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
