Ruth Downie - Terra Incognita

She nodded.

“One last thing,” said Ruso. “When you paid him, did he make a note of it?”

“He wiped me off his list. I watched him do it.”

He got to his feet. “Thank you, Dari,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“I know.”

“And you won’t tell anybody?”

“Not if I can help it,” he said.

Tilla had been surprised by the sudden cacophony of “Aemilia!” echoing around the hall of the bathhouse as a group of young women in the corner noticed their arrival. There had followed a flurry of greetings and compliments and surprise, as it seemed everyone needed to assure everyone else very loudly-in Latin-how lovely it was to see them and how Aemilia wasn’t looking at all terrible and she was being wonderfully brave and-finally-who was her friend?

“This is my cousin,” announced Aemilia, putting an arm around Tilla’s shoulders. “Her name is Darlughdacha.”

This seemed to cause some confusion. “Hasn’t she got a Roman name?” demanded one of the girls.

“Does she speak Latin?”

Tilla eyed the eager faces framed with fancy hairstyles and decided that she did not wish to hear her beautiful name mangled by the lips of strangers. “Tilla,” she said. “You can call me Tilla.”

Aemilia pulled up a stool and introduced her to each girl in turn, declaring the names as if she were proud to have so many friends.

“I remember you,” said Tilla, accepting the space on a bench beside a girl with a squint who was introduced as Julia but who had been called something very different when they had last met. She slipped back into the ease of her native tongue. “You lived in one of the houses near Standing Stone Hill. Your da used to work a lathe.”

The girl tossed her head and replied in Latin, “Oh, that was a long time ago! Now I live here in a proper house.”

“Julia has a son,” confided Aemilia. “Her man is with the Tenth. Like-”

Tilla saw apprehension in the faces of the other girls.

“-my poor Felix,” finished Aemilia. She gulped, and made a sudden grab for her purse. “We need some oil. Come and help me choose, cousin.”

As Tilla followed her cousin across the hall, she was almost sure the jumble of echoed voices around her held a hiss of, “She really doesn’t know, does she?”

Tilla adjusted her towel and leaned back against the wall of the warm room, closing her eyes to the sight of the painted dolphins leaping across the walls and, beneath them, the unpleasant things women were having done to themselves in the pursuit of elegance. She wished she could also close her nose to the stench of competing perfumes and her ears to the babble of voices laced with the occasional grunt from the massage couch and “Ow!” as the plucker of unwanted hairs delivered her own particular form of torture. The smell, the heat, and the noise were making her head ache. It was hard to imagine why anyone would want to come here at all, let alone turn up every day to be exposed and prodded by strangers.

She let out a long breath and let her head fall slightly to one side, mimicking sleep. Around her, the brittleness of the chatter became more obvious as she shut out the wide eyes and overeager smiles. It was as if, with few shared memories to link them, these women were so far apart that they needed to keep reassuring themselves by waving and shouting across the gap.

She thought of the long comfortable silences at home. The nights snuggled under warm blankets, listening to the low murmur of adult voices. The heavy crunch of another log being thrown onto the fire. The gentle trickle of beer being poured. Later, sometimes, the giggling and shuffling and gasping from her parents’ bed that she and her brothers were not supposed to hear.

A sudden wail followed by, “Sorry, miss!” brought her mind back to the bathhouse. This, perhaps, was what people who abandoned their ancestors and surrendered their souls to the foreigners became. Brittle shapes, clinging to one another and shrieking to drown the shame.

Her mind was drifting above the conversation around her when she heard a change of tone and realized an argument was starting.

“Look!” her cousin was insisting.

Tilla opened her eyes to see Aemilia tugging off her precious gold ring.

“Look!” she repeated. “It is my name. In Greek. Aemilia.”

The middle-aged woman standing over her gave a derisive laugh. “You can’t read Greek!”

“Can you?”

“No,” she retorted, “but I know what that says. It says, Long Life to Elpis. Ask anybody. That’s my ring. And you’re the little thief who pinched it from me last week.”

Ruso was leaving Susanna’s when both of the girls he now needed to talk to emerged from the bathhouse and scurried along the wet street. Aemilia, the buxom daughter of Catavignus, was holding a towel over her head to protect her hair from the drizzle.

“Tilla!” he shouted. He was going to get this difficult encounter over before tackling Aemilia about the gold ring.

Both girls turned. Aemilia had clearly spent too long in the steam room and was still very pink in the face. Tilla said something to her and she hurried on.

“I want to talk to you,” he said to Tilla, wondering who had given her that dress whose shade picked up the color of her eyes and why she was wearing perfume. “Where can we go?”

Tilla shrugged. “I have no house. I am not allowed in the fort because I am not a soldier. Soon I am not allowed in the baths because I am not a man, and Susanna’s is closed.”

“We’ll sit outside,” he said, heading toward the benches underneath the sodden awning.

“You will sit with me where everyone can see?” She sounded pleased.

Choosing the only table not under a drip, he realized she was not calling him “my lord” anymore. And he realized he did not know how to start this conversation. He had imagined speaking with her in private, but there was nowhere private to go.

Before he could decide how to begin, she said, “Do you know who it is yet who kills the soldier?”

He cleared his throat. “No.”

“I have some new things to tell you. That Felix is a thief and a liar. He has given a ring to my cousin to keep her quiet. It was a stolen ring. She is shamed in front of all the women.”

Ruso said, “Oh.”

She chuckled. “And last night my uncle’s housekeeper says she sends away a drunk, because I forget to tell her you are coming.”

“Where were you the night before?”

The smile faltered. “With a friend.”

“Rianorix.”

She paused. “If you know, why do you ask?”

“Because I was hoping you would deny it,” he said.

There should have been some sort of hesitation while she considered her shame. Instead she shot back, “I am visiting Rianorix, who is a friend of my brothers, who are in the next world, and that snaky one comes with his soldiers and-”

“What were you doing sharing a bed with him?”

“Why are you spying on me?”

“I’m not. I trusted you. I didn’t want to believe it when they told me.”

“Then choose not to believe it.”

“You just told me yourself it was true!”

“There is one bed. One blanket. But I do not betray you with this man. That snaky one is telling you these things.”

“I trusted you, Tilla. Holy gods, of all the men you could have chosen!”

She folded her arms. “The soldiers will not let me in the fort. I have to go somewhere.”

“You had an uncle here. Or you could have stayed at Susanna’s.”

“Where I sleep at night is my own business.”

He took a deep breath. “If you were my wife, I would divorce you for saying that.”