“I will have milk,” said Tilla. “What rebels?”
The woman seemed surprised that she needed to ask the question. “I hear they call themselves warriors. Followers of some Messenger of Cernunnos.”
“I have seen him!”
The woman frowned. “I do not want to.”
Tilla followed her past a scrubby vegetable patch. The thatch above her uncle’s porch was collapsing and there were unfilled cracks in the walls. Evidently the curse these people were suffering from was laziness.
“Nobody knows the name of this messenger,” said the woman. “He wants to throw the army off our lands. His warriors turn up asking for hospitality and no sooner is it given than the soldiers come and arrest everyone for harboring criminals. Sometimes they burn the house and take all the livestock.”
“The warriors?”
“The soldiers. To teach a lesson. That’s why the master says we mustn’t let anyone in. If there’s any trouble here we will be turned out.”
“I have not come to cause trouble.”
“Wait there,” said the woman, pushing open the door and kicking something out of the way as she entered the house.
Tilla seated herself on a heavy log set under the eaves. Her feet were aching. Her shoulder was stiff from the weight of the bag. She leaned back against the cracked wall and closed her eyes. Last night’s grand room at the inn seemed a thousand miles away, and not so bad after all.
“This is all we have.”
Tilla opened her eyes to see a very small cup of milk being offered. She wondered if the household was genuinely short of milk. With three cows in the paddock, it did not seem likely. But perhaps Catavignus had most of his produce delivered into town.
“Nobody told us you were coming.”
“No,” agreed Tilla. “I am sure they did not.”
“My husband will have to talk to the master. This is only a poor house for servants now.”
“Who is building the house with corners?”
The woman frowned. “That house has nothing to do with us. We don’t know anything about it. The builders do as they please. We just look after the master’s land.”
“The house is for Catavignus?”
“He never said we were supposed to watch them. One day they were here putting in foundations, and the next they were gone. It’s not our fault.”
“I did not say it was.” Wearily, Tilla eyed the path that led back toward the fort. If she hurried, she could make it down to her uncle’s new house before the lamps were lit. She finished the milk and reached for her bag of damp clothes. “I thank you for the drink,” she said, getting to her feet. “There will be no need to talk to Catavignus. I shall see him myself.”
“We could make you up a bed,” said the woman, suddenly seeing a new reason to be anxious. “You must not tell the master we turned you away. Of course it would be a poor bed compared to what you are used to-”
“I am used to many things,” Tilla informed her. “And now I shall need to get used to having come back from the dead. But you have orders not to invite people in, and I will not ask you to disobey.”
“But-”
“There is no need to worry,” said Tilla. “I shall say nothing about you to my uncle.”
“But mistress-”
“I am not your mistress,” pointed out Tilla. “I am not anybody’s mistress anymore. But if I were, I would tell you that the thatch needs mending, those tools should be put away even if they are not yours, and someone needs to hoe the vegetable patch.”
“But what will the master say if he knows we let you wander off by yourself at sunset?”
“I don’t know,” said Tilla, swinging her bag onto her shoulder and heading for the gate. “Perhaps I shall be eaten by wolves on the way back, and then nobody but you will ever know, will they?”
22
The sky was orange above the silhouette of the western hills by the time Ruso left Lydia in the infirmary with Postumus. The shutters of We Sell Everything had been pulled across. The barber’s shop was locked and there was no sound from the bathhouse. The awning outside the snack shop rose with a brief gust of wind, then collapsed again. It seemed everyone had gone to pay their last respects to Felix.
Ruso arrived at the small cemetery on the road out of town and slipped in at the back of the crowd gathered around the bier, glad of the approaching dusk. Distracted and late, he had not thought of changing into better clothes. Audax, easily distinguished by the centurion’s plume across his helmet, was standing at attention among the ranks of Batavians whose full formal turn-out displayed a polished range of antique but fearsome-looking weaponry. Over the heads of the crowd he saw the prefect move forward and step up onto some sort of platform.
As Decianus announced that every man was born mortal, Ruso was distracted by the gaggle of young women in front of him. Several were clinging to one another and sniffling. All seemed to have spent much time inconsolably wrecking their fancy hairstyles, and had he been closer, their torn mourning clothes might have revealed some interesting sights.
Decianus moved on to extol the virtues and the necessity of good military trumpeters, while Ruso craned to look around at the rest of the civilians. He wondered if Tilla had come to watch the funeral before delivering his supper. He would have asked her to visit Lydia, but in the fading light he recognized only Susanna from the snack bar and the barber’s wife.
Decianus was commending Felix as a true Batavian, a man of four years’ loyal service to Rome and to the Tenth and a man who would be much missed, when he was interrupted by a stray wail from one of the young women. There was an audible intake of breath from the crowd. Decianus ignored the intrusion and went on to explain that Felix was now freed from the pains and difficulties of life, and that we must all prepare ourselves-
Another wail rose into the air, followed by sobbing and furious hisses of “Sh!” Decianus was still talking, but quite possibly no one was listening as a plump and bedraggled female howled, “Oh, Felix!” The ensuing commotion suggested that either she had collapsed, or one of her wiser friends had wrestled her to the ground. Ruso sighed. Since everyone knew he was the doctor, he supposed he had better step forward.
Catavignus got there first. Evidently this was Aemilia, the daughter who was not well. Grabbing the apparently unconscious girl under the arms, he dragged her away from the mourners onto the grass beyond the gravestones. The angular woman Ruso had seen haggling with the butcher separated herself from the crowd and limped across to kneel beside her. Catavignus waved Ruso away. “We’ll just get her home, Doctor. This has been a very difficult day.”
As Ruso walked away from them he heard the slap of a hand on human flesh, and a wail of pain. Catavignus was administering his own treatment.
Ruso rejoined the funeral just as the speech came to an end. There was another blast of the trumpets. Decianus stepped up to the bier, raised a staff of office, and sprinkled something on the corpse, reciting a chant in what Ruso now recognized as Batavian. A fat man who had been blocking Ruso’s view shifted and for the first time he could make out the full shape of the body. Either the head had been found, or a convincing dummy placed under the shroud. A command was yelled, the troops saluted, the horns blared, and flames began to lick up around what remained of Felix the trumpeter.
Decianus stepped back and stood at attention. A couple of men moved the platform safely away from the flames. The fire cast a flickering light on the impassive features of Audax, who was watching the disappearance of the body that he had been guarding since early morning. Perhaps he was hoping that the fire had been well set, so that the flames would obscure what lay beneath when the shroud burned away. It took Ruso a while to spot Metellus. In the end it was not his face that betrayed his identity beneath the anonymous shell of the helmet, but his stance. All other eyes looking out from under the polished brims were trained on the pyre as Felix’s comrades
