Persona Non Grata (32 page)

79

H
IRING TRANSPORT TO get home was not easy on the day of the Games, and by the time Tilla helped the Medicus clamber up into the only carriage that was prepared to leave town at this hour, the sun had gone and the color was draining away from the day. The driver, who had insisted on payment in advance, whipped the reluctant horses into a trot. Tilla was not sorry to speed past the long rows of tombstones leading away from the Augustus Gate. The area looked distinctly unwelcoming and there was an autumnal chill in the air.

The Medicus seemed surprisingly happy now that the medicine had taken effect. He was lying across the seat with his feet halfway up the wall of the carriage and his head resting on her lap. It was not a dignified position for either of them, and Tilla was glad there were few people around to see it.

She ran a thumb along his unshaven jaw. She wished she could tell the driver to carry on into the night: to take them both away to somewhere private, far from his family and their parched land with its hideous love of cruelty. She wished they had never left Britannia. Even if he wanted her here, how could she bear to stay?

The Medicus stirred in her lap, gave a murmur of contentment, and said something that sounded like, “All home now.”

She laid a hand across his forehead. “Sleep,” she murmured as the carriage jolted them down the road toward the farm.

Suddenly his eyes opened. “Why did they come here?” he asked, looking up at her as if they had been carrying on a conversation. Perhaps he had been dreaming.

She said, “Who?”

“Calvus and Stilo.”

“To visit their friend Severus to plan more stealing, I suppose,” she said. “Or perhaps they met him on the road to your house and poisoned him. Go back to sleep.”

The eyes drifted shut. The carriage jolted on. Tilla closed her own eyes and felt her head beginning to nod.

“But after he was dead, why did they stay?”

Tilla, whose mind had wandered back to other journeys in Britannia, had to remind herself who the Medicus was talking about. “To find out who killed him?” she suggested. “What did they say to that fat man on the balcony?”

The Medicus explained that a woman looking like Claudia had bought poisoned honey. “Ennia must have overheard us talking and told Calvus and Stilo, or whatever their names were.”

“You see? I told you it was the old wife who did it.”

“She says it wasn’t, and I think I believe her.”

She sighed. Even now, he could not face the truth.

“Why did they care?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Why did Calvus and Stilo care who killed Severus?”

“Perhaps they liked him and they wanted to avenge him,” she suggested. “Perhaps they wanted to make some money from finding the poisoner. Why are you lying down if your mind is working and you are not asleep?”

He snuggled against her. “I can think better down here. Listen. Even if they did like him, it isn’t their duty to avenge him, it’s his family’s. And why would they risk hanging around, knowing that somebody might work out who they were at any moment? It makes no sense. Who’s to say the Gabinii would have paid them for helping, anyway? Besides, they’d already got the money Severus had helped them swindle out of Probus for the ship.”

She shrugged. “Who cares? They are just bad men.”

He wriggled, pulled himself up to sit properly, and peered out of the side of the carriage. “Where are we?”

“On the way back to your home.”

He was upright now, leaning forward, calling, “Stop!” to the driver.

She grabbed the neck of his tunic and pulled him back. “What are you doing? This is the middle of the road!”

“Stop!” he yelled louder, grabbing one of the borrowed crutches and banging on the floor. The driver allowed the horses to slow and called, “Something the matter, boss?”

The Medicus was peering out into the dusk. “Turn around. Take the turn a hundred paces back, uphill between the vineyards.”

“The senator’s place? You sure about that?”

“No!” called Tilla. “He is ill. I am taking him home.”

“I want to go to the senator’s estate,” insisted Ruso.

“Make your minds up!” came the voice from in front. “I’m not driving around all night in the dark. One or the other. Quick, or you get out and walk.”

“The estate.”

With some grumbling, the driver maneuvered the vehicle around in a tight semicircle and set off back the way they had come.

Tilla said, “You are going to see the old wife.”

“I need to make sure she’s safe.”

Tilla sighed and leaned against the back of the carriage. “Still, you think you are the only one who can save her. She is making a fool of you.”

“Possibly,” he said, “but I don’t think Calvus and Stilo ever came here for a social visit. I think they came here to find something, and they’ve been looking for it ever since. And if I’m right, they won’t want to leave without it.”

80

T
HE CARRIAGE WAS already disappearing into the dusk when the Medicus rapped on the gates of the big estate for a second time. After a moment Tilla pointed out, “Nothing is happening.” He said, “There should at least be a dog.”

“Why would this Calvus and Stilo come here when everyone knows they are liars and there will be men looking for them?”

The Medicus seemed to be wondering that himself. Perhaps his mind was still lost inside the pain-fighting medicine. Perhaps this really had just been an excuse to come and visit the old wife. She wished she had insisted on overruling him about the carriage. Still, if he really thought they could catch the men who had murdered Cass’s brother . . . “Bang on the gate.”

“No,” he said, fiddling with the latch and pushing at the studded wood with one shoulder. “I don’t want the whole house hold to hear.”

She could not resist a sigh of exasperation. “Very good. The driver has gone back to town. Everyone here has locked the doors and gone to bed early and you do not want to wake them up. So now we have a long walk home.”

“Not yet,” he said, pushing harder at the gate. It gave way slowly, as if there were something heavy behind it. He bent to examine what he had just pushed out of the way.

“It’s the gatekeeper.” He was feeling for a pulse when she tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. The dog lay motionless, surrounded by a dark stain. No wonder it had failed to bark.

While the Medicus tended to the injured man she unsheathed her knife and crept out of the far end of the gate house.

She stopped dead.

The place was full of tall people.

She ducked back under the gatehouse. Her heart continued to thud furiously even as her brain registered her mistake. The people were not tall. They were on plinths. They were statues. She was entering a grand garden.

She took a couple of deep breaths, then moved forward again. On the left of the garden was an expanse of water and beyond it, the dark hulk of a house. She hesitated, chewing her lower lip. The Medicus had not bothered to tell her what the false investigators were looking for. All he had said was that he wanted to make sure the old wife was safe. That would be interesting. How much danger should a woman leave an old wife in before it was necessary to help her?

It was a question she would have liked to debate around the fire late one night with her own people. Instead, she had a more pressing problem. The wife would be in the house. The house was reached by the paths, and the paths were deep gravel.

She could walk quickly toward the house, or she could walk quietly. Since she needed to do both, there was only one way to do it. Tilla veered sideways, lifted her skirt above her knees, and sank one foot into the soil of a flowerbed. The scent of crushed rosemary wafted around her. She smiled to herself as she marched past the pond. The old wife would not be able to complain: The barbarian was here on the orders of the Medicus, and they were coming to save her from the murderers who called themselves Calvus and Stilo. Although why he thought they would be here was a mystery.

She crept across the gravel that separated the last flowerbed from the house and tried to peer around the shutters of a side window. Everything inside was dark. The next window was the same, and the third. It did not seem right. There should have been servants moving about. Lamps being lit.

When she returned, the Medicus had laid the gatekeeper on his side. She whispered, “There is nobody there. Will he live?”

“I think so. Are you sure?”

“No. I cannot see through walls. Do you want to go in?”

“Not yet.”

When he did not suggest anything else she said, “What is happening?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I am not going to stand here all night. What are this Calvus and Stilo looking for?”

“Money.”

“There is plenty of money to steal back in Arelate,” she pointed out. “Why come here?”

“They’d already stolen it,” he said. “Or rather, Severus stole it for them.”

This did not make a great deal of sense, but he seemed to have lost interest in explaining. He was pointing to the shapes of what must be farm buildings looming on the far side of the garden. “I thought I heard something over there.”

“Walk through the flowers,” she told him. “Not on the path.”

“What?”

“Otherwise you might as well shout, Hello, here we come.”

The Medicus followed her, lifting the crutches, plunging them down through the plants and swinging his feet to land heavily farther forward. There would be a fine mess in the morning, and it would be obvious who had made it.

The gate that led through the garden wall to the farmyard had been left open. Trying to peer ahead without being seen, she could make out an empty cart and the complicated shape of some sort of wooden harvesting machine under a shelter on the far side. She held her breath as something moved in the machinery, then the sleek black shape of a cat jumped down into the yard and melted away into the shadows. Somewhere, an animal snorted and stamped.

The Medicus was about to go through the gateway when there was a muffled burst of laughter from inside one of the buildings that opened onto the yard. Tilla pulled at his tunic to drag him back. “Was that what you heard?”

“No,” he whispered. “That’s just the slaves in the bunkhouse.”

The slaves did not sound as though they knew there were murderers about. Nor did they yet know that there was another pair of intruders sneaking around the yard in the dark. Once they found out, they would have no trouble catching the one on crutches and beating him up in the name of the senator.

“This is not a good idea,” she whispered.

“I know,” he agreed, “but I haven’t got any others.”

“If we do find those men, what are we going to do?”

“I’m glad you said ‘we.’ ”

“I have to. You are not much use on your own.” She pushed past him and slipped in through the gateway. “Stay there.”

She heard the crutches tap on the cobblestones as he hissed, “Wait for me!”

She was waving a hand to tell him to stay where he was when she heard the scream. Then a man’s voice. Then some sort of muffled thump.

“In that building over there.” She jumped when she realized that the Medicus had moved close enough to whisper in her ear without her noticing.

After what seemed an age keeping lookout with her back against the warm stone of the building while the Medicus peered through a gap by the door hinge, Tilla began to wonder if they had been mistaken. The sounds she could make out from inside the building sounded more like work than murder. The sharp crunch and rattle of earth being dug and shoveled away. Indistinct murmurs of conversation. Then a hollow clunk as if something were being smashed, the slosh of liquid, and, seconds later, the rich smell of grape juice. This must be the estate winery.

Beside her, the Medicus crouched down, trying to get a better view.

She slid down the wall to breathe in his ear, “What can you see?”

He did not seem to have heard. When she repeated the question he took her arm, pointed to the narrow gap between the door and the wall, and eased himself back to his feet.

Tilla closed one eye and pressed her face against the gap. For a moment she could make no sense of what she was looking at. She had expected an ordered winery like the one back at the Medicus’s house: rows of buried jars brimming with sparkling foam. Instead she was watching an unlikely bunch of people deliberately and silently wrecking the place. As far as she could make out in the lamplight, jars had been dug up and smashed. Piles of earth and broken pottery had been dumped against the walls and inside the juice vats. The wreckers, several men and a bedraggled woman with smeared makeup and short, strangely colored hair, were squelching around in a quagmire of mud mixed with fermenting juice. It was hard to see why they were doing it, since they did not seem to be enjoying themselves. As she watched, one of the men picked up his shovel and deliberately shattered the shoulder of the closest jar. The woman stepped aside to avoid the juice that was forming a glistening pool around her feet and glanced toward the door. For a moment Tilla thought she had sensed someone watching her. Then she realized the woman was looking at something inside the winery.

“Who said you could take a rest?” The voice was familiar, and alarmingly close.

Tilla grabbed the nearest part of the Medicus, which turned out to be his knee. She was about to whisper, “Stilo!” when the woman aimed her shovel at the next jar, missed, slipped in the mud, and landed on her backside. As the woman put her head in her hands and began to sob, something moved and blocked Tilla’s line of vision—but not before she had recognized the one who called himself Calvus stepping forward across the mud.

The slap and the order to shut up were followed by a third, oddly strangled-sounding voice: a girl, who seemed to be standing just behind the door where Tilla was listening. “Please!” she whimpered. “Please, just do what they want!”

“I can’t!” wailed the woman.

“You can!” insisted the girl.

Tilla, still unable to see, straightened up. From inside the winery she heard Calvus say, “All right. Put your shovel down and get back in the corner. You— yes, you—move across and take over.”

“Can I make a suggestion?” It was a thin, officious voice.

“No,” said Stilo. “Shut up and dig.”

“Only it would be more efficient if we—”

His suggestion was drowned by a squeal of pain from near the door. Tilla winced.

“See?” said Stilo. “That’s what happens when you make suggestions. Just find the money. Then nobody gets hurt.”

Tilla felt the warmth of the Medicus’s breath on her cheek. “They’ve already got the steward in there,” he whispered. “Go across to the bunk-house, find out who’s in charge, and get them to send a couple of sensible men into town to tell Fuscus what’s going on and fetch Probus.”

“Will they send help?”

“I doubt they’ll get here in time. Tell the rest of the men to round up every sort of weapon they can think of— there should be plenty of scythes and things in the barns—and come over here and surround the exit to the building without making any noise.”

“What if the slaves are all locked in for the night?”

“You’ll think of something.”

“What are you going to do?”

The Medicus straightened his crutches and hitched himself forward. “I’m going in for a chat with our so-called investigators,” he said.