The Silver Branch [book II] by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

sir?’
    ‘No, c-carry on cleaning those tools.’
    And Justin set about bathing and dressing the cut, while Manlius stood staring woodenly into space. In a little, the orderly took the burnished instruments into an inner room, and instantly Manlius’s eyes flew to the door after him, then back to Justin’s face, and he muttered, ‘Where’s the Commander, sir?’
    ‘The Commander? In the P-Praetorium, I imagine. Why?’ Instinctively Justin kept his own voice down.
    ‘Get him. Get all the money you have, anything of value, and go both of you to my woman’s bothie in the town. It is the last bothie in the street of the Golden Grasshopper. Don’t let any see you enter.’
    ‘Why?’ Justin whispered. ‘You must tell me what you mean; I—’
    ‘Don’t ask questions, sir; do as I tell you, and in Mithras’s name do it at once, or I’ve gashed my thumb to no purpose.’
    Justin hesitated an instant longer. Then with the footsteps of the returning orderly already at the door, he nodded. ‘Very well, I’ll trust you.’
    He finished his task, tied off the bandage, and with a casual ‘Goodnight’ to both men, strolled out into the autumn dusk, picking up in passing the slim, tube-shaped case that held his own instruments from the table on which it lay.
    A few moments later he was closing the door of Flavius’s office behind him. Flavius looked up from the table at which he was working late on the week’s duty roster. ‘Justin? You look very solemn.’
    ‘I feel very solemn,’ Justin said, and told him what had happened.
    Flavius gave a soundless whistle when he had finished. ‘One of the bothies of the town, and take all the money we have. What do you suppose lies behind this, brother?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Justin said. ‘I’m horribly afraid it has to do with Evicatos. But I’d trust Manlius to the world’s end.’
    ‘Or at the world’s end. Yes, so would I.’ Flavius was on his feet as he spoke. He began to move quickly about the room, clearing the tablets and papyrus rolls from the table and laying them away in orderly fashion in the record chest. He locked the chest with the key which never left its chain about his neck, then turned to the small inner room that was his sleeping-cell.
    Justin was already next door in his own cell, delving under the few garments in his clothes-chest for the leather bag containing most of his last month’s pay. He hadn’t anything else of value except his instrument case. He picked that up again, stowed the small leather bag in his belt, and returned to the office just as Flavius came out from the inner room flinging on his cloak.
    ‘Got your money?’ Flavius said, stabbing home the brooch at his shoulder.
    Justin nodded. ‘In my belt.’
    Flavius cast a look round to see that all was in order, and caught up his helmet. ‘Come on, then,’ he said.
    They went down through the fort in the darkness and the mist that was creeping in from the high moors; and with a casual word to the sentries at the gate, passed through into the town.
    The town that, though its name changed with every fort along its length—Vindobala, Aesica, Chilurnium—was in truth one town eighty miles long, strung out along the Wall and the coast-to-coast legionary road behind it. One long, teeming, stinking maze of wine-shops and baths and gaming-houses, stables and granaries, women’s huts and small dirty temples to British and Egyptian, Greek and Gaulish gods.
    The last bothie in the narrow, winding alley-way that took its name from the Golden Grasshopper wine-shop at the corner was in darkness as they drew near. A little squat black shape with the autumn mists creeping about the doorway. Almost as they reached it, the door opened silently into deeper blackness within, and the pale blur of a face showed in the opening. ‘Who comes?’ a woman’s voice demanded softly.
    ‘The two you wait for,’ Flavius murmured back.
    ‘Come, then.’ She drew them into the houseplace, where the