oversaw his departure to the realms of the dead. Only the prefect’s aide was more interested in watching the crowd.
23
Ruso was on the way back to the infirmary for his first evening in charge, when he heard a familiar voice bawling orders. Exactly what the orders were was a mystery, since half of the syllables seemed to have been swept away in the tidal wave of sound, but the infantrymen tromping down the street understood the need to wheel right, march forward a few paces, and then halt.
“Dismissed!”
That was clear enough.
Ruso was threading his way through the crowd of men heading for their barrack rooms when the same voice called, “Hey, Doc! I want a word!”
Audax’s office displayed a predictable lack of interest in home comforts. The furniture looked old, hard, and lonely. Around it, a selection of notices hung from nails that had cracked the plaster. The only extravagances, all the more striking because of the plain surroundings, were the crested helmet and scarlet cloak that Audax was now unloading onto the wooden frame in the corner.
Ruso assumed he had been called in to hear the latest news about the search for the missing remains of Felix the trumpeter, but he was wrong.
“I’m telling you this,” announced Audax, kicking the door shut and not bothering with a greeting, “Since you don’t seem to be as much of an idiot as some of the others. You want to keep an eye on that lazy smear of grease that works over in the infirmary.”
“Gambax?” suggested Ruso, reflecting that Audax was not a man one would choose to lead a stealth mission.
“That’s him. The other one never got him under control. Don’t suppose you’ll do much in a few days, but I thought you ought to be warned.”
“Thank you.”
“He’s another one who thinks he can do what he likes.”
“Another one?” queried Ruso.
Audax snorted. “The other one was my problem. Still is. Problem alive, problem dead. Typical. Should have done what he was bloody told for once and come in before curfew. None of this would have happened.”
“Felix.”
Audax shrugged. “Ah well. Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Specially not under the circumstances.”
Ruso glanced around to confirm that the door was firmly shut and murmured, “That head on the corpse…”
“Fake.”
“I assumed from his funeral that he was pretty popular.”
“Half of ’em probably owed him money and wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to collect.”
This did not seem to explain the distress of the disheveled girls. “Felix was a moneylender?”
“He was a trader. Buying and selling. Everybody’s mate.”
“Can you think of any reason why Doctor Thessalus would have a grudge against him?”
“No more than anybody else. Thessalus wouldn’t harm a fly. No wonder being in the army’s driven him crackers.”
“You don’t happen to know where Thessalus was called out to on the night of the murder?”
Audax did not.
“What did you mean by ‘no more than anybody else’?”
Audax glanced around the shadowy corners of the room. “You believe in spirits?”
“You’re not speaking ill of him,” Ruso assured him, curious. “You’re telling the truth.” It was a distinction fine enough for a prefect’s aide.
“Hmph.” Audax pondered that for a moment, and fingered the charm around his neck. Finally he said, “When I got here six months ago, Felix was paying other men to toot his horn for him so he could wander off doing his fancy business deals. You wanted it, Felix could get it. At a price, and no questions asked. Now, my lads don’t get paid as much as you boys in the legions and I don’t mind them making a bit extra, but they’ve got to do it in their own time. And the minute I put a stop to Felix skipping off duty, he took to going sick with invisible ailments.”
“Bad back?” suggested Ruso, familiar with the list of conveniently unprovable disorders. “Headaches?”
“That sort of thing. Sets a bad example to the others.”
“And he was seen at the infirmary by Thessalus?”
“Gambax.”
Ruso was beginning to see why the medical service commanded scant respect among the Tenth. “You really excused him from duty on Gambax’s say-so?”
“Twice,” said Audax. “Then I cured him myself. Sent him on a twenty-mile run. And d’you know, he was never ill again. Felix was a lazy bugger, Doc. But he was my lazy bugger, and he didn’t deserve to go like that.”
24
In the rapidly fading light the sensible thing to do would be to hurry straight back to-no, the sensible thing would have been to accept the woman’s grudging offer of a bed for her first night back at home. The second most sensible thing would be to hurry back to her uncle’s house by the fort. Tilla did neither of these sensible things. Instead, she set off up the path to a place she had not seen for three winters and where there would be nothing to welcome her except memories. The woman had made it clear that even if any others had survived, they were not there.
She glanced back at the paddock with the strange ditches cut into a rectangle. With the Votadini for neighbors, this was probably a stupid place to build any sort of a house. She shook her head. Her uncle had always had some very odd ideas. Like giving his daughter a Roman name and insisting that she learn to speak fluent Latin. Her own father had always said it was pointless: The Romans had finally abandoned their attempts to control the northern tribes a few years ago and any fool could see that it was only a matter of time before they gave up here too.
Time, had they known it, was the one thing her family would not be given.
The Votadini had come in the dark. Bandits, thieves-perhaps they too called themselves warriors. Warriors who were too cowardly to show their faces in daylight. She had imagined their approach countless times since that night. Threading their way up through the woods, crouching behind the field wall and listening to Trenus whispering last words of encouragement. Clambering across the ditch and creeping silently over the bank. Excited, perhaps, by their own daring. Slinking across the yard in the dark to surround the house where the family lay dreaming by the warmth of the dying fire.
The dog alone had sensed the danger. He had raised the alarm, but there were too many of them, and this time they had not just come to steal a few cows.
The walls were in poor repair, as she had expected. Yet one paddock was still properly fenced, and a shaggy pony, nothing like the fine horses Trenus had stolen from her family, lifted its head to watch her as she passed.
Someone was living here.
Whoever had built the small round house had set it on the same patch of level ground as the old one. She scanned the earth at its feet for the scars of the burning. Instead the gods had sent new growth. She saw only spring grass, with a couple of chickens pecking for food. The land, it seemed, had a shorter memory than those who tilled it.
