Ruso and the Root of All Evils

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.