weapons.
“I haven’t seen any illegal weapons,” declared Firmus, a statement which was truer than most of his audience knew. “You can send your guards back to town: We’ll keep order here. Now is somebody going to light that pyre, or not?”
The wails of the Iceni rose with the crackling of the flames as the fire blazed once more, sending Camma on the way to whatever kind of next world awaited her. Ruso adopted a respectful silence. He itched to explain to Firmus that Dias and Gallonius were the ones who should be arrested, but the attempt would stir up the trouble they had just managed to avert. Yet again, Dias had slithered out of his grasp.
Dias knew it too. He directed a practiced salute at Firmus and the decurion, then smirked at Ruso before turning his men to march them back toward the road. Gallonius went with them. Ruso was still wondering how he was going to explain any of this to the procurator-let alone to Metellus-when Valens appeared and announced that he and his wife wanted to get the boys home by nightfall. Firmus decided the cavalry could escort the Iceni tomorrow without his help, and turned to Ruso. “I’ll ride back with you,” he said, adding ominously, “You can explain everything to me on the way. I can inspect the milestones at the same time.”
Tilla had not been included in any of these conversations. She had produced the feeding bottle from somewhere and was sitting on the grass, wailing with the Iceni women. After several attempts Ruso managed to catch her eye and point toward the carriage that was still waiting over by the road. She said something to the redhaired woman next to her, and got up to leave. The woman stood too, and Ruso realized there was some sort of argument going on. Tilla began to walk away. The woman went after her.
Firmus was still talking, but Ruso was not listening.
There was some sort of struggle. The feeding bottle fell and landed in the grass.
He ran across the middle of the clearing, crouching to shield his face from the heat as he ran.
“Stop!”
The Iceni woman was tugging at the baby. Tilla was trying to kick her away. The baby was crying. The funeral wailing ceased as the other Iceni tried to intervene.
“Leave her alone!” he shouted. The struggle paused, but neither woman let go. The baby was still crying. He had never seen Tilla look so desperate.
“My wife has looked after this baby since he is born,” he explained in awkward British over the noise to anyone who would listen. “He knows her. She likes him very much.” He looked around. The Iceni were grimfaced. “We can give him a good home,” he promised. “We will teach him and look after him and-” What else could he promise?
“He will never go hungry,” put in Tilla.
“What will you teach him?” demanded the redhaired woman.
Tilla’s chin rose. “I will tell him the story of his beautiful mother,” she said, wresting him out of the grasp of the woman and patting his back to console him. She leaned her cheek against his swollen red face and his cries began to die away. “Little one, I will tell you about your father from the Dobunni and your mother from the Iceni and your ancestors who were wronged by Rome and how they took a terrible revenge. And when you grow up, I will tell you about an old woman who was still afraid of them sixty years later and about her son who tried to make things better by a marriage, and how it did not work, and how your family came to this place afterward to make sure you were safe.”
“We will bring him to visit his people,” added Ruso, putting an arm around Tilla and gazing around at the fierce faces of the family who had come here to rescue a sister and did not look as though they were inclined to leave empty handed.
“What will you teach him, Roman?” demanded their leader.
“Medicine,” said Ruso. “Healing.” What the hell was the word in British? He switched to Latin for “Surgery.”
“In Latin?”
“He will speak Latin and British, like you.”
“How to give orders and demand tribute?”
“My wife was a friend to your sister,” Ruso tried. “She delivered this baby. Camma trusted her.”
“She trusted both of them,” put in another voice. Ruso had forgotten that Grata was there. “They are good people.”
“Another foreigner!” declared the redhaired woman. “What does she know?”
“More than you,” retorted Grata. “And I’m not foreign.”
“Don’t argue with them!” pleaded Tilla. She turned to the leader. “I am begging you, sir, let me look after this child. Do not take him away from us.”
“We want to-” Ruso stopped. How did the Britons say adopt? He didn’t even know if they had a word for it. “We will make him our son.”
He knew from the man’s eyes what the answer was going to be. He barely heard the words: just Tilla’s anguished cry and a brief and rapid exchange in British. The leader seemed to be asking Tilla something. When she did not answer, the woman stepped forward and took the baby out of her arms.
73
Medicine, like investigating, was an occupation fraught with failure. Still, back in Londinium, it was a relief to retreat into the relative simplicity of covering out-of-hours calls so that an unusually hesitant Valens could spend more time with his family. In quiet moments, Ruso carried on working his way through a stack of writing tablets, contacting everyone he could think of who might care to recommend him for a job.
There was no shortage of quiet moments. Tilla seemed to have very little to say to him or to anyone else. He had said he was sorry about the baby, but the only response was, “Yes.” He had asked what the Iceni man had said to her, but she refused to tell him. Since Serena had now reinstalled a full complement of servants, there was little for her to do. Instead she spent long hours sitting in the bedroom by herself. Asked what she was doing up there, she said, “Thinking.”
“About what?”
“Things.”
Not sure he was welcome upstairs, Ruso took to spending his evenings helping the apprentices practice their stitching on ox tongues and testing them on the medicinal properties of flavored wines. When the short one offered to take his teetering stack of letters, he realized with a jolt that he had no desire to send them. A new job would mean leaving Londinium. It would mean being on his own with Tilla. He was not sure either of them wanted that. “I’ll sort them all out when I’ve finished,” he told the apprentice, doggedly carrying on writing requests and leaving them to accumulate on the new table in Valens’s hall.
At night he lay awake regretting the demise of the cockerel. It would have been some sort of company as he waited for the trumpet from the fort to sound the change of watch and hoped for an emergency to give him something to do. In the mornings he slept late.
Tilla’s was not the only frustrating silence.
It was three days since he had delivered his report to the procurator’s office along with a claim for his expenses. Neither the procurator nor Firmus had been available to speak to him at the time, and there had been no message since. He had used the excuse of his expenses to visit the Residence, but again no one was around. The gap-toothed expenditure clerk told him his claim was being processed and that he would be contacted. The travel warrant clerk-last seen on horseback in the cemetery at Verulamium-had refused to discuss his emergency reinstatement into the cavalry. It was, apparently, “a military matter.”
Was his report so comprehensive that the procurator didn’t need to question him? Did nobody here care what went on up the road as long as the tax was paid? Maybe it had been a mistake to admit the truth about his coerced speech to the Council. Being honest about one’s failures was not a trait much prized among the powerful.
Ruso was even beginning to wish Metellus would get in touch. He had left a note in the Room Twenty-seven pigeonhole, but there had been no response. It had begun to dawn on him that he might never find out the end of the story. He was not important enough to be told. Nor, it seemed, was he competent enough to be given any more
