Onion-breath called, ‘We’re closed!’ at the same time as Cass cried, ‘Help us! We’ve been — ’ It ended in a scream as Onion-breath stepped across and hit her in the face.
Too late, he remembered about Tilla’s knife. As he staggered backwards, staring at her in disbelief, there was a crash from across the room. The door, frame and all, collapsed inwards with two men on top of it.
The men tried to get up but were knocked aside by drinkers clambering over them to flee into the sunlit alleyway. The old man in the corner rose from his seat and staggered out after them.
Onion-breath was slumped beneath one of the tables. He was not moving. Tilla stared at him. Was that it? Was that how easy it was?
A voice was saying, ‘Are you all right, miss?’
She leaned back against the wall, waiting for her heart to stop thudding.
‘Miss?’
She knocked the hand away from her arm, then realized it was meant in friendship. ‘Sorry,’ she said to a curly-haired youth she vaguely recognized. She was aware of a strong smell of horse as he took the bloodied knife from her hand.
The second rescuer was still sprawled along the length of the door, largely because Cass was on top of him, wiping blood off his chin with her skirt and crying, ‘Lucius! Oh, Lucius, my love, where are you hurt?’
Tilla rubbed her eyes in confusion. What was Lucius doing here? And was that the Medicus’ stable lad?
Lucius was not so badly hurt that he could not cling to his wife and gasp, ‘Cass! When we saw that thief running down the street with your bag I thought — ’
‘Oh, my darling, you’re so brave!’
The stable lad looked at the reunited couple, then at Tilla. ‘Master Lucius knocked the thief down and took your bags back, miss. Then he made him tell us where he got them. I don’t know if everything’s in them.’
Tilla moved one hand to indicate the body of Onion-breath. The lad stepped across the fallen door and bent to peer at him.
Lucius lifted his head and noticed Onion-breath for the first time. ‘What happened to him?’
‘It is the sort of thing that happens in a place like this,’ said Cass, suddenly decisive. She got to her feet and took the knife from the stable lad. ‘None of us saw anything.’
Tilla was still staring at the body, vaguely aware of Cass bustling about with water and a cloth. The stable lad touched her arm. ‘We ought to go, miss’ he murmured.
Tilla looked up. Lucius seemed to be suffering from no more than a bitten lip. His wife had a red mark on her cheek that was already beginning to swell. ‘That will teach you,’ Lucius announced to Onion-breath, ‘to mistreat the wife of an honest farmer.’
‘Yes,’ said Cass. She handed Tilla the knife, now clean, and picked up the striped bag that the stable lad had retrieved. ‘I would like to go home now, please, husband.’
They stepped out into the narrow street. Apart from a long rope and a stray dog, it was empty. Evidently the ropemakers had decided not to see anything either.
68
Arria paused on her way across to the bath-house and informed Ruso that there was no sign of poor Lucius coming back from Arelate. No, there was no word of Cassiana or That Girl either. ‘The staff keep asking me to decide things. Why don’t they know how to do it themselves? What’s the point of buying slaves if we have to do all the work? As if I don’t have enough to do!’
Ruso, preoccupied, let the wave of complaint wash over him and only surfaced to hear ‘… and join us in the baths. All the young people are there. The children have hardly seen you since you’ve been home.’
‘I need to go and check on the farm staff,’ he said, suspecting it was Arria rather than the children who wanted some adult company. ‘Then I’ve got to get ready for the games tomorrow.’ He ran his fingers over the soft leather of his purse, feeling the circle of the iron ring inside. ‘Could you tell Marcia to come and find me as soon as she’s free?’
The mindless rhythm of the iron blade sliding along the sharpening-stone usually soothed whatever agitation Ruso might be feeling, but this afternoon it had not had time to work its magic when there was a knock on the study door. He laid the scalpel back in the linen roll where he now kept his instruments and hid them behind the desk. Then he retrieved the ring from his purse and called, ‘Come in!’
Marcia closed the door behind her and leaned back against it. ‘Did you give him my letter?’
Ruso nodded, trying not to stare at the rags tied around the curls in his sister’s damp hair, which gave her the odd appearance of a cavalry horse being prepared for parade.
‘Did he tell you it was respectable?’
‘Yes.’
She attempted a smile as she said, ‘I knew you’d be too stuffy to read it!’ but he saw the way her fingers were twisted around each other.
‘He looks in good shape,’ he told her. ‘He’s very confident. That’s half the battle.’
Marcia seemed to find that more reassuring than she would have done had she realized how little her brother really knew about gladiators.
‘They’ll be having the grand dinner tonight,’ she said. ‘They do that, you know. Before the games.’
‘I know.’
‘And then tomorrow there’ll be the sacrifices to Jupiter, and he’ll be in the procession.’ There was no need for her to explain what came next.
‘He didn’t have time to write a reply,’ he said, holding out the ring, ‘but he asked me to give you this.’
She took it. Instead of slipping it on to her finger she turned it around, examining it. ‘I have been thinking,’ she said. ‘If he is not dead, but horribly mutilated, what will happen?’
‘I’ll do my best. Men often recover far better than you expect.’
‘I mean, what shall I do? With a cripple?’
He could not answer that.
She gave a sudden howl of grief, ran forward and flung her arms around him. ‘Oh, Gaius!’ she sobbed, her ragtied head pressing hard against his chest. ‘I can’t bear it, I really can’t!’
69
Lucius had hardly spoken to Tilla from the moment he had burst into the bar until they had turned the cart off the road to settle here under the trees for the night. She knew that he blamed her for his wife’s sudden rebellion. When she had said she would sleep under the cart beside the stable lad there had been no offer of a more comfortable night with Cass up under the leather canopy.
Rolled in their cloaks on the hard ground, Tilla and the stable lad both seemed to be pretending that the other was not just two feet away in the darkness. Inside the black bulk of the cart above them, Cass was asking Lucius about the children. Had Sosia’s tooth come out yet? Did Publius eat his dinner? Had they gone to bed without a fuss? When they asked where she was, what had he told them? Had they been upset?
Listening to the replies, Tilla felt sadness weighing down on top of night-time chill and exhaustion. Cass and Lucius had a home to go to, and a family waiting for them. Tilla was no longer even sure that her family were waiting for her in the next world. It seemed that heaven, like God, was everywhere, but not everyone was allowed to go to it. None of her people had worshipped Christos. Perhaps they had been rejected at the gates, like soldiers who did not know the password.
Even Britannia was not home. By now someone else would be renting that little upstairs room outside the fort. Some other soldier’s woman, perhaps. Someone who would never be part of the Army but who was no longer part of her own people either. Someone to whom marriage did not seem important, but who might one day find herself desperate for a welcome amongst the family of a man who was not her husband.
