Terra Incognita

47

"Valens! ” said Ruso. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m taking some leave. Move over.” Ruso’s former housemate edged around the table and collapsed next to him on the bench.

“You’re taking leave from the hospital? While I’m away?”

A weary grin spread across Valens’s handsome and unshaven face. “You’re not completely indispensable, Ruso. They’ve brought a replacement in on a temporary contract. And I have to say, he’s no fun at all. So I started to wonder how you were getting along up here in the wilds.”

Ruso did not believe a word of this, but did not want to say so in front of Albanus. “He turned to his clerk. “Perhaps you could go to the kitchen and see if they can find Officer Valens some-”

“Anything,” said Valens. “Anything at all. I’m starving.”

The moment they were alone, Ruso said, “Right. Now tell me.”

“It’s not my fault,” insisted Valens. “Really it isn’t. None of this would have happened if you and Tilla hadn’t pushed off and left me on my own in the house.”

“None of what?”

“You remember the Second Spear?”

“Not with pleasure.”

“Well, you know he had a daughter?”

“Gods above! Tell me you haven’t?”

“Do listen, Ruso. It wasn’t my fault. She found out you’d gone and I was at home alone and bored, and she started popping ’round to see me.”

“With no encouragement from you, of course.”

“Ruso, she’s a rather attractive young lady-”

“Who stands to inherit all of the Second Spear’s money.”

Valens looked pained. “Money does not come into this. Anyway, you’re quite right, it wasn’t a good idea. So I told her it had to stop before her father found out. And that’s when the trouble started. Are you going to finish that bread or can I have it?”

“What trouble?”

Valens sighed, and Ruso saw signs of the strain he must have been under for the last few days. “It’s all a bit of a mess,” he conceded. “I wasn’t intending it to go quite like this.”

“You were allowing a single girl to pop ’round and visit. Completely unchaperoned, I suppose. How did you think it would go?”

“I didn’t sleep with her, Ruso. I swear.”

“You might as well have.”

“That’s what she said.”

“What else did she say?”

“I don’t want to remember. You know what her father’s like?”

The memory of one particular clash with the Second Spear made Ruso shudder.

“Well, she’s inherited it. She’s terrifying, Ruso. She’s like.. ” Valens searched for a simile. “She’s like a one-woman cavalry charge. I had to take to sleeping in the hospital to avoid her. That was when she went and told her father.”

“Oh,” said Ruso, needing no further explanation. “So what are you going to do?”

Valens shook his head. “I really don’t know. I am genuinely on leave, by the way. It cost me a fortune to wangle it, which is why I can’t afford a shave, and I’m going to have to ask you to pay for my supper, but I wouldn’t have lived to spend the money anyway.”

“And you really haven’t touched her?”

“Of course I’ve touched her. I just haven’t done anything irrevocable.”

“You could try going back and telling him that.”

The dark eyes widened. “Ruso, he’s bigger than me. And so are all the men with swords who’ll do whatever he tells them. I’ve been on the road for days. Sleeping in wagons in case he had people searching the inns.”

“So now what are you going to do?”

“I was hoping I could stay up here with you for a while. Just until he calms down. I could help out with… well, with something or other. Anything, really.” Valens brightened. “I could do your night duties!”

Ruso tried to remember any previous occasion upon which Valens had offered to do someone else’s night duties. This simple offer was more alarming than all the fear and exhaustion betrayed by his friend’s face.

He lowered his head into his hands. “Well,” he said, “thanks for involving me in all this.”

“I’m sorry. But you’re my best friend. How much longer is your clerk going to be with that food?”

“I think he’s taken a fancy to the waitress,” said Ruso. “He’s scrubbed the ink off his fingers and he’s wearing hair oil. It’s a dangerous time, spring.”

Ruso circumvented the difficulty of explaining Valens’s arrival at the fort by not bothering to try. He announced that an officer had arrived from the Twentieth and a gate pass was issued without question.

There was only a night porter on duty at the infirmary. “It’s evening,” explained Ruso to his bemused colleague, who was staring around the office in dismay.

“Gods above, Ruso, is this really how they do things up here?”

“No,” said Ruso. “This is how it looks now that I’ve gotten them to sort it out.” He was about to offer to take Valens around and introduce him to the patients when he heard the soft closing of the outside door. Metellus glided into the office and asked to have a word with him in private.