Ruso and the Root of All Evils

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.’