stand on feet numb with cold, the nearest man grabbed him and pushed him towards the bank. The movement pulled Ruso off balance. His foot caught an uneven ledge of rock, bent sideways, and gave way beneath him in an explosion of pain.
3
‘Broken metatarsal?’ suggested Valens, leaning further over his colleague’s misshapen foot to view it from a different angle.
‘I think I felt it go.’ Ruso, whose rescuers had carried him up to the fort hospital as if they were heroes, shifted himself to a more comfortable position. The movement sent fresh waves of pain crashing up the outside of his leg.
‘Interesting. You’ve probably done a lot of other damage as well. What happens if you try to put weight on it?’
‘I don’t want to find out.’
‘Well, you know the drill.’
Ruso sighed. ‘This can’t be happening.’
‘No food tonight, fluid diet till the swelling goes down, and you’ll have to go easy on it for a good six weeks. No wine, of course.’
Ruso eyed the vanishing dimple that had recently been his ankle. ‘Could you try and sound a bit less cheerful about it?’
‘Well, there’s no point in both of us being miserable, is there? Want me to help you hop down to the dressing station?’
‘Who’s on duty?’
Hearing the name, Ruso winced. ‘Bring me the stuff and I’ll do it myself.’
‘Poppy?’ offered Valens.
‘Lots.’ There was no point in bothering with bravery.
Valens returned a few minutes later with a tray bearing a large bowl of cheap wine mixed with oil, and a smaller cup. Reaching for a wad of linen from the shelf, he observed, ‘So tell me. How exactly did you manage to fall in the river and break your foot at the same time?’
Ruso took a draught of bitter poppy from the cup. ‘Long story,’ he explained. ‘But I’ll be making a full report, believe me. There are five men who are going to be very — ’ He stopped. ‘Oh, gods. I told Tilla I’d be back in a minute. She won’t know where I am.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Valens, dipping the linen in the bowl. ‘The lovely Tilla. I should have said. She came to the gate a while ago. Your dinner’s gone cold.’ Valens wrung out the compress. ‘And she’s been called out on midwifery duty and she’s not best pleased that some of our boys threw the messenger in the river before he got to her. So you might as well find a bed here tonight, because there’s nobody at home to kiss it better.’
Ruso reached forward and grabbed the compress. ‘Let me do that,’ he insisted, draping it gingerly over the swollen foot and wrapping it around. So that was why the boy had been lurking around the houses at dusk.
‘One more thing,’ said Valens, reaching for a bandage. ‘She left a letter for you.’
Since Tilla could neither read nor write, this seemed unlikely.
‘From your brother,’ explained Valens, nodding towards a sealed writing-tablet behind Ruso on the desk.
The word URGENT scrawled across the outside of the letter suggested that the latest financial crisis at home was even worse than usual. Ruso snapped the twine, flipped open the folded wooden leaves and braced himself to face the details.
To his surprise, the letter said very little. On the inside of one leaf, in his brother’s writing, was the date on which it had been composed: the Kalends of June. On the other, the briefest of messages:
LUCIUS TO GAIUS.
COME HOME, BROTHER.
Ruso frowned over it for a moment, then passed it to Valens. ‘What do you make of that?’
Valens studied the carefully inscribed letters and observed, ‘Your brother is a man of few words.’
‘But what am I supposed to do about them?’
‘Go home, I suppose.’
Ruso grunted. ‘Hardly convenient, is it?’
Valens stepped back to admire his bandaging. ‘It could be arranged,’ he said.
4
‘This is ridiculous,’ growled Ruso, eyeing the cup of milk he had just insisted on pouring for himself and wondering how he was going to carry it across to the bed so he could sit down and enjoy his late breakfast. He had already discovered this morning that, since the lodgings he shared with Tilla were upstairs, the only safe way to reach them was to hook the crutches over one arm and hitch himself upwards on his bottom.
She stepped forward and took the cup. ‘Go and sit.’
Ruso adjusted his grip on the crutches, assessed the distance to the bed and swung across to stand in front of it. Then he hopped and clumped until he had turned around, stuck his bandaged foot out in front of him and collapsed backwards on to the blankets.
‘Gods and fishes!’ he muttered, dropping the crutches on the floor and swivelling to swing his feet up on to the bed. ‘What am I supposed to do for six weeks like this?’
Tilla handed him the cup and retrieved the crutches. ‘Go home.’
‘It’s too far,’ he explained, realizing a Briton would have no concept of that sort of distance. ‘The south of Gaul’s over a thousand miles away, Tilla. Imagine how long it takes to get back down to Deva from here. Then imagine you’ve only done about a tenth of the trip.’
Tilla yawned and sat beside him on the bed with her back propped against the wall. He realized she must have slept even less than he had the previous night. ‘I know how to do adding up,’ she said. ‘What I do not know is why your brother says to come home.’
Ruso retrieved the letter from beneath the pillow and examined the leaves on both sides. The outsides bore nothing beyond the usual to-and-from addresses and the alarming URGENT inked in large letters thickened with several strokes of the pen.
Lucius’ letters usually held either a desperate request for money or a fresh announcement of a happy arrival for him and his wife, Cassiana. Sometimes both. There were times when Ruso had wondered whether the family fortunes — precarious at the best of times — would finally be ruined not by demands to repay his late father’s massive borrowings, but by the need to feed and clothe all his nephews and nieces.
Lucius’ requests for cash were always couched in careful terms, lest they should fall into the wrong hands: the sort of hands whose owner would blab about one creditor to another. He usually gave just enough clues about the latest crisis to spur Ruso into doing something about it. But this message was exceptionally cryptic.
Was the date a code? Was there something significant about the Kalends of June? If so, he could not think what it was. He turned the leaves upside down to see if there was some message concealed in the script that was only visible from the opposite direction. He tried warming the letter over a lamp flame in search of secret ink. He succeeded only in scorching the wood.
‘It’s no good,’ he conceded. ‘I don’t know what it means.’
‘It means,’ said Tilla, ‘Come Home.’
‘I wouldn’t get there before mid-September,’ he pointed out. ‘By the time I wanted to come back I’d be lucky to find a captain willing to take a ship out. I might not get back till the seas open again.’ He lifted his foot in the air. ‘This isn’t going to earn me that much leave.’
‘It is a very big bandage. Valens can tell lies about what is underneath.’
‘But I’ve got patients to see, men to train …’
