by Ruso
Onion-breath was slumped beneath one of the tables. He was not moving. Tilla stared at him. Was that it? Was that how easy it was?
A voice was saying, ‘Are you all right, miss?’
She leaned back against the wall, waiting for her heart to stop thudding.
‘Miss?’
She knocked the hand away from her arm, then realized it was meant in friendship. ‘Sorry,’ she said to a curly-haired youth she vaguely recognized. She was aware of a strong smell of horse as he took the bloodied knife from her hand.
The second rescuer was still sprawled along the length of the door, largely because Cass was on top of him, wiping blood off his chin with her skirt and crying, ‘Lucius! Oh, Lucius, my love, where are you hurt?’
Tilla rubbed her eyes in confusion. What was Lucius doing here? And was that the Medicus’ stable lad?
Lucius was not so badly hurt that he could not cling to his wife and gasp, ‘Cass! When we saw that thief running down the street with your bag I thought –’
‘Oh, my darling, you’re so brave!’
The stable lad looked at the reunited couple, then at Tilla. ‘Master Lucius knocked the thief down and took your bags back, miss. Then he made him tell us where he got them. I don’t know if everything’s in them.’
Tilla moved one hand to indicate the body of Onion-breath. The lad stepped across the fallen door and bent to peer at him.
Lucius lifted his head and noticed Onion-breath for the first time. ‘What happened to him?’
‘It is the sort of thing that happens in a place like this,’ said Cass, suddenly decisive. She got to her feet and took the knife from the stable lad. ‘None of us saw anything.’
Tilla was still staring at the body, vaguely aware of Cass bustling about with water and a cloth. The stable lad touched her arm. ‘We ought to go, miss’ he murmured.
Tilla looked up. Lucius seemed to be suffering from no more than a bitten lip. His wife had a red mark on her cheek that was already beginning to swell. ‘That will teach you,’ Lucius announced to Onion-breath, ‘to mistreat the wife of an honest farmer.’
‘Yes,’ said Cass. She handed Tilla the knife, now clean, and picked up the striped bag that the stable lad had retrieved. ‘I would like to go home now, please, husband.’
They stepped out into the narrow street. Apart from a long rope and a stray dog, it was empty. Evidently the ropemakers had decided not to see anything either.
68
Arria paused on her way across to the bath-house and informed Ruso that there was no sign of poor Lucius coming back from Arelate. No, there was no word of Cassiana or That Girl either. ‘The staff keep asking me to decide things. Why don’t they know how to do it themselves? What’s the point of buying slaves if we have to do all the work? As if I don’t have enough to do!’
Ruso, preoccupied, let the wave of complaint wash over him and only surfaced to hear ‘… and join us in the baths. All the young people are there. The children have hardly seen you since you’ve been home.’
‘I need to go and check on the farm staff,’ he said, suspecting it was Arria rather than the children who wanted some adult company. ‘Then I’ve got to get ready for the games tomorrow.’ He ran his fingers over the soft leather of his purse, feeling the circle of the iron ring inside. ‘Could you tell Marcia to come and find me as soon as she’s free?’
The mindless rhythm of the iron blade sliding along the sharpening-stone usually soothed whatever agitation Ruso might be feeling, but this afternoon it had not had time to work its magic when there was a knock on the study door. He laid the scalpel back in the linen roll where he now kept his instruments and hid them behind the desk. Then he retrieved the ring from his purse and called, ‘Come in!’
Marcia closed the door behind her and leaned back against it. ‘Did you give him my letter?’
Ruso nodded, trying not to stare at the rags tied around the curls in his sister’s damp hair, which gave her the odd appearance of a cavalry horse being prepared for parade.
‘Did he tell you it was respectable?’
‘Yes.’
She attempted a smile as she said, ‘I knew you’d be too stuffy to read it!’ but he saw the way her fingers were twisted around each other.
‘He looks in good shape,’ he told her. ‘He’s very confident. That’s half the battle.’
Marcia seemed to find that more reassuring than she would have done had she realized how little her brother really knew about gladiators.
‘They’ll be having the grand dinner tonight,’ she said. ‘They do that, you know. Before the games.’
‘I know.’
‘And then tomorrow there’ll be the sacrifices to Jupiter, and he’ll be in the procession.’ There was no need for her to explain what came next.
‘He didn’t have time to write a reply,’ he said, holding out the ring, ‘but he asked me to give you this.’
She took it. Instead of slipping it on to her finger she turned it around, examining it. ‘I have been thinking,’ she said. ‘If he is not dead, but horribly mutilated, what will happen?’
‘I’ll do my best. Men often recover far better than you expect.’
‘I mean, what shall I do? With a cripple?’
He could not answer that.
She gave a sudden howl of grief, ran forward and flung her arms around him. ‘Oh, Gaius!’ she sobbed, her ragtied head pressing hard against his chest. ‘I can’t bear it, I really can’t!’
69
Lucius had hardly spoken to Tilla from the moment he had burst into the bar until they had turned the cart off the road to settle here under the trees for the night. She knew that he blamed her for his wife’s sudden rebellion. When she had said she would sleep under the cart beside the stable lad there had been no offer of a more comfortable night with Cass up under the leather canopy.
Rolled in their cloaks on the hard ground, Tilla and the stable lad both seemed to be pretending that the other was not just two feet away in the darkness. Inside the black bulk of the cart above them, Cass was asking Lucius about the children. Had Sosia’s tooth come out yet? Did Publius eat his dinner? Had they gone to bed without a fuss? When they asked where she was, what had he told them? Had they been upset?
Listening to the replies, Tilla felt sadness weighing down on top of night-time chill and exhaustion. Cass and Lucius had a home to go to, and a family waiting for them. Tilla was no longer even sure that her family were waiting for her in the next world. It seemed that heaven, like God, was everywhere, but not everyone was allowed to go to it. None of her people had worshipped Christos. Perhaps they had been rejected at the gates, like soldiers who did not know the password.
Even Britannia was not home. By now someone else would be renting that little upstairs room outside the fort. Some other soldier’s woman, perhaps. Someone who would never be part of the Army but who was no longer part of her own people either. Someone to whom marriage did not seem important, but who might one day find herself desperate for a welcome amongst the family of a man who was not her husband.
Lucius had already told them about the surprise arrival of the investigators as they had driven out of Arelate. He was now giving Cass a repeat account of exactly what they had said to him and what he had said back. Lucius’ part in the story was getting bigger every time he told it. She caught the sound of a yawn. Cass must be weary after all that lying awake worrying about spiders, but she was still loyally pressing her husband with questions as if he were the cleverest, bravest and most interesting man in the world. And then what happened? And what did you do? No, really? So what do you think will happen about the dogbane?
Lucius moved on to describing his trials during his search for them in Arelate, and how he had visited all five of the marine shipping offices, ‘but nobody could remember seeing you’. Tilla could hear the accusation in his voice. She saw now that she had gone about everything in the wrong way. She did not understand how things worked here. She had never even heard of
marine shipping offices. No wonder she had failed. They had found neither the mysterious Ponticus that Lucius had come to warn them about nor any real trace of the ghostly Captain Copreus.
She was lucky they had not been pursued for knifing Onion-breath in the bar. She supposed she would have to tell the Medicus about that before one of the others did. It was not the sort of thing a Roman looked for in a woman. She was willing to bet that the widow next door had never killed a man in a bar fight. Even the old wife had used poison, so that she could pretend she hadn’t done it and the Medicus could imagine that he believed her.
Tilla trapped the far end of the cloak between her feet and tugged it down. She wondered what the Medicus had said to the investigators. She saw now what a terrible mistake this trip had been. She should have stayed back at the farm, loyally supporting him as if she thought he too was the cleverest, bravest and most interesting man in the world. That was what Roman men seemed to want. Instead, afraid of looking a fool over dinner and convinced she could do something about Cass’s brother when everyone else had failed, she had run away.
Tilla yawned and shifted the bag that she had folded into a lumpy pillow. The Medicus had once asked her to marry him. She had refused. He would not ask again now.
Lucius and Cass were still talking softly as her jumbled thoughts gradually settled into stillness. For a brief moment she was aware that something important had just drifted past her. It was the sort of unexpected clarity that sometimes lit the mind in the middle of the night: an understanding usually followed by the thought, I must remember that in the morning, but already when she tried to catch it, it was gone.
70
The morning light was barely outlining the shutters when Ruso opened his eyes and remembered two things: firstly that Tilla was not here and secondly that this was the day of the games, and he had not yet given Tertius’ money to the aunt. Since he could hardly stroll on to Lollia’s property without greeting her, he supposed that would mean yet another meeting. Arria would be proud of him.
Later, watching the early sun gild Lollia’s hair as she took the two coins from him to give to Tertius’ aunt, he wondered where that same sun would find Tilla and Cass this morning. He had already spoken to the household gods on their behalf. Since the gods could not be relied upon to act unaided, as soon as he had discharged his duties at the amphitheatre, he was going to hire a decent horse and ride to Arelate.
Making his way back across the olive grove in search of breakfast, it occurred to him that, until recently, if he had ever felt in the mood to marry again, he would have been searching for someone exactly like Lollia Saturnina. Now, distracted by worries about Tilla, he could not recall a single word of what she had just said to him.
71
They were on the barge, and he was telling her she must not get her words muddled up. Calvus and Stilvicus. Calpreo and Ponto. Repeat after me. Pons, Pontis, Ponticorum, Ponticuli, Ponticissimissimus. You must learn to speak Latin properly in a peaceful country, Tilla!
The widow who had lamed his horse was catching up with him now, leaping over the rows of amphorae with her hair streaming out behind her. Tilla tried to follow, but her feet were mired in the grape juice, and as soon as she pulled one free she remembered the other one and found it was stuck again. She knew she should pray for help but she could not remember the right words in Latin, and then the drowned ship’s captain who was lying in the corner of the winery woke up, pointing at the knife in his chest with two fingers and laughing. With a huge effort, she leaped out of the trough, fled across the winery, crashed her forehead into the beam of the winepress and found herself lying on the ground underneath a big wooden box, stunned and terrified.
A familiar voice said, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ She tried to remember where she had heard it before.
‘You forgot where you were,’ said the stable lad. ‘There’s no room to sit up under here. Is your head all right?’
She ran a hand over her forehead and decided it was. Then she lay back beneath the cart and allowed her mind to poke at the edges of the fear, proving to herself that it could not rise and swallow her. It had been a dream: a confusion of all the things that had happened to her. She was getting everything and everybody mixed up, especially the nasty men. Lucius had told them how one of the investigators had frightened the children by waving the stumps of his fingers in their faces. The other one … had nothing to do with it. The other one was some Onion-breathed sailor who thought it was funny to terrify innocent women and who had lived to regret it, but not for long.
She saw again the twin fingers of Onion-breath stabbing towards her eyes in that horrible bar. His fingers had not been missing, just tucked away in the palm of his left hand when he had pretended to be Copreus …
She narrowly missed banging her head on the cart again.
‘Lucius, wake up! How many fingers does this investigator man not have?’
‘Uh?’
Cass’s sleepy voice repeated the question.
Lucius grunted, ‘Two.’
‘Which hand?’
‘What’s for breakfast?’
‘Close your eyes,’ insisted Tilla, leaning over the side of the cart so he could see her upside down. ‘See him in your mind. Which hand?’
Lucius yawned. She ducked out of range as he stretched his arms into the early-morning air.
‘Think!’ she urged.
Cass, seeing the expression on Tilla’s face, said, ‘This might be important, husband.’
‘Um … right.’
‘Tell me what else he looks like. And the other one.’
Lucius gave a grunt of protest, then slowly described the heavy build and the cropped hair and the tattoos.
Tilla recalled the description they had been given of Ponticus by the grim-faced Phoebe. ‘Is the other one short, about thirty years old, with a clever face and he wears a ring with a red stone?’
Lucius frowned. ‘If you already know, why are you waking me up?’
She said, ‘Calvus and Stilo. Ponticus and Copreus. They are not drowned, Cass! Lucius has met them at the farm, and the Medicus is back in Nemausus asking questions about the things they have done.’
‘Holy gods,’ said Lucius, pushing strands of hair out of his eyes and sitting up. At last he seemed to have understood. ‘Wake up, wife. We need to get back and warn Gaius.’
72
The youth in the usher’s tunic stepped out in front of them. ‘Ladies only up here, sir!’
Ruso fixed him with a glare that suggested if he did not get out of the way, he would shortly find himself tumbling down the several flights of steps that the remnant of the Petreius family had just toiled up. ‘I’m escorting these ladies to their seats,’ he growled.
The youth glanced both ways along the corridor. Failing to spot any other officials amongst the spectators clambering around the stone labyrinth of the amphitheatre, he stepped smartly aside with ‘Of course, sir!’ as if this had been his intention all along.
The crush of people thinned as they climbed the final steps. Eventually the four of them stood blinking in the morning sun, staring out across the vast oval whose circumference was alive with the hubbub of spectators settling in for a day’s entertainment.
Arria glanced up at the canopy stretched out above the curving rows of benches. ‘Well, at least we shall be in the shade.’
‘I told you,’ said Flora. ‘It said on the notices. Shades will be provided.’
‘We’ll sit down here,’ announced Marcia, starting to pick her way along the front row before anyone could argue.
Arria called after her, ‘We’d be more private higher up, dear!’
‘I want to see!’
Arria pursed her lips and turned to Ruso as if to say, what can I do with her?
Marcia settled herself next to an aisle on the front tier of seats and flung the green stole sideways as far as it would reach to prevent any other hopefuls sitting too close before her family caught up. Ruso, who found the
narrow space between the benches and the parapet no easier to negotiate than the stairs, edged along through the gap and finally unslung the sack of supplies from his shoulder. Arria busied herself pulling out the contents. Marcia leaned her elbows on the parapet and stared down at the small figures of the slaves raking the arena, as if glaring at an expanse of sand dotted with bushes in pots – presumably the forest for the morning’s wild animal hunts – would give her some clue about how events would unfold later in the day.
‘I don’t know why we have to sit up here,’ she grumbled. ‘We can’t see a thing.’
Flora grabbed a cushion from the bag and knelt on it, scanning the tiers of seats above them to see if she recognized any of the other females edging along the rows and snatching up their skirts to scale the stone steps.
‘Would you like a cushion, dear?’
When Marcia did not reply, Arria leaned around Flora and tapped her on the knee. ‘Do take one, dear, the seats are very hard.’
Marcia snatched the cushion with an ‘Ohh!’ of exasperation and slapped it down on the seat as if she were swatting a wasp.
Ruso removed the food basket and two leather-covered water-bottles from the sack. He was relieved to see that neither was the one that had belonged to Severus. ‘Anybody want a drink?’
‘I don’t need a drink!’
‘Marcia, please!’ said Arria. ‘There’s no need to be rude.’
‘I want some,’ said Flora, seizing one of the bottles and ignoring her mother’s plea to use a cup.
‘I’ll come and find you if I can,’ promised Ruso. ‘If I don’t –’
His reply was interrupted by a shrill and slightly off-key blast of trumpets.
‘I know, dear,’ Arria assured him over the rising noise of the crowd. ‘We’ll make our way over to the Augustus gate and hire a carriage. Flora, really! What will people think? You really must – oh look, here they come!’