Ruso scratched his ear. Bassus had confirmed what he already suspected: Secundus could not have been involved with the death of Saufeia. Valens was right: He had been off-balance. The accident with the trowel had been a simple coincidence. As for the fire-he did not have time to worry about the fire now. He said, 'Would any of the girls know where she was going?'
'The girls didn't see her. I did. And then she left. And if you don't want to get me into trouble, you'll do the same.'
Tilla had still not returned when Valens and he went to bed. Ruso heard the third and fourth watch sounded. Once he got up to investigate a noise that might have been someone knocking, but when he opened the door there was nobody there. He called her name into the darkness. The only reply was a blustery spatter of rain.
He woke with an uneasy feeling that there was something he should remember. When he remembered it, the unease blossomed into an anxiety that lifted him out of bed before dawn to pace about in a house where her absence was almost tangible. He tried to silence his imagination by telling himself she had chosen to leave. Her arm was recovering: She didn't need him anymore.
Instead of being worried, he should be pleased. He owed it to his family to sell her, but he had not been looking forward to it. Now she had solved his dilemma by running away. The tale about Phryne had been a cover for some sort of primitive good-luck potion she was cooking up for herself. Tilla had fled from Deva and was safely on her way to the hilly lands of the Brigantes.
Valens came wandering into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. 'No breakfast, then?'
Ruso shook his head. 'Can you manage without me this morning?'
Valens's eyes squeezed shut and his mouth widened in a lopsided and unstifled yawn that displayed a couple of missing teeth and distorted his agreement into something like, 'Yuhhhh.'
Ruso wished the girls who called him 'the good-looking doctor' could see him now.
'Wretched girl might have bothered to send a message,' remarked Valens.
'I think she might have run off,' confessed Ruso.
'Even so.'
Ruso nodded. His relationship with the girl had been awkward, hesitant, and frequently bad tempered, but he thought they had developed some level of mutual respect.
'You did fix her arm for her,' Valens continued, voicing Ruso's own thoughts.
'And paid money for the privilege,' he grumbled. Damn it, if he hadn't rescued her from Innocens there might well have been a third dead girl found in Deva.
Immediately he wished he had not brought to mind the image of those bodies: the one strangled and bloated and the other barely recognizable as human. Why would Tilla have chosen to leave before her arm was healed? He had no evidence that she was on her way back to the Brig-antes. Her soul could already have begun the journey to a darker place. If that was true, then he wanted to know. He wanted to bury her himself. And then he would not only hunt down whoever had killed her: He would seek out the people who should have investigated the previous deaths, and hadn't. The trouble was, he was one of them.
He turned abruptly. 'I'm going out,' he announced.
In the gloom of his bedroom, he pulled on his overtunic without thinking once about scorpions. He flung his old cloak around his shoulders and paused to run a finger over the smooth, cold hilt of his knife.
63
Once he had passed the cemetery, Ruso urged the borrowed horse into a canter. It was a broad-backed beast, recently retired as the mount of a tribune, who, according to the groom, was not the steadiest of horsemen. It was mild-tempered, comfortable, and too staid to be in great demand. It was the ideal horse for a man who needed an animal that could carry an extra rider.
He slowed it to a trot to pass a string of heavy carts, then wove around a road gang and a couple of mounted men leading a string of shaggy ponies. A local family was heading into town carrying baskets of vegetables. Half a dozen legionaries were heaving against the tilted side of a vehicle that had one wheel in the ditch, evidently determined to right it without unloading it first. A couple of them glanced hopefully up at him, realized he was an officer, and bent back to their task.
Farther out, the traffic grew lighter. Sheep were grazing beside the road, watched over by a small boy with a large stick. Ruso concentrated on the opposite shoulder, looking out for the path that led across to the woods.
The horse seemed surprised at being asked to jump the ditch-evidently the tribune had demanded very little of it-but it landed on the other side in a reasonably tidy fashion. A couple of birds flew up from the trees in alarm as it approached. Apart from birds, the woods appeared to be deserted. The horse slowly picked its way forward along the narrow path, apparently unperturbed by its rider's occasional lurch forward to lie along its neck as they passed under overhanging branches.
There was no smell of smoke among the trees: only that of damp earth and rotting leaves. A better tracker than Ruso would have known whether anyone had passed this way recently. Unable to read the signs, he concentrated on making his way safely through the undergrowth and strained to catch any sounds beyond the brush of leaves, the creak of the saddle, and the warble of distant birdsong.
He emerged from the woods picking twigs out of his hair and circled the horse around the clearing, trying to look into the trees and over the bracken to the muddy patch where the spring originated. There was no sign of her.
'Tilla!'
His shout died away into silence. The birdsong had stopped.
'Tilla! Can you hear me?'
He tried several times, twisting in the saddle to call in different directions, waiting each time for a response that did not come.
He swung down off the horse and left it to graze while he pushed his way through the bracken to the spring. The remains of a small fire lay in the grass, sodden and cold. The fire could have been lit on her last visit or last night: He had no way of knowing. What was certain was that it had not been active this morning.
Ruso got to his feet, took a deep breath, and shouted, 'Tilla! Where are you?' one last time.
He turned to face the spring. He raised one hand in the air as he had seen his servant do. Glad that no one but the horse could hear him, he offered a prayer to the goddess of the spring, asking her to keep safe her faithful servant whose name was… he pulled the document from his tunic and read out, 'Dar… lugh… dach… a,' and then added, 'but who is known to me as Tilla.'
His approach to the native houses was announced by several excited dogs. As he drew closer, chickens scuttled to safety under a gate on which a small boy sat staring with his mouth open. A couple of squawking geese made experimental runs at the horse. It flattened its ears but plodded forward.
Ruso dismounted and led the horse toward the gate. The boy scram bled down the other side of the gate and fled into the houses. Women appeared in the doorways. An old man emerged from behind a haystack and shouted an order. The dogs, which to Ruso's relief were tethered, fell silent.
When he turned after fastening the gate, the occupants of the houses had all gathered in a silent line. Several women had their arms folded. One, white up to the elbows with flour, rested a reassuring hand on the head of the small boy, who was now hiding behind her skirts. To the right of the people, swinging gently in the morning breeze, Ruso saw the reason why the dogs were tied up. The carcass of a freshly slaughtered sheep dangled, still dripping, over a tub of thick blood. As the natives stared at him in silence it struck him that the outer skin of civilization was very thin here. He had no doubt that not so very long ago, these people would have slaughtered him with as little compunction as they had killed the sheep, and cheerfully nailed his severed head to the gatepost.
Surveying the eight pairs of eyes watching his every move, he wondered where the men and the rest of the children were. The girl whose appearance had distracted the First Century on its training run was nowhere to be seen. There must be people still hiding in the houses. He wondered if he should have unlatched the safety strap on his knife. He wondered if he could vault onto the horse before they reached him. He wondered whether the horse could clear the gate. Then he began.
'My name,' he announced, 'is Gaius Petreius Ruso, Medicus with the Twentieth Legion. I have come here to
