by Ruth Downie
"You wouldn't!"
"Only with the deepest reluctance, I assure you."
One of the candles dimmed and drowned in a pool of wax. Ruso wondered if Valens had gone to bed yet. He took a deep breath. "If I keep quiet now," he said, "I'll be in your hands. I'll never know when you might decide to talk."
"Nor I you," Priscus pointed out.
"Is that any way to live?"
"On the other hand," said Priscus, "as I suggested, we could extend the terms of the loan. I can arrange to mislay the guarantee document.
So you can sell your slave whenever you like."
There was a movement. Before Ruso realized what was happening, Tilla had put one hand to her throat and snapped the twine that held the poison around her neck.
"Stop!" he urged, lunging toward her and freezing a step away as she put the package to her lips once more. "Tilla. Please."
"Daphne is safe," said Tilla, looking first at Ruso and then at Priscus.
"Now one of you will sell me. For greed, or for debt."
He did not dare to move. She could slip the acorn into her mouth and crush it in an instant if he tried to snatch it from her. "Please, Tilla, don't take whatever it is you've got there."
Those eyes were looking into his. The eyes that had first looked at him, unseeing, as she was being dragged down a back street by the greasy Claudius Innocens. "Daphne does not need me," she said. "Why should I not take it?"
And suddenly, clear and so obvious he could not understand how he had overlooked it, he knew why. "Tilla, listen. Do you trust me?"
The poison was held steady. "You take me in. You mend my arm," she said.
"Yes. You see?"
"So you can sell me for money."
"No! I had no idea…" He was about to say, "I had no idea you would turn out to be so valuable," but that was more truthful than helpful. He closed his eyes and prayed for the sort of persuasive powers the gods gave to other men. Men like Valens. When he opened them, no inspiration came. In desperation he whispered, "You must trust me." Then he turned back to Priscus. "I won't keep silent," he said. "This has got to stop."
Priscus frowned. "I'm offering you your precious slave back, Ruso. Surely you can't be thinking of sacrificing your family to prove a point about a couple of dead whores? There are hundreds of them! You said it yourself: Anyone can buy a girl in a back street."
"Anyone can," said Ruso, "but once you have, you're responsible for her." Without looking, he stretched one hand back toward Tilla, palm open. "Give me the poison, Tilla."
The hand remained empty in the air.
A muscle began to twitch in Priscus's cheek. "You're not seeing things clearly, Ruso," he said. "Think about it overnight. We'll discuss it in the morning."
"There's nothing to discuss."
"Ruso, I am the hospital administrator. I have served with the legion for fifteen years. You are a visiting medic with a record of damaging hospital property, a reputation for lateness, and a known penchant for hanging around bars with loose women. Which of us will be believed?"
"I don't know," said Ruso. "We'll have to see. Give me the poison, Tilla." A long streak of muscle in his arm was beginning to ache, and still his hand remained empty.
Priscus was watching Tilla. The wolfish smile began to spread across his face again. "Have you ever seen a slave market, Tilla? Rows of bodies chained up to be inspected and auctioned to the highest bidder. Of course he wants you to live. I imagine you will fetch quite a price."
"Don't listen to him, Tilla. Give it to me." Ruso, not daring to turn, tried not to think about what would happen to her, and to Lucius and the rest of the family, if she did not do as she was told. But then, when had Tilla ever done as she was told?
"She's grown fond of you, Ruso," said Priscus. "She doesn't want you to sell her to a stranger. She would rather die. You need to realize that the locals have no fear of death. That's why we have so much trouble with them. They would rather go to the next world than live dishonored in this one."
"I think they may have a point."
"You see, Tilla? Even your medicus thinks it is shameful to live without honor. Just one little bite, and you can be free."
"Tilla, please! Trust me."
"The two of us can come to an understanding, Ruso." The twitch in Priscus's cheek had begun again. "For the sake of the medical service."
Ruso felt something touch the palm of his hand. His fingers closed over three smooth warm shapes.
"It's your duty to support me, Ruso!" cried Priscus. "They were just slaves! They were of no importance!"
Ruso took Tilla by the arm and helped her to her feet. When he turned back, Priscus was clutching a kitchen knife. Ruso backed away, cursing his carelessness and snatching at the empty space where his own weapon should have been. "Stay back, Tilla!"
Instead, Tilla pushed him out of the way and stepped forward, her good arm pointed toward Priscus. In her hand was Ruso's knife, still stained with the blood of the birth.
"Careful, Priscus," Ruso warned, suddenly inspired. "Her tribe train all their left-handed people to be warriors."
"I'll have you arrested and sold!" Priscus shouted at Tilla. He waved the kitchen knife at Ruso. "He signed the documents!"
"You could do that," agreed Ruso, moving toward the foot of the bloodstained bed, "but it wouldn't keep me quiet, would it?"
He opened his hand and placed the poison on the bedcovers. Still defended by Tilla, he made for the door. "Perhaps you're the one who needs to think about it overnight, Priscus," he said. "Shut the door behind us, will you, Tilla?"
77
Ruso, hunched in his room with his spare cloak around his shoulders and his feet warmed by a sleeping dog, reached for another tablet of the Concise Guide. He flipped it open and squinted at the lettering in the lamplight. Then he breathed on the wax to warm it and ran the flattened end of the stylus across the sheet to wipe away the writing he had spent so many hopeful hours composing.
Stacked at a safe distance from the lamp were the final plans of the Concise Guide and a couple of tablets full of notes. These were the only parts he intended to keep. The rest was being finally and irrevocably scrapped. He was never going to finish it: he realized that now. Even if he had not been as tired as he was-and it had taken a lot of night duty to pacify Valens for being left alone on payday-he knew he was not blessed with the powers of concentration that a real author needed. A real author would not have sat for hours in front of an uncompleted work, pondering the answers to irrelevant questions like what had happened to his former servant and whether she was safe. Wondering if she might think of him occasionally. Wondering whether he would ever find out where she was. Wondering whether, if he had been more insistent, she would have stayed. And if she had stayed, what might have happened.
Ruso picked at the twine tying the two leaves of the next tablet, tugged at the end, and scowled as it tightened into a knot. He had managed without Tilla before she came. He would manage without her now that she was gone. In time-and it was obviously going to take longer than the thirty days he had so far been without her-she would become no more than an interesting memory. In time he would stop feeling a fool for having offered her a choice in the hope that she might want to stay Perhaps in time he would forget the whole business. Perhaps in time he would even be able to walk the streets of Deva without feeling tainted by the human misery that he now knew lay behind the entertainment of the legion he served.
He glanced across at the damp stain that had blossomed beneath his bedroom window. Of course she wouldn't have wanted to stay. Even Valens would have had trouble enticing a woman to stay in this moldering excuse for a home. Ruso, the man who had considered selling Tilla for a profit, had not stood a chance. No wonder the last he had heard of her was a message saying she had gone north and taken Phryne with her.
He sliced the tip of his knife through the knot and breathed warmth onto the next sheet. The stylus scraped across the surface, filling the scratches and catch
ing up the misted droplets where his breath had condensed on the cold wax. His careful thoughts on "where a broken bone is suspected" sank into the past.
He had signed the death warrant of the Concise Guide three weeks ago, when the camp prefect had called him and Valens in separately for "a chat." The chat had not been a cozy experience. Evidently the camp prefect knew more than Ruso would have wished about his performance since joining the Twentieth. There was nothing to be gained by explaining that he was normally very reliable and that the downhill slide was the result of his colleague eating a dish of bad oysters. When the prefect had said, "And if you were in charge of the medical service, what would you change?" he had come up with the brightest idea he could think of at the time, which was that practical first-aid training for every man in the unit would mean faster treatment of injuries, less time off sick, and less pressure on the hospital.
The chief medical officer had been appointed the following day. He was a Greek medic from the Second Augusta, based farther south. He was generally agreed to possess connections, competence, and no charm whatsoever. Unfortunately, though, Ruso's bright idea had not died with his ambitions. The prefect passed it on to the new CMO, who congratulated Ruso on his initiative and gave him the job of organizing the training. Since no legionary would pay for something the army would give him for free, Ruso found himself organizing the destruction of the market for his own work.
Valens's response to being overlooked was to announce that he was glad to be able to carry on practicing real medicine, instead of being mired in administration like the CMO. Apparently the second spear's daughter was very impressed with his devotion to his calling. Ruso was impressed too: not with Valens's devotion but with his ability to weave a useful lie in with the truth. The new man had indeed taken over the reins at a difficult time, following the suicide of the hospital administrator.
It was a month since Priscus's manservant had gone to wake him and found him dead in his bed. A doctor was called. According to Valens, the sight of the administrator's ghastly grimace of pain beneath his beautifully combed hair was the stuff of nightmares. The note on the bedside table had given typically detailed instructions for his funeral-Priscus was an administrator to the last-but no reason for the taking of his own life. The second spear, charged with investigating both this death and a murder on the same night in the adjoining bar, dismissed Ruso's suggestion that the two were connected with, "You again! I suppose you're going to tell me you saw him do it?"
"No, sir."
"Then don't come bothering me with any more of this rubbish. The pen-pusher from the hospital killed himself for reasons I know but you needn't, and from what I hear, the doorman was a nasty piece of work who could cheerfully have been knifed by a couple dozen suspects. And since the woman who owns the place has run off, it's pretty bloody obvious which one of them did it."
"Sir, with respect-"
But the look on the face of the second spear told Ruso that respect was not required. What was required was to shut up, go away, and stop being a nuisance.
It occurred to Ruso that only he, Tilla, and possibly Merula would ever know the real story behind Priscus's suicide. Ruso had been ignored, Tilla had gone away, and Merula, wherever she was, was certainly not going to say anything that would reveal her own failure to protect the Roman citizen whom they had all known as Saufeia. As for Asellina, the slave put to death by her owner for having a fit of the giggles-Ruso tried to find something comforting to say to Decimus, and failed.
In the absence of fact, speculation was both rife and confident. Even Albanus could not resist hinting to Ruso that irregularities had been found in the hospital accounts and in the Aesculapian Thanksgiving Fund. "And when you hear what's in his will, sir, you'll see what I mean."
At Priscus's request the funeral had been attended by all the hospital staff. As instructed, a clerk read the will to the assembled company. The wish that his manservant be granted his freedom was of scant interest to the mourners. The desire that all his property be sold for the benefit of the Aesculapian fund, however, caused raised eyebrows and the exchange of more than one knowing glance. Ruso caught Albanus looking at him before both resumed a dutifully funereal expression. The camp prefect, who was turning out to be a more perceptive man than Ruso had imagined, described Priscus in his funeral oration as "an outstanding administrator and a man of many contradictions."
To Ruso's intense relief, the money loaned to Stichus had been repaid shortly after Stichus and Chloe reappeared from wherever they had been hiding. He had waited in vain, though, for a demand to pay it back to the Aesculapian fund. Finally his conscience sent him to see the unfortunate clerk who had been given the task of wrestling Priscus's outstanding administration into a shape presentable to the imperial auditors.
The man hunched over onto one elbow while he ran a chewed fingertip down the accounts. Finally the finger paused.
"You did have a loan," he agreed. "It was paid back on the twelfth before the Kalends of October."
"No, that's not right."
"Well, that's what it says."
"There must be some sort of mix-up."
The man sighed, swiveled the record around, and slid it across the desk, the finger pointing to an entry in Priscus's precisely-spaced hand.
"Look."
Ruso read it twice. The meaning was unmistakable. About the same time as the administrator had persuaded him to sign over Tilla as guarantee, Ruso's loan had been repaid in full. There was no mention of a slave in the fund records. The only explanation Ruso could think of was that Priscus had chosen to take over the debt himself. If Ruso failed to pay up, Priscus would take Tilla for his own purposes-and as he must have guessed, when he tired of her she would still be worth far more than the loan had cost. But if the loan had been paid, Priscus would merely have broken even… Ruso paused. He had never been able to settle the business of the fire in his own mind, nor that accident under the bathhouse scaffolding. But now that he thought about it, the fire had happened just after he had signed the loan guarantee. Priscus had been in the hospital that night and could have slipped out to push something burning through the shutters of the bedroom window. He had not been on the building site, but he had been a man of wide influence. Perhaps Ruso would go and have a chat about him with Secundus from the century of Gallus. Because, of course, if Ruso had burned to death or had his skull split by the trowel, he would never have paid and Priscus would have had his signature on the document handing over Tilla… A document that he had not bothered to read before signing it. Had he signed Tilla over to the fund itself, or to its administrator?
"Satisfied?"
"Mm." Ruso scratched his ear. "I suppose," he said, "as all Priscus's money was bequeathed to the fund, I'm morally obliged to consider paying it myself anyway."
The man looked horrified. "You can't do that! I've only just got it to balance. You'll mess up the whole system."
So instead, he had sent the money to another good cause: a family in southern Gaul.
Ruso wiped out the final line of "in cases of fever" and reflected that truth might be an honorable concept, but very few men actually wanted to hear it. And of those who did, some would regret having asked. He leaned back in his chair and eyed the pile of tablets waiting to be erased. Months of work. Ahead of him, several tedious and penny-pinching hours saving the cost of tablets he would never need again because he was not going to write a book. Ever. He reached forward, scooped them up, pulled his feet from under the dog, and strode into the kitchen.
The embers in the kitchen hearth were still glowing. The first tablets were beginning to smoke as he threw the last one on. A yellow flame popped up through a gap, wavered, and grew tall.
The Concise Guide was illuminating the kitchen with a merry blaze when the main door scraped open and Valens called, "Darling! I'm home!" before appearing in the kitchen doorway and giving an exaggerated sniff. "What's that you're burning?"
"Just some rubbish I didn't need."
<
br /> "Well, burn some more and perhaps we'll be rehoused sooner than we thought." Valens, his ambition for the CMO's house thwarted, was now eagerly trying to engage better lodgings. He bent to peer at the contents of the fire. "That reminds me. I was supposed to bring you a letter."
Ruso reached out his hands to warm them over his disappearing masterpiece. "From?"
"Londinium. That chap you sent to get his cataracts looked at. Albanus gave it to me and I left it in the surgery. Big handwriting. Did it himself, apparently. They're naming their son after you. The worst eye's been done and it seems to have worked."
"Good."
"They'll discharge him anyway, you know. The sight will never be up to much."
"I know," said Ruso, recalling the battle with Priscus about the cost of the operation. The administrator had been right, but for all the wrong reasons.
Valens lifted the lid of the bread bin.
"It's empty," said Ruso, reaching for the poker to prod at the settling flames.
Valens lowered the lid with a disappointed sigh. "I can't eat out, I'm on call. I'll have to wander back to the kitchen and see what I can scrounge up. We're going to have to do something about another slave, Ruso."
"Yes," agreed Ruso, not adding that they had agreed this more than once, but neither of them had done anything about it. They needed a slave to go and find them a slave.
"Oh, and there was another message. Apparently Albanus thinks I've become his assistant. He said to tell you something about a girl being home safe."
Ruso stopped. "Tilla?"
Valens looked pained. "I would have remembered if it was the lovely Tilla, Ruso, whom you so rashly allowed to abandon us with an empty bread bin. No. This is another of your many women. Let me think
… something Greek."
"Phryne?"
"That's it. Phryne."
"Who brought the message?"
Valens shrugged. "Some urchin brought it to the gate, apparently."
The poker clattered back on the hearth. Ruso snatched up his cloak from the chair where he had thrown it. "I've got to go out."