Ruth Downie - Tabula Rasa

He did not wake until well past dawn.

“Sit down, man. You look as though you should be in your own hospital.”

Ruso gratefully lowered the salute and persuaded the muscles that had stiffened up overnight to let him sink back onto Ria’s bench. He hoped the legate and the tribune would go away soon so he could tackle the bowl of honeyed porridge that steamed in front of him. He had woken very hungry but unable to chew anything.

The legate said, “I hear you saved the boy single-handed.”

“Not really, sir,” he confessed. “I had quite a lot of help.”

“Well, well done anyway.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ll be pleased to hear that the boy’s identified Mallius as the kidnapper. We’ve got him locked up and the natives seem to have calmed down at last.”

“That’s good, sir.” Did senior officers tire of the bland statements they heard in response to their speeches? Or did they simply ignore them, like the bleating of sheep? At least the man had taken the trouble to visit and congratulate him. It was an honor, and one Ruso wished he felt well enough to appreciate.

Moments later the legate had swept out of Ria’s bar on his way to deal with the next crisis. Ruso forced himself not to look longingly at the porridge. The legate had gone, but he had left the tribune behind.

“A word in private, Ruso,” said Accius, swinging a leg over the nearest bench and resting his elbows on the table. “This Mallius chap. It’s not as straightforward as it might be. He says it wasn’t him, he doesn’t know anything about anything, the boy has identified the wrong man, he was asleep when the boy was taken, and all he did the other night was mistake a patch of moonlight for a ghost.”

“Well, he would, sir.”

“The sleep thing isn’t a problem. I’ve reinterviewed everyone and it seems our witness didn’t see the face of whoever it was in the bed. There are other candidates.”

“And the boy identified him?”

“Oh, that’s conclusive. We’ll try him for kidnap. But whatever antics your wife got up to the other night didn’t really give us any answers about Candidus, and frankly it would be useful to get this this thing settled. Nobody wants it coming back to bite us later on. I was wondering if you had any thoughts.”

So the legate was pretending to know nothing while his junior dealt with the problem. It seemed Accius was reluctant to risk using torture again, especially now that there was no life at stake. That was something to be glad about. There were men who got a taste for it.

“He’ll be executed anyway for the boy.”

Ruso shook his head, trying to clear the drowsiness of the poppy, and wished he had not. Then he said, “Do we have the men’s records here, sir?”

“They’re all back at Deva as far as I know. Why?”

“Just a thought. Can I talk to Mallius?”

“Go to the east gatehouse at Parva. Tell them I sent you.”

Warned by Valens that nobody had been allowed in to clean the prisoner up, Ruso arrived at the gatehouse with his medical case and a jug of water. Mallius looked as though someone had picked him up by his chains and swung him round and round the cubicle, crashing him into the stone walls as he spun. Ruso’s own bruising and stitching and black eye-which he could now open, thank the gods-felt trivial in comparison. At least the first half hour of his visit was spent washing and examining and applying salve and bandaging, and in between, Mallius wept and groaned and insisted that he had nothing to do with anything, nobody believed him, the boy was lying, they were going to kill him for thinking he’d seen a ghost, and was there anything the doctor could do to convince them?

“Perhaps,” mused Ruso, wiping salve off his fingers and dropping the cloth back into his case, “it would help if we send for your family.”

Mallius’s eyes widened. “No! They mustn’t know, sir. They would be heartbroken. It would kill my mother.”

“We should contact them before the trial, though,” Ruso insisted. “You should have someone there.”

“Please don’t, sir. Please.”

Ruso sighed and shut the case. “Let’s save them the trouble, then. They won’t recognize you anyway, will they?”

“Sir?”

Mallius’s apparent innocence was impressive. But then, he’d had plenty of practice. “What’s your real name?”

“Real name, sir?”

“It definitely isn’t Mallius. His family wouldn’t have known you even before you were beaten up, would they?”

The red-rimmed eyes stared into his own for a moment. Then the man slumped back against the wall, all sign of weeping suddenly gone. “I never thought it would do any harm.”

Ruso waited.

“It was the slave at the dealer’s, right?”

“He recognized you,” Ruso told him. “You should never have stopped bleaching your hair.”

“I thought he did.” He sighed. “I never wanted to hurt anybody. Seven years of no bother, then just when I stop looking over my shoulder, two people turn up out of the past.”

“The Legion wasn’t the best choice you could have made.”

“I was hoping to get a transfer overseas, sir.”

“You couldn’t join in the first place,” Ruso pointed out. “You were a slave. Were you ever freed?”

“I wasn’t far off,” said the man who was not Mallius. “I had plenty saved up to make a good start in business. And then the new wife came.”

The story came out slowly and in a confusing order, but what Ruso managed to piece together was that Mallius had been a trusted slave in a wealthy household until the owner remarried. The new wife took a fancy to him, which left him in the extremely awkward position of having to disobey either master or mistress. He turned the woman down, and she accused him of rape. The new husband, still dazzled by love, believed her. Mallius-whose real name was Agelastus-fled. By some kindness of the gods he happened to be passing a bar when the young man really called Mallius was killed in a knife fight.

“You just happened to be passing?”

“It was a miracle, sir.”

Agelastus helped the anxious and illiterate bar owner by writing to the family, explaining that young Mallius had died of a fever and been cremated far from home. In exchange, he was allowed to keep the recruitment letter that was in Mallius’s pack. So Agelastus the runaway slave did his best to turn blond to match the description on the recruitment records and became Mallius of the Twentieth Legion.

“And then?”

“It was all fine until Candidus turned up, sir. He remembered seeing me at my master’s house. I tried to explain to him why he had to shut up but he thought it was funny.”

“Funny?”

“That I’d got away with it for so long.” Mallius’s hand trembled as he reached for the cup of water Ruso had brought him. “I could just see him telling all his cronies over a game of dice. It was all right for him, but I’d have been executed. All because of an idle little blabbermouth who thought he was clever.”

Ruso took a breath. “Is he in the wall?”

Mallius tried to straighten his shoulders. “There is no body in the wall, sir. The legate says so.”

“Don’t play games with me.”

The man slumped again. “I didn’t know the kid was watching. When I found out, I had to do something. But I didn’t hurt him, sir. I sold him to somebody who promised he would feed him.”

“Branan didn’t see you hide the body,” Ruso told him. “Somebody else did.”

Mallius let out a long breath.

“He must have told you that he didn’t see anything. Why didn’t you just make up some excuse and release him?”

“He was acting scared, sir. He was acting like he was lying.”