Ruth Downie - Semper Fidelis

“I will tell my husband to be careful,” Tilla agreed. “These deaths-what causes them?”

“Dannicus drowned in the river.” Virana shuffled on the bed. “So you cannot help me?”

“I cannot see inside the womb, sister. Think who you lay with at about lambing time and try to work it out.”

Virana began counting on her fingers and murmuring names. There seemed to be a lot of them. Tilla opened the shutters again.

“They were all nice to me.” Virana stopped counting. “I wouldn’t do it with the rude ones.”

“Of course not.”

“They bought me beads.”

“So I see.”

“I felt sorry for them.”

Tilla, trying to remember if she had ever felt sorry for a soldier in her life, said, “Why was that?”

“Mam said to stay away from them, but what does she know? I shall have plenty of time to grind flour and milk cows when I’m old like her.”

“There is no need to feel sorry for soldiers, Virana. Especially when they ask you to comfort them.”

The pout reappeared. “They won’t have me back at home now. My aunt says I’ll turn the milk sour.”

“I am sad to hear it.”

“It wouldn’t be Tadius, would it? I only did it once with him because of my sister.”

“Once is often enough,” said Tilla, pushing aside the thought, but not for me.

“Well, I’m sure it isn’t. Anyway, I need somebody alive. Marcus is nice …” The girl looked up. “You won’t tell my sister about me and Tadius, will you?”

“I do not know your sister.”

“She thinks she was the only girl he ever looked at. Now she is lying at home, sulking.”

Tilla dismissed the question of what the parents had done to deserve two such daughters, and tried to steer Virana back toward the danger the Medicus might be in. “Could the father be either of the other men who died?”

“Oh, Sulio and Dannicus weren’t interested in girls. You know. Like they say about the emperor.”

Tilla was not going to discuss the emperor’s bedroom habits with a girl who could not control her tongue or, it seemed, much else. “So the boy who jumped off the roof was the lover of the one who drowned?”

Virana nodded. “After Dann was drowned, Sulio was so frightened he couldn’t eat. He wanted to run away. I told him not to be silly.” She sniffed. “I should have said, Yes, go, shouldn’t I? If he had run away, he would still be alive.”

“Why was he frightened? Was he to blame for the drowning?”

“Tadius and Victor were really cross with him.”

“He was frightened of the other recruits?”

But Virana had moved on. “Now Tadius is dead and Victor knew it would be him next and Corinna would be left on her own.” She sniffed. “Like I will be if I’m not careful.”

While the girl paused to wipe her nose on the back of her hand, Tilla tried to make sense of what she had said. “Three soldiers are dead, but from different causes, and one has run away.”

Virana nodded vigorously, shaking the remaining strands of hair loose. “Corinna really is Victor’s wife. But that’s none of the army’s business, is it?”

Talking with this girl was like trying to catch fleas: you never knew which way she was going to jump. “That depends on who you ask.”

Virana thought about that for a moment. “It’s not so bad for me, really, is it? I mean, I’ve got plenty to choose from. Corinna never lay with anybody else, so she can’t get them to help now that Victor’s gone.”

It seemed the local girls had rushed to make the new recruits very welcome indeed. A harder woman would have told them that if they must take on a soldier, go for an older man who was about to settle down with his retirement fund. The young ones had no money, little free time, and no choice over where they were posted-but of course they had clear eyes and smooth skin and full heads of hair, and they thought they were immortal. Until, it seemed, they came to Eboracum.

She decided to approach from a different angle. “Who spoke this curse, Virana?”

The girl glanced at the open window again. “I do not think one ram to Jupiter will make much difference.”

“What should I tell my husband to look out for?”

Virana got to her feet and adjusted the pink dress again. “I have to go now. I don’t have to pay, do I? You didn’t help me.”

“I need something,” Tilla insisted. “I have done everything I can for you, and I cannot have word go round that I see patients for free.”

Virana pulled at a strand of her hair. “I have no money.”

“You hoped I would help you because I am generous?”

“I hoped if I warned you about the curse …”

“What you have told me is gossip. I need to know exactly what my husband has to fear in the fort. Who spoke the curse, and why?”

The girl twisted the hair around her forefinger until the fingertip went white. “It will probably be all right,” she said at length. “It is only the recruits that bad things happen to. An officer from Deva will be safe.”

“I hope so, Virana. Because if you have lied to me, I will find you, and you will be sorry.”

The empress Sabina had long ago formed her own theory about the nonsense in travel books. No traveler, having gone to the expense and trouble of venturing where most civilized people were too sensible to go, was going to come home and admit that it had been a waste of time. Instead, he had to pronounce his destination to be full of strange wonders, like the elk with no knees that could be caught by sabotaging the tree against which it leaned when it slept (Julius Caesar) or the men from India who could wrap themselves in their own ears (reported by the elder Pliny, who seemed to have written down everything he was ever told), or the blue-skinned Britons (Julius Caesar again).

Strangely, no traveler ever brought one of these creatures home for inspection. Doubtless they were impossible to capture, or died on the journey, or the blue came off in the wash.

Travel, in Sabina’s experience-and the gods knew she had suffered enough of it in the last twenty years-was less a matter of wonder than of discomfort and disappointment. Londinium was no exception. It had been as empty of blue-skinned natives and promiscuous Druid women as she had feared. Instead, the outgoing governor had led them on a tour of the local forum, followed by an interminable display of marching, fighting, and killing in the amphitheater. In the evenings she and the emperor had been trapped for hours in the palace dining room with provincial administrators and hairy native chieftains. As if the emperor could not see fora or amphitheaters, or eat oysters, or meet barbarians who spoke Latin everywhere he went! The irony, which of course the native chieftains would never be subtle enough to grasp, was that while they were eager to be Romans, their esteemed Roman leader liked to pose as an intellectual Greek.

But since Julia had fallen pregnant-no doubt on purpose in order to avoid this trip-there was no friend with whom she could share the joke. The slaves were all chosen by Hadrian, and presumably primed to report her every complaint, yawn, and mutinous scowl.

The governor’s wife, poor woman, was as tedious as Sabina feared she herself might become if she were obliged to spend much longer marooned in the provinces. She was desperate for the latest gossip from Rome-as if Sabina had been there recently, instead of dutifully shivering through a Germanic winter that froze your teeth if you opened your mouth, and turned the slaves’ feet and noses blue with cold.

Perhaps things would be better when they finally arrived in Deva. Paulina had sounded positively thrilled to know that her distant and now very famous cousin was coming to visit. She had promised to keep Sabina entertained while the emperor and her husband did all those important things that emperors and legates had to do. Meanwhile, Sabina had asked the governor’s wife in vain for the locations of singing stones, statues that spoke, stuffed monsters, giants’ bones, or relics of Helen of Troy. She supposed pyramids were unlikely in Britannia, as were temples filled with treasures, or elephants trained to write, or fountains that miraculously spouted wine-although admittedly she had never been able to pin down the last two herself. But it seemed even the distant hills of the North and West boasted no steaming sulfurous craters or fissures belching poison gases. There was not even an oracle.