Medicus

by Ruth Downie

  He took a deep breath before diving into the perfumed dusk of the oil shop. He had placed his flask on the counter and was naming what he wanted when the shopkeeper's attention was caught by something behind him. The man snatched up a heavy stick and leaped out from behind the counter, yelling, "Clear off!" The dog that had finished Ruso's cake shot out from behind a stack of jars and scuttled off down the street.

  The shopkeeper replaced the stick under the counter. "Somebody ought to do something about those dogs."

  "Are they dangerous?"

  "Only when they bite. Now, what was it you were after?"

  Outside, half a dozen pairs of hands were dragging a limp body along the pavement to where the fountain, a large and ugly stone fish, was spewing water into a long rectangular tank.

  The shopkeeper glanced up from the jug he was pouring. "Something's going on over there."

  Ruso heard a splash as he said, "A woman fainted in the street."

  "Oh." The man twisted the stopper into the flask and wiped the side with a cloth. Ruso handed over a sestertius. As the man counted out the change, more people began crowding around the fountain. Voices drifted across the street.

  "Get up, you lazy whore!"

  "Give her another dunk!"

  "If you burn some feathers—"

  "Stand her up!"

  "Lie her down!"

  "Lie her down? She does nothing but lie down!"

  Ruso dropped the coins into his purse and emerged into the fresh air.

  He was not going to offer to help. He had been caught like that before.

  Poor people, like stray dogs, bred huge litters they couldn't look after and latched on to you with the slightest sign of encouragement. As soon as the whisper went around that some doctor was treating people for free, every case of rotten teeth and rheumatism within a thousand feet would be rounded up and thrust under his nose for inspection. He would be lucky to get away before nightfall.

  A voice whispered in his memory—a voice he hadn't heard for almost two years now—a voice accusing him of being cold-hearted and arrogant. He silenced it, as he usually did, by recalling other voices. The Tribune's praise of his "commendable single-mindedness" (of course Valens had to ruin it later by explaining, "He meant you're boring"). Or the officer's wife who had smiled at him over her sprained ankle and said, "You're really quite sweet, Petreius Ruso, aren't you?" That memory would have been more comforting, though, if she hadn't been caught in the bed of the chief centurion a week later and been sent back to Rome in disgrace.

  Raising his fingers to sniff the smear of perfumed oil, Gaius Petreius Ruso headed back the way he had come.

  The sharp crack of a hand on flesh rang down the street.

  "On your feet! Move!"

  A pause.

  "Throw some more water on her."

  A splash. A cry of, "Hey, mind my new shoes!"

  Laughter.

  Ruso pursed his lips. He should have stayed up at the fort. He could have helped himself to some of Valens's oil and used the hospital baths.

  Now he would sit in the steam room wondering what had happened to the wretched woman, even though he wasn't responsible for it.

  "Wake up, gorgeous!"

  More laughter.

  If he managed to revive her, those comedians would take the credit.

  "Turn her over!"

  If he didn't, he would get the blame.

  There was a sudden gasp from around the fountain. Someone cried, "Ugh! Look at that!"

  A child was pawing at her mother's arm, demanding, "What is it?

  I can't see! Tell me what it is!"

  Ruso hesitated, came to a halt, and promised himself it would only be a quick look.

  The military belt was an accessory with magical powers. Several of the onlookers disappeared as soon as it approached. The rest parted to let its wearer through, and Ruso found himself staring down at his second unfortunate female today. This one was a skinny figure lying in a puddle by the fountain. She was still breathing, but she was a mess. The rough gray tunic that covered her was the same color as the bruise under one eye. Blood was oozing from her lower lip and forming a thin red line in the water that still trickled down her face. Her hair was matted and mud-colored. She could have been any age between fifteen and thirty.

  "We're giving this girl some water, sir," explained someone with an impressive grasp of understatement.

  "She's fainted," added someone else.

  "She always faints when there's work to be done," grumbled the man who had been shouting at her. He bent as far down as his belly would allow and yelled in the girl's ear, "Get up!"

  "She can't hear you," remarked Ruso evenly. His gaze took in the copper slave band around the girl's upper right arm. Below the elbow, the arm vanished into a swathe of grimy rags. The pale hand emerging at the other end was what had silenced the crowd. It was sticking out at a grotesque and impossible angle. Ruso frowned, unconsciously fingering his own forearm. "What happened to her arm?"

  "It wasn't us!" assured a voice in the crowd. "We was only trying to help!"

  The grumbler turned his head to one side and spat. "Silly bitch fell down the steps."

  "Fell down the steps, sir," corrected Ruso, restraining an urge to seize the man by the ear.

  "Yes, sir. Didn't look where she was going, sir."

  "It should have been set right away."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Get it done."

  "On my way now, sir."

  The girl groaned. The man grabbed her good arm and hauled her to her feet. She fell against him. Caught off balance, he struggled to stay upright.

  Ruso was uncomfortably aware that he was now at the center of this entertainment. Whatever he did, he must not admit to being a doctor. Nor did he intend to waste his afternoon being soaked and muddied by dragging a sick slave around.

  "You there!" He pointed to a greasy-haired youth who was lolling against a wall trying to dislodge something from his ear with his forefinger. "Yes, you! Give him a hand."

  The youth withdrew the finger, opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. He slid a reluctant hand under the girl's good arm. He and the girl's owner began to drag the limp body along the pavement.

  Ruso scowled at the crowd, which began to disperse.

  "The fort's the other way!" he shouted after the owner.

  No reply.

  He overtook them, blocking the path. The trio paused. The girl slumped lower.

  "She needs to go to the fort hospital. Now."

  "Yes, sir," agreed the owner. "But the thing is, sir . . ."

  The thing was that he was short of cash. The girl's last owner had driven away with a cartload of his best-quality woolens and palmed a slave off on him who was lazy and useless. Now she had gone and broken her arm and he couldn't even sell her. A harder man would have thrown her out into the street, but everyone knew Claudius Innocens was a man too soft for his own good. He knew the hospital at the fort had an excellent reputation—"Get on with it!" prompted Ruso—but it was too expensive for a poor trader. He had heard there was a good healer on the Bridge road. He was going there now.

  "I just have to do a little business on the way, sir," he added. "So I can pay for the treatment."

  Ruso had only been stationed in Deva for four days, but already he knew that the local healer wouldn't be able to do anything with that arm. He said nothing. It was not his problem. He had only come out for a drink and a flask of bath oil. The girl's face was horribly pale: she probably didn't have long left anyway. The healer would have henbane, or mandrake. Perhaps some imported poppy juice.

  Ruso glanced around to make sure no one was looking, then undid his purse and placed two sestertii into the hand of Claudius Innocens. "Take her there now," he ordered. "Buy her a dose of something for the pain."

  "You're a kindhearted man, sir!" Innocens's jowls bulged outward in a smile that failed to affect his eyes. "Not a lot of gentlemen would see a poor man in need and—"
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br />   "See to it!" snapped Ruso, and walked away, checking that his oil flask was still tied to his belt and had not been subtly removed by someone in the crowd. He was not feeling like a kindhearted man. He was a man who was deeply exasperated. He was a man who needed a good night's sleep. And before that, he needed a trip to the baths.

  In a few minutes, stretched out on a warm couch with a soft towel beneath him, he would forget the merchant's slimy gratitude and the grisly shape of his slave girl's arm. He would forget the screams of the recruit this morning as his arm was put back into its socket. Distracted by the splash of the cold plunge and the murmur of gossip, his thoughts would drift away from the puzzle of that unknown woman lying in the mortuary. The perfumed oil would clear the stench of decay from his nostrils. The masseur's practiced hands would pummel away the tension of problems, which, when he thought about them logically, all belonged to other people.

  There was no sign of the young soldiers at the tables in Merula's. The doorman pretended not to recognize Ruso. He must have overheard the warning about the food.

  An elderly slave was limping past the place where the girl had collapsed. The stink of the two buckets swaying on the pole over his shoulders was unmistakable. The man stopped to scrape up the pile of dung Ruso had almost trodden in earlier.

  Half the world, decided Ruso, raising his fingers to his nose again, spent its waking hours engaged in cleaning up the mess made by the other half. That girl's owner, like whoever had dumped that corpse in the river, had been a mess maker. Not fit to be in charge of a dead dog. That disgusting bandage had been on her arm for days.

  Ruso stopped so suddenly that a child running along behind him collided with the back of his legs, tumbled full-length on the paving stones, and, refusing his offer of help, ran off howling for his mother.

  That girl hadn't fallen down any steps. She had raised her arm to shield herself from the blows that had blackened her eye. The wool trader would pocket the money and leave town, and before long another unclaimed body would be found floating down the river. Gaius Petreius Ruso had just been swindled out of two sestertii.

  It did not take long to find the unattractive trio again. The wet trail led away from the fountain and down a side street, weaving unsteadily around the legs of scaffolding poles. The scrape and slop of shovels mixing mortar announced yet another row of new shops. Ruso strode around the far side of the building site, entered the street from the opposite end, picked his way down past a burned-out building awaiting demolition, and came face-to-face with the shuffling threesome.

  "The Bridge road is the other way!" he shouted over a sudden burst of hammering, stabbing his forefinger in the direction from which they had just come.

  The girl opened her eyes and looked at him.

  She couldn't see him, of course. It was an illusion. The eyes were blank; like the eyes of a sleepwalker. For the first time Ruso noticed the delicate shape of her nose, the tiny dimple in an earlobe where jewelry had once hung. And those eyes. The color of—what were they the color of? Like . . . like the clear deep waters of. . . Ruso's tired mind groped for a description that didn't sound like the work of a bad poet, and failed to find one.

  The merchant was still talking. The youth was examining the toe straps of his sandals. Only Ruso seemed to be interested in the girl.

  "If you don't get help for her soon, this slave is going to die."

  He realized it was a mistake as soon as he had said it. The trader bent forward and dragged down the girl's lower eyelid with a dirty thumb.

  Then he forced her jaw open and peered into her mouth. He was clearly not a man to waste two sestertii on dying livestock.

  "It's not the state of her teeth you need to worry about."

  Innocens turned and looked at him curiously "You wouldn't be a medical man yourself, by any chance, sir?"

  Ruso glanced up, wishing he believed in the sort of theatrical gods who swooped down from the heavens at difficult moments and set humanity to rights. But the gods, if they were watching, were hiding in the gray British clouds beyond the scaffolding poles, leaving him to his fate. And then, as if inspired by something beyond himself, Ruso had an idea.

  "You said she isn't worth anything."

  Innocens paused. "Well, not the way she is, sir. After she's been cleaned u p - "

  "I'll take her off your hands."

  "She's a good strong girl, sir. She'll perk up in a day or two. I'll knock a bit off the price for that arm."

  "What price? You told me she was lazy and useless."

  "Useless at cleaning, sir, but an excellent cook. And what's more . . ."—

  Innocens raised his free arm to steady the girl as he leaned forward in a haze of fish sauce and bellowed over more hammering—"just the thing for a healthy young man like yourself, sir! Ripe as a peach and never been touched!"

  "I'm not interested in touching her!" shouted Ruso, just as the noise stopped.

  Someone sniggered. Ruso looked up. A couple of men were leaning down over the scaffolding. One of them said something to the other and they both laughed. The youth holding the girl glanced up and grinned.

  It would be all over the fort by morning.

  You know that new doctor up at the hospital? The one that's been telling the boys to stay out of whorehouses?

  What about him?

  Hangs around back streets. Tries to buy women.

  Innocens was smiling again. Ruso suppressed an urge to grab him by the neck and shake him.

  "What would you like to offer, sir?"

  Ruso hesitated. "I'll give you fifty denarii," he muttered.

  Innocens's jowls collapsed in disappointment. He shrugged the shoulder not being used to prop up his merchandise. "I wish I could, sir. I can hardly afford to feed her. But the debt I took her for was four thousand."

  It was a ridiculous lie. Even if it wasn't, Ruso didn't have four thousand denarii. He didn't even have four hundred. It had been an expensive summer.

  "Fifty's more than she's worth, and you know it," he insisted. "Look at her."

  "Fifty-five!" offered a voice from the scaffolding.

  "What?" put in his companion. "You heard the man, she's a virgin. Fifty-six!"

  Innocens scowled at them. "One thousand and she's yours, sir."

  "Fifty or nothing."

  The trader shook his head, unable to believe that any fool would offer all his money at the first bid. Ruso, remembering with' a jolt that payday was still three weeks away, was barely able to believe it himself. He should have put some water in that wine.

  "Two hundred, sir. I can't go below two hundred. You'll ruin me."

  "Go on!" urged the chorus from the scaffolding. "Two hundred for this lovely lady!"

  Ruso looked up at the workmen. "Buy her yourselves if you like. I only came out for a bottle of bath oil."

  At that moment the girl's body jerked. A feeble cough emerged from her lips. Her eyelids drifted shut. A slow silver drool emerged from her mouth and came to rest in shining bubbles on the sodden wool of her tunic. Claudius Innocens cleared his throat.

  "Will that fifty be cash, then, sir?"

  3

  WHAT ARE YOU doing in here?"

  Ruso opened one eye and wondered briefly why he was being addressed by a giant inkwell. Opening the other eye to find himself in fading light and surrounded by shelves, he realized he must have fallen asleep in the records office. He hauled himself upright on the stool and yawned. "Catching up on some notes. How are you feeling?"

  Valens grinned. "Better than that thing in Room Twelve. It looks as if it's just crawled out of the sewer. What is it?"

  Ruso reached for the writing tablet before Valens could make out: Female, history unknown, fracture to lower right arm, pale, dry cough, weak, no fever. Note: Launder bedding, treat withfieabane. He snapped it shut and slid it into the Current Patients box.

  "That thing is a sick slave with a broken arm."

  "Whose?"

  "Her own."

  "Very f
unny Whose slave?"

  Ruso scratched his ear. "Couldn't say, really" He had entertained a faint hope that his purchase might be claimed by the lovesick porter and taken off his hands, but the man had not recognized her.

  "I leave you on your own for a couple of days," said Valens, "and you fill the place with expiring females."

  "A couple of fishermen found the other one already expired. The town council clerk wouldn't let them dump her outside his office and they couldn't think what else to do with her."

  Valens shrugged. "Of course. We're the army, we'll deal with everything. If somebody doesn't identify her soon, I suppose we'll have to bury her too. So who said her friend could die in one of our beds?"

  "She isn't dying," argued Ruso, seizing the chance to side step the question of who had brought her in.

  "That's not what I heard. She on your list?"

  He nodded.

  "No hope for her, then." Valens glanced out into the corridor, pushed the door shut, and lowered his voice. "Five says she'll be dead by sunrise."

  Ruso pondered this for a moment. Payday seemed farther away now than when he had foolishly offered all his remaining cash for a slave he didn't want. If he could just keep her alive until tomorrow, he would salvage some of his dignity and come out of it with money in his purse.

  "She isn't dying," he repeated with more confidence than he felt.

  "Five says she's alive when they blow first watch."

  "If she were a dog, you'd knock her on the head now."

  "Well she isn't, and I shan't. So push off and find some patients of your own to annoy."

  The hollow cheeks of the patient in Room Twelve looked distinctly yellow against the white of the blanket that had been draped over her. The injured arm, secured across her chest in a crisp linen sling, rose and fell gently with each breath. The drugged drink had done its work. She was asleep. Her doctor placed a cup of barley water on the table beside the bed and went to the shrine of Aesculapius.

  The hospital entrance hall was empty save for a smell of fresh paint and roses. Aesculapius leaned on his stick and looked out from his niche with a quiet dignity that somehow transcended the inscription WET PAINT chalked underneath him. The god of healing needed more maintenance than most of his colleagues: The touch of his eager supplicants tended to damage his paint. Today the faithful had left a bunch of white roses and a couple of apples at his feet, hoping to be saved from their ailments. Or, more likely, from their doctor.