Terra Incognita: A Novel of the Roman Empire Read online

  “It’s making things very difficult,” said Metellus. “There’s been an interesting change in language up here lately,” he said. “Travelers are no longer talking about arriving at their destination. They’re starting to call it getting through.”

  “I’m told there are people who think the Stag Man is some sort of god,” said Ruso, not adding that his housekeeper was one of them.

  “The locals are a superstitious bunch,” explained Metellus. “They think stags are messengers from another world. You don’t have to go back too many generations before you find human sacrifice and all manner of magic and mayhem in the name of religion. That’s another reason for keeping a watchful eye on their get-togethers.”

  Ruso decided this was not the time to request a gate pass to allow Tilla in and out of the fort.

  “Not everything you’ll hear about the Stag Man is true,” continued Metellus. “But as you’ll find when you’ve been up here awhile, what’s true is less important than what people believe.”

  “Well, I believe I’ve got a body to examine.”

  Metellus turned to head toward the steps, and waited for a man to lead a mule laden with firewood past before continuing, “So, we don’t want our men putting all that together with the murder and imagining there’s some sort of mad Druid revival going on right outside the gates.”

  “Where their families live.”

  “Exactly. It would cause unnecessary alarm.”

  It would also cause a serious discipline problem. The fine balance of the border would be a distant memory, and so would Metellus’s hopes of making a good impression on the new governor.

  As he followed him back toward the shambles that called itself a medical service, Ruso pondered the man from Rome. Average height, average weight, age somewhere between late twenties and midthirties. Being so unremarkable made him the sort of man who could notice things without himself being noticed. The sort of man who would have had written on his recruitment documents, “no distinguishing features.” An ideal man for special duties.

  “The trouble with the Britons, Doctor,” Metellus continued as they approached the twin gods of the infirmary, “is that you can never quite rely on them. But fortunately for us, the tribes have a long tradition of falling out with each other. In addition to which, some of them don’t take much notice of their own leaders.” Metellus paused. “So the last thing we need is a troublemaker who’s going to unite them.”

  11

  RUSO HAD ALREADY guessed from the shape what he was going to find when he pulled the sheet back, but it was still a shock. He dragged the sheet down to the end of the table and folded it with unaccustomed neatness while he struggled to control the urge to walk out of the incense-filled mortuary and fill his lungs with fresh air. He had been a fool to open his mouth in the prefect’s office. He should never have got himself involved in something like this. He understood now what the prefect had meant about Metellus helping with his report. This was some sort of ritual killing, and he was being asked to help cover it up.

  The wave of nausea passed. Regaining his composure, he turned to Metellus. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Security,” said Metellus. “You never know who’s listening.”

  “So,” said Ruso, turning back toward the naked corpse which had been so thoroughly washed that any incidental evidence would be long gone, “Where is his head?”

  “We’re hoping to find it when we get hold of the murderer,” said Metellus. “Just tell us what you can from what you have here.”

  Ruso walked slowly around the table, examining what remained of the body from all angles, and glancing at the polished military belt and dagger that had been laid out beside him. “I’m not going to be able to do much with this,” he said. “Who cleaned him up?”

  “Audax.”

  Centurion Audax had gone to fetch the bowl of water and cloths Ruso had asked for, and which he now realized were superfluous.

  Ruso flipped open a note tablet and reflected that it was just as well Albanus was still some miles back on the road with Postumus and the other men from the Twentieth. The clerk would be deeply offended to find Ruso writing his own notes.

  “The victim’s name is Felix,” prompted Metellus, “And the cause of death is head injuries.”

  Ruso glanced up. “Without a head to examine, that’s rather difficult to prove. For all we know he could have been poisoned. Died of natural causes. Choked on a radish. This could have been done afterward. How much blood was there?”

  “The cause of death in the report needs to be consistent with the statements already made. With no mention of anything missing.”

  “What’s true is less important than what people believe?”

  “You were the one who asked to be involved.”

  “If I put down the cause of death as head injuries,” pointed out Ruso, “And then the head turns up—”

  “If it turns up, Doctor, particularly if it turns up in native hands, your professional reputation will be the least of our problems. Now if you have everything you need, I’ll leave you with Audax. As you’ll appreciate, I’m having a rather busy day.”

  As Ruso was wondering whether he could possibly write a postmortem report that left out “cause of death” altogether, Centurion Audax entered, bringing the water and a welcome waft of slightly clearer air from the corridor.

  “You’re another of these doctor fellers, then,” the centurion observed, eyeing Ruso as if he were some kind of interesting insect. “Not mad, are you?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Well, you won’t find anything wrong with me. Or my men.”

  “Good,” said Ruso, placing the water on a side table.

  The centurion lifted his chin slightly, narrowing his eyes as if he was not sure whether Ruso was being sarcastic. “Want to know why?”

  There were several things that Ruso wanted to know. They included the whereabouts of the rest of the corpse, the circumstances of its discovery, what it had looked like before it was washed, and what the hell he was going to put on his report. The reasons for Audax’s good health were not of immediate relevance, but clearly he was going to have to listen to them before he could find out anything else.

  “Doctor Scribonius’s Tonic,” announced Audax.

  “Really?” Ruso had never heard of this particular medicine, but he was not surprised. A public desperate for health and wary of doctors provided a willing market for any number of wonder cures. A few were genuine, most useless, and some positively dangerous.

  “A dose of Doctor Scribonius,” said Audax, “and a swim in the river every morning.”

  “That sounds very healthy,” said Ruso, turning back to the body. “Can you tell me—”

  “Take a look at this.” The centurion had lifted one leg in the air as if he were about to perform a dance. “See?”

  Ruso guessed that he was supposed to be admiring the ragged four-inch scar that ran from just above the knee to the outside of the thigh. “How did that happen?”

  “Arrow,” said Audax, as casually as another man might have said, “Splinter.” “Pulled it out and stitched it myself.”

  “Very impressive,” said Ruso, wondering if the centurion cut his hair himself too.

  The leg was lowered. “That’s what the doctor said.”

  There was a pause. Ruso suspected he was supposed to fill it by announcing that he had decided to give up wasting his time with medicine and become a plumber. “Well,” he said, “it sounds as though I won’t be seeing many of your men while I’m here. Now, about this—”

  “If you get one and he’s fit to stand, you send him straight back to me. It’s no good me training them up if they can sneak across to you and have every sniffle blamed on breathing bad air and eating the wrong thing for dinner.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” said Ruso, recognizing a garbled parody of other men’s careful and considered work on the causes of disease. “When you found this body—”

/>   “My men’s job is to eat what they’re given, go where they’re told, and do what I tell them when they get there. It won’t do them a scrap of good to lie around the infirmary feeling sorry for themselves.”

  It was the second time this afternoon that Ruso had been told what his diagnosis should be. “So, as one of your men, Felix was in good health?” he asked, finally seeing a way to corral Audax and steer him toward the subject.

  Audax at last paid some attention to the body. One hand rose to finger a charm on a leather thong around his neck. “You’re the doctor,” he said.

  “You were his centurion,” retorted Ruso. “I don’t want to waste my time guessing at things other people already know.”

  Audax finally conceded that Felix had no known health problems that might have prevented him from defending himself against an attacker, but despite a careful examination of the body Ruso could find no sign that he had done so. There were only some yellowed bruises that could have been training or sports injuries, and a fresh graze on his knee that probably happened when he fell.

  “And Metellus says this is the murder weapon?” Ruso picked up the gleaming dagger lying beside the body and laid its edge against the victim to test the shape of the blade.

  “I’ve cleaned it up,” explained Audax, grasping the charm around his neck again. “We’re cremating him tonight. That’ll be sent to his family back home along with the rest of his kit.”

  “This doesn’t look like the work of anyone who’s studied anatomy,” observed Ruso, checking the sharpness of the dagger and bending down to take a closer look at the corpse. “Why didn’t he put up more of a fight? Had he been drinking?”

  “He wasn’t a big drinker.”

  Ruso scrawled, “Four cut marks on fifth cervical vertebra, division between fifith and fourth cervical,” vertebrae into his notes. At least they would be accurate, even if his official conclusion was questionable. “Did you notice the temperature of the body?”

  Audax sniffed and replied that it was about what you would expect from a man who had been lying dead in a back alley all night. And yes, he did seem to have been killed where he was found. “I should know. I got sent down by matey from Rome to clean up the alley.”

  “Metellus?”

  “While he sat on his ass in here waiting for me to come back and wash the body.”

  “The body was only ever seen by the two of you? Not the infirmary staff?”

  “We decided not to invite the neighbors in for a look,” retorted the centurion, inadvertently trampling over Ruso’s theory of how the disturbed doctor had learned the details of the murder.

  “And you haven’t spoken to anybody about what you found?”

  Audax scowled. “Who’s running this, you or Metellus?”

  “I’m supposed to be helping him.”

  “So help him by telling us something we don’t know already. Like why some bastard native would do this sort of thing to one of my men.”

  “Can I take a look at his clothes?”

  “They’re burned.”

  “Really? Why?”

  Audax shrugged and said it had been done on Metellus’s instructions. Well, they hadn’t known a medic was going to come along asking questions, had they? And no, nothing much had been found on the body.

  “Nothing at all?” asked Ruso, surprised.

  “Just his belt and his purse with his money still in it. The money’s gone back into the camp bank.”

  The young man’s hands were surprisingly uncalloused for a soldier. One of his fingernails had been blackened some time ago. Ruso imagined him cursing when that had happened. Imagined him expecting to live long enough for the injury to heal. Imagined him hurrying into that alley between the butcher’s and the general store, perhaps worried about getting back to the barracks in time for curfew. Instead, his night out had ended with him being turned into some sort of ghastly sacrificial victim.

  Ruso told his imagination to get back into its place. He must think clearly. He must find something useful enough to justify his insistence on a postmortem, but not so useful that he would look like a threat.

  He allowed himself a small glow of self-congratulation. After several months of sharing quarters with Valens he was beginning to get the hang of this politics business.

  “Thanks,” he said to Audax. “I’ll write up my report now.”

  Alone in the mortuary with his note tablet and his thoughts, Ruso found that his eyes were still irresistibly drawn to the place where Felix the trumpeter’s head should be. It was just—not right. Every time he looked away, his imagination replaced the head and each new look was a fresh shock.

  He stood up and pulled the linen sheet back over the length of the table. Then he sat on a stool, balanced the note tablet on his knee, and tapped the point of the stylus against the wooden frame.

  He needed to have discovered something. Stating, “No sign of resistance,” and refusing to speculate on an unknown cause of death would only confirm what seemed to be a generally poor opinion of doctors here.

  The point came to rest on the corner of the wax. The murderer had not used his own weapon, which suggested the crime—or at least, the method—was not premeditated. Somehow, the murderer had managed to take Felix’s knife and use it against him without an obvious fight. Ruso dismissed the idea of an overpowering god and told himself he must be tired. A god would surely have used a more efficient manner of execution. No, Felix had fallen forward onto his knees . . .

  Ruso dug the point of the stylus into the wax. On the evidence he had found, it was not impossible that someone had approached the victim from behind and overpowered him by knocking him out.

  He readjusted his grip on the stylus and scraped, “Possible cause of death: head injuries,” and told himself the word possible meant he was not compromising his standards.

  12

  TILLA PAUSED AT the top of the slope, taking in the sight of the broad meadows and the river snaking between the willows and dividing around the little islands. Home was just beyond the wooded ridge on the far side of the valley, not yet in sight. Perhaps that was a good thing. She would not spoil this moment by thinking about what she might find there. Instead, she would enjoy the memories of paddling in those stony shallows with her brothers and the other children while their parents exchanged goods and gossip at the market.

  She had assured the medicus that this valley was beautiful, but in truth the memory of its beauty had faded with use. Now, seeing it basking in the afternoon sun, with the skylarks spilling music into the air like silver and the yellow splashes of gorse on the hillsides celebrating her return, she wanted to shriek with delight and run laughing down the road, leaving behind the sour-faced soldiers still tramping in their miserable column like a row of iron wood lice.

  Instead she took in a deep breath of the precious air and told herself, “I am home!” before walking on, keeping pace with the baggage train. She had a duty to make sure Lydia was safe. Lydia would not be running around laughing today. Her man would not be running for a long time. Perhaps never. This morning he had been a healthy young Roman with a new daughter and a steady trade as a carpenter with the legion. By midday he had become a body lying in a cart with a crushed leg that the medicus had covered up so as not to frighten him. She tried not to think about what the medicus might have done to him while other men held him down. She had assured Lydia that her master was a fine doctor. This had seemed to comfort her. Evidently the girl knew very little about surgery.

  She shifted her bruised arm to ease the ache that echoed the blows from the centurion’s stick. She would ask the medicus for some salve tonight. Perhaps she would also ask him to explain to the centurion that she had nothing to do with the accident, and that she was not in league with Cernunnos the horned god or with Taranis the god of thunder against anybody. The figure had simply appeared to her in answer to her prayers for another woman’s safety. It was not her fault if he had come back the next day and brought about a terrible ac
cident. And if he had a face that was vaguely familiar, what of it? She must have seen him in a dream.

  “Is that it?” Lydia was clutching the side of the cart with both hands and peering at the buildings on the low rise beyond the river.

  “Yes.” Tilla followed her gaze, seeing the familiar mud brown rectangle of the fort and the jumble of thatched houses that spread out from it like a stain. The clang of a smithy echoed across the valley, interrupted by the distant whinny of a horse.

  “It’s very small.”

  Tilla had to agree. Yet the fort had not seemed small when she lived here. It had seemed massive and ugly and overwhelming.

  She could make out tiny figures moving along the streets outside the fort. She wondered if she knew any of them. How many of the girls she had grown up with had been seduced by Roman money? What had happened to the girls who should have married her brothers?

  She would not think about her family. She would not think about them because when she did, the sparkling river and the birds and the splendid yellow of the gorse became a hollow joy: a reminder of all that she had lost.

  The civilians who had traveled with the Twentieth were barely across the bridge when a gaggle of residents—mostly women of assorted ages, sizes, and colors—surged down the slope to greet them. Bags were grabbed, with or without the owners’ permission. A blather of multi-accented Latin promised fine rooms, dry rooms, cheap rooms, rooms with no bother with the neighbors, rooms with good views of the river, snug and secure rooms, nice quiet rooms, rooms handy for the shops, rooms only a short stroll from the waterspout. . . . Nobody, Tilla noticed, even bothered to try the local tongue. These women were living their lives on the land her own people had farmed for generations, yet now it was she who was the stranger.

  The mule’s bridle was seized by a shawled woman with badly bleached hair who assured them in Latin that she had a very comfortable loft room, and they should hurry now before someone else took it. “Close to the baths, over a very respectable eating house,” she assured them, tugging the animal past an official-looking inn and up the slope toward the houses while the driver protested in vain.