Tabula Rasa (36 page)
“Where is he now?”
The vehicle jolted in and out of a large pothole, which gave Lupus’s “I don’t know” a kind of hiccup in the middle.
Ruso held the mare back until Lupus drew level with him again. “What happened to the boy?”
Lupus poked his index finger into his mouth and retrieved something from between his teeth. He looked at it, wiped it off on the furs, and said, “The boy escaped before they got to Coria.”
“That’s a twenty-mile trip. Where exactly did they lose him?”
“I’m very annoyed about it. Piso should have had more sense.”
Ruso said, “If any harm has come to that boy, the family will hold you responsible.”
“But the family handed him over. The loss is mine.”
“No they didn’t,” said Ruso, eyeing the scrawny neck and wondering whether he could lean across and wring it. “Haven’t you heard there’s a child been stolen?”
Lupus sighed. “Every time someone goes missing, traders like me are the first to get the blame. But the moment they want staff, it’s a different story.”
Ruso reined in the mare and let the cart go on ahead. Eventually the chained slaves were shuffling past. Ruso caught Piso’s eye and said, “Where did you lose the boy?”
Piso frowned. “The old crow’s blaming me, is he?”
“We can talk about blame later. Where’s the boy?”
“How should I know?” He stepped closer. “When we found out half the army was looking for him, I wanted to hand him in. It was the boss’s idea to let him go.”
So Branan had not run away at all. “When was that?”
“Last night. Back in Coria.”
“You turned a child loose on his own in a town miles from home? At night?”
The man shrugged. “He’ll be all right. He’s a local.”
Ruso leaned sideways and grabbed Piso’s club with one hand and the back of his tunic with the other, pulling it up so the front rose tight under his chin. The mare, taken by surprise, sidestepped away from the disturbance and Ruso would have been unseated but for one thigh hooked under the horn of the saddle. “He’s nine years old!” Ruso hissed, aware of the other guards coming back to intervene. Trying to lever himself back up without letting go, he said, “Do you know how much trouble you’re in? The Legate of the Twentieth has ordered this search. The governor himself has asked to be kept informed.”
“It wasn’t my idea to let him go!”
“You bought him. You knew who he was and you didn’t bring him back. You’d better help us find him. And catch the seller. If you’re lucky, the governor just might not throw you to the Britons.”
With that, Ruso dropped the club and pushed himself back up into the middle of the saddle. It was hard to make a credible threat if you fell off your horse while doing it.
Several natives who had paused to watch returned to clearing the roadside ditch when he glared at them. Piso retrieved his club and straightened his tunic before saying that he had no idea where Branan had gone last night. Yes, it was after dark. Down by the bridge. No, he had not been given any supplies or warm clothing. The boss had said the natives would take him in.
“In the middle of the night?” Ruso demanded. “What was he supposed to do, knock on doors?”
Piso shrugged, as if these things were no concern of his. “Ask the boss.”
“How do I know you didn’t just kill him and dump him?”
“A body is hard to get rid of. It was easier if he wandered off.”
Ruso shook his head. “You people.”
“I was just doing what I was told.”
“Tell me something useful. Tell me who sold him to you.”
“A legionary called Marcus.”
“Marcus what?”
But of course the man did not know, and since there were probably several hundred Marcuses serving with the Twentieth alone, it was a fine name to pick if someone wanted to stay anonymous. “Had you seen him before?”
“Maybe. I see a lot of people.”
“Try harder. What did he look like?”
“Sort of . . . brown hair. Not tall, not short. Not fat, not thin.”
“Of course not.” This was hopeless. Ruso was gathering his thoughts, ready to head back into town, when Piso said, “He had one pale arm.”
“He had what?” asked Ruso, wondering if he had heard correctly.
“One arm. It was paler than the other one. You didn’t notice until you saw the two together, but it was. The left, I think.”
Ruso eyed the bald head for a moment, wondering whether there was any point in persisting or whether already Piso was starting to make things up. Finally he said, “All this is going in my report. If you’ve lied to me—”
“If I’d lied, I’d have come up with something better.”
He went to Susanna’s first, because that was the place to get things done. Susanna herself was out looking for anyone who had just bought a boy slave, but one of the girls promised to pass on the news. They were now looking for a child on his own who had been down by the bridge late last night. Then he went over to the fort, where a glum clerk in the CO’s office arranged to send an urgent warning downriver to the port. As the man observed, if anyone picked up the boy and put him on a ship, he would be lost forever.
Ruso needed to start where the boy had started, so he walked the familiar road down to the bridge. Back at Deva, he would have nailed up notices or scrawled on prominent walls:
MISSING—Branan, nine years old, last seen on the third day before the kalends of November. Any information to . . .
He could have put up signs at milestones and crossroads and public latrines. Whereas for the illiterate Britons the only way to find out something was to have someone tell you. News grew wings on market days, but the rest of the time word of mouth was hopelessly inefficient.
While Susanna spread the word around the civilians of Coria, and the local CO sent the message down to his men through his centurions, someone was going to have to ride around to every farm for miles, asking if a lone boy had been seen—especially one traveling west. And that someone would have to hope that the locals would tell him the truth. Much as the Britons complained about foreigners, they were not above using each other as slaves when it suited them. He wondered briefly whether to send an update back to everyone at Parva, then decided to wait. There was nothing they could do tonight, and with luck the boy would be found by morning.
He leaned back against the parapet of the bridge and tried to think where a boy would have gone from here in the dark. Not uphill to the town, surely. He would want to put as much distance as possible between himself and his captors. But which way? Would he stick to the roads for speed or the field paths for safety? Ruso tried to remember whether it had been cloudy last night. He had paid very little attention, but it would have mattered to Branan. During the day he would have known from the sun that he had traveled east; at night he would need the stars to find his way home. If there were no stars . . . Ruso turned to face the road that led south out of the valley, away from town. It was the main route to the rest of the province. It would have taken Branan in the wrong direction, but it was the quickest way away from here, and when the sun rose there would be plenty of farm carts that might give him a lift.
Ruso folded his arms and closed his eyes.
Think
.
This had been the problem all along. Not knowing which way to turn. But it was no good circling in one place and trampling it bare like a tethered goat. Sooner or later Branan would head for home. Ruso would leave Coria to Susanna and the local force and spread the word at the farms and roadside stations on the way back to Parva.
He opened his eyes and saw his own folded arms. How could a man end up with his left arm paler than his right? Nobody carried a shield for that long. But . . . there had been that time when he had an injured leg strapped up for weeks, and when the dressings had come off . . .
He was almost back up at the west gate when a dispatch rider came out at a canter. Ruso held up both hands, waving wildly as he stepped into the road, shouting, “Stop, I need to send a message!”
This rider was better-mannered than the others. Instead of running Ruso down, he swerved, waving cheerily back. If he heard Ruso yelling, “Tell the tribune at Parva to look again at Mallius!” he showed no sign of it.
Mallius, the sometime-blond soldier who had passed the water up to the stranded prefect in the quarry. Mallius, the supplier of a dead hen of unknown provenance. Mallius, who had been part of the search party that had seen Branan and Tilla together at the farm. Mallius, whose wrist and forearm must have been bandaged for at least a month and which, even in this climate, would have emerged more sun-starved than the rest of him.
The same Mallius who had been fully occupied at the brothel, and then certifiably asleep, on the afternoon of the kidnap, and who had no reason that Ruso knew of to steal and sell a child.
Ruso shook his head. Accius, if he got the message, would have to puzzle that one out for himself. Ruso had a boy to find.
He was halfway to Susanna’s when he saw her careering down the street, waving one hand in the air and holding her skirts out of the mud with the other. There was news! He ran to meet her, feeling a smile escaping his caution.
And then it froze.
Gasping for breath, Susanna managed to get the story out. “He was seen! Lupus’s man met some fur traders. On the bridge. They took the boy north. I think he’s been sold.”
At last Tilla had some use for her escort. With Dismal following her, and the military brands on the horses, nobody dared to question her right to ride down the track that crossed the line of wall where the soldiers were working. The weary Enica pointed toward the rough slopes where Aedic’s family had lived. At the top, Tilla could see the builders tidying up, ready for the end of the day’s work. They were leaning out from the scaffold to throw covers over the freshly laid stones and gathering their equipment together, ready to carry it back down to the camp. Tilla swallowed. This looked very much like the place where her husband had described Candidus’s knife being found. But there was no sign of a boy, and no one answered their cries of “Aedic!”
There was little news to exchange on either side when they delivered Enica home. Dismal had clearly been hoping the search would be abandoned for the day, and his face fell even further when Tilla explained that they were now going to retrace their steps to the wall and carry on hunting for Aedic. Instead of following her, he turned his horse the other way and peered across the fields below the house to where the trees marked the passage of the stream.
“What is it?”
“Be quicker down that way and through the quarry, miss.”
Tilla let him lead her down past a half-ruined farm building. After some exploring, during which Dismal appeared to be lost but was not going to admit it, they found a place where they could jump the horses over a tumbled section of wall. They scrambled down a bank and cantered north, following a broad track that was in unusually good repair along the course of the stream. After a couple of hundred paces it curved into a large cleared area where the side of the hill had been hacked away. Part of the cliff had tumbled into a steep slide of loose earth and rock. She held the horse back, gazing up at it. This must be what her husband had climbed across to rescue Valens’s father-in-law.
How simple everything had seemed just a few days ago, when the biggest problem of her afternoon had been the thought that her husband would be late for supper. Now they were both out hunting for other people’s missing children and she had no idea where he was or whether anything would ever be quite the same again.
“Miss!”
The voice made her jump. She recognized the man who had led the search party: What was his name? Daminius. But instead of telling her to clear off out of the quarry, he was slipping his work hammer into a loop on his belt and asking, “Any news about the boy, miss?”
“They would have sounded the horn,” she told him. Since he was free, she supposed they must have decided he had nothing to do with Branan’s disappearance. “Have you seen my husband?”
“I heard he was going to Vindolanda.” There was something about the man’s expression that said there was more, but all he said was “Keep well clear of the landslide, miss. Just in case.”
She explained about the search for Aedic, and he nodded. “There’s a big clump of bushes up toward the wall where they’ve got the scaffolding. About a hundred paces east of the stream. He sometimes hides there.”
“You know him?”
“Warn him to watch out. Most of the lads know he’s harmless, but my replacement might think he’s a spy.”
“Your replacement? Are you being sent away?”
The optio shrugged, and she thought there was a slight flinch, as if he had disturbed a forgotten injury. “This is the Legion, miss. You never know.”
“I wish you well,” she said, and meant it. She was about to ride on when she noticed what was hanging around his neck. “Did you lend that to my husband?”
He picked up the little winged phallus and grimaced. “I don’t know what he did to it,” he said. “I’ve had nothing but bad luck ever since he got his hands on it. Miss, are you the one who helped Fabius’s kitchen maid?”