Georgicus came back to stand beside me with his baulk of wood upraised. He gave me a curt nod, and — realising finally that I was not at risk from him — with a sudden movement I thrust the gates apart.
I was half expecting killers, dangerous and armed. What I found, when I had lowered my eyes sufficiently, was an extremely frightened little boy — a sort of infant land-slave, from the ragged tunic that he wore. I hadn’t seen him through the knot-hole because he was so small. I was so relieved that I could hardly speak, just stood there staring at him stupidly.
He might have been perhaps as much as five or six years old, though he was so under-developed that it was hard to tell. His dirty, tousled carrot-coloured curls reached scarcely to my hips. He was as thin as he was tiny, and his legs were bare, though an enormous pair of cut-down peasant ‘boots’ reached almost to his knees. (These rough bags of cow-skin were far too big for him and had clearly been formed on someone else’s feet.) His skinny face was filthy, streaked with mud and tears, and his red-rimmed eyes were staring in terror at my knife.
I heard the thud behind me as Georgicus let fall his makeshift club. ‘Tenuis! What in the name of all the gods …’
The child’s gaze never faltered from the blade. ‘Captain! Overseer Georgicus! You can see it’s only me. Don’t let the citizen stab me with his knife.’
I pulled myself together, turned the blade aside, and stood back to let the child come in. ‘One of your land-slaves?’ I said to Georgicus, trying to sound as if I hadn’t been afraid. ‘He seems to know who I am, since he calls me citizen.’
‘All my land-slaves know who you are, citizen. And he’s mine all right. But as to land-slave, I am not so sure, though that is what they call him. The smallest one we’ve got,’ Georgicus said. ‘Come on in then, Tenuis.’
The apparition unwillingly obeyed.
‘Came as part of a job lot that the master bought last year,’ his overseer said, putting a hand on one shoulder to usher him inside. ‘I was at the slave market with him at the time. There were four half-decent land-slaves at an attractive price. I only wanted them, but the dealer insisted that we took this one as well. Though it is a puzzle what to do with him.’ He put a finger underneath the small boy’s chin and tilted up the face. ‘Not pretty enough to be a household page, and far too small and puny to be useful otherwise. No good for proper land-work, because he isn’t strong enough to dig, but he can fetch eggs and carry firewood and that sort of thing. When he keeps his mind on it, which he obviously can’t. He was sent to look for kindling this morning in the woods, not come wandering to the villa of his own accord.’ He squeezed the chin quite roughly before he let it go.
The child recognised that he had been rebuked. ‘I know you told us not to come up to the house,’ — his voice was terrified — ‘but the others sent me here.’
‘The others?’ I echoed. ‘You mean the land-slaves who were supposed to be working in the fields? We didn’t see them as we came along.’
Tenuis nodded eagerly. ‘Exactly. They saw you though, captain. You were running up the lane. They decided you must be coming up here to the house, but of course they didn’t dare to leave their posts themselves. So they sent me to find you. Then if anyone was punished …’
‘It would be you,’ I said, moving to close the heavy gates again.
Tenuis seemed unaware of any irony. He turned towards me. ‘Exactly, citizen. But they weren’t expecting any trouble of that kind. I’m younger than they are and I can run in and out without the house staff taking much account.’
‘You were trying to avoid the house staff then?’ Georgicus raised an eyebrow and jerked his head towards the orchard wall. I knew exactly what he was signalling — that Tenuis, at least, had no idea of what had happened there.
I nodded to show I’d understood and murmured to the boy, ‘Go on with your account.’
Tenuis needed no encouragement. ‘I didn’t care about the steward, anyway, today, ’cause I had a proper errand. I was sent to find you, captain.’ He turned to Georgicus. ‘They want to know if it’s all right to go back to their tasks and leave the wood-pile unattended for a time. Nobody has come for it, though they’ve been waiting hours.’ He dropped his glance and muttered to his feet. ‘At least that’s what they say. I think there’s really something else that they’re not telling me. There was an awful lot of whispering that I couldn’t hear.’
But Georgicus was not listening. He had crouched down to gaze intently into the slave-boy’s face. He turned the lad towards him, holding both the skinny shoulders as he said, ‘What wood-pile is this?’
NINE
Tenuis looked at him with startled eyes. ‘Why, captain, the wood-piles that you told them to build up yesterday. You know, all the dead boughs and fallen branches from the wood …’ He saw the expression on the overseer’s face and trailed off into silence. ‘At least, they said you told them …’
‘I did no such thing. I did give them instructions, but my orders were specifically for jobs to do elsewhere: pruning and weeding and working in the fields. Surely you heard me. I make these announcements in front of everyone!’
Tenuis shook his head. ‘But … wasn’t that countermanded afterwards?’
Georgicus let go of the boy, stood up and frowned at me. ‘Did our intruders contrive this, do you think? Just to make sure that there was nobody about to see them come and go?’
I had been busy bolting up the gates and struggling to put back the heavy wooden bar. ‘It’s possible,’ I said addressing Georgicus over the head of the boy, who had his back to me. ‘But your land-slaves wouldn’t take orders from a stranger, do you think? Especially not if they contradicted yours.’
Tenuis whirled around to stare at me with startled eyes. ‘Strangers? Intruders? What …? Oh!’ He clapped a startled hand across his mouth. ‘Has there been some sort of problem overnight? Is that why the back gate was all locked and barred with no gatekeeper on duty to let anybody in?’
Georgicus turned impatiently to him. ‘Never mind that now. Though we do have a problem, certainly. I’ll tell you in good time. Meantime, you can tell me about my land-slaves and who it is that they’ve been talking to. The citizen is right. I had given them orders for the day. Who told them otherwise?’
The boy shrugged skinny shoulders. ‘I don’t really know. I thought that it was you. If not, it must have been the chief steward, I suppose.’
I would have come to that conclusion in his place, I thought. The chief steward was officially in charge of everyone, including the land-slaves, while the master was away. He would have authority to overrule any orders which Georgicus gave — though to do so without informing him would be discourteous at best.
The captain of the land-slaves clearly thought so, too. ‘Did they just receive a message? Or did the steward come himself?’
Tenuis shrugged. ‘I wasn’t there when the new instructions came. The others were all over working in the fields, but I was out there in the forest anyway, picking up kindling, like you told me to. Then they came rushing over, saying that they had this urgent job. I didn’t ask who gave them orders to do that. They wouldn’t have answered me in any case, but they certainly did not seem to think they’d disobeyed.’
The story was so startling that I joined in as well. ‘Urgent? What made a simple wood-pile so urgent all at once?’
Tenuis looked at me distrustfully. ‘I don’t know, citizen. You’d better ask the steward about that. Something about a provisional contract that the master had agreed, where the conditions had unexpectedly been met. The slaves were to pull all the big dead branches and logs that they could find into the clearing in the middle of the wood. That much I can tell you because I saw them doing it. There was a lot of private grumbling, in fact, because it had to be done as fast as possible and it was very energetic work’
Georgicus exchanged another glance with me. ‘I’m sure it was. No doubt it kept them fully occupied for several hours.’