Terra Incognita

68

There were, Ruso reasoned, only a limited number of places a visiting chieftain with a rough reputation could be lurking in a place like this. If Trenus were in the fort, Metellus would know. If he were not, he would be in a bar, a brothel, or the bathhouse. Ruso hoped he wasn’t going to have to search them all. He was supposed to be working at the infirmary. He needed to get some sense out of Aemilia. He needed some proper evidence against Gambax. He needed to check on Albanus. He was supposed to be doing any number of important and urgent things, none of which included hunting for a visiting tribesman in defense of a woman who had betrayed him, but suddenly that seemed more important than any of them.

Trenus was not at Susanna’s, and no one would have been interested if he had been. The little waitress was blotchy faced, and Susanna’s head covering kept sliding off and having to be yanked forward again.

“Two of them!” she muttered across the counter, furiously and ineffectively rubbing at an old stain with a cloth. “Two customers attacked in one week!”

Ruso agreed that it was very bad luck.

“Why me?” she demanded, her hand pausing in midrub. “I ask you, what sin have I committed that this should happen to me? I close on the Sabbath. I don’t envy anybody anything. I don’t eat the food offered to Apollo-Maponus. I admit it’s served in my house, but what can I do? There’s only me here. I don’t eat it myself, and it’s too late to cancel the caterers now. You’ll be there, and Doctor Valens..”

“Don’t worry on our account,” said Ruso generously. “You can say you’re canceling out of respect for Albanus.”

“But all the caterers will be making things to bring, and the pastries are in the oven, and the duck’s been stuffed!” She sighed. “If we cancel now, people will say we’re giving in to the rebels. But I swear if that young man survives, I’ll never host another one of these things. Never mind what the caterers think. That’s the end of it.”

Ruso crossed the street. Someone in a place this size was bound to have noticed a visiting chieftain.

The barber was busy with another customer but greeted him like a long-lost friend. “Doctor! I won’t be a minute!”

“Don’t rush, Festinus,” Ruso urged him. “I just want a word.”

Moments later the customer was clutching a wad of bloodstained linen against his jaw, and Ruso had been directed to a bar on the far side of the west gate.

“Step right in, sir! What’ll you have to drink? Will it be wine, beer, mead?”

“No thanks,” said Ruso, who had drunk enough overpriced vinegar in seedy bars to know better. From the look of the customers eyeing him from the table in the waiting area, they were wishing they hadn’t bothered, themselves.

“Of course for our selected clients we do have”-here the woman propelled him in by the arm and gave him a frightening leer as she stage-whispered- “Doctor Ruso’s special love potion.”

“What?”

The secretive wink was even more frightening than the leer. “Very effective, sir. You’ll be impressed.”

“What did you call it?”

“Special love potion, sir. As used in all the best establishments in Gaul.”

Ruso peered at the face again, wondering if underneath the paint- which had sunk into the wrinkles around her eyes, making her look even older-there was a patient from his clinic, who was trying to apply one of the first rules of salesmanship: Address the customer by name. But try as he might, he could not recall the violently red hair. Nor the black teeth. “What,” he said, turning to make sure he was leaning against a solid wall and not one of the curtained-off alcoves in which the real business was conducted in this sort of place, “did you say the name of the potion was?”

The stink of breath-freshening pills surrounded him as she stood on tiptoe to whisper again, “Doctor Ruso’s, sir.”

“And he sold you his potion, did he?”

“Oh, no, sir. We get it from a supplier. He imports it from a famous specialist.”

“I see,” said Ruso, postponing further inquiries because at that moment, deeper into the gloom of the interior, a curtain was pushed back and a hefty black-haired man emerged, fumbling as he attempted to knot his belt.

Ignoring the owner’s assurance that Cynthia would be free to entertain him in a minute, Ruso eyed the man’s braided hair and drooping mustache and said, “Trenus?”

Behind him, he heard a bench scrape back across the floor. The two customers who had been lounging over the table were on their feet, and much taller than he had expected.

One of them asked something in the local language. Not for the first time, Ruso cursed his laziness in not bothering to learn it.

“He says,” explained Trenus, “who wants to know?”

“I do,” said Ruso, relieved to find that the man spoke good Latin and moving aside lest the two bodyguards should think he was trying to trap Trenus in the building. The owner, he noticed, had retreated behind the planking that served as a bar.

Ruso said, “I hear you paid a visit to the local brewer this morning.”

“What’s that got to do with you?”

“In case Catavignus didn’t explain something to you, I’ll do it. Stay away from his niece.”

Under the mustache, Trenus’s mouth spread into a smile. “The blond?”

“You know who I mean,” said Ruso, hoping to avoid pronouncing her native name.

“What I did for that girl,” said Trenus, “was a kindness. She was supposed to go up in smoke with the rest. Not that I ever got any thanks for it. You’re her latest victim, then?”

“If you ever lay a hand on her again,” said Ruso, “if you so much as look at her-you’ll answer to me. Have you got that?”

Trenus held up a hand as if requesting a pause. “I’ll just translate that for the boys,” he said.

There followed a rapid exchange that Ruso could not understand, then all three looked at him and laughed. “What will you do then, eh?” inquired Trenus, pretending a genuine interest.

Ruso paused in the doorway. It was all very well trying to defend Tilla, but he had no idea what he could do that would either frighten or impress a man like Trenus, who was now standing between his henchmen with his thumbs hooked into his belt and his head cocked to one side, waiting for an answer.

What was it Tilla had said about this man? The body of a bear, the brain of a frog, and he makes love like a dying donkey with the hiccups. None of that seemed especially helpful at the moment.

“I’m only one man,” Ruso conceded. “And you’ve got two bodyguards. So at the moment, all I could do is run away.”

“Hah!”

“Not only that, but I hear you’ve got important friends. I hear the governor’s invited you to dine with him in the fort.”

“What’s that got to do with you?” repeated Trenus.

“Nothing,” said Ruso. “I’m just a humble medic.” He pointed at the woman hiding behind the bar, whom he suspected of clutching some kind of hidden weapon. “She’ll tell you all about Doctor Ruso. Specialist in potions and poisons, temporarily in charge of the fort medical service.”

Trenus glanced at the woman as if he were wondering whether to believe any of this.

“Did you know there are some poisons so deadly that a man can be killed just by having a vessel painted with it touch his lips?”

“You’re lying.”

“Am I?” Ruso smiled. “Enjoy your dinner, Trenus.”