In the silence that followed, a stack of record tablets teetered, then clattered to the floor.
Marcus slumped back against the wall. As they both surveyed the chaos he had caused, someone knocked hard enough to rattle the door latch. “Are you all right in there, sir?”
“Fine, thank you!” Ruso called, glad the bread had not been aimed at him. “Just give me a few minutes.”
The Briton put his hands over his head. He slid down the wall until he was cowering on the floor like an animal expecting to be beaten.
Ruso shifted his weight forward. The front leg of the stool landed on the floorboards with a gentle thud. He said, “While we pick all this up, Marcus, I want you to tell me exactly what happened to Austalis.”
Once he had accepted that he was not about to be clapped in irons and flogged, Marcus made distracted attempts to tidy up, consisting mostly of stacking tablets vertically and then failing to catch them as they slid sideways along the shelf and fell over. Ruso, crouched on the floor, took his time retrieving the strays from under the desk, because the lad had started to talk.
Austalis, it seemed, had committed some minor offense. Geminus had discovered it and delivered one of those devastating streams of abuse that centurions were fond of serving up to recruits at high volume in front of anyone who happened to be around at the time. Geminus had scorned Austalis’s intelligence, his personal hygiene, his prospects, and his parentage before singling out the tattoo of a stag on his arm as symbolic of his inferior status.
“It was a beautiful tattoo, sir. Even better than mine. And Austalis, he decides this is enough. He says, ‘What is wrong with it?’ and the bastard with the two shadows hits him round the head with his stick, and shouts, ‘You might as well write up your arm,
It was not hard to picture the scene. “So then what happened?”
“Austalis shouts back. Geminus calls it insubordination. They make him stand outside HQ for hours holding a clod of turf, sir.”
Ruso had seen this many times. It did not sound like much, but the heavy turf would have to be held at arm’s length, and before long the muscles would be screaming for relief.
“After they let him go, I think he went to find the beer supply-” Marcus stopped.
“This is why you aren’t supposed to have one,” Ruso pointed out, guessing they had stashed it somewhere in the unused buildings, and wondering how Geminus and his shadows had managed to miss it.
Marcus rammed the last of the records into a space on the shelf. “When we found him, he was drunk and bleeding, with the stag cut out of his arm.”
Ruso handed up the last of the record tablets. Somebody had to tell the truth around here. “Geminus probably didn’t mean it,” he said. “Centurions sometimes insult their men to test their self-control.”
Marcus stared at him. “Is that true?”
“I’ve seen it.” And so had plenty of other men, and somebody should have had the grace to warn these lads.
The lad stiffened. “You must think the Britons very funny, sir.”
“If I thought the natives were a joke,” said Ruso, “I wouldn’t have married a Brigante.”
Marcus seemed to be pondering this as the trumpet sounded the next watch. “I must go,” he said. “If I come back tonight, can you start the potion?”
“Let me talk to your centurion first.”
“But, sir-”
“Leave it with me,” said Ruso, who had no idea what he was going to say to Geminus the war hero, but knew that whatever it was, it needed saying.
Chapter 22
The clerk returned not long after Marcus left. He was reeking of bonfire and surprisingly sanguine about the disorder on the shelves. It did not matter, since he was currently engaged in a sorting-out anyway.
Ruso sniffed. “What have you been burning?”
“Old rubbish we don’t need to take to Deva, sir.”
“Medical records?” Ruso was on his feet. “Show me.”
The charred edge of the tablet that Ruso rescued with the end of a hoe almost certainly said
Pera’s hair was even wilder than usual. His tunic had damp patches and there were smudges of black muck on his elbows that he had failed to quite wash off. Ruso said, “That idiot clerk’s just burned your postmortem report.”
Pera squinted at the untended bonfire, where it seemed only the hospital records were burning with any vigor. Thick smoke was pouring from the old bedstraw and worn-out rags that made up the rest of the pile. “I told the clerk to get rid of any useless junk, sir.”
“Not things you only did the other day.”
Pera was rubbing the back of his neck again. “I’ll have a word with him, sir.”
Ruso propped the hoe back against the wall, next to a bucket of water. “The ward round was fine apart from Austalis,” he said, glancing around to make sure that no one was close enough to listen before he went on to explain gravity of the situation. “I wasn’t impressed with the staff. They seem to be trying to avoid him.”
“I’ll have a word with them too, sir.”
Ruso eyed his disheveled state. “Who put you on sanitary inspection?”
“Geminus, sir.”
“Don’t you have engineers for that sort of thing?”
“I was with an engineer, sir. The sewer outlet’s out of bounds otherwise.”
Ruso wondered what possible reason Geminus could have had to send a medic crawling around the drains. Pera should not have needed to do any more than ask the engineers whether what went in at one end of the sewer was coming out at the other. It was hard not to suspect that he was being punished for something, and-given the timing-it was probably something that Ruso had ordered him to do.
He was wondering how to tackle the subject when the heavy figure of the clerk appeared, lugging the remains of a broken chair and a sack of something that proved to be old wood shavings mixed with floor dirt, some of them rich red-brown with the dried blood they had been scattered to absorb. They crackled and spat as he poured them over the flames.
“Go to the baths before ward round,” Ruso told Pera. “You’ll frighten the patients.”
“Clean men are healthy men, sir.”
Ruso grinned, recognizing his own words. “Name the deadliest enemy of an army.”
“The deadliest enemy of an army is disease, sir.”
When the clerk was safely out of earshot, Ruso said, “He didn’t seem to know that any report on Tadius existed before yesterday.”
“He didn’t see it, sir. He wasn’t on duty, so I put it away myself.”
“And then I brought it to his attention.”
Pera said nothing.
“It was a good report.”
“You always taught us to record everything, sir.”
“And the purpose of that was …?”
“In case we could learn something from it later.”
“It seems you were listening after all.”
“Thank you, sir. But we can’t learn anything from it now, can we?”
Ruso glanced at him. “If you’re going to fake a tone of regret, Pera, you’ll have to try harder than that.”
“I’m very sorry, sir.”
“That’s better. I’m sure between us we could remember most of it.”
