Terra Incognita

53

"Aemilia! ” called the voice. “Ut vales, filia mea?”

Tilla paused with one arm inside her overtunic, and frowned. Even in their own home, Catavignus was asking his daughter how she was feeling this morning in Latin. Perhaps her father’s old taunt was right: Perhaps her uncle really did have a toga stashed away somewhere, ready for the governor’s call to wrap himself in it and strut about as a citizen of Rome.

Tilla opened the door a crack and replied in her own tongue, “She is asleep, uncle.”

“Child!” He slipped back immediately into the language of his ancestors. “Welcome home!”

Catavignus was grayer, and perhaps heavier, but otherwise unchanged. For a moment she wondered why he was not surprised to see her. Then she realized that Ness must have told him she was here. He had had time to prepare himself.

“I am sorry not to have welcomed you yesterday,” he continued. “I was away on business. If I had been told you were coming-”

“No matter, uncle,” she assured him. “Aemilia made me welcome.”

“Aemilia, yes.” He dropped his voice to a murmur. “How is she?”

Tilla glanced over her shoulder at a pile of jumbled blankets: all that was visible of her cousin. “Still asleep.”

“Come to my office when you are dressed, child,” suggested Catavignus. “We have much to talk about.”

When she was dressed Tilla wandered along to the kitchen and moments later found herself enjoying not only soft bread and warm milk, but the luxury of knowing someone else had risen at dawn to fetch the water and sweep out the hearth and get the fire lit. She sat with her elbows resting on the scrubbed table, watching Ness’s quick fingers checking supplies and seeing her lips move as she limped around the kitchen memorizing a shopping list.

She would have liked to speak freely with Ness, but what could she say? I know now how it is to be a slave? Of what help would that be to either of them? They had embraced last night, genuinely glad to see each other again, but today they had returned to their roles. The only useful thing she could do would be to get up off the stool and help, and that would embarrass both of them.

Ness finished counting and began to grope her way along the line of laundry, checking for dampness. “Were you expecting a visitor last night, mistress?”

“A visitor?” said Tilla, realizing she had forgotten to explain to anyone here about the medicus.

Ness slapped a dry pair of socks down on the table. “I knew he was lying!”

“Who was he?”

“Some drunken soldier. Did you not hear the banging on the door?”

“I must have been asleep,” said Tilla. The family bedrooms were farther back in the house. Ness slept in the little storeroom facing the noise of the street, so that Catavignus did not have to feed a doorkeeper as well as a cook. “What did this soldier look like?”

“Like a man in a helmet in the dark. I got rid of him.”

“Did he leave a message?”

“No.”

“There is an officer I know,” she confessed. “A medicus. It might have been him.”

“It was very late.” Ness was sounding defensive now.

“He is sometimes delayed by his patients.”

“I am not here to let men in and out late at night. What sort of a house do you all think this is?”

Tilla grinned, drained her milk, and made her way out of the back door into the gray of a drizzly morning.

The yards of the house and the brewery were linked by a tall gate that was not locked. Pushing it open, she entered the brewery yard and paused to marvel at how much her uncle’s business had expanded in just three years. Instead of a few sacks of homegrown barley and a collection of buckets and fat-bellied cauldrons beside the hearth, he now had a whole building devoted to the production of beer. Not only that, but at the far end of the yard, well away from the main building, the rain was dripping off the thatch of a little square house that had a narrow blackened tunnel disappearing under one wall. The soldiers must be drinking so much beer that her uncle had built a special hot floor to dry the sprouted barley.

A surly-faced boy emerged from the back door of the brewery with a bucket in each hand. He stared at Tilla for a moment, then dunked the buckets into the water trough. When he lifted them out, the trickle of water of which she had been vaguely aware became louder. She looked on in amazement as she realized that the sound came from a metal spout over the trough. Clear water was trickling out of the spout and refilling the trough. When the boy had carried the buckets back in, she went across to examine what she had seen and found another pipe leading away from the trough in the direction of the house latrine. She thought of the endless trips down to the stream on days when her mother told her to go and help Ness. The aching shoulders on the long climb back up to the house. The fingers numb with cold. The effort not to tip the buckets lest she should waste the water and have to traipse back down and fetch more. Now, her uncle’s servants did not even have to leave the house. The hot floor was nothing compared to this. Catavignus had his own water pipe in the yard and a latrine that cleaned itself.

“Niece!” exclaimed a voice from the back door of the brewery. “Come in out of the wet.”

She made her way across the damp paving stones and into the gloom. The surly boy was pouring the water into a hissing cauldron set over a charcoal fire. Her uncle did not introduce them.

The surroundings had changed, but the smell of the boiling mash was still the same. The smoke and steam made her cough as Catavignus led her down through the building past stacks of barrels and grain sacks. A gnarled old man who looked as though he had worked there for centuries paused from hooking down a bunch of dried flowers from the rafters when Catavignus yelled in his ear, “My niece, back from a long journey!”

The man nodded and grinned at Tilla, exposing both of his teeth.

“We just add the meadowsweet for the flavor these days,” explained Catavignus, indicating the brittle bunches of flowers above her. “Demand is so high that everything is drunk before we need to think about preservation.” He pushed open a side door. “We can talk in my office.”

The only light slid in on a cold draft from a window that was open onto the wet street. Office, Tilla observed, was a grand name for a cramped storeroom with a desk that looked suspiciously like a military castoff under the window. She seated herself on the proffered stool and pointed to a glossy orange inkwell sporting a feather quill.

“Have you learned to read and write, Uncle?”

The crease between her uncle’s brows deepened. “Of course. But I rarely find the time. I have a man who comes in to deal with that sort of thing.”

“You are doing very well,” she observed. “You have…” she counted on her fingers. “Ness, a boy, the old man, a man who does the writing you are too busy for, the woman and her husband up at the old house-”

“You have been to the old house?”

“Yesterday. Six servants, two houses, and a brewery with a hot floor and a water pipe!”

“The gods have been kind to me.” The bow of acknowledgment was modest. “Coria is a good place to do business. I have formed a guild of caterers. Things are moving forward.”

Forward. The word he had used in all those shouting matches with her father. You must move forward. Seize the opportunity. Rome is the future. As if the wisdom of the ancestors were of no value. Now, with Da gone, there was nobody to disagree with him.

She said, “I see you are trying to build a grand Roman house in a place that will never succeed.”

For a moment he hesitated, then his face split into a warm smile that reminded her painfully of her father. “You have your da’s directness,” he said. “He would be proud.”

Tilla wondered if that were true.

“If only we had known you were alive! But there was no ransom demand. We thought you were lost in the fire. Then last year we heard a rumor that you had been seen in the southern plains. I went down there to look for you. They told me a girl with your name had gone back to Deva to live with a soldier.”

The words hung in the air, innocent enough, but clad in the armor of old arguments.

“I said nothing to your cousin,” he added. “In case the rumors were not true.”

She said, “They were true.”

He nodded. “We all have to make changes, child. Your father was a fine man, but he was not always right about everything.”

“The man I lived with is not a proper soldier,” she insisted, conscious of evading the gaze that reminded her of Da. “Not really. He is a healer.”

“I see.”

“The family would have learned to like him.” Perhaps. Or perhaps they would have refused to have anything to do with her, just as Rianorix’s family had shunned Veldicca when she had rejected their chosen blacksmith and set up home with a soldier who had more patience with his bees than his woman.

Catavignus said, “Is this healer traveling with the Twentieth Legion?”

“Medicus Gaius Petreius Ruso.”

Her uncle nodded approval. “I have met him. A good man. An officer. You have done well.”

“Do you think so?”

“Your cousin will be jealous.”

“I am not his wife,” she pointed out. “I am his slave.”

“His slave?” Catavignus frowned. “Well. We shall have to do something about that.”

“We?”

“From now on, daughter of Lugh, we must look after each other. As family. You, me, Aemilia-and in time, if the gods are willing, your officer.”

“Aemilia is not well,” said Tilla, eager to change the subject.

Her uncle nodded. “She needs some womanly advice.”

“Yesterday I advised her to get out of bed, wash herself, and eat properly. Today I shall advise her to go for a walk.”

“Good. Did she tell you why she is behaving in this way?”

“Not exactly,” said Tilla, not sure what Catavignus was supposed to know.

“She entangled herself with a very unsuitable young man. It has ended badly, as I knew it would. I told her at the time that she could do better, but what do I know? I am only her father. It is not easy for a man to raise a daughter on his own.”

Tilla bit back the observation that he hadn’t done it on his own: What about the succession of honorary aunties? The fat one with the wart. The one with the slit up one side of her tunic that showed her thigh. The one who was always cleaning and who liked to grab passing children and wipe dirt off their faces with the cloth she had just spat on. None had stayed long, but there had been plenty of them. And now he had Ness to limp around after them both.

He was still talking. “We must make the most of you while we have you,” he said. “They tell me your medicus will be moving on in a few days.”

Tilla looked her uncle in the eye. “He will be moving on,” she agreed. “I may go with him. Or I may not.”