?”
“I’ve seen it.” And so had plenty of other men, and somebody should have had the grace to warn these lads.
The lad stiffened. “You must think the Britons very funny, sir.”
“If I thought the natives were a joke,” said Ruso, “I wouldn’t have married a Brigante.”
Marcus seemed to be pondering this as the trumpet sounded the next watch. “I must go,” he said. “If I come back tonight, can you start the potion?”
“Let me talk to your centurion first.”
“But, sir—”
“Leave it with me,” said Ruso, who had no idea what he was going to say to Geminus the war hero, but knew that whatever it was, it needed saying.
Chapter 22
The clerk returned not long after Marcus left. He was reeking of bonfire and surprisingly sanguine about the disorder on the shelves. It did not matter, since he was currently engaged in a sorting-out anyway.
Ruso sniffed. “What have you been burning?”
“Old rubbish we don’t need to take to Deva, sir.”
“Medical records?” Ruso was on his feet. “Show me.”
The charred edge of the tablet that Ruso rescued with the end of a hoe almost certainly said Tad—but he was too late: the words inside had run away with the wax. He slid the hoe beneath it and tossed it back onto the foully smoking heap just as a voice said, “How was ward round, sir?”
Pera’s hair was even wilder than usual. His tunic had damp patches and there were smudges of black muck on his elbows that he had failed to quite wash off. Ruso said, “That idiot clerk’s just burned your postmortem report.”
Pera squinted at the untended bonfire, where it seemed only the hospital records were burning with any vigor. Thick smoke was pouring from the old bedstraw and worn-out rags that made up the rest of the pile. “I told the clerk to get rid of any useless junk, sir.”
“Not things you only did the other day.”
Pera was rubbing the back of his neck again. “I’ll have a word with him, sir.”
Ruso propped the hoe back against the wall, next to a bucket of water. “The ward round was fine apart from Austalis,” he said, glancing around to make sure that no one was close enough to listen before he went on to explain gravity of the situation. “I wasn’t impressed with the staff. They seem to be trying to avoid him.”
“I’ll have a word with them too, sir.”
Ruso eyed his disheveled state. “Who put you on sanitary inspection?”
“Geminus, sir.”
“Don’t you have engineers for that sort of thing?”
“I was with an engineer, sir. The sewer outlet’s out of bounds otherwise.”
Ruso wondered what possible reason Geminus could have had to send a medic crawling around the drains. Pera should not have needed to do any more than ask the engineers whether what went in at one end of the sewer was coming out at the other. It was hard not to suspect that he was being punished for something, and—given the timing—it was probably something that Ruso had ordered him to do.
He was wondering how to tackle the subject when the heavy figure of the clerk appeared, lugging the remains of a broken chair and a sack of something that proved to be old wood shavings mixed with floor dirt, some of them rich red-brown with the dried blood they had been scattered to absorb. They crackled and spat as he poured them over the flames.
“Go to the baths before ward round,” Ruso told Pera. “You’ll frighten the patients.”
“Clean men are healthy men, sir.”
Ruso grinned, recognizing his own words. “Name the deadliest enemy of an army.”
“The deadliest enemy of an army is disease, sir.”
When the clerk was safely out of earshot, Ruso said, “He didn’t seem to know that any report on Tadius existed before yesterday.”
“He didn’t see it, sir. He wasn’t on duty, so I put it away my
self.”
“And then I brought it to his attention.”
Pera said nothing.
“It was a good report.”
“You always taught us to record everything, sir.”
“And the purpose of that was … ?”
“In case we could learn something from it later.”
“It seems you were listening after all.”
“Thank you, sir. But we can’t learn anything from it now, can we?”
Ruso glanced at him. “If you’re going to fake a tone of regret, Pera, you’ll have to try harder than that.”
“I’m very sorry, sir.”
“That’s better. I’m sure between us we could remember most of it.”
“I can’t be of much help, I’m afraid, sir. And it’s not going to bring him back, is it?”
“That’s generally true of postmortem reports,” Ruso observed. “Was the clerk ordered to burn it?”
“Sir, please don’t ask. Nothing good will come of it.”
“Why not? Give me a good reason and I’ll leave it alone.”
“I—I can’t, sir.”
“I’ve wasted enough time on this. Perhaps I’ll get more sense out of Geminus.”
“Yes, sir. I expect so.”
“That’s the wrong answer, Pera.”
“Yes. I know it is, sir.”
A gust of wind sent thick smoke billowing down the street toward the hospital. They stepped apart to avoid choking. Ruso leaned on the wall beside the hoe, waiting for the air to clear.
“Let me tell you a better story,” he said through the smoke. “Tadius died as a result of a severe beating. There was a cover-up, which you cooperated with, because you were ordered to, but privately you were so outraged by what had happened that you recorded the truth. Then you hid it in the files, perhaps hoping to bring it out at Deva once you were safely clear of Eboracum.”
The breeze dropped almost as suddenly as it had risen. The buildings across the street began to reappear. Pera remained silent.
“Well?” Ruso squinted through the smoke.
The shape standing against the far wall was too big to be Pera. On either side of it stood two junior officers.