Ruth Downie: Tabula Rasa

So much of being a trainee medicus, she now saw, was not about medicine at all but about the complications of people’s lives.

She passed the south wall of the little fort and turned the corner into the huddle of civilian buildings. For once there were no off-duty soldiers lounging about and ogling girls, or carrying their children on their shoulders down the street, or haggling with the shopkeepers. They must have been kept in. It happened sometimes, usually for reasons that were not interesting enough to be worth the bother of finding them out.

The change in the weather had lifted everyone’s spirits. The cobbler was whistling a tune, hammering nails into a sole in time to the rhythm. The baker called to her across the counter as she passed. He grinned and held up a raisin pastry. It was a way of saying he hadn’t forgotten.

She thanked him, slipping the pastry into her bag.

“Don’t tell Ria,” he said. “She’d have sold you one.”

“I shall sneak it past her.” The baker and Tilla’s landlady were brother and sister, but business was business. “How is your little girl?”

“No more trouble so far.” His tone was still wary. “It’s been near enough six weeks.”

“I am sure it was just the fever,” she assured him, wondering if he and his wife ever used the word fit in private or whether they were afraid that speaking the name would somehow bring one on. A family who had lost two babies at birth had no illusions about how easily a surviving child could be snatched away into the next world.

He began to pile the loaves from one half-full basket into another. “I hear your man’s busy, eh?”

“He is always busy,” she agreed.

His hands stilled. “Did you not hear? Where have you been?”

She hurried back to the lodgings feeling faintly ashamed. A woman who had just been told that her husband was taking part in a tricky rescue should be fearful for him, or proud of him, or probably both. Instead, she was cross with him for taking such a risk.

On any other day she might have been proud and worried, but today was different. He had promised.

One night was not much to ask. She had put up with his relatives for a whole summer. Apart from meeting her cousin and her uncle a few years ago, she had asked nothing of him-except for tonight. And he had given his word, even though he was plainly uneasy about it. But now he had found some sort of crisis, and as usual it seemed nobody else could deal with it. He would be late, if he turned up at all, and she would have to explain why her Roman was not there, and how was she to know whether they would understand? She hardly knew them herself. They were not real relatives.

They might have been, though.

It was a peculiar thought that she might have been the old man’s daughter. If Mam had not broken her promise and run away with her father instead, Tilla might have spent her whole life here, milking cows and growing vegetables, grumbling about the Romans and refusing to speak Latin. Thinking a trip to market was exciting, a journey to the seaside a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Knowing and being known by all the neighbors and never wanting to leave. Or maybe desperate to get out? Neighbors were not always kind.

Instead here she was, trailing about after a foreign husband. Living in temporary lodgings, having to eat meals from snack bars, while half their possessions were stored miles away in Deva. Soon she would leave behind most of the people she had grown to know here over the summer. Probably she would never see them again, because you never knew where a soldier would be sent next, and if you wanted any sort of marriage, you had to go with him.

The shutters that formed the entrance of the snack bar had been opened up to let in what was left of the autumn sun. A group of dark-skinned men dressed in rich colors were seated outside, chatting over the remains of a meal in a tongue Tilla did not recognize. She wondered what they made of the drab décor of the only bar in town. Ria looked up from stacking cups behind the counter. “I hear your man’s a hero.”

“I will tell him you said so,” Tilla promised, feeling guilty. At least he did not beat her, and he was not a maid chaser like the centurion at the fort, whose kitchen girl had come to her in tears begging for some charm or potion to keep her from falling pregnant.

Ria leaned across the counter, jabbed a bony finger toward the men outside, and whispered, “From Palmyra. If you want any silk, let me know.”

“Not really.”

“Pity,” she observed. “I could have got you a good deal.”

Someone in the back room was humming a tune Tilla had heard the soldiers singing on the march.

Ria observed, “Your girl’s in a good mood.”

“She doesn’t like silence.”

“She’ll be glad enough of it after the baby comes. What can I get you?”

“I’ll put my bag away first.” Tilla made her way past the empty tables and into the dimly lit storeroom where Virana slept, and where a sturdy ladder provided access to the privacy of the loft room she and her husband were renting.

“Mistress!” Virana’s large form was precariously balanced on a stool in front of a high shelf.

“If you’re going to do that,” Tilla told her, “find something safe to stand on.”

“Oh, I’ve finished now.” Virana clambered down clutching a honey pot. “How is Cata? Is it true her boyfriend broke her jaw?”

Tilla delved into her bag. “Share a pastry?” She would have died rather than reveal anything about her patients to Virana, but sometimes she wondered why she bothered to keep her mouth shut. Nobody else around here did.

Virana picked out a raisin and popped it into her mouth. “Is the master back yet?”

“No.”

“He is very brave. Did his clerk come back?”

“Yes. And no.”

“Shall I take your bag up?”

“Virana, you’re supposed to be . . .” Tilla paused. She could hardly say resting , since the arrangement for Virana to work in Ria’s snack bar suited everyone very nicely, including Virana, who saw it as a chance to meet the legionary of her dreams. “I’ll take it,” she said. “You’re supposed to be careful. And don’t drop crumbs or you’ll be sleeping with mice.”

By the time she came back down, Ria had left the bar and was clattering about in the kitchen. The outside table had now been taken over by a group of local women. The loaded baskets suggested they had been shopping over at Vindolanda; the fact that they were here suggested they were in no hurry to go home, but not daft enough to pay Vindolanda prices for drinks.

She had not intended to eavesdrop, but as she carried her beer across to the last patch of sunshine slanting in through the doorway and across a table, she realized she was in an ideal position to listen: hidden from view but able to hear every word.

“So she said to them,” declared a voice with a familiar lisp, “ ‘Why d’you have to march straight through my cabbages?’ So the one in charge pointed up the hill, and he said, ‘We’ve got orders to go up there.’ So she said, ‘Well, you should go around! Can’t you see I’ve got things growing here?’ and he said-this is what he said, without a word of a lie-‘The Twentieth Legion do not go around.’ ”

“The Twentieth Legion do not go around!” repeated the others, rolling this new outrage about on their tongues as if they were enjoying the flavor.

“So I said to her,” continued the woman with the lisp, “you want to do what my cousin did when they kept letting his sheep out.”

Tilla took a sip of beer and waited, an invisible member of the audience. The woman was local: She remembered the thick brows and the eager front teeth. “He moved the sheep up to the common,” the woman said, “and he put the bull in there instead.”