Stacked at a safe distance from the lamp were the final plans of the Concise Guide and a couple of tablets full of notes. These were the only parts he intended to keep. The rest was being finally and irrevocably scrapped. He was never going to finish it: he realized that now. Even if he had not been as tired as he was-and it had taken a lot of night duty to pacify Valens for being left alone on payday-he knew he was not blessed with the powers of concentration that a real author needed. A real author would not have sat for hours in front of an uncompleted work, pondering the answers to irrelevant questions like what had happened to his former servant and whether she was safe. Wondering if she might think of him occasionally. Wondering whether he would ever find out where she was. Wondering whether, if he had been more insistent, she would have stayed. And if she had stayed, what might have happened.
Ruso picked at the twine tying the two leaves of the next tablet, tugged at the end, and scowled as it tightened into a knot. He had managed without Tilla before she came. He would manage without her now that she was gone. In time-and it was obviously going to take longer than the thirty days he had so far been without her-she would become no more than an interesting memory. In time he would stop feeling a fool for having offered her a choice in the hope that she might want to stay Perhaps in time he would forget the whole business. Perhaps in time he would even be able to walk the streets of Deva without feeling tainted by the human misery that he now knew lay behind the entertainment of the legion he served.
He glanced across at the damp stain that had blossomed beneath his bedroom window. Of course she wouldn't have wanted to stay. Even Valens would have had trouble enticing a woman to stay in this moldering excuse for a home. Ruso, the man who had considered selling Tilla for a profit, had not stood a chance. No wonder the last he had heard of her was a message saying she had gone north and taken Phryne with her.
He sliced the tip of his knife through the knot and breathed warmth onto the next sheet. The stylus scraped across the surface, filling the scratches and catching up the misted droplets where his breath had condensed on the cold wax. His careful thoughts on "where a broken bone is suspected" sank into the past.
He had signed the death warrant of the Concise Guide three weeks ago, when the camp prefect had called him and Valens in separately for "a chat." The chat had not been a cozy experience. Evidently the camp prefect knew more than Ruso would have wished about his performance since joining the Twentieth. There was nothing to be gained by explaining that he was normally very reliable and that the downhill slide was the result of his colleague eating a dish of bad oysters. When the prefect had said, "And if you were in charge of the medical service, what would you change?" he had come up with the brightest idea he could think of at the time, which was that practical first-aid training for every man in the unit would mean faster treatment of injuries, less time off sick, and less pressure on the hospital.
The chief medical officer had been appointed the following day. He was a Greek medic from the Second Augusta, based farther south. He was generally agreed to possess connections, competence, and no charm whatsoever. Unfortunately, though, Ruso's bright idea had not died with his ambitions. The prefect passed it on to the new CMO, who congratulated Ruso on his initiative and gave him the job of organizing the training. Since no legionary would pay for something the army would give him for free, Ruso found himself organizing the destruction of the market for his own work.
Valens's response to being overlooked was to announce that he was glad to be able to carry on practicing real medicine, instead of being mired in administration like the CMO. Apparently the second spear's daughter was very impressed with his devotion to his calling. Ruso was impressed too: not with Valens's devotion but with his ability to weave a useful lie in with the truth. The new man had indeed taken over the reins at a difficult time, following the suicide of the hospital administrator.
It was a month since Priscus's manservant had gone to wake him and found him dead in his bed. A doctor was called. According to Valens, the sight of the administrator's ghastly grimace of pain beneath his beautifully combed hair was the stuff of nightmares. The note on the bedside table had given typically detailed instructions for his funeral-Priscus was an administrator to the last-but no reason for the taking of his own life. The second spear, charged with investigating both this death and a murder on the same night in the adjoining bar, dismissed Ruso's suggestion that the two were connected with, "You again! I suppose you're going to tell me you saw him do it?"
"No, sir."
"Then don't come bothering me with any more of this rubbish. The pen-pusher from the hospital killed himself for reasons I know but you needn't, and from what I hear, the doorman was a nasty piece of work who could cheerfully have been knifed by a couple dozen suspects. And since the woman who owns the place has run off, it's pretty bloody obvious which one of them did it."
"Sir, with respect-"
But the look on the face of the second spear told Ruso that respect was not required. What was required was to shut up, go away, and stop being a nuisance.
It occurred to Ruso that only he, Tilla, and possibly Merula would ever know the real story behind Priscus's suicide. Ruso had been ignored, Tilla had gone away, and Merula, wherever she was, was certainly not going to say anything that would reveal her own failure to protect the Roman citizen whom they had all known as Saufeia. As for Asellina, the slave put to death by her owner for having a fit of the giggles-Ruso tried to find something comforting to say to Decimus, and failed.
In the absence of fact, speculation was both rife and confident. Even Albanus could not resist hinting to Ruso that irregularities had been found in the hospital accounts and in the Aesculapian Thanksgiving Fund. "And when you hear what's in his will, sir, you'll see what I mean."
At Priscus's request the funeral had been attended by all the hospital staff. As instructed, a clerk read the will to the assembled company. The wish that his manservant be granted his freedom was of scant interest to the mourners. The desire that all his property be sold for the benefit of the Aesculapian fund, however, caused raised eyebrows and the exchange of more than one knowing glance. Ruso caught Albanus looking at him before both resumed a dutifully funereal expression. The camp prefect, who was turning out to be a more perceptive man than Ruso had imagined, described Priscus in his funeral oration as "an outstanding administrator and a man of many contradictions."
To Ruso's intense relief, the money loaned to Stichus had been repaid shortly after Stichus and Chloe reappeared from wherever they had been hiding. He had waited in vain, though, for a demand to pay it back to the Aesculapian fund. Finally his conscience sent him to see the unfortunate clerk who had been given the task of wrestling Priscus's outstanding administration into a shape presentable to the imperial auditors.
The man hunched over onto one elbow while he ran a chewed fingertip down the accounts. Finally the finger paused.
"You did have a loan," he agreed. "It was paid back on the twelfth before the Kalends of October."
"No, that's not right."
"Well, that's what it says."
"There must be some sort of mix-up."
The man sighed, swiveled the record around, and slid it across the desk, the finger pointing to an entry in Priscus's precisely-spaced hand.
"Look."
Ruso read it twice. The meaning was unmistakable. About the same time as the administrator had persuaded him to sign over Tilla as guarantee, Ruso's loan had been repaid in full. There was no mention of a slave in the fund records. The only explanation Ruso could think of was that Priscus had chosen to take over the debt himself. If Ruso failed to pay up, Priscus would take Tilla for his own purposes-and as he must have guessed, when he tired of her she would still be worth far more than the loan had cost. But if the loan had been paid, Priscus would merely have broken even… Ruso paused. He had never been able to settle the business of the fire in his own mind, nor that accident under the bathhouse scaffolding. But now that he thought about it, the fire had happened just after he had signed the loan guarantee. Priscus had been in the hospital that night and could have slipped out to push something burning through the shutters of the bedroom window. He had not been on the building site, but he had been a man of wide influence. Perhaps Ruso would go and have a chat about him with Secundus from the century of Gallus. Because, of course, if Ruso had burned to death or had his skull split by the trowel, he would never have paid and Priscus would have had his signature on the document handing over Tilla… A document that he had not bothered to read before signing it. Had he signed Tilla over to the fund itself, or to its administrator?