Tabula Rasa (44 page)
Only when they were alone again did her husband give Tilla a look whose meaning she recognized in spite of the black eye and the swelling.
“I am not sure the tribune believed Mallius saw a ghost,” she admitted.
“I’m not sure he believed any of it,” Ruso said, his voice still sounding odd because he was trying not to move his jaw.
She leaned over and kissed his forehead.
“Ow.”
“I may have left a few things out,” she admitted. “But he does not need to know them. Two soldiers went out with me last night to visit a patient, one of them thought he saw a ghost on the way, and then I invited them to the Samain celebration at the farm.”
“You expect Accius to believe that you invited a murder suspect to a party? And that party was being given by a family whose son was missing?”
She shrugged. “Accius expects me to believe there is no body in the emperor’s wall.”
Instead of replying, Ruso reached for the cup of water beside the bed, then eased himself down and closed his good eye. “I’m going to sleep,” he told her. “Don’t wake me up until somebody else has sorted out this mess.”
Moments later she heard, “Did I dream it, or did you tell me that you think the old man is your father?”
“It seems there was much my mother did not tell me.”
“So Branan is your brother?”
“As is Conn.”
He gave a grunt that might have been amazement, or disbelief, or simple exhaustion. “I think I’m glad for you.”
She said, “I think I am glad too. But it feels very strange.”
In reply there was only a soft snore.
She went down to the bar to tell Ria that she and her husband both needed to sleep and they could not accept any more visitors, but another one arrived while she was there.
Aemilia.
Aemilia and her husband were not offended. Not at all. She had not complained about coming all this way for a wedding that nobody had told them was canceled, because everybody had been very busy and she could see that sending a message to a long-lost cousin was not very important. Now they had come across from their lodgings to see that lovely husband of hers and tell him he was a hero but they could not see him because everyone else had already visited and worn him out. Which was a shame, but just another one of those things.
“No it’s not,” put in her husband, not bothering to look up from his beer. “It’s bloody annoying.”
Aemilia told him he needn’t be so grumpy just because Ria’s beer wasn’t as good as their own.
“The brewery is doing very well,” she told Tilla. “We’re expanding. We’ve left one of our freedmen in charge, but we really can’t stay away any longer if there isn’t a wedding.”
“So tell me,” said Aemilia’s husband, looking at Tilla over his cup, “is there a body in the wall or not?”
Their eyes met. He was still handsome, if a little more creased around the eyes and thicker around the waist. Tilla wondered briefly what would have happened if she had married him and not the man lying in the bed upstairs. It had been possible, before the Northerners’ raid on her family’s farm had changed her life forever. Now she could not even answer his simple question truthfully. But neither could she bring herself to lie to him. Instead she offered the biggest distraction she could think of.
“You have not come all this way for nothing,” she said. “There will be a wedding. I will ask my father.”
Rianorix frowned. “Your what?”
“Senecio,” she explained, then paused. These people knew the ages of her brothers. To tell this story was to betray her mother. But then, had her mother not betrayed the man she had married—the man everyone had thought was Tilla’s father? But before she could say more, Aemilia asked, “You know, I’m sure Daddy once said something about your mam and a stranger from over in the hills.”
“People knew?” Tilla sank back against the wall, feeling the ground of her childhood slip beneath her once more. “What did he say?”
But Aemilia could not remember the details. “It was a long time ago,” she said, waving it off with a flick of the hand. “I never thought anything of it.”
Tilla looked from one to the other of them. “Why did nobody ever tell me?”
Aemilia’s husband poked his forefinger into his beer and hooked something out. “Perhaps the same reason you won’t tell me there’s a body in wall,” he said.
The rest of the day of Ruso’s return had passed between sleep and pain and, blurring the two, regular doses of poppy tears administered by Tilla. Several times she tried to ask him questions, but when he tried to grasp them they slid away, so he decided to answer, “Yes,” to everything and sort it out later. The tribune came back. He wanted to talk about Mallius and Daminius, Tilla and Conn. Ruso could not remember what he was supposed to say, or even exactly what he knew, so he pretended to be more ill than he felt. It was surprisingly easy once you started to pay attention to every little twinge and gurgle. He even began to convince himself until he realized this was probably how Fabius started. At other times he lay alone, hearing distant voices and the clatter of crockery from Ria’s kitchen, thinking about what had happened and deciding he must get up. But not just yet. He would just lie here for a moment longer, letting his tongue explore the tender gap where his tooth used to be.
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.”
“He thought he was in trouble for playing a prank on the road,” Ruso told him. “What did you do to him?”
The man who was not Mallius was talking to his chained hands now and mumbling. It seemed that even he could feel shame. “I didn’t hurt him, sir, I swear. I just told him his house would be burned like that other one if he didn’t do what he was told.” He looked up. “I was going to let the family know where he was as soon as we were on the way back to Deva. He would have been found.”