Ruth Downie - Semper Fidelis

“If you had a slave brand,” he said, “I could understand it. But as tattoos go, those are rather good. Marcus, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” Or his arms, at least.

“You were one of the doctors who said I could join the army, sir.”

“I imagine that seems a long time ago.”

“A whole life, sir. What is in the potion? Can you do it before we go to Deva?”

Ruso angled himself on the stool so that it was resting on the back two legs, and dismissed a distant echo of his first wife’s warnings about ruining the furniture. “First,” he said, dodging the first question lest the patient should decide to slap lime all over himself, “tell me why you would want to bother.”

Moments later he was recalling a conversation with a young lawyer in Antioch who had insisted that he was not ashamed of his own people. “I simply want to go to the baths and not be noticed, Doctor. It’s bad for business. Other men get Oh, look, there’s the lawyer . Or: There’s the man who won the Stephanus case . Or: There’s a man who looks reliable. I strip off and I get Oh, look, there’s a Jew. ”

Ruso had explained the difficulties of the surgery, the inevitable pain, the possible consequences of serious inflammation at the operation site, and the fact that nothing would fully restore what had been lost. The lawyer, who seemed to think he was bargaining, begged him to reconsider and offered more money. That evening Ruso’s ex-wife, who had recommended him through an acquaintance, demanded to know why he had embarrassed her by refusing the case.

“Because it’s unnecessary, nasty, and dangerous.”

“But it must work or people wouldn’t do it.”

“True.”

“And if you get a good reputation for doing this epispasm thing, he’ll send all his friends, and-”

“I don’t want any sort of reputation for surgery people don’t need.”

“But he thinks he needs it! Now he’ll have to go to somebody who’s not as good as you. And when his thing drops off, it’ll be your fault.”

Sometimes Ruso thought it was a wonder he and Claudia had stayed married for as long as they did. They had still been arguing when the earthquake struck. The lawyer was only one of a great number of people he had never seen again.

Now he was facing a man with a similar problem. The trouble with tattoos, apparently, was that when legionaries of any rank saw them they thought, Oh, look, there’s a Briton, and lowered their expectations accordingly.

“It’s bad enough to be in an unlucky unit, sir, but if the rest of the Legion think we are no good because we are barbarians …”

“Do they?”

Marcus twisted the rough bread between his hands. A shower of crumbs fell to the floor. “I am a Roman citizen, sir,” he insisted. “Just like the rest. My father has a copy of the citizenship order. Signed by the emperor Trajan himself.”

Ruso said, “To be chosen by the emperor is a great honor.” It was true, although Tilla would have said that any Briton chosen by the emperor had obviously done something to be ashamed of. “Are you the first legionary in the family?”

Marcus nodded. “Everyone’s very proud of me at home, sir.” He looked up. “How can I tell them what it’s really like?”

“It’ll be better when you get to Deva and you’re assigned to your century,” Ruso promised him. “It’s not all like basic training.”

“Austalis will never go to Deva now, sir, will he?”

“I don’t know.” Austalis would be lucky if he survived at all.

“It’s not right, sir. Me and Austalis grew up together. We had our first tattoos on the same day. We enlisted together. And now … now …” Marcus, unable to find the words, gestured helplessly with the bread. Then he raised the arm with the horse tattoo. A roar of fury and despair covered the sound of hard bread crashing against shelves. The British curse on the name “Geminus!” was clear enough, and so was the threat to kill him.

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, Look at me, I’m a barbarian and I’m stupid .’”

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.

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.