Semper Fidelis (5 page)

^{HE BLACK BEADS}
were cheap and the pink dress had been made for someone much slimmer. The first owner had probably abandoned it when efforts to scrub out a spatter of grease spots across the middle of the skirt had left them marooned in a faded patch.

Before Tilla could speak, the girl said in British, “Are you the doctor’s woman?”
“I am the midwife,” said Tilla in the same tongue. The girl was too young to be the boy’s mother, so she was not Lucina come to ask why some stranger had been claiming to know her. It must be Pamphile, or Hedone, or some other working girl who was supposed to be looking forward to the arrival of the Sixth Legion. Which was more likely to mean her own er was looking forward to a rise in his profits.
“I am Virana.” The girl glanced over her shoulder at the manager. “Grumpy over there doesn’t like me. But you did say to come here, didn’t you?”
Tilla gestured toward the courtyard door. “Come with me. We will speak in private.”
“You are not Parisi,” the girl guessed, following her along the walkway. “From your accent—Brigante?”
“Near enough,” agreed Tilla, because no matter how many times she explained about the Corionotatae, people only remembered the names of tribes they had heard of before.
“You are Brigante, and you have married an officer!” It seemed the girl had never heard of such a thing. “How did you do it?”
“That is a long story.” Tilla ushered her into the room and gestured toward the chair with the red cushion.
The girl seated herself and gazed around her, lifting the corner of the cloth to see what was laid out on the table. “Is this your dinner?” She tipped the flagon toward her and sniffed the contents. “I don’t like wine,” she said. “Beer is much nicer.”
“Yes,” said Tilla, putting the flagon back and replacing the cloth. She had left Marcia’s letter on the table, hoping her husband might read her some news of his family in Gaul. Now she moved that out of the girl’s reach too, hoping this was indeed a patient, and not just a local nuisance whom the mansio manager had failed to keep out. “You look in good health, Virana.”
“Oh, I am! Is that your husband’s armor?” The girl reached out and ran a fingertip along the curve of the metal plates.
“Yes.” Who else’s did she imagine it might be? “How can I help you?”
Virana, having finished her inspection of the room, leaned across the table to where Tilla had seated herself on the bed, and beamed. “I think I am with child!”
“That is good news,” said Tilla, not entirely sure that it was. “I have herbs that will help the baby grow and keep you strong. I can give you something to take when the time comes, and an egg charm to hold in your hand when you give birth, but you will have to find your own midwife. We are only here for a few days.”
“And then you are going back to Deva with the soldiers,” said Virana, her eyes bright. “Tell me, is it true there are stalls selling silk and ivory and spices and eastern perfumes? And I can wear my shoes outside, because there is no mud in the streets, and nobody needs buckets, because the water flows to every house?”
“No.”
“Well, never mind.” Virana reached back to retrieve a bone pin and shook her hair loose. “I’m sure it will be better than here. I know the Sixth Legion are coming, but they’ll send all the best ones up north to build the Great Wall, won’t they? We’ll just be stuck with the old fat ones again. So I thought you would know what to do.”
“What to do about what?”
“I don’t mind if he doesn’t marry me. I know it’s not allowed unless he’s an officer.”
“It is not recognized,” corrected Tilla. “But if you have chosen a soldier and he has chosen you, that is none of the army’s business.”
“That’s what I think too.”
“When your man is moved, you will have to follow. It will not be easy, but plenty of women do it.”
Virana pouted. “But that’s the trouble. Nobody wants me to follow. They all say the baby is somebody else’s.”
Tilla suppressed a sigh. Was there no end to the supply of stupid girls living near army bases?
“Please don’t shout at me. Everyone else does.”
“I am not going to shout at you. I am going to work out some dates. It is hard to be certain about these things, but at least we might know where to start.”
The girl shook her head and her hair came loose again. “I don’t know anything about dates. One day is much like another here. We don’t have all those big festivals and games like you have in Deva.”
“You must have a market day.”
Virana brightened at this, but it seemed one market day was also much like another, and the boredom of life around Eboracum was only made bearable by friendly encounters with young recruits on their weekly afternoon out from the local fort. “I was going to wait and see who it looked like,” she said, “but now they’re going back to Deva there isn’t time.”
“I will examine you now,” Tilla told her. “But these things are very uncertain, and if you cannot remember when things happened, I am not sure how else I can help.”
The girl lay down on one of the beds as instructed, then sat up suddenly. “You aren’t going to take it away, are you?”
“No.”
“Because if you take it away, I’ll have to stay here, won’t I?”
The examination revealed nothing new. The girl was indeed pregnant and all appeared to be well. Tilla felt a wave of jealousy. Why this stupid girl? Why almost every other woman in the world and not her? She swallowed, hearing the echo of her mother’s words after she had voiced some forgotten complaint:
Nobody likes a person who feels sorry for herself.
You don’t understand, Mam.
No. And nobody else will, either. It’s no good moping, girl. There’s work to be done!
Virana was still prattling. “What I was thinking,” she said, “was that if you tell your husband that you know who the father is, then he could order him—”
“My husband is not allowed to do that sort of thing.”
“But how else will I get out of this place?” Virana sat up and gave the pink dress a violent tug to straighten it. A bulge of pale flesh appeared through a hole in the side seam. “They won’t even let me in to talk to anybody.”
“They are not going to help you,” Tilla agreed.
“Those horrible centurions don’t care about anybody.”
“It is not their job to care about you.”
The girl swung her feet to the floor. “They don’t even care about their own soldiers!”
Tilla said, “My man does his best.”
The girl put a hand to her mouth. “I am sorry. I meant no insult.”
“You can speak the truth, Virana. I am not in the Twentieth Legion just because he is.”
Virana glanced at the window, then said softly, “You should tell him to be careful in there.”
“Why?”
The girl leaned closer and mouthed, “People keep on dying. They say there is a curse.”
“I heard about the man on the roof.”
“Not just Sulio.” Virana glanced at the window again, and fell silent.
Tilla checked that no one was listening at the door. Then she closed the shutters, plunging them into near darkness. “What do you mean, ‘People keep on dying’? What sort of people?”
“I don’t want to get into trouble.”
“There will be no trouble if you tell me the truth.”
The girl sniffed. “First Dannicus. Then Tadius. Then Victor ran away, and now Sulio lies dead too.”
Tilla paused. “This Victor—does he have ginger hair?”
In the gloom she could just make out Virana’s nod.
She said, “I think I have seen him,” but Virana was not listening.
“Fortune has turned her back on them!”
“But you still want to go to Deva with them?”
“They say the tribune will offer a ram to Jupiter in the morning. Perhaps things will be better after that. But tonight—”
“I will tell my husband to be careful,” Tilla agreed. “These deaths— what causes them?”
“Dannicus drowned in the river.” Virana shuffled on the bed. “So you cannot help me?”
“I cannot see inside the womb, sister. Think who you lay with at about lambing time and try to work it out.”
Virana began counting on her fingers and murmuring names. There seemed to be a lot of them. Tilla opened the shutters again.
“They were all nice to me.” Virana stopped counting. “I wouldn’t do it with the rude ones.”
“Of course not.”
“They bought me beads.”
“So I see.”
“I felt sorry for them.”
Tilla, trying to remember if she had ever felt sorry for a soldier in her life, said, “Why was that?”
“Mam said to stay away from them, but what does she know? I shall have plenty of time to grind flour and milk cows when I’m old like her.”
“There is no need to feel sorry for soldiers, Virana. Especially when they ask you to comfort them.”
The pout reappeared. “They won’t have me back at home now. My aunt says I’ll turn the milk sour.”
“I am sad to hear it.”
“It wouldn’t be Tadius, would it? I only did it once with him because of my sister.”
“Once is often enough,” said Tilla, pushing aside the thought,
but not for me.
“Well I’m sure it isn’t. Anyway, I need somebody alive. Marcus is nice . . .” The girl looked up. “You won’t tell my sister about me and Tadius, will you?”
“I do not know your sister.”
“She thinks she was the only girl he ever looked at. Now she is lying at home, sulking.”
Tilla dismissed the question of what the parents had done to deserve two such daughters, and tried to steer Virana back toward the danger the Medicus might be in. “Could the father be either of the other men who died?”
“Oh, Sulio and Dannicus weren’t interested in girls. You know. Like they say about the emperor.”
Tilla was not going to discuss the emperor’s bedroom habits with a girl who could not control her tongue or, it seemed, much else. “So the boy who jumped off the roof was the lover of the one who drowned?”
Virana nodded. “After Dann was drowned, Sulio was so frightened he couldn’t eat. He wanted to run away. I told him not to be silly.” She sniffed. “I should have said,
Yes, go,
shouldn’t I? If he had run away, he would still be alive.”
“Why was he frightened? Was he to blame for the drowning?”
“Tadius and Victor were really cross with him.”
“He was frightened of the other recruits?”
But Virana had moved on. “Now Tadius is dead and Victor knew it would be him next and Corinna would be left on her own.” She sniffed. “Like I will be if I’m not careful.”
While the girl paused to wipe her nose on the back of her hand, Tilla tried to make sense of what she had said. “Three soldiers are dead, but from different causes, and one has run away.”
Virana nodded vigorously, shaking the remaining strands of hair loose. “Corinna really is Victor’s wife. But that’s none of the army’s business, is it?”
Talking with this girl was like trying to catch fleas: you never knew which way she was going to jump. “That depends on who you ask.”
Virana thought about that for a moment. “It’s not so bad for me, really, is it? I mean, I’ve got plenty to choose from. Corinna never lay with anybody else, so she can’t get them to help now that Victor’s gone.”
It seemed the local girls had rushed to make the new recruits very welcome indeed. A harder woman would have told them that if they must take on a soldier, go for an older man who was about to settle down with his retirement fund. The young ones had no money, little free time, and no choice over where they were posted—but of course they had clear eyes and smooth skin and full heads of hair, and they thought they were immortal. Until, it seemed, they came to Eboracum.
She decided to approach from a different angle. “Who spoke this curse, Virana?”
The girl glanced at the open window again. “I do not think one ram to Jupiter will make much difference.”
“What should I tell my husband to look out for?”
Virana got to her feet and adjusted the pink dress again. “I have to go now. I don’t have to pay, do I? You didn’t help me.”
“I need something,” Tilla insisted. “I have done everything I can for you, and I cannot have word go round that I see patients for free.”
Virana pulled at a strand of her hair. “I have no money.”
“You hoped I would help you because I am generous?”
“I hoped if I warned you about the curse . . .”
“What you have told me is gossip. I need to know exactly what my husband has to fear in the fort. Who spoke the curse, and why?”
The girl twisted the hair around her forefinger until the fingertip went white. “It will probably be all right,” she said at length. “It is only the recruits that bad things happen to. An officer from Deva will be safe.”
“I hope so, Virana. Because if you have lied to me, I will find you, and you will be sorry.”

^{HE EMPRESS SABINA}
had long ago formed her own theory about the nonsense in travel books. No traveler, having gone to the expense and trouble of venturing where most civilized people were too sensible to go, was going to come home and admit that it had been a waste of time. Instead, he had to pronounce his destination to be full of strange wonders, like the elk with no knees that could be caught by sabotaging the tree against which it leaned when it slept ( Julius Caesar) or the men from India who could wrap themselves in their own ears (reported by the elder Pliny, who seemed to have written down everything he was ever told), or the blue-skinned Britons ( Julius Caesar again).

Strangely, no traveler ever brought one of these creatures home for inspection. Doubtless they were impossible to capture, or died on the journey, or the blue came off in the wash.

Travel, in Sabina’s experience—and the gods knew she had suffered enough of it in the last twenty years—was less a matter of wonder than of discomfort and disappointment. Londinium was no exception. It had been as empty of blue- skinned natives and promiscuous Druid women as she had feared. Instead, the outgoing governor had led them on a tour of the local forum, followed by an interminable display of marching, fighting, and killing in the amphitheater. In the eve nings she and the emperor had been trapped for hours in the palace dining room with provincial administrators and hairy native chieftains. As if the emperor could not see fora or amphitheaters, or eat oysters, or meet barbarians who spoke Latin everywhere he went! The irony, which of course the native chieftains would never be subtle enough to grasp, was that while they were eager to be Romans, their esteemed Roman leader liked to pose as an intellectual Greek.

But since Julia had fallen pregnant—no doubt on purpose in order avoid this trip— there was no friend with whom she could share the joke. The slaves were all chosen by Hadrian, and presumably primed to report her every complaint, yawn, and mutinous scowl.

The governor’s wife, poor woman, was as tedious as Sabina feared she herself might become if she were obliged to spend much longer marooned in the provinces. She was desperate for the latest gossip from Rome—as if Sabina had been there recently, instead of dutifully shivering through a Germanic winter that froze your teeth if you opened your mouth, and turned the slaves’ feet and noses blue with cold.

Perhaps things would be better when they finally arrived in Deva. Paulina had sounded positively thrilled to know that her distant and now very famous cousin was coming to visit. She had promised to keep Sabina entertained while the emperor and her husband did all those important things that emperors and legates had to do. Meanwhile, Sabina had asked the governor’s wife in vain for the locations of singing stones, statues that spoke, stuffed monsters, giants’ bones, or relics of Helen of Troy. She supposed pyramids were unlikely in Britannia, as were temples filled with treasures, or elephants trained to write, or fountains that miraculously spouted wine— although admittedly she had never been able to pin down the last two herself. But it seemed even the distant hills of the North and West boasted no steaming sulfurous craters or fissures belching poison gases. There was not even an oracle.

“There is the circle of very large stones, madam.”
“Do they do anything?”
“Not that I know of. But you might like the temple of Sulis Minerva at

Aquae Sulis.”
“What does that do?”
“It is an old and very holy place where a constant supply of hot water

springs out of the ground.”
“How very con venient,” she conceded. “If one were short of slaves.” “The people throw in offerings to the goddess and curses on their enemies.”
“Well, I suppose it will have to do. Is it nearby?” Sadly, it was not.

The only way to get to Paulina at Deva was to travel north with the emperor. Even that was a better prospect than staying in Londinium, discussing cushion covers with the governor’s wife. Besides, there was always a faint chance that the stories of a northern land of perpetual daylight might be true. Even if they were not, Tranquillus and Clarus would be amusing and intelligent company on the journey. Although they did not dare say so, she was sure they, too, wished they were back at home: Tranquillus working on his writing, and Clarus, who always looked as though his uniform belonged to somebody else, with his nose buried in a scroll.

Hadrian could find someone else to bore with his lectures about drawings and mea sure ments. His latest project might be the biggest and best wall in the empire, but it was still just a wall. Of course, she was the only one who had ever dared to tell him so.

An auspicious day had been chosen for the start of the voyage, and the omens had been good. Even so, things had gone wrong almost straight away. The dress she wanted to wear turned out to be in one of several trunks loaded onto the wrong ship. Clarus had been assigned to another vessel with most of his men, while the quiet and nondescript man who had been hanging around in the governor’s palace—and was undoubtedly some sort of spy—turned up on deck and then vanished, giving her the uneasy feeling that he had hidden somewhere to watch everybody. Or perhaps just her.

Tranquillus had shrunk yet again from letting her read his
History of Famous Prostitutes
and still refused to tell her stories from it lest the emperor should disapprove. Then after two days, the wind had risen. The mounting seas had hidden Clarus’s ship along with the vessel carrying her luggage and the motley collection of ambassadors seeking an audience with the emperor. She had felt increasingly ill. Tranquillus had retired to his cabin “to work on his latest biography.” Her maid reported that the only sign of productivity was the occasional emergence of a slave clutching a covered bucket.

She no longer cared. It was impossible to be amused or intrigued when the wallowing and heaving of the gray waters outside seemed to be competing with what was going on in one’s stomach. It was a great pity that the author who had declared the sea around the north of Britannia to be “sluggish and scarcely troubled by winds” was already dead. She would have taken great pleasure in arranging to have him tied in a sack and thrown into it.

The emperor, of course—that was how she thought of him these days:
the emperor
, not
my husband
— the emperor was still striding about the deck, giving orders to the captain and encouragement to the crew before expecting his weary companions to join him for stimulating conversation over platters that slid about on the table. Hadrian had scant sympathy for those who succumbed to seasickness: evidently it was one of the many forms of weakness to which one should not yield.

There was a soft tap at the door.
“Come!”
A blast of damp air blew a slave into the little cabin. The slave was clutching a tray in one hand and had a cup clamped onto it with the other. She fell backward, slamming the door with her bottom.

Faintly recollecting that she had asked for some water, Sabina said, “Just leave it on the floor.”
The slave, appointed by the emperor and so doubtless a spy, did as she was told and withdrew. A moment later the ship gave a violent lurch to starboard. Somewhere outside, a woman screamed. The cup fell over, sending trickles of water exploring first one way and then another across the boards. Every timber around her seemed to be creaking as if it was straining to part from its neighbor.
Men were shouting. Footsteps hurried past the cabin. The bedchamber slave crouched to wipe up the water just as the ship hit another wave. The girl fell sideways, grabbing at the end of Sabina’s small sleeping platform to steady herself. Seawater slid in under the door and sloshed across the planking. Normally silent unless told to speak, the girl began to gabble prayers to her gods.
More shouting. More lurching.
The empress Sabina lay on her side, closed her eyes and prayed for sleep. Or death. Either would do, so long as she stopped feeling like this, but neither was happening. The pitching and rolling of the ship grew worse. She clung to the edge of the sleeping platform to steady herself. Finally the prayers ended in a shriek as the world rolled sideways. Sabina lost her grip and landed on top of the struggling slave.
The women slid in a heap of limbs into the corner. Water was streaming in from all directions now. They clung to each other, the slave sobbing and wailing and Sabina trying to call out prayers to Neptune over the crashing of waves and the straining of timbers.
They both screamed as the door burst open and a bedraggled figure staggered in, clutching a knife. It bent to slash the ropes that held the trunk containing her jewelery in place beneath the sleeping platform and dragged it toward the door.
Remembering her duty, the slave made a lunge for it. “Thief! Stop!” “Captain’s orders!” he yelled.
Sabina pulled her back, put her mouth against the girl’s wet hair, and shouted, “They are throwing everything over to make the ship lighter. Be glad you are not going with it. If this does not work, we will all drown.”