Tabula Rasa(11)

“That’s the one. Candidus.” They had both been introduced to Candidus some years ago, but the youth had—understandably—been more interested in watching passing girls than in meeting old army friends of his uncle. “Albanus wrote and said the boy was having problems settling in at Magnis,” he explained. “I asked for him here hoping he might have taken after his uncle.”

“And had he?”

“Well, he looks very much like him, but he’s not what you’d call a natural administrator.”

Candidus had followed Ruso on his ward rounds, dutifully scrawling on a wax tablet, never once asking him to repeat or spell anything and replying cheerfully, “Yes sir!” every time he was asked, “Did you get that?” It was an insouciance that Ruso had only briefly mistaken for competence.

“There’s only one Albanus,” Valens told him. “You were spoiled. Neither of my clerks is a patch on him.”

Ruso looked up. “You’ve got two clerks?”

“I know. It’s hopeless, really. For the number of beds, it should be at least three if not four.”

Ruso said nothing. Several months ago, when Valens was short of work and out of favor, Ruso had petitioned the Legion to take him back. Now Valens, who was no more skilled or experienced than he was himself, was in charge of a hospital with deputies and departments and flunkeys and rows of porters who lined the corridors and saluted as he passed. Or perhaps that only happened in Ruso’s imagination. But there was no escaping the fact that Valens had a comfortable post in a base at a major road junction while he himself was stationed at a makeshift unit in the toy-sized fort of Parva, with the added joy of a clinic in a tented camp that was slowly sinking into the mud.

Another man might have demanded of the gods what he had done to deserve this state of affairs, but Ruso already knew. This was what happened to upstarts who were known to be acquainted with the Emperor. Now that Hadrian had gone back across the sea to Gaul, Ruso was suffering the fate of teacher’s pet when Teacher had left the room. He supposed he was lucky his fellow officers hadn’t stripped his clothes off, tied him to a tree, and made him eat his homework.

Valens said, “I’ll ask around at Magnis, see if somebody knows where he’s gone. From the sound of it I can’t imagine anyone will have poached him.”

Ruso glanced past Valens at Pandora’s cupboard, and pictured again the words He is rather a sensitive boy in Albanus’s neat handwriting. It was hard to imagine how a sensitive boy could have lasted beyond the first week of basic training. Indeed, unless the bitten fingernails betrayed a nervous disposition, Candidus had shown no sign of sensitivity to anything except the dangers of hard work. At every opportunity, he had abandoned his duties and wandered around the hospital, chatting to people. Several of them seemed to have been given the impression that he was in charge. Ruso might have been almost glad to lose him, except that he had then done something unexpected.

Immediately after an exasperated Ruso had ordered him to get his backside on that stool and not move or speak until he had sorted out the orders for blankets and buckets and updated the repairs list, Candidus stood to attention behind his desk and said, “May I speak, sir?”

“Briefly.”

“I’ve made a bit of a mess of things so far, haven’t I, sir?”

“Yes,” said Ruso, surprised by the young man’s frankness.

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ve never been a clerk before, sir. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice and I’d just pick it up as I went along.”

“Then you should have stayed at your desk and listened to what you were told.”

Candidus swallowed. “Are you going to get rid of me, sir?”

Ruso sighed and leaned against Pandora’s cupboard. If the lad hadn’t had the same skinny build and innocent eyes and floppy black hair as his uncle, it might have been easier to be angry with him. “Just get those orders done. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll do them straightaway.”

“Good,” Ruso said, not sure if he was being taken for a ride. “If there’s anything you don’t understand, ask. Don’t guess.”

“Yes, sir. I will. And I won’t. And I’ll do better from now on, sir.”

But the next day Candidus did not turn up, and nobody had seen him since.

It was a moment before Ruso registered what Valens was pointing at. “Is there something underneath that chicken?”

Ruso reached underneath the soft feathers and drew out the thin slivers of another writing tablet. As he did so he felt a stab of guilt. He was already late. Tilla would be waiting, and the hen would still be dead when he got back tomorrow. On the other hand, he needed to check that it belonged to him, especially since he might run across the donor by accident and fail to thank them because he had not paused a few short moments to open a—