It was not the soldiers themselves who were causing Ruso's difficulties: They were either off skull-cracking or living in the barracks that they were slowly working their way around to modernization. It was the women and children, widowed mothers and spinster aunts the men collected around them. The women and children and mothers and aunts-not to mention the veterans with nowhere else to retire to, who had women and children of their own-all needed beds to sleep in. Then there were all the hangers-on who congregated wherever there were soldiers to be separated from their wages. Hangers-on needed beds too.
The wail of a trumpet from the other side of the fort wall announced that the morning was almost at an end. Ruso was on duty in an hour and he was still no nearer to keeping his promise to the girl. He was going to have to try Valens's suggestion after all.
Earlier that morning, he had pointed out that he had no intention of lodging his slave in a bar that was effectively a brothel.
"Ah, but it isn't," Valens had explained. "Not technically. We had a tax collector in here the other day. Broken wrist: fell off his horse.
Anyway, he said lots of those sort of places don't register their girls so they don't have to pay the tax on their earnings, and when anybody official asks why there's so many bedrooms then, they say that it's because that take in lodgers. It's worth a try. Just don't let her eat the oysters."
"A tax-dodging brothel. Marvelous."
"You could always have a nice chat with Priscus. I hear his new place is rather spacious. Perhaps he'll find you a spare room."
"Maybe I will," agreed Ruso, just to see the expression on Valens's face.
As Merula swayed across the empty barroom in another stylish silky creation, Ruso mused that this was not the sort of landlady he had envisioned.
The elegantly plucked eyebrows rose at his question. Evidently he was not the sort of tenant she was used to either.
"It's not for me," he explained.
"For a friend?"
"Not exactly." He was aware that he was scratching his ear again. He really must try to stop that. Claudia used to say she knew it meant he was lying, which showed how little they understood each other. He lowered his fist onto the barroom table just below the initials of one CLM, who had felt it necessary to carve not only the first letters of his name but a majestic phallus as well, and said, "I have a female slave whom I can't use at home and who is in need of lodgings. One of my colleagues suggested you might be able to find somewhere for her."
"Ah. An officer at the hospital?"
"Yes," said Ruso, suddenly seeing a way forward. "I believe you know him. He was here a short while ago and he had to have some time off work as a result."
Merula managed to look surprised, as if virulent food poisoning were something she could have hoped to keep secret. "So you know about, uh…?"
"I suggest we say no more about it."
Ruso was satisfied to see relief on the woman's face. He was right: She had been afraid Valens would sue. When she said, "I think we can find a place for her," his problem appeared to be solved.
His problem appeared to be solved until Merula asked, "Is the girl experienced in this kind of work?"
Ruso shook his head. "She can't work. She's sick."
"She can't work?" The painted eyes met his. "So why did your friend tell you to send her to me?"
"I can't have her at my place, she needs to recuperate, and I can hardly billet her in a barracks room."
Merula pursed her lips. "This sickness. Is it fever?"
"She's recovering from surgery on an injured arm."
"And before long you expect her to be fit to work."
"I see no reason why not. In the meantime all she needs is a quiet room and regular meals. You do rent out rooms?"
"Oh, yes!" After this confident assertion she paused. "We don't have anything very comfortable just at the moment…"
"But you do have a private room?"
"We do, but-"
He followed her up the open staircase and along the creaking wooden landing that looked down over the bar. Several of the upstairs doors were ajar, revealing small cubicles with beds covered in bright blankets and cushions. It all looked reasonably clean. Ruso consoled himself with the thought that at least he was doing business with the best possible class of tax-dodging brothel.
In the gloom at the end of the corridor was a closed door. Merula scraped a key into the lock.
The room was bare except for a bench against one wall and a mattress in the corner. Merula glided forward and unlatched the shutters.
Before he could remark on the bars across an upstairs window, she said, "We sometimes use this room for secure storage." The light revealed the rings of old drinks and drips of candle wax on the surface of the bench. Underneath, one leg had been replaced with a new chunk of yellow wood that was much too heavy and the whole thing had been clumsily nailed to the floorboards. Ruso crouched and turned over the stained mattress. The straw was even lumpier than the one he was borrowing from Valens and it didn't smell good.
Merula started to explain that the room had not been used for a while. He interrupted her.
"Do you have mice?"
She frowned. "The girl is on a special diet?"
"I don't mean on the menu. I mean running around. Wild mice."
As soon as she told him they didn't, he said, "Put in a clean bed and I'll take it."
19
She was pretty. Old women said so to her mother, and her mother always laughed and replied, "And she knows it." Her brothers knew it too, although they would die before they said so. Sometimes her father came into the house smelling of beer, roared, "Where's my beautiful girl?" and lifted her onto his shoulders while her mother shouted at him to mind that child's head on the door. And for a few moments she would be a giant, lurching around the houses, reaching for the edges of the thatch, taller than the horses, and seeing right over the tops of people's fences until he put her down and ignored her pleas for "More!" because parents had things to do and because being pretty did not make you important.
When her mother muttered and sighed and tugged at the tangles with the comb, it was because shiny golden curls needed a lot of looking after. She tried not to smile. Her mother would want to know what she was smiling about, and she already knew it wasn't her cousins' faults that they were ordinary little girls whose hair fell down in straight brown lines and she had to remember to be nice to them and…
And the smell was wrong.
Somewhere outside, a man's voice was making ugly, solid sounds that fell like rough logs.
Someone was trying not to pull her hair. Someone was-
She remembered the stink of the bathhouse. The glint of metal blades.
"No!"
Her eyes snapped open as her free hand lashed out and clouted a crouching girl across the face. A jolt of pain shot through her injured arm as the girl squealed and fell backward in a flurry of brown skirt and dirty bare feet.
She had managed to pull herself up and lean against the wall by the time the other girl, who was dark and heavily pregnant, had managed to maneuver herself onto all fours and then haul herself up to sit on the wooden bench.
She remembered the bench. She remembered the room. She remembered what her name was supposed to be. She looked at the girl's hands, which were empty, rough, and red with work. Then she looked around the floor. There was no sign of any shears. She said, "Who are you?"