Tabula Rasa(2)

Daminius, the optio in charge, rubbed his forehead with his fist, adding another streak of grime. Then he raised the arm to point. “See that big boulder there, sir, just past the fallen tree?”

Ruso gulped. He had naïvely assumed that the trapped officer would be lying at ground level. Instead, the limp and muddy shape that he now saw to be a human being was lying head-down on the slope, out of reach. His left leg was scraped and bloody. The right vanished under a massive lump of rock that teetered directly above him.

“Are you sure he’s alive?” Ruso murmured, clutching at the hope that they might be too late.

The optio called, “It’s all right, sir, hold on! The medic’s here.”

“I don’t n-need a bloody medic,” said a voice that Ruso had never heard waver before. “Give me a knife.”

Ruso stared. “Pertinax?”

“Prefect Pertinax . . . to you, Ruso.” He might be seriously injured, but he was still the man who had terrified Ruso ever since one of them had been a very new medic with the Twentieth Legion and the other had already reached the exalted post of second spear.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t worry, sir,” called Daminius. “The lads’ll get you down. Just hold on a moment and we’ll get them organized.”

“I don’t want . . .” Pertinax’s voice cracked. He tried again, weaker this time. “Can’t risk . . . more men. My leg’s gone.” One bloodstained and filthy hand grasped vainly at the air. “Give me a knife.”

Daminius nodded to a man who was approaching with a dripping waterskin tied to a scaffolding pole. Ruso recognized the grubby bandage around a minor sprain of the left wrist, and noted that its owner had abandoned the vanity of being blond since stumbling into the fort hospital a while ago with one eye full of vinegary hair coloring.

Daminius called up, “We’re going to get some water to you now, sir. Try not to move about too much.”

“A knife.” Pertinax repeated. “That’s a . . .” He stopped, as if he could not remember the word. “That’s an order.”

Daminius instructed his man in a voice too low for the prefect to hear, “Gently, eh? If anything moves, drop it and run.”

The no-longer-blond man nodded and adjusted his grip on the pole.

“The water’s just coming up now, sir.”

Pertinax groped toward the skin. Water cascaded down his face before he managed to clamp the opening against his mouth.

Daminius drew Ruso aside. “You see the problem, Doctor?”

“How long has he been asking for a knife?”

“Ever since he realized how things stand.”

Ruso said, “If he’s up there much longer, he’ll die anyway.”

“We wondered about getting a rope on and pulling him up . . .”

“Not if the leg’s still attached.”

Daminius nodded, as if he had already thought of that. “Besides, the movement could bring the whole lot down on top of him.”

“Can you stabilize the boulder?”

“It’s too high to prop, and too heavy for ropes. And we’re not going to dig underneath to get him out.”

With a feeling that he was not going to like what came next, Ruso prompted, “So?”

The optio looked at him. “Could you cut the leg free, sir?”

Ruso swallowed. “How am I going to get up there?” Let alone, how am I going to perform surgery at that angle and in all that filth? And what about that huge boulder teetering over my head?

Surprisingly white teeth showed as Daminius’s filthy face spread into a grin. “That’s the spirit, sir. We reckoned if we put you on a rope, you could work your way down and across. Then, once you’ve got him freed, my lads will come up and get him.”

Despite the absence of his centurion—or more likely because of it—Daminius was managing the situation with impressive calm. No wonder they said he would not be hacking rocks out of the ground for long.

Just as this thought crossed Ruso’s mind, an imperious voice called, “It’s all right, I’m here!” and the rescue party had to stop to salute Centurion Fabius’s approach along the track beside the stream. Fabius’s horse was being led by his personal slave. His carefully curled hair was in disarray and he was swaying in the saddle. Ruso could smell the drink on his breath as he proceeded to apologize for being delayed, demanded a full update on the situation, and then expressed his shock and dismay. Pertinax, meanwhile, remained trapped.

“We need to make a decision,” put in Ruso, who thanked the gods every morning that he had been excused from sharing quarters with Fabius and wished he had not yielded to this morning’s request for medicinal wine.