him, and he supposed they would still be wet in the morning, but a man had to keep up some sort of standards.
He untied his boots, which he had slung around his neck after a bathhouse slave had taken pity on him and slipped him a pair of wooden sandals. In a reversal of the usual practice, he now put the boots on to go indoors.
He had been allowed the concession of a straw mattress, although not a clean one, and a thin gray blanket into which he now rolled his aching and chilled body. Stretching out on the mattress, he reminded himself that virtue was sufficient for happiness.
The man who thought that one up evidently had no need of clothes. Or a fire. Or dignity. Or dinner. Or a wife, who might or might not get the message that he had paid one of the bathhouse slaves to give to a friend who might or might not be going to the mansio.
He hoped Accius would leave Tilla alone. He hoped Pera would make sure the staff didn’t neglect Austalis. He hoped the emperor would get to hear about the plight of his old comrade from Antioch and order his immediate reinstatement. He hoped he wasn’t becoming as deluded as his stepmother. After that, he could think of nothing else to hope for, so he closed his eyes and attempted to enter the last refuge of the desperate: sleep.
He had almost made it when someone crashed open the door and started shouting about needing a doctor.
“I’m not on duty.”
“You are now,” said Dexter. “Get out of bed. Jupiter’s arse, something stinks in here. One whiff of you’ll kill the poor bastard anyway.”
“On my way,” said Ruso, flinging the blanket round his naked shoulders.
“Like that?”
“Or not at all.”
It was Pera who had insisted on having Ruso summoned to help with the injured. A spare tunic was swiftly produced, after which cuts were bathed and stitched, noses straightened, and one or two hopelessly loose teeth removed before the owners sobered up enough to care. In the midst of all this, a semiconscious and dramatically bloody man arrived on a stretcher, and Ruso spent some time cleaning him up, searching for the source of the bleeding before he could staunch it.
Eventually the waiting area was cleared and the man with the bleeding head admitted for observation. Tomorrow the centurions would have to sort out the recriminations. Tonight, since Dexter must be busy elsewhere and had left no instructions, Ruso and Pera left the orderlies to clear up the treatment room and headed off down a poorly lit corridor to take advantage of whatever warmth was left in the hospital baths.
On the way, Pera murmured, “I’m very sorry to hear about your situation, sir.”
“You don’t have to call me sir now.”
“I know, sir.”
They had just stolen one of the few lamps from the corridor to light the changing room, when Ruso said, “The password hasn’t changed since this morning, has it?”
Pera paused with his tunic halfway over his head. “Sir, you can’t-”
“Yes or no?”
“Not as far as I know, sir. But-”
“Then I’ll thank you for the respite, wish you good night, and go back to barracks.”
Before Pera could extract himself from his clothing, Ruso had snatched up the cloak he had just spotted abandoned in an alcove and was back in the corridor with it bundled under his arm. He hid it behind his back to stroll past a couple of off-duty Praetorians. True to form, they ignored him.
The office door was ajar. He heard the murmur of conversation from the late-duty staff, but nobody seemed to notice his passing. He waited until he was out in the dark of the street and well away from the hospital before flinging the Praetorian cloak around his shoulders, tugging the hood over his head, and fumbling with the arrangement of loops and toggles that seemed to fasten it together at the front. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to spot that they’d taken away his army belt.
The guards on the east gate looked at him strangely, but decided to err on the side of caution and added a “sir” to the very reasonable question of “At this hour?”
Ruso said, “When the emperor says
They stepped aside to let him pass.
Whatever had gone on out here an hour ago, the streets were quiet now. The slave on duty at the mansio took one look at the cloak and let him in, but the door to the courtyard rooms was locked and he insisted he could not open it without authorization. Ruso stood in the entrance hall, still concealed beneath the hood, hearing a distant clatter from the kitchen. The convivial murmur of a dinner party swelled suddenly, then faded with the click of a door latch. A pair of matching slaves scuttled across the entrance hall, not pausing to bow. Moments later the manager appeared with the rumpled look of a man who had finally managed to snatch some sleep and had now been woken by someone he neither expected nor wanted to see.
“My wife,” said Ruso without preamble. “Is she here?”
The manager was eyeing the stolen cloak with an air of confusion when someone else hurried in from the street and clacked across the tiles in studded boots. Ruso shrank deeper into the hood as Dexter demanded to know if Centurion Geminus was on the premises. The manager consulted with the door slave and confirmed that he was not. “Then I need to talk to the tribune,” declared Dexter, ignoring the lone Praetorian hunched over the counter with his back to him.
To Ruso’s relief, Dexter was sent into the courtyard to await the tribune’s response. When he had gone, the manager reached underneath the counter. Etched across a wax tablet in a large and unevenly formed hand that Ruso recognized as Tilla’s was
Mercifully the clouds had cleared. The moon was silvering one side of the street and plunging the rest into deep shadow. Ruso walked quickly, pushing aside thoughts of dogs and Geminus and what any stray Praetorians might do to a legionary deemed to be impersonating one of their own.
Tilla answered his knock so quickly, she must have been waiting behind the door. “At last!” she whispered, giving him an unexpectedly warm embrace and murmuring in his ear, “There are rats!”
He closed the door behind him. “Rats?”
She sniffed. “What have you been doing? Are you all right? Were you in the fighting?”
He shook his head. “I can’t stay. What have they told you?”
“We must go to the fort. If you take that box, I can carry the bags, and on the way you must tell me everything you know about the empress Sabina.” She stopped, and pulled his hand toward the light from the fire. “Is that blood?”
“Work.” He wiped his hands on the borrowed tunic, but the ingrained red needed to be scrubbed. “Tilla, I’m in trouble.”
When he had finished telling her, she was silent for a moment. Then she took his hand. “This is my fault. I prayed that you would talk to him.”
“I chose to do it.”
She said, “Are we divorced? Will you ask me to go back to my people?”
“Of course not. Lay low until the Twentieth march out tomorrow, and I’ll send a message here for you. This will probably all blow over.”
“‘Probably’?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’ve never betrayed a legion, harassed an emperor, and humiliated a tribune before.”
“You are not the one who has done wrong here.”
“I deliberately disobeyed an order.”
She began to rifle through one of the bags.
“I’ve made a bit of a mess of this,” he said, feeling the stitches pull in his leg as he crouched beside her.
“It does not matter,” she insisted, placing a hand on his knee. “You have done a brave thing.” She turned back to the bag.
“What are you looking for?”
