Terra Incognita: A Novel of the Roman Empire (6 page)

The young man rubbed his unshaven jaw and appeared to be pondering this
question. Then he said, “No, sir. I have to tell the truth. I was the man who killed
Felix.”

Decianus sighed. “We already know who killed Felix, Thessalus. It wasn’t
you.”

The dark eyes widened. “Holy gods! That wasn’t Felix?” The fingers that rose
toward his mouth were trembling. “This is even worse than I thought. Is there another
man missing, sir?”

A swift glance at Metellus assured Decianus that there was not. “What,” he
said, “exactly, do you think you did to Felix?”

Thessalus swallowed. His eyes attempted to focus on the edge of the desk. Finally
he said, “I think I may have, ah—I may have . . .” The words had failed
but the meaning of the collision between the outer edge of the hand and the back
of the neck was unmistakable.

Decianus glanced at Metellus again, then returned his attention to the doctor.

“Tell me what you did with the body.”

Thessalus appeared to be pondering the meaning of this question. Finally he
said, “The local people believe the soul resides in the head, sir.”

“I see. So where is the soul of Felix residing now?”

“They take the enemy’s head home with them. They keep it on display as a
trophy. Sometimes they make a cup out of the skull and drink from it.”

“That was years ago,” put in Metellus. “Even the northerners don’t get up to
that sort of thing now.”

Instead of replying, Thessalus swayed alarmingly and grabbed hold of the desk
for support.

“Stand up straight, man! Why on earth would you want to murder Felix?”

Thessalus’s eyes closed. His knees buckled. His body slumped to the floor.

“He’s relieved of duty,” said Decianus, leaning over the desk. “He’s to be confined
to quarters until further notice. And he’s not to talk to anyone.”

When the semiconscious doctor had been dragged out, Decianus turned to Metellus.
“Search his rooms.”

“It can’t have been him, sir. He’s not the type.”

“Then how does he know?”

There was a soft tap at the door. A servant scurried in and removed the tray.
When he had gone Metellus said, “Audax must have talked.”

“That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Well, it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you either.”

Decianus looked him in the eye. “It might have been better to tell the truth in
the first place.”

“You’re doing the right thing, sir,” Metellus assured him. “We’ll keep Thessalus
quiet, arrest the native, and it’ll all blow over.”

“It had better blow over before the governor gets here.”

“Do you want some ideas for the funeral speech?”

Decianus scowled at him. “No,” he said. “I want you to concentrate on keeping
this thing under control.”

When he was alone, Decianus walked across to the small wooden shrine on the
side wall of his office, sprinkled some more incense in the burner, and prayed that
this mess was not about to get considerably worse.

5

J
UST AS POS TUMUS
had predicted, the lone rider reappeared— on a low rise to their right this time—just after the column had stopped for water. The officers continued to ignore him. When everyone moved on, he disappeared.

Ahead of Ruso, Postumus was berating a marcher for some misdeed or other. Ruso found it difficult to see how anyone could get into trouble simply by putting one foot in front of another, but some remarkably creative men seemed to manage it. Indeed, a man on a long journey could begin to think and do all manner of bizarre things. He could start to wonder if his housekeeper truly had seen something strange in the yard at the inn. Tilla was no fool: perhaps he should have been more sympathetic. He could wonder what he should do with the rest of the stolen money. He could even, after he had exhausted all other possibilities, begin to wonder if he should have listened to his ex-wife. Certainly, since he had discovered the true extent of his family’s debts, Ruso had begun to see—too late—the sense of Claudia’s plans to expand his business.

“I’m not a businessman,” he had objected. “I’m a doctor.”

“But you never try to make yourself
known
, Gaius. Do you? I keep telling you!”

“I don’t want to be known. I’ve plenty of work already. If I make myself more known, I’ll have more patients than I can cope with.”

“Of course you will! That’s the idea. Take on an apprentice to deal with the easy cases and—”

“But if people want me, they want
me
. Not some apprentice.”

“Oh, Gaius, for goodness’ sake! All you have to do is hire somebody who’ll be nice to people! You said yourself that lots of patients get better by themselves and all you have to do is try not to kill them while they’re doing it!”

“I said
what
?”

In the course of the argument that followed, it became clear that some unguarded and long-forgotten remark of his had been horribly mangled on its journey through the space between his wife’s ears and her mouth.

Finally, unable to shake her belief that she was repeating his exact words, he said,

“I hope that’s not what you go around telling people?”

“Of course not! I care about your career, even if you don’t!”

Ruso scowled at the ears of his horse. He needed a promotion. Distracted by Tilla and entangled in that business about the barmaid, he had failed to impress the right people in Deva. He could not allow that to happen a second time. In the future he must avoid dabbling in matters that were none of his business. And he must make it clear to everyone at this temporary posting that Tilla was not the troublesome sort of native who met gods in stable yards or spread rumors about men with antlers, but a respectable housekeeper who was under proper control.

It was starting to spatter with rain again. Ruso leaned back in the saddle as the horse began to pick its way down a long slow drop that had been cut into the side of the hill. To his right, a bank loomed above the road. To the left, a grassy slope fell away into a thickly wooded valley.

The column must have been descending for at least half a mile when he drew the horse to a standstill. For some reason the pace had slowed to a crawl, and there seemed to be a line of stationary vehicles ahead. He heard Postumus bellow the order to halt.

It was not a wide stretch of road, and the cavalryman coming up the hill had to weave his mount through the queue of men and carts.

“What’s the holdup?” asked Ruso.

“The river’s burst its banks,” explained the cavalryman. “Taken part of the bridge with it. They’ve got a team patching it up, but—” He broke off, distracted by shouting farther down the hill.

Stationary and bored, soldiers who had had nothing interesting to look at for some miles were craning to their left and yelling abuse. A rider was galloping at full tilt along the margin of the woods not 150 paces below the road. Ruso blinked. He rubbed his eyes. The rider definitely had the head of a stag. And the stag had antlers.

The cavalryman wheeled his horse around and plunged headlong down the hillside to join his comrades in pursuit. Ruso was wondering whether to follow them when over the shouting he heard someone farther back in the line roar, “Clear the road! Out of the way!”

What happened next was over in seconds and seemed to take hours. Ruso urged his own horse aside to the sound of screams and the bellowing of frightened animals. People were trampling over one another in the rush to escape the path of a heavy wagon careening down the road out of control. The axles were shrieking, the oxen galloping and skidding in a vain attempt to outrun the vehicle to which they were still yoked.

Ruso grabbed a fistful of mane as the terrified horse reared beneath him. One of the front oxen fell. The others were dragged down around it. The wagon collided with the thrashing tangle of black bodies. It slewed off the road, crashed onto its side, and rolled down the hill. For a moment there was a terrible silence. Then came the sound of men screaming.

Finally bringing the trembling horse to a standstill, Ruso surveyed the chaos. Further back, two carts had tipped off the road. One had a pair of mules still struggling and kicking in their harness. A boy had slid down from the bank above them where he must have leaped for safety, and was wiping the mud from his hands. A woman was comforting her sobbing children. People were calling the names of friends and of gods, gathering their scattered possessions or sitting dazed at the roadside while drivers set off toward the woods in pursuit of fleeing animals.

Legionaries were running to form a guard as two men with bloodied swords stepped away from the carcasses of the oxen. Down by the stricken wagon, Postumus was barking orders and a squad was struggling to heave the cargo of lead out of the wreckage.

He could not see Tilla.

He dismounted and put his hand on the shoulder of a pale boy who was standing motionless with his fingers in his mouth. “Are you hurt?”

The boy shook his head, still staring at the scene.

“Hold her steady for me,” ordered Ruso, pressing the reins into the boy’s hand. The child looked relieved to have something to do.

As he strode up to retrieve his medical case from one of the stricken carts, Ruso glanced down at the woods. The Stag Man, or Cernunnos, or whoever he was, had vanished.

6

T
HE GRAY-FACED CARPENTER
laid out on the grass gave a moan of pain. Ruso had not revealed the severity of his injuries to the man, nor to his hysterical girlfriend, who turned out to be Lydia, Tilla’s patient from yesterday. The tiny bundle of cloth she was clutching had the sort of persistent rasping cry that set one’s teeth on edge. Finally the man himself had summoned the strength to tell her to go away and see to the child: He would be fine. Ruso, knowing the state of the leg hidden beneath the blanket and suspecting further internal injuries, could not imagine that he really believed it.

“We’ll get you down to the sick bay at the fort,” he promised, relieved to see that the man he had dispatched with a message to the fort by the river was already weaving his way back up through the jammed traffic on the road.

The news was not good. The sick bay had flooded during the storm. The patients had been evacuated. The building was full of orderlies padding about in mud with mops and buckets.

Ruso checked the state of the leg again. The bleeding was more or less under control, but the man would not survive the journey across the hills to Coria without surgery.

He helped the stretcher bearers maneuver the carpenter across the slippery remains of the damp bridge, then strode ahead up the road, examining the line of vehicles waiting to cross in the opposite direction. Picking out an empty carriage that had the luxury of suspension, he commandeered it with the optimistic promise to the driver that the army would pay the owner well for his trouble. The vehicle was maneuvered out of the line and parked farther up the hill away from the traffic. One of the stretcher bearers lit a fire at the roadside.

Ruso began to lay out the instruments: needle and thread, hooks, scalpel, cautery. . . . Finally alerted to the enormity of what was happening by the appearance of the bone saw, the driver had to have his objections quieted by the promise of more cash and an imminent flogging if he refused to cooperate. The carpenter was in turn quieted with mandrake and held steady by two less-than-confident stretcher bearers as Ruso cleaned up the mess that had been a leg and prepared for the drastic surgery that might save its owner.

Later, as the carriage rumbled up out of the river valley in the direction of Coria, it held four men in addition to the disgruntled driver. Ruso was tending the carpenter, whose truncated thigh was now neatly sewn over with a flap of skin hidden by a temporary dressing. Behind them, a bandager plucked from the ranks of the Twentieth was looking after the unfortunate slave who had been in charge of the wagon when it ran out of control.

“Not long now,” Ruso promised the carpenter as a particularly nasty pothole caused the man to groan. “We’ll have you properly patched up in the hospital.”

The slave’s injuries were less serious. He had leaped clear just as his vehicle tipped over, and escaped with cuts and bruises only to find himself chained and beaten up by the soldiers who found him weeping beside his fallen animals. Postumus had asked Ruso to get him away from the scene before somebody killed him.

The slave had tears welling in his swollen eyes, but to Ruso’s surprise they were neither of pity for himself nor sorrow for the trouble he had caused. “Poor old Speedy and Star,” he was mumbling through broken teeth. “Poor little Holly. Never a bit of trouble. Even old Acorn. Poor old boys. They didn’t deserve to go like that. I wouldn’t have let them go like that, sirs.”