Chapter 70
Ruso was trying to find out who he should ask about borrowing a horse when he found Dexter riding alongside him. The man had never been friendly, so he was surprised to hear a greeting. He was even more surprised when Dexter said, “You did a good thing, Doctor.”
“I did?”
“Somebody should have done it way back.”
“Geminus?”
“Me, I was never happy about him. You just turned up and dealt with it. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. The horse tossed its head.
“I didn’t do it.”
“Shame about young Victor, but he’s not the sharpest tool in the box, is he?”
“He didn’t do it, either.”
“I bet you’re thinking,
“
“Where did you think you were, the amphitheater?”
“It was just a bit of harmless fun to start with. But the old man didn’t know when to stop. And I didn’t have the authority to stop him.”
“Men were being injured!”
“They weren’t my men.”
Perhaps not, but Dexter must have been betting on them.
“Then he went and lost that lad in the river. Even Geminus could see he’d gone too far there.”
“But by then he’d implicated everyone else,” Ruso surmised.
“He was a clever bastard.”
“Was it you who told the maintenance crews to follow me?”
“We had to know what you were up to. They were keen enough to help. Nobody likes an inspector.”
“You could have backed me up!”
Dexter shrugged. “What’s done was done. The old man said if we talked, we’d all be thrown out with no payoff. Or worse. So we decided to keep the lid on it.”
And they said centurions were the bravest men in the army.
“You don’t how it was,” continued Dexter, as if he had guessed what was in Ruso’s mind. “You weren’t there.
“I got the general idea from his dog. Where is it, by the way?”
“Still with him,” said Dexter unexpectedly. “We couldn’t have a dangerous dog on the march, so it went on the pyre.”
Ruso pictured the wolf dog standing calmly alongside its master and felt more kindly disposed to it in death than he had in life. “Bella,” he said, as if he felt he should mark its passing by naming it, and then tightening the muscles in his leg so that the stitches pulled. “How much does the tribune know?”
Dexter shrugged. “That’s what he’ll be trying to decide, ready for telling his story at Deva.” He paused. “Nobody meant it to end like it did, you know. It was just a bit of fun.”
“I didn’t kill Geminus,” Ruso repeated. “Neither did Victor. So where were you that night?”
Dexter was staring ahead to where the recruits were marching in ragged lines four abreast. “Busy knocking heads together,” he said. “But if that’s the way the wind’s blowing, maybe I’ll take the credit.” Urging his horse into a trot, he moved forward to ride alongside his men.
Ruso watched him trim the lines and fall in beside some of the junior officers. According to Pera, Geminus’s shadows had managed to get themselves sent north with Hadrian, but he supposed most of the officers had been tainted by Sports Night in one way or another. No wonder they were keeping a close eye on the recruits. They were terrified of them.
Chapter 71
The tribune’s guards had shown little interest in Tilla, but Minna seemed to be taking the duty very seriously. Her approach to guarding a hostage who might yet turn out to be an officer’s wife was to travel behind, watching her every move, ask from time to time if she was quite comfortable, and then do very little about it if she wasn’t.
Tilla was bored, frustrated, and still feeling faintly queasy from the cough medicine. Only the fear of causing more trouble for her husband had kept her in her seat all day, watching the land gradually begin to rise and fall as the convoy trudged toward the hills at the speed of the slowest ox in front.
From time to time she had sent Virana to find out what was going on. There was no good news. The Medicus was busy. Victor was spending another day limping along behind a supply wagon. He must be in agony: Already his wrists were rubbed raw and his feet would be blistered where he had been unable to shake the grit out of his boots yesterday. The medics had bound them up, but another day of marching must have made them much worse. There were at least eighty thousand paces between here and Deva, and Victor would feel every one of them.
The sun was well past its midday height when the convoy ground to a halt yet again for no apparent reason. Tilla had had enough. Without glancing back at Minna, she and Virana jumped down and went forward to see if there was anything interesting happening.
By the time they got there, the empress’s painted carriage had been unhitched and was propped on stacks of wood by the side of the road. The front wheels lay in the grass. As was the way with breakdowns, there were a lot of men standing around pointing at various parts of the carriage and telling each other what had gone wrong and how to fix it. Several more were crouching by the props to hold them steady, and offering advice to the one man underneath who was actually trying to do something. As Tilla approached, a loud and very rude word suggested things were not going well down there.
“Really!” Minna, of course, had not been able to resist following them. “Fancy speaking like that in front of the empress!”
The empress, seated on a folding stool under a parasol held by one of her slaves, looked weary rather than shocked. Minna managed to corner another of her slaves and ask if there was anything the tribune’s household could do to help, and that was how, somehow, the empress, the parasol, and the first slave ended up in Celer’s smelly cart while Tilla and Virana walked behind them the mile to the Falcon’s Rest.
Tilla remembered the Falcon’s Rest from their journey to Eboracum. It was the sort of inn that was only there because it was on the way to somewhere else. It squatted on a minor crossroads and scowled down from its high barred windows at any travelers who might be approaching in search of a meal and fresh horses. Its defensive stance had made her feel oddly cheerful. It was a reminder that, without soldiers to hide behind, the Romans were frightened people.
There was no fort here, and the air was already filled with the clatter of mallets on tent pegs by the time Celer delivered his important passenger to the front door of the Falcon’s Rest and Tilla and Virana scrambled back in for the short drive past a straggle of smaller eating houses to the stable yard at the back. Tilla had already worked out that there would be a shortage of beds, and she was not going to risk being turned away.
As soon as they were in, she sent Virana off to buy something to eat and looked around for somewhere better than the cart to spend the night. The main mansio building formed one side of the stable yard: two stories pierced with more mean little windows, those of the better rooms glassed to protect the guests from smells and flies and drafts. By the time the empress and her hangers-on were installed, there would not be much room in there. The rest of the yard was surrounded by stables with what must be stores above.
She thought about mice and rats. Then she thought about sharing a room with Minna.
She climbed down so Celer could unhitch the mule, and slipped a couple of coins to a stable hand. He directed her to the corner of a hayloft and then went back to dealing with more horses than they probably saw in a month.
