Ruth Downie - Tabula Rasa

“You don’t see them under there,” said Matto. “You feel them.”

“You have to see the tail.”

Matto said, “Don’t.”

“Yes you do. My da says.”

“What does your da know?” said Matto. “He’s a drunk.”

He was not going to get dragged into that. “My da’s caught hundreds of trout,” he said. “How many have you caught?”

“Liar!” said Matto, so quickly that Aedic knew he didn’t want to answer.

“Go on, how many?”

“Loads,” said Matto. “Anyway, you’re lucky we let you join in. After what everybody says about you.”

“ You’re the liar!” was not much of an answer, but he didn’t know what Matto was talking about. What did they say about him?

“Ha!” said Matto, making sure everyone was listening, “Everybody knows you’re a soldiers’ bumboy!”

There were shouts of laughter as Aedic yelled, “I am not!”

The unbrother, excited by the argument, waved his arms about. “Bumboy! Bum-bum-bum-”

“Shut up!” he shouted. It was all the unbrother’s fault for squealing and splashing in the first place. “I am not!”

He was facing Matto now, each standing on a rock with the water gurgling in between. Matto was at least a handspan taller, and heavier, and his rock was higher. Everyone else had gathered round to watch the fight. “I am not!”

“Not what?”

“Not what you said. You take that back.”

“Everybody’s seen you. Hanging around, trying to talk to them.”

“I just do jobs for them!” Aedic wished he hadn’t stayed to try and catch the stupid trout. Matto’s family had been turned off their land too. The army had given them a farm miles away that the soldiers had stolen from its owners, but it was mostly rock and bog, and the family had nothing good to say about people who dealt with Romans. “Lots of people do jobs for them!”

“Ha! I bet you love the soldiers. I bet when nobody’s looking you kiss them!”

His shouts of “No I don’t!” were lost under shrieks of laughter and howls of “Kissy-kissy!” from the other boys. His face was hot. Matto’s “Look at him going red! It’s true!” just made it worse.

“Anyway,” he shouted, desperate to stop them before the whole world thought he kissed the soldiers, “I know something you don’t!”

Matto said, “Who cares?”

But for a happy moment the shouting died away. They wanted to know.

Matto said, “What is it, then? Another thing you didn’t see happen?”

Aedic swallowed. Why had he said that? What was he thinking? He might have got it all wrong. It could be one of those times where you said what you thought was true and all the grown-ups laughed at you and then repeated what you’d said to each other while you tried to smile as if you’d made a joke on purpose. “Not telling.”

Matto had a smirk on his face, as if he’d finally proved how stupid Aedic was. The son of a drunk. The soldier-kisser. “Liar,” he breathed. Then he moved his mouth slowly round the words, “Bumboy.”

Aedic squared his shoulders. “It’s about the emperor’s wall.”

“What about it?”

“There’s a dead body inside it.”

For a moment nobody spoke. There was a look on Matto’s face that said he wasn’t expecting that and he didn’t know how to answer. Aedic stood taller as the others crowded round his rock.

“Where?”

“Who is it?”

“Who put it there?”

“Was it dead when it went in?”

“Was it buried alive?”

Matto narrowed his eyes. “How do you know?”

Trust Matto to ask something like that. “I know . . . somebody who saw them put it in there.”

“Who’s that, then?”

“He’s making it up.”

“I am not!”

“Tell us who saw it, then!”

“Tell us where it is!”

“Is it one of us or one of them?”

“He’s lying. Look at him! Liar!”

“It’s true,” Aedic insisted.

“Tell us who saw it,” said Matto, “else we’ll know you’re lying.”

He took a deep breath. “I swore not to tell.”

“We won’t let on!”

“But I made an oath-”

He couldn’t say the rest because Matto jumped on him. His knee smashed against hard rock and cold water rushed up his nose and into his throat. Then there were fingers jammed up his nostrils, wrenching his head back and pulling his mouth out into the air. He managed to stop coughing long enough to splutter, “Lemme go!”

“Who saw it?”

“Let go!”

“Tell us who saw it.”

“You got to swear not to tell! Ow!”

“Who was it?”

Aedic’s nose was being torn off his face. The pain was unbearable. He cast about inside his mind for the name of somebody no one saw very often. “Swear!”

Matto was shouting, “I swear!”

“Hope to die?”

“May the sky fall on me!”

Aedic gasped, feeling the pain ease as he named a boy who lived with a family on the other side of the wall. It wouldn’t matter. Da said they wouldn’t be seeing much of anybody over there from now on because the army were going to make everyone pay to go through special gates to get across, and they would search all the vehicles, so nobody would bother. He repeated the name, running his fingers gently across his face to check that his nose was still attached. “He saw it.”

“Saw what?” Matto pushed him away. “What did he see?”

They were all quiet now, wanting more. Aedic could hardly believe he had started this. The body was real now, even if it hadn’t been before.

He got up very slowly. He rubbed his nose again, sniffed, and spat. “He was hiding up there one night,” he said. “It was nearly dark and the patrol had gone past, and he saw a man carry a dead body up the hill and drop it in the middle of the wall. Then the man covered it up with stones and the next day the soldiers came and carried on building over the top of it.”

“What man? Who was it? What did he look like?”

“He didn’t say,” he said, thinking fast. “He said if he tells, the man’ll come and get him too.”

Matto scowled, as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe it.

One of the smaller boys said, “Will the man come and get us too now?”

“Don’t be stupid,” put in someone else. “We don’t know who he is.”

“We don’t know anything,” added somebody else.

“That’s why you mustn’t tell anyone about the body,” Aedic reminded them. “If you tell, he’ll know that you know.”

Would they keep their word? Or would they go chasing after the boy he had named next time they saw him, wanting to know whether it was really true about the dead body inside the Great Wall? That was what Aedic would have done.

“Hah!” Matto cried. “You’re in more trouble now. You broke an oath. You’ll die a horrible death and crows will eat your eyes and worms will go up your nose.”

“Back to you!” Aedic told him, but before it could all start again the unbrother slipped and landed in the water. The dead body was forgotten in the race to pull him out. After that, Aedic had a new problem: how to explain to Petta why the unbrother’s clothes weren’t wet and dirty but the rest of him was.

Ruso’s entry to the big camp above the quarry was delayed by a troop of cavalry streaming out of the north gate toward the road. Then a full century of infantry marched past him. He knew better than to ask the guards where they were going. There were easier ways to find out.

He picked his way past banners and laundry that fluttered bravely above mud that wouldn’t dry out until next April, and arrived at the medical tent.

The landslide was yesterday’s news. The morning queue was buzzing with tales of a man from the Twentieth who had been kidnapped by the natives. Opinions differed on how it had happened-he had been collecting firewood, he had gone to a farm to buy a dog, or retrieve stolen property, or ask directions, or had been lured with promises of a woman-but one way or another, all were agreed that the unlucky legionary had been held captive overnight and only rescued at dawn when a passing road patrol heard his calls for help.