by Ruso
From somewhere behind the man came, ‘Come on, mate, that’s enough!’ to which he hissed, ‘Shut up, I’m dealing with it!’ He turned back to Ruso. ‘We’re not finished yet. It’s no good being soft on ’em. You think he’s scared? This is nothing. If you knew what his lot did to our lads on the pay wagon –’
‘I saw exactly what they did to the lads on the pay wagon,’ said Ruso, not wanting to be reminded of it. He had ridden out with the rescue expedition in the forlorn hope that some of the victims of the ambush would still be able to use medical help.
‘You’d best stay out of this, sir,’ suggested one of the men Ruso had seen before somewhere.
‘He can’t,’ prompted the man holding the other foot. ‘He’s got a native girlfriend.’
Ruso squared his shoulders. ‘My name is Gaius Petreius Ruso, Senior Medical Officer with the Twentieth Legion, and I’m taking that Briton into custody. Lift him back on to the bridge. That’s an order.’
‘We already got him where we want him,’ growled the man.
‘Now,’ said Ruso. At that moment the blare of the trumpet from the fort announced the curfew.
It was never clear whether they dropped the boy on purpose or by accident. One second his arms were dangling above the water, the next there was a scream and a splash, and the thin body began to slide downstream between the rocks while his captors began shouting at him to swim and quarrelling about whose fault it was and who should get him out.
The last thing Ruso wanted to do was haul several none-too-sober men out of the river. Ordering two to fetch help and the rest to stay where they were, he placed one hand on the parapet and vaulted down on to the bank.
The river god was kinder to the boy than the Army had been: his body had wedged against a boulder, and was being held there by the force of the flow. Ruso stepped into the rush of peat-brown water that, even in late July, still carried the cold of northern hills. It was not deep but it was moving swiftly, and he felt the tug against his legs. The only way to reach the boy was to wade out to where he was marooned. Ruso slithered and splashed, trying not to lose his footing on the slippery rocks, occasionally bending to grab at the top of a boulder to keep his balance. Yells of encouragement and advice came from the bridge. Ahead of him, the boy lifted his head and began to move.
‘Stay where you are!’ Ruso shouted over the sound of the water, afraid the child would dislodge himself and be swept further down. There was a channel at least four feet wide between him and the boy. Now he was closer he could see that the river, thwarted in other directions by the boulders, flowed through the gap fast and smooth and deep. A tentative step told him that, as soon as he let go, the force of the water would sweep him off to be battered against the rocks downstream.
He should have told those men to fetch a rope. He turned to call to the others, but they were so busy shouting suggestions, bawling, ‘Man in the river!’ and warning him to be careful that they weren’t listening. The boy called something in British and tried to pull himself up. The only effect was to shift him closer to the deep channel.
‘Don’t move!’ called Ruso, holding up one hand in a ‘stop!’ gesture. He added, ‘I’ll come and get you,’ with more confidence than he felt. He could make his way back to the bank, cross the bridge and try from the other side, but the boy might be swept away in the meantime. He could try to get a grip in a crack in the rock this side and reach across …
It almost ended in disaster. He managed to haul himself back and clung to the nearest boulder, gasping with the effort and the cold, vaguely aware of more cries from the bridge as the boy’s body slid closer to the channel. He dragged himself upright and struggled to unfasten his belt with stiff fingers. It was not the form of rescue he would have chosen, but it was the boy’s only chance. He pulled the belt tight around his wrist, prayed the buckle would hold, gripped the rock behind him again and flung the loose end of the belt towards the boy.
The child managed to grab it on the third attempt. ‘Wrap it round your wrist!’ yelled Ruso, hoping the boy was stronger than he looked and waiting for him to get a good hold with both hands. He was about to shout, ‘Ready?’ when the boy launched himself into the flood and was instantly swept down the gap. Ruso felt the jerk as the belt tightened. The force of the water on the child’s body dragged at his arm. His grip on the rock began to slide, and he felt himself being pulled into the flow.
Suddenly there was a hand clamped around his arm. Someone else was dragging at his tunic, wrenching him back up and out of the power of the water. He felt the blessed scrape of dry rock beneath him.
Miraculously, the child had managed to keep hold. He scrabbled up on to the boulder, then got to his feet and fled across the exposed rocks while Ruso’s rescuers were still congratulating each other and telling him he didn’t want to go in the river by himself like that, sir – what was he thinking?
If they had left him to recover at his own pace, the accident would never have happened. But his rescuers seemed determined to make up for their earlier misdemeanours. Having pulled him to safety, they now decided to form a human chain across the rocks and hustle him to dry land as fast as possible. The moment he attempted to stand on feet numb with cold, the nearest man grabbed him and pushed him towards the bank. The movement pulled Ruso off balance. His foot caught an uneven ledge of rock, bent sideways, and gave way beneath him in an explosion of pain.
3
‘Broken metatarsal?’ suggested Valens, leaning further over his colleague’s misshapen foot to view it from a different angle.
‘I think I felt it go.’ Ruso, whose rescuers had carried him up to the fort hospital as if they were heroes, shifted himself to a more comfortable position. The movement sent fresh waves of pain crashing up the outside of his leg.
‘Interesting. You’ve probably done a lot of other damage as well. What happens if you try to put weight on it?’
‘I don’t want to find out.’
‘Well, you know the drill.’
Ruso sighed. ‘This can’t be happening.’
‘No food tonight, fluid diet till the swelling goes down, and you’ll have to go easy on it for a good six weeks. No wine, of course.’
Ruso eyed the vanishing dimple that had recently been his ankle. ‘Could you try and sound a bit less cheerful about it?’
‘Well, there’s no point in both of us being miserable, is there? Want me to help you hop down to the dressing station?’
‘Who’s on duty?’
Hearing the name, Ruso winced. ‘Bring me the stuff and I’ll do it myself.’
‘Poppy?’ offered Valens.
‘Lots.’ There was no point in bothering with bravery.
Valens returned a few minutes later with a tray bearing a large bowl of cheap wine mixed with oil, and a smaller cup. Reaching for a wad of linen from the shelf, he observed, ‘So tell me. How exactly did you manage to fall in the river and break your foot at the same time?’
Ruso took a draught of bitter poppy from the cup. ‘Long story,’ he explained. ‘But I’ll be making a full report, believe me. There are five men who are going to be very –’ He stopped. ‘Oh, gods. I told Tilla I’d be back in a minute. She won’t know where I am.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Valens, dipping the linen in the bowl. ‘The lovely Tilla. I should have said. She came to the gate a while ago. Your dinner’s gone cold.’ Valens wrung out the compress. ‘And she’s been called out on midwifery duty and she’s not best pleased that some of our boys threw the messenger in the river before he got to her. So you might as well find a bed here tonight, because there’s nobody at home to kiss it better.’
Ruso reached forward and grabbed the compress. ‘Let me do that,’ he insisted, draping it gingerly over the swollen foot and wrapping it around. So that was why the boy had been lurking around the houses at dusk.
‘One more thing,’ said Valens, reaching for a bandage. ‘She left a letter for you.’
Since Tilla could neither read nor write, thi
s seemed unlikely.
‘From your brother,’ explained Valens, nodding towards a sealed writing-tablet behind Ruso on the desk.
The word URGENT scrawled across the outside of the letter suggested that the latest financial crisis at home was even worse than usual. Ruso snapped the twine, flipped open the folded wooden leaves and braced himself to face the details.
To his surprise, the letter said very little. On the inside of one leaf, in his brother’s writing, was the date on which it had been composed: the Kalends of June. On the other, the briefest of messages:
LUCIUS TO GAIUS.
COME HOME, BROTHER.
Ruso frowned over it for a moment, then passed it to Valens. ‘What do you make of that?’
Valens studied the carefully inscribed letters and observed, ‘Your brother is a man of few words.’
‘But what am I supposed to do about them?’
‘Go home, I suppose.’
Ruso grunted. ‘Hardly convenient, is it?’
Valens stepped back to admire his bandaging. ‘It could be arranged,’ he said.
4
‘This is ridiculous,’ growled Ruso, eyeing the cup of milk he had just insisted on pouring for himself and wondering how he was going to carry it across to the bed so he could sit down and enjoy his late breakfast. He had already discovered this morning that, since the lodgings he shared with Tilla were upstairs, the only safe way to reach them was to hook the crutches over one arm and hitch himself upwards on his bottom.
She stepped forward and took the cup. ‘Go and sit.’
Ruso adjusted his grip on the crutches, assessed the distance to the bed and swung across to stand in front of it. Then he hopped and clumped until he had turned around, stuck his bandaged foot out in front of him and collapsed backwards on to the blankets.
‘Gods and fishes!’ he muttered, dropping the crutches on the floor and swivelling to swing his feet up on to the bed. ‘What am I supposed to do for six weeks like this?’
Tilla handed him the cup and retrieved the crutches. ‘Go home.’
‘It’s too far,’ he explained, realizing a Briton would have no concept of that sort of distance. ‘The south of Gaul’s over a thousand miles away, Tilla. Imagine how long it takes to get back down to Deva from here. Then imagine you’ve only done about a tenth of the trip.’
Tilla yawned and sat beside him on the bed with her back propped against the wall. He realized she must have slept even less than he had the previous night. ‘I know how to do adding up,’ she said. ‘What I do not know is why your brother says to come home.’
Ruso retrieved the letter from beneath the pillow and examined the leaves on both sides. The outsides bore nothing beyond the usual to-and-from addresses and the alarming URGENT inked in large letters thickened with several strokes of the pen.
Lucius’ letters usually held either a desperate request for money or a fresh announcement of a happy arrival for him and his wife, Cassiana. Sometimes both. There were times when Ruso had wondered whether the family fortunes – precarious at the best of times – would finally be ruined not by demands to repay his late father’s massive borrowings, but by the need to feed and clothe all his nephews and nieces.
Lucius’ requests for cash were always couched in careful terms, lest they should fall into the wrong hands: the sort of hands whose owner would blab about one creditor to another. He usually gave just enough clues about the latest crisis to spur Ruso into doing something about it. But this message was exceptionally cryptic.
Was the date a code? Was there something significant about the Kalends of June? If so, he could not think what it was. He turned the leaves upside down to see if there was some message concealed in the script that was only visible from the opposite direction. He tried warming the letter over a lamp flame in search of secret ink. He succeeded only in scorching the wood.
‘It’s no good,’ he conceded. ‘I don’t know what it means.’
‘It means,’ said Tilla, ‘Come Home.’
‘I wouldn’t get there before mid-September,’ he pointed out. ‘By the time I wanted to come back I’d be lucky to find a captain willing to take a ship out. I might not get back till the seas open again.’ He lifted his foot in the air. ‘This isn’t going to earn me that much leave.’
‘It is a very big bandage. Valens can tell lies about what is underneath.’
‘But I’ve got patients to see, men to train …’
‘Other doctors can see the patients and train the men. There is not so much for you to do now, and you have a broken leg.’
‘Foot.’
She did not reply. There is not so much for you to do now was one of the rare allusions which either of them had made to the Army’s apparent success in crushing a native rebellion far more ferocious than anyone had expected. The casualty figures had been kept secret, but while Ruso was on duty behind the battlefront she must have seen the wagonloads of Roman wounded arriving back at the fort. More than once during the worst of the fighting she had disappeared for days at a time and returned with sunken eyes and dried blood beneath her fingernails. He had asked no questions. That way, she did not have to pretend she had been away delivering babies and he did not have to pretend he believed her.
As if to reassure him, she said, ‘The baby was a girl. Born at first light. She is very small, but I think she will live.’
‘What did this lot pay you with?’
Tilla’s smile was triumphant. ‘Guess.’
He glanced around the bare little room. Tilla’s skills as a midwife had been less in demand since the start of the rebellion. Most of the sensible locals had fled at the height of the troubles last year, dragging their wide-eyed children by the hand, burdened with cooking pots and blankets and hens in baskets. Those who remained paid her in whatever way they could manage. Eggs and apples were always useful. The first smelly fleece had been bartered for a new pair of boots: the second was still stashed away in a sack under the bed. There were no new offerings on display.
‘It’s not another goat, is it?’
‘No, but I can buy a goat if I want. Look!’ She untied her purse. Shiny bronze coins cascaded on to the bed. ‘All earned by working!’ she added.
He was pleased. Tilla had never fully subscribed to his own view that it was wrong to help oneself to other people’s property, but at least she seemed to have learned to respect it. The money was only small change, but he picked up one of the coins to admire it all the same. Within seconds all thoughts of congratulation had gone. He said, ‘Oh, hell.’
‘No, they are real.’
‘I don’t doubt they’re real.’ He passed her the coin. ‘Look at the back of it. Not Hadrian’s head, the other side.’
‘Is that supposed to be a woman?’
‘It says BRITANNIA. Have you ever seen a coin like that before?’
‘No.’
Neither had he. It was very obviously fresh from the mint, and the only way it could have reached here was on the ambushed wagon.
He cleared his throat. ‘It’s my duty to ask who gave you this money, Tilla.’
There was no need to explain: the news of the stolen pay chest had been impossible to suppress. Finally she said, ‘What if I do not tell you?’
He had to say it. ‘If you refuse to tell me, it will be my duty to report this to HQ.’
A cart with a squeaking wheel was passing outside the window. When the sound had faded down the street she said, ‘I will not tell you.’
‘I never thought you would.’ He reached for the crutches. ‘I’m going to talk to Valens. When I get back, either you or that money will have to be gone. If you’re still here, we’ll start packing to go home.’
5
Ruso stretched out his legs, leaned his back against the rail of the ship and gazed up at a seagull perched on the mast. He felt queasy. The roll of the vessel did not combine well with the smell of the fleece Tilla had insisted on bringing with her, and which she was now contentedly spinning beside h
im in the afternoon sunshine.
How, he wondered, did seagulls keep themselves so clean? Compared with the bird, the white bandage that encased his leg from hip to toe was disgustingly grimy. It was also much bigger than necessary, and Ruso had wondered as it went on whether Valens was going too far. What he wanted was convalescent leave, not an irrevocable medical discharge from the Army. Valens, however, had been confident.
‘Three months to recuperate, two months’ winter leave, that takes you to … some time in December. And don’t worry about leaving us in the lurch: I’ve said I’ll do extra nights if they need the cover.’
Ruso blinked. ‘Really?’ He could only remember one occasion on which Valens had offered to do extra night duty, and that was because he was trying to hide from a fierce centurion with a grudge. ‘Can’t they get one of the new men in?’
Valens tied the end of the bandage and tucked it in. ‘I’m a married man these days. You must remember what it was like.’
‘I try not to.’
‘It wasn’t too bad when it was just her,’ said Valens. ‘But now she’s got the twins.’
‘Well, that’s your fault.’
‘Indeed,’ Valens agreed. ‘But a chap has to sleep sometime, doesn’t he? And it’s not as if she’s on her own with them. That nursemaid cost me a fortune. I’m not the sort of husband who shirks his responsibilities, you know.’
‘So you come to work for a rest?’
‘Just as well, now you’ve gone and let everybody down by dancing about in the river. Did you know your rescuers have all been put on latrine duty for a month? Drunk and disorderly.’
Ruso was about to remark that they had got off lightly when there was a knock at the door.
‘Ah, here’s the chap who’s going to sign for you.’ Valens retrieved a writing-tablet from the desk and handed it to a fresh-faced young doctor who must have arrived with the latest batch of reinforcements. ‘Here you are. Sign in the space at the bottom.’
The man glanced at the impressive bandaging, ran one finger over what had been written on the document and signed without making any attempt to verify it. ‘Sorry I can’t stop to chat,’ he said to Ruso. ‘I have to go and take a leg off. Oh, and thanks for the chair.’