Tabula Rasa(7)

Her anger rose again as she remembered the plump girl’s anxious insistence that her injuries were nothing: She had tripped and banged her head on the doorpost, and then fallen awkwardly. She did not need a healer. She just needed to rest for a while. She was sorry for all the fuss.

Tilla had done her best to be gentle as she set the broken fingers straight, but Cata still cried out in pain.

“Your mother tells me this sort of thing has happened before.”

Cata sniffed. “I am very clumsy.”

Tilla laid the compress over the grazed and swollen cheek. “You are lucky none of the bones of your face are broken.”

The girl kept her eyes closed, like a child who wanted to be invisible.

“You may not be so lucky next time.”

No reply.

“You must stay close to your family,” Tilla told her. “And they must put in a complaint to his centurion.”

Still no reply.

“Do not go near him,” Tilla continued. “Do not waste a single moment hearing how sorry he is, because it will mean no more this time than it did the last.”

Just when she thought she might as well have been speaking to a deaf woman, Cata said, “You don’t know him.”

“No,” Tilla agreed, “but I am older than you and I have met men like him.”

The girl’s swollen lips trembled. “I thought you would understand.”

“My husband does not beat me.” Did she imagine this was what all soldiers’ women had to put up with? “If he did, I would leave him.”

“Sometimes he is very kind.”

“I am sure he is. Drink this.” Tilla handed her the cup. “I am sure he is fond of you, in his own way. And after he has killed you, he will be sorry he did it, and he will miss you very much.”

But the girl showed no sign of having heard.

Tilla did her best to be patient with these girls. It was not so easy to leave when your man knew where your family lived, and he had friends who could have people arrested and searched. Only last week a soldier had come to her demanding to know where his woman was and blaming Tilla for encouraging her to run off. Tilla, who had seen how cowed the girl had become, was secretly delighted. Her family did not know where she was, either, but a small boy had arrived with a message to say that she was safe. Tilla had to go back and tell the soldier that it was no good pestering the family for information: They knew no more about where the girl was hiding than he did.

So much of being a trainee medicus, she now saw, was not about medicine at all but about the complications of people’s lives.

She passed the south wall of the little fort and turned the corner into the huddle of civilian buildings. For once there were no off-duty soldiers lounging about and ogling girls, or carrying their children on their shoulders down the street, or haggling with the shopkeepers. They must have been kept in. It happened sometimes, usually for reasons that were not interesting enough to be worth the bother of finding them out.

The change in the weather had lifted everyone’s spirits. The cobbler was whistling a tune, hammering nails into a sole in time to the rhythm. The baker called to her across the counter as she passed. He grinned and held up a raisin pastry. It was a way of saying he hadn’t forgotten.

She thanked him, slipping the pastry into her bag.

“Don’t tell Ria,” he said. “She’d have sold you one.”

“I shall sneak it past her.” The baker and Tilla’s landlady were brother and sister, but business was business. “How is your little girl?”

“No more trouble so far.” His tone was still wary. “It’s been near enough six weeks.”

“I am sure it was just the fever,” she assured him, wondering if he and his wife ever used the word fit in private or whether they were afraid that speaking the name would somehow bring one on. A family who had lost two babies at birth had no illusions about how easily a surviving child could be snatched away into the next world.

He began to pile the loaves from one half-full basket into another. “I hear your man’s busy, eh?”

“He is always busy,” she agreed.

His hands stilled. “Did you not hear? Where have you been?”



She hurried back to the lodgings feeling faintly ashamed. A woman who had just been told that her husband was taking part in a tricky rescue should be fearful for him, or proud of him, or probably both. Instead, she was cross with him for taking such a risk.

On any other day she might have been proud and worried, but today was different. He had promised.

One night was not much to ask. She had put up with his relatives for a whole summer. Apart from meeting her cousin and her uncle a few years ago, she had asked nothing of him—except for tonight. And he had given his word, even though he was plainly uneasy about it. But now he had found some sort of crisis, and as usual it seemed nobody else could deal with it. He would be late, if he turned up at all, and she would have to explain why her Roman was not there, and how was she to know whether they would understand? She hardly knew them herself. They were not real relatives.