Ruth Downie - Ruso and the Root of All Evils

Two men with kerchiefs over their faces drew level with him, one urging on a black horse and the other a big roan. Both men looked old enough to know better. The roan was much too close.

‘Move over!’ he yelled, just as the roan barged him. Ruso’s horse leaped sideways. A front hoof slipped on the side of the ditch and he was sent lurching over its shoulder. The horse managed to scramble up and Ruso righted himself, wishing he had a cavalry mount and a decent saddle. He was still trying to calm the horse when he realized the men were turning back.

‘I’m all right!’ he yelled, holding the animal steady in the middle of the road, well away from the ditch in case it decided to spook again at their approach.

They were coming too fast. Both shouting. He saw the odd movement of the hand. The flash of metal in the sunlight. For a moment he stared, unable to believe what was happening. To have survived Britannia, only to be attacked by bandits here at home.

His fingers fumbled with the safety strap. They were almost on him now: the one on the black with knife raised, the other reaching forward, ready to seize the reins of his horse.

No time for his own knife. He urged the horse towards the gap between them, ready to barge the roan whilst hooking at the knifeman’s arm with the end of his walking-stick. He had to get away from them and go to warn Tilla.

It would have worked. It would have worked beautifully. In fact it was on the way to working when his own mount stumbled on that front leg. He heard the rider of the roan cry out as the two horses collided. Ruso’s lunge towards the knifeman became a wild wave in mid-air as the grey horse gave way beneath him and they crashed to the ground in a crunching confusion of hooves and tail and elbows and gravel.

Ruso’s first instinct was to curl up, hands protecting his head. Only when the thrashing about had stopped did the pain start to burn its way through the shock.

Someone was nudging his shoulder. He wanted to say, don’t just poke the casualty, talk to him! but then he remembered in whose company he had fallen. He lifted one arm — at least that much was working — and found himself staring into the whiskery nostrils of Severus’ horse, which was examining him with an air of puzzled concern.

He rolled over on to his back. A shadow fell over him and an oddly shaped fist clutching a knife filled the centre of his vision. Beyond it, he managed to make out that the other man had unrolled some sort of document.

‘In the name of Senator Gabinius Valerius,’ announced the reader, ‘I order you to come with us. Put it away, Stilo. He’s got nowhere to run.’

The man backed away. As he sheathed his knife, Ruso saw that someone had done an untidy amputation of the last two fingers. He sat up and began to inspect himself for damage. He said, ‘You’re the investigators.’

‘Calvus and Stilo,’ said the knifeman, who must be the one the gatekeeper had described as the muscle. ‘I’m Stilo.’

Ruso wiped the blood off a scrape on his elbow and decided the rest of him was only bruised. Mercifully he had done no more damage to his foot. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

‘If you didn’t know who we was,’ countered Stilo, ‘why was you running away?’

Ruso unstrapped the bottle that the stable lad had filled for him. Evidently he had not bothered to rinse it: the water tasted disgusting. ‘I wasn’t running away,’ he said. ‘I need to catch up with somebody.’

‘A lot of people need to catch up with somebody when we want to talk to them.’

‘Get back on your horse and come with us,’ said Calvus, gingerly easing his shoulder backwards and forwards with the opposite hand and wincing as he did so. He was slightly built and several inches shorter than Ruso: a man who might be irritated by his bluff companion but who would need his bulk as backup.

Ruso stifled his professional curiosity about the state of Calvus’ shoulder and moved on to examining the grey horse.

He stumbled as a hand shoved him from behind. Stilo said, ‘He said, get back on.’

Ruso retrieved his stick and urged the horse forward a few paces. Its gait was not dissimilar to his own. He swore quietly. There was no way he was going to catch up with anyone on this animal. ‘I’m trying to get to a friend,’ he said, without much hope. ‘She’s in danger. I need to borrow a horse.’

The answer was in the looks on their faces. The best he could do was to get home and try and persuade someone — Lollia Saturnina? — to let him borrow a fresh mount. ‘This one’s lame,’ he said, ‘and so am I. It’ll take me hours to walk anywhere.’ He glanced from one to the other of them.

‘Get on Stilo’s horse,’ ordered Calvus. ‘The exercise will do him good.’

The glare that accompanied Stilo’s handing over of the black horse’s reins suggested that Ruso would be sorry for this later.

Ruso had hoped to leave out parts of the truth. Omission was easier than lying. As he and Calvus rode slowly back along the road with a resentful Stilo leading the lame horse, it seemed that he might get away with it.

He summarized the circumstances of Severus’ death, adding that Claudia had since confirmed that her husband was not in the best of health.

‘Yes, I hear you’ve been to see the widow,’ observed Calvus. ‘Twice.’

‘We used to be married,’ said Ruso, noticing the heavy ring on Calvus’ right hand and wondering whether a stone that size was there to add a sharp edge to his punch.

Calvus said, ‘What was Severus doing at your house?’

‘We were both involved in a court case.’

‘He was going to wipe you out, and you’re telling me he just dropped by for a chat?’

Ruso suspected the investigator would not believe that Severus had come to discuss a settlement, and he was right.

‘Why would he do that?’

They were approaching the ox-cart they had overtaken a few minutes before. The driver looked them up and down, noted the lame horse and passed by with the barely concealed superiority of one who had known that too much rushing about never came to any good in the end.

Ruso said, ‘It’s complicated. There was a falling-out between the women in both families.’

‘And Severus let it affect his business decisions?’ It was obvious that Calvus was not convinced.

‘Judge for yourself,’ suggested Ruso. ‘You’ve met Claudia.’

‘Somehow,’ said Calvus, ‘I don’t see a man like the Senator choosing an agent who’s told what to do by his wife.’

‘Severus made some remarks about my sister,’ Ruso explained. ‘Apparently he meant it as a compliment, but my brother took it as an insult, and my stepmother reported it to Claudia, who gave him a very bad time about it. He was angry with my family for stirring up trouble in his marriage, and since — according to him — we owed him money, he decided to make things difficult for us.’

‘I see.’

‘Only later on, he realized things had gone too far,’ said Ruso. ‘We’d just done a deal to straighten things out when he was taken ill.’

‘We’ll need to talk to whoever witnessed the agreement.’

‘There wasn’t anybody,’ explained Ruso. ‘There wasn’t time to get things organized. I was more worried about his state of health.’

‘I see.’

‘I know this doesn’t sound very likely.’

‘Did I say that?’ asked Calvus.

‘You didn’t say that,’ confirmed Stilo across the horse.

Ruso said, ‘Severus was a bully and a liar. We can’t have been the only people he tried to swindle.’

‘The first rule of investigating,’ said Calvus. ‘Never trust a suspect who tries to blame somebody else.’