Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

He closed his eyes, told his slithering mind to get a grip, and looked again. Now she was standing with her loosened curls haloed in the lamp, swirling sludgy gray liquid around in the vial and apparently mouthing words to it.

There would be an explanation. There was always an explanation with Tilla, but not necessarily a logical one and not one he wanted to listen to after a long day. He had a vague memory of wanting to ask her something, but whatever it was could wait. He let his eyes drift shut and left her to carry on. Thus he was totally unprepared to be woken by a rush of cold air, a warm body straddling his overfull stomach, and a voice announcing from above, “I am ready for you, husband!”

“Huh?”

“Now. While the medicine is working.”

He opened his eyes and surveyed his naked and wild-haired wife with more alarm than desire. “What medicine?”

“It is spring, and the moon is waxing. It is a good time to make a child.”

He swallowed. “Right now?”

The eyes that were not blue but were not really green, either, fixed on his own. “Right now,” she declared, and reached across him to pinch out the bedside lamp.

Sometime later, vaguely aware that it was still dark despite the screech of a neighbor’s cockerel, he heard her say, “And another thing. This bed is too hard.”

He mumbled, “Perhaps the beds will be better in Verulamium.”

“I hope many things will be better.” He guessed this referred to their latest attempt to produce an heir, which had been swiftly concluded and followed-as far as he could remember-by his drifting off to sleep while she was still talking. She said, “I have told Camma she can travel with us tomorrow.”

He grunted his assent.

Outside, the cockerel again shrieked the start of a nonexistent dawn. He said, “Somebody ought to put that bloody bird in the pot.”

“It is good we are not at home in Brigantia.”

In the silence that followed, he wondered what the Brigantes did with poultry.

“Nobody at home will find out I have married a tax man.”

Ruso sighed. There was, he decided, a fundamental incompatibility between women and men. Women could not just get on and do things. They had to decide how they felt about doing them, and then they had to tell you how they felt, and then they expected you to do something about it, no matter how irrational their feelings might be. He had tried to explain to her that modern living needed money, that for ordinary people money came from taking a job, and that a job inevitably involved a man going where he was told and doing what he was paid to do when he got there. There were times when the question of whether his wife would approve was not uppermost in his mind.

“I’m not a tax man,” he pointed out, deciding it would not help to admit that he could not care less whether the Britons paid their taxes. “I’m an investigator. Besides, you were the one who wanted me to look for the missing husband.”

“I have been thinking about that. Do not look too hard.”

“What?” He rolled over to face her in the dark. “It’s too late now. I’ve got everybody from the procurator’s office downward on the lookout. Even Albanus is spreading the word.”

“He does not deserve her, or his beautiful son. What sort of a man leaves his family for a bag of money?”

“She says he hasn’t taken the money.”

“Of course she says this. He is a tax collector. He has lied to her and run away with his brother. She will be better off without him.”

Ruso lay on his back with his eyes closed and marveled at the speed with which his wife could change her mind.

Outside the window there was a soft pattering of rain, followed by the unsteady rhythms of dripping from the eaves. Farther along the landing he could hear the rasping cry of the newborn child keeping its mother awake in the room usually occupied by Valens’s children. Tomorrow, he vowed, he would go and find the temple of a suitable god. He would give thanks for a safe journey and offer whatever the priests thought might be appropriate in exchange for an heir. It could do no harm.

He was just beginning to drift back to sleep when the cockerel jolted him awake with another fanfare. He felt a flash of irritation. Somebody ought to wring that feathery neck. He would cheerfully do it himself. But that would mean leaving a warm bed, groping for his boots, creeping down the stairs, and prowling wet lanes and gardens in the dark. Instead he said, “There should be a law against keeping a bird like that in town.”

“He should be in a house with a good low roof to keep his head down,” said Tilla. “When you find proper work and we have a home, I shall keep hens.”

“It’ll be easier to get work as a medic now I’m here,” he promised her. “I’ll start writing to people in a day or two.”

“Perhaps they will want a doctor in Verulamium.”

He said, “Don’t say that to anybody up there, will you?”

“You are proud to work for the tax man and ashamed to be a healer?”

“I can’t get on with inquiries if people keep asking me to look at their bunions.”

“Be careful, husband. It is bad enough this Julius Asper is a tax collector, but a man who would leave a wife like that will do anything. If they are still around and they know you are chasing them, they will try to stop you.”

He slid one arm around her waist, drawing her close so that her hair tickled his nose. “I’ll be safe,” he promised. “I’ve got a fierce British warrior-woman to defend me.”

Tilla said something that sounded like, “Hmph.”

He remembered what he had wanted to ask her earlier. “Has Valens said anything to you about Serena?”

“She was a fool to marry him.”

Ruso assumed this insight had originated from Tilla rather than Valens. A worrying thought crossed his mind. “You haven’t been talking to him about us, have you?”

“You think I would talk to Valens?”

He had to admit it was hard to imagine. “So where did you get that medicine?”

There was a pause, then, “From somebody I met.”

Clearly she was not going to tell him. “And did this somebody tell you what was in it?”

After a moment’s hesitation she said, “Ashes of hare’s stomach in wine.”

“Ah.” He had heard hare recommended as a treatment for barrenness. “Anything else?”

“Roast sparrow.”

Another cure more often endorsed by rumor than by experience. “Let’s hope it works.”

“She would not tell me the other things.”

“Probably just as well,” he said, glad that they would be leaving in the morning. Whoever had sold Tilla that concoction would have to find some other desperate woman to exploit.

The guardians of the sunken chamber of Mithras did not seem to think the god would be overeager to help a man who had never bothered with him during all his years in the army. In truth, the officers’ favorite god would not have been Ruso’s first choice, but he did not have time to hunt around for another deity this morning. Finally the guardians sized him up and agreed that an unblemished lamb would be a sufficient offering to make should the great one grant him a son, although unless Ruso were to go through the proper initiations, divine assistance was unlikely. Ruso duly descended into the gloom and made his promise to the god. Stepping over a wide puddle outside the exit, he crushed the unholy thought that the guardians might be partial to roast lamb. He had more important things to think about.

He could not understand why Camma was convinced the Council was behind her husband’s disappearance, nor why they in turn seemed to suspect him and his brother of running off with the money. Tax collection was a form of licensed theft anyway. It was hard to see what Asper might gain by becoming a real criminal when he could sit comfortably where he was, charging over the odds and growing legally rich on a fat percentage of the receipts. It was the only reason for anyone to take on such an unpopular role in the first place. If the red-haired Iceni wife had been the problem, he could have divorced her. It was surely far more likely that the men had been attacked by robbers on the road.