“You just happened to be passing?”
“It was a miracle, sir.”
Agelastus helped the anxious and illiterate bar owner by writing to the family, explaining that young Mallius had died of a fever and been cremated far from home. In exchange, he was allowed to keep the recruitment letter that was in Mallius’s pack. So Agelastus the runaway slave did his best to turn blond to match the description on the recruitment records and became Mallius of the Twentieth Legion.
“And then?”
“It was all fine until Candidus turned up, sir. He remembered seeing me at my master’s house. I tried to explain to him why he had to shut up but he thought it was funny.”
“Funny?”
“That I’d got away with it for so long.” Mallius’s hand trembled as he reached for the cup of water Ruso had brought him. “I could just see him telling all his cronies over a game of dice. It was all right for him, but I’d have been executed. All because of an idle little blabbermouth who thought he was clever.”
Ruso took a breath. “Is he in the wall?”
Mallius tried to straighten his shoulders. “There is no body in the wall, sir. The legate says so.”
“Don’t play games with me.”
The man slumped again. “I didn’t know the kid was watching. When I found out, I had to do something. But I didn’t hurt him, sir. I sold him to somebody who promised he would feed him.”
“Branan didn’t see you hide the body,” Ruso told him. “Somebody else did.”
Mallius let out a long breath.
“He must have told you that he didn’t see anything. Why didn’t you just make up some excuse and release him?”
“He was acting scared, sir. He was acting like he was lying.”
“He thought he was in trouble for playing a prank on the road,” Ruso told him. “What did you do to him?”
The man who was not Mallius was talking to his chained hands now and mumbling. It seemed that even he could feel shame. “I didn’t hurt him, sir, I swear. I just told him his house would be burned like that other one if he didn’t do what he was told.” He looked up. “I was going to let the family know where he was as soon as we were on the way back to Deva. He would have been found.”
“He was found,” Ruso told him. “No thanks to you.”
Mallius sighed and closed his eyes. “Then the trader’s slave remembered seeing me before. It was like the revenge of the gods. They give and then they take away again, sir.”
Ruso hoped Mallius’s philosophy would comfort him where he was going, because if the army did not behead him, then he could well be sold for the entertainment of the crowds at the amphitheater. He might not die straightaway. He might languish in captivity for as long as a year, all the time building up pictures in his mind of how his death would be delivered.
“I never hurt him, sir. I wouldn’t do that.”
It sounded oddly plaintive, as if the man had committed some act of special kindness. Perhaps, in his own mind, he had. The story of the false rape accusation was plausible. On the other hand, it sounded suspiciously like an old Jewish tale Ruso had once heard, and it was just the sort of story a slave would invent to justify running away. The convenient death of the real Mallius was either a very lucky coincidence or the cover story for another murder.
Whatever the truth of this man’s tale, it was going to end only one way.
“Sir, can I have something to ease the pain?”
Ruso considered this for a moment.
“I know I don’t deserve it, sir.”
Ruso opened his case and brought out the poppy, suspecting he was doing this largely because the effects of his own dose this morning had not yet worn off. “That’s for getting the water up to Pertinax,” he said, using the rounded end of a bronze probe to measure a drop into the cup. A second drop trembled at the base of the probe and he stirred it in. “And this is for not hurting Branan.”
By the time Ruso got back to Ria’s, he was exhausted and the aches had returned to gnaw at his bones. Tilla was not there. Virana looked up from serving a jug of wine to Albanus, and Daminius said she had gone out, which he could have deduced for himself. He blinked at Daminius and said, “Shouldn’t you be on duty?”
“I just dropped by to thank you, sir. It was very good of you.”
“Ah,” said Ruso, guessing that sooner or later he would remember what Daminius was grateful for. “It was nothing.”
“It’s not nothing to us, sir.”
Ruso, none the wiser, said, “Good. I’m pleased.”
“I promise I’ll repay you as soon as we get to Deva, sir. I’ve got enough in my savings.”