Vita Brevis

by Ruth Downie

  He propped the amphora in the corner and rewarded his womenfolk with a warm smile. It was made warmer by the knowledge that soon, thanks to his investment in a baby-minder, he and his wife would be enjoying their first nocturnal privacy in many weeks.

  Tilla glanced at the table, then sniffed his shoulder. “You have been to the baths.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want a husband who smells worse than the staff.”

  “I have not been to the baths.”

  “Never mind,” he assured her, pulling her close. “I like you the way you are.”

  She said, “I have been here dealing with the slaves and the patients and seeing off more debt collectors.”

  He tensed. “The one with the limp again?” While he was dallying at the bathhouse, Birna could have come straight here from the undertakers’.

  “No, two new ones.”

  They could be some of Birna’s cronies. “Did they say where they came from?”

  “I do not care where they came from. Also there were patients. One for me, and two who wanted to talk to a man, but I could not tell them when you would be back, so one of them went somewhere else. The other one wants you to visit his father, but it is not urgent.”

  “There’s a new one waiting in the surgery too.”

  She said, “Do not let him smell that strong wine on your breath.”

  Her tone seemed a little sharp, but no doubt she was tired. With no time to dwell on it, he went back into surgery and apologized for keeping his new patient waiting.

  “I’m Tubero the Younger,” the man announced. “You might not have heard of me.”

  “Ruso,” said Ruso, who hadn’t. “How can I help?”

  The man snorted. “I’ll bet you heard about that big crowd in the Forum of Peace last week, listening to the fine verses.”

  “No, I must have missed it.”

  “Well, you must be the only man in Rome who did. Spellbound, they were! You should have seen them. The woman next to me said, ‘He’s very good, isn’t he?’ And I said, ‘He’s very good at thieving.’ Half of his lines were mine. But of course I couldn’t get her to believe me. Nobody believes me. They’d rather listen to a pretty boy sponsored by a silly old man who thinks he’s in love with him.”

  Recalling the debate about the content of arteries, and the crowds that had gathered to see the woman being dropped off the amphitheater, Ruso suggested, “If you object, you sound curmudgeonly.”

  “Exactly!” cried the poet, shooting out an arm to grab at Ruso while carefully keeping his torso still. “Exactly. It’s such a relief to find someone who understands, Doctor.”

  Ruso lifted his patient’s hand from his arm and recalled Tilla’s warning about his breath. “So, how can I help?”

  As expected, it was back trouble. Ruso performed the usual examinations on Tubero the Younger’s flabby white torso. The man’s effort to touch his toes was not a great success, and his attempt to squat was accompanied by a gasp of “I never have to do all this for the other doctor!” As Ruso noted the way the poet’s head was permanently inclined to the right and his shoulder rose slightly to meet it, he was entertained by a monologue on the difficulties of earning a living as a man of letters.

  There were the friends who borrowed a scroll and then had copies made by their own slaves rather than pay for one. “I donate to the libraries, of course—one has to do one’s bit. And then they go and hide my work away in a corner where nobody can find it!”

  “It must be a struggle,” Ruso conceded, regretting his earlier sympathy. “Does the pain go down your legs at all?”

  No, the pain did not go down his legs. “People don’t appreciate the professional requirements of the job. I have to have my special desk, like you have your instruments. And my routine. The muse of poetry has to know where to find me. Although sometimes it must be very difficult for her. I get invited out a lot, you know.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I used to think like that. But just because I recite in the Forum from time to time, people think I’ll be happy to keep their whole dinner party entertained all evening for nothing. You’ll meet new readers, they say. You can have some of the food, they say. Leftovers, they mean. But then, one of the guests might be a patron on the lookout for new talent. So I say, ‘I’ll come if you send me an escort,’ and, you know, I never hear from most of them again. How’s a man in my condition supposed to walk all the way across the city at night on his— What are you doing?”

  “Testing your reflexes.”

  “Oh. Anyway, I’m not paying for transport to go and recite my poems. That’s not how it’s supposed to work at all.”

  Ruso, who was frequently expected to work for free himself, recognized the frustration. Still, it was hard to see exactly why anyone should pay for anything as pointless as poetry.

  “A little respect is all I ask,” insisted the poet.

  “And payment. You can get down now.”

  Tubero the Younger grasped the scarred edge of the operating table with both hands and carefully lowered his feet to the floor. “Payment would be a token of respect. I’m thinking of going into funeral orations.”

  “That should be a steady trade.” Ruso shoved the table aside to make more space. “Just turn and walk away from me, will you?”

  The poet complied, announcing to the far wall, “Doctor Kleitos just gives me something to rub in.”

  “And back again, please. I thought you were looking for Doctor Simmias?”

  “Only because I heard Kleitos is away.”

  “But Simmias doesn’t—”

  “Simmias covered for him last time he wasn’t working,” explained the poet, coming to a halt in front of Ruso. “If your doorman had had the sense to explain, I’d have gone straight over to the night watch barracks and asked to see Simmias there.”

  “He was working here?” So why, when they met at the slave market, had the portly doctor had claimed he and Kleitos barely knew each other?

  “Only for a few weeks. Kleitos broke his arm—or leg—I can’t remember. Are you going to give me some more of that rub?”

  “Mm,” said Ruso, pondering this new information. “Sit down somewhere here and write something.” The new slave had left the workbench covered with clean, damp jars and bottles. He moved the stool across to the operating table.

  The poet eyed the makeshift desk with distaste. “I can’t just write to order, you know. People imagine I just scribble down the first thing that comes into my head. But a real poet has to consider every word.”

  “I don’t mean compose something,” said Ruso. “Just put your name on that tablet.”

  When the poet had finished slouching over the operating table the name appeared so deeply gouged through the wax that it was probably engraved in the wood underneath.

  “You write very forcefully.”

  “I write with passion!”

  Eventually Ruso prescribed light exercise, frequent breaks, and massage.

  “No medicine?”

  “I can give you something to help relax the muscles, but I think it’s the way you sit,” Ruso explained. “Maybe you could raise your special desk and stand instead.”

  “But I need to think!”

  “Can’t you walk up and down and think at the same time?”

  “I have to think in the thinking position.”

  “You told me the pain and stiffness is interfering with your work. I’m telling you what you can do about it. Keep moving. Walk in the gardens. Go for a swim in Trajan’s very splendid pool.”

  “Hmph. You military types are all the same. You’ll have me sleeping in a tent next.”

  “You could write a poem about it,” Ruso suggested as he scooped some greasy white muscle rub from the main pot into a smaller one. “Rub that in morning and evening.”

  “I suppose you want to charge me?”

  “I’ll throw in the rub for free. Two sesterces for the consultation.”

  “I’m prepared to of
fer you and your friends a private dinner recital—”

  “I don’t give dinners,” Ruso told him.

  “I know!” The poet pulled a scroll from his bag and helped himself to the inkpot Ruso had set up for writing labels before turning back to the operating table. When he had finished he handed over the scroll. “Careful. The ink is still wet. Enjoy!”

  With that, the patient disappeared into the arcade remarkably quickly for a man with crippling back pain.

  Ruso gazed down at the scroll, where the crabbed handwriting suggested that Tubero the Younger was not a man to waste money on professional copyists. Above it glistened the letters, To a fine Medicus, with thanks. Neither Ruso’s own name nor that of the poet, so it wasn’t even any use as a recommendation. He sighed, shoved a few bottles aside, laid the scroll out on the workbench, and propped it open with a mixing bowl and a bleeding cup, and then went to find out what was for supper.

  Ruso had hoped that buying a slave who could cook would make mealtimes easier, but evidently he had been mistaken. For reasons he could not understand, the cook had been sent to the bar next door to fetch the dinner, while his wife was worrying about where the slaves should eat.

  “I am thinking they could eat with us,” she said. She seemed to have forgiven the woman for being part of the Catuvellauni tribe. “Narina is a sensible woman, and Esico did well when those debt collectors came pretending to collect the other doctor’s things. He says he was a warrior at home.”

  “I bet he didn’t smell like that at home.”

  “It was worse before he washed.”

  Perhaps she was hoping that if she didn’t mention the runaway, they could both forget he had ever existed.

  The workbench was still covered with damp bottles and useless poetry. The operating table was the only other alternative to the borrowed kitchen furniture. It was less than ideal, even though the lad had done a fair job of cleaning up, and the waste bucket no longer held somebody else’s teeth. Ruso said, “I think they should wait until we’ve finished.”

  “Then we will have to hurry up, or they will be watching their food get cold.”

  Ruso scratched one ear with his forefinger, pondering this modern dilemma. Things must have been so much easier in the old days, when an aristocrat like Cato could cheerfully assert that a farm slave only needed one new tunic and one pair of shoes every two years, and that anyone too old or ill to be productive should be sold off. But then, Cato’s wife probably hadn’t stocked his house with slaves who reminded her of home. And Cato’s wife had surely never been a slave herself.

  Tilla rarely spoke of that time. Assuming she wanted to forget, he did not ask. But it struck him now that you would never forget how it had felt to watch other people eat while you were hungry.

  “They can eat at the operating table tonight,” he announced. He was going to have to take charge here before his household became a little outpost of Britannia, full of barbarians all demanding the right to hot suppers. “Tomorrow we’ll get Narina to cook, and they can both wait their turn.”

  “That is what I thought,” said Tilla in a reassuring show of solidarity.

  Finally the traditional domestic scene was in place. One lamp was casting a gentle glow over the two remaining barbarians as they dined at the operating table. The other illuminated the kitchen, where Mara was safely propped up on her sheepskin sucking her fingers, and his wife was free to tell him what she wanted him to do.

  The first thing was to check what was actually in the jar labeled CUMIN and something in Greek on the end of the shelf, because it wasn’t cumin at all. “And some of the other things are not right, either. I looked.”

  The second, for reasons he could not fathom, was to intercept the carpenter from upstairs and tell him how marvelous their daughter was.

  “Just in passing,” she added.

  “What if he doesn’t ask?”

  “You will think of something.”

  “I don’t want him thinking I might be interested in Christos.”

  “He is a carpenter. You could ask him about his work.”

  Unable to imagine how that conversation might unfold, he concentrated on tonight’s stew, which tasted very much like last night’s, although he was certain the portions were smaller.

  She said, “You are very quiet.”

  “I’m eating.” He wondered if he ought to tell her that his visit to the undertakers’ had reinforced his suspicions about Kleitos—and raised new ones about the undertakers themselves—and that Sabella’s order of events—which he doubted she would keep to herself—contradicted the cover story they wanted everyone to believe. Still, the visit from more debt collectors suggested that their story was partly true: Kleitos really did have money troubles. And if Ruso had learned anything from the charlatan at the amphitheater, it was that the most plausible lies were the ones that contained an element of truth.

  Be careful who you trust.

  He stirred the stew, watched the vegetables swirling around, and decided everything was bound to make more sense after a night’s sleep. He would not burden Tilla with everything now. This would be their first uninterrupted night together in weeks and he was not going to spend it discussing the hunt for Kleitos, and still less the unsavory side of the undertaking trade.

  Meanwhile, noticing her watching him, he said, “I’m not bothering to chase that runaway.”

  “I think you are wise.”

  Again, this unprecedented level of respect. It was almost worth the debt he had incurred. “But don’t say that to those two out there,” he added. “We don’t want to lose any more.”

  “We must treat them well.”

  “Just be careful they don’t take over. They’re not visitors: They’re here to work.”

  Tilla looked him in the eye, and he braced himself for her reply. But instead of arguing she said, “I heard something about Horatius Balbus’s daughter today.”

  “She’s much better company than her father,” he said.

  “Is she?”

  “I met her over at the house. I’m supposed to be helping Accius make a good impression.”

  “Accius?”

  “It makes sense. She’ll have pots of money from her father’s tenants, and he’ll have the aristocratic background.” Now that he thought about it, once Horatia inherited the properties all Accius had to do was appoint agents who would treat the tenants decently for a change, and he would have ready-made popular support. Some of them might even have votes.

  Tilla said, “Perhaps, but Accius is not the name I heard.”

  “Oh?”

  “I heard …” She paused. “Some names that both start the same. Curtius something. Phyllis’s husband works for him.”

  “The carpenter?” He put down the spoon in which he had scooped up the last of the stew. “Not Curtius Cossus?”

  “That is him.”

  “That can’t be right,” he told her, recalling the elaborate precautions Balbus had taken against being poisoned by Cossus’s dinner. Not to mention Horatia’s description of him as that awful old builder. “He’s twice her age at least.”

  “You have met him too?”

  “Balbus introduced us. It might lead to some work, but I doubt it.” Cossus had acknowledged him with a nod and then politely excused himself to deal with a question from one of his men. He had not seemed particularly awful, but Ruso was not a teenage girl.

  She said, “Phyllis seemed very sure. But Phyllis does not always think straight.”

  “Too much hymn singing.” He mopped the bowl with a chunk of bread and stood up. “Where’s the patient who wants a visit? I’ll do it now.”

  His wife took the bowl, stacked it on top of hers, and dropped both spoons into it. “Whatever you think is right, husband.”

  “Tilla, are you feeling ill?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the matter with you?”

  “There is nothing the matter with me,” she told him, turning aside to put the dirty b
owls on the tray.

  He sat down again. “Perhaps I’d better stay. It’s getting dark. If the debt collectors come back—”

  “You will have to visit patients at night sooner or later, husband. I am not afraid of those men. We will bar the doors. If they try to break in, the neighbors will hear, and Sabella will frighten them off.”

  He leaned back out of range as she wiped the table with unusual vigor. Clearly there was some sort of problem, and he was supposed to guess what it was. “If you don’t like it here, we can look for somewhere else.” But here, apparently, was as good as anywhere else that was not Britannia. He stood again. “Well if there’s nothing the matter and you’re not worried about the debt collectors, I’ll see you later.”

  “There might be robbers in the street,” she told him. “You should take Esico.”

  Unable to decide whether this was a genuine suggestion or some sort of test, he chose to take her at her word. There might indeed be robbers in the street. Who knew? There was more of everything in Rome. He went into the bedroom, delved into the box under the bed, and strapped on his old army dagger. Then he stood beside the bed and listened until he was reassured by the sound of the neighbors moving about upstairs. Leaving Esico to wait at the foot of the steps, he ran up to explain to Timo and Phyllis that he was going out on an urgent call and that his wife was nervous about being on her own after dark—“But don’t tell her I told you so.” Otherwise he would be in even more trouble.

  28

  Since Kleitos had left no covered lantern behind, and there was neither a torch nor any materials for assembling one, Ruso and Esico went without. The patient lived in an apartment block farther along Vicus Sabuci, and once Ruso’s eyes adjusted to the dark he could see well enough. On the way, he tried asking Esico for more details of the debt collectors who had called this afternoon, but the slave had evidently understood Tilla’s warning about nighttime robbers and was glancing around nervously, brandishing his broom handle in such a manner as to tell any lurking thief that something in Ruso’s medical case was worth stealing. “Just walk boldly down the middle of the street,” Ruso told him in British, deciding Esico must have been a very junior warrior and possibly not a well-practiced one. As far as he knew, most of the Dumnonii beyond the reach of the legionary base had adopted a policy of ignoring the soldiers and hoping they would go away.