Terra Incognita (31 page)

Surely she would find something better than that to say about him?

Curled up together like kittens.
The thought made him shudder.

He rolled over. He must think about something else.

Despite his bold assurances to Albanus, he did not know who or what the strangely invincible Stag Man was, nor how long the army could keep on playing down the subversion he was raising.

Who had murdered the trumpeter? He didn’t know that either. Tomorrow, if he couldn’t get Thessalus to retract his confession, he would declare him insane. The way would be clear for Rianorix to be arrested and questioned again about the names of his fellow rebels. It was no worse than he deserved. If one believed in curses, then logically cursing a man was as bad as doing him physical harm.

Tilla’s voice came back to him.
I know this, my lord. But he did not do it.

Then he should have kept his mouth shut at the bar. And he should have kept his hands off Tilla. Metellus had investigated everyone else. Rianorix was the only logical suspect.

There was, however, the illogical one. Thessalus, the man who had been out all night and could not explain where—but did know how the murder had been committed.

Ruso had never met anyone quite like Thessalus before. He gave up his time to run a free clinic for people who largely didn’t do what he told them. He was a good doctor but was so doped up with poppy that he was incapable of defending his patients against the laziness of his staff. He put up with a ghastly deputy and even took him out on his birthday, and then—according to him—committed a grisly and apparently motiveless murder in a back alley. It made no sense. Yet like a lot of his apparent nonsense about triangles and fish, there might be some sort of meaning if one could piece together the background.

Ruso rolled back, put his hands behind his head, and stared at the invisible rafters.

Thessalus had not chosen an easy calling. Only the sick would be truly eager to meet a man who spent his days with the ulcerated and unlovely, poking about in the dark and stinking recesses of humanity that most people would prefer to forget about. Ruso sometimes wondered why he had taken it up himself, since he frequently found his patients drove him more to exasperation than compassion.

Thessalus had evidently found it too much of a strain. Working with Gambax would not have helped. Unable to bring about the miracles demanded of him daily and possibly asked to collude in torture, a kindly and well-meaning man could easily find himself unable to sleep. So he would take a carefully controlled dose of something to lift himself above his worries. He would tell himself it would steady his nerves. Indeed, it would do so. He would take another dose the next night, believing he needed the rest and would wake refreshed and a better healer the next morning. He would tell himself he could stop at any time, and would always be on the verge of stopping. But knowing that “any time” was receding farther into the distance, he would come to distrust and despise himself. He would also begin to need more and more medicine to achieve the same effect. In fact he might need it merely to achieve the levels of calm he had enjoyed before he had started down this path.

All the time, beneath the false calm of the medicine, a worm would be burrowing. A little worm of doubt and shame, one that would whisper in his ear that he was not quite in control of what he was doing. Indeed, there might well be inexplicable gaps in time when he could not remember what he had done. Sooner or later his confused and guilty mind, already filled with gory images from surgery, would latch onto some terrible deed and convince him that he had carried it out. That he had come home with Felix’s blood on his hands. That the only way to avoid execution was to pretend his mind was completely gone and he was not responsible for his actions.

Thessalus had already ended his contract with the army because he knew he could not resist the poppy and he knew he was not fit to practice under its influence. In a way, that was an honorable course of action. Many other men in the same position would have hung on as long as possible and pretended all was well.

But how did he know about the head?
Only four people knew about that. Audax, the prefect, Metellus, and himself. Five people including the murderer.

Ruso sighed. In the darkness, everything was too tangled. He wished he could talk it over with— No. He was not going to think about her.

“Is that Ruso?” said a voice from the direction of the couch. “Please. I need poppy.”

He said, “Tell me where the head is.”

“Haven’t you found it?”

Ruso sat up. “Tell me where it is, and I’ll believe you did it.”

“I remember looking into his eyes.” The voice was unsteady. “I remember asking him where he wanted me to put it.”

“You don’t know.”

“After that, nothing. Until I was back here with the blood—”

“Yes, we’ve been through that. You don’t know, because you didn’t do it. Who told you what happened?”

“No one. I only know what I can remember.”

“I have been trying to think this through logically,” said Ruso. “I realize poppy tears might confuse you. I suppose too much might give you bad dreams, or make you frightened or sick, and a big overdose would finish you off altogether. But I can’t find any record of poppy making patients violent. You were sensible enough on that night to bring Gambax back from Susanna’s. I imagine you were sensible enough to know that he wasn’t fit to be left in charge of the infirmary. But despite that, you went out. You explained quite clearly to the gate guards that you’d had a call to a civilian emergency. Emergency calls are the sort of things people remember. They like to think they’re helping. Yet I haven’t been able to track that message down.”

“I’ve told you—”

“I know what you’ve told me. Let me pass on what I’ve been told by somebody else. That Felix deserved to be punished and you were the instrument of the gods.”

Thessalus let out a long sigh of relief. “That explains it!”

“Of course it doesn’t explain it!” snapped Ruso. “I’m tired of being made a fool of, Thessalus.” He threw back the blanket. “Apart from thinking you’re Julius Caesar, you’ve demonstrated just about every symptom of madness in the book. Of course you have. You’ve read the books. What was it you said to Ingenuus that persuaded him to sneak medicine in here for you?”

“Please. Poppy is the only thing that works.”

Ruso sprang to his feet. “Enough of this don’t-touch-me rubbish about curing people by talking to them. You’re going to get up, and I’m going to fetch a couple of lamps. Then you’re going to get undressed and we’re going to have a proper look at exactly what’s wrong with you.”

“There’s no need,” came the reply. “I can tell you. But you must swear not to tell anyone else.”

By the light of the feeble lamp Ruso measured out a dose of poppy in wine and handed it to Thessalus. “That should ease it a little.”

Thessalus nodded his thanks. When he had downed the drink, he rested back on the couch. “When I was an apprentice,” he said, “I discovered I had quite a few fatal diseases.”

“So did I.”

“But then you learn to stop looking, don’t you? So when this began—” he indicated his emaciated body—“I told myself I was just tired.

Overworking. Out of balance.”

Ruso nodded. There was no need to comment on the injustice of it. Thessalus was only twenty-four years old. He had already tried every treatment Ruso would have suggested. “If you’d told me the truth in the first place instead of babbling on about fish and triangles, I might have been more helpful.”

“I kept it quiet because I was afraid they would discharge me, and I needed the money. Gambax just thinks I’m in love with the poppy tears. I had to tell Ingenuus because I was not brave enough to face the pain.”

“He won’t talk. He wouldn’t even tell me.”

“Have you ever thought,” continued Thessalus, “how useful it would be if each of us was born knowing the time of our death? How many different choices we would make?”

“We might waste our lives trying to change our fate.”

“I think we might spend them more wisely.”

“You have done a great deal of good,” Ruso assured him. “Men are alive now who would not be. The clinic patients speak highly of you.”

“All of them?”

“Most. You know how it is.”

Thessalus chuckled, then eased himself into a more comfortable position. “You have been good to me,” he said. “Do me one last honor. Make them believe me.”

“But
I
don’t believe you. Nobody does. You didn’t do it.”

“My last wish is that I should be found guilty of this crime and that the life of an innocent native should be spared.”

“But—”

“My liver is diseased—which I forbid you to tell them—but my mind is quite sound. If you testify otherwise, you will be lying.”

“Everyone I meet here seems to want me to tell some sort of lie. And always for the best possible reasons.”

“I’m sorry, Ruso. I know you mean well. But you’re so determined to do the right thing.”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“You don’t understand what the right thing is. Which makes you dangerous.”

“And you’re a man with nothing to lose. Which you seem to think gives you the right to make a fool out of me and everyone else.”

“Nothing to lose?” repeated Thessalus. His hands rose to cover his face. His shoulders began to heave. For a moment Ruso thought he was crying, then he realized the movement was silent laughter. “Nothing to lose!” repeated Thessalus. “The gods have given me all I ever wanted, and now you’re trying to help them snatch it out of my grasp!”

“Then don’t just lie there, man!” snapped Ruso. “I’m the only one who’s in a position to help you. Tell me the truth!”

52

W
HAT WOULD YOU
think,” Thessalus asked Ruso, “if a man were taken sick and died, and you discovered the doctor who failed to cure that man had been secretly visiting his wife?”

Ruso winced. “I would think that doctor should have referred the case to a colleague.”

“Even if that colleague were Gambax?”

“Even Gambax. He’s not bad at his job, just lazy.” The far end of Thessalus’s blanket began to slide onto the floor. Ruso reached across to the couch and rearranged it. “How’s the pain?”

“Easing,” said Thessalus. “You’re right, I should have sent for Gambax. Everything is so obvious now. But I thought people would wonder why I was sending for help to treat a simple fever.”

“Even so.”

Thessalus’s smile was bitter. “Do you know, Ruso, even as he was slipping away, I really managed to convince myself there wouldn’t be a problem? I had genuinely done my best. I wrote up all the notes afterward. I thought if nobody knew that I had been seeing his wife . . . it was Gambax who worked it out. I think he must have wondered why I insisted on sourcing the herbs myself instead of letting him do it.”

“You’ve been seeing the herb woman? That’s where you went that night?”

“I’ve been seeing the herb woman,” agreed Thessalus. “Veldicca. Rianorix’s sister.”

Ruso stared at him. At last something made some sort of sense. He said, “You’re dying anyway. You’ve confessed to save your girlfriend’s brother.”

They had met at the clinic, where Thessalus had guessed that his patient’s “accidental” injuries had been inflicted, not by a fall as she claimed, but by a fist. It was not her first visit, and it would not be her last. His fury had risen with each successive “accident”: each fresh crop of cuts and bruises meted out by a husband to whom he dared say nothing lest he make the bullying worse.

He claimed he could not remember how it had started. Perhaps a look. Perhaps a brushing of one hand against another as she laid out the herbs she was now delivering weekly for his clinic, and for which he was overpaying her out of his own salary. He did not ask what she did with the money. She did not tell him until much later that the man she called her husband was demanding the coins from her at the end of each market day.

The secret she kept from Thessalus, though, was as nothing compared to the secret she kept from her husband. And when the child was born with dark hair and its eyes turned the color of peat, she and Thessalus celebrated in secret. In secret, because although the husband was dead by this time, they were still in danger.

“Gambax is lazy, but he’s not stupid. He saw Veldicca at the market one morning with our daughter and came straight back and told me he would do me a favor and keep quiet about my so-called murder of her husband.”

“In exchange for what?”

“He never made that entirely clear. He just started taking time off whenever he wanted. Ignoring orders when it suited him. That’s why I didn’t ask to renew my contract here.”

“You were planning to make a fresh start together?”

“We had to. I knew that even if I could prove I hadn’t killed the husband, Gambax would say Veldicca had poisoned him with her herbs.”

“Did she?”

Thessalus yawned. “Of course not.”

“How do you know?”

“Ruso, don’t you trust
anybody
?”

“Not women.”

“Well, she didn’t, I promise you.” Thessalus tried to shift into a more comfortable position. “Of course, the irony is that we made all these plans expecting to live forever. Or at least for the foreseeable future. We would move south and marry in a town where nobody knew us. It wouldn’t matter that Veldicca’s family had disowned her for mixing with the army, because I would be setting up a practice that would support us both. But it matters now.”

“She’ll be left here with no family and no support.”

“And possibly no infirmary to supply, either. You’ve seen what’s going on around here. The governor will report back to Rome and Hadrian will have to do something. He might well pull out like he has in the east.”

“Or he might send a lot more troops.”

“Whatever happens, Veldicca and my daughter will need friends. I don’t want her having to take in some other lout in a uniform just to survive. And actually her brother isn’t a bad man.”