Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

Ruso paused. “You mean you can remember what was written on it?”

“No, sir.” The youth held out the parchment. “But I’ve got my notes. It was hopeless with two of us trying to work on it at once, so I copied it out.”

Ruso scanned the document and read aloud, “Dearest girl, when your sweet lips meet my eager-” He looked up. “This isn’t it, surely?”

“Oh, no, sir! That’s a poem. The other side.”

He turned it over and flattened the curve against the wall with his thumbs to reveal two lines of text in fresh black ink. As far as he could recall, the shapes echoed those of the original. They even curved down toward the foot of the document at the right-hand end.

The tall apprentice was leaning over his shoulder. “Why didn’t you say you’d got that, stupid?”

It was a good question, but not one Ruso was inclined to waste time on. “Young man,” he said, placing his hand on the short apprentice’s shoulder, “You are a hero.”

The blush shot upward. The youth mumbled something about Doctor Valens insisting they always took notes. For a moment Ruso even felt a rush of gratitude toward Valens and his ability to teach by lecture, if not by example.

“Will it do, sir, or do you want us to keep on looking?”

“This will do,” said Ruso, tightening the roll of the parchment. “This will do very nicely.”

As the carriage trundled northward, it occurred to Tilla that before she met her husband she would never have thought of traveling undefended through the territory of a southern tribe. Especially not that of the Catuvellauni, notorious for trampling all over their neighbors until the Romans had come and put them in their place. Naturally the Catuvellauni, untrustworthy as ever, had then switched sides and become staunch supporters of the emperor.

Among all his other warnings this morning, the Medicus had told her not to mention any of this to anybody in Verulamium. As if she would be such a fool! The last thing she wanted to do was remind them that their warriors’ resistance to Rome had finally crumbled when a treacherous queen of her own tribe had betrayed their leader. Such shameful deeds were best left unspoken. She was part of a new world now. She was the well-traveled and respectable wife of a man who worked for the procurator.

The vehicle jolted through a pothole. Tilla leaned back against the blanket she had folded to cushion the carriage wall and closed her eyes. No one in her family had ever been south of Eboracum before. She tried to imagine what they would think if they could see her now. What would she say to them about her marriage? They would never understand how easy it was to drift once you were away from home: how small compromises seemed right at the time, and how you could find yourself on the far side of a river with no clear idea of when you had crossed it.

Was that what had happened to Camma?

When she had some privacy, Tilla would tell Christos about Camma and the baby and the missing brother. He was supposed to be able to hear you no matter where you were, but just in case he had no power here across the sea, she would find out where the gods of the Catuvellauni were worshipped and make an offering to them too.

The baby who was not the husband’s was asleep in a box tied to the seat beside his mother, lulled by the steady clop of hooves and the rumble of the wheels. He was swaddled in the cloths and bandages Tilla had brought back from Gaul. Camma seemed to think she carried baby clothes about with her because she was a midwife, and she had not bothered to explain. Still, if that disgusting gritty medicine had worked, she would have a use for them herself before long. If the gods were kind, she and the Medicus would have their own home too. The red crockery gleaming on the table would remind them of Gaul and they would have a pair of iron fire dogs framing the hearth like the ones in the house where she grew up. Outside there would be a vegetable patch, and some hens, and-

“You have been kind to me, sister.”

Tilla returned to the present. “Anyone would have done the same.”

Camma had pulled a strand of hair forward and was chewing the end of it. “I was afraid nobody would help. I thought I would die.”

“You were in need,” Tilla pointed out. “Of course people would help you, even here in the South.”

“And now you are leaving your husband behind to come with me, when I don’t deserve it.”

“It’s nothing,” Tilla assured her, wondering if Camma was about to explain the rift with her own husband. Instead, the Iceni woman glanced down at the shrouded figure laid out along the floor of the carriage. “A man who collects taxes is never liked,” she said, “but somebody must do it.”

“Doctors are not much liked, either,” offered Tilla. “A few bad ones and they all get the blame.”

It was not until Camma said, “I thought he must be a doctor,” that Tilla remembered she was supposed to be keeping that quiet.

“But now he is an investigator,” she added.

“If you say so.”

“It is only a job,” said Tilla.

“So is collecting taxes.”

They were passing a couple of thatched round houses. A woman was working at a loom set up outside one of the doors. Behind her, fat skeins of brown wool were hung to dry on lines slung from one porch to the other. It reminded Tilla of her childhood.

Camma said, “I can’t believe he is gone. The medicine makes me sleep, then I wake up and it has all still happened.”

“Have you thought about a name for the baby?”

There was no reply.

Whoever was supposed to mend the road after the winter had not done it very well. The carriage lurched as a front and then a back wheel went into the same hole. The baby’s eyes opened. Camma checked the cords that held the box onto the seat. Satisfied they were secure, she leaned forward so the driver could not listen. “You will be asking what an Iceni woman is doing among the Catuvellauni.”

It would not have been Tilla’s first question, but considering the old enmity between the tribes, it was a good one.

“When we get there I expect someone will tell you about my famous ancestor.”

There was only one famous family among the Iceni, headed by a woman who had seen her people bitterly wronged by Rome and taken revenge. Tilla realized she was staring at her traveling companion. “You are-”

“She was my great-grandmother,” said Camma. “Whatever they tell you about all of my family being hunted down after the battle is a lie.”

As Tilla digested this she continued, “What do you do with an ancestor like that? Everyone watches you. Everything you do has meaning.”

Tilla gazed out of the carriage. Farm carts and passenger vehicles were going about their business with scarcely a guard in sight. The verges were spattered with primroses and beyond, sheep were grazing with their lambs. A small villa was poised on a southern slope to catch the sun and the occasional drift of smoke marked the site of an isolated farm. She tried to picture Camma’s ancestors and their allies thundering up this road with Londinium in flames behind them and Verulamium undefended in front.

They said that Boudica had lost control of her warriors. That her forces had butchered anyone who could not run fast enough. Old people. Women. Children. They said too that the soldiers who should have fought to save Londinium had marched away and abandoned it.

“I was sent to Verulamium in payment of a debt,” continued Camma. “I was accepted to show that the past is buried and forgotten. An Iceni princess can marry a Catuvellauni leader. Look, we are all modern Romans now!”

“Not where I come from,” said Tilla, understanding at last why Camma had married that angry old man. “Most of my people would rather be who we have always been.”