Tabula Rasa

Chapter 16

“Let’s get this straight.” Tribune Accius’s manicured hand demonstrated an invisible straightness between Ruso and Centurion Fabius. As his weight shifted against Pandora’s cupboard, the stacks of writing tablets piled on top swayed sideways. “Yesterday you wanted a search for this clerk. This morning you don’t.”

“I’m still looking for him, sir,” Ruso explained, wishing more than ever that he had not pushed Fabius into authorizing that search. One of them was going to be in trouble here. Possibly both. “But I don’t think his disappearance had anything to do with the kidnapping, because it turns out the victim of the kidnapping wasn’t just a random soldier. So there’s no reason to suppose my man is being held by the natives.”

“Indeed,” said Accius drily. “As several of those natives have pointed out in their complaints this morning.”

The silence that followed was not a cue to speak. It was simply Accius leaving a space for him to consider the error of his ways. Ruso let his vision drift out of focus. It was the adult equivalent of the child closing his eyes to make himself invisible.

Accius said, “I’m told the kidnap victim was already in dispute with the family.”

No doubt the outraged natives had pointed that out too.

“Did anyone know this before we burned their houses down?”

Fabius swallowed noisily. “There was a complaint, sir. The man was disciplined.”

If he thought that was going to excuse him, he was wrong. “Why wasn’t the legate made aware of this when he was asked to authorize reprisals?”

Fabius made a sound as though he had something stuck in his throat. Ruso, even more glad than before that he had not been involved in the reprisals, was relieved to be out of the line of fire. The silence went on until Fabius ventured, “I wasn’t aware of the request, sir.”

Accius moved again, and the stacks swayed in the opposite direction. “Who received the original complaint?”

“I did, sir,” Fabius answered.

“Who disciplined the man?”

“I did, sir.”

“Who requested the authorization for reprisals?”

“Optio Daminius, sir.”

“He’s your optio, man! What sort of an outfit are you running here?”

“I wasn’t aware-”

“Well, you should have been. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the doctor here had the bright idea of annoying the natives even further by sending men out to shake them down for someone who wasn’t there!” Accius left another pause for remorse before continuing, “Obviously the legate’s ordered us to stand by the actions that were taken. No apologies. An assault on one of our men can’t be allowed to pass no matter how justified the natives thought it might be. How badly hurt is he?”

“He’s more humiliated than hurt, sir,” put in Ruso. “This all started because he mistreated a girl. I think the family just intended it as a message.”

“Well, now they’ve had their reply,” said Accius. “Centurion, you will discipline the man involved, and do it more successfully than last time. Then have him transferred somewhere out of reach. Thanks to him and you two, we’ve successfully managed to enrage every local within a five-mile radius. As a result, we have movement restrictions and a curfew we didn’t want to have to police. Any man out there on his own will be in trouble now, if he wasn’t before.”

Ruso said, “I’m sorry, sir. But I’m still concerned about my clerk, and with Prefect Pertinax out of action-”

“If he weren’t, he’d have told you to stop interfering and leave the deserter to his own devices.”

“Yes, sir.” It was true. Ruso could see now how badly skewed his judgment had been. If Candidus had been a stranger instead of a young man commended into his care by an old friend, he would have behaved very differently. Still, perhaps there was something to be salvaged from the situation. “Sir, I know one of the native families in the area. They’re connected to my wife. It might help if I go and explain about the search.”

“Don’t say anything that could be construed as an apology.”

“It’ll be difficult to pacify them if I don’t, sir.” And even harder to pacify Tilla.

“Then get your wife to explain if you can’t, man. And tell her we’d like to know where the kidnappers are. By the time we got there, they’d cleared out.”

Fortunately there was no reason for Accius ever to know that the kidnappers had been potential guests at his marriage blessing. He said, “The locals don’t trust my wife, either, sir. They think she’s one of us now.”

“I’m not surprised, if you sent men to raid her people’s farm.”

“I didn’t think, sir.”

“I hope you wouldn’t have treated them any differently if you had thought?”

Ruso looked him in the eye. “Absolutely not, sir.”

For a moment the stare was like a challenge. Accius was no fool, and he had had dealings with Tilla before. Ruso had an uncomfortable feeling that the tribune thought he was lying. He was not too sure himself.

“You got yourself into this, Ruso. This is precisely why senior officers aren’t allowed to marry while abroad on duty.”

Accius did not want to be reminded that Ruso was not a senior officer, nor that he had married in Gaul when he was in between medical contracts with the Legion. He wanted to hear what Ruso now said, which was a meek “Yes, sir.”

This was met with an exasperated “Agh!” Evidently the stupidity that the tribune was forced to deal with this morning was beyond words.

Fabius cleared his throat. “Perhaps we could invite some of the local leaders to dinner, sir.”

The words to dinner were repeated with such contempt that Fabius lapsed back into silence.

“And now it seems we have another problem,” Accius continued. “Have either of you heard this ridiculous tale about a body?”

Suddenly Ruso stopped longing for the conversation to be over. “A body, sir?”

“The gods alone know who it’s supposed to be,” said Accius. “Or where. The point is, it’s slowing us down.”

“Sir?” Ruso was now completely lost. Fabius looked equally blank.

“You don’t know anything about a body buried inside the wall?”

“Inside the wall, sir?” Ruso asked.

“Don’t repeat the question. Do you or don’t you?”

“No, sir. Is there any chance it’s my clerk?”

“Of course not,” said Accius. “The body doesn’t exist. The patrols would have noticed. It’s just a malicious rumor. We’ve denied it, of course, but the chief engineer’s had two native transport contractors fail to turn up this morning and he thinks that’s why. We had patrols not wanting to go up there last night for fear of ghosts, and if it spreads further I expect we’ll have men trying to get themselves off the building crews.”

“I’ll tell my staff to look out for malingerers, sir.”

Fabius chipped in with an enthusiastic “Any man not reporting promptly for work will be flogged, sir!”

Ruso reflected on the irony of soldiers who were frightened of their own defenses. “Do we know where all this started, sir?”

Accius shrugged. The stacks of documents shifted a little more. “We’re making inquiries,” he said. “We have plenty of names to work through, but they may just be people the informers don’t like much.”

Realistically, they might as well hunt for the source of the wind. Any minute now Accius would ask the inevitable question. Ruso decided to anticipate it. “I doubt my wife can shed any light, sir. But I’ll ask.”

“Don’t tell her anything she doesn’t already know. Or anyone else. No loose talk.”

Ruso wondered how anyone could trace the source of a rumor without divulging what it was. “Sir, do you think it’s just possible that-”

“No, I don’t,” said Accius. “And you don’t, either.”

“No, sir.”

“There is no body, Ruso, because the wall is regularly patrolled, and besides, if there were, how would we find it?”

“Dogs, sir?” Ruso suggested, aware that regularly did not mean frequently.

“We’ve had men take a stroll up there with dogs, but it’s raining and it’s windy, and they can’t tell the dog what to sniff for. Besides, we’ve got whole stretches up to twelve or sixteen courses high now. We’re not going to start hacking the wall apart just because a fox has pissed on it.”

“Yes, sir.” The tribune had a point. Conducting an obvious search for a body would only suggest that the officers believed in it too. Besides, how far would they go? Demolish one side to examine the core? Knock it all flat? Dig the foundations out? Defenses had been rising across the land from sea to sea since the spring: vast barriers of turf and stone in which, when you thought about it, dozens of bodies could be concealed. And now, of course, Ruso was. Thinking about it.

This was not the place to say so, but the rumor was a masterly piece of sabotage. It was already slowing down progress, and there would be people who wanted to believe it. There was never any shortage of missing persons. Apart from the regular flow of deserters, there were ordinary civilians who simply went out one day and never came back. Some of them wouldn’t want to be found. Others must have been expecting to return home, but never made it. Most, like the girl who had run away from her violent boyfriend, would leave families behind who were desperate for any scrap of news. As this wretched rumor spread, more and more people would be wondering if the emperor’s wall was a prison for the unquiet spirit of a relative whom it was their duty to find and lay to rest with a proper burial.

While everyone would want to know who it was, one thing was for certain: Nobody would want to be up there the day after tomorrow when the sun went down to mark the start of Samain, the night when the-what was it? When the walls between the living and the dead melt away.

Accius reached for his cloak, which he had hung to drip on the back of the door. The stacks now teetered perilously close to the edge of Pandora’s cupboard. “Anyway,” he said, “if there is anything in this tale, it’s more likely to have happened miles away over on the turf section.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ruso, noting that Accius had just undermined his former denial. “Sir, about my clerk . . .”

“Let me know when he turns up.” Accius flung his cloak around his shoulders. A pile of writing tablets cascaded off the cupboard and clattered across the floorboards.

Ruso lunged across the room to stop a second landslide. Accius glared at the cupboard and then at Ruso, who seized the opportunity to say, “We need someone to sort this out, sir.”

“At least you could put things away,” Accius observed. “This is sheer laziness. You can’t even get in there with all this rubbish cluttering the place up. You shouldn’t have kit stored in here.” He shoved Candidus’s bag aside with one foot and reached for the twine holding the cupboard handles together. “What’s in-”

“Sir, no!”

But it was too late. The doors swung wide, and the tribune’s feet were buried in an avalanche of wooden writing tablets, crushed scrolls, old inkpots, and tangles of twine.