While Fabius began to explain the situation to Daminius, Conn was whispering urgently to Tilla. Nobody was bothering with the old man. Ruso stepped forward and urged him into the chair before he fell. Senecio clutched his arm, still very agitated, and insisted in British, “He is one of them! He came to the farm!”
“Silence!” ordered Fabius. He sounded more petulant than authoritative. He turned to his deputy. “Optio?”
“I’ll have the men account for their movements yesterday, sir,” Daminius promised. “And we’ll have all the buildings and the quarry searched.”
“Wait!” Tilla cried. “Not yet!”
Ruso frowned. This was going too far. He reached for her arm. “A word in private, wife,” he urged, excusing them both and propelling her toward the door. Out in the entrance hall he whispered, “You can try telling Fabius what to do when nobody else is listening, but you can’t order his optio about in front of everyone. Daminius is a sensible man and he’s trying to help. What’s all the fuss about?”
“Daminius is the man who searched the farm.”
“Gods above, don’t your people ever let go of a grudge? He was only obeying orders! Now he’s been ordered to help find Branan.”
“This is not a grudge! Listen!” Tilla glanced around to make sure they were alone before putting her arms around him. To anyone passing through the hall, they might have been snatching a moment of un-Roman intimacy. Her breath tickled his ear as he heard, “Senecio has been thinking. What soldier will know to say to Branan, ‘The Roman lady wants to see you?’ He has been asking himself, ‘What Roman could know that Branan has met the Daughter of Lugh?’ Who has seen me and Branan together?” She paused, letting him think about that for a moment.
“The search party who went to the farm,” he said.
“Yes. And Daminius is one of them.”
One of the many disadvantages of having a minuscule HQ building was the lack of privacy. A bemused Daminius was sent to wait in the clerk’s office and the three Britons were left under guard in Fabius’s room while Ruso and Fabius glanced around the corridor, agreed that they might be overheard, and banished themselves to the middle of the street outside to hold a hurried conversation. The air was still pulsating with the angry chant from the Britons beyond the walls. Ruso tried to shut it out of his mind. “We have to take this seriously,” he said. “What the old man is saying makes sense.”
“This is absurd!” Fabius kept glancing over at the gates as if he was expecting wild natives to burst through them at any moment. “Why would Daminius have anything to do with stealing a child?”
“They’re not saying it’s him personally,” Ruso pointed out. “They’re saying he’s one of the eight men it could be.”
“I should never have left the Sixth,” muttered Fabius. “The gods have sent me nothing but bad luck ever since. Terrible weather, bodies in the wall, men kidnapped and tortured, natives complaining. No wonder I’m ill. I should never have listened to you about that missing clerk.”
“We need to check up on all the men who’ve met the boy,” said Ruso, wondering if he had been deliberately paired with Fabius by some senior officer whom he had managed to annoy.
The centurion lifted his head. “Can you hear that? Thanks to you, we’ve become a target for native revenge!”
“If you’d been sober enough to discipline Regulus properly in the first place, none of this would have happened!”
“It was you who prescribed the wine, Doctor!”
They stood glaring at each other in the street. Finally Ruso said, “This is getting us nowhere. We need the names of everyone on that search party straightaway, and we need to check where they were yesterday afternoon.”
“This is beyond our level. I’m not doing anything without authorization.”
“You don’t need authorization to talk to your own men. Get Daminius to give you the names, keep him here, and have the others rounded up.”
“But—”
Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the watch captain needing further orders on how to deal with the fifty or so Britons making that racket outside the south gate.
Fabius, whose job it was to give those orders, looked at Ruso and the watch captain and the closed gates as if searching for some hint about how to proceed. Ruso hoped he was not going to do something stupid. He wished the Britons would shut up. They were not helping.
Fabius asked if they were armed.
“Just a few farm tools, sir.” The watch captain’s growl made him sound more authoritative than his centurion. “And they’ve got women and children and old people out there.”
Fabius looked relieved. “Just ignore them unless they attack.”
The watch captain, who might have been hoping that his centurion would take charge of the situation, left with the paltry consolation that whatever went wrong from now on, everyone would know it was Fabius’s fault.
“Daminius is a decent man,” Ruso continued when the watch captain was out of earshot. “He’ll want to help you catch a child snatcher.”
“If there is one,” snapped Fabius. “If this isn’t some plot the natives have cooked up between them. Taking revenge on your ill-judged search party. I’ve had enough of your bright ideas, Ruso. I want some authorization. We’ll need to get a message through to the camp.”
“I’ll do that,” Ruso promised, wondering why Fabius was talking as if the fort were under siege. Since the riot outside the south gate could be seen from the main road, it was more likely to be the officers at the camp who were under siege, surrounded by passersby now clamoring to tell them about the excitement. “I’m going across there for a clinic anyway.”
Fabius’s eyes widened. “If you go out there, I can’t promise my men can protect you.”
“It’s only a rabble of native families,” Ruso assured him, wondering as he said it whether people had assumed the same thing about Boudica and her warriors. “If we send the father and brother home with a promise of action, they’ll probably disperse.”
“And if they don’t?”
“They’ve got children with them,” said Ruso, who was not going to encourage any hint of using force. “I doubt they’ll want to stay long.” He hoped he was right. It made sense to him that any self-respecting mother would want to get her children home for supper and bedtime. The trouble was, women—even self-respecting ones—did not always behave in the way one predicted. “Can you get Daminius’s search party assembled for questioning and make sure they don’t talk to anybody?”
“You seem to think I’m some sort of incompetent, Ruso.”
“Can you?”
“Of course.”
“Good. By then I’ll have spoken to the tribune and we’ll know what he wants us to do.”
With luck, it would be something useful.
Peering through the gap between the gates, Ruso could see a thin vertical slice of the crowd that had gathered outside. He caught a glimpse of a brightly dressed woman with a toddler and a baby in her arms, and a young man in a muddy farmworker’s tunic. The Britons had sat down on the stone surface of the causeway that carried the road across the ditch, perhaps more to keep their backsides dry than to block the access, since they must know they were obstructing only one of the routes into the fort. Shifting sideways to change his angle of vision—which was annoyingly narrow—he saw a small girl sitting cross-legged in front of a toothless creature with straggly white hair. He had to admit that Fabius had been right to ignore them.
He nodded to the guard to lift the bar. The chant disintegrated into yelling as one of the heavy gates swung partly open. A barrage of missiles splattered against it: rotten apples, cabbage stalks, clods of earth.
Senecio limped forward. As he stepped outside something flew past his ear. Behind him, one of the guards swore. Ruso turned to see the remains of an egg sliding down the shoulder plates of the man’s armor. The stench made him gasp. Tilla stepped away, holding her nose.
The barrage stopped. Senecio was leaning on his stick and holding up one hand for silence. Then he thanked them for coming. “It is a comfort to have good neighbors at a time like this.”
Someone shouted, “Where’s Branan?”
Senecio shook his head. “We do not know. The soldiers say they did not—”
His words were lost beneath the protest. He held up his hand again until the outcry of accusation and disbelief died down. “The soldiers will search their forts and land, and will ask questions of the—”
Ruso’s concentration stumbled over the unknown word that must mean suspects or culprits, and he lost the thread of what was being said. When he picked it up again Senecio was, as agreed, asking them to go to their homes. “I beg you to think,” he said. “Think where a thief might have hidden my son. Ask your neighbors if anyone has seen him. And search. Search your buildings, your fields, the woods and commons . . .” His voice faltered. He gulped a breath, steadied himself and continued. “Search the streams around your land. Ask everyone. Somebody . . .
somebody
must have seen Branan.”
Conn stepped forward and took his father’s arm. “My brother has been missing since late yesterday afternoon,” he said. “You know what he looks like. Nine years old, brown curly hair, front teeth that do not touch each other. He is wearing a green work tunic and brown trousers and boots.”
Another voice yelled, “Great Andraste, take revenge on the Romans!”
There were cries of agreement. Others chimed in with “String them all up!” and one with more imagination shouted, “Gut them and feed them to the dogs!”
Conn held up his hand. “That comes later. First, we find my brother.”
The crowd, given something to do, began to disperse just as Ruso had hoped. The old man leaned on his stick and surveyed them. “Many good people are searching for my boy,” he said. “It is a bitter thing to be too lame to join them.”
Ruso said, “Is there anything more we can do to help? Can we take you home?”
“We have our own cart,” Conn told him. “They wouldn’t let us bring it in.” He put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Perhaps there will be news at the house.”
Senecio gently lifted his son’s hand. “Go,” he said. “Enica is waiting at home. Tell her until he is found, my place is here.”
Ruso and Tilla exchanged a glance. “Grandfather,” she said, “the soldiers will do everything that can be done here. Conn is right: You should be at home.”
The old man lifted his head and looked at everyone standing around him. He said to Tilla, “Daughter of Lugh, see to it that nobody harms my wife.” Then he turned and limped back inside the fort. Mercifully Fabius had the sense not to object, and the guards, lacking any instructions, stood back to let him pass.
Conn watched him go for a moment, then turned on his heel and strode toward the waiting cart, where the nondescript woman from the farm stood holding the head of the mule. By the time he reached it, he was surrounded by supporters.
Ruso was suddenly aware of his wife standing beside him. She slipped her hand into his and whispered, “I have to go with them. Pray for us all.” Then she ran out after the cart.
When she reached it there was some sort of argument, with Conn seemingly trying to turn her away and Tilla insisting. Conn was no match for Tilla, and Ruso was not surprised when she finally clambered onto the cart to join them. He just hoped the rest of the locals would accept her. This could easily turn into the sort of situation where everyone had to be on one side or the other.
Meanwhile, he hoped that wherever Branan was the gods would look kindly upon him, and that Branan would sense the desperation of all the people who were trying to bring him safely home.
“You can’t leave him there, Ruso!”
“I didn’t put him there.” Ruso had been surprised at the agility with which the aging Senecio had lowered himself onto his blanket. He was now hunched opposite the entrance to the HQ building. It was impossible for anyone to enter or leave without being aware of the old man’s gaze upon them.
Fabius said, “He’s in the middle of the road.”
“Move him, then. I’ve got to find Accius and I’m late for clinic at the camp.”
“But what—”
Whatever complaint Fabius was about to make died in his throat. The gates had screeched open again and a group of riders was making its way in. At the head of them was the distinctively straight-backed and scowling Tribune Accius.
Ruso sighed. He must be almost an hour late by now. There would be a line of disconsolate patients grumbling about him over at the camp, and the staff would be wondering if they had been forgotten. He put down his medical case and saluted. As he did so, someone shouted a warning, and a mule cart changed course to avoid the old man sitting in the street.
The tribune glared at Ruso and Fabius over the ears of his horse and demanded to know what the hell was going on. “I was told you had a hundred natives hammering on the gates and chanting war songs.”
“We’ve managed to disperse them, sir,” said Fabius.
“But you did have?”
Ruso said, “About fifty, sir, including women and children.”
“Why in the name of Jupiter didn’t you send someone to get me out of my meeting?” He sounded disappointed, as if he had missed the excitement. The cavalrymen with him would be annoyed too. They would have been hoping to see some action.