Semper Fidelis: A Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  Pera was halfway across the entrance hall when Ruso grabbed him by the shoulder. “Tadius,” murmured Ruso, in a voice so low even the statue of Aesculapius, benignly gazing out to welcome his new patients, would have struggled to hear. “What time was he brought in?”

  Pera thought about it. “It was after the evening meal, sir, but it wasn’t dark. About the tenth hour? The days are very long at the moment.”

  Ruso nodded. “It was still light enough for you to do a detailed postmortem report the same day.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Which ankle was the shackle mark on?”

  “I can’t remember, sir.”

  “But you can confirm that there was one.”

  Pera’s hand rose to rub the back of his neck. “It’s hard to remember anything, really, sir.”

  Ruso sighed. “Never mind.”

  “Will you be joining me on ward round, sir?”

  “No,” said Ruso, heading for the street. “But get a trumpet call out for me if there’s any change with Austalis. I need to go somewhere else.”

  Chapter 26

  As he walked toward the east gate, Ruso could make out the shouts of men in training. The watch captain was talking to a couple of his men beneath the stone arch of the gate. Ruso lingered in a doorway, pondering what Geminus had told him about the guilty recruits running away in the dark. It must have been a simple slip of the tongue. After all, how visible would Victor’s ginger hair have been if there was no light?

  As soon as the watch captain strode off toward the north gate, Ruso stepped out from the doorway. The guards on the east gate did not dare to ask why a doctor wanted to see the cells where the unruly were usually dumped overnight to consider the folly of their ways. He found, as he had expected, chains attached to iron rings in the wall. But they were too high: The prisoners here must be cuffed by the wrists.

  The guards directed him to the north gate in his medically inexplicable hunt for custody cells, but since he had just seen the watch captain heading in that direction, Ruso decided to take his time. Without much hope, but not knowing what else he could do, he made his way along the walkway of a deserted barrack block, shouldering open damp doors as he went.

  Normally the first room behind each door would be used to cook and store equipment for the eight men who slept in the room behind it. Now in the gloom he found untidy splatters of pigeon droppings, broken furniture, abandoned rags, an occasional worn-out shoe, and one wriggling nest of kittens. A small dead animal lying on a windowsill turned out to be a lady’s hairpiece, the presence of which would be forever unexplained.

  By the time he reached the third block, he had to acknowledge that the search was hopeless. Even assuming that what he was looking for existed, and that he would recognize it when he saw it, the fortress was the size of a town. Laid out between the main roads were dozens of buildings with hundreds of rooms. Even if he ignored all the doors blocked with weeds, and anything that was locked, that would still leave more places than he would ever have time to check.

  He crunched over broken glass in the doorway of a storeroom, wrinkling his nose at the stench. Crisp brown leaves had blown in across the floor, and the dung suggested the most recent occupants had been goats. He turned on his heel and walked out, heading for the north gate. A couple of soldiers clutching brooms appeared from between two buildings and passed him with the purposeful gait of men who might be on their way to doing something, or might just be wanting to look as though they were.

  The north cells turned out to have the same security arrangements as the east. This was a waste of time. Trudging down a street between two rows of storehouses, all of which proved to be locked, he tried to assess the situation logically. The first two deaths were not connected. The drowning had been bad luck, or maybe bad judgment on the part of the centurion. The training accident was a murder.

  Army basic training was not a pretty sight, with free men apparently being treated like slaves and pushed beyond what they believed to be their limits in body and mind. All of them loathed the men who were making them suffer, and many would grumble freely to anyone who would listen. Normally, as the grueling weeks wore on, most of them found strength and resilience they did not know they possessed, and by the end they were proud of having survived the trial. But according to Geminus, these recruits had turned on each other like animals. They were lucky not to have been caged and whipped. He had no doubt that the punishment waiting for them back at Deva would be imaginative, memorable, and very nasty indeed.

  The men with the brooms appeared in front of him again, then vanished around a corner.

  Maybe he should go back and confirm the time of the death with Geminus, just to allay any lingering doubt. Maybe he should ask him about that shackle mark. There was probably a simple explanation.

  He was trying the door of an abandoned centurion’s house when the trudge of boots and jingle of strap ends woke him from his thoughts. He turned to see two men in patched work tunics. The one with the shovel said, “Looking for something, sir?”

  “Just checking.”

  It sounded ridiculous and it was, but he was an officer and they weren’t, so they would not say so to his face. He wondered how long they had been watching him, and what they could possibly imagine he was doing trying to break into empty buildings. Fortunately, compelled by the need to look busy in his presence, they would not be able to hang around and find out. As soon as they were gone, he turned and headed in the opposite direction.

  It was only then that he noticed a gap between the barrack blocks that he had already passed once without thinking. It was not the gap itself that was remarkable: The buildings were the standard ten-doors-per-century blocks with the centurion’s house on the end and a narrow break before the pattern was repeated. What struck him was that the gap was unusually well-trodden for a passageway leading from one empty street to another. At first he thought it was a goat track, but as he moved closer he could see that the edge of the puddle filling most of its width bulged into the ovals of boot prints.

  He was about to leap across the puddle when he heard someone whistling. A lone and overweight soldier rounded the corner and began to shovel the accumulation of dead leaves and dirt from a doorway where it must have lain moldering since last winter. “Are you lost, sir?”

  Ruso indicated the passageway. “What’s down there?”

  The man paused from his work to peer between the two buildings before declaring, “Nothing, sir.”

  “There’s a lot of boot marks.”

  “That’ll be our lads, sir,” the man explained. “That’s how we get round the back to paint the walls and fix the windows and what have you.”

  “Ah,” said Ruso. He wondered what strange diligence might lead the maintenance gangs to converge on the backs of these buildings when the fronts were so neglected. Before he could speak again, the man gave a yell of alarm. There was a thudding of hooves and a black and white billy goat leapt over a broken door and cantered away down the street, leaving a distinctive waft in the air behind it.

  Ruso said, “Doesn’t anybody round them up?”

  “Only for dinner, sir. Goats keep the weeds down.”

  He resumed his walk back to the hospital. The man followed him. He turned right. The man was behind him. He turned right for a second time. The man with the shovel had gone. In his place were the two with the brooms.

  Ruso stepped off the track and into a doorway. The men trudged past with barely a glance. He waited until they were twenty paces in front, then set off after them. Sure enough, one of them turned to see where he was. He lifted one hand in a cheery wave. The man pretended not to notice and kept walking.

  There was nobody behind him now. The men in front turned off down an alleyway. He sidestepped into the muddy passage. Beyond the barracks, the timbered walls rising on either side of him were no longer accommodations but some sort of large warehouses. Each had a couple of shuttered windows just above head height: too small for thieves
to slip through.

  Emerging onto the street at the far end, he followed the muddy trail round to the right and found himself in front of a nondescript wooden building about thirty paces long. At first sight the double doors were padlocked like all the others, but then he saw that although the lock had been slid across, it was not secured into the body. He glanced round to check that nobody was watching, slid the lock open, and stepped into a silent darkness.

  With the door closed behind him he could see nothing. Then he could make out bright lines around the shutters. He picked his way across what felt like a bare earth floor to reach up and let in the light from the passageway. He turned and waited for his sight to adjust to the gloom.

  Gradually, the object he had been searching for took shape in the middle of the floor.

  He had seen this sort of thing before. A shackle and chain attached to a heavy stone block. It was where the captured animal or the condemned prisoner was attached, so that it could not escape from its tormentors while the crowd in the amphitheater cheered them on.

  Ruso perched on the edge of the block and fastened the cold shackle around his ankle. He stood. Two experimental paces away from the stone, the chain jolted him back. He tried to move as a man would who was trying to defend himself. The chain wrong-footed him. It wrapped around his free ankle so he had to hop to release himself. Then he tripped over the block and sat heavily on the floor. That was when he noticed darker patches on the mud around him. He ran a forefinger over one of them and sniffed it.

  Blood.

  Blood, and a shaft of light spreading across the floor, and the broad silhouette of a legionary in the doorway. Centurion Dexter’s voice said, “Best to stay out of here, Doctor. The roofs are none too good in some of these buildings. That’s why we keep them locked.”

  Ruso said, “The place looks used.”

  Dexter made his way across the room and slammed the first set of shutters closed. “Crafty buggers had a stash of beer hidden in here.”

  “Is this where Austalis was found?”

  “I hear he’s dying.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  The second set of shutters slammed. “When I joined up, we got paid to keep the Brits out. Now we invite ’em in and give ’em weapons.”

  As he followed Dexter toward the door, Ruso said, “What’s the block and chain for?”

  Dexter halted in the doorway and turned to gaze across the room as if he had not noticed the stone cube he had just walked around.

  Ruso pointed to it.

  Dexter shrugged. “Something left by the last lot, I suppose.”

  The statement was plausible. The pretended ignorance was not. Ruso was beginning to think that something even worse than Geminus had described had happened to young Tadius. This did not look like a hunting game that had gone wrong. The blood could have belonged to a drunken Austalis, but the presence of the shackle made it look very much as though Tadius’s comrades had taken him here, chained him to a stone, and beaten him to death.

  Chapter 27

  Corinna’s son was lying motionless on the little bed in the alcove, his eyes closed and one plump arm flung above his head. Tilla bent over him, relieved when the faint rise and fall of the covers told her he was breathing. His skin was pink: His hand was warm. The poppy had done its work safely.

  “I always check too.” Reassured, Corinna teased out more wool from the combed fleece by her stool and twirled the dangling spindle. “As soon as they are born, you worry about them.”

  Tilla noticed again the soft burr of the Southwest in her voice. This girl was a long way from home. She left the curtain drawn back so they could see the little bed from where they sat talking in low voices by the hearth. It seemed the family lived in this one narrow rented room, with a loft above, a small plot behind where Corinna had planted a few vegetables, and an empty shop counter at the front under which they kept a stock of firewood that had almost run out. It was clean and homely and probably as good as anything they had grown up with. The child was bonny and Corinna seemed a gentle sort of girl. Wondering what could make a man leave all this behind, Tilla gave her the bag of dried honeysuckle leaves to help against weariness before passing on the news that she thought she had seen Victor at Calcaria two days before.

  The girl’s eyes widened. “You know about him?”

  “Virana told me.”

  Corinna gave the wool a sharp tug. “I’ve had no message. There is nothing I can tell you.”

  “The army are not chasing him, and if they were, I would keep silent unless you asked me to speak. Someone tried to help him, but he ran away.”

  The girl laid the spindle in her lap. “How was he?”

  “Bruised, but well able to run.”

  “Hm.” Corinna did not seem to be sure whether she was pleased about that or not.

  Tilla said, “It is not easy to be married to a man who is supposed to be married to the Legion.”

  Corinna glanced over at her son again. “I thought at first that I could manage.”

  “You are a strong woman. And your son will heal.”

  “I want to go home.”

  Tilla sat back in the battered chair. “Tell me about your home.”

  “It is very beautiful,” Corinna said. “The army hardly bother us. The seas are wild around the rocks but there is good fishing. The land is rich for cows and good for crops if you lime it, but things do not change very fast. And Victor is a man who always thinks there is something better somewhere else.”

  She picked up a rag from the wool basket and wiped the grease off her hands. “I tried to tell him it was a good life, but he wouldn’t listen. He is a fighter: a champion wrestler. In the old days he would have been a warrior, but of course at home he was not allowed to train for battle or carry weapons. He used to talk all the time about the legions—how he wished he had joined when he had the chance.”

  “This was after you were married?”

  “I doubt he meant it as an insult, but he kept saying I was the only thing that stopped him from joining. I knew the army would treat us as divorced, but he spoke of it so often that I was afraid he would run off and join anyway.”

  “So it was better to agree than to lose him.”

  “That is what I thought back then.” Corinna shrugged. “My mother said he was a fool, and so was I, but my father had a pair of soldier’s boots made for him as a gift. We traveled for weeks to get to this place of terrible winters. Then he was only allowed out for one afternoon every week, and when we saw him, all he wanted to do was quarrel or sleep.”

  “I have met other women who say the same.”

  “Perhaps it is different if your husband is an officer. The Legion was not the life he was expecting. The training is hard, even for a strong man. There were a lot of arguments.”

  Tilla said, “Did he tell you he was leaving?”

  The thin fingers rubbed a fold of her skirt. “He said we would slow him down. The soldiers came here to look for him, but I do not think they were sorry to see him go.”

  “Was there something that happened that made him leave, Corinna?”

  The girl eyed her steadily. “It was not for any reason they will tell you. That is all I can say.”

  “Who hurt him?”

  “Tadius.”

  Tilla frowned. “I have been told wrongly. I thought Tadius was his friend.”

  “He was. A good friend.”

  “Then why—”

  “There are things you don’t know.”

  “Tell me.”

  The pale lips twitched into a smile that did not reach the eyes. “If you don’t know, you are safe. You don’t have to decide what to do. You can keep quiet and not call yourself a coward, because you know nothing. And if you are a friend to my family, you will forget I have ever spoken to you of this.”

  Tilla puzzled. “But if there is something wrong—”

  “Don’t complain. Tadius complained. Victor wanted to.”

  “About w
hat?”

  “About lots of things,” said Corinna. “But look what happened. The Legion always wins in the end.”

  Chapter 28

  “No, no, no, no, no!”

  The orderly seized Austalis by his good arm and wrestled him back down onto the bed.

  “No, no!”

  Ruso raised his hands to show they were empty, but Austalis was too frightened to care. The orderly kept him pinned down while Ruso retreated and leaned against the wall.

  “No.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Ruso assured him, which at that moment was true.

  The “No!” was more of a whimper now: Austalis had reached the end of his strength.

  Ruso stood motionless, as he would have with a frightened animal. Eventually he said, “Would you like some water?”

  “No.”

  “You’re very ill, Austalis.”

  “No.”

  “The surgery would help.”

  The voice was very weak now. “Don’t … cut.”

  Ruso nodded to the orderly, who stood up, hitched his torn tunic back over his shoulder, and retreated to a corner. To Austalis he said, “You’re in a bit of a mess there. Shall I put your bed straight?”

  There was no sign of Austalis caring one way or the other. Ruso straightened the bedding and poured a few drops of water between the cracked lips.

  “Let me tell you about Clementinus,” said Ruso. “Clementinus used to be a vet in the Twentieth. Now he earns a good living as a dog breeder and he’s fathered two children. Or there’s Amandus the brewer. He’s got a wife and a son. Both men lost an arm at about your age, and I did the surgery.”

  A whisper of “No.”

  “We can give you something to dull the pain and I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  “No.”

  “If it’s the arm or you, I know which I’d choose.”

  The silence was encouraging.

  “It’s the best choice. We’ll get rid of the diseased—”

  The door burst open and Geminus strode into the room. He loomed over the end of the bed, eyed the startled patient, and announced, “That arm’s coming off, then.”