Semper Fidelis

Chapter 2

Ruso had already noted with relief that the young man’s black eye and swollen jaw were too mature to have been administered by his wife. Or by the Germans, who had sloped off up the hill with obvious disappointment now that their sport had been taken away from them. “I’ve just left spiced chicken and a decent wine,” he said. “Why aren’t you over at the inn?”

Tilla frowned. “If I have to listen to the driver and that woman for much longer, I shall get off and walk. I went to eat in peace by the river and look at your sister’s letter, and this man came to beg for food. Do you think his jaw is broken?”

Ruso, setting aside yet again the disagreeable prospect of a letter from his sister, cast an eye over the native’s injuries. They looked like the result of a brawl. Perhaps somebody else had caught him pestering their wife.

The man had shortish ginger hair, appeared to be in his early twenties, and-apart from the bruises-seemed to be in excellent physical shape. Still speaking Latin, Ruso asked, “Been in a fight, soldier?”

The native looked up. There was fear in his eyes.

“It is all right,” Tilla assured him in British, but the words were still on her lips as the man sprang away and pelted down the slope toward the river.

“Stop!” cried Tilla.

Ruso seized her by the wrist before she could give chase.

“My husband is a doctor!” she cried. “He can help you! Come back!”

The man’s tethered hands gave him a peculiar gait, as if he were trying to run through something sticky.

Ruso released his grip on her wrist.

“We will give you food!”

The man did not break his stride.

“What is the matter with him?”

Ruso folded his arms and watched as the man staggered across the river, lurching as the current pulled at him and then recovering to struggle up the slippery bank without the help of his hands. Finally he vanished into the woods on the far side.

“He’s either stolen his civilian clothes,” Ruso observed, “or his army boots. My money’s on the clothes.”

“Will you send the soldiers after him?”

He bent to pick up his case. “I’ve got enough patients without chasing after more.”

“What will happen to him?”

“I’m guessing he’s one of the British recruits they’ve started taking into the Legion. Not a very bright one. He’s got rid of his belt, but unless he has the sense to change his boots and hide amongst the locals while his hair grows, he’ll be caught.”

“But he has the voice of a Southerner,” she said. “He has no one around here.”

“So?”

“The local tribe might sell him back to the army.”

Ruso reflected that British tribes were always more complicated than you thought. “Well, it’s not our problem.”

Assuming that the spiced chicken would be cold and the wine would be finished by now, he accompanied his wife back to the river bank to compete with the local ducks for a share of her lunch.

“My brothers,” said Tilla, raising her voice over the din of a squawking flotilla lunging for the bread as it hit the water, “would never have joined the Legion.”

Since Tilla’s brothers were not Roman citizens and had been killed by neighboring cattle raiders before they were twenty years old, this was not surprising. “And would they have said, Our sister would never marry a soldier?”

“You are not a proper soldier,” she said, flinging the next handful toward a lone bird hesitating at the back. “You are a medicus.”

Ruso glanced down at his army belt and reflected that this fine distinction might be a comfort to Tilla, but it was invisible to everybody else. He had renewed his vows to the emperor. He was an officer of the Twentieth once more, and it did not matter that he had only come back because he missed the salary and the camaraderie and because he never, ever wanted to work as an investigator again. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, he was just another soldier.

When all the food was gone, he escorted her back to the inn. “Just stay out of trouble this afternoon, will you?”

“If that driver is still in there telling stories about how stupid the natives are, I may punch him on the nose.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed. “If it needs straightening afterward, send him up to me.”

On the way back past the gate guards he wondered if he should, after all, report the escaped Briton as a deserter. Then he remembered it was his own wife who had prized the man away from the guards, and decided someone else could do it.