Semper Fidelis (8 page)

^{HE MANSIO SLAVE’S}
directions were good. It was barely two hundred paces upstream along the muddy path from the wharf to where the old willow bent to dip its leaves into the glittering silver of the river. She raised one arm, counted to three, and flung the coin. The small splash was washed away in the flow. While the gift was sinking, she said a prayer to the river and to the goddess to look kindly on her husband and keep him safe. Then she asked for a blessing on her new start, and for courage, because the decision that had seemed so clear this morning had faded in the sunlight.

Who has ever heard of a woman being a medicus?
What will your husband say?
You can hardly read Latin, and nearly all the recipes for medicines are written in

Greek. You cannot even understand Greek, let alone read it . . .
Who will do all the work you do now?
Do you really want another woman in the house?
What if you get the wrong sort of slave—one who needs constant watching, or one

Something white caught her eye. Two swans, a cob and a pen, were gliding downstream. She watched as they drifted past the fort walls, smoothly changed direction to pass behind the approaching ferry, and disappeared beyond the warehouses. It was a sign. She let out a long breath and whispered a prayer of thanks, remembering the wounded Brigante warriors she had tended with stolen ban dages and medicines during the troubles. None of them had complained about her being a woman.

I help?”
She turned, startled and not pleased. The pink dress was no cleaner than
yesterday. “Good morning, Virana.”
“Are you looking for plants for healing?”
“Not this morning.”
Virana parted the fronds of the willow as if she hoped there might be
something interesting beyond them, then let them fall. “This is where Sulio
came to pray for the soul of Dannicus.”
“Is this where he drowned?”
“No, farther down by the ford. Sulio tried to save him but he couldn’t,
and then the Centurion had to get Sulio out too.”
“It must have been frightening.”
“I suppose so. I was at home with my family.” She hauled the beads out of
her cleavage and hung them down the front of the pink dress. “They were
all being horrible to me, as usual. Did you hear the trumpets this morning?
They don’t usually sound like that. Was it because of the sacrifice?” “Sulio must have been a brave man.”
“Oh, he didn’t jump in. He was there anyway.”
When Tilla looked puzzled, she said, “He hurt his knee while he was on
one of those long marches they do, and Dann stopped to help him, and
then they had to get back across the river. Well, that’s what they’re saying.” Tilla frowned. “Why did they not use the ferry?”
The girl began to fiddle with the beads again. “I wasn’t there myself.” “You can tell me the rest of the story while we walk back to town.” The string had twisted and hooked over one bead, making a loop. Virana
frowned as she tried to straighten it. “If I tell you, will you tell your husband?”
“My husband is a medicus. He understands about secrets.” The bead was finally disentangled. “I only know what I heard.” “That will be fine.”
“You must swear on the bones of your ancestors that you won’t say who
told you.”
“I swear.”
The path was only wide enough for one. Tilla’s skirts brushed through
the overhanging grass while Virana’s voice sounded in her ears. “The river is always cold,” the girl said, “and it rises with the tide. It’s
worse after a new moon. And it had rained a lot, so the water was almost
at the top of the landing stage.”
Tilla could not remember much about the landing stage; she would have
to go down and take a look. “So it was dangerous to cross?” “Even the ferrymen don’t like it when it’s like that. Anyway, they were
late back and the centurions were waiting for them and somebody heard
Geminus shout across to them that he wasn’t going to send the ferry because it was their own fault. And he told them to swim.”
“Did he not see it was dangerous?”
“Dann was never any good at swimming.”
What had her husband said?
I’m surprised more haven’t deserted
. She was
beginning to see why.
She did not need to ask why the recruits had obediently entered deep
fast-flowing water. She had spent long enough in and around army camps
to know that they would not dare to refuse an order, in case something
worse happened to them.
Virana said, “They got sticks to keep themselves steady and they tried to
cross hand in hand, but the current was pushing them, and then Dann lost
his footing and they both went under. Then Geminus dived in on the end
of a rope and they got Sulio out.”
“But not Dannicus?”
She shook her head. “The ferrymen found him washed up on the north
bank the next day. He was a long way downstream.”
There was only one question left now. “Did the centurions know that
Dannicus couldn’t swim?”
“Well, I knew,” said Virana. “And my friend knew. And I heard the other
boys teasing him about it. So I should think everybody did, wouldn’t you?”

^{USO WAS SEARCHING}
the office in vain for the postmortem report he had read only yesterday when he was startled by a rap on the door. He shoved the box onto the nearest shelf and turned just as a young man burst in wearing a sweat-stained tunic, exuberant tattoos, and an anxious expression.

In Ruso’s experience, recruits were perpetually hungry, but this one seemed to have given up the battle with the chunk of tough barley bread clutched in his hand. He also seemed to have forgotten how to speak.

“The clerk’s gone to find some lunch,” continued Ruso, who had chosen this moment to visit the office for that very reason. “I’m the doctor.”
The man glanced down at the bread, then tried to hide it behind his back before more or less standing to attention.
“Are you looking for somebody else?”
“No, sir.”
“So,” said Ruso, wondering if his visitor was also on a mission to sneak into the rec ords while the clerk was absent, “why are you here?”
“I was told to come and see Austalis, sir.”
“Ah,” said Ruso, helping himself to a seat. “Stand easy, er . . .”
“Marcus, sir.”
A man called Marcus who spoke Latin with that accent had probably been given one of the few Roman names his parents knew. Ruso guessed he was a full-blooded native son of some sort of local chief. “You’ll find him in the room opposite. Don’t stay too long: He’s very weak.”
“I have seen him already, sir. He looks terrible.”
Ruso said, “We’re doing everything we can.”
“I think he will die.”
“Not necessarily.”
Marcus ran a hand back through his hair, inadvertently giving Ruso a better view of the blue horse rearing up his right arm. “He was fine just a few days ago.”
“I’ve been wondering why a man who was fine would deliberately take a slice off his own arm.”
The young man hesitated.
“There are safer ways to remove tattoos.”
His visitor’s face brightened: Ruso had guessed well. “Are there, sir?”
“Nothing’s completely safe, but I’d suggest burning them off slowly with a caustic potion.”
“Can you do these?”
“Turn around and let me see.”
A serpent slithered down the other arm toward the left wrist.
“If you had a slave brand,” he said, “I could understand it. But as tattoos go, those are rather good. Marcus, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” Or his arms, at least.
“You were one of the doctors who said I could join the army, sir.”
“I imagine that seems a long time ago.”
“A whole life, sir. What is in the potion? Can you do it before we go to Deva?”
Ruso angled himself on the stool so that it was resting on the back two legs, and dismissed a distant echo of his first wife’s warnings about ruining the furniture. “First,” he said, dodging the first question lest the patient should decide to slap lime all over himself, “tell me why you would want to bother.”
Moments later he was recalling a conversation with a young lawyer in Antioch who had insisted that he was not ashamed of his own people. “I simply want to go to the baths and not be
noticed,
Doctor. It’s bad for business. Other men get
Oh, look, there’s the lawyer
. Or:
There’s the man who won the Stephanus case
. Or:
There’s a man who looks reliable.
I strip off and I get
Oh, look, there’s a Jew.
”
Ruso had explained the difficulties of the surgery, the inevitable pain, the possible consequences of serious inflammation at the operation site, and the fact that nothing would fully restore what had been lost. The lawyer, who seemed to think he was bargaining, begged him to reconsider and offered more money. That eve ning Ruso’s ex-wife, who had recommended him through an acquaintance, demanded to know why he had embarrassed her by refusing the case.
“Because it’s unnecessary, nasty, and dangerous.”
“But it must work or people wouldn’t do it.”
“True.”
“And if you get a good reputation for doing this epispasm thing, he’ll send all his friends, and—”
“I don’t want any sort of reputation for surgery people don’t need.”
“But he thinks he needs it! Now he’ll have to go to somebody who’s not as good as you. And when his thing drops off, it’ll be your fault.”
Sometimes Ruso thought it was a wonder he and Claudia had stayed married for as long as they did. They had still been arguing when the earthquake struck. The lawyer was only one of a great number of people he had never seen again.
Now he was facing a man with a similar problem. The trouble with tattoos, apparently, was that when legionaries of any rank saw them they thought,
Oh, look, there’s a Briton,
and lowered their expectations accordingly.
“It’s bad enough to be in an unlucky unit, sir, but if the rest of the Legion think we are no good because we are barbarians . . .”
“Do they?”
Marcus twisted the rough bread between his hands. A shower of crumbs fell to the floor. “I am a Roman citizen, sir,” he insisted. “Just like the rest. My father has a copy of the citizenship order. Signed by the emperor Trajan himself.”
Ruso said, “To be chosen by the emperor is a great honor.” It was true, although Tilla would have said that any Briton chosen by the emperor had obviously done something to be ashamed of. “Are you the first legionary in the family?”
Marcus nodded. “Everyone’s very proud of me at home, sir.” He looked up. “How can I tell them what it’s really like?”
“It’ll be better when you get to Deva and you’re assigned to your century,” Ruso promised him. “It’s not all like basic training.”
“Austalis will never go to Deva now, sir, will he?”
“I don’t know.” Austalis would be lucky if he survived at all.
“It’s not right, sir. Me and Austalis grew up together. We had our first tattoos on the same day. We enlisted together. And now . . . now . . .” Marcus, unable to find the words, gestured helplessly with the bread. Then he raised the arm with the horse tattoo. A roar of fury and despair covered the sound of hard bread crashing against shelves. The British curse on the name “Geminus!” was clear enough, and so was the threat to kill him.
In the silence that followed, a stack of record tablets teetered, then clattered to the floor.
Marcus slumped back against the wall. As they both surveyed the chaos he had caused, someone knocked hard enough to rattle the door latch. “Are you all right in there, sir?”
“Fine, thank you!” Ruso called, glad the bread had not been aimed at him. “Just give me a few minutes.”
The Briton put his hands over his head. He slid down the wall until he was cowering on the floor like an animal expecting to be beaten.
Ruso shifted his weight forward. The front leg of the stool landed on the floorboards with a gentle thud. He said, “While we pick all this up, Marcus, I want you to tell me exactly what happened to Austalis.”
Once he had accepted that he was not about to be clapped in irons and flogged, Marcus made distracted attempts to tidy up, consisting mostly of stacking tablets vertically and then failing to catch them as they slid sideways along the shelf and fell over. Ruso, crouched on the floor, took his time retrieving the strays from under the desk, because the lad had started to talk.
Austalis, it seemed, had committed some minor offense. Geminus had discovered it and delivered one of those devastating streams of abuse that centurions were fond of serving up to recruits at high volume in front of anyone who happened to be around at the time. Geminus had scorned Austalis’s intelligence, his personal hygiene, his prospects, and his parentage before singling out the tattoo of a stag on his arm as symbolic of his inferior status.
“It was a beautiful tattoo, sir. Even better than mine. And Austalis, he decides this is enough. He says, ‘What is wrong with it?’ and the bastard with the two shadows hits him round the head with his stick, and shouts, ‘You might as well write up your arm,
Look at me, I’m a barbarian and I’m stupid
.’ ”
It was not hard to picture the scene. “So then what happened?”
“Austalis shouts back. Geminus calls it insubordination. They make him stand outside HQ for hours holding a clod of turf, sir.”
Ruso had seen this many times. It did not sound like much, but the heavy turf would have to be held at arm’s length, and before long the muscles would be screaming for relief.
“After they let him go, I think he went to find the beer supply—” Marcus stopped.
“This is why you aren’t supposed to have one,” Ruso pointed out, guessing they had stashed it somewhere in the unused buildings, and wondering how Geminus and his shadows had managed to miss it.
Marcus rammed the last of the records into a space on the shelf. “When we found him, he was drunk and bleeding, with the stag cut out of his arm.”
Ruso handed up the last of the record tablets. Somebody had to tell the truth around here. “Geminus probably didn’t mean it,” he said. “Centurions sometimes insult their men to test their self-control.”
Marcus stared at him. “Is that true?”
“I’ve seen it.” And so had plenty of other men, and somebody should have had the grace to warn these lads.
The lad stiffened. “You must think the Britons very funny, sir.”
“If I thought the natives were a joke,” said Ruso, “I wouldn’t have married a Brigante.”
Marcus seemed to be pondering this as the trumpet sounded the next watch. “I must go,” he said. “If I come back tonight, can you start the potion?”
“Let me talk to your centurion first.”
“But, sir—”
“Leave it with me,” said Ruso, who had no idea what he was going to say to Geminus the war hero, but knew that whatever it was, it needed saying.