Free Persona Non Grata by Ruth Downie Page A

sort of point.
    “Of course,” he said, “I might ask you to volunteer.”
    “Oh!” With this final sigh of exasperation Marcia leaned back, folded her arms, and lapsed into a sulk.
    Marcia and Flora disembarked at the roadside, rearranging their stoles around their elaborately pinned curls and shaking off the dust of the road. He had offered to drive them right up to the Augustus gate, whose broad stone arches were now visible in the town walls, but they had refused. Evidently the girls would rather traipse the last few hundred paces along the tomb-lined road in stifling heat than suffer the shame of being seen dismounting from a farm cart outside the gates.
    Ruso considered asking them who was likely to care what vehicle they arrived in. Then he remembered Claudia demanding to know why he always had to argue with people like some bearded old Greek philosopher: a complaint that was especially memorable since it had been preceded by a loud howl and the use of a makeup pot as a missile.
    So instead he limped quietly aside as Tilla refused his help to climb down from the back of the cart, then murmured, “Sorry about my family.”
    She plucked at the fabric of the pale yellow tunic Arria had insisted on lending her and which did not suit her. “Your stepmother says I must wear this while I look after your sisters. I am going with them to see all the things my people are not foolish enough to want.” Reaching up to adjust the brim of the battered straw hat, she added, “Perhaps I shall bring some of these things back with me.”
    “Please don’t,” he urged, and raised his voice for the others to hear. “I’ve got business to see to. I’ll have one of the men meet you at the seventh hour outside the Augustus gate.”
    “Come on, Tilla,” urged Marcia, pausing to push one of Flora’s hairpins back into place and then flinging the green linen stole over her shoulder. “Leave our boring brother to get on with his business. We’re going shopping!”
    Ruso parked the cart under a tree and left it in the charge of a small boy who promised to keep the mules in the shade. As he headed toward the town on foot, he caught a glimpse of green stole vanishing under the pedestrian archway of the Augustus Gate. For the first time in his life, he wished he were going shopping.

14
    T HE BUILDINGS WERE grander than anything she had seen before, but the streets smelled just as powerfully as every other town of fish sauce and fresh bread, frying, warm dung, sweaty bodies, and brash perfume.
    “Come on, Tilla, or what ever your name is,” urged Marcia over the clatter of a passing handcart. “We’ve got something to show you.”
    The something was a temple, its stone pillars still new enough to glare white in the sun. Marcia pointed upward. “See those marks?”
    Tilla shaded her eyes and squinted at the roof that projected out over the high base of the building. “What marks?”
    “Those gold marks are called writing,” explained Marcia. “I don’t suppose you have much of that where you come from.”
    “We do not need it,” said Tilla, who had heard enough inscriptions read aloud to know that they were usually full of lies and showing off. “My people have good memories.”
    “You’re not just staying with any old family, you know,” Marcia continued, undaunted. “That says, ‘This Temple was built by Publius Petreius Largus’—that’s our father. It was hideously expensive. So everyone can see how generous we are.”
    “This,” murmured Flora in Tilla’s left ear, “makes it all the more embarrassing that Gaius won’t give us a dowry.”
    “What’s that about dowries?”
    “Shh!” hissed Flora, glancing around. “We don’t want everyone to know.”
    “As if they don’t already,” retorted Marcia. “And Gaius isn’t even embarrassed about it, is he?”
    Tilla said, “Your brother is a good man who is doing his best.”
    Marcia sniffed. “Is that what he told you? I bet he’s bought himself