Tabula Rasa

Chapter 4

The patient’s family had given Tilla two hard-boiled eggs, fresh bread, and a cup of warm milk with the usual warning about not drinking the water from the stream. It was kindly meant, but she had been here for most of the summer and heard it a dozen times before. If you wait long enough, the muck from the building work all sinks to the bottom, but no matter what the soldiers tell you, everyone knows they piss in it.

That was the trouble with soldiers, Tilla thought, stepping aside onto the grass verge to let a couple of carts rumble past, and glancing up to where small figures were moving around on the scarred hillside. You couldn’t trust them.

Her anger rose again as she remembered the plump girl’s anxious insistence that her injuries were nothing: She had tripped and banged her head on the doorpost, and then fallen awkwardly. She did not need a healer. She just needed to rest for a while. She was sorry for all the fuss.

Tilla had done her best to be gentle as she set the broken fingers straight, but Cata still cried out in pain.

“Your mother tells me this sort of thing has happened before.”

Cata sniffed. “I am very clumsy.”

Tilla laid the compress over the grazed and swollen cheek. “You are lucky none of the bones of your face are broken.”

The girl kept her eyes closed, like a child who wanted to be invisible.

“You may not be so lucky next time.”

No reply.

“You must stay close to your family,” Tilla told her. “And they must put in a complaint to his centurion.”

Still no reply.

“Do not go near him,” Tilla continued. “Do not waste a single moment hearing how sorry he is, because it will mean no more this time than it did the last.”

Just when she thought she might as well have been speaking to a deaf woman, Cata said, “You don’t know him.”

“No,” Tilla agreed, “but I am older than you and I have met men like him.”

The girl’s swollen lips trembled. “I thought you would understand.”

“My husband does not beat me.” Did she imagine this was what all soldiers’ women had to put up with? “If he did, I would leave him.”

“Sometimes he is very kind.”

“I am sure he is. Drink this.” Tilla handed her the cup. “I am sure he is fond of you, in his own way. And after he has killed you, he will be sorry he did it, and he will miss you very much.”

But the girl showed no sign of having heard.

Tilla did her best to be patient with these girls. It was not so easy to leave when your man knew where your family lived, and he had friends who could have people arrested and searched. Only last week a soldier had come to her demanding to know where his woman was and blaming Tilla for encouraging her to run off. Tilla, who had seen how cowed the girl had become, was secretly delighted. Her family did not know where she was, either, but a small boy had arrived with a message to say that she was safe. Tilla had to go back and tell the soldier that it was no good pestering the family for information: They knew no more about where the girl was hiding than he did.

So much of being a trainee medicus, she now saw, was not about medicine at all but about the complications of people’s lives.

She passed the south wall of the little fort and turned the corner into the huddle of civilian buildings. For once there were no off-duty soldiers lounging about and ogling girls, or carrying their children on their shoulders down the street, or haggling with the shopkeepers. They must have been kept in. It happened sometimes, usually for reasons that were not interesting enough to be worth the bother of finding them out.

The change in the weather had lifted everyone’s spirits. The cobbler was whistling a tune, hammering nails into a sole in time to the rhythm. The baker called to her across the counter as she passed. He grinned and held up a raisin pastry. It was a way of saying he hadn’t forgotten.

She thanked him, slipping the pastry into her bag.

“Don’t tell Ria,” he said. “She’d have sold you one.”

“I shall sneak it past her.” The baker and Tilla’s landlady were brother and sister, but business was business. “How is your little girl?”

“No more trouble so far.” His tone was still wary. “It’s been near enough six weeks.”

“I am sure it was just the fever,” she assured him, wondering if he and his wife ever used the word fit in private or whether they were afraid that speaking the name would somehow bring one on. A family who had lost two babies at birth had no illusions about how easily a surviving child could be snatched away into the next world.

He began to pile the loaves from one half-full basket into another. “I hear your man’s busy, eh?”

“He is always busy,” she agreed.

His hands stilled. “Did you not hear? Where have you been?”

She hurried back to the lodgings feeling faintly ashamed. A woman who had just been told that her husband was taking part in a tricky rescue should be fearful for him, or proud of him, or probably both. Instead, she was cross with him for taking such a risk.

On any other day she might have been proud and worried, but today was different. He had promised.

One night was not much to ask. She had put up with his relatives for a whole summer. Apart from meeting her cousin and her uncle a few years ago, she had asked nothing of him-except for tonight. And he had given his word, even though he was plainly uneasy about it. But now he had found some sort of crisis, and as usual it seemed nobody else could deal with it. He would be late, if he turned up at all, and she would have to explain why her Roman was not there, and how was she to know whether they would understand? She hardly knew them herself. They were not real relatives.

They might have been, though.

It was a peculiar thought that she might have been the old man’s daughter. If Mam had not broken her promise and run away with her father instead, Tilla might have spent her whole life here, milking cows and growing vegetables, grumbling about the Romans and refusing to speak Latin. Thinking a trip to market was exciting, a journey to the seaside a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Knowing and being known by all the neighbors and never wanting to leave. Or maybe desperate to get out? Neighbors were not always kind.

Instead here she was, trailing about after a foreign husband. Living in temporary lodgings, having to eat meals from snack bars, while half their possessions were stored miles away in Deva. Soon she would leave behind most of the people she had grown to know here over the summer. Probably she would never see them again, because you never knew where a soldier would be sent next, and if you wanted any sort of marriage, you had to go with him.

The shutters that formed the entrance of the snack bar had been opened up to let in what was left of the autumn sun. A group of dark-skinned men dressed in rich colors were seated outside, chatting over the remains of a meal in a tongue Tilla did not recognize. She wondered what they made of the drab décor of the only bar in town. Ria looked up from stacking cups behind the counter. “I hear your man’s a hero.”

“I will tell him you said so,” Tilla promised, feeling guilty. At least he did not beat her, and he was not a maid chaser like the centurion at the fort, whose kitchen girl had come to her in tears begging for some charm or potion to keep her from falling pregnant.

Ria leaned across the counter, jabbed a bony finger toward the men outside, and whispered, “From Palmyra. If you want any silk, let me know.”

“Not really.”

“Pity,” she observed. “I could have got you a good deal.”

Someone in the back room was humming a tune Tilla had heard the soldiers singing on the march.

Ria observed, “Your girl’s in a good mood.”

“She doesn’t like silence.”

“She’ll be glad enough of it after the baby comes. What can I get you?”

“I’ll put my bag away first.” Tilla made her way past the empty tables and into the dimly lit storeroom where Virana slept, and where a sturdy ladder provided access to the privacy of the loft room she and her husband were renting.

“Mistress!” Virana’s large form was precariously balanced on a stool in front of a high shelf.

“If you’re going to do that,” Tilla told her, “find something safe to stand on.”

“Oh, I’ve finished now.” Virana clambered down clutching a honey pot. “How is Cata? Is it true her boyfriend broke her jaw?”

Tilla delved into her bag. “Share a pastry?” She would have died rather than reveal anything about her patients to Virana, but sometimes she wondered why she bothered to keep her mouth shut. Nobody else around here did.

Virana picked out a raisin and popped it into her mouth. “Is the master back yet?”

“No.”

“He is very brave. Did his clerk come back?”

“Yes. And no.”

“Shall I take your bag up?”

“Virana, you’re supposed to be . . .” Tilla paused. She could hardly say resting, since the arrangement for Virana to work in Ria’s snack bar suited everyone very nicely, including Virana, who saw it as a chance to meet the legionary of her dreams. “I’ll take it,” she said. “You’re supposed to be careful. And don’t drop crumbs or you’ll be sleeping with mice.”

By the time she came back down, Ria had left the bar and was clattering about in the kitchen. The outside table had now been taken over by a group of local women. The loaded baskets suggested they had been shopping over at Vindolanda; the fact that they were here suggested they were in no hurry to go home, but not daft enough to pay Vindolanda prices for drinks.

She had not intended to eavesdrop, but as she carried her beer across to the last patch of sunshine slanting in through the doorway and across a table, she realized she was in an ideal position to listen: hidden from view but able to hear every word.

“So she said to them,” declared a voice with a familiar lisp, “ ‘Why d’you have to march straight through my cabbages?’ So the one in charge pointed up the hill, and he said, ‘We’ve got orders to go up there.’ So she said, ‘Well, you should go around! Can’t you see I’ve got things growing here?’ and he said-this is what he said, without a word of a lie-‘The Twentieth Legion do not go around.’ ”

“The Twentieth Legion do not go around!” repeated the others, rolling this new outrage about on their tongues as if they were enjoying the flavor.

“So I said to her,” continued the woman with the lisp, “you want to do what my cousin did when they kept letting his sheep out.”

Tilla took a sip of beer and waited, an invisible member of the audience. The woman was local: She remembered the thick brows and the eager front teeth. “He moved the sheep up to the common,” the woman said, “and he put the bull in there instead.”

Her audience seemed to like that.

“I was there when the next lot came. You should have seen them run! Tripping over each other and everything falling out of their packs.”

There was general laughter, and Tilla could not resist a smile.

“See? The Twentieth Legion do go around after all.”

The talk drifted to people she did not know. Across the road, a cat was picking its way delicately along the roof of the leatherworker’s shop, untroubled by the puddle that covered half the street below.

Had she done the right thing about Cata? The mother had plainly been hoping she would use her influence with the Medicus to have the man disciplined. That was the problem with being honest about having married an officer: People wanted her to pass messages to the Legion. But at least this way she could not be accused of betraying anybody. Everyone knew from the start not to tell her things that the Romans were not supposed to know. And if there were times when that made her lonely, well, that was how life was. One of her mother’s favorite sayings was Nobody likes a girl who feels sorry for herself. Which was very annoying but true.

Virana passed by her with a tray of drinks and then returned to the back room. Outside, the woman with the lisp said, “You know about that one, do you?”

Tilla held her breath. They had been offered a room here after Virana had given a sob story about her baby’s father being dead. “Well, he might be,” Virana had insisted when Tilla challenged her about it later. On the other hand, there were plenty of candidates for fatherhood still very much alive and serving with the Twentieth Legion, and Tilla had known she could not keep it quiet for long.

“They all live together over the bar here, you know.”

“No! Really? I thought he lived in the fort.”

Tilla frowned into her beer and wondered if she should walk away. Or perhaps stand up and let herself be seen. She did neither, despite another of her mother’s favorites: No good comes of listening to gossip.

Someone asked a question she could not catch. “Enica says the wife is barren,” said the woman with the lisp. “But she says he’s had more luck with the slave, as you see.”

Tilla struggled to stifle her spluttering as the beer went the wrong way. Enica was a member of the family she would be introducing to her husband tonight-if he managed to turn up. She had explained when they first met that Virana’s child was nothing to do with her husband, who was not a maid chaser. And Virana had said so too, and Enica had said . . . It did not matter what Enica had said, because it was clear now that she had not believed either of them.

Somebody said, “I heard they picked that one up in Eboracum and she isn’t really a slave at all.”

“Hmph. I’m surprised the wife puts up with it.”

“The wife’s probably grateful to be taken in,” said another voice. “I heard he rescued her from the Northerners.”

“That is just what she says,” said someone else. “Did you not know? He bought her. She was in a brothel down in Deva.”

“That can’t be right. Isn’t she a Roman citizen?”

Tilla wanted to shout, I was only lodging in the brothel! Why didn’t you just ask me? Instead she took a large gulp of beer.

Somebody said, “And the old boy’s really invited them?”

“That’s what Enica said. Because she looks like her mother. You can imagine what Enica thinks about that. Conn too.”

“Ah, but Conn is a miserable offering these days, don’t you think? Not a bit like his father. Or his brother, may he walk in peace.”

“They all end up that way, girl. Look at mine.”

“What? Dead?”

“No, he just looks it. Bad-tempered.”

“Mine too,” chimed in another voice. “Never happy unless he’s complaining.”

“Still, it’s a bad sign if he’s like that already at his age. You want something better at the start, no?”

And they were off into discussing the reasons why the son of the man whose hearth she would be sharing tonight had slumped from being a fine young man to a miserable offering.

She could not argue: The one time she had seen him, Conn had certainly worn the face of a man who had found a dead rat in his dinner. Perhaps it really was because his once-betrothed had been raped by a soldier during the troubles and refused to get rid of the soldier’s baby, and perhaps it wasn’t, because these women would believe any scandalous nonsense they were told. They deserved to be shamed. To be set straight. To be made to say they were sorry for being so spiteful. To be made to feel sorry.

The trouble was, anything she said now would leave them with even more to gossip about than before. And nothing would make this evening any easier.

She drained her beer, clapped the cup down on the table, and strode across the bar toward the back door. It would have been better if she had not knocked over a bench on the way, but she was not going to turn around and pick it up. Nobody was going to see how pink her face was.