Ruth Downie: Tabula Rasa

Over and over again since then, Aedic had closed his eyes and pictured that moment, trying to decide if he really could have seen a human head and an arm that flopped down as it fell. Whatever it was, it blended into the ground. The man stretched up into the rain, loosening his muscles after the strain of the carrying. Then he bent down over the new length of wall and lifted off the covers.

How could he be inspecting the work in the dark?

Perhaps he had lost something.

He must be a soldier, because nobody else . . .

But Aedic wasn’t a soldier, and he was there, so perhaps the man wasn’t a soldier either.

If it had been daylight, he might have run up and offered to help. It was all right to go near the troops as long as you were careful. Some of them wanted messages delivered in exchange for an apple or a taste of honeycomb, or they asked which way to go or who could sell them things. Some of them were even glad to see the local boys because they missed their own sons at home, wherever that was. Sometimes when nobody was looking they let people travel in the ox wagons. If you said you had a big sister, you might get offered a ride home on one of the pack ponies , but Aedic kept quiet about the girls at his cousins’ house. He wouldn’t have dared to let Da see him with the soldiers. Not after they had turned the family off the farm and dug great trenches across the grazing. They had set fire to the houses and hacked most of the trees down for scaffolding and firewood. When one of Grandfather’s tottery old friends came to sing a song to the dying trees, the soldiers shouted and threw clods of earth at him until their centurion told them to stop.

Sometimes, when Aedic saw the soldiers tearing the land apart, he thought that was what was happening to him too.

The man up by the wall seemed to move about as if he were working in daylight. He was bending to pick up filling stones from the pile.

Usually the soldiers built up both sides of the wall with rows of the big square stones that they had cut out of the hillside, and then they filled the gap in the middle with things nobody would see: rough stones and clay and sand and sometimes, when the officers weren’t looking, lumps of turf. But that day the rain had got worse. When it rained like that, it washed the wet mortar out and left white streaks down the outsides of the stones, so the centurion had come and told them to stop before they filled the middle in. Aedic had watched them pack up their tools and heard the centurion telling them to make sure they covered the sides up properly before they marched back to the camp. Then he had stayed up there and seen the man carrying the thing that looked very much like a body, and when the wind dropped he could hear the familiar thump and clunk of stones being thrown onto a pile. Up there in the dark and the drizzle, all on his own, the man was filling in the middle of the wall.

The filling-in seemed to go on for a long time, and Aedic’s thoughts had drifted to his dinner and the dog when he realized the man wasn’t there anymore. This time he heard the footfalls. He held his breath as they came down the hill toward his hiding place. Then a cry and a curse and all the bushes shuddered and spattered raindrops. There was the pale shape of a hand, so close that he could have reached out and touched it. Aedic narrowed his eyes and kept as still as a hunter.

The hand lifted, the bushes shook again, and the man was back on his feet and away much too quickly for anyone carrying anything heavy. Whatever it was, he had left it up there.

Even after days of thinking about it, Aedic did not understand what he had seen. But when he thought about telling anyone, the squirming in his stomach told him not to.

This was the first time in days that he had managed to sneak away from his chores for another look, but he was not even sure where the body was now. The soldiers had built up lots more rows of stones and filled in the gap between them. This stretch of wall was too high to see over. He had been about to run back to the cousins’ house before anybody started to wonder why he was taking so long to find firewood, but then came the terrible noise from somewhere down in the valley, beyond the soldiers’ road. And now here he was, seeing the rock all tumbled down and a bloodstained and muddy old man struggling and crying out as the other one was trying to cut his leg off while all the others watched.

“Hey!”

Aedic jumped at the sound, and grabbed the branch to steady himself.

“Yes, you!” the voice shouted in Latin. “What are you doing up there?”

But by the time the soldier got there, Aedic was down the tree and gone.

The patient’s family had given Tilla two hard-boiled eggs, fresh bread, and a cup of warm milk with the usual warning about not drinking the water from the stream. It was kindly meant, but she had been here for most of the summer and heard it a dozen times before. If you wait long enough, the muck from the building work all sinks to the bottom, but no matter what the soldiers tell you, everyone knows they piss in it.

That was the trouble with soldiers, Tilla thought, stepping aside onto the grass verge to let a couple of carts rumble past, and glancing up to where small figures were moving around on the scarred hillside. You couldn’t trust them.

Her anger rose again as she remembered the plump girl’s anxious insistence that her injuries were nothing: She had tripped and banged her head on the doorpost, and then fallen awkwardly. She did not need a healer. She just needed to rest for a while. She was sorry for all the fuss.

Tilla had done her best to be gentle as she set the broken fingers straight, but Cata still cried out in pain.

“Your mother tells me this sort of thing has happened before.”

Cata sniffed. “I am very clumsy.”

Tilla laid the compress over the grazed and swollen cheek. “You are lucky none of the bones of your face are broken.”

The girl kept her eyes closed, like a child who wanted to be invisible.

“You may not be so lucky next time.”

No reply.

“You must stay close to your family,” Tilla told her. “And they must put in a complaint to his centurion.”

Still no reply.

“Do not go near him,” Tilla continued. “Do not waste a single moment hearing how sorry he is, because it will mean no more this time than it did the last.”

Just when she thought she might as well have been speaking to a deaf woman, Cata said, “You don’t know him.”

“No,” Tilla agreed, “but I am older than you and I have met men like him.”

The girl’s swollen lips trembled. “I thought you would understand.”

“My husband does not beat me.” Did she imagine this was what all soldiers’ women had to put up with? “If he did, I would leave him.”

“Sometimes he is very kind.”

“I am sure he is. Drink this.” Tilla handed her the cup. “I am sure he is fond of you, in his own way. And after he has killed you, he will be sorry he did it, and he will miss you very much.”

But the girl showed no sign of having heard.

Tilla did her best to be patient with these girls. It was not so easy to leave when your man knew where your family lived, and he had friends who could have people arrested and searched. Only last week a soldier had come to her demanding to know where his woman was and blaming Tilla for encouraging her to run off. Tilla, who had seen how cowed the girl had become, was secretly delighted. Her family did not know where she was, either, but a small boy had arrived with a message to say that she was safe. Tilla had to go back and tell the soldier that it was no good pestering the family for information: They knew no more about where the girl was hiding than he did.