Ruth Downie: Tabula Rasa

Her audience seemed to like that.

“I was there when the next lot came. You should have seen them run! Tripping over each other and everything falling out of their packs.”

There was general laughter, and Tilla could not resist a smile.

“See? The Twentieth Legion do go around after all.”

The talk drifted to people she did not know. Across the road, a cat was picking its way delicately along the roof of the leatherworker’s shop, untroubled by the puddle that covered half the street below.

Had she done the right thing about Cata? The mother had plainly been hoping she would use her influence with the Medicus to have the man disciplined. That was the problem with being honest about having married an officer: People wanted her to pass messages to the Legion. But at least this way she could not be accused of betraying anybody. Everyone knew from the start not to tell her things that the Romans were not supposed to know. And if there were times when that made her lonely, well, that was how life was. One of her mother’s favorite sayings was Nobody likes a girl who feels sorry for herself. Which was very annoying but true.

Virana passed by her with a tray of drinks and then returned to the back room. Outside, the woman with the lisp said, “You know about that one, do you?”

Tilla held her breath. They had been offered a room here after Virana had given a sob story about her baby’s father being dead. “Well, he might be,” Virana had insisted when Tilla challenged her about it later. On the other hand, there were plenty of candidates for fatherhood still very much alive and serving with the Twentieth Legion, and Tilla had known she could not keep it quiet for long.

“They all live together over the bar here, you know.”

“No! Really? I thought he lived in the fort.”

Tilla frowned into her beer and wondered if she should walk away. Or perhaps stand up and let herself be seen. She did neither, despite another of her mother’s favorites: No good comes of listening to gossip .

Someone asked a question she could not catch. “Enica says the wife is barren,” said the woman with the lisp. “But she says he’s had more luck with the slave, as you see.”

Tilla struggled to stifle her spluttering as the beer went the wrong way. Enica was a member of the family she would be introducing to her husband tonight-if he managed to turn up. She had explained when they first met that Virana’s child was nothing to do with her husband, who was not a maid chaser. And Virana had said so too, and Enica had said . . . It did not matter what Enica had said, because it was clear now that she had not believed either of them.

Somebody said, “I heard they picked that one up in Eboracum and she isn’t really a slave at all.”

“Hmph. I’m surprised the wife puts up with it.”

“The wife’s probably grateful to be taken in,” said another voice. “I heard he rescued her from the Northerners.”

“That is just what she says,” said someone else. “Did you not know? He bought her. She was in a brothel down in Deva.”

“That can’t be right. Isn’t she a Roman citizen?”

Tilla wanted to shout, I was only lodging in the brothel! Why didn’t you just ask me? Instead she took a large gulp of beer.

Somebody said, “And the old boy’s really invited them?”

“That’s what Enica said. Because she looks like her mother. You can imagine what Enica thinks about that. Conn too.”

“Ah, but Conn is a miserable offering these days, don’t you think? Not a bit like his father. Or his brother, may he walk in peace.”

“They all end up that way, girl. Look at mine.”

“What? Dead?”

“No, he just looks it. Bad-tempered.”

“Mine too,” chimed in another voice. “Never happy unless he’s complaining.”

“Still, it’s a bad sign if he’s like that already at his age. You want something better at the start, no?”

And they were off into discussing the reasons why the son of the man whose hearth she would be sharing tonight had slumped from being a fine young man to a miserable offering.

She could not argue: The one time she had seen him, Conn had certainly worn the face of a man who had found a dead rat in his dinner. Perhaps it really was because his once-betrothed had been raped by a soldier during the troubles and refused to get rid of the soldier’s baby, and perhaps it wasn’t, because these women would believe any scandalous nonsense they were told. They deserved to be shamed. To be set straight. To be made to say they were sorry for being so spiteful. To be made to feel sorry.

The trouble was, anything she said now would leave them with even more to gossip about than before. And nothing would make this evening any easier.

She drained her beer, clapped the cup down on the table, and strode across the bar toward the back door. It would have been better if she had not knocked over a bench on the way, but she was not going to turn around and pick it up. Nobody was going to see how pink her face was.

“Not bad, considering.” Medical Officer Valens finished his examination of Ruso’s handiwork, moved the lamp away, and let the damp cloth fall back into place over the wound. He surveyed his sleeping father-in-law for a moment, then turned to the orderly. “I’ll be here all night. Call me if there’s any change or if he wakes up.” Standing in the gloom of the hospital corridor, he murmured, “What do you think?”

“He was already weak when I got to him.”

Valens said, “Anyone else would be dead by now.”

“Has Serena been sent for?”

“Of course.”

For a moment Ruso felt bad for doubting it. But the way Valens added, “He is her father,” suggested he too had considered leaving his wife in ignorance back in Deva. “It’s strange. I always imagined the old boy was indestructible.”

Ruso said, “You don’t have to cover for me tonight if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t mind,” Valens assured him. “This way I can tell the wife I did something useful.”

The room by the hospital entrance was just the right size to be an office, a pharmacy, or an overflow storage space-but not, unfortunately, all three at once. It was certainly not big enough to store anything that was not supposed to be there, and Ruso felt firmly that a dead hen fell into the latter category. It lay in the deflated way that dead hens did, with its head flopped over the side of the desk that should have been occupied by Ruso’s clerk.

Valens said, “Has somebody brought you a present?”

“Not that I know of.” Grateful patients sometimes offered gifts, but he had no idea where this had come from. He hoped it did not have lice.

Valens pulled a thin wooden writing tablet out of his belt. “One of the centurions asked me to give you this.”

Ruso took it across to the lamp and flipped the leaves apart. A Centurion Silvanus from Magnis, the next fort along the line, wished him to know that Legionary Candidus was no longer stationed there. He had left there a week ago and was now working as a clerk in the hospital at Parva.

The fact that it was Ruso-now standing in that very hospital at Parva-who had raised the query in the first place, did not seem to spark any curiosity. The whereabouts of a man who was no longer his responsibility was clearly not at the top of Centurion Silvanus’s worry list. Ruso noted bitterly that the message was written in one hand and hastily signed in another. It seemed Silvanus had a clerk of his own-one who had turned up and done his job as expected.

Valens had seated himself on the pharmacist’s table. Fortunately the pharmacist was on leave and so unable to object. Valens extended one leg, hooked a stool, and pulled it over for a footrest. “Bad news?”