Vita Brevis

by Ruth Downie

  Meanwhile Accius, instead of abandoning his misguided attempt to chase Cossus away from Horatia, had now put Metellus in sole charge of it. If Cossus were to retaliate by making his own enquiries, someone would surely ask why a doctor who admitted to knowing very little about poisons had been mixing up something that he had apparently presented to his patient as theriac. And if it wasn’t theriac, Doctor, then what exactly was it?

  If only he had thought to keep some of the mixture back instead of filling the bottle. The only sample must be somewhere in Balbus’s house. It was hard to see how he could get hold of it without arousing suspicion. Anyway, what would he do with it? Tip it down the nearest drain? Replace it with something definitely safe, in case anyone asked? Ask Xanthe what she thought of it? No: She might talk. The only way to find out in secret was to drink it and see what happened.

  Ruso squeezed his eyes tight shut and tried to silence the echoes of Xanthe’s dramatic warnings, but telling himself that he very probably hadn’t poisoned his chief patient did not provide a great deal of comfort in the lonely dark of the kitchen.

  The patient trusted you, Doctor. And where is the patient now?

  Dead, sir.

  The woman cried out again.

  Everything depended on finding Kleitos. Kleitos could reassure him that what was in that pot was simply normal-strength poppy. Kleitos could sell some of the possessions he’d taken away with him on that vegetable cart and pay off the undertakers for their unwanted and illegal delivery.

  Christos had already been roped in to join the hunt. Perhaps they should try a wider appeal for divine help. It could do no harm. He had met people who were sure they had been healed after presenting some god with a clay replica of the affected part of the body. The priests in the temple over on Tiber Island asked the patients to do little more than lie down and sleep and think good thoughts, and their eager scribblings on the walls testified to the cures that had come to them in dreams.

  He turned to face the little shrine on the wall where Tilla had put the oak leaves and the little horse and the statue of Mercury. “The gods who lived here before you,” he whispered to the dark, “where has Kleitos taken them?” But the oak leaves and little horse and the statue of Mercury remained stubbornly silent: only the woman cried out.

  Why was he even thinking like this? It was insane. The gods were the invention of storytellers: the product of collective imaginings that only existed because people agreed to believe in them.

  He yawned, punched the wretched lump in the mattress again, and had just closed his eyes when he heard Esico moving about in the surgery. Moments later the door was pushed open and someone was shuffling across the kitchen, feeling his way around the furniture.

  Ruso spoke in British. “How’s the head, Esico?”

  The slave gasped in fright and crashed into something.

  “Sorry.”

  “The head hurts, master. And now my foot.”

  “Do you feel sick? See flashing lights or seeing double?”

  “No, master.”

  He heard the rustle of the curtain being pushed back and a sigh as Esico sat on the pot. The slave had not had the best of evenings, either. His new family’s home had come under threat for the second time in two days, and in trying to defend it he had practically been knocked senseless. He had managed to blunder out into the courtyard and tried to explain to a passing neighbor but it was not until Narina arrived to translate that help had been summoned.

  “You see,” Tilla had observed, tucking in the knot on the bandage around Esico’s freshly stitched forehead, “It is good to have slaves who speak the same tongue.”

  The curtain was pulled back into place. Esico said into the darkness, “Will you sell me, master?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Narina says those men want money.”

  Ruso was not proud of imagining a torrent of coins rolling toward him in exchange for a loyal and healthy slave who was bound to get a grip on Latin before long. “Go back to bed, Esico.”

  Esico shuffled out. The woman shrieked.

  Ruso lay down, closed his eyes, and put his fingers in his ears. If the boy had to go, he deserved to go to a good home. That was what any decent man did when disposing of loyal members of his household. But the trouble was, Esico would be sold only if things were desperate, and that very desperation might mean he had to go to whoever would pay. Once that happened, his former owners would have no more control over how he was treated than they would if they had sold a dog.

  He needed to find Kleitos. He needed reassurance and information and he needed hard cash.

  It was impossible to get comfortable with his fingers in his ears. As he removed them he heard a bloodcurdling scream. Then a silence, followed by the scratchy and irritable wail of a new soul forced out to cope in a messy world.

  46

  Everyone was up early. Narina was making proper porridge with milk. Esico’s head was still sore and the first shadows of a black eye were showing, but he seemed keen to work. He even took on a woman’s job, going out to the fountain for water.

  While the slaves were busy Tilla joined her husband in the surgery. As she had feared, he refused to think about going back to Britannia. He looked so tired that she decided to leave that argument for later, but as she told him, if they were to stay, they needed a plan. Or six hundred sesterces. Or some way of earning in two days what an ordinary person might hope to earn in many months.

  “As rich men say,” he told her, “it’s only money. Careful!” He reached out to hold her back, then crouched to pick up a tiny sliver of glass and wipe it off his finger into the bucket.

  “If we do not leave today,” she said, “we must find Kleitos, or some new patients who are very rich, and you must go to Accius.”

  “I don’t want to involve Accius.”

  “But you must! He needs to know. Someone is threatening his man. It is an insult to him.”

  “I’m not sure I am his man anymore. Besides, I can’t go today. It’s the funeral.”

  She had forgotten the funeral. She needed to find something dark to wrap around Mara, and she must remember to take the gray cloak and her own night blue tunic out of the trunk and hang them to get rid of the creases. She would tell the slaves to stand on either side of them. The household needed to look respectful for her husband’s sake, even if the dead man had allowed people to live in homes overrun with cockroaches.

  “You can see him tomorrow, then,” she said. “He must be able to do something. Can he not talk to somebody?”

  “It was talking to people that got us into this.” He lowered his voice. “I can’t explain why Squeaky wants money without telling Accius what was going on here, and once he knows, he’s implicated in covering it up. I’m supposed to help his career, not drag him into scandal.”

  “Tell him something else. Tell him you need money because one of our slaves ran away and—wait!”

  For a moment he looked hopeful. Then when she told him her idea, and he explained why it would not work, she felt foolish. Of course the dealer’s famous six-month money-back guarantee was only a promise that the slave was as described. You could not complain when someone who bore the label runaway ran away. “Tell Accius one of them died and we need to buy another one,” she suggested. “He is a rich man with a big house—he will hardly notice it.”

  “He’s not as rich as you imagine. And I already owe him for the slaves we still have.”

  She swallowed. It was her fault, so she should be the first to say it. “If you want to sell them …”

  “I don’t. Yet.”

  “I will tell everyone I am taking on patients now we have Narina. And you could earn some money with the night watch. Those men said there was a job.”

  “They know that because it was one of the watch’s doctors who brought them down on us. Besides, I’m not leaving you here overnight.”

  She wanted to shout, Then what are you going to do? but as the words formed in her mind
she heard an echo of them in her mother’s voice. “This is what bullies do,” she said, remembering the raised voices around the fire night after night while she and her brothers were supposed to be sleeping. “This is what my people did when the Legions came. Nobody knew what to do.” And then, something she had never spoken aloud before. “It was not the soldiers who broke us,” she said. “It was we ourselves with our quarreling.”

  “We’re not quarreling. We’re having a discussion.”

  “No,” she told him, even more annoyed now. “I am having ideas and you are saying no to them. You have been like this ever since that patient died, and he was not a nice man anyway. I am going to stop talking to you until you have an idea of your own.”

  She leaned back against the workbench and folded her arms. He did the same. She wondered if he had thought about the box of soldiers’ kit under the bed: the valuable kit that he would need if they were to go back to Britannia. Soldiers always needed doctors. If Accius could get him out of the Legion, Accius could surely get him back in. She knew she could suggest selling it, and she knew she was not going to. Not yet.

  Nor, it seemed, was he. “We’re talking as if they’re coming back this morning. We still have two days. We could ask Metellus.”

  “Metellus? Husband, are you losing your mind?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “But if anyone can find Kleitos, he can.”

  She took a deep breath. “I am sorry,” she said. “I thought you meant you would ask Metellus for money.”

  “Mm. We could try that too if Kleitos won’t pay up.”

  “Tell me you are teasing me.”

  He shrugged. “You complain when I turn down all your ideas.”

  “Perhaps the men will come back today to fetch Kleitos’s things,” she said, trying to find something hopeful to say. “Then we will find him and he can sort everything out and we will have no need to do anything.”

  “Perhaps.”

  It was as near an apology as she was going to get. She reached up to flatten a spike of hair that was sticking out above his ear. “You must comb this before you see anyone. You look like a man who has slept with his head on upside down. Did I tell you what Narina said about the followers of Christos?”

  This time he made the effort to grasp her peace offering. “Tell me.”

  “She said, ‘If he is a powerful god, why does he put up with that Sister Dorcas?’”

  The smile was not broad, but it was there. And that was when he told her the other thing that was worrying him: how Accius had fallen out with him because Ruso was refusing to help prove that Curtius Cossus the builder was a murderer.

  She was saying, “He wanted you to prove what? What is the matter with him?” when they both heard the scrape of boots on stone very close by. Then something scratching at the door, as if someone were trying to work out a way of getting in.

  She put her hand on his arm. He nodded, and she ran to the kitchen to warn Narina, who grabbed a cloth and moved the porridge pan off the heat. The one thing they had all agreed on this morning was a plan. If there was danger, Narina would snatch up the baby and run—in the daytime, to the baths, where there would be plenty of people. At night, she would try to get up the steps to Phyllis, or knock on any door where there was a light showing, or … The nighttime plan needed more thought. But not right now, because her husband called through to say it was only Timotheus measuring up the door. Cossus had told all his workers to take the morning off and line the streets for Horatius Balbus’s funeral procession.

  Out in the courtyard, Tilla took a great lungful of the nearest thing this city had to fresh air, and told her heart to slow down again.

  She hoped her husband had remembered what he was supposed to say. With Timo standing there, it was the ideal chance to work the conversation around to family life and babies. Slipping back inside to listen, she heard him thanking Timo for everyone’s help last night—but as far as she could tell, the chance to say how precious Mara was went by unused. Timo said he hoped those men wouldn’t be back, and her husband agreed, and then there was a silence.

  “Two six,” said Timo. There was a pause, then, “Six four.” When she looked, he was holding a wooden rule up against the door. “Top, three and a quarter inches.” He clamped the rule between his teeth and the little slave boy beside him held out a tablet and stylus so he could write the numbers down.

  Her husband went back to work, sorting through the jumble of documents in the box under the workbench.

  “Done,” said Timo, handing the rule back to the boy, who knelt to put it in the battered leather tool bag. “If I can get that sawn this afternoon, I’ll do it tonight.”

  Her husband said it was very good of him, and Timo grunted that the wife had told him to do it. No, he didn’t need money in advance for the timber.

  “We’ll pay you when it’s sorted, then. Thanks.”

  At this rate the ideal moment would be wasted. And so would the chance to repeat the other story that needed to be passed on to the neighbors at every opportunity. Tilla stepped forward, greeted Timo, and said, “You and Phyllis have been very kind. We are so sorry that Kleitos’s debts have caused so much trouble. If we had known what a bother it would all be for everyone, we would never have come here.”

  Timo seemed just as surprised as everyone else had been at the news that Kleitos had debt problems. Tilla could hear the disbelief in his tone. She supposed this was how it was going to be, even with people she had begun to look on as friends. Everybody would think they had brought trouble to this place themselves, and now they were trying to blame somebody else.

  “I have work to do,” she told him, retreating toward the kitchen. “But if there is anything we can do to help you in return, you must say so. And please tell Phyllis you are both welcome here at any time.”

  Her interruption had made the men talk to each other, but not in the way she had hoped. As she retreated she heard Timo telling her husband he was sorry if they had troubles, but he had told Phyllis she was to stay away from here in the future. “I can’t have my wife near men like that,” he said. “Not with her on her own and me out at work all day.”

  With one ear pressed up against the crack in the door she heard her husband say, “Of course not,” and “Absolutely,” and “We’re very grateful to you,” because there was nothing else he could say, and then Timo went through his reasons all over again, perhaps because he was embarrassed or perhaps because he was enjoying being seen protecting his wife. So there was some more “Absolutely” and “Yes, I understand,” and now instead of willing their visitor to stay, she was willing him to go.

  At last he seemed about to leave, when she heard her own husband say, “While you’re here, I’m sure there was something I had to say to you.”

  “It was nothing!” she called, hurrying out to join him and hooking one arm through his. The whole point of telling Timo how happy they were with their adopted daughter was that her husband had to slip it in casually and pretend that it was his own idea. That nobody had asked him to say it and certainly no one—least of all Phyllis—had ever mentioned the barrenness of Timo’s marriage. “Husband, our neighbor is a busy man. He does not want to spend all morning here talking to you.”

  But instead of agreeing he said, “Ah, I’ve got it!” and turned back to the carpenter.

  She tightened her arm around his. “There is a funeral procession to dress for, husband!”

  “Sawdust,” he said. “Could you let us have a sack for sweeping up? We’ve run out.”

  “Sawdust,” repeated Timo, bending to pick up his toolbag. Then, as if he too had remembered something, “The wife said to ask you about Paullus. A good friend of yours, is he?”

  “Paullus?” Her husband shook his head. “I don’t know him.”

  “She saw you in the gardens with him yesterday.”

  Metellus, the man who could look like no one and anyone. And no better to have around than the undertakers. Tilla said, “She is mistaken.
That was a man we know from Britannia.”

  “That’s him, then,” said Timotheus. “Clerk in the urban prefect’s office?”

  Her husband said, “Something like that.”

  “That’s the one,” said Timo. “Metellus Paullus. Next time he’s around, tell him to drop in. We haven’t seen him for a while.”

  Tilla could not believe it. “Metellus is a friend of yours?”

  Timo glanced sideways at the steps to his apartment, as if he was wishing he had not started this. “Sort of.”

  “Surely he is not a follower of Christos?”

  Timo sniffed and rubbed his nose with his free hand. “Don’t say anything. It might not go well for him at work. But he’s on our side.”

  “We will keep it quiet,” Tilla promised. Not because she wanted to save Metellus from embarrassment at the prefect’s office, but because she was certain he was never on anyone’s side but his own.

  47

  The first patient of the day arrived at the back door. Tilla was surprised to see the girl from upstairs, now no longer pregnant but carrying a very small and angry baby and a water jug.

  “Oh, what a clever girl you are! Let me see!”

  The girl was on the verge of tears. “It won’t feed,” she said, waving the water jug in frustration. “And Ma says I’ve got to get rid of it.”

  Remarking that it sounded healthy enough, Tilla fetched a chair into the surgery and gestured to her husband and Esico to get out of the way. The girl sank gratefully onto the cushion.

  “Why did you not call me when you were in labor?”

  “Ma said she could manage.”

  Assuring her she had done very well, Tilla checked the baby, who was a boy, and congratulated the mother again. Somebody had to. She bit back a question about the name: If a child was not to be kept, it was best not to think of one. “I’d have come if I’d known.”

  “I thought I was going to die,” the girl told her. “I was hoping you would hear me.”