Ruth Downie - Semper Fidelis

“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 now , he means now .”

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 Come for me at the house of Krina.

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?”

“I am taking out the things we do not need,” she said, tugging at some sort of female undergarment. “If we do not carry too much and we start now, we can be ten miles away by morning.”

“What? Tilla, I’m not-”

“Shhh!” She put her fingers on his lips. “Corinna and the boy are sleeping in the loft.”

“I’m not going to run!” he whispered.

“Then what are you going to do? The Legion will not want you!”

He shrugged. “I swore to serve.”

“But-”

“Besides, where could we go where we wouldn’t be noticed, you and I?” Her silence was his answer. She said dully, “They execute men who disobey orders.”

“Oh, it won’t come to that,” he assured her, pushing aside the moments in the dark depths of the sewer this afternoon when he had felt almost paralyzed with terror. If disease really was caused by foul air, then spending time down here could kill him as surely as having his head severed-only more slowly. “I’ll send a message as soon as I can. Have you got enough money?”

She cast an eye over his beltless tunic. “Have you any to give me?”

“No.”

“Then I have enough.”

He took both her hands in his bloodstained grasp and kissed her on the lips. “Be safe, Darlughdacha of the Corionotatae.”

She stroked his hair. “May the gods smile upon you, Gaius Petreius the Medicus.”

“Look after my kit, will you?” She nodded. Halfway out of the door, he paused. “Why did you want to know about Sabina?”

“Is it true she and her husband hate each other?”

“I believe so.”

“Why did you never tell me this?”