Ruso and the Root of All Evils

by Ruso

  While Lucius had sent urgent appeals for cash, his wife had softened them with winter woollens and jars of food from home and pictures drawn by the children.

  She stepped back. ‘You look tired. I’ve told the bath-boy to light the fire. Lucius will be home soon. He’s doing some business in town. How are you? We heard about that dreadful rebellion in Britannia. Is that how you hurt your leg?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ confessed Ruso. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing! But is it true they had to send extra troops in?’

  ‘It’s mostly sorted out now,’ he assured her. He was not sure whether he was allowed to reveal that Hadrian had sent in the fresh troops not just as reinforcements, but as replacements for serious losses. ‘I haven’t seen you to congratulate you on, ah …’ He suddenly realized he did not know the name of the dribbling toddler.

  ‘We called him Gaius, after you – didn’t you know? Everyone says he looks just like you.’

  ‘Do they really?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Cass beamed at him, evidently thinking it was some sort of compliment.

  ‘The children seem very … lively.’

  ‘They’re dreadful, aren’t they?’ she agreed, as if it were something to be proud of. ‘But we’re so fortunate. Five healthy children! Every day I give thanks for them. You never know, do you? Polla had a terrible fever a while ago, then little Lucius broke his arm, and last month Sosia was ill – Arria was so cross about the cushions but she couldn’t help it, could she? We tried everything. It was a pity you weren’t here, Gaius.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘They’ll be so glad you’re home. They do miss their Uncle Justinus terribly.’

  ‘Justinus? Is he away somewhere?’

  She stared at him. ‘But Lucius told you, surely?’

  ‘The letter must have got held up. What’s happened?’

  She shook her head. ‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘That’s the worst part. My brother went on a merchant ship from Arelate down to Ostia back in June and …’ Her voice tailed off. ‘The ship never arrived,’ she said. ‘They could be shipwrecked on an island or something, couldn’t they? Waiting to be rescued.’

  Since it was now September, Ruso could not pretend that this was likely.

  ‘If it was pirates …’ Her voice trembled into silence.

  Ruso hoped she was not going to cry. He was never sure what to do with women when they cried.

  She swallowed. ‘We would just like to know.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ The last time he had met Cass’s brother was in the house of Ruso’s former father-in-law, where Justinus was a respected if somewhat put-upon steward. ‘What was he doing at sea?’

  ‘Probus sent him to oversee some sort of business deal. You probably heard about it. The Pride of the South.’ She paused, evidently expecting this would mean something to him.

  Ruso did not want to tell her that ships went down every day. That unless the Pride had been carrying something valuable, or somebody famous, it was unlikely that anyone except her owners and the families of the crew would mourn her loss or even bother to remark upon it.

  ‘We were on a different sea,’ he explained. ‘He’d have been going south. We came down the west coast and across.’

  ‘What about the men on the river barges? Didn’t anybody say anything at all?’

  ‘They might have thought it was bad luck,’ he said, trying to soften the blow of public indifference.

  ‘He was so excited about seeing Rome,’ she said. ‘He had some wine from the Senator’s estate to deliver. He dropped in on the way to Arelate to say goodbye.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Ruso, and meant it. ‘I liked Justinus.’

  She hesitated, as if she was wondering whether to continue. ‘Lucius says I ought to give up hope,’ she said. ‘He says we should build the tomb and call his spirit home and let it rest.’

  Ruso, scenting a marital dispute, said, ‘He’s probably worried about you.’

  ‘He’s right, isn’t he? If we don’t do it …’ She did not need to explain. Her brother’s spirit would be left wandering lost and alone, unable to find peace.

  ‘There really aren’t many pirates out there these days, Cass. If there’s been no word in three months –’

  ‘I know! I know all that. I was going to say yes to having the tomb built, but … oh, now I don’t know what to do!’ She glanced round to make sure the door was closed. ‘Gaius, you know Probus better than any of us. If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it a secret?’

  Ruso hoped his face did not betray his rising sense of foreboding at the mention of his former father-in-law.

  ‘Probus came to see me a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to know whether I was sure my brother was dead.’

  Whatever Ruso had been expecting, it was not this. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. He seemed to be angry about something, but he wouldn’t say what.’

  Ruso refrained from pointing out that, in his experience, Probus usually looked angry about something.

  ‘So I said to him, you were the one who told me the ship was missing in the first place, and all he said was, “Yes.” When I wanted to know why he was asking, whether he’d heard something, he just told me to forget all about it and not say anything to anybody.’

  It certainly seemed odd, not to mention deeply insensitive. ‘Do you want me to talk to him?’

  ‘No! He’ll know I’ve told you. What’s the matter with him, Gaius? Why would he ask a question like that? It was as if he thought Justinus might have run away. So now I don’t know what to do. If we call his spirit to a tomb and he’s still alive somewhere – what would happen to him?’

  Ruso, who had no idea, said nothing.

  ‘I wanted to go into town and ask Probus what he meant, but Lucius says fussing won’t bring my brother back, and if I’m not careful I’ll upset Probus, and then we’ll be in more trouble.’

  Ruso reflected that Lucius was probably right. The familial ties with Probus might be severed, but they still owed him money, and the last thing they needed was a hostile creditor.

  ‘I was hoping you might know something.’

  ‘It’s not unusual for ships to vanish, Cass,’ he said, realizing she had probably never seen an expanse of water bigger than the swimming pool at the town baths in Nemausus. ‘You can’t imagine how vast the seas are if you haven’t seen them. It could have been hit by a freak wave, or gone too close the rocks, or …’ Catching the expression on her face, he realized this speculation was not helpful. ‘There are lots of things, really. Nobody would know until it didn’t turn up at the other end.’

  ‘I tried asking the fish-sellers in town,’ she said. ‘They said perhaps it was sunk by a falling star. They didn’t want to talk to me.’

  ‘I don’t know about the star,’ he said, ‘but I’d imagine people who earn their living on the water don’t want to spend too much time discussing shipwrecks.’

  ‘I don’t want to cause trouble, Gaius. I just want to know what’s happened to my brother. There’s nobody else left to look after him.’

  ‘Of course.’ Ruso was wondering whether he was witnessing the obstinacy of hope or whether there really could be something odd about the disappearance of the Pride of the South when a masculine voice out in the hall bellowed, ‘Gaius! Where are you, Brother?’

  Cass put a hand on Ruso’s arm. ‘Please don’t say anything to him,’ she murmured. ‘He’s cross enough with me already.’ She retreated to the door. Ruso heard a brief exchange in the hallway, and a moment later she was replaced by a paunchy middle-aged man with thinning hair and bags under his eyes. Ruso opened his arms and braced himself.

  8

  The latest hug turned out to be less enthusiastic than the one from his sister-in-law. When they had clung to each other for what Ruso felt was a decent length of time, they held each other at arms’ length. Ruso politely informed the middle-aged man that he was looking well.

  ‘
No, I’m not.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ agreed Ruso, relieved that he had not been the first of them to say it. ‘I got your letter.’

  ‘Gaius.’ Lucius’ breathing was audible, as if the lungs were weighed down with the bulk of the paunch. ‘This is very bad timing.’

  ‘I couldn’t get here any faster. I know you had to be careful, but you might have given me some idea of what the problem was.’

  Lucius glanced behind him and closed the door. ‘How many people know you’re home?’

  ‘How long has this legal business been going on?’

  Lucius smoothed the top of his thinning hair. ‘We could probably keep it quiet. The staff won’t talk. Did you see anyone you knew on the road?’

  Ruso frowned. ‘You didn’t say anything about coming home in secret.’

  Lucius subsided on to the chair that Ruso still thought of as belonging to their father. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do now. Not now that you’ve turned up.’

  Ruso stared at him. ‘But you’re the one who wrote and asked me to come home!’

  The tired eyes that reminded him of his own seemed to be displaying equal bafflement. ‘No, I didn’t. That’s the last thing I would have done.’

  Ruso pondered the remote possibility that the letter had said, DO NOT COME HOME. Surely he could not have misread it? Tilla’s views were of no help since Tilla could barely read her own name. But Valens had interpreted it as COME HOME too. ‘It was in your writing.’

  Lucius shook his head. ‘The only things I’ve written to you about lately are Cass’s brother being drowned, and Marcia’s wretched dowry.’

  ‘That’s not the letter I got.’

  ‘No, you’d probably already left by the time it arrived. Are you sure this COME HOME was addressed to you?’

  ‘Of course I am! And it looked exactly like your writing. You don’t think I’d travel a thousand miles on crutches because of a letter to somebody else, do you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’ The tone was reluctant rather than conciliatory.

  Ruso sat on the trunk, propped his stick against the wall and scowled as it slid sideways out of reach and clattered on to the floor. ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Did you bring this letter with you?’

  ‘I burned it. So if you didn’t send it, who did?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I wish they hadn’t.’

  Ruso shrugged. ‘Well, I’m here now.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lucius cleared his throat. ‘I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. You’re looking well, anyway. How was Britannia?’

  ‘Messy. Is it true someone’s trying to bankrupt us?’

  Lucius leaned back in their father’s chair and folded his arms. ‘If I were to say no,’ he said, ‘and ask you to go straight back to Deva for the good of the family, would you do it?’

  ‘I can’t,’ Ruso pointed out. ‘I had to wangle months of leave to get here.’

  ‘So you can’t go back to the Legion.’ Lucius managed to look even more depressed.

  ‘Arria says somebody’s applied for a seizure order.’

  Lucius let out a long breath. ‘There’s a law somewhere,’ he said, ‘that says you can’t take out a seizure order against someone who’s away from home on public service.’

  Ruso began to grasp the nature of the problem. ‘Does that apply to an ordinary man in the Army?’

  ‘The last thing I would have done, Brother, was to ask you to come home.’

  ‘So it’s true, then? We have a legal problem?’

  ‘We do now,’ said Lucius.

  9

  Finally, Tilla was alone with her headache. The Medicus’ nephews and nieces had been rounded up by their mother. The older girls had grown bored with her and gone about their own business, and the cook, eager to get this stranger out of his kitchen, had handed her a cup of water and suggested that she go and sit in the garden.

  She glanced both ways down the long stone porch that shaded the front of the house. There was no sign of the man whom she called the Medicus, everyone else called Ruso and now his family – confusingly – seemed to know as Gaius. She supposed he was somewhere talking to the brother, finding out at last why they were here.

  She crossed the porch and went down the steps into a garden where roses and lavender grew in beds corralled by little clipped hedges, as if they might otherwise make a dash for freedom.

  The path led under the dappled shade of a long wooden frame that she thought might be called a pergola. The word was one of the many new things she would have to learn here. She already had the word for the insects hiding up amongst the leaves. Cicadas. The Medicus had promised her she would grow to love the song, but so far the terrible grating screech made her feel as though she was having her back teeth sawn off.

  Tilla sank on to a stone bench that looked out over a cracked concrete pond. The water had evaporated long ago, leaving a black flaking coat that might once have been algae. She gazed at a plinth, where a rusted bracket reached for a statue that wasn’t there, and tried not to think how far she was from home. Everything was as the Medicus had described it: the sunshine, the olive grove outside the gates, the tall vines, the winery … but her mind had taken his words and painted its own pictures. In those pictures nothing was quite as big, or as hot, or as foreign. Or as badly maintained.

  The people were not what she had been expecting, either. The fine fleece that had taken much of the journey to spin would stay bundled up in the luggage. She did not want the humiliation of presenting it as a gift and having to watch the stepmother find something polite to say about it.

  While they were travelling she had tried to understand exactly how the Medicus’ family had managed to get itself into such debt, but his attempts to explain how loans worked had only caused more confusion.

  ‘Imagine,’ he had said, ‘that you borrow a cow for a year. You drink the milk every day. When the time comes to give the cow back, you give back the cow, and the calf it’s produced, as thanks for having had the use of it.’

  She had said, ‘What if there is no calf? What if the cow dies?’

  ‘That’s the advantage of money,’ he said, looking as though he thought he was clever. ‘It doesn’t deteriorate.’

  ‘Then what is the problem?’

  He had scratched one ear as he did when he was thinking and admitted that borrowing money could not really be explained in terms of cows. ‘Basically, you have to make the money make more money,’ he said. ‘Instead, Arria and my father chose to spend the money on a temple to Diana and Home Improvements.’

  ‘So it is as if she slaughtered the cow before it calved, ate the meat and boiled the hooves down for glue, and now she has no meat or a calf to give back.’

  He had pondered that for a moment before agreeing that it was near enough.

  Now that she had seen the house, she understood at last what Home Improvements were. Mosaics on the floor. A hall for welcoming guests that was painted with pictures of pale women with skimpy clothes and vacant faces and muscular men leading bulls to be sacrificed. Cupids dancing around the dining room. Then there was the carved head of the Medicus’ father set on top of a lump of marble, and lots of silly little polished tables with spindly legs. What could you do with things like that? You could not milk them or eat them. They would not keep you warm in winter. She could not understand how anyone had the energy to bother, or indeed why.

  The water was cool in her throat. She dipped her fingers into the cup and wiped them across her forehead. Then, since nothing seemed to be moving out here except a few bees, she tipped the rest over her head, unpeeled the tunic that was stuck to her damp back and stretched out along the length of the bench. She put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes. She wished she could close her nose to the smell as easily. The scent of the flowers could not disguise the fact that something seemed to have gone wrong with the drains. Just as the children’s excitement at her arrival could not make up for the shock of realizing that nobody here
knew who she was. In Britannia, she had thought that she was an important part of the Medicus’ life. Now it was plain that, even though she had been in the room with him when he wrote many of his letters home, not one of them had mentioned her.

  Letting one hand trail down, she ran a finger over the parched lichen that had formed on the stone leg of the bench. She found herself picturing the brittle thorns she had seen by the roadside, offering nothing but crops of white snails so maddened by the sun that they climbed up nearer to it to bake themselves under the brilliant sky. She pushed the picture away. It was making her feel hotter. Instead she tried to imagine herself paddling in the willow-fringed shallows of the river at home. It did not help.

  Arria’s insistence that she be led away to be fed and watered had probably been kindly meant. The half-sisters had taken the trouble to show her around the umpteen rooms of the house, dutifully pointing out decoration and glass windows, and she had done her best to think of a new way of admiring each one. She had wanted to ask about the farm: are you worried that the soil is baked so dry? When does it rain? How many cows do you have? What else can you grow apart from grapes and olives? But the girls did not seem interested in the farm. When they were not showing off the house they seemed to do nothing but talk about clothes and boys and get in the way of the staff.

  Tilla was reflecting that at least the Medicus had found time to warn her about them, if not the other way around, when she felt a painful jab in her ribs and opened her eyes to see those same half-sisters standing over her.

  ‘She’s awake!’ exclaimed Marcia, who had no right to be surprised since she was the one who had just poked her.

  Tilla blinked as her eyes adjusted again to the glare filtering through the leaves.

  ‘Good news,’ announced Marcia. ‘Mother says you can chaperone us into town tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s not our turn for the tutor tomorrow,’ said Flora, the younger of the two. Then, as if Tilla might not know what a tutor was, she added, ‘In our family you have to learn poetry, even if you’re a girl. And music.’