Semper Fidelis

Chapter 46

Nobody seemed to know how the fighting started, but for once it was impossible to blame the recruits. Despite putting on a remarkably good show for the emperor, they had been ordered to celebrate within the walls of the fort. Outside, there was talk of a local trader quarreling with men from the Twentieth about settling their bills before heading west; but the putative trader seemed to have fled, and if the departing legionaries were involved, they were not going to admit it. There was talk of a fight erupting between the Sixth and some of the maintenance crews, who did not take kindly to being called old men who could piss off now that the professionals were here. That version had the Praetorians trying to restore order. Other accounts had the Praetorians involved from the start, with comrades on all sides weighing in to defend each other and nobody attempting to halt the spread of the mayhem until a gang of centurions and their staff charged out of the east gate, beating their sticks on their shields. By this time teeth and noses were broken, furniture had been dragged into the street as weaponry, and someone’s roof was on fire.

In the confusion, it was a while before anyone noticed the soldier from the Sixth who was leaning quietly against the wall of the temple of Mithras, clutching both hands to his head and staring in puzzlement at the dark liquid dripping into his lap.

Meanwhile Ruso, denied access to the bathhouse, had resorted to washing by stripping off beside the nearest water trough and tipping several buckets of water over his head. He had then dunked his stinking tunic and loincloth into another bucket and given them several rinses before hanging them outside the crumbling barrack room where he would spend the night alone, since no one wanted to share with him. Those were the only clothes he had with him, and he supposed they would still be wet in the morning, but a man had to keep up some sort of standards.

He untied his boots, which he had slung around his neck after a bathhouse slave had taken pity on him and slipped him a pair of wooden sandals. In a reversal of the usual practice, he now put the boots on to go indoors.

He had been allowed the concession of a straw mattress, although not a clean one, and a thin gray blanket into which he now rolled his aching and chilled body. Stretching out on the mattress, he reminded himself that virtue was sufficient for happiness.

The man who thought that one up evidently had no need of clothes. Or a fire. Or dignity. Or dinner. Or a wife, who might or might not get the message that he had paid one of the bathhouse slaves to give to a friend who might or might not be going to the mansio.

He hoped Accius would leave Tilla alone. He hoped Pera would make sure the staff didn’t neglect Austalis. He hoped the emperor would get to hear about the plight of his old comrade from Antioch and order his immediate reinstatement. He hoped he wasn’t becoming as deluded as his stepmother. After that, he could think of nothing else to hope for, so he closed his eyes and attempted to enter the last refuge of the desperate: sleep.

He had almost made it when someone crashed open the door and started shouting about needing a doctor.

“I’m not on duty.”

“You are now,” said Dexter. “Get out of bed. Jupiter’s arse, something stinks in here. One whiff of you’ll kill the poor bastard anyway.”

“On my way,” said Ruso, flinging the blanket round his naked shoulders.

“Like that?”

“Or not at all.”

It was Pera who had insisted on having Ruso summoned to help with the injured. A spare tunic was swiftly produced, after which cuts were bathed and stitched, noses straightened, and one or two hopelessly loose teeth removed before the owners sobered up enough to care. In the midst of all this, a semiconscious and dramatically bloody man arrived on a stretcher, and Ruso spent some time cleaning him up, searching for the source of the bleeding before he could staunch it.

Eventually the waiting area was cleared and the man with the bleeding head admitted for observation. Tomorrow the centurions would have to sort out the recriminations. Tonight, since Dexter must be busy elsewhere and had left no instructions, Ruso and Pera left the orderlies to clear up the treatment room and headed off down a poorly lit corridor to take advantage of whatever warmth was left in the hospital baths.

On the way, Pera murmured, “I’m very sorry to hear about your situation, sir.”

“You don’t have to call me sir now.”

“I know, sir.”

They had just stolen one of the few lamps from the corridor to light the changing room, when Ruso said, “The password hasn’t changed since this morning, has it?”

Pera paused with his tunic halfway over his head. “Sir, you can’t-”

“Yes or no?”

“Not as far as I know, sir. But-”

“Then I’ll thank you for the respite, wish you good night, and go back to barracks.”

Before Pera could extract himself from his clothing, Ruso had snatched up the cloak he had just spotted abandoned in an alcove and was back in the corridor with it bundled under his arm. He hid it behind his back to stroll past a couple of off-duty Praetorians. True to form, they ignored him.

The office door was ajar. He heard the murmur of conversation from the late-duty staff, but nobody seemed to notice his passing. He waited until he was out in the dark of the street and well away from the hospital before flinging the Praetorian cloak around his shoulders, tugging the hood over his head, and fumbling with the arrangement of loops and toggles that seemed to fasten it together at the front. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to spot that they’d taken away his army belt.

The guards on the east gate looked at him strangely, but decided to err on the side of caution and added a “sir” to the very reasonable question of “At this hour?”

Ruso said, “When the emperor says now, he means now.”

They stepped aside to let him pass.

Whatever had gone on out here an hour ago, the streets were quiet now. The slave on duty at the mansio took one look at the cloak and let him in, but the door to the courtyard rooms was locked and he insisted he could not open it without authorization. Ruso stood in the entrance hall, still concealed beneath the hood, hearing a distant clatter from the kitchen. The convivial murmur of a dinner party swelled suddenly, then faded with the click of a door latch. A pair of matching slaves scuttled across the entrance hall, not pausing to bow. Moments later the manager appeared with the rumpled look of a man who had finally managed to snatch some sleep and had now been woken by someone he neither expected nor wanted to see.

“My wife,” said Ruso without preamble. “Is she here?”

The manager was eyeing the stolen cloak with an air of confusion when someone else hurried in from the street and clacked across the tiles in studded boots. Ruso shrank deeper into the hood as Dexter demanded to know if Centurion Geminus was on the premises. The manager consulted with the door slave and confirmed that he was not. “Then I need to talk to the tribune,” declared Dexter, ignoring the lone Praetorian hunched over the counter with his back to him.

To Ruso’s relief, Dexter was sent into the courtyard to await the tribune’s response. When he had gone, the manager reached underneath the counter. Etched across a wax tablet in a large and unevenly formed hand that Ruso recognized as Tilla’s was Come for me at the house of Krina.

Mercifully the clouds had cleared. The moon was silvering one side of the street and plunging the rest into deep shadow. Ruso walked quickly, pushing aside thoughts of dogs and Geminus and what any stray Praetorians might do to a legionary deemed to be impersonating one of their own.

Tilla answered his knock so quickly, she must have been waiting behind the door. “At last!” she whispered, giving him an unexpectedly warm embrace and murmuring in his ear, “There are rats!”

He closed the door behind him. “Rats?”

She sniffed. “What have you been doing? Are you all right? Were you in the fighting?”

He shook his head. “I can’t stay. What have they told you?”

“We must go to the fort. If you take that box, I can carry the bags, and on the way you must tell me everything you know about the empress Sabina.” She stopped, and pulled his hand toward the light from the fire. “Is that blood?”

“Work.” He wiped his hands on the borrowed tunic, but the ingrained red needed to be scrubbed. “Tilla, I’m in trouble.”

When he had finished telling her, she was silent for a moment. Then she took his hand. “This is my fault. I prayed that you would talk to him.”

“I chose to do it.”

She said, “Are we divorced? Will you ask me to go back to my people?”

“Of course not. Lay low until the Twentieth march out tomorrow, and I’ll send a message here for you. This will probably all blow over.”

“‘Probably’?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’ve never betrayed a legion, harassed an emperor, and humiliated a tribune before.”

“You are not the one who has done wrong here.”

“I deliberately disobeyed an order.”

She began to rifle through one of the bags.

“I’ve made a bit of a mess of this,” he said, feeling the stitches pull in his leg as he crouched beside her.

“It does not matter,” she insisted, placing a hand on his knee. “You have done a brave thing.” She turned back to the bag.

“What are you looking for?”

“I am taking out the things we do not need,” she said, tugging at some sort of female undergarment. “If we do not carry too much and we start now, we can be ten miles away by morning.”

“What? Tilla, I’m not-”

“Shhh!” She put her fingers on his lips. “Corinna and the boy are sleeping in the loft.”

“I’m not going to run!” he whispered.

“Then what are you going to do? The Legion will not want you!”

He shrugged. “I swore to serve.”

“But-”

“Besides, where could we go where we wouldn’t be noticed, you and I?” Her silence was his answer. She said dully, “They execute men who disobey orders.”

“Oh, it won’t come to that,” he assured her, pushing aside the moments in the dark depths of the sewer this afternoon when he had felt almost paralyzed with terror. If disease really was caused by foul air, then spending time down here could kill him as surely as having his head severed-only more slowly. “I’ll send a message as soon as I can. Have you got enough money?”

She cast an eye over his beltless tunic. “Have you any to give me?”

“No.”

“Then I have enough.”

He took both her hands in his bloodstained grasp and kissed her on the lips. “Be safe, Darlughdacha of the Corionotatae.”

She stroked his hair. “May the gods smile upon you, Gaius Petreius the Medicus.”

“Look after my kit, will you?” She nodded. Halfway out of the door, he paused. “Why did you want to know about Sabina?”

“Is it true she and her husband hate each other?”

“I believe so.”

“Why did you never tell me this?”

He shook his head, baffled. “You never asked. Does it matter?”

“No,” she said. “Not now.”