Vita Brevis

by Ruth Downie

  “There was a barrel outside the door when I got here at midday,” Ruso told him. “You must have walked past it when you came to fetch me.”

  “Go on.”

  “The neighbors told us it belonged to Kleitos. My wife opened it up and found a dead man inside. She says the caretaker’s had him taken away. I was just coming to tell you.”

  Firmicus paused to assess this before saying, “The master told you that we would look after you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You should have told me straightaway. Let us deal with it. The master doesn’t expect to hear this kind of thing from street gossip.”

  It was another version of people are very upset, and almost as annoying. “I tried to tell him,” Ruso pointed out, “but he wasn’t interested. If I find another body, you’ll be the first to know. Meanwhile my wife was left here to manage on her own and she did what she thought was best.”

  Firmicus’s “Hm” suggested that letting women think what was best was not a good idea. Out in the kitchen, the song was relating a tale of glorious victory for Tilla’s tribe.

  “Nobody seems to know who the man in the barrel was,” Ruso said, assuming that at some point Firmicus would get around to asking. “I didn’t get a very good look, but I’d say he was in his twenties or early thirties. Short fair hair, clean-shaven. Scar above the left eye. No clothes.”

  “So who put him there?”

  It might have been the man with the limp who came asking for money. It might not. It has nothing to do with us, husband. He said, “We weren’t here. You could try asking the neighbors.”

  “And you don’t know why?”

  “No,” said Ruso, not wanting to voice his uncomfortable suspicion. “Maybe Kleitos upset somebody. Maybe it was put there to frighten him. Maybe it was just dumped.”

  Firmicus was looking around at the empty shelves. “And Kleitos has gone to visit his sick father.”

  “Yes.”

  The sudden grab at his tunic took Ruso by surprise. He was hauled forward across the edge of the table before he could back away. His attempt to resist died when he saw the knife.

  Firmicus said, “That’s a lie, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Kleitos’s father has been dead for years. He’s taken all his things with him. Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  Straining his chin away from the knife, he said, “My name is Gaius Petreius Ruso. Until the start of last month I was medical officer with the Twentieth Legion. Publius Accius can vouch for me.”

  “Publius Accius has his own reasons for wanting to get close to my master.”

  Maybe it was time to call on Metellus after all. “And there’s a man in the urban prefect’s office who knows me.”

  “He can confirm that Kleitos invited you?”

  “No.” The blade of Firmicus’s knife was pressing against his jugular vein.

  “Where’s Kleitos now?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruso said. “He just left a note for me with Accius. I can show it to you.”

  “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Firmicus released him as suddenly as he had lunged forward. “Give me the note.”

  Pulling his clothing straight, Ruso moved to place himself between Firmicus and the door to the kitchen, where Tilla’s ancestors were enjoying some otherwise unrecorded victory over the invading legions. It seemed she had finally grasped that this wasn’t Britannia, where women tended to think they could get involved in whatever they liked, and where men saw the look in their eyes and tended to let them.

  He retrieved the little roll of parchment from his purse and placed it in the middle of the operating table. Still holding the knife, Firmicus took it across to where it caught the light filtering through the thick panes of glass above the door. He read the Latin aloud. “What’s all this Greek about …” He paused, squinting at the lettering. “Death and being careful?”

  “It’s an old medical text,” Ruso explained, realizing the light was too poor for Firmicus to see the difference in the ink between textbook medical advice and Kleitos’s warning. Not inclined to enlighten him, he said, “He’s reused it. Symptoms of quartan fever. You have to watch out which sort of herbs you use: Some of the usual fever treatments do more harm than good.”

  Firmicus squinted at the parchment for a moment, then tossed it back across the table.

  “Always was a tightfisted bastard.”

  Ruso watched the knife slide back into the sheath at Firmicus’s belt. “That’s what Horatius Balbus’s protection looks like?”

  “That was me making sure you deserve it,” said Firmicus, as if the explanation did away with any need for apology.

  “I’ve no reason to lie,” Ruso told him. “I don’t know what’s gone on here, but it’s nothing to do with me. Now that you’ve done your job, perhaps you’d leave me to get on with mine.”

  Firmicus was already moving toward the exit when someone knocked on the door. As if it were an afterthought, he reached out and placed a handful of silver coins on the table. “The master sent payment for the medicine. And remember, if you get any more trouble—”

  “You’re the first person I’ll come to.”

  The steward stepped out past a middle-aged couple. The woman was clutching her husband’s arm. The man’s voice was calm and measured, but the intensity of both their expressions suggested they would not breathe freely until Ruso told them whether or not the body that had been found was that of their missing son. When he told them about the hair color they looked relieved—and disappointed—and backed away, thanking him more than was necessary. Then they apologized for disturbing him.

  To their retreating figures, Ruso said, “I’m sorry. I hope you find him soon.” The man raised a hand in weary acknowledgment. The son had been missing for over a month, and so far no amount of pious hoping had done any good at all.

  16

  When he went back into the kitchen the Britons had finished chasing the Romans off the musical battlefield. Tilla said, “I hope that was not a debt collector.”

  “No,” Ruso said. “He works for Kleitos’s patron. He just came to make sure we were all right.” Before she could ask why that had been confidential, he told her about the couple with the missing son. “Thank the gods for the fair hair,” he said.

  Tilla said, “Yes. He was probably only a dead barbarian.”

  It struck him that there was more color in her cheeks than he had seen for many days. “I meant,” he said, “it’ll make him easier to identify.”

  “The sort of barbarian who comes ’round to these nice apartments causing trouble and getting into fights. No wonder he was shut up in a barrel.”

  Realizing what this was about, he said, “I was trying to protect you from those women. The bit about not wanting to see a fight was a joke.”

  “You tell people I am a citizen of Rome but you make a joke about me being a fighting barbarian.”

  He perched himself on the stone counter of the kitchen and contemplated the bare room, the blue curtain in the corner, and the cushions where Mara was busy examining the sole of her foot. Tilla had hung his cloak and her shawl on the back of the door. She had unpacked the red crockery and arranged it neatly on a shelf alongside a wooden platter, four spoons, two knives, and their one cooking pan. Unfortunately there was no sign of any of this display being used to prepare supper, and now that the initial shock had passed, he was hungry. He said, “Were there any patients while I was out?”

  “No. Just more people being nosy and the slaves who took the body away and somebody looking for a lost brother.” Tilla propped herself against the other end of the counter and folded her arms. “Sabella said it is unlucky to cook in here until the priest has been to purify the rooms.”

  “Sabella says?”

  “Because that poor man’s body was here and it is not buried yet.”

  Across the room, Mara put her toes in her mouth and sucked them.

  He said, “The
note offering me the job also said, Be careful who you trust.”

  “You are only telling me this now?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  She wrapped her arms around her thin frame. “How will we ever be safe in this city? There is nobody in charge.”

  “There’s a chap called the urban prefect, and there are departments for—”

  “But it is not how a tribe should be,” she insisted. “I thought before we came … But there is no tribe called the Romans.”

  “There are several different—”

  “It is just lots of strangers all living in one place and fighting to get by.”

  “We’ll get used to it,” he promised, realizing this was not the time for a lecture on the benefits of civilization, literacy, and the rule of law. Especially since his first patient was convinced that malicious rivals were trying to poison him. “We’ll make friends and find work, like we always do in a new place.” He opened his fist to reveal two of the denarii Firmicus had left on the table. “Here’s a start. I’ve had my first proper fee. Kleitos’s patron is doing his best to put business our way. And it’s obvious Kleitos won’t be back in a hurry.”

  She picked up one of the little coins and clamped it between her teeth. Then she angled it toward the light of the window to check that there was no iron showing through the silver. “We can afford to eat from the bar tomorrow too.”

  Given the erratic nature of Tilla’s cooking, this was good news. “And we have somewhere clean to sleep,” he reminded her.

  “And tomorrow we will buy a slave.”

  Only if Accius came up with the necessary loan, but he did not want to snuff out her flickering optimism by saying so.

  “Perhaps the gods have taken pity on us. We will be—” She stopped. “What is that?”

  Ruso tipped his head back, eyeing the joists and floorboards that separated them from the swelling noise of singing in the apartment above. “Who lives up there?”

  “I thought just Phyllis and her husband, but …” As her voice trailed into silence, he saw her mouthing the words along with the tune.

  “You know this song?”

  She said, “I heard it in Gaul.”

  He was about to ask why he did not recognize it himself, when he realized. “Oh, holy Jupiter. Don’t tell me our neighbors are followers of Christos.” So that was what illegal meetings meant.

  “Phyllis is very kind.”

  “Perhaps she would kindly tell her friends to go and sing hymns somewhere else.”

  “This is not a good building: The floor is very thin. She says they can hear what goes on in the surgery. Just imagine.” She was swaying with the rhythm, mouthing more words.

  He said, “Tilla, promise me you won’t get involved with all that again. If we want to stay here, people have to trust us. It’s bad enough starting with a dead body.”

  “They have some nice songs. I had forgotten this one.”

  “If you want songs,” he told her, “Stick to the ones about your ancestors. They’re much better. And longer.”

  A slow smile spread over her face. “You have never told me before how much you like the songs of my people.”

  “It’s time Mara learned them,” he assured her.

  “Which one do you like best?”

  He was saved by the sound of yet another caller at the door. “I don’t think we’ll be lonely here.”

  She followed him through the surgery. “Be careful who you trust. If it is the neighbors again, I will talk to them. If it is the debt collectors, remember—we do not know where he is.”

  It was neither. A man in a white toga was standing on the threshold. With him were two slaves. One was carrying a knife and a bundle of kindling, and the other a metal rattle and a basket containing some sort of bird that was unlikely to make it home again. It was the first time Ruso had ever been glad to see a priest.

  17

  Ruso woke from a dream of falling off Kleitos’s operating table to find himself hanging over one edge of a straw mattress that was too narrow for the bed frame. Careful investigation in the dark revealed that his wife was similarly marooned on the opposite side of the bed, while Mara lay spread-eagled and fast asleep across the middle. Not for the first time, he wondered if they could hire her out to patients who came seeking advice on contraception.

  A voice whispered, “Don’t wake her!”

  He said, “We need a bigger mattress.”

  “Tomorrow I shall make a list of things we need. But it was very kind of Phyllis’s friends to lend us this one.”

  “Hm.”

  “And the bench and table for the kitchen, and the two stools.”

  He said, “I’d rather have paid for them and not had to listen.”

  “You are very grumpy,” she told him. “Christos has never done you any harm.”

  “I haven’t got anything against Christos. It’s the way his followers go on about him and turn their noses up at ordinary religion.”

  She said, “Sometimes I pray to him.”

  “Well, try not to.”

  “I always remember the other gods too.”

  “Mm.” He had a feeling Christos’s more ardent followers might have something to say about that. And also about the quarrel between husband and wife that had broken out upstairs after the hymn singers had clumped away into the night.

  Lifting Mara’s arm out of the way, he shifted himself off the rope supports that crisscrossed the bed frame and onto the relative comfort of the straw. Mara sighed, wriggled, and poked something—a foot, a knee?—into his back. He leaned against it, but instead of withdrawing, whatever it was pushed harder. Finally he eased himself out of range, pondering the unexpected intimacies of parenthood and wondering if he would be more comfortable on the floor. Or indeed on the operating table.

  From the far side of the bed a voice said, “I keep seeing him when I shut my eyes.”

  “That will pass.”

  “He looked as if he was asleep in there. I am very sad for him and his family.”

  “We don’t know he had a family. We don’t know anything at all.”

  There was a moment where he could hear nothing but Mara’s breathing and the distant squeak of a badly oiled wheel passing down the street. He was beginning to drift into sleep when he heard, “What if he is not buried yet?”

  “He can’t come back here,” he mumbled, knowing what she was thinking. “The rooms have been cleansed.”

  “But if his spirit—”

  “It won’t. Your friend said they can smell incense and roast pigeon all the way up the stairs.”

  She sighed one of those you-do-not-understand sighs.

  “Think about it,” he whispered, annoyed at being awake despite the welcome muting of traffic noise and the absence of insect life. “If you believe in ghosts and Christos and the normal gods and all your gods from Britannia and—”

  The hand groping across his face clamped over his mouth. “Sh, don’t wake her!”

  He lowered his voice, but he was determined to make his point. Propping himself up on one elbow to face his wife in the dark, he tried again. “If you believe in all these things,” he said quietly, “then it’s just as logical to believe that he’s at rest because he’s been properly buried and the sacrifice has dealt with anything that might be lingering here. You see?”

  It appeared that she did not see.

  “You have to be consistent,” he urged.

  The ropes creaked as she shifted in the bed. “It is the middle of the night,” she reminded him, sounding farther away. “I do not have to be anything.” It seemed like a satisfactory last word, but just when he thought that was the end of it, he heard, “I know I said it is nothing to do with us, but people think it is.”

  “They’ll get over it.”

  “People think it is my fault because I come from a province a long way away.”

  If he was going to tell her, now was the time. “I think,” he said, “they’re more li
kely to think it’s my fault.”

  When she did not answer, he continued very softly. “When you broke your arm, I didn’t just guess where to join everything back together.”

  Any hope that she might understand was dashed by “What is that to do with it?”

  So he made her whisper a promise into the darkness of the bedroom that she would say nothing of this to anyone. And then, wondering if he was making a big mistake, he told her about surgeons who were desperate to explore inside others’ redundant bodies so that they could become better at their work.

  The bed creaked as she rolled over to face him. “But surely—”

  “That barrel was delivered here,” he reminded her. “And someone wanted payment.”

  “You told me this Doctor Kleitos was a good man!”

  They both fell silent as Mara snorted and shuffled about in the bed. Finally she seemed to drift back to sleep, and he said, “I think he’s a good doctor.” He had also thought Kleitos was a generous man, but he now was starting to wonder if he had been offered this practice because nobody else wanted it. “You know it’s true,” he urged. “There are patients we could help if we knew more about what’s inside the human body instead of just inside animals.”

  “By cutting someone to pieces? What about respect?”

  “Not a live someone, of course.”

  “What? A live— Husband, how could you even think of that?”

  Trying to reconcile his wife to something she found disgusting by telling her about something even worse had definitely not been a good idea. “It was hundreds of years ago,” he explained. “Across the sea in Alexandria. Their anatomists practiced on condemned criminals.”

  “Alive?”

  “Apparently.”

  “And who said they were criminals?”

  “It’s appalling to think of,” he told her, “but you and I probably benefit from the knowledge they handed down.”

  “Ugh. I think you are mad.” She rolled away from him, and he heard her whisper fiercely to the opposite wall, “This whole city is mad. It is bad enough seeing the poor man in the barrel without imagining him being cut up into bits. Why did you have to tell me this?”