Semper Fidelis: A Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  “A man of his rank does not have a wife.”

  Before she could stop herself, she said, “And a woman of my rank does not let the army decide who she is married to!”

  She waited for the blow to land. You did not challenge a man like this. You appealed to his vanity. “Sir,” she said quickly, “you are an honorable man. I know you will want justice for the death of the centurion.”

  He gripped her by the shoulders. “Your husband tried to step over me to get to the emperor.”

  She swallowed. “He did not kill Geminus, sir.”

  Forcing her back against the wall, he said, “Nobody insults me like that.”

  “Sir, he was with the doctors last night, and then he was with me.”

  One hand was groping her breast. “We both know that’s a lie.”

  “Sir, I beg you—”

  But it was not her who made him pause. It was the secretary, tapping on his shoulder. “Sir! Please, sir!”

  “What?” snapped Accius.

  For a moment Tilla thought the secretary might be a decent man who had chosen to rescue her. But what had saved her was an urgent summons from the emperor. The secretary even asked Accius if they should keep the woman here until he returned.

  “Don’t bother. I don’t have time to waste on native whores.”

  She took a deep breath. “Sir, I will try to find out who really killed the centurion.”

  “What?”

  “The local people will not talk to your soldiers, but they talk to me.”

  The fierce gaze was leveled straight at her. “Stay out of army business,” he said. “If I catch you near any of my men, you’ll be executed. Guards!” The door opened. “Take her away.”

  Chapter 52

  It was not until the soldiers pushed her out of the east gate that Tilla noticed the state of the streets she had hurried through earlier. Parts of Eboracum’s civilian quarter stank of urine and looked as though they had been battered by a terrible storm. Flowers and weeds alike were trodden flat. A couple of people were wandering about with buckets, picking up broken glass for remolding. A slave was washing vomit from a wall and two men were removing a shutter that looked as though someone had punched a hole in it. Opposite the temple of Mithras, a thin trail of smoke still rose from a mess of stark black timbers. A man and a barefoot woman stood in front of the wreckage. The woman was crying. Tilla moved on.

  As ordered, she would not talk to soldiers. But as for keeping out of army business … well, the murder of Geminus was her business too now.

  She soon found there was no shortage of people eager to tell her what had happened last night. Many had damage to property or to themselves to show her. For a lucky few, the outrage was soothed by a good evening’s takings, but for most, it had been a costly night. For some, the worry was not over yet. They were now waiting for news of relatives who had been hauled in this morning for questioning.

  The trouble was, nobody could tell her anything useful about Geminus. Most people assumed he had been killed by another soldier. Few seemed surprised. And as several people pointed out, all soldiers looked alike in the dark.

  According to the sleepy girls behind the bruised but defiant doormen at the bar, soldiers didn’t all feel alike, but none had seen or felt Geminus last night. None seemed at all sorry about it, nor about what had happened to him. Tilla was fairly certain they were telling the truth.

  While she was there, the small boy appeared with a stack of kitchen pans and seemed pleased that the lady whose bags he had carried had come back to visit his mother. Tilla promised two sestertii to be shared between him and any of his friends who could give new information about Geminus’s death. With luck, all the children in the town would now be hot on the trail, and a message would arrive at Corinna’s house if there was any news. Tilla was slightly uneasy about this part of the arrangement with Victor hiding there, but she could not think of anyone else to trust.

  Slipping into the mansio by the side door, she managed to snatch a brief word with the slave of one of the visiting eastern ambassadors. The man spoke just enough Latin to swear that the visiting slaves had huddled indoors, protecting their masters. Nobody had seen any centurions or men with knives, thank the gods.

  The gardener looked up from weeding the rose bed, hoped she had found no more pigs’ heads, and asked if there might be any more mandrake. Tilla would have fetched the whole bottle if it would have released more information, but the gardener knew nothing about the murder. He had enough troubles of his own with that lot (here he glared at the eastern slave) pinching herbs and pissing in the flower beds.

  Before she could escape, the manager appeared, asked after her health, and ordered her to leave in a manner so polite that it almost sounded as though he were sorry. He had not seen Geminus, and his guests and staff had already been questioned by the authorities. He was not able to allow her in at the moment. The guests’ privacy had to be respected and the staff were very busy.

  “When will they not be busy?”

  The manager took a firm grip of her arm and steered her toward the street door. “My staff are always busy.”

  Tilla moved on down the street. Nobody had anything useful to offer until a sallow-faced woman filling a water jar at the fountain told her that a man had been seen skulking around the ditch in a suspicious manner. He was wearing a red cloak “to hide the blood.” This became less credible when she added, “He had a bloodstained surgeon’s knife in his hand.”

  “You saw all this in the dark?”

  “Not me. A friend of someone I know.”

  “Is the friend here now?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps the person who told you?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because my own man will be executed if I do not find out who did this.”

  “You’re the wife!” The woman snatched up her jar and backed away. “I can’t help you. Nobody knows anything.”

  “If nobody knows anything,” Tilla called after her, “then stop spreading rumors!”

  The shopkeeper’s small daughter was helping by passing him the nails one by one while he hammered a diagonal strut across a broken door shutter. He recognized Tilla and offered his sympathies on the Medicus’s arrest.

  “He did not do it. Does anyone know who did?”

  The man assured her that they knew nothing at all.

  “No,” added the small daughter. “We’re not going tell anybody. My da says so.”

  Tilla laid a hand on the arm clutching the hammer. “Shall we talk in private?”

  The truth, once she had managed to extract it from him, was nothing to do with Geminus. Last night drunken looters had smashed their way into his shop, seized anything that took their fancy, and flung at him anything that didn’t. While he was begging them to stop, one of them began to climb the ladder to where his wife, his children, and his day’s takings were hidden in the loft. The shopkeeper tried to drag him away. Meanwhile, the wife leaned down and cracked the looter over the head with a chamber pot. The man fell senseless to the floor. The others ran off, leaving the shopkeeper and his wife to decide that the safest thing was to haul the dazed man away and dump him outside the temple of Mithras. “I went to look for him this morning,” said the man, “but he’d gone.”

  Tilla surveyed the chaos of broken furniture and cabbage leaves. “I am sorry for your troubles.”

  The heroine of the chamber pot appeared from somewhere at the back of the shop. “It could be worse.” She retrieved an onion and a shoe from under the counter. “Anything worth having was already sold, and they didn’t stay long enough to find the money.”

  “We didn’t mean to hurt him,” the man said.

  The woman said, “I did.”

  The man ignored her. “We don’t want to lead off on the wrong foot with the new legion.”

  “I think,” said Tilla, “that he and his friends will say nothing. They know they should not have been here.”

 
“That’s what I told him,” the woman agreed. “But he likes to worry.”

  “But they will ask you about the dead centurion,” Tilla warned them. “You need to have the girl better trained. Never mind what she is not to say. Think what they might ask, and get her to practice what she will answer.”

  As she was leaving she heard the woman’s voice rise from the back of the shop, “What do you mean, ‘much too hard’? Next time, you do it!”

  Chapter 53

  Ruso shifted in the chains, wincing as the stiff muscles in his neck and shoulders were forced into movement. He wriggled his fingers to bring the blood back, then wriggled them again to disperse the stabs of pain as the feeling returned. What if the injury was permanent? What use was a surgeon with damaged fingers? What use were any sort of fingers if they cut his head off? He shifted his elbows, shrugged his shoulders up toward his ears, clenched and unclenched his fists, and wondered what time it was.

  Daylight still bloomed around what passed for a window, but from where he sat with his back against the cold wall, it was as distant as the stars. He closed his eyes. There was nothing to do in here but worry and drift into a fitful sleep, and he knew which he preferred.

  Sometime later, as he was floating back to reality, it dawned on him that there were two sandaled feet on the floor in front of him. The pain in his neck and shoulders as he looked up should have jerked him awake, but when he saw who the feet appeared to belong to, he realized this was one of those deceitful, half-coherent dreams that seemed like waking: the sort that the mind sometimes recalled as real even when reason proved they could not be. He blinked. The figure was still there.

  “Valens?” The sound of his own voice startled him. Could a man hear his own voice in his dreams?

  His old friend and colleague looked down at him with an expression of pity. “Gaius.”

  This was definitely wrong: Valens was up on the border with the procurator, and nobody outside the family ever called him Gaius.

  He tried closing his eyes and opening them again. Above him, the light from the window caught lines on the handsome face that Ruso had never noticed before. Valens looked tired and anxious. That was all wrong too.

  Ruso squirmed against the wall and felt the ridges of the stones. If this was not a dream, what was it? A vision? Why a vision of Valens, of all people? Why not a god, or someone useful? Struck by a sudden fear, he said, “Are you dead?”

  “No.”

  This was not entirely reassuring. Valens was alive, and he himself was seeing things.

  The vision spoke again. “I’ve come to try and help you.”

  “Can you take these chains off?”

  It shook its head. “Sorry, old chap. I did ask, but they said no.”

  Ruso supposed that an apparition’s claim to have had a chat with his guards was no more surprising than its initial appearance.

  It crouched in front of him. A pair of bleary dark eyes looked deep into his own as if they were searching for his soul. “Gaius, do you realize—”

  “Why are you calling me Gaius?”

  “Sorry. Ruso. I just thought, since you were a little confused, the family name might—”

  Ruso said, “I know what my name is!” before it struck him that if he was rude to the vision, it might disappear. “Sorry.”

  It brushed away the musty straw with a remarkably realistic swish of a hand and sat on the floor beside him. “You do realize, don’t you, that the way you’ve been behaving lately is rather … odd?”

  “It seemed like the right thing at the time.”

  “Of course. Look, old chap, you probably don’t know this, but your mind has gone.”

  “Has it?”

  “Yes. You’re quite crazy. But don’t worry. These things often pass with the seasons. In the meantime I’ll tell them that you’re not quite yourself at the moment.”

  Ruso closed his eyes and recalled several patients who had seemed to be living in a different reality from everyone else—a reality that, to them, had been utterly reasonable.

  How would you know?

  The vision got to its feet. “I’ll get them to bring you some decent food. How about some fresh air? Shall I recommend to Clarus that they let you out for a walk?”

  Ruso scratched one ear and wondered whether a vision that believed it could hold conversations with the Praetorian prefect was therefore as deluded as he was. “Yes,” he said. It could do no harm.

  “Excellent!” said the vision, with more of Valens’s characteristic cheeriness. “And don’t worry, old chap. We’ll get you sorted out.”

  Instead of vanishing, the vision banged on the door and called, “I’m done!”

  Ruso scrambled to his feet. “It is you! You’re real! What the—Bugger these things!” The chains had jerked him to a halt.

  Valens paused in the doorway. The anxious expression had returned. “Ruso, old chap … who or what did you think you were talking to just now?”

  “I didn’t murder Geminus. And I’m as sane as you are!”

  Valens’s very best reassuring smile would have been more reassuring if Ruso had not seen the circumstances in which he usually used it. “Of course you are, old chap. Or at least, you soon will be.”

  “I’m sane now! I was just half-asleep and I thought—Don’t leave me here! Valens! Come back!”

  But he had gone. Ruso was a lone prisoner in chains shouting at an empty space.

  Chapter 54

  The hammering on the door was louder the second time, which was just as well, because it covered the sound of Lucios shouting, “Dada! Dada gone!” as Victor vanished into the loft. Tilla grabbed the child and swept him up into the air, whispering, “Time to play bears sleeping in the trees!” while Corinna tried to peer through a crack between the planks.

  “Some Roman,” announced Corinna, stepping back. “It’s all right, he’s gone.”

  Tilla wanted to say, What if it is a message for me? but when she opened the door, there was no one there.

  They were about to sit down when someone rattled the back gate and a voice shouted in Latin, “Hello! Anyone in?”

  The sleeping bear came down from the trees faster than he expected. Tilla paused to kiss him on the forehead, then rushed out of the back door, leaned across the gate, and flung her arms around the visitor. “Valens! Oh, Valens, it is good to see a friend!”

  He stepped back, holding her by the shoulders and looking at her. “Tilla, dear girl, you look exhausted.”

  “It is not me who is in trouble, it is—”

  “I know, I know. I’ve just seen him.”

  Tilla turned to introduce him, but Corinna had slipped back into the house.

  Valens said, “They don’t seem awfully welcoming around here. I just went to ask for you at the mansio and the chap couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. Where can we talk?”

  The owner of the bar brought them very watered wine with a drop of honey and some sort of hard, flat cake. He apologized for the lack of choice, but his man had gone out of town in search of supplies: The locusts had stripped everything else last night. When he had gone, Tilla leaned across the table. “You have seen him. How is he?”

  Valens shook his head sadly. “It was a shock to see him in that state, I have to admit. I’ve recommended they improve his diet and let him out for exercise. How long has he been like this?”

  “They locked him up this morning. They won’t let me see him. What will happen?”

  “You mustn’t despair. I’m going to try and talk to some people before I leave, see if we can get him a medical discharge.”

  “You think they will let him out?”

  “They might allow you to take him back to Gaul. He may well improve, you know. These things often burn themselves out.”

  She shook her head. “I know you are trying to offer comfort, and I thank you. But you have been out of the Legion for a long time. The army will not forgive something like this.”

  There was an awkward silence. Both p
icked up the unappetizing cake. Valens ventured a bite. Tilla noticed the scalded-like-a-pig woman and a friend staring at them from across the street. She waved and forced a smile, and they moved on.

  Valens carried on chewing for a while, then pushed the remains of the cake away. “A whole one of those could be fatal.”

  Tilla remembered to ask, “What are you doing here?”

  “The emperor is here, the procurator is the emperor’s man, and I’m the emperor’s man’s doctor. We arrived this morning after a rather hasty journey. The wife would say hello if she knew I was seeing you.”

  So he was still calling her “the wife.” It was as if he might change her at any moment and did not want the bother of remembering a new name. She said, “Please take my greetings to her and the boys.”

  “I have to say,” said Valens, “that finding you here is one bright moment in rather a gruesome few days. I tried to persuade the procurator not to rush down here, but he insisted, even though he’s not well. Politics and friendship, you know. An irresistible force. Now it looks as though we’re going to be going straight back to the border again in the morning.”

  Tilla said, “It is a comfort to see you.”

  Valens nodded. “I was sorry to see poor old Ruso like that. He got quite agitated when I left.”

  “I think perhaps it is my fault,” Tilla confessed.

  “Oh, no! Never. Every marriage has its troubles, you know. If you could blame this sort of thing on the wife, I’d have been driven over the edge years ago. No, it would have happened anyway. He’s lucky he has you to look out for him. But in time, with the right care, I see no reason why he shouldn’t make a complete recovery.”

  Tilla frowned. “He is ill?”

  “Dear girl, hasn’t anyone told you?”

  “No.”

  “I happened to spot him by the gates as we arrived this morning. To be frank, he wasn’t looking good. So I asked around. It seems he started to think he’d been sent to inspect the entire fort. He’s been breaking into buildings and spying on the maintenance crews. Countermanding other men’s orders, making accusations, and … well, they should have kept a closer eye on him last night. But you don’t think he would have spoken to Hadrian like that if he were in his right mind, do you?”