Ruth Downie - Tabula Rasa

“No.”

Ria rolled her eyes. “Another one!”

“Perhaps just a little,” Tilla offered. “Where did Virana go?”

The woman carried the tray of empty bowls to the back of the bar and swung one hip against the door to open it. “You can come out now!” she announced into the gap. “They’ve all gone and your mistress wants her dinner.”

From somewhere behind it a voice called, “I am not coming out!”

Ria let the door swing shut again and joined Tilla on the bench. “I’ll tell you what happened,” she said. “I doubt Madam will.”

Tilla, too tired to argue, sat and waited.

“Some locals came in and got mouthy with a few lads from the camp,” Ria explained. “The soldiers had orders to walk away from bother, so they got up and left without buying a thing. I wasn’t best pleased. Then the locals picked on your girl instead. Nasty bunch. Most of them from somewhere across the wall. When I told them to clear off home they said they were looking for the stolen boy. I said, ‘You won’t find him by sitting in a bar insulting people, will you?’ ”

“Is she hurt?”

“Only her pride.” The woman lowered her voice further. “They were making donkey noises, saying every man in the Legion’s ridden her. There was talk of shaving her hair off. You know the sort of thing. She ran into the back and she’s been there ever since.”

Tilla pulled herself to her feet. She had tried many times to explain to Virana that there was a difference between how to get a baby and how to get a husband. Perhaps at last she understood. “I’ll talk to her.”

The only light in the back room came from a small window paned with thick green glass that opened onto an alley between two buildings. Virana’s bed was in the shadows beyond the ladder. Even so, Tilla could see the girl’s swollen eyes and disheveled hair. In a voice that was blurred by tears Virana said, “I am not going out there again. You can’t make me.”

“You do not have to,” Tilla assured her, moving across to sit beside her. “I am sorry the men were rude to you.”

“Not just men. Girls too.” Virana pulled a strand of hair forward, twisting it around her fingers. “They said horrible things.”

Tilla doubted anyone had called her any worse names than her own brothers had used back at her family’s farm, but the insults of strangers would be far more painful. “They are angry with the army and they think it is clever to hurt anyone who is friends with the soldiers.”

Virana sniffed and blew her nose on a cloth. “Conn was there.”

“Conn was a part of this?” Tilla felt her blood rise. “He has no right to insult you! I will make sure he apologizes.” She would work out how later.

“It was not him who said those . . . things. He came in at the end.”

“But did he tell the others to stop?”

Virana shook her head. “He just looked at me.”

Tilla said, “This is very wrong. I will speak to him.”

“I know it is terrible about his little brother,” Virana said, “but it’s not my fault. Is it?”

“Of course not. He has no reason to hurt you.”

“Anyway, he was nasty before that.”

He had never been anything but gruff to Tilla, either. She had seen a different side of him during the search-hardworking, determined-but he was still stubborn and rude. No wonder Enica’s friends thought her stepson was a miserable offering.

Virana gave another sniff and scrubbed the cloth across her mouth as if she were trying to scrape away the humiliation. “I am not surprised nobody will marry him. Branan was much nicer. I liked Branan. I used to look forward to seeing him.” She looked up. “Is there any-”

“No,” said Tilla. “No news at all. But Enica needs to know who started the story about the body in the wall. Can you remember who brought it to the bar?”

Getting the old man under cover was not easy, but Ruso finally managed to persuade Senecio that nobody would see his protest in the dark. The deep arch of the east gateway was not exactly indoors, so he could honorably shelter there from the rain and wind. This led in turn to an argument with the watch captain, who was afraid the old man might open the gates to hordes of murderous tribesmen under the cover of darkness.

Ruso’s “Not unless your lads go to sleep” did not go down well.

With Senecio installed under the glare of the torches and of the watch captain, Ruso went to raid the hospital stores.

It seemed Doctor Valens had arrived earlier, dealt with a couple of casualties, and headed over to the centurion’s house to introduce himself. Ruso went down to the office to get the key to the bedding store and check for messages, took one look at Nisus still stoically pounding leaves into green pulp by lamplight, and remembered, “Figs!”

“Figs, sir,” agreed Nisus in a tone that suggested he might as well have asked for the golden apples of the Hesperides, because he would have stood about as much chance of getting them.

“I’ll go for them in a minute,” Ruso promised. He needed to try Fabius’s kitchen anyway. The hospital cook, having been told that Doctor Ruso was no longer on duty, had fed his dinner to a friend’s dog.

Nisus went back to pounding.

Ruso was less of a disappointment to the new clerk. Gracilis looked pleased to be complimented on the reduction of the former shambles to two small piles of documents on the desk and one large one propped against the wall behind Pandora’s cupboard. Observing that the door handles were no longer tied shut, Ruso wondered if the man had removed half the contents and burned them, and noted with mild interest that he no longer cared.

“If you have a moment, sir? Just one or two queries.”

“I’m not really on duty here now,” Ruso told him, reaching up to where the key hung on a nail. “You need to ask Doctor Valens.”

Gracilis, a man who could wrestle order out of chaos, was not going to be put off that easily. “He won’t know the answers, sir.”

“I’m on the way to see the tribune,” Ruso explained. “But I’ll have a quick look.”

Gracilis’s one or two queries turned out to be only a fraction of the large Ask the Doctor pile behind him. Apart from the usual difficulty in deciphering handwriting, he needed advice on how to deal with one man who seemed to have three different names, three men with the same name but different conditions, and several conditions with no name at all or some tantalizingly useless piece of information such as Bed XI . Had they not been in his own handwriting, Ruso would have sworn he had never seen most of them before. Some wax tablets contained two sets of records: the top one apparently created by Candidus and below it the remains of the one he had half obliterated in order to have something to write on. If any of them held the name of the mystery man Candidus had set out to meet, it was impossible to know which. Ruso set aside four difficult questions, resolved three easy ones, deduced that Bed IV Wobbly Legs was carpentry rather than medicine, and promised to take a proper look before long.

His raid on the hospital stores produced a couple of clean blankets and a reasonably clean straw mattress, which he lugged over to the east gate. “You gave me hospitality,” he explained. “Now it is my turn.”

Senecio made no attempt to take them. “Why should I have a comfortable bed when my son has none?”

“Because,” Ruso said, his patience giving way, “if you do not stay warm, your son will have no father, either. Use the mattress and put those blankets around you. We have enough to worry about already.”

Accius need not have worried about his dinner: His cook was indeed at the fort and was now in Fabius’s kitchen, poking at something that crackled and spat back at him over the hot coals. Meanwhile Fabius’s cook had his back to him and was hacking up carrots with a force that suggested they had just insulted his mother. Both glanced up to see who had come in, ascertained that it was nobody important, and went back to the tasks of sharing a kitchen and ignoring one another. Ruso was put in mind of two cats pretending not to notice each other rather than fight. He was wondering how best to scrounge both figs and dinner when he heard a familiar voice saying, “Allow me!” To his left, the door swung open and revealed a beaming Valens. Tottering in beneath his outstretched arm was Fabius’s kitchen maid clutching a tray of dirty crockery.