Terra Incognita

22

The sky was orange above the silhouette of the western hills by the time Ruso left Lydia in the infirmary with Postumus. The shutters of We Sell Everything had been pulled across. The barber’s shop was locked and there was no sound from the bathhouse. The awning outside the snack shop rose with a brief gust of wind, then collapsed again. It seemed everyone had gone to pay their last respects to Felix.

Ruso arrived at the small cemetery on the road out of town and slipped in at the back of the crowd gathered around the bier, glad of the approaching dusk. Distracted and late, he had not thought of changing into better clothes. Audax, easily distinguished by the centurion’s plume across his helmet, was standing at attention among the ranks of Batavians whose full formal turn-out displayed a polished range of antique but fearsome-looking weaponry. Over the heads of the crowd he saw the prefect move forward and step up onto some sort of platform.

As Decianus announced that every man was born mortal, Ruso was distracted by the gaggle of young women in front of him. Several were clinging to one another and sniffling. All seemed to have spent much time inconsolably wrecking their fancy hairstyles, and had he been closer, their torn mourning clothes might have revealed some interesting sights.

Decianus moved on to extol the virtues and the necessity of good military trumpeters, while Ruso craned to look around at the rest of the civilians. He wondered if Tilla had come to watch the funeral before delivering his supper. He would have asked her to visit Lydia, but in the fading light he recognized only Susanna from the snack bar and the barber’s wife.

Decianus was commending Felix as a true Batavian, a man of four years’ loyal service to Rome and to the Tenth and a man who would be much missed, when he was interrupted by a stray wail from one of the young women. There was an audible intake of breath from the crowd. Decianus ignored the intrusion and went on to explain that Felix was now freed from the pains and difficulties of life, and that we must all prepare ourselves-

Another wail rose into the air, followed by sobbing and furious hisses of “Sh!” Decianus was still talking, but quite possibly no one was listening as a plump and bedraggled female howled, “Oh, Felix!” The ensuing commotion suggested that either she had collapsed, or one of her wiser friends had wrestled her to the ground. Ruso sighed. Since everyone knew he was the doctor, he supposed he had better step forward.

Catavignus got there first. Evidently this was Aemilia, the daughter who was not well. Grabbing the apparently unconscious girl under the arms, he dragged her away from the mourners onto the grass beyond the gravestones. The angular woman Ruso had seen haggling with the butcher separated herself from the crowd and limped across to kneel beside her. Catavignus waved Ruso away. “We’ll just get her home, Doctor. This has been a very difficult day.”

As Ruso walked away from them he heard the slap of a hand on human flesh, and a wail of pain. Catavignus was administering his own treatment.

Ruso rejoined the funeral just as the speech came to an end. There was another blast of the trumpets. Decianus stepped up to the bier, raised a staff of office, and sprinkled something on the corpse, reciting a chant in what Ruso now recognized as Batavian. A fat man who had been blocking Ruso’s view shifted and for the first time he could make out the full shape of the body. Either the head had been found, or a convincing dummy placed under the shroud. A command was yelled, the troops saluted, the horns blared, and flames began to lick up around what remained of Felix the trumpeter.

Decianus stepped back and stood at attention. A couple of men moved the platform safely away from the flames. The fire cast a flickering light on the impassive features of Audax, who was watching the disappearance of the body that he had been guarding since early morning. Perhaps he was hoping that the fire had been well set, so that the flames would obscure what lay beneath when the shroud burned away. It took Ruso a while to spot Metellus. In the end it was not his face that betrayed his identity beneath the anonymous shell of the helmet, but his stance. All other eyes looking out from under the polished brims were trained on the pyre as Felix’s comrades oversaw his departure to the realms of the dead. Only the prefect’s aide was more interested in watching the crowd.