Tabula Rasa

Chapter 3

It was lucky the leaves were still on the trees or the soldiers would have seen him by now. They had been so busy running around and shouting orders that nobody had noticed a boy creeping along beside the stream until he could get near enough to see the whole of the amazing thing that had happened in the quarry.

The one tied to the rope had made it across to the one who was stuck under the rock now. He moved very slowly, as if he were frightened. Aedic had never seen a soldier frightened before.

The one on the rope was . . . Aedic stretched out and parted the leaves with the tip of his finger. The one on the rope was hunched up right underneath the big rock, trying to do something to the other one’s . . . What was that in his hand? Surely he wasn’t going to cut the other one’s leg off? Aedic felt his mouth fall open, closed it again, and swallowed.

First the dead body, and today a Roman having his leg sawn off. It was the most exciting week he could remember since the day the soldiers turned up and threw everything out of the house and called it “helping.” This made up for not being able to tell the others about the body. Almost.

He still wasn’t sure he believed in the body himself.

He had been hiding in the tunnels his family’s sheep had made through the thick clump of bushes. In the middle the ground still smelled faintly of sheep, even though the flock was long gone, but around the edges was the sharp stink of wee. He didn’t like it, but you got used to it after a bit and at least it meant the soldiers who were building the wall had left these bushes here to use as a latrine instead of chopping them down along with everything else. Farther down the hill, the bramble berries were finished; everyone said you mustn’t pick them past the end of September and it was true-they were dull and shriveled-so he was even hungrier than usual. He had eaten all the cheese he had taken when Petta wasn’t looking, sucking it slowly to make the taste last longer, just like Mam used to tell him. It was nearly dark now, and it was starting to rain again, and still nobody had come to look for him. The patrol had gone past and wouldn’t be back for ages. He supposed he should get up and go home before Petta gave his share of supper to the dog.

He was rubbing his foot to get rid of the pins and needles when he heard . . . a gasp? A grunt? At the time he wasn’t sure what it was, but it wasn’t the wind in the leaves, and it was much too close.

So he had shifted carefully to one side, trying to get a better view out between the tangle of rough stems. The thing grunted again. A shape was moving up the hill away from him. If it had picked up his scent, it wasn’t interested. It wasn’t afraid, either. Too big to be a man; too upright to be a pony or a cow. He lost sight of it, and then it reappeared up by the black line of the wall. He could see its shape against the remaining light in the sky. Two legs. A man, then. But he was not tramping along, carrying a shield like the men on patrol. He was carrying something big and heavy on his back-something that he now let fall onto the ground.

Over and over again since then, Aedic had closed his eyes and pictured that moment, trying to decide if he really could have seen a human head and an arm that flopped down as it fell. Whatever it was, it blended into the ground. The man stretched up into the rain, loosening his muscles after the strain of the carrying. Then he bent down over the new length of wall and lifted off the covers.

How could he be inspecting the work in the dark?

Perhaps he had lost something.

He must be a soldier, because nobody else . . .

But Aedic wasn’t a soldier, and he was there, so perhaps the man wasn’t a soldier either.

If it had been daylight, he might have run up and offered to help. It was all right to go near the troops as long as you were careful. Some of them wanted messages delivered in exchange for an apple or a taste of honeycomb, or they asked which way to go or who could sell them things. Some of them were even glad to see the local boys because they missed their own sons at home, wherever that was. Sometimes when nobody was looking they let people travel in the ox wagons. If you said you had a big sister, you might get offered a ride home on one of the pack ponies, but Aedic kept quiet about the girls at his cousins’ house. He wouldn’t have dared to let Da see him with the soldiers. Not after they had turned the family off the farm and dug great trenches across the grazing. They had set fire to the houses and hacked most of the trees down for scaffolding and firewood. When one of Grandfather’s tottery old friends came to sing a song to the dying trees, the soldiers shouted and threw clods of earth at him until their centurion told them to stop.

Sometimes, when Aedic saw the soldiers tearing the land apart, he thought that was what was happening to him too.

The man up by the wall seemed to move about as if he were working in daylight. He was bending to pick up filling stones from the pile.

Usually the soldiers built up both sides of the wall with rows of the big square stones that they had cut out of the hillside, and then they filled the gap in the middle with things nobody would see: rough stones and clay and sand and sometimes, when the officers weren’t looking, lumps of turf. But that day the rain had got worse. When it rained like that, it washed the wet mortar out and left white streaks down the outsides of the stones, so the centurion had come and told them to stop before they filled the middle in. Aedic had watched them pack up their tools and heard the centurion telling them to make sure they covered the sides up properly before they marched back to the camp. Then he had stayed up there and seen the man carrying the thing that looked very much like a body, and when the wind dropped he could hear the familiar thump and clunk of stones being thrown onto a pile. Up there in the dark and the drizzle, all on his own, the man was filling in the middle of the wall.

The filling-in seemed to go on for a long time, and Aedic’s thoughts had drifted to his dinner and the dog when he realized the man wasn’t there anymore. This time he heard the footfalls. He held his breath as they came down the hill toward his hiding place. Then a cry and a curse and all the bushes shuddered and spattered raindrops. There was the pale shape of a hand, so close that he could have reached out and touched it. Aedic narrowed his eyes and kept as still as a hunter.

The hand lifted, the bushes shook again, and the man was back on his feet and away much too quickly for anyone carrying anything heavy. Whatever it was, he had left it up there.

Even after days of thinking about it, Aedic did not understand what he had seen. But when he thought about telling anyone, the squirming in his stomach told him not to.

This was the first time in days that he had managed to sneak away from his chores for another look, but he was not even sure where the body was now. The soldiers had built up lots more rows of stones and filled in the gap between them. This stretch of wall was too high to see over. He had been about to run back to the cousins’ house before anybody started to wonder why he was taking so long to find firewood, but then came the terrible noise from somewhere down in the valley, beyond the soldiers’ road. And now here he was, seeing the rock all tumbled down and a bloodstained and muddy old man struggling and crying out as the other one was trying to cut his leg off while all the others watched.

“Hey!”

Aedic jumped at the sound, and grabbed the branch to steady himself.

“Yes, you!” the voice shouted in Latin. “What are you doing up there?”

But by the time the soldier got there, Aedic was down the tree and gone.