Ruso and the Root of All Evils

by Ruso

Cass was not much better company. She had chattered nervously as the cart first rattled and jolted them away from the farm. She had never been to Arelate. It was a big and beautiful town. The river was said to be huge. This would be an adventure.

  As the sun rose higher, her excitement faded. When they passed a milestone she read ‘Nemausus, eleven miles’ as if it were a mark of loss rather than a sign of progress.

  Tilla reflected that more and more these days she was thinking it might be useful to be able to read. Somewhere amongst the other letters chipped into the tall stone must be the good news of the diminishing distance to Arelate.

  The milestone must have inspired Cass’s sudden ‘We won’t be back tonight, will we?’

  ‘We will find an inn.’ Had Cass only just thought of this? How fast did she imagine a mulecart could make a trip of over twenty miles?

  Cass was chewing her lower lip. ‘What if they wake in the night?’

  ‘Galla will deal with them,’ said Tilla, guessing she was talking about the children.

  ‘I’m their mother.’

  ‘They will manage. They are used to Galla and they are not babies.’

  Cass fell silent again. Tilla leaned back, closed her eyes and tried to pretend that she was still travelling with the Medicus to a peaceful land of blue skies and gentle breezes where she would be welcomed into a new family.

  ‘Lucius will be furious.’

  ‘Lucius will have to learn to treat you better,’ insisted Tilla, secretly disappointed that so far neither the Medicus nor his brother had come after them.

  Cass was saying something about ‘… divorces me?’

  ‘Of course he will not divorce you. He cannot afford a slave to do your work and nobody else would marry him.’

  In the silence that followed, there was plenty of time to wish she had thought about that before she said it.

  Cass said, ‘I hope somebody remembered to collect the eggs.’ When Tilla did not answer she said, ‘What if the slaves eat all the provisions?’

  ‘Then they will go hungry later.’

  ‘We should never have left home.’

  ‘We are doing a good thing,’ Tilla insisted, pushing aside the urge to explain that, if Cass had not turned up at the last minute, she would have abandoned the trip herself and been at the dinner to face the widow and all her money and watch the Medicus trying to make his difficult choice. ‘We will go and find somebody who knows about your brother’s ship.’

  ‘But what if –’

  ‘Most of what if never happens. Pray to Christos for help. Galla says you can do it anywhere.’

  ‘If Galla hadn’t told you about Christos, we wouldn’t be here. When I get back Lucius will have her whipped.’

  Tilla was glad she was not Galla. Somehow, everything was always her fault.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Cass, ‘I can’t pray to Christos. You’ll have to do it. You’re not married.’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Christos’ followers are supposed to obey their husbands.’

  Tilla tried to picture the women who had been at the meeting and wondered if they had all been there with male permission.

  ‘I told my brother Lucius would never let me follow a foreign religion when we’ve spent all that money building Diana’s temple, so it was no good him telling me any more about Christos.’

  The cart jolted in and out of a pothole. Cass pushed back one of the bundles that had slid sideways beneath her. ‘I should have let Lucius build a tomb.’

  ‘You can build a tomb when you go home.’

  ‘I tried to explain to him, but he wouldn’t listen.’

  Tilla yawned and lifted Galla’s hat in the hope that some cool air might circulate around her head. She wished Cass would keep her worries to herself. It had all seemed so straightforward last night, in the enthusiasm of the singing and the cries of Amen, Sister!

  ‘We are doing a good thing,’ she repeated, wishing she was not doing it at all.

  50

  The leather water-bottle thumped against his side as the horse thudded across the burned stubble of the wheat-field, cutting off the corner where the track led up to the main road. Ruso jammed his fluttering hat lower on his head and glanced down to check that he had fastened the safety strap on his knife. He urged the horse to leap the ditch and flung it into a sharp turn to veer past a train of startled pack mules. Ignoring the angry yells of the driver, he dug his heels into the grey flanks and headed along the verge at a gallop.

  He could hear nothing around him: only the rush of air and the thump of hooves. Ahead of him, a flock of sheep scattered at his approach. He yelled an apology to the shepherd – who should have had more sense than to use the road anyway – and urged Severus’ horse on. It responded with a further burst of speed that would have set the stable lad laughing with delight. This was as near as a man could get to flying. At this rate, he might even catch them before they reached Arelate. Whatever transport this Solemnis had to offer, it would not be as fast as his own.

  With luck, all that would be needed was to make Solemnis one very sorry carter and deliver a lecture on why women should never travel with strange men, even in a civilized country. If they were unlucky … Severus’ contact might be in the port. He did not want to dwell on what the man might do to silence two women who were asking the wrong questions.

  Ruso squinted at the sky. It must be past the eighth hour by now. The sun was well over the zenith, and it was appallingly hot. His eyes felt gritty. The kerchief he had tied over his nose was slipping down. He pushed it back into place, wrinkling his nose in a futile attempt to hold it there and finally yanking it down out of the way and swearing at it. He had never intended to hurtle across to Arelate at this speed. As usual, he was having to clear up somebody else’s mess. And as usual, instead of talking things over in a sensible manner, Tilla had decided to make his life far more difficult than it was already. Sometimes he wondered whether she did it on purpose. A one-woman rebellion against Rome.

  Severus’ horse, out of condition from its enforced rest, was already beginning to tire. He would have to pick up a fresh animal halfway – and since he was not on active duty, he would have to pay. In the meantime, he slowed to a canter and swerved to overtake a heavy-goods vehicle, not bothering to wonder what might be under the tarpaulin at the back. Nobody facing a journey of over twenty miles would travel by ox-cart: it was quicker to walk. He was just urging the horse past a panniered donkey when it struck him that Tilla might well be doing what he least expected in order to avoid detection. On the other hand, if he paused to inspect every vehicle he might not catch up with them before the light began to fade and the town gates closed.

  There was no sense in looking over his shoulder, but he did it all the same.

  As he had expected, there was no blonde head poking out from under the receding tarpaulin. Instead, the wagon was being overtaken on both sides. Two more riders were pounding towards him, evidently staging some sort of race.

  The road ahead was clear to the next rise. Fields dotted with the orange roofs of small farms stretched away into the distance on both sides. He wondered if the shepherd had managed to regroup his flock before those two idiots thundered past and scattered it again. As he topped the rise to see more empty road ahead, he could hear the racers’ hoofbeats. He nudged his own horse aside to let them pass.

  Two men with kerchiefs over their faces drew level with him, one urging on a black horse and the other a big roan. Both men looked old enough to know better. The roan was much too close.

  ‘Move over!’ he yelled, just as the roan barged him. Ruso’s horse leaped sideways. A front hoof slipped on the side of the ditch and he was sent lurching over its shoulder. The horse managed to scramble up and Ruso righted himself, wishing he had a cavalry mount and a decent saddle. He was still trying to calm the horse when he realized the men were turning back.

  ‘I’m all right!’ he yelled, holding the animal steady in the middle of the road, we
ll away from the ditch in case it decided to spook again at their approach.

  They were coming too fast. Both shouting. He saw the odd movement of the hand. The flash of metal in the sunlight. For a moment he stared, unable to believe what was happening. To have survived Britannia, only to be attacked by bandits here at home.

  His fingers fumbled with the safety strap. They were almost on him now: the one on the black with knife raised, the other reaching forward, ready to seize the reins of his horse.

  No time for his own knife. He urged the horse towards the gap between them, ready to barge the roan whilst hooking at the knifeman’s arm with the end of his walking-stick. He had to get away from them and go to warn Tilla.

  It would have worked. It would have worked beautifully. In fact it was on the way to working when his own mount stumbled on that front leg. He heard the rider of the roan cry out as the two horses collided. Ruso’s lunge towards the knifeman became a wild wave in mid-air as the grey horse gave way beneath him and they crashed to the ground in a crunching confusion of hooves and tail and elbows and gravel.

  Ruso’s first instinct was to curl up, hands protecting his head. Only when the thrashing about had stopped did the pain start to burn its way through the shock.

  Someone was nudging his shoulder. He wanted to say, don’t just poke the casualty, talk to him! but then he remembered in whose company he had fallen. He lifted one arm – at least that much was working – and found himself staring into the whiskery nostrils of Severus’ horse, which was examining him with an air of puzzled concern.

  He rolled over on to his back. A shadow fell over him and an oddly shaped fist clutching a knife filled the centre of his vision. Beyond it, he managed to make out that the other man had unrolled some sort of document.

  ‘In the name of Senator Gabinius Valerius,’ announced the reader, ‘I order you to come with us. Put it away, Stilo. He’s got nowhere to run.’

  The man backed away. As he sheathed his knife, Ruso saw that someone had done an untidy amputation of the last two fingers. He sat up and began to inspect himself for damage. He said, ‘You’re the investigators.’

  ‘Calvus and Stilo,’ said the knifeman, who must be the one the gatekeeper had described as the muscle. ‘I’m Stilo.’

  Ruso wiped the blood off a scrape on his elbow and decided the rest of him was only bruised. Mercifully he had done no more damage to his foot. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

  ‘If you didn’t know who we was,’ countered Stilo, ‘why was you running away?’

  Ruso unstrapped the bottle that the stable lad had filled for him. Evidently he had not bothered to rinse it: the water tasted disgusting. ‘I wasn’t running away,’ he said. ‘I need to catch up with somebody.’

  ‘A lot of people need to catch up with somebody when we want to talk to them.’

  ‘Get back on your horse and come with us,’ said Calvus, gingerly easing his shoulder backwards and forwards with the opposite hand and wincing as he did so. He was slightly built and several inches shorter than Ruso: a man who might be irritated by his bluff companion but who would need his bulk as backup.

  Ruso stifled his professional curiosity about the state of Calvus’ shoulder and moved on to examining the grey horse.

  He stumbled as a hand shoved him from behind. Stilo said, ‘He said, get back on.’

  Ruso retrieved his stick and urged the horse forward a few paces. Its gait was not dissimilar to his own. He swore quietly. There was no way he was going to catch up with anyone on this animal. ‘I’m trying to get to a friend,’ he said, without much hope. ‘She’s in danger. I need to borrow a horse.’

  The answer was in the looks on their faces. The best he could do was to get home and try and persuade someone – Lollia Saturnina? – to let him borrow a fresh mount. ‘This one’s lame,’ he said, ‘and so am I. It’ll take me hours to walk anywhere.’ He glanced from one to the other of them.

  ‘Get on Stilo’s horse,’ ordered Calvus. ‘The exercise will do him good.’

  The glare that accompanied Stilo’s handing over of the black horse’s reins suggested that Ruso would be sorry for this later.

  51

  Ruso had hoped to leave out parts of the truth. Omission was easier than lying. As he and Calvus rode slowly back along the road with a resentful Stilo leading the lame horse, it seemed that he might get away with it.

  He summarized the circumstances of Severus’ death, adding that Claudia had since confirmed that her husband was not in the best of health.

  ‘Yes, I hear you’ve been to see the widow,’ observed Calvus. ‘Twice.’

  ‘We used to be married,’ said Ruso, noticing the heavy ring on Calvus’ right hand and wondering whether a stone that size was there to add a sharp edge to his punch.

  Calvus said, ‘What was Severus doing at your house?’

  ‘We were both involved in a court case.’

  ‘He was going to wipe you out, and you’re telling me he just dropped by for a chat?’

  Ruso suspected the investigator would not believe that Severus had come to discuss a settlement, and he was right.

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  They were approaching the ox-cart they had overtaken a few minutes before. The driver looked them up and down, noted the lame horse and passed by with the barely concealed superiority of one who had known that too much rushing about never came to any good in the end.

  Ruso said, ‘It’s complicated. There was a falling-out between the women in both families.’

  ‘And Severus let it affect his business decisions?’ It was obvious that Calvus was not convinced.

  ‘Judge for yourself,’ suggested Ruso. ‘You’ve met Claudia.’

  ‘Somehow,’ said Calvus, ‘I don’t see a man like the Senator choosing an agent who’s told what to do by his wife.’

  ‘Severus made some remarks about my sister,’ Ruso explained. ‘Apparently he meant it as a compliment, but my brother took it as an insult, and my stepmother reported it to Claudia, who gave him a very bad time about it. He was angry with my family for stirring up trouble in his marriage, and since – according to him – we owed him money, he decided to make things difficult for us.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Only later on, he realized things had gone too far,’ said Ruso. ‘We’d just done a deal to straighten things out when he was taken ill.’

  ‘We’ll need to talk to whoever witnessed the agreement.’

  ‘There wasn’t anybody,’ explained Ruso. ‘There wasn’t time to get things organized. I was more worried about his state of health.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I know this doesn’t sound very likely.’

  ‘Did I say that?’ asked Calvus.

  ‘You didn’t say that,’ confirmed Stilo across the horse.

  Ruso said, ‘Severus was a bully and a liar. We can’t have been the only people he tried to swindle.’

  ‘The first rule of investigating,’ said Calvus. ‘Never trust a suspect who tries to blame somebody else.’

  ‘I’m trying to help.’

  ‘If Severus went round swindling people,’ put in Stilo, ‘where’d he hide the money? The wife says he didn’t have a bean.’

  ‘All I’m saying is, he might have had other enemies. People with fewer scruples.’

  ‘We’ll bear it in mind,’ said Calvus.

  ‘If we get desperate,’ said Stilo.

  ‘It could be somebody who knew he was coming to see us and who deliberately tried to blame us for his death.’

  ‘Talks a lot, don’t he?’ observed Stilo to his partner. ‘I reckon it was him.’

  ‘Before we jump to conclusions,’ said Calvus, frowning at Stilo across the back of the lame horse, ‘go through again exactly what happened when Severus fell ill.’

  Ruso’s account was as accurate as he could make it. So accurate, indeed, that, as he explained the process by which he had eliminated all the causes he could think of, Stilo began to yawn. ‘So y
ou’re saying he was definitely poisoned, right?’

  Ruso said, ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well was he, or wasn’t he?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything else that would make sense of the symptoms.’

  ‘Is that yes or no?’

  ‘Probably.’

  Stilo sighed. ‘You’re all the same, you medics. It might be this or it might be that, or it might be some other bloody thing altogether. Do you have a special school where they teach you how not to answer questions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Calvus said, ‘What were his last words?’

  ‘Somebody’s poisoned me,’ said Ruso.

  ‘Hah!’ Stilo raised his free hand to the sky as if imploring the gods to listen to this idiot.

  ‘Somebody has poisoned me,’ repeated Calvus slowly, as if he were speaking to a foreigner who was just learning Latin. ‘I’d say that was a clue, doctor, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Hmph,’ put in Stilo. ‘For a minute there I thought we were going to get a straight answer.’

  ‘He might have been wrong.’

  Stilo muttered something that sounded very much like ‘Smartarse.’

  Ruso had a feeling that, had their positions been reversed, he would have felt the same way. The most convincing part of his story was the censored version of Severus’ last words. All the rest – the conveniently unwitnessed offering of a truce, the victim’s sudden collapse in the lone company of a man equipped with medicines and a motive – pointed in entirely the wrong direction.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ said Ruso. ‘If I were going to murder Severus, I’d have found a much cleverer way of doing it. I’d have used a poison that wasn’t so obvious, or I’d have found a way to blame somebody else right from the start.’

  ‘I see,’ said Calvus.

  ‘It can’t be him, boss,’ said Stilo. ‘It weren’t clever enough, see?’

  ‘I see,’ said Calvus again. ‘Tell us how you would have done it, then, doctor.’

  52

  Ruso surveyed the household lined up along the porch in an awkward parody of the welcome he had received only a few days before. This time nobody was looking cheerful. Lucius was striding up and down and muttering to himself despite being ordered to stand still. Arria and the girls looked bewildered, Galla pale and even the nieces and nephews were temporarily overawed by the presence not only of Calvus and Stilo, but of four grim-faced men armed with clubs. Ruso recognized a couple of them as Fuscus’ men. Try as he might, Ruso could not imagine Fuscus had sent them to protect the family of his dear departed friend Publius Petreius.