Tabula Rasa (13 page)
Ruso said, “I’m sorry, sir. But I’m still concerned about my clerk, and with Prefect Pertinax out of action—”
“If he weren’t, he’d have told you to stop interfering and leave the deserter to his own devices.”
“Yes, sir.” It was true. Ruso could see now how badly skewed his judgment had been. If Candidus had been a stranger instead of a young man commended into his care by an old friend, he would have behaved very differently. Still, perhaps there was something to be salvaged from the situation. “Sir, I know one of the native families in the area. They’re connected to my wife. It might help if I go and explain about the search.”
“Don’t say anything that could be construed as an apology.”
“It’ll be difficult to pacify them if I don’t, sir.” And even harder to pacify Tilla.
“Then get your wife to explain if you can’t, man. And tell her we’d like to know where the kidnappers are. By the time we got there, they’d cleared out.”
Fortunately there was no reason for Accius ever to know that the kidnappers had been potential guests at his marriage blessing. He said, “The locals don’t trust my wife, either, sir. They think she’s one of us now.”
“I’m not surprised, if you sent men to raid her people’s farm.”
“I didn’t think, sir.”
“I hope you wouldn’t have treated them any differently if you had thought?”
Ruso looked him in the eye. “Absolutely not, sir.”
For a moment the stare was like a challenge. Accius was no fool, and he had had dealings with Tilla before. Ruso had an uncomfortable feeling that the tribune thought he was lying. He was not too sure himself.
“You got yourself into this, Ruso. This is precisely why senior officers aren’t allowed to marry while abroad on duty.”
Accius did not want to be reminded that Ruso was not a senior officer, nor that he had married in Gaul when he was in between medical contracts with the Legion. He wanted to hear what Ruso now said, which was a meek “Yes, sir.”
This was met with an exasperated “Agh!” Evidently the stupidity that the tribune was forced to deal with this morning was beyond words.
Fabius cleared his throat. “Perhaps we could invite some of the local leaders to dinner, sir.”
The words
to dinner
were repeated with such contempt that Fabius lapsed back into silence.
“And now it seems we have another problem,” Accius continued. “Have either of you heard this ridiculous tale about a body?”
Suddenly Ruso stopped longing for the conversation to be over. “A body, sir?”
“The gods alone know who it’s supposed to be,” said Accius. “Or where. The point is, it’s slowing us down.”
“Sir?” Ruso was now completely lost. Fabius looked equally blank.
“You don’t know anything about a body buried inside the wall?”
“Inside the wall, sir?” Ruso asked.
“Don’t repeat the question. Do you or don’t you?”
“No, sir. Is there any chance it’s my clerk?”
“Of course not,” said Accius. “The body doesn’t exist. The patrols would have noticed. It’s just a malicious rumor. We’ve denied it, of course, but the chief engineer’s had two native transport contractors fail to turn up this morning and he thinks that’s why. We had patrols not wanting to go up there last night for fear of ghosts, and if it spreads further I expect we’ll have men trying to get themselves off the building crews.”
“I’ll tell my staff to look out for malingerers, sir.”
Fabius chipped in with an enthusiastic “Any man not reporting promptly for work will be flogged, sir!”
Ruso reflected on the irony of soldiers who were frightened of their own defenses. “Do we know where all this started, sir?”
Accius shrugged. The stacks of documents shifted a little more. “We’re making inquiries,” he said. “We have plenty of names to work through, but they may just be people the informers don’t like much.”
Realistically, they might as well hunt for the source of the wind. Any minute now Accius would ask the inevitable question. Ruso decided to anticipate it. “I doubt my wife can shed any light, sir. But I’ll ask.”
“Don’t tell her anything she doesn’t already know. Or anyone else. No loose talk.”
Ruso wondered how anyone could trace the source of a rumor without divulging what it was. “Sir, do you think it’s just possible that—”
“No, I don’t,” said Accius. “And you don’t, either.”
“No, sir.”
“There is no body, Ruso, because the wall is regularly patrolled, and besides, if there were, how would we find it?”
“Dogs, sir?” Ruso suggested, aware that
regularly
did not mean frequently.
“We’ve had men take a stroll up there with dogs, but it’s raining and it’s windy, and they can’t tell the dog what to sniff for. Besides, we’ve got whole stretches up to twelve or sixteen courses high now. We’re not going to start hacking the wall apart just because a fox has pissed on it.”
“Yes, sir.” The tribune had a point. Conducting an obvious search for a body would only suggest that the officers believed in it too. Besides, how far would they go? Demolish one side to examine the core? Knock it all flat? Dig the foundations out? Defenses had been rising across the land from sea to sea since the spring: vast barriers of turf and stone in which, when you thought about it, dozens of bodies could be concealed. And now, of course, Ruso was. Thinking about it.
This was not the place to say so, but the rumor was a masterly piece of sabotage. It was already slowing down progress, and there would be people who wanted to believe it. There was never any shortage of missing persons. Apart from the regular flow of deserters, there were ordinary civilians who simply went out one day and never came back. Some of them wouldn’t want to be found. Others must have been expecting to return home, but never made it. Most, like the girl who had run away from her violent boyfriend, would leave families behind who were desperate for any scrap of news. As this wretched rumor spread, more and more people would be wondering if the emperor’s wall was a prison for the unquiet spirit of a relative whom it was their duty to find and lay to rest with a proper burial.
While everyone would want to know who it was, one thing was for certain: Nobody would want to be up there the day after tomorrow when the sun went down to mark the start of Samain, the night when the—what was it?
When the walls between the living and the dead melt away.
Accius reached for his cloak, which he had hung to drip on the back of the door. The stacks now teetered perilously close to the edge of Pandora’s cupboard. “Anyway,” he said, “if there is anything in this tale, it’s more likely to have happened miles away over on the turf section.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ruso, noting that Accius had just undermined his former denial. “Sir, about my clerk . . .”
“Let me know when he turns up.” Accius flung his cloak around his shoulders. A pile of writing tablets cascaded off the cupboard and clattered across the floorboards.
Ruso lunged across the room to stop a second landslide. Accius glared at the cupboard and then at Ruso, who seized the opportunity to say, “We need someone to sort this out, sir.”
“At least you could put things away,” Accius observed. “This is sheer laziness. You can’t even get in there with all this rubbish cluttering the place up. You shouldn’t have kit stored in here.” He shoved Candidus’s bag aside with one foot and reached for the twine holding the cupboard handles together. “What’s in—”
“Sir, no!”
But it was too late. The doors swung wide, and the tribune’s feet were buried in an avalanche of wooden writing tablets, crushed scrolls, old inkpots, and tangles of twine.
Ruso was barely aware of his steady pace along the road or of the cold rain trickling down his neck. He was concentrating on rehearsing what to say. Every time he came up with a sentence that was not an apology, he heard the voice of Senecio dismissing it.
“We had to treat everyone the same.”
You ate at our hearth.
“If word gets around that we didn’t search you, you could have trouble with your own people.”
It is not up to a Roman to save us from our own people.
And besides, it was a lie. He had not considered them at all.
“I am sorry you feel insulted.”
But you are not sorry for the insult itself?
“I cannot apologize for the Legion. I apologize for my judgment.”
So you think you should not have sent those men?
“I should have come with them. I should have explained. But I was on duty at the hospital.”
The reply to that came in his own voice: “You were only discharging Regulus for transfer and talking to Pertinax. Things that could have waited. You should have thought to go with them.”
And then there was
You have come wearing armor and a helmet this time,
to which he would reply, “We’ve been ordered to wear it when not on army property.” But of course Senecio would not comment: He would merely observe this further insult, and Ruso would have no chance to explain.
Nor would he be able to ask the question the Legion would like answered, which was:
Why are people saying there is a body in the wall?
Approaching the turn to the farm track, he pushed distracting thoughts aside and took stock of his surroundings. A carriage approaching from the east: a squad of infantry marching off toward the brighter sky in the west.
The russet shape of a squirrel ran out into the middle of the track. It caught sight of him, and scampered off into the woodland on the other side. Probably nobody lurking in the trees, then, but the danger would not lie here, in sight of the main road. If Conn and his friends wanted some fun, they would be waiting farther along, where the track disappeared around a bend to the right. There, they could be seen from neither road nor farm.
He moved ahead steadily, alert to the sound of water dripping off leaves and the squelch and crunch of his own boots, and pushing aside the voice in his mind that said,
You should never have come alone.
Rounding the corner, he thought he glimpsed the figure of a legionary amongst the trees on his left, but then it was gone. Wishful thinking. He moved faster. Another forty paces. Thirty. Almost there . . .
As he approached the gate, Conn and the one-eyed man stepped out from behind the main house. The big black dog trotted along behind them. They ignored Ruso’s greeting and marched up to block the gate, farm implements casually laid over their shoulders. Conn might conceivably have been working under shelter with that pitchfork, but there was no call for a scythe in weather like this.
Ruso was wondering whether Branan would appear when the boy dropped out of the tree by the gate and ran across to join his older brother. He was not looking friendly now. He had picked up an axe that was half as tall as he was.
When the boy had taken his place, Conn said, “There is nothing for you in this place, soldier.”
The other man’s one eye and empty socket glared at Ruso. “Perhaps he’s come to see for himself.”
“I would like to speak with your father.”
Conn said, “My father does not want to hear you.”
“That is for him to decide. My wife promised him I would come.”
They stood facing each other. Rain trickled down Conn’s face and dripped off the end of his nose. Ruso knew that if he flinched now, he had lost.
Branan looked from one to the other of them. “Shall I ask Da, Conn?”
“I’ll do it. You watch him.” Conn strode away into the house. Branan shifted his grip on the axe handle and lifted his chin, then spoiled the effect by taking one hand off the axe to wipe the rain off his nose and shove his wet curls out of his eyes.
Ruso, still behind the flimsy protection of the gate, glanced around the yard. He had barely noticed when he was here before, but he saw now that the main house, the biggest of the buildings, had so many logs stacked under the broad eaves that the walls were almost hidden. A fat hayrick sat on a raised platform under its own thatched roof. He remembered the apples on the shelf indoors. This was what the family had worked through the summer and autumn to build up: the supplies that would, if their gods were kind, keep them and their animals from freezing and starving through the long, barren months of winter. This would be what the army had destroyed over at the house of Senecio’s sister.
A few hens and a cockerel with a shimmering blue-green tail were pecking amongst the cobbles. Ruso guessed that the sister’s livestock had made some very tasty suppers in military quarters last night.
Conn reappeared. “Let him in.”
The one-eyed man gestured toward Ruso’s sword and held out a hand to receive it across the top of the gate. His other hand retained its grasp on the scythe.
Ruso would have felt more at ease if he had been allowed to keep the sword and walk in naked.
After the daylight the house seemed even gloomier than it had at night. Senecio was seated in his carved chair again. As far as Ruso could make out, there was nobody else there. But he knew now about all those dark sleeping spaces hidden away behind the wicker partitions.