Persona Non Grata (2 page)

2

T
HE LEGIONARIES WERE still in full kit but presumably off duty, since they were swaggering down the street outside the fort with the belligerent cheer of men who had been sampling the local brew. Ruso, never keen to meet one loud drunk in possession of a sword, let alone five, walked past and ignored them. The light was fading and there was hardly anyone else about. The trumpet would sound the curfew in a minute. If this bunch didn’t get themselves in through the fort gates soon, their centurion would be out to round them up.

He was halfway up the wooden steps to his lodgings when he heard the cry. He paused. The raucous laughter told him some silly girl hadn’t had the sense to steer clear. The gang had found a victim.

The night guards who patrolled the streets to frighten off scavenging wolves and marauding Britons would not be on duty yet, and none of the civilians living out here would want to tackle a gang of legionaries bent on mischief. Ruso didn’t want to tackle them either, but he supposed it was his duty to go and take a look. He clattered up the steps, assured Tilla, who was waiting for him, that he would be back to eat in a minute, and left before she could ask where he was going or—worse— insist on joining him.

The soldiers were not difficult to find: He only had to follow the sound of overexcited young men urging one another to do stupid things. Instead of making their way back to barracks, they had drifted down toward the river. Despite the noise—or perhaps because of it— Ruso seemed to be the only other person on the streets. The snack bar had put up its shutters for the night. The tenants of the nearby houses had chosen to bar their doors and mind their own business.

The men had their victim pinned against the wooden parapet of the bridge. None of them seemed to notice the army medical officer making his way toward them through the rough grass of the riverbank. As he drew closer he was surprised to see that the small figure was not a woman, but a native boy of about nine or ten. His captors, jostling around him like crows squabbling over a corpse, were accusing him variously of thieving, of spying, and of being a sniveling little British bastard.

Ruso strode up onto the bridge and adopted a friendly tone for “Where did you find this one?” just as a couple of the men hoisted the boy up onto the parapet, seized his ankles, and tipped him backward. The boy’s shrieks of terror provoked more laughter as they dangled him headfirst above the rocky bed of the river. Someone shouted above the din, “Shut up or we’ll drop you!”

Ruso vaguely recalled a couple of the faces but could not name them. Perhaps they had been patients. There were thousands of troops in the north of Britannia and there had been so many casualties at the height of the rebellion that he could remember only a blurred succession of mangled bodies. He raised his voice. “What’s going on here?”

The shrieking stopped. There was some confused shuffling as the men realized they were being addressed by an officer. One of them attempted a salute, with limited success.

Finally the man holding the nearest foot announced, “We caught a spy.”

The man’s upper lip was distorted by a fresh red scar that reached to the corner of his eye. Ruso recalled stitching one very much like it. Probably neither of them had been in a fit state to remember the other.

He glanced over the parapet. The captive was a skinny creature whose ragged tunic had fallen over his face. Tails of mousy hair were dangling just clear of the water. “That’s a spy?”

“What’s he doing snooping around at this hour, then?” demanded the scarred one.

“Let’s get him up and ask him.”

The man looked askance at Ruso, as if he was wary of being tricked. A voice behind him hissed, “Let him up, mate. You’ll get us all in trouble.”

Ruso said, “He’s only a child.”

“They use kids,” said the man.

“And women,” chipped in somebody else.

“Yeah, kids and women. Don’t ya?” The man gave the bare foot a shake, as if its own er was responsible for the unsporting practices of the British rebels.

The child responded with a howl.

“He’s frightened enough now,” said Ruso. “Get him back up.”

From somewhere behind the man came, “Come on, mate, that’s enough!” to which he hissed, “Shut up, I’m dealing with it!” He turned back to Ruso. “We’re not finished yet. It’s no good being soft on ’em. You think he’s scared? This is nothing. If you knew what his lot did to our lads on the pay wagon—”

“I saw exactly what they did to the lads on the pay wagon,” said Ruso, not wanting to be reminded of it. He had ridden out with the rescue expedition in the forlorn hope that some of the victims of the ambush would still be able to use medical help.

“You’d best stay out of this, sir,” suggested one of the men Ruso had seen before somewhere.

“He can’t,” prompted the man holding the other foot. “He’s got a native girlfriend.”

Ruso squared his shoulders. “My name is Gaius Petreius Ruso, senior medical officer with the Twentieth Legion, and I’m taking that Briton into custody. Lift him back onto the bridge. That’s an order.”

“We already got him where we want him,” growled the man.

“Now,”
said Ruso. At that moment the blare of the trumpet from the fort announced the curfew.

It was never clear whether they dropped the boy on purpose or by accident. One second his arms were dangling above the water, the next there was a scream and a splash and the thin body began to slide downstream between the rocks while his captors shouted at him to swim and quarreled about whose fault it was and who should rescue him.

The last thing Ruso wanted to do was haul several none-too-sober men out of the river. Ordering two to fetch help and the rest to stay where they were, he placed one hand on the parapet and vaulted down onto the bank.

The river god was kinder to the boy than the army had been: His body had wedged against a boulder and was being held there by the force of the flow. Ruso stepped into the rush of peat brown water that, even in late July, still carried the cold of northern hills. It was not deep but it was moving swiftly and he felt the tug against his legs. The only way to reach the boy was to wade out to where he was marooned. Ruso slithered and splashed, trying not to lose his footing on the slippery rocks, occasionally bending to grab at the top of a boulder to keep his balance. Yells of encouragement and advice came from the bridge. Ahead of him, the boy lifted his head and began to move.

“Stay where you are!” Ruso shouted over the sound of the water, afraid the child would dislodge himself and be swept farther down. There was a channel at least four feet wide between him and the boy. Now that he was closer, he could see that the river, thwarted in other directions by the boulders, flowed through the gap fast and smooth and deep. A tentative step told him that as soon as he let go, the force of the water would sweep him off to be battered against the rocks downstream.

He should have told those men to fetch a rope. He turned to call to the others, but they were so busy shouting suggestions, bawling, “Man in the river!” and warning him to be careful that nobody was listening. The boy called out something in British and tried to pull himself up. The only effect was to shift him closer to the deep channel.

“Don’t move!” called Ruso, holding up one hand in a “stop!” gesture. He added, “I’ll come and get you,” with more confidence than he felt. He could make his way back to the bank, cross the bridge, and try from the other side, but the boy might be swept away in the meantime. He could try to get a grip in a crack in the rock this side, and reach across . . .

It almost ended in disaster. He managed to haul himself back and clung to the nearest boulder, gasping with the effort and the cold, vaguely aware of more cries from the bridge as the boy’s body slid closer to the channel. He dragged himself upright and struggled to unfasten his belt with stiff fingers. It was not the form of rescue he would have chosen, but it was the boy’s only chance. He pulled the belt tight around his wrist, prayed the buckle would hold, gripped the rock behind him again, and flung the loose end of the belt toward the boy.

The child managed to grab it on the third attempt. “Wrap it around your wrist!” yelled Ruso, hoping the boy was stronger than he looked and waiting for him to get a good hold with both hands. He was about to shout, “Ready?” when the boy launched himself into the flood and was instantly swept down the gap. Ruso felt the jerk as the belt tightened. The force of the water on the child’s body dragged at his arm. His grip on the rock began to slide, and he felt himself being pulled into the flow.

Suddenly there was a hand clamped around his arm. Someone else was dragging at his tunic, wrenching him back up and out of the power of the water. He felt the blessed scrape of dry rock beneath him.

Miraculously, the child had managed to keep hold. He scrabbled up onto the boulder, then got to his feet and fled across the exposed rocks while Ruso’s rescuers were still congratulating one another and telling him he didn’t want to go in the river by himself like that, sir— what was he thinking?

If they had left him to recover at his own pace, the accident would never have happened. But his rescuers seemed determined to make up for their earlier misdemeanors. Having pulled him to safety, they now decided to form a human chain across the rocks and hustle him to dry land as fast as possible. The moment he attempted to stand on feet numb with cold, the nearest man grabbed him and pushed him toward the bank. The movement pulled Ruso off balance. His foot caught an uneven ledge of rock, bent sideways, and gave way beneath him in an explosion of pain.

3

B
ROKEN METATARSAL? ” SUGGESTED Valens, leaning farther over his colleague’s misshapen foot to view it from a different angle.

“I think I felt it go.” Ruso, whose rescuers had carried him up to the fort hospital as if they were heroes, shifted himself to a more comfortable position. The movement sent fresh waves of pain crashing up the outside of his leg.

“Interesting. You’ve probably done a lot of other damage as well. What happens if you try to put weight on it?”

“I don’t want to find out.”

“Well, you know the drill.”

Ruso sighed. “This can’t be happening.”

“No food to night, fluid diet till the swelling goes down, and you’ll have to go easy on it for a good six weeks. No wine, of course.”

Ruso eyed the vanishing dimple that had recently been his ankle.

“Could you try and sound a bit less cheerful about it?”

“Well there’s no point in both of us being miserable, is there? Want me to help you hop down to the dressing station?”

“Who’s on duty?”

Hearing the name, Ruso winced. “Bring me the stuff and I’ll do it myself.”

“Poppy?” offered Valens.

“Lots.” There was no point in bothering with bravery.

Valens returned a few minutes later with a tray bearing a large bowl of cheap wine mixed with oil, and a smaller cup. Reaching for a wad of linen from the shelf, he said, “So tell me. How exactly did you manage to fall in the river and break your foot at the same time?”

Ruso took a drink of bitter poppy from the cup. “Long story,” he explained. “But I’ll be making a full report, believe me. There are five men who are going to be very—” He stopped. “Oh, gods. I told Tilla I’d be back in a minute. She won’t know where I am.”

“Ah, yes,” said Valens, dipping the linen in the bowl. “The lovely Tilla. I should have said. She came to the gate a while ago. Your dinner’s gone cold.” Valens wrung out the compress. “And she’s been called out on midwifery duty and she’s not best pleased that some of our boys threw the messenger in the river before he got to her. So you might as well find a bed here to night because there’s nobody at home to kiss it better.”

Ruso reached forward and grabbed the compress. “Let me do that,” he insisted, draping it gingerly over the swollen foot and wrapping it around. So that was why the boy had been lurking around the houses at dusk.

“One more thing,” said Valens, reaching for a bandage. “She left a letter for you.”

Since Tilla could neither read nor write, this seemed unlikely.

“From your brother,” explained Valens, nodding toward a sealed writing tablet behind Ruso on the desk.

The word
urgent
scrawled across the outside of the letter suggested that the latest financial crisis at home was even worse than usual. Ruso snapped the twine, flipped open the folded wooden leaves, and braced himself to face the details.

To his surprise, the letter said very little. On the inside of one leaf, in his brother’s writing, was the date on which it had been composed: the Kalends of June. On the other, the briefest of messages:

Lucius to Gaius.

Come home, brother.

Ruso frowned over it for a moment, then passed it to Valens. “What do you make of that?”

Valens studied the carefully inscribed letters and observed, “Your brother is a man of few words.”

“But what am I supposed to do about them?”

“Go home, I suppose.”

Ruso grunted. “Hardly convenient, is it?”

Valens stepped back to admire his bandaging. “It could be arranged,” he said.

4

T
HIS IS RIDICULOUS, ” growled Ruso, eyeing the cup of milk he had just insisted on pouring for himself and wondering how he was going to carry it across to the bed so he could sit down and enjoy his late breakfast. He had already discovered this morning that since the lodgings he shared with Tilla were upstairs, the only safe way to reach them was to hook the crutches over one arm and hitch himself upward on his bottom.

She stepped forward and took the cup. “Go and sit.”

Ruso adjusted his grip on the crutches, assessed the distance to the bed, and swung across to stand in front of it. Then he hopped and clumped until he had turned around, stuck his ban daged foot out in front of him, and collapsed backward onto the blankets.

“Gods and fishes!” he muttered, dropping the crutches on the floor and swiveling to swing his feet up onto the bed, “What am I supposed to do for six weeks like this?”

Tilla handed him the cup and retrieved the crutches. “Go home.”

“It’s too far,” he explained, realizing a Briton would have no concept of that sort of distance. “The south of Gaul’s over a thousand miles away, Tilla. Imagine how long it takes to get back down to Deva from here. Then imagine you’ve only done about a tenth of the trip.”

Tilla yawned and sat beside him on the bed with her back propped against the wall. He realized she must have slept even less than he had last night. “I know how to do adding up,” she said. “What I do not know is why your brother says to come home.”

Ruso retrieved the letter from beneath the pillow and examined the leaves on both sides. The outsides bore nothing beyond the usual to-and-from addresses and the alarming URGENT inked in large letters thickened with several strokes of the pen.

Lucius’s letters usually held either a desperate request for money, or a fresh announcement of a happy arrival for him and his wife, Cassiana. Sometimes both. There were times when Ruso had wondered whether the family fortunes—precarious at the best of times— would finally be ruined not by demands to repay his late father’s massive borrowings, but by the need to feed and clothe all his nephews and nieces.

Lucius’s requests for cash were always couched in careful terms, lest they should fall into the wrong hands: the sort of hands whose owner would blab about one creditor to another. He usually gave just enough clues about the latest crisis to spur Ruso into doing something about it. But this latest message was exceptionally cryptic.

Was the date a code? Was there something significant about the Kalends of June? If so, he could not think what it was. He turned the leaves upside down to see if there was some message concealed in the script that was only visible from the opposite direction. He tried warming the letter over a lamp flame in search of secret ink. He succeeded only in scorching the wood.

“It’s no good,” he conceded. “I don’t know what it means.”

“It means,” said Tilla, “come home.”

“I wouldn’t get there before mid-September,” he pointed out. “By the time I wanted to come back I’d be lucky to find a captain willing to take a ship out. I might not get back till the seas open again.” He lifted his foot in the air. “This isn’t going to earn me that much leave.”

“It is a very big bandage. Valens can tell lies about what is underneath.”

“But I’ve got patients to see, men to train . . .”

“Other doctors can see the patients and train the men. There is not so much for you to do now, and you have a broken leg.”

“Foot.”

She did not reply.
There is not so much for you to do now
was one of the rare occasions on which either of them had mentioned the army’s apparent success in crushing a native rebellion far more ferocious than anyone had expected. The casualty figures had been kept secret, but while Ruso was on duty behind the battlefront she must have seen the wagonloads of Roman wounded arriving back at the fort. More than once during the worst of the fighting she had disappeared for days at a time and returned with sunken eyes and dried blood beneath her fingernails. He had asked no questions. That way, she did not have to pretend she had been away delivering babies and he did not have to pretend he believed her.

As if to reassure him, she said, “The baby was a girl. Born at first light. She is very small, but I think she will live.”

“What did this lot pay you with?”

Tilla’s smile was triumphant. “Guess.”

He glanced around the bare little room. Tilla’s skills as a midwife had been less in demand since the start of the rebellion. Most of the sensible locals had fled at the height of the troubles last year, dragging their wide-eyed children by the hand, burdened with cooking pots and blankets and hens in baskets. Those who remained paid her in whatever way they could manage. Eggs and apples were always useful. The first smelly fleece had been bartered for a new pair of boots; the second was still stashed away in a sack under the bed. There were no new offerings on display.

“It’s not another goat, is it?”

“No, but I can buy a goat if I want. Look!” She untied her purse. Shiny copper coins cascaded onto the bed. “All earned by working!” she added.

He was pleased. Tilla had never fully subscribed to his own view that it was wrong to help oneself to other people’s property, but at least she seemed to have learned to respect it. The money was only small change, but he picked up one of the coins to admire it all the same. Within seconds all thoughts of congratulation had gone. He said, “Oh, hell.”

“No, they are real.”

“I don’t doubt they’re real.” He passed her the coin. “Look at the back of it. Not Hadrian’s head, the other side.”

“Is that supposed to be a woman?”

“It says ‘Britannia.’ Have you ever seen a coin like that before?”

“No.”

Neither had he. It was very obviously fresh from the mint, and the only way it could have reached here was on the ambushed wagon.

He cleared his throat. “It’s my duty to ask who gave you this money, Tilla.”

There was no need to explain: The news of the stolen pay chest had been impossible to suppress. Finally she said, “What if I do not tell you?”

He had to say it. “If you refuse to tell me, it will be my duty to report this to HQ.”

A cart with a squeaking wheel was passing outside the window. When the sound had faded down the street she said, “I will not tell you.”

“I never thought you would.” He reached for the crutches. “I’m going to talk to Valens. When I get back, either you or that money will have to be gone. If you’re still here, we’ll start packing to go home.”