Tabula Rasa: A Crime Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  “Oh, that’s conclusive. We’ll try him for kidnap. But whatever antics your wife got up to the other night didn’t really give us any answers about Candidus, and frankly it would be useful to get this this thing settled. Nobody wants it coming back to bite us later on. I was wondering if you had any thoughts.”

  So the legate was pretending to know nothing while his junior dealt with the problem. It seemed Accius was reluctant to risk using torture again, especially now that there was no life at stake. That was something to be glad about. There were men who got a taste for it.

  “He’ll be executed anyway for the boy.”

  Ruso shook his head, trying to clear the drowsiness of the poppy, and wished he had not. Then he said, “Do we have the men’s records here, sir?”

  “They’re all back at Deva as far as I know. Why?”

  “Just a thought. Can I talk to Mallius?”

  “Go to the east gatehouse at Parva. Tell them I sent you.”

  Chapter 74

  Warned by Valens that nobody had been allowed in to clean the prisoner up, Ruso arrived at the gatehouse with his medical case and a jug of water. Mallius looked as though someone had picked him up by his chains and swung him round and round the cubicle, crashing him into the stone walls as he spun. Ruso’s own bruising and stitching and black eye—which he could now open, thank the gods—felt trivial in comparison. At least the first half hour of his visit was spent washing and examining and applying salve and bandaging, and in between, Mallius wept and groaned and insisted that he had nothing to do with anything, nobody believed him, the boy was lying, they were going to kill him for thinking he’d seen a ghost, and was there anything the doctor could do to convince them?

  “Perhaps,” mused Ruso, wiping salve off his fingers and dropping the cloth back into his case, “it would help if we send for your family.”

  Mallius’s eyes widened. “No! They mustn’t know, sir. They would be heartbroken. It would kill my mother.”

  “We should contact them before the trial, though,” Ruso insisted. “You should have someone there.”

  “Please don’t, sir. Please.”

  Ruso sighed and shut the case. “Let’s save them the trouble, then. They won’t recognize you anyway, will they?”

  “Sir?”

  Mallius’s apparent innocence was impressive. But then, he’d had plenty of practice. “What’s your real name?”

  “Real name, sir?”

  “It definitely isn’t Mallius. His family wouldn’t have known you even before you were beaten up, would they?”

  The red-rimmed eyes stared into his own for a moment. Then the man slumped back against the wall, all sign of weeping suddenly gone. “I never thought it would do any harm.”

  Ruso waited.

  “It was the slave at the dealer’s, right?”

  “He recognized you,” Ruso told him. “You should never have stopped bleaching your hair.”

  “I thought he did.” He sighed. “I never wanted to hurt anybody. Seven years of no bother, then just when I stop looking over my shoulder, two people turn up out of the past.”

  “The Legion wasn’t the best choice you could have made.”

  “I was hoping to get a transfer overseas, sir.”

  “You couldn’t join in the first place,” Ruso pointed out. “You were a slave. Were you ever freed?”

  “I wasn’t far off,” said the man who was not Mallius. “I had plenty saved up to make a good start in business. And then the new wife came.”

  The story came out slowly and in a confusing order, but what Ruso managed to piece together was that Mallius had been a trusted slave in a wealthy household until the owner remarried. The new wife took a fancy to him, which left him in the extremely awkward position of having to disobey either master or mistress. He turned the woman down, and she accused him of rape. The new husband, still dazzled by love, believed her. Mallius—whose real name was Agelastus—fled. By some kindness of the gods he happened to be passing a bar when the young man really called Mallius was killed in a knife fight.

  “You just happened to be passing?”

  “It was a miracle, sir.”

  Agelastus helped the anxious and illiterate bar owner by writing to the family, explaining that young Mallius had died of a fever and been cremated far from home. In exchange, he was allowed to keep the recruitment letter that was in Mallius’s pack. So Agelastus the runaway slave did his best to turn blond to match the description on the recruitment records and became Mallius of the Twentieth Legion.

  “And then?”

  “It was all fine until Candidus turned up, sir. He remembered seeing me at my master’s house. I tried to explain to him why he had to shut up but he thought it was funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “That I’d got away with it for so long.” Mallius’s hand trembled as he reached for the cup of water Ruso had brought him. “I could just see him telling all his cronies over a game of dice. It was all right for him, but I’d have been executed. All because of an idle little blabbermouth who thought he was clever.”

  Ruso took a breath. “Is he in the wall?”

  Mallius tried to straighten his shoulders. “There is no body in the wall, sir. The legate says so.”

  “Don’t play games with me.”

  The man slumped again. “I didn’t know the kid was watching. When I found out, I had to do something. But I didn’t hurt him, sir. I sold him to somebody who promised he would feed him.”

  “Branan didn’t see you hide the body,” Ruso told him. “Somebody else did.”

  Mallius let out a long breath.

  “He must have told you that he didn’t see anything. Why didn’t you just make up some excuse and release him?”

  “He was acting scared, sir. He was acting like he was lying.”

  “He thought he was in trouble for playing a prank on the road,” Ruso told him. “What did you do to him?”

  The man who was not Mallius was talking to his chained hands now and mumbling. It seemed that even he could feel shame. “I didn’t hurt him, sir, I swear. I just told him his house would be burned like that other one if he didn’t do what he was told.” He looked up. “I was going to let the family know where he was as soon as we were on the way back to Deva. He would have been found.”

  “He was found,” Ruso told him. “No thanks to you.”

  Mallius sighed and closed his eyes. “Then the trader’s slave remembered seeing me before. It was like the revenge of the gods. They give and then they take away again, sir.”

  Ruso hoped Mallius’s philosophy would comfort him where he was going, because if the army did not behead him, then he could well be sold for the entertainment of the crowds at the amphitheater. He might not die straightaway. He might languish in captivity for as long as a year, all the time building up pictures in his mind of how his death would be delivered.

  “I never hurt him, sir. I wouldn’t do that.”

  It sounded oddly plaintive, as if the man had committed some act of special kindness. Perhaps, in his own mind, he had. The story of the false rape accusation was plausible. On the other hand, it sounded suspiciously like an old Jewish tale Ruso had once heard, and it was just the sort of story a slave would invent to justify running away. The convenient death of the real Mallius was either a very lucky coincidence or the cover story for another murder.

  Whatever the truth of this man’s tale, it was going to end only one way.

  “Sir, can I have something to ease the pain?”

  Ruso considered this for a moment.

  “I know I don’t deserve it, sir.”

  Ruso opened his case and brought out the poppy, suspecting he was doing this largely because the effects of his own dose this morning had not yet worn off. “That’s for getting the water up to Pertinax,” he said, using the rounded end of a bronze probe to measure a drop into the cup. A second drop trembled at the base of the probe and he stirred it in. “And this is for not hurting Branan.”


  By the time Ruso got back to Ria’s, he was exhausted and the aches had returned to gnaw at his bones. Tilla was not there. Virana looked up from serving a jug of wine to Albanus, and Daminius said she had gone out, which he could have deduced for himself. He blinked at Daminius and said, “Shouldn’t you be on duty?”

  “I just dropped by to thank you, sir. It was very good of you.”

  “Ah,” said Ruso, guessing that sooner or later he would remember what Daminius was grateful for. “It was nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing to us, sir.”

  Ruso, none the wiser, said, “Good. I’m pleased.”

  “I promise I’ll repay you as soon as we get to Deva, sir. I’ve got enough in my savings.”

  “Good,” said Ruso again, with less confidence. The broad smile of approval from Virana did nothing to restore it.

  He promised to join Albanus for lunch just as soon as he had had a nap, but lunch was long gone by the time he woke up again, and it was halfway through the afternoon. Tilla arrived carrying a bowl of warm water and a towel and announced that everything was ready. She told him that all he had to do was wash, get dressed, and turn up. By way of encouragement, she whipped off all the bedclothes and began rummaging about in a trunk for clean clothes.

  He had a worrying suspicion that he knew what she was talking about and that he had agreed to it yesterday under the cheering influence of the poppy. Rather than risk a direct question, he tried, “Remind me of what I did for Daminius.”

  She pulled his best cream tunic out of the trunk and flapped it vigorously to get rid of the creases. “You have kindly lent him the money to buy Fabius’s kitchen maid. It is very good of you.”

  “But I haven’t got any money! If I had, I’d spend it on a kitchen maid of my own.”

  She eyed him over the top of the tunic.

  “That didn’t sound quite how I intended.”

  “You do not have money, but Serena has arrived to visit her father and she always has plenty of money because her father says she does not deserve to live like a doctor’s wife.”

  “So, in effect, Valens’s wife has lent money to a man she doesn’t know in order for him to buy the slave he was having an affair with?”

  “No. She has lent it to you to buy a horse. You have lent it to Daminius.”

  Ruso groaned. “Is there anything else I’ve done that I should know about?”

  “I did ask you,” she said. “You said yes.”

  “Was I full of poppy?”

  “You do remember that we are to have the wedding blessing this afternoon?”

  He rolled over to put his feet on the floor so she could not see his face. “Of course. But I don’t feel up to a big fuss.”

  “Just the family and a few friends. I shall be there waiting for you. I will ask Conn to fetch you in the cart.”

  He did not want to spend time with Conn. “I’ll walk.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “I know.”

  Ruso suspected he and Albanus made a comical pairing as they limped down the farm track in the rain, one leaning on a stick to support a bandaged ankle and the other shuffling along as if he had aged forty years in the last couple of days. Still, he was glad of the opportunity for an uninterrupted conversation about Albanus’s lost nephew, who had failed to realize the danger he was in once he had recognized a runaway slave who did not want to be caught.

  When he had finished, Albanus was silent. They separated to skirt around opposite sides of a puddle. Albanus said, “All this has caused you a great deal of trouble, sir.”

  Ruso opened his mouth to assure him it was no trouble at all, but the words would not make their way past the dull ache in his jaw. Instead he said, “If he were my nephew, I’m sure you’d have done the same.” Albanus, without the distraction of Tilla, would probably have dealt with it in a much more professional manner. He said, “I’m sorry it ended the way it did.”

  “Thank you, sir.” But Albanus had further apologies to make. He seemed to think he was entirely responsible for the ghost escapade, since he had failed to strangle the plan at birth, and when it all went wrong—as he had anticipated—he had then sat nursing a sprained ankle and sent Tilla off into the night alone.

  “I thought it was a bad idea from the start, sir, but your wife was very keen, and I thought I’d better try and help. But I didn’t.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ruso assured him. “I know how persuasive my wife can be.” He squinted through the drizzle, assessing how much farther they had to walk. “I hope you don’t mind coming to a thing like this when you’ve just had bad news.”

  “That’s quite all right, sir. I’m glad to be asked. Weddings are always cheerful.”

  Something else occurred to Ruso as they passed the leaf-spattered fork in the track and turned in amongst the trees. “You never did tell me what happened to—”

  “Hah!” interrupted Albanus, as if he did not want Grata’s name mentioned. “A fat old merchant flaunted his moneybags in front of her, sir.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “She seemed to think he wouldn’t last long. She promised to marry me next, but I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that.”

  Ruso doubted that the fat old merchant would have liked it much, either. He said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I wish I had come sooner, sir.”

  From up in the oak tree there was a cry of “There you are!” and Branan scrambled down to where the dog was waiting for him.

  Ruso glanced across the yard and saw Enica watching her son from the porch. “Your eye looks even worse today!” Branan exclaimed. “Come and show everybody.”

  Chapter 75

  Just a small affair, Tilla had said. Just the family and a few friends. The roar that went up as he arrived made him wonder if he had come to the wrong place. Perhaps there was a cockfight going on in there somewhere. Branan gave him a push and whispered, “Go on!”

  The air inside the house was vibrant with cheering and heavy with the smell of smoke and wet wool and beer and pork crackling. There were people sitting on skins around the hearth with their knees jammed into other people’s backs, and human shapes filled all the space back into the darkness behind the wicker screens.

  Ruso was led forward to sit next to Tilla on the bench with the tickly fur, which had been moved nearer to Senecio’s chair. Tilla was pink-faced with the heat and unusually demure in a pale green dress he was fairly sure he hadn’t seen before. Her hair was swept up into some sort of complicated knot and adorned with what he at first thought were large spiders but turned out to be flowers. Maybe the poppy was still affecting him.

  “Mostly family,” she whispered, in answer to his question. “Just a few neighbors.”

  Ruso gazed round at the unfamiliar faces and foresaw a lot of You must remember them: You met them at our wedding conversations.

  “The friends are yours,” she added.

  Someone handed him a brimming cup of beer and said, “Pass it on.” As his eyes adjusted to the poor light he could make out Aemilia and her husband. Conn and the other people from the farm. Virana sitting awkwardly next to Ria. Enica by the door, where she could see if Branan tried to leave. He thought he recognized the baker from outside the fort, and then, over by the wall, behind all these natives, he found himself looking at Accius and Daminius with Gallus from the hospital, standing upright in full parade kit and looking deeply uncomfortable. Daminius in particular looked as though he would rather be almost anywhere else. Ruso assumed Tilla had invited him by way of apology for whatever had happened last night, but it might have been kinder to leave him alone. Fabius, he supposed, was too ill to leave the fort.

  Senecio heaved himself to his feet almost unnoticed and said, “Friends!” This brought on a chorus of “Shh!” and “Stop shushing, we can’t hear!”

  “Friends,” he said, indicating the bride, “this is my precious daughter, Darlughdacha, whom the gods have sent home to me at last. She is even more b
eautiful and brave than her mother, so already we have enjoyed several arguments.” He paused to let the laughter die away. “This is Gaius Petreius Ruso, a man of great courage who brought our son back to us. His people and his farm are far across the sea in the south of Gaul. We welcome him into our family.”

  There was movement over by the door, with more people crowding in and a loud whisper in Latin: “Sorry we’re late. You know how long women take to get ready.”

  Ruso, spying a true friend, stood and beckoned Valens over. Serena, stouter than Ruso remembered, picked her way between the seated guests with obvious distaste. She accepted a beer cup from a grinning native with buckteeth and wild hair and passed it straight on. Ruso wondered if he should thank her for the money.

  The next part was as long and tedious as only a Briton—or a politician—could have made it. As Senecio sang the history of Tilla’s people from the time they had descended from the gods, Ruso found himself watching the progress of the beer and willing it to come round again. Even Serena relented and took a sip before passing it on. While the locals cheered at the mention of each familiar character, he felt himself starting to nod off.

  He was woken by a painful elbow in the ribs. “It is your turn!” Tilla hissed.

  “What?”

  “Thank him for the beautiful verse about us and tell the story of your people and how we met.”

  Everyone was looking at him. “Me?” he whispered. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “I did! You said yes!”

  It was Tilla who spoke up. “His people do not sing their story,” she explained. “They write things down instead.”

  “Perhaps he will read it to us,” suggested Senecio.

  Bride and groom exchanged glances. She said, “He has not brought the writing with him.”

  There was a faint murmur of disapproval.

  “That is the problem with writing.” The old man shook his head, apparently in pity for the simpletons who had to rely upon the work of pens and styluses. “It has to be carried, and is very easily left behind.”