Vita Brevis

by Ruth Downie

  “Firmicus brought it for you from the fountain,” the soft voice said. “He thought you would be thirsty when you woke up.”

  “Don’t want it. Don’t drink it.”

  The man with the water said, “He’s still groggy. He’ll be all right in a moment.”

  And then, with a huge effort, Ruso managed to pull himself up onto one elbow and say, “Nobody drink the water. You, um—”

  “Horatia,” she prompted.

  “You get some fresh. New cup.”

  “The mistress does not fetch water!” said the man.

  “Fresh from the spout,” he said, collapsing back onto whatever was underneath him and trying to remember how he knew that the man with the drink was dangerous.

  70

  Anyone who glanced down the alleyway beside Balbus’s house would know those people were up to no good: two slaves, a smart young man, and a blond woman all huddled around something on the ground, whispering. But unlike a real fortress, Balbus’s house had no guards on patrol, and anyone who saw anything suspicious had more sense than to interfere.

  Accius’s man bought the oil from a supplier farther along the street and the basket from the shop next door, where he also managed to beg for dry offcuts of willow and reed to fill it. Tilla tore a linen cloth into strips and then pulled out her knife and cut the strips into small pieces. Accius struck the spark from the steel in his purse, remarking that if there was one thing soldiering had taught him, it was never to be without fire.

  Nobody seemed to notice the clean flame in the sunlight. The slave carried the basket around the corner and knelt to place it in front of the door before standing casually in front of it, chatting to his master and a gangly youth with a black eye. Then Tilla dropped on the handful of weeds that Esico had fetched, and joined the others just as thick stinking smoke began to rise, along with shouts of alarm from the shops and people in the street.

  The broom and the flapping cloths were easy enough to beat aside in the confusion, the owners of stamping feet not hard to knock off balance while more people were piling in to help and everyone was shouting at everyone else to be careful and get out of the way. Somewhere in the house, a bell was clanging. And then she heard Accius shout, “Now!” and through the smoke she saw the door open and Accius lunge forward just as the torrent of water came out and hit him. She screamed, “No!” and tried to claw her way forward but someone knocked her aside and the door was closing again and Accius was still on this side of it and she could not get there in time and—

  And a big figure was shouldering his way in, his high-pitched voice sounding above the uproar, “Undertaker to see the steward!”

  They slipped in unhindered in the wake of Squeaky, who reached up and stilled the bell. “Undertaker to see the steward,” he repeated, and the doorman, stumbling backward away from him, said, “Just wait there, sir,” but nobody did.

  Several household slaves were running toward them, with Firmicus striding along behind.

  Squeaky said, “I need a word with you.”

  Firmicus looked at him for a moment, then ordered everyone else back to work. Meanwhile Horatia came running across the entrance hall and flung herself into Accius’s wet arms. “I knew you would come! I knew it!” The little woman who cried, “Mistress Horatia!” in shocked tones might as well not have bothered.

  Tilla said, “Where is my husband?” but nobody answered. So she ran past Accius and the others, calling for him in the entrance hall, and past all the statues and out into the second courtyard, and there he was, being dragged toward the fountain by Metellus.

  “Leave him alone!”

  His clothes were creased, his hair was sticking up, and he was grinning at her as if he were a small boy. She held him tight and he started to giggle.

  Metellus said, “It’s the medicine. He says it’ll wear off.”

  “It’s all right,” her husband assured her, reaching out to cup one hand under a stream of the fountain and slurping the water before wiping his wet palm over his face. “It’s all right. It was just ordinary poppy all along.” He glanced around before leaning closer to whisper, “Got to watch out for the steward.”

  “I know,” she told him. “That’s what Kleitos said to Simmias. I came to tell you.”

  He blinked. “Say that that again,” he said. “Slowly.”

  71

  It did not take Accius long to decide that since he was an aristocrat and a former military tribune and a man, he must be in charge. He unwound himself from Horatia, who was now very damp, gave his doctor a friendly slap on the shoulder that nearly knocked him over, and announced that he needed a word with the skull-faced cousin. The cousin muttered something about him being banned and about needing another bodyguard—and where was that steward when he was wanted?—but nobody seemed to take any notice. All the staff had either vanished or were scuttling about, making themselves look busy. When Horatia followed them into her father’s old study to hear the word Accius was about to have, her cousin did not even try to send her away.

  Tilla stood close to her husband as he scooped more water from the fountain spout. Gellia, very pale, was leaning over the opposite side and gazing at the fish as if she had nothing better to do. Esico was standing awkwardly by a pillar, trying to hide his black eye while he waited to be given orders. Metellus had disappeared, but he was like a pet snake: If you knew he was out of his cage somewhere you could never rest easy.

  There was a cup abandoned on the marble seat. Tilla stepped across to collect it and Gellia suddenly seemed to wake up. “Not that one, miss.” The girl hurried across and snatched it from her. “I’ll get you a clean one.”

  Tilla supposed that was the way they did things in a house with too many servants. People did not even know how to rinse a cup for themselves. She took her husband by the arm. “This is the last time you take your own medicine.”

  “It was only a very low dose of poppy.”

  “It could have killed you! Look at you! You are not even used to taking it like that man would have been.”

  “Only poppy,” he repeated, grinning at her. “Four times the minimum dose, but only…”

  “That was what I told you all along,” she said, not entirely certain that she had. “Now, talk to me about that steward.”

  “Kleitos said not to trust him.”

  “I just told you that! What else do you know?”

  So then he explained, with pauses to collect his thoughts that made her want to poke him to hurry him up.

  When Gellia returned with the cup Tilla passed it to her husband and told her to stay.

  “I need to talk to you about Latro.”

  Gellia raised her chin. “I am not talking about him.”

  “Yes, you are. This is important.” Tilla was ashamed not to have seen the lie for herself yesterday. Nor even when she had repeated the story to her husband over breakfast. “Who told Latro that he would be freed in the master’s will?”

  Gellia frowned. “The master, I suppose.”

  “Think very hard about this, Gellia. Do you think it is likely that a master who depends on someone to help him stay alive would tell that someone that he will benefit from the master’s death?”

  Gellia did indeed look as though she was thinking very hard about it, possibly because she did not understand the question.

  “Gellia, if I am your master and you are my bodyguard, will I tell you that things will go well for you if I die?”

  “Oh, I see!”

  “Are you quite sure it was the master?”

  She was not. She had just supposed it must be.

  “And if it was not the master, who was it?”

  She said in a very small voice, “The only one who would know what was in the will was Firmicus.”

  The empty cup clapped down onto the side of the fountain. “That’s what I thought as well,” Ruso said. “The two men guarding Balbus when he died.”

  “Husband, not now!”

  He said it anyway. �
�The steward who knew he would benefit from the death, and the bodyguard who …” He paused, scratched his head, and said, “The bodyguard who thought he would be freed too.”

  Gellia said, “Latro always looked after the master, he wouldn’t…”

  Tilla said, “My husband is just guessing.”

  But all the remaining color had drained from Gellia’s face. Tilla reached out to take her arm but she spun away out of reach, racing across the courtyard and thundering up a wooden staircase. Tilla followed. By the time they reached the room beyond the courtyard balcony she was already shouting, “You! It was you! You made him do it!”

  Tilla caught a glimpse of Firmicus and Squeaky staring at Gellia from either side of a pile of denarii before the slave girl stepped forward, and the desk rose up and silver coins were glinting in the air all around them and pattering over the floor like hail.

  Gellia would have done better to press home the attack. Instead she faltered, hands covering her mouth, staring at what she had done.

  Firmicus stood without speaking, and righted the fallen table. His eyes were cold. Gellia took a step backward.

  “Get back to work,” he told her, adding in a voice that Tilla could barely hear, “I’ll have you brought to me later.”

  72

  Accius strode into the steward’s office looking even more annoyed than usual. Meanwhile Horatia and her cousin had followed him up the steps. By the time Firmicus finished counting out the money he had rescued from the floor, the little room was crammed with people, and Ruso, who had got there before them, had to shift farther along to let them in.

  Despite being only two paces away, Squeaky seemed not to have recognized either him or Tilla. Perhaps the big man was hoping they might mistake him for somebody else. When Firmicus handed him the newly filled purse he twisted the drawstring around his wrist, cupped the weight in his palm, and blundered toward the door.

  To Ruso’s surprise Tilla stepped into Squeaky’s path. “What is that money for?”

  Firmicus said, “Payment for the master’s funeral.”

  She had picked the wrong fight. Even Squeaky could not be a money-grabbing bully all of the time. Now the big man was grinning down at her, and she was clearly wrong-footed. He knew he should say something, but Be nice to my wife didn’t sound quite right.

  Fortunately Accius took charge. “Nobody’s to leave until we’ve cleared up what happened to Horatius Balbus.”

  Horatia looked up at him adoringly. Squeaky glanced ’round to see if anyone was going to tell Tilla to get out of the way, then backed into a corner. Ruso leaned against a cupboard and stifled a yawn. He was feeling faintly queasy, but he must stay alert. This was important.

  Accius turned to address the cousin, who was looking more weary than impressed. Ruso guessed he would rather be back in his butcher’s shop, hacking up carcasses.

  “Sir,” Accius began, “perhaps you’d allow me to inform our friends here of your kind acknowledgment that I had absolutely nothing to do with the sad death of the man I had hoped to call father-in-law and neither did my man Ruso.”

  This is what we need at a time like this, Ruso wanted to say. A man who can make speeches. For a moment he wondered if he had actually said it. But Accius was still talking, so probably not.

  Then Firmicus said, “The tribune is innocent, sir, but the doctor isn’t. My master collapsed and suffered a fatal injury after taking that man’s fake medicine.”

  The cousin turned to Ruso and raised one eyebrow.

  “The only potentially dangerous ingredient was poppy, sir,” Ruso told him, stifling an urge to agree that making medicine with a dubious ingredient was a very stupid thing to do, and trying to remember where he had intended to go with this statement. Fortunately Tilla guessed.

  “Horatius Balbus had been taking small amounts of poppy daily,” she said. “Anyone who knows about poppy will tell you that if you take it every day, it is bad to stop, but if you take it that way it has a weaker effect. My husband does not take it often, and you made him swallow many times as much as his patient, and look! He is still here.”

  In body, at least. He was not sure where his mind was. “In any case, sir,” he began, then paused. It was very distracting to be stared at by everyone like that. Ah, yes. “In any case, we’ve only got the steward’s word for it that his master collapsed.”

  “Not true!” snapped Firmicus, not bothering to address the cousin. “Latro was there. He saw it too.”

  “But he’s not here now,” Ruso pointed out.

  Tilla said, “You both thought you would be freed if Balbus died.”

  “The street was full of people!”

  “You know, it’s very odd,” Ruso said, genuinely puzzled. “I couldn’t find a single person who saw him before he fell. I spent a long time looking.”

  That sent Firmicus into a long speech about his lifetime of service here and how Ruso had blown in from the provinces only yesterday. Ruso could not understand why anyone was bothering to listen to this bluster, but he suspected he was still slightly adrift on the receding tide of the poppy. There was something else he needed to say, and it was important, and in a minute he would remember what it was.

  “You waited till you were in the dark with nobody looking,” Tilla interrupted, “And—”

  “Sir!” Firmicus demanded. “Why are we listening to this—this woman?”

  The cousin said, “Let her speak,” but Tilla was already talking.

  “In the dark,” she insisted, “with nobody looking, you and Latro knocked your master down and killed him!”

  What a woman he had married! She really was marvelous. This was like watching a boxing match.

  Firmicus, on the other hand, thought she was talking nonsense and said so.

  “You lied to Latro,” Tilla went on. “You told him he would be freed when the master died, and he saw his chance to buy Gellia and marry her. He wouldn’t have helped you otherwise.”

  Surely Firmicus would be floored by that? But no. When the cousin said, “Well?” he rallied. He had, he agreed, not been telling the whole truth. The fault did not lie entirely with the incompetent doctor, although he deserved to be punished for carelessness anyway.

  Absolutely right, Ruso thought, then realized when everyone turned to look at him that he had spoken aloud.

  Firmicus had not wanted to say this in front of the family, but that woman—why did people insist on calling Tilla that woman?—had forced him into it.

  The whole thing, it seemed, had been planned by Latro. Firmicus himself had suspected nothing until they were passing the shoemaker’s door and Latro suddenly stepped back and cracked his master on the side of the head with his club. Asked why, Latro said Balbus had refused to grant him his freedom, and if Firmicus didn’t shut up and play along, he would get the same. To Firmicus’s great shame, he had been too shocked and afraid to speak up at the time. Then later he had taken the difficult decision not to say anything out of loyalty to the family.

  “Loyalty?” put in Horatia, incredulous.

  “You need me, mistress.” He looked around the room. “You all need me. Nobody else knows how the business works.”

  “What did Pa ever do to hurt you?”

  “Nothing,” Firmicus told her. “He was going to free me next year. The loss of me as well as him would have destroyed everything he built up for you to inherit.”

  A silence fell over the little room and this time it seemed even Tilla had nothing to say. It was too late now for Doctor Kleitos said you weren’t to be trusted.

  Finally the cousin turned to Horatia. “Is that three or four versions we have now of how your father died?”

  Accius put his hand on her arm. “Let me deal with this. Sir, this is distressing for the young lady and we don’t need all these other people here, either. I suggest you and I remain here with the steward and we’ll get to the truth.”

  Or at least, thought Ruso as the rest of them trooped out onto the sunlit balcony, a versio
n of the truth that would suit Publius Accius. Which was probably no bad thing.

  73

  Gellia had not gone back to work. She was leaning over the side of the fountain again, staring at a dozen silver bodies floating and bobbing in the water.

  “The fish!” cried Horatia, running down the steps. “All the fish are dead! We are cursed! First Pa, then Latro, now this!”

  This seemed the wrong way around to Ruso: Surely the gods would start with the fish and work their way up?

  Gellia stepped away from the fountain. This was a very different Gellia from the nervous creature he had first met, or the screaming fury who had thrown over the table, or the cowed servant expecting punishment. This was a young woman who clasped her hands over her pregnant belly and, with a clear voice, asked permission to speak.

  Horatia said, “Of course.”

  “Firmicus did it, mistress.”

  Horatia frowned. “Firmicus struck the fish dead?”

  “The water that he brought for the doctor,” the girl said, pointing at the fish. “The water the doctor wouldn’t drink. They said to take it away, so I tipped it in the fountain.”

  The queasiness returned as Ruso realized how close he had been to never waking up again.

  “But why?” Horatia demanded of no one in particular. “Why did he do all these terrible things? Pa was going to free him next year anyway!”

  Gellia said, “Your pa said that every year, miss.”

  Horatia was still staring at the fish. “We would have thought it was the medicine,” she said, following the same train of thought as Ruso. “The doctor would have been blamed for everything, and poor Accius, and—”

  At that moment they heard Accius yell, “Stop him!” but Firmicus leapt over the side of the steps and was past them and ducking in behind a trellis at the far end of the garden.

  As they ran Tilla cried, “The door!”

  But instead of the rattle of a lock there was a howl of pain, and a violent rustling of leaves as something hit the trellis, and a high-pitched voice shouted, “No you don’t, pal!”