Semper Fidelis

Chapter 38

Motionless, silent, gazing at the crested helmet of the man in front of him, Ruso marveled at the way a couple of trumpet blasts had conjured these splendid ranks of legionaries out of the chaos of half an hour ago. The first call had been the signal for every man to abandon whatever unfinished task lay in front of him, run to his quarters, and scramble into full parade uniform. The second was the signal to assemble. They were now standing like parallel rows of statues lining the road from the marketplace to the east gate, waiting in the low evening sun for the most powerful man in the world to pass between them. All around, an excited rabble of civilians chatted and laughed and argued in the sunshine, waiting for the free show. Youths dangled their legs from the eaves of buildings. Children had been hoisted up on parents’ shoulders. A white-haired woman was clinging to a donkey.

Ruso shifted his grip on his shield and watched a fly land on the helmet and begin to crawl up the crest. His bandaged leg was aching and his mind kept going back to two conversations. The first was with Marcus.

He had spotted the tattooed recruit moving toward the barrack blocks with the cautious gait of a man in pain. He offered what was intended to be a friendly greeting. Marcus jumped as if he had felt the cold touch of a ghost, then turned and gave an awkward salute.

His upper lip was swollen to twice its normal size. There was dark blood congealed around his nostrils and a jagged wound at the edge of his hairline.

“What happened to you?”

“Nothing, sir.” The swollen lip distorted the edges of his words.

Ruso wondered what else was concealed beneath the tunic. “A training injury, perhaps?”

“Yes, sir.” The Briton glanced around awkwardly, as if he were trapped with a bore at a party and was longing to get away.

“I haven’t forgotten our conversation. I’ll talk to your centurion-”

“No, sir, don’t-”

“I’m speaking!” Ruso was not used to being interrupted by his juniors. “I’ll talk to your centurion when things aren’t so busy.”

Marcus’s eyes widened with desperation. “Please, sir. I’ve changed my mind. I want to keep them, sir.”

“Keep the tattoos?”

“Yes, sir.” A slave emerged from one of the barrack rooms. “I have no complaints, sir,” Marcus announced in a voice loud enough to be overheard.

And that was all Ruso could get out of him.

The second conversation was with Tilla. His message to report to the emperor’s steward had allowed her into the fort, where she had arrived at the hospital with some medicines he didn’t need in order to tell him things he didn’t like the sound of.

First, someone had been in their room in the mansio and left a gruesome souvenir of the visit, and she was clearly not as calm about it as she was trying to pretend.

“I’m going to have this out with Geminus,” he fumed. “It’ll be him, or one of his shadows. And I’ll see the manager. I can’t believe a thing like that can happen and nobody sees anything. It’s outrageous!”

“The manager is asking his staff,” she said, “but there are always people coming and going there. Lots of them are carrying things. Nobody would notice one more sack.”

“Surely the room was locked?”

“Lots of people can pick locks.”

“I don’t want you going back there without me.”

“Then where am I to go when I have finished cleaning and sweeping up for your emperor? It will be all right. We have another new room, and the staff are watching. Now, stop making a fuss, because there is something else I must tell you.”

He did not like the second piece of news, either. Had he not been so busy nor she so pale, he would have quarreled with her, demanding to know why she had allowed herself to listen to more scandalous gossip about Geminus.

“Somebody will have to do something,” she said. “They cannot ignore something like this.”

“I can’t do anything now, Tilla. This is not the time.”

So she had looked him in the eye and said, “Then when is?”

Ruso opened his mouth very slightly and directed a stream of air at the fly. It flew off on his second attempt.

Geminus was strutting up and down the silent ranks, prodding the occasional offender back into line with his stick. Ruso found himself eyeing the end of the stick for traces of Marcus’s blood. He was certain that the clerk had overheard the conversation in the office and reported every word.

And now there was Tilla’s news. They have been placing bets on the recruits …

It made sense. It made sense of the dangerous order to cross the river. It made sense of the training injuries, incurred when the British recruits were urged to compete with each other. It made sense of Austalis and Marcus’s desperation not to be marked out as Britons when they reached Deva, lest they be exposed to more men like Geminus. Geminus, or perhaps his shadows, had beaten Marcus into silence. Now he had taken steps to frighten Tilla. If it was true that Tadius and Victor had been caught trying to report their centurion’s twisted abuse of power to Deva, then perhaps they had been not only threatened but silenced.

On the other hand, it was hard to be rational about a man after being attacked by his dog.

He tensed the muscles in the injured leg. A fresh stab of pain cut through the ache. There were times when it did not matter whether you were rational, as long as you were right.

There had been no physical coercion of Sulio, but there had been no need. Recalling his early conversation with Geminus, Ruso doubted that the centurion had really persuaded the lad to stay in the army. If the conversation had taken place at all, it was far more likely that Geminus-knowing what Sulio might reveal once he was freed-had refused him permission to leave. Trapped inside the fortress, perhaps fearing that he too would shortly meet with some kind of “accident,” Sulio had attempted the only escape that seemed open to him, and Geminus had followed him onto the roof to make sure he succeeded.

Ruso focused his gaze on the blank faces of the men lining the far side of the street. How many of them could testify to Geminus’s bullying? There must be witnesses standing all around him now, too frightened to speak. If only Pera had kept his nerve and clung to the courage that had caused him to slip an accurate postmortem report into the records without anyone else seeing it. He must have watched with horror as Ruso blundered in and drew it to the clerk’s attention. Now the report was destroyed, and Pera had fallen silent. Just like all the others who had failed to support Tadius and Victor. Perhaps it was too far-fetched to imagine that all those minor annoyances at the hospital had been arranged by Geminus. But someone had put that thing in the mansio bed. And then there was the dog. The dog had been a deliberate attack.

If only he had known all of this when he first approached Accius. The tribune would have been compelled to do more than have an informal chat with an old friend.

He caught a snatch of conversation behind him. A woman was saying in British, “… to see how she gets it to stay up in coils like that.”

“It isn’t hers,” said a second woman. “It lifts off at night.”

“Really? She must have to pin it very tight to her real hair.”

“Well, I don’t suppose she moves much,” replied the first woman. As their voices faded Ruso heard, “They don’t even wipe their own backsides, these people. They have slaves to-oh! Is something happening?”

There was indeed a stir in the crowd. While the legionaries stared stoically ahead, the civilians were craning for a view of what was approaching down the east road. The chatter died away. The bark of an order was followed by the tramp of heavy boots approaching from the fortress gate as the guard of honor, with Accius at its head, marched out to meet the imperial party.

The trumpets wailed above the sound of cheering and applause. Forbidden to turn and see what was approaching, the legionaries had to wait until the procession passed in front of their eyes, but all around them Accius’s instructions seemed to have had the desired effect. The locals cheered and whooped and waved at the horse guards as if Hadrian’s cavalry were riding in to liberate them from the blighted presence of the Twentieth Legion. Behind them came the Praetorian Guards, identifiable to anyone who did not know them by the scorpions on their shields, and to anyone who did by their air of owning the place already. Ruso could see their officers scanning the crowd for trouble, as if they did not trust the local garrison to keep order. It was strangely satisfying to think that these highly paid arrivals from Rome would be obliged to march across Britannia in the rain just like everyone else.

The noise of the excited crowd rose even higher. Across the street, a couple of youths on a roof clambered to their feet, raised their hands in the air, and began to wave their arms from side to side on their precarious perch as if they were swaying in the wind. Ruso caught sight of the thin civilian liaison centurion trying to order them to sit down. It was hopeless. Others followed suit, and soon the buildings opposite were crowded with arms swaying back and forth in time with the chant of some sort of cheerfully chaotic native greeting.

Geminus raised his stick twice in the air. The ranks of the Twentieth erupted into a roar of “Cae-sar! Cae-sar!”

And there he was. A lone figure with a glittering breastplate over a surprisingly plain tunic, seated on a white stallion, one hand raised in greeting. The face a little heavier than Ruso remembered from Antioch, surveying the crowd with an air of approval. The lanky rider behind him must be the prefect of the Praetorians. Then more guards, and shrieks of excitement from the crowd as six bearers in scarlet tunics appeared, carrying an open litter.

Children were held up to fling handfuls of white petals into the air. They caught in the breeze and floated down like snowflakes. The empress Sabina looked out from beneath her elaborate hairstyle with no obvious emotion. Ruso tried to suppress the question of whether there really were slaves whose job it was to wipe the imperial backsides, and wondered whether the empress’s pallor was white lead makeup or the aftereffects of a rough sea trip and the knowledge that if she wanted to escape this island of dancing and screaming barbarians, she would have to repeat it.

Moments later, on the far side of more ranks of marching Praetorians, Ruso glimpsed a blond woman smiling and waving at him. No doubt she was just caught up in the excitement of the crowd, but he felt oddly moved. It was not often that Tilla appeared to be proud of him.

Then he remembered what they had been talking about earlier, and he knew it wouldn’t last.