Terra Incognita: A Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  She would go and invite them in. The medicus, whose duty it was to help people, would not be able to turn them out in the storm. It would be a good use of the money. And it would serve him right.

  “Close the window, will you?”

  She fastened the shutters as ordered. Then, ignoring his “Where are you going dressed like that?” she snatched up her shawl and hurried out of the room.

  3

  BY THE TIME Tilla had found the yard door and struggled with the latch, the storm was overhead. Rain was beating on the roofs and spluttering in the drains. No one else was about. Staff, guests, and slaves would be huddled in their rooms, praying for the storm to pass safely over them. From the shelter of the doorway she squinted out into the blustery dark, trying to distinguish the shapes of the vehicles lined up along the far side.

  “Lydia?”

  Another flash of lightning captured pale streaks of rain in mid fall and veiled everything beyond them. She had barely counted five paces when she had to clap her hands over her ears. She shook her head like a dog as the thunder drilled through her skull.

  When it was over she shouted, “Lydia! Are you out here?”

  There was no answer.

  The spatter of raindrops on tarpaulin told her she was nearing the vehicles. She ducked around to shelter between the first hulk and the wall, and called in Latin, “Are you there? Lydia? Don’t be afraid. Is the midwife. Come indoors with me.”

  Still no reply. She moved on, calling at the second shape and then waiting for more thunder to die away before trying the third. It seemed smaller, more like the cart her patient had hired, but in the dark it was difficult to tell. Whatever it was, no one was replying from inside. There was nobody else out here.

  Tilla shivered. Her wet scalp felt as though it was shrinking in the cold. She pulled the shawl over her head and told herself the woman must be safe indoors with the baby. She had worried for nothing. Surely not even the most money grabbing of innkeepers would turn away a newly delivered mother in a storm. Only her guilt-ridden midwife was alone in the dark, getting wet. Unless, of course, the driver had not brought the cart into the yard at all. Lydia could be anywhere among the houses huddling around the army’s camp.

  Wrinkling her nose at the stench of flooded drains, Tilla turned to splash back across the courtyard and stubbed her toe. Her feet were so cold that the pain took a couple of paces to register. When it did, it reached her mind at the same time as the thought that there was still one thing she could do to help the mother and baby.

  Raising her hands to the gods roaring in the sky, she cried in the language they had given to her people, “Great Taranis, god of the thunder, come to visit us this night! I am your servant, here to greet you!”

  The rain lashed at her face. She stood with her arms stretched out, trying not to shiver. Perhaps she had said the wrong things. Prayer was a difficult business at the best of times, and even harder when the worshipper was growing numb with cold. “Listen to me, great god of thunder!” she shouted into the rain. “I have no gift today, but I will make one if you keep safe the woman Lydia and the—”

  She was silenced by a white flash that left her blinking, staring, wiping the water out of her eyes, unable to take in what she had just seen. Summoning her courage, she peered into the darkness and called, “Who is there? Speak to me!”

  Something brushed against her. She shrank away, lost her footing, and landed with a splash. She lay with her hands over her ears as another crash of thunder buffeted the yard.

  When the thunder god’s voice rolled away, she scrambled to her feet. Someone was calling out. It was not the strange creature she had seen in the lightning. It was a recognizable voice, speaking in Latin, and definitely not heavenly.

  “Tilla, where the hell are you? What are you doing?”

  She turned toward the medicus. “I am looking for someone who is not here!”

  She heard the splash of approaching footsteps. She felt herself seized and lifted and pressed against his warmth as he carried her back toward the safety of the doorway.

  He said, “Who were you talking to?”

  Tilla closed her eyes, picturing the creature who had the form and face of a young man but growing from his head there had definitely been . . . “You will not believe me,” she said.

  They both lurched sideways as the medicus kicked the door open. “Try me.”

  She saw again the angles of the antlers in the harsh light. Antlers. The sign of Cernunnos, king of the beasts. But she had seen the hand on the wheel of the cart. . . . The wheel was the sign of Taranis, ruler of the thunder. She did not know whom her prayer had conjured in the yard. But she knew what. As the medicus stumped up the stairs, she whispered, “It is a powerful god.”

  CENTURION AUDAX OF the Tenth Batavians had stumbled over nasty things in back alleys before, but none quite like this. He took a step backward, unable to believe what he was looking at. Then, glancing around to see if anyone else was watching, he unfurled his cloak and bent to drape it over what remained of Felix the trumpeter.

  The only sign of life in the street was the huddled figure of a woman making an early start out of town with a bundle on her back. A swelling chorus of birdsong was heralding a clear dawn. The rest of Coria was either still in bed or yawning over its breakfast.

  Audax rapped on the door of the butcher’s shop. “Go over to the fort,” he ordered the bleary-eyed slave who finally responded to his knocking. “Tell them Audax needs Officer Metellus down here right away. And tell him I said to come alone.”

  He tramped back through the stink of the alley and crouched beside the body, pulling out a fold in the cloak to hide another inch of pale leg. It was pointless, but until Metellus turned up he did not know what else he could do.

  It was a while before he noticed the drawing. Scratched in charcoal on the plastered wall above Felix’s body was a crude sketch of a man. Audax scowled. Whoever had done it wasn’t much of an artist. He supposed those things that looked like two trees sprouting from the man’s head were meant to be antlers. It was not a good picture, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t have to be a good picture to make a great deal of mischief.

  4

  LAST NIGHT’S STORM seemed to have washed the sky clean but already a stiff breeze was blowing fresh clouds in from the west. Beneath them, a cavalry outrider had stationed himself in a dramatic pose on the top of a distant hill from whence he could see not only the column but also the approach of any potential marauders. Ruso, whose horse was ambling along as if it were asleep, wished he could join him. Instead he was expected to keep pace with infantry. The goods convoy the infantry was escorting on this last-but-one stage of their journey included a wagon carrying lead for replumbing Ulucium’s leaky latrines, so the pace of the column was excruciatingly slow.

  Ruso rubbed at an itch on his elbow, muttered, “Pick your feet up, will you?” to the horse, and urged it into a trot. As he passed up the hill along the column he scanned the glum faces of the Twentieth. The prospect of drying out in Coria this evening seemed to offer little cheer. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that the man who invented a tent that could fend off rising as well as falling water would have a statue erected in his honor in every army camp in the empire.

  Finally spotting the soldier he wanted, Ruso allowed his mount to relax into a walk. “ ’Morning, Albanus.”

  A slight figure in a damp tunic looked up from the ranks. “Good morning, sir.”

  The clerk did not look quite as weary today. Ruso suspected that Albanus had suffered on this march. No matter how keen a man might be, and how regularly he attended physical training, a life of writing letters and organizing medical records was poor preparation for carrying a full pack across the hills in all weather for days on end. Rubbing his elbow again, Ruso said, “Just as well nobody called me out last night, eh?”

  “Very lucky, sir.”

  He wondered what Albanus would think if he knew that he had been paid with Tilla�
��s stolen money for being willing to get up and fetch Ruso—who should have been in one of the tents—if a doctor were needed. “I don’t suppose you got much sleep anyway,” he ventured.

  Albanus smiled. “Oh, I was fine, sir. My mother says I’ve always been the same. Once I’m off, nothing ever wakes—” He stopped.

  Ruso hid his amusement. “I see.”

  “I would have got up, sir, of course—”

  “I’m sure you would,” said Ruso, truthfully. There was no fun in teasing Albanus. It was like poking a kitten with a stick. He slapped at his elbow. The itch shrank away for a few seconds, then crept back.

  The road was still running along high ground, offering views to either side that would have been dramatic had there been anything new to look at. But even native house fires were no longer a novelty. There was another one now. A fresh plume of thick black smoke rushing skyward from a settlement in the middle distance. It was hardly surprising that people who insisted on lighting fires in the middle of thatched huts would have mishaps, but as they drew closer he could make out a squad of men clad in armor marching away down the valley, ignoring the frantic figures who were trying to beat out the flames.

  It occurred to him that perhaps some of the other fires had not been accidents either. Everyone said the natives were more difficult to manage in the north.

  Ruso yawned. He had not slept well. Tilla had finally consented to join him in the bed, but his efforts to warm her up had led to an unexpected cry of “Cernunnos!” at a crucial moment, and somehow despite her insistence that this was the name of the god she had seen in the yard, it had still put him off his stroke. Unabashed, she had proceeded to speculate about what this divine visitation might mean. His insistence on resuming his own more earthly visitation was greeted with tolerance rather than enthusiasm.

  She had woken him again in the middle of the night, babbling in British. It was a moment before he realized she was talking in her sleep, no doubt to some god with antlers. After she fell silent he had lain awake in the dark, telling himself that it was completely irrational to be jealous of a trick of the light, and that he was only starting to wonder if she really had seen something because he was not properly awake himself.

  Another itch had sprouted in the hollow between his shoulder blades. When the column stopped for water, he would have to dig out his baggage and try and find some calming ointment. In the meantime, his fingers slid up between two of the layers of iron plates, but they were now trapped at an awkward angle and he could not move them enough to have any effect. Twisting sideways, he tried plunging the hand down the back of his neck instead. The probing fingers fell just short of their destination.

  Several instruments that would have done the job safely were in his medical case, but that was back on one of the carts. He tried grabbing the top and bottom of his tunic, and pulling it taut while wriggling against it like a cow trying to scratch itself on a gate. That did not work either.

  Finally he thumped at his back with his fist before noticing that several of the legionaries tromping up the slope beside him were watching with interest. Among them was his clerk.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “Fine, thank you, Albanus.” He wondered whether to add, “Just doing some morning stretches,” but decided that would make it worse.

  He urged the horse forward, musing upon the pointlessness of formal education. Instead of wasting time arguing over dilemmas unrelated to real life, bright young minds should be set useful questions. Questions such as: A man is offered a chance to share a room with a bad-tempered woman and several biting insects, or a tent with his comrades and a large quantity of rainwater. Which should he choose?

  Moments later he was level with a centurion whose nose appeared to have been attached to his face as an afterthought. This was Postumus, the man in whose tent he had failed to appear last night. Ruso was anticipating some cutting comment on his absence, but Postumus was busy scowling at the horizon.

  “Little bugger,” Postumus observed.

  Following the centurion’s gaze, Ruso saw the lone rider still silhouetted against the gathering clouds. “There’s something to be said for joining the cavalry,” he said.

  “He’s not cavalry.”

  “No?” At this distance, it was impossible to make out whether the horseman was carrying weapons. “Who is he, then?”

  “That’s exactly what he wants us to ask.”

  “Ah,” said Ruso, surprised to find he had fallen into some sort of trap. Then, as the outline of the horse narrowed and began to sink into the rise of the hill, “He’s going.”

  “He’ll pop up again farther along,” said Postumus. “Always where we can see him and always just out of range. He’s following us.”

  “I’ve seen him before,” said Ruso.

  “One of the patrols went after him yesterday and he outran them. Vanished into the woods and couldn’t be tracked.”

  “What do you think he wants?”

  “Well, he’s not a lookout,” said Postumus. “They’d use some snot-nosed little goatherd for that.”

  “They?”

  “The natives,” said Postumus. “I reckon all that one wants is to get on our nerves.”

  “Ah.”

  “Which is why, for the time being, we’re ignoring him.”

  “Right,” said Ruso, guessing that the watcher’s presence had been the cause of yesterday’s unexplained order to don helmets. “So we do know who he is.”

  “If you’d been where you were supposed to be last night, you’d know what I know. Nice and cozy up at the inn, were you?”

  “Very,” said Ruso, suddenly unable to resist wriggling under his armor. “Kind of you to ask.”

  Postumus was looking at him oddly. “Something the matter with you?”

  “Me? No.”

  “Uh.”

  They rode on in silence for a while, then Postumus said, “You haven’t heard what’s going on, then?”

  “What?”

  “You might want to think about making an offering to Fortuna next time you get a chance,” added Postumus. “Or whatever god you think might be listening up here.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” promised Ruso, deducing that he was being punished for sleeping under a solid roof last night.

  “Not that our lads are worried,” added Postumus.

  “Of course not,” agreed Ruso.

  “But the units stationed up here are pretty jumpy.”

  Ruso felt his resolve slipping away. Eventually he said, “What aren’t we worried about, exactly?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Go on then.”

  “The story I heard . . .”

  The story Postumus had heard began with an army transport convoy making its way to a base at the opposite end of the border. The convoy had been delayed by a breakdown and was still an hour away as darkness fell. They were making good progress when a sudden shower of burning arrows rained down on the carts, and a fire broke out in the straw packing around a consignment of oil jars. Postumus described what ensued as “a fine old fry-up” and in the chaos that followed nobody noticed that the guards on the rear vehicle had been knifed and the cargo stolen. Nobody could remember seeing any of the attackers.

  “So next morning they do a security roundup and most of the natives don’t know a thing, as usual. But after a bit of expert prompting they start talking about a strange figure riding past in the half-light, and they swear he had antlers and he’s a messenger from the gods.”

  “Antlers?”

  “Nobody took much notice until a couple of the guards on the transport said they saw the same thing, only they didn’t speak up in case people thought they were crazy.”

  “It was dark when they saw this—thing?”

  “But every one of them described it the same way. That’s not all. There’s an outpost where the whole unit fell ill, including the medic.”

  Ruso ignored the gibe.

  “Turned ou
t there was a dead wolf in the water channel,” said Postumus. “But it couldn’t have got in there by itself. Someone had replaced the cover stone and laid a set of antlers on top. Then there’s a tax collector who got ambushed. He saw him too.”

  “Who’s going to believe a tax collector?”

  The centurion grunted. “I’m just telling you what I heard. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But like I said, I don’t reckon matey on the horse is anything to worry about.”

  “No,” agreed Ruso. “The lack of antlers would seem to support you there.”

  “I reckon,” continued Postumus, “that he’s some scabby little Brit who thinks he’s clever. We’ll go across and give him a surprise later on. When we’re good and ready.”

  Privately Ruso thought that if the scabby little Brit really were clever, he would play along with the rumors by strapping something spiky to his head. Deciding not to bother Postumus with this thought, he said, “So we’ve been sent up here to steady a few nerves.”

  “I’ve been sent,” corrected Postumus, edging his horse sideways to steer around a minor landslip where the curb had begun to collapse into the ditch. “I heard you volunteered. Don’t know what the hell for. Specially with that girl of yours.”

  “I heard there’s more action up on the border,” said Ruso, not keen to get into a discussion about Tilla.

  A grin made its way around the nose. “Not enough bodies for you back at base, eh?”

  Ruso sighed. He had never wanted to get tangled up in that business of the murdered barmaid. Now, no matter how often he denied it, it seemed everyone in the Twentieth legion knew him as the medicus with as much interest in dead patients as live ones. “Last month,” he explained, “a man turned up on my doorstep with the corpse of his girlfriend’s cat, and asked me to find out who’d poisoned it.”