Terra Incognita: A Novel of the Roman Empire Read online

  “Just an itch,” explained Ruso, leaning back against the wall. “You did well, father.”

  “If I’d have been ten years younger, I’d have had ’em!” the man assured him, waving his stick in the direction of the natives’ flight. “Barbarians. Savages. Oughtn’t to allow ’em in the streets.”

  A thunder of hooves announced the approach of a cavalry patrol. Moments later a blur of color passed the end of the alley, heading toward the river.

  Unable to spend the rest of the afternoon blocking the view of the wall, Ruso distracted the old man with a request for help in getting the soldier up, and together they shuffled back toward the street. The old man seemed delighted to hear that the authorities might want to ask him some questions. The soldier complained that he didn’t want a fuss.

  “You want to make all the fuss you can, boy,” insisted the old man. “You might have ended up cracked over the head like that Felix.” He turned to Ruso. “You tell them to come and ask questions any time. It’ll make a change from listening to the wife.”

  “Nosy old bugger,” muttered the soldier after he had gone. “What’s it got to do with him?”

  “Did you know who those men were?”

  “Didn’t see their faces.”

  Something about the manner of the reply suggested that he was lying. “But you knew what they wanted.”

  “I never said that!”

  “I’m going to have to report it anyway,” Ruso told him, “so you’d better think what you’re going to say.”

  The man winced and clutched at his abdomen. Ruso told him to come over to the infirmary later for a checkup.

  “It was only a bloody hen,” the man muttered. “Everybody does it. How was I supposed to know it belonged to somebody?”

  “Hens usually do belong to somebody,” pointed out Ruso. “When did you last see a flock of wild hens?”

  The man scowled. “Whose side are you on?” he said.

  Ruso made his way back through the alley and finished rubbing off the worst of the charcoal figure before going in search of his assistant.

  The stampede seemed to have come to a halt at the end of a muddy lane leading to the river meadows. He could see the top of Ingenuus’s head above an excited mob who were all too busy shouting questions to listen to the answers. Other men were walking back up from the willows along the riverbank. In the far corner of the field, a couple of grooms were trying to round up some horses who were cavorting around in circles and far too excited to let anyone approach.

  The dogs had wandered off. The small boys, having seen all there was to see, had fallen to wrestling with one another. Nobody appeared to be hurt.

  As Ruso heard the next watch being sounded from inside the fort walls, it occurred to him that Metellus had been waiting to see Tilla for his identity parade since breakfast, and it was now midmorning. Well, he would have to wait. He stepped forward and extricated Ingenuus from the melee, relieved to see he was still clutching the medicine box.

  “Broad daylight!” the bandager grumbled as they made their way back up the slope toward the bathhouse. “Broad daylight! They’re getting more uppity by the day, sir. That’s two good stallions gone, and if we get them back they’ll probably be ruined.”

  “Who took them?”

  Ingenuus stared at him. “Didn’t you see, sir? The natives! Strolled into the field right under the groom’s nose, shot a couple of slingshot stones at him, mounted up and jumped the hedge! Something’s going to have to be done, sir. This can’t go on.”

  “No,” agreed Ruso, wondering if the daylight horse theft had been laid on as a distraction for the attack on the soldier. It seemed an elaborate and risky plan to punish the theft of one hen. But if “everyone” really did do it as the soldier had claimed, perhaps the natives had finally had enough of having their meager food supplies raided by foreigners bored with military rations.

  36

  THIS IS WHERE it all started, sir,” said Ingenuus, pausing beneath the sagging awning outside Susanna’s snack bar. “The night before last. Felix was at this table here . . .” He led Ruso in and indicated a corner table. “We were over on the other side. If only the beer hadn’t run out, we’d have been here to help.”

  The elderly woman now sitting at the table of the ill-fated Felix repaid Ruso’s interest with a scowl.

  He eyed the rest of the customers seated in the very plain surroundings of the snack bar. There was no sign of Tilla or Lydia. Nor were there any workmen snatching a quick bite to eat. Not a single loafer was idling away the morning with a jug of Susanna’s unexpectedly good wine. Instead . . . he turned to Ingenuus. “Is there something I don’t know?” he murmured, wondering if Ingenuus’s insistence on a midmorning snack was about to violate some local custom.

  “What sort of thing, sir?” asked Ingenuus, unhelpfully.

  Ruso leaned close to the big man’s ear and hissed, “They’re all women.”

  The bandager, unembarrassed, surveyed the occupants of the tables across the top of his box. “Never mind sir, I expect they’ve left us some food.” He headed for the counter. “Watch out, ladies!” He lifted the box to clear the head of the elderly woman, who clutched at the bundle on the table in front of her as if she feared he would steal it.

  Ruso reluctantly followed his assistant along a path created by a hurried shifting of stools and skirts and shopping baskets and small children.

  “This is Susanna,” announced Ingenuus.

  “Susanna who serves the best food in town,” she corrected from behind the counter, as if this were part of her name. “Hello again, Doctor!” She nodded toward the tables. “You’ve got a good crowd to see you today.”

  “To see me?”

  Before Ruso could digest this unwelcome news, Ingenuus put in, “Susanna can tell you all about it, sir. Felix was sitting there minding his own business and the native came in—”

  “What can I get you, sirs?” interrupted Susanna.

  “We’ve just come for a quick bite to eat,” said Ruso, whose appetite seemed to have scuttled into a distant corner at the sight of all these female patients. “And I was hoping for a word with Tilla.”

  “So was I,” said Susanna. “When you find her, tell her that her friend upstairs could do with some company.” She gestured toward the trays of pastries and sausages laid out behind her, beyond the reach of prying fingers. “So. What can I get you? More of that Aminaean wine, doctor?”

  “Just a splash,” said Ruso, not wanting to be accused of practicing while drunk.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it, sir,” said Susanna. “To tell you the truth, Doctor Thessalus wasn’t very keen on us serving it.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Gambax said not to put it out when he was here because he wouldn’t approve.”

  Ruso hoped there was not some new and disappointing discovery about the dangers of Aminaean wine that had reached Coria before it reached the Twentieth Legion’s medics. It seemed unlikely, but now he came to think of it, the wine had had an alarming effect on Claudia, who had never thrown anything heavier than a shoe at him before.

  He ordered some nameless pastry thing by pointing at it. He felt he should do something about Lydia, but he did not know what. He wished he could find Tilla. Women were better at that sort of thing and besides, while he was housed in the infirmary, she would have little else to do.

  Ingenuus was busy surveying the room. “Short staffed today?” he asked.

  “Dari’s gone to visit her mother,” said Susanna. “She may be back, she may not.”

  “She’d better be back. She was the best girl you had.”

  “I’m sure you thought so,” agreed Susanna. “But I hire girls to serve food, not flirt with the customers. This is a respectable family eating house.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a bit of innocent arm wrestling.”

  Ruso’s efforts to picture an arm-wrestling waitress distracted him from the conversation, to which
he returned as Ingenuus was indignantly assuring Susanna that, “I’m not telling everyone. I’m telling the doctor because he’s interested. He asked to see Felix before he was cremated. Didn’t you, sir?”

  Ruso opened his mouth to explain about the postmortem, but Ingenuus had moved on.

  “And you know what that ruckus was just now? A bunch of natives helping themselves to two of our horses! Broad daylight! I tell you, ever since that Stag Man started appearing, they think they own the place. Next they’ll be—ow! Is there something the matter, sir?”

  Ruso lifted his boot from Ingenuus’s large toes. “We haven’t got time to talk,” he said, handing over the money for whatever it was Susanna had just placed in a wooden bowl and handed to him. “We need to eat and get across to the clinic.”

  “Well,” put in Susanna, “if the Stag Man comes, we can count on you boys to defend us, can’t we?”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” said Ruso, hoping he was right.

  The mystery food item turned out to be some sort of cheesecake. In between licking his fingers, he explained quietly to Ingenuus that it was not a good idea to speculate in public about the murder and the Stag Man. “We don’t want to make people worried.”

  “But I wouldn’t be making them worried, sir,” Ingenuus protested. “They’re worried already.”

  37

  THE EXERCISE HALL of the bathhouse was not an ideal place to hold a clinic. The women playing a surprisingly rough game of ball seemed to resent giving up one end of the room to benches full of ailing civilians. Even when the modesty of each had been protected by two sets of wooden screens—to the evident disappointment of those who thought the encounter of patient and healer should be a public spectacle—the high ceiling and concrete floor bounced back every noise, so that the whole hall was a constant boom of sound from which it would be difficult to pick out the words of a shy patient. Especially if that patient’s Latin was not fluent.

  “Ingenuus,” said Ruso, praying Albanus would turn up at any moment with Tilla, “do you speak the local language?”

  The man frowned. “A little, sir. ‘How much is that’; ‘Hey you get out of the way,’ and so on.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be of much use.”

  “I shouldn’t worry, sir. Most of them can speak Latin if they want something.”

  The first people to sidle around the doctor’s screen were the elderly woman, still clutching the bundle, and a small girl. Remembering Valens’s first rule of dealing with women (always get the name right), he greeted them politely. “Good afternoon. I’m Doctor Ruso. What are your names?”

  The response from both was a blank stare. Ingenuus leaned across and murmured, “They’re from the homeland, sir. Shall I translate?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Ingenuus obliged. Instead of relaying the answer, he appeared to be arguing with it.

  “What’s she saying?” interrupted Ruso, frustrated.

  Ingenuus coughed. “She’s not been in this country long, sir. She’s the widowed mother of one of the men. She’s come with his niece. They’ve got nobody left at home so he’s brought them over here.”

  “I didn’t ask for a life history!”

  “No, sir. I just happen to know. That’s why she’s not very well acquainted with the ways over here, sir.”

  “Surely she’s acquainted with her own name?”

  “Oh yes, sir. She just wants to know why she has to tell you.” It was not a good start.

  One or two patients left when they discovered he was not Doctor Thessalus. One thought she had heard of Doctor Ruso: Her husband had even tried a bottle of his tonic. “But it didn’t do any good, Doctor.”

  Another took the trouble to explain in halting Latin that she was very disappointed that he was not the other doctor, because the other doctor was a lovely kind young man and very handsome, and if he had murdered anybody it must have been their own fault.

  When Ruso demanded, “Where did you hear this?” a flush spread up her neck and across her cheeks as she said, “At the market, sir. Everyone is saying it.”

  The news of Thessalus’s confession could hardly have spread farther if Metellus had stood on the top of the ramparts and shouted it across the town.

  One woman insisted that she knew what Doctor Thessalus would have said about her son’s headaches, and that it was not what Ruso had just told her. There was a woman seeking infertility treatment and one who had very obviously been beaten up but insisted she had walked into a door, followed by an elderly man who explained in detail what the other doctor had told him to do last week, and then all the reasons why he had not done it.

  There was a brief respite when one visitor had come to give rather than take: an attractive young woman with a scar beneath one eye who arrived with a baby on one arm and a basket of fresh herbs for the pharmacy on the other. Veldicca, a native apparently well known to the infirmary staff, seemed upset at the news about Doctor Thessalus. Ruso had to curtail Ingenuus’s whispered explanation of the conspiracy theory currently circulating around the barracks. It would, he explained, get the bandager into trouble and besides, there were people waiting to be seen.

  There were people with chronic pain, in need of a miracle and receiving only medicine and advice they had probably heard a hundred times before. There were hideous stinking ulcers to clean and dress and lectures to be given to their weary owners about hygiene and exercise and diet. There were people whose descriptions of their symptoms made no sense at all even though he understood all the words. Ingenuus was unable to explain what “He has feathers in his chest” meant, and “My knees are runny” was about as helpful as Thessalus’s claim that his triangles were getting blunt.

  None of the patients had called out Doctor Thessalus on the night of the thunderstorm.

  A sickly three-year-old was followed by a perspiring man who shuffled behind the screens carrying a small pot with a lid in one hand and a stoppered jar in the other. He placed these offerings in the middle of the heavy table that Ruso had commandeered for his examinations, and said proudly, “There you are!” before standing back with his arms folded.

  Ruso had thanked him, but explained that no payment was necessary.

  “Oh, they’re not gifts!” the man exclaimed. “You’ve got to look at them.”

  “I have?” said Ruso, eyeing the receptacles with a faint stirring of dread. “Perhaps if you could tell me what the problem is first?”

  The man’s only response was a nod toward the pots. “It’s all in there,” he said.

  Ruso stretched out one arm and lifted the lid off the pot. It was, indeed, all in there, although how it had been got in there was a matter on which he did not care to speculate. He replaced the lid.

  “Aren’t you going to take a proper look?” demanded the man.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Ruso, twisting the stopper out of the jar and sniffing the liquid inside, which smelled just as he had expected.

  “You’re all the same, you people,” grumbled the man. “I try to be helpful and nobody wants to bother. Well? What’s the verdict?”

  “If you just give me some idea of what the problem is before I . . .”

  “Hah!” As if this proved some point he had been trying to make, the man snatched up his samples and marched out, declaring, “Call yourself a doctor!”

  “He is very good doctor!” echoed a loyal voice from beyond the screen, apparently addressing the line. “Take no notice of that rude man!”

  “Tilla!” Ruso stood on tiptoe and peered over the top of the screen. He could not remember a time when he had been more pleased to see her. “Tilla, come here, will you?”

  By the time Ruso had finished washing his hands, Tilla had joined him. He sent Ingenuus around the screen to see how many more patients were waiting and apologized for the mix-up over the gate pass. “I sent Albanus out but he couldn’t find you. Where have you been?”

  “I see a friend, and just now I see Lydia who
se man is dead.”

  “I came to tell you about him last night, but it was too late. How is she?”

  “There is a storm inside her head,” said Tilla. “But she is sleeping now.”

  He reached for her sleeve. “Let me see that arm.”

  She straightened her elbow so he could slide the fabric up over the old scar. The bruising had spread. Most of the expanse between her shoulder and her elbow was purple now.

  As he smoothed on the salve, he could not resist leaning forward and kissing her ear. “I missed you last night.”

  “I am staying with my uncle in the last house on the east road. Catavignus.”

  “Catavignus the brewer? Gray hair, mustache? Guild of caterers? He’s your uncle?” So that explained why he thought he had seen the man before.

  “Catavignus, the man who makes beer for the army,” she said. “But he is still my father’s brother.”

  “Will he let me visit?”

  She shrugged. “Why not? You are an officer. He will probably ask if you want to marry my cousin. My lord, there is something I have to ask you. It is about a friend.’

  Before she could explain, Ingenuus appeared and announced that only fifteen of the people still waiting were actually patients.

  “Fifteen? Gods above! Tilla, I want you to stay here.” Metellus would have to wait for his identity parade. He doubted Tilla could identify anyone anyway. “If we get any locals, you can translate.”

  “My lord, I have to ask you—”

  “Yes, ask me. Later. Just stay here and help me for now. You’ll put the women at their ease.”

  As the morning wore on, Ruso came to the conclusion that Thessalus must have been a remarkably public-spirited soul to run a free clinic. Treating the genuinely sick was fair enough, but at least half of the people here were time wasters who would not have come if it had cost them anything.

  So his penultimate patient, a man with obvious injuries, came as something of a relief—until Ingenuus burst out, “What’s he doing here?”