Terra Incognita

4

Last night’s storm seemed to have washed the sky clean but already a stiff breeze was blowing fresh clouds in from the west. Beneath them, a cavalry outrider had stationed himself in a dramatic pose on the top of a distant hill from whence he could see not only the column but also the approach of any potential marauders. Ruso, whose horse was ambling along as if it were asleep, wished he could join him. Instead he was expected to keep pace with infantry. The goods convoy the infantry was escorting on this last-but-one stage of their journey included a wagon carrying lead for replumbing Ulucium’s leaky latrines, so the pace of the column was excruciatingly slow.

Ruso rubbed at an itch on his elbow, muttered, “Pick your feet up, will you?” to the horse, and urged it into a trot. As he passed up the hill along the column he scanned the glum faces of the Twentieth. The prospect of drying out in Coria this evening seemed to offer little cheer. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that the man who invented a tent that could fend off rising as well as falling water would have a statue erected in his honor in every army camp in the empire.

Finally spotting the soldier he wanted, Ruso allowed his mount to relax into a walk. “ ’Morning, Albanus.”

A slight figure in a damp tunic looked up from the ranks. “Good morning, sir.”

The clerk did not look quite as weary today. Ruso suspected that Albanus had suffered on this march. No matter how keen a man might be, and how regularly he attended physical training, a life of writing letters and organizing medical records was poor preparation for carrying a full pack across the hills in all weather for days on end. Rubbing his elbow again, Ruso said, “Just as well nobody called me out last night, eh?”

“Very lucky, sir.”

He wondered what Albanus would think if he knew that he had been paid with Tilla’s stolen money for being willing to get up and fetch Ruso-who should have been in one of the tents-if a doctor were needed. “I don’t suppose you got much sleep anyway,” he ventured.

Albanus smiled. “Oh, I was fine, sir. My mother says I’ve always been the same. Once I’m off, nothing ever wakes-” He stopped.

Ruso hid his amusement. “I see.”

“I would have got up, sir, of course-”

“I’m sure you would,” said Ruso, truthfully. There was no fun in teasing Albanus. It was like poking a kitten with a stick. He slapped at his elbow. The itch shrank away for a few seconds, then crept back.

The road was still running along high ground, offering views to either side that would have been dramatic had there been anything new to look at. But even native house fires were no longer a novelty. There was another one now. A fresh plume of thick black smoke rushing skyward from a settlement in the middle distance. It was hardly surprising that people who insisted on lighting fires in the middle of thatched huts would have mishaps, but as they drew closer he could make out a squad of men clad in armor marching away down the valley, ignoring the frantic figures who were trying to beat out the flames.

It occurred to him that perhaps some of the other fires had not been accidents either. Everyone said the natives were more difficult to manage in the north.

Ruso yawned. He had not slept well. Tilla had finally consented to join him in the bed, but his efforts to warm her up had led to an unexpected cry of “Cernunnos!” at a crucial moment, and somehow despite her insistence that this was the name of the god she had seen in the yard, it had still put him off his stroke. Unabashed, she had proceeded to speculate about what this divine visitation might mean. His insistence on resuming his own more earthly visitation was greeted with tolerance rather than enthusiasm.

She had woken him again in the middle of the night, babbling in British. It was a moment before he realized she was talking in her sleep, no doubt to some god with antlers. After she fell silent he had lain awake in the dark, telling himself that it was completely irrational to be jealous of a trick of the light, and that he was only starting to wonder if she really had seen something because he was not properly awake himself.

Another itch had sprouted in the hollow between his shoulder blades. When the column stopped for water, he would have to dig out his baggage and try and find some calming ointment. In the meantime, his fingers slid up between two of the layers of iron plates, but they were now trapped at an awkward angle and he could not move them enough to have any effect. Twisting sideways, he tried plunging the hand down the back of his neck instead. The probing fingers fell just short of their destination.

Several instruments that would have done the job safely were in his medical case, but that was back on one of the carts. He tried grabbing the top and bottom of his tunic, and pulling it taut while wriggling against it like a cow trying to scratch itself on a gate. That did not work either.

Finally he thumped at his back with his fist before noticing that several of the legionaries tromping up the slope beside him were watching with interest. Among them was his clerk.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Fine, thank you, Albanus.” He wondered whether to add, “Just doing some morning stretches,” but decided that would make it worse.

He urged the horse forward, musing upon the pointlessness of formal education. Instead of wasting time arguing over dilemmas unrelated to real life, bright young minds should be set useful questions. Questions such as: A man is offered a chance to share a room with a bad-tempered woman and several biting insects, or a tent with his comrades and a large quantity of rainwater. Which should he choose?

Moments later he was level with a centurion whose nose appeared to have been attached to his face as an afterthought. This was Postumus, the man in whose tent he had failed to appear last night. Ruso was anticipating some cutting comment on his absence, but Postumus was busy scowling at the horizon.

“Little bugger,” Postumus observed.

Following the centurion’s gaze, Ruso saw the lone rider still silhouetted against the gathering clouds. “There’s something to be said for joining the cavalry,” he said.

“He’s not cavalry.”

“No?” At this distance, it was impossible to make out whether the horseman was carrying weapons. “Who is he, then?”

“That’s exactly what he wants us to ask.”

“Ah,” said Ruso, surprised to find he had fallen into some sort of trap. Then, as the outline of the horse narrowed and began to sink into the rise of the hill, “He’s going.”

“He’ll pop up again farther along,” said Postumus. “Always where we can see him and always just out of range. He’s following us.”

“I’ve seen him before,” said Ruso.

“One of the patrols went after him yesterday and he outran them. Vanished into the woods and couldn’t be tracked.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“Well, he’s not a lookout,” said Postumus. “They’d use some snot-nosed little goatherd for that.”

“They?”

“The natives,” said Postumus. “I reckon all that one wants is to get on our nerves.”

“Ah.”

“Which is why, for the time being, we’re ignoring him.”

“Right,” said Ruso, guessing that the watcher’s presence had been the cause of yesterday’s unexplained order to don helmets. “So we do know who he is.”

“If you’d been where you were supposed to be last night, you’d know what I know. Nice and cozy up at the inn, were you?”

“Very,” said Ruso, suddenly unable to resist wriggling under his armor. “Kind of you to ask.”

Postumus was looking at him oddly. “Something the matter with you?”

“Me? No.”

“Uh.”

They rode on in silence for a while, then Postumus said, “You haven’t heard what’s going on, then?”

“What?”

“You might want to think about making an offering to Fortuna next time you get a chance,” added Postumus. “Or whatever god you think might be listening up here.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” promised Ruso, deducing that he was being punished for sleeping under a solid roof last night.

“Not that our lads are worried,” added Postumus.

“Of course not,” agreed Ruso.

“But the units stationed up here are pretty jumpy.”

Ruso felt his resolve slipping away. Eventually he said, “What aren’t we worried about, exactly?”

“You really want to know?”

“Go on then.”

“The story I heard…”

The story Postumus had heard began with an army transport convoy making its way to a base at the opposite end of the border. The convoy had been delayed by a breakdown and was still an hour away as darkness fell. They were making good progress when a sudden shower of burning arrows rained down on the carts, and a fire broke out in the straw packing around a consignment of oil jars. Postumus described what ensued as “a fine old fry-up” and in the chaos that followed nobody noticed that the guards on the rear vehicle had been knifed and the cargo stolen. Nobody could remember seeing any of the attackers.

“So next morning they do a security roundup and most of the natives don’t know a thing, as usual. But after a bit of expert prompting they start talking about a strange figure riding past in the half-light, and they swear he had antlers and he’s a messenger from the gods.”

“Antlers?”

“Nobody took much notice until a couple of the guards on the transport said they saw the same thing, only they didn’t speak up in case people thought they were crazy.”

“It was dark when they saw this-thing?”

“But every one of them described it the same way. That’s not all. There’s an outpost where the whole unit fell ill, including the medic.”

Ruso ignored the gibe.

“Turned out there was a dead wolf in the water channel,” said Postumus. “But it couldn’t have got in there by itself. Someone had replaced the cover stone and laid a set of antlers on top. Then there’s a tax collector who got ambushed. He saw him too.”

“Who’s going to believe a tax collector?”

The centurion grunted. “I’m just telling you what I heard. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But like I said, I don’t reckon matey on the horse is anything to worry about.”

“No,” agreed Ruso. “The lack of antlers would seem to support you there.”

“I reckon,” continued Postumus, “that he’s some scabby little Brit who thinks he’s clever. We’ll go across and give him a surprise later on. When we’re good and ready.”

Privately Ruso thought that if the scabby little Brit really were clever, he would play along with the rumors by strapping something spiky to his head. Deciding not to bother Postumus with this thought, he said, “So we’ve been sent up here to steady a few nerves.”

“ I’ve been sent,” corrected Postumus, edging his horse sideways to steer around a minor landslip where the curb had begun to collapse into the ditch. “I heard you volunteered. Don’t know what the hell for. Specially with that girl of yours.”

“I heard there’s more action up on the border,” said Ruso, not keen to get into a discussion about Tilla.

A grin made its way around the nose. “Not enough bodies for you back at base, eh?”

Ruso sighed. He had never wanted to get tangled up in that business of the murdered barmaid. Now, no matter how often he denied it, it seemed everyone in the Twentieth legion knew him as the medicus with as much interest in dead patients as live ones. “Last month,” he explained, “a man turned up on my doorstep with the corpse of his girlfriend’s cat, and asked me to find out who’d poisoned it.”

“And did you?”

“No.”

“Heard you didn’t have much luck pinning down who killed that barmaid, either.”

“I don’t investigate dead cats,” said Ruso, who knew far more about the barmaid than Postumus suspected. “I’ve got better things to do.”

“Well, perhaps you can track down matey with the antlers.” Postumus was scanning the horizon, presumably looking out for the scabby little Brit so he could carry on ignoring him.

Ruso let the centurion ride on ahead before making another futile attempt to scratch his back. There was a suspicious tickling sensation on the lower right-hand side of his ribcage now. Almost as irritating as the itching was the fact that he had not noticed any of this until after they had set out this morning. Otherwise he would have cornered that lying innkeeper and demanded a refund.

For a moment he had been alarmed by the way Postumus’s stories echoed Tilla’s. Now, thinking about it logically, he realized that Tilla must have heard those same stories from other travelers. Her vision in the yard last night had not been an apparition sent to inspire her or to terrorize the army, but the result of frightening rumors working on the uneducated native imagination. The only mysterious creature at the inn had been the common but strangely invisible bedbug-and if she did not mention the bites, neither would he. She would only gloat.

Officer Metellus was able to name Felix’s murderer by the start of the third watch. It was a native. His identification had not been difficult, since he was not the brightest of men. Plenty of people had heard him pick a quarrel with the victim in a local snack bar only hours before the body was found. Several of the witnesses could remember the exact wording of the threats he had made.

Unfortunately, as Prefect Decianus of the Tenth Batavians observed over his lunch tray, naming the murderer did not solve the problem.

“We’ll pick him up soon, sir,” promised Metellus, who had not been invited to share the frugal offering of bread and black olives. “All our contacts know who to look for, and I’ve got men watching the house.”

Decianus tore a chunk off the bread. “Audax wants to round up twenty natives and execute one every watch until someone tells us where he is.”

Metellus frowned. “I don’t think the governor would approve, sir. His orders are-”

“I don’t need you to tell me what the governor’s orders are, Metellus. Obviously we aren’t going to do that. Not without approval. I’ll send a message down and see what he says.”

“I’ve already done that.”

Decianus glanced at him. “I don’t suppose we’ll get much of an answer till he gets here to see for himself. And I want to have this cleared up by that time anyway.” He dropped the bread back onto the tray. “Where’s the body now?”

“In the mortuary. Audax is guarding the door. Nobody else has been allowed anywhere near it.”

Decianus pondered that for a moment. “What are the men saying?”

Metellus said, “We’re putting it out that it was just a quarrel in a bar, sir.”

“And do they believe it?”

“Probably not.”

“I want it made absolutely clear that we’re dealing with a simple backstreet brawl. There’s nothing mysterious about the way the native cursed our man, and there is no connection between this business and anything else they may have heard.”

“I’ll do my best sir,” agreed Metellus. “But judging by the number of civilians lining up to make devotions to the gods, it’s not going to be easy.”

Decianus sighed. “Tell me this isn’t happening, Metellus.”

“It’ll be better when we arrest the native, sir.”

“It’ll be better when you find our missing item.”

Metellus said, “It’s nowhere in his house. I’ve got two men covering the road between here and there, and another three covering the streets, spreading out from where the body was found.” He raised a hand to silence the objection the prefect was about to make. “It’s all right, I haven’t told them anything. Their orders are to search for evidence of anything the native might have stolen from the victim, then bring it back and say nothing.”

Decianus picked up an olive, examined it for a moment, then flung it back into the bowl. It bounced off the rim, missed the desk, and skittered across the floorboards. “We should have seen this coming.”

“My people can’t be everywhere, sir. The native wasn’t on our list as anybody important.”

As Decianus was saying, “Well he’s found a way of making himself important now,” there was a knock on his office door. Apparently the fort doctor urgently wished to speak with him.

Decianus frowned. “I suppose he’s come to complain about having a centurion keeping him out of his mortuary.”

The young soldier in the doorway hesitated, evidently not sure whether the prefect was always right or whether his staff were expected to warn him when he wasn’t. Finally he said, “Not exactly, sir.”

Decianus brushed breadcrumbs from his tunic. He had not been impressed by Doctor Thessalus’s recent performance. The man was due to be replaced in a few days when the governor arrived, and Decianus was not sorry. “Very well,” he said, sliding the tray aside. “Send him in.”

The state in which Thessalus appeared before him did nothing to improve his opinion. “Stand easy,” he ordered.

Thessalus, who had not been standing as straight as he might, relaxed even further. The glare of the guard who had marched him in suggested that he would very much like to seize this excuse for an officer and straighten him up again.

Thessalus seemed to be having difficulty staying awake. He squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them again. Decianus followed his gaze and saw that a fly had settled on the tray and was now busy cleaning its back legs. Decianus dismissed the guard and waved away the fly. Metellus, who had retreated to sit in the corner, said nothing.

“So, doctor,” said Decianus, “Tell me what’s so urgent.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed the doctor. “Right away, sir.” The silence that followed was broken by a hiccup. “Oops,” he said, a faint grin creasing his thin face. “Sorry, sir.”

Decianus reflected that it was very early in the day to be drunk. He nodded to Metellus, who approached the doctor and leaned close to repeat the order into his ear.

Thessalus’s smile faltered. He blinked several times. His mouth opened, closed again, and then, in an accent that betrayed a better education than everyone else in the room, offered the words, “I’ve come to confess to a murder, sir.”

Decianus leaned his elbows on the desk, placed his fingertips together, and eyed the unsteady Thessalus over the top of them. “You might want to reconsider what you’ve just said, doctor.”

The young man rubbed his unshaven jaw and appeared to be pondering this question. Then he said, “No, sir. I have to tell the truth. I was the man who killed Felix.”

Decianus sighed. “We already know who killed Felix, Thessalus. It wasn’t you.”

The dark eyes widened. “Holy gods! That wasn’t Felix?” The fingers that rose toward his mouth were trembling. “This is even worse than I thought. Is there another man missing, sir?”

A swift glance at Metellus assured Decianus that there was not. “What,” he said, “exactly, do you think you did to Felix?”

Thessalus swallowed. His eyes attempted to focus on the edge of the desk. Finally he said, “I think I may have, ah-I may have…” The words had failed but the meaning of the collision between the outer edge of the hand and the back of the neck was unmistakable.

Decianus glanced at Metellus again, then returned his attention to the doctor.

“Tell me what you did with the body.”

Thessalus appeared to be pondering the meaning of this question. Finally he said, “The local people believe the soul resides in the head, sir.”

“I see. So where is the soul of Felix residing now?”

“They take the enemy’s head home with them. They keep it on display as a trophy. Sometimes they make a cup out of the skull and drink from it.”

“That was years ago,” put in Metellus. “Even the northerners don’t get up to that sort of thing now.”

Instead of replying, Thessalus swayed alarmingly and grabbed hold of the desk for support.

“Stand up straight, man! Why on earth would you want to murder Felix?”

Thessalus’s eyes closed. His knees buckled. His body slumped to the floor.

“He’s relieved of duty,” said Decianus, leaning over the desk. “He’s to be confined to quarters until further notice. And he’s not to talk to anyone.”

When the semiconscious doctor had been dragged out, Decianus turned to Metellus. “Search his rooms.”

“It can’t have been him, sir. He’s not the type.”

“Then how does he know?”

There was a soft tap at the door. A servant scurried in and removed the tray. When he had gone Metellus said, “Audax must have talked.”

“That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Well, it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you either.”

Decianus looked him in the eye. “It might have been better to tell the truth in the first place.”

“You’re doing the right thing, sir,” Metellus assured him. “We’ll keep Thessalus quiet, arrest the native, and it’ll all blow over.”

“It had better blow over before the governor gets here.”

“Do you want some ideas for the funeral speech?”

Decianus scowled at him. “No,” he said. “I want you to concentrate on keeping this thing under control.”

When he was alone, Decianus walked across to the small wooden shrine on the side wall of his office, sprinkled some more incense in the burner, and prayed that this mess was not about to get considerably worse.