Tabula Rasa

Chapter 8

Ruso survived a night in a native bed, although without his native wife. It was something Tilla might have warned him about, but didn’t. She seemed to be annoyed about something. Instead he had been offered a bracken-stuffed mattress and some blankets behind the wicker partition that denoted the men’s area. Senecio did not join them.

He had lain awake for what seemed like hours listening to sounds that might be rodents or might be Conn creeping across from one of the other beds to knife him where he lay.

Where was his sword? What would he do if they didn’t give it back?

He finally dropped off to sleep only to be woken by whispering from behind some other partition. This was followed by giggling and the unmistakeable sounds of sex. In a house with no proper rooms, everybody could hear everything that went on.

And on.

He hoped the sounds were nothing to do with Virana. The sooner that wretched girl was handed back to her family, the happier he would be. Meanwhile he would be obliged to put up with the embarrassment of some enthusiastic native ceremony with the old man making up poems about them and everyone singing those interminable ancestor songs that Tilla used to sing in the kitchen at Deva to frighten the mice away. He rolled over on the lumpy bed and tried to go back to sleep, but the gasping and grunting was annoyingly out of time with the rhythm of Conn snoring, and then almost as soon as it was over a child started to cough.

He considered getting up to find Tilla, but it was dark, he had no idea where she was, and besides, he suspected he was not entirely sober. He could hardly stumble around the house waking up sleeping bodies to find out which one he was married to, and it seemed Tilla had no plans to come and fetch him. Valens was right: No good came of mixing with the wife’s friends and relations.

He woke feeling bleary and foolish. Nobody had attacked him in the night. Conn returned his sword as he left. Ruso dismissed the murmur of “I am no happier with this friendship than you are, Roman,” as an attempt to salvage some British pride. Whatever the son thought, he had the old man’s approval.

Had he been feeling brighter on his walk back to the fort, he would have enjoyed the sound of the birds celebrating another sunny morning. He would have savored the smell of fresh bread from the ovens over in the ramparts. Unfortunately he felt more like the dead hen that was still lying on the desk.

Pertinax was still alive. “No hemorrhage, no excessive swelling, no unexpected pain,” reported Valens. He was annoyingly cheerful, having persuaded the deputy to stay awake at the bedside while he himself just dropped in a couple of times to check that nothing more needed to be done. “He’s taken some poppy but he’s lucid enough to insult me.”

“That’s good news.”

“Hm.” Valens settled himself on the pharmacist’s table. “You look done in. Good night, then?”

“Absolutely,” Ruso lied, hoping he did not smell of stale beer and farmyard. He pointed at the hen. “Why is this thing still here?”

“Ah!” Valens looked pleased with himself. “I found out about that. I think your clerk should be returning very soon. He’s on cook duty tonight so he arranged to buy a decent dinner from some chap with local contacts. A man called Mallius turned up half an hour ago wanting to be paid.”

“When did Candidus arrange this?”

“Some time ago, I think,” said Valens, unhelpfully vague. “So tell me, exactly how mad and manipulative are these people of Tilla’s?”

“I’m not sure,” said Ruso, who was not going to breathe a word to Valens about the wedding blessing. “The eldest son’s a nasty piece of work but the old man means well enough. I think he’s genuinely concerned about Tilla. Do you mind?” He pointed at his friend’s footwear, restraining the urge to cry, “Boots!” in the outraged tone adopted by Serena on the rare occasions when she and Valens were in the same room and speaking to each other.

“Sorry.” Valens swung his feet down from the stool and made a halfhearted attempt to brush off the clumps of dried mud. “Apart from Pertinax it’s been pretty quiet. Your centurion dropped in to ask what I thought of an invisible rash on his neck, and there was one admission in first watch with chest pains. Probably indigestion. He’s in Room Five.” Valens glanced at Pandora’s cupboard. “I wasn’t sure what to do about notes.”

Ruso sighed. “Nobody is.”

“Perhaps Albanus will give you a hand when he turns up.”

“If he’s not too busy trying to find his nephew.” Ruso’s brief nostalgia for the days when he had enjoyed Albanus’s willing and intelligent assistance was interrupted by the sound of approaching voices. Rising above them, the scurrying of feet culminated in a thump on the door before it burst open to reveal the rumpled fair hair and pink cheeks of his deputy, Gallus, who declared, “Sirs, it’s the legate!”

Valens leapt up. “I’ll be off, then.”

“If you run into my clerk-”

“I’ll slap his wrists and send him over.” With that, Valens slipped out of the room and moments later the outside door slammed.

Ruso thrust a myrrh pastille under his tongue in an attempt to sweeten his breath, and pulled his tunic straight. Then he shut the door to hide the chicken and went to head off the new arrivals before they all decided to visit Pertinax at once.

To his relief the legate decided to go in with only Ruso for company, leaving his trail of followers to wait outside.

Pertinax made an effort for his senior officer but Ruso could see he was struggling. The great man had the sense to leave after wishing the patient well, telling him he would send his personal physician, and assuring him that everything was under control. When he was gone Pertinax sank back on his pillow and closed his eyes with obvious relief.

Ruso watched the legate stride off down the street to rejoin his entourage, and decided to view the offer of the personal physician as a compliment to Pertinax rather than an insult to himself. If the next few days did not bring fever or hemorrhage or gangrene or any of the other horrors that could undermine a surgeon’s best efforts, the prefect would be fit to be sent across to Magnis. Valens could deal with him and with the legate’s physician too.

He was about to start his delayed ward round when a figure detached itself from the group. For a brief and unrealistic moment he thought it might be a sobered-up Fabius come to thank him for his efforts yesterday, but instead it was Fabius’s deputy, looking very different without the coating of mud.

Ruso unslung the lucky charm and handed it back. “Thank you.”

Daminius grinned. “I knew you’d be all right, sir. It’s never let me down yet.”

“Perhaps you should lend it to Pertinax. Is the quarry still closed?”

The grin faded. “The chief engineer’s inspecting it this morning, sir. Meantime the lads aren’t sorry to be out of it.”

“Nor am I,” Ruso assured him.

“We appreciate what you did, sir. If you ever need a favor, you know where we are.”

Ruso was not going to let the offer lie. “If you happen to hear of the whereabouts of a clerk called Candidus, just transferred over here from Magnis . . .”

“I met him when he arrived, sir. I’ll get the lads to keep an eye out. They’ll be spread around till we get back to work, so somebody might know something.” Daminius glanced at the legate’s party retreating down the street. “Mind you, there’s talk of shoring up and getting going again at the other end.”

It was clear from his tone what he thought of that. Ruso had already heard the suggestion that the accident had been caused by working saturated ground with haste rather than care, perhaps spurred on by the rumors that the Sixth were ahead of their building schedule and the Second Augusta were already finished and packing to march south to Isca for the winter.

An alarming thought slipped into Ruso’s mind: the thought that Candidus might have been making his way along the lip of the quarry just as Pertinax had been. That his missing clerk might even now be lying a few hundred paces south of the main road, buried under tons of rubble, while his feathered dinner lay slowly decomposing on his desk.

Moments later he left Pertinax’s room reassured that the prefect had been alone up there. Thinking rationally, he could see the utter improbability of Candidus vanishing for a couple of days and then returning to wander around in the sight of any senior officer, let alone one as fearsome as Pertinax. He was worrying about nothing. The lad had probably decided that the challenge of sorting out Pandora’s cupboard was too much for him and slipped away to Coria for a few days’ unofficial leave. He would stroll in one morning full of innocence and excuses, trusting that Ruso would pretend to believe him because his uncle was a friend. With luck, he would turn up before Albanus did.

Meanwhile, Ruso needed to get the kitchen to do something with that hen. Then there was a ward round to be done, and over at the camp a queue would already be forming outside the medical tent.