by Ruth Downie
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-"
"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 thousa
nd 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 funny 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.
Usually Ruso spared the deity no more than a passing nod. Now he paused to stand in front of the niche and murmur a promise of two and a half denarii should the girl in Room Twelve survive until morning.
Having thus enlisted extra help for the cost of only half his winnings, and with nothing to pay if the god failed to perform, Ruso headed back to Room Twelve to see what more could be done to improve his chance of winning this unexpected and probably illegal wager.
4
"Are you sure he's-dead?" asked Ruso, the words punctuated by grunts as he struggled to maneuver his end of the stretcher through the door.
"Positive, sir," said the surgical orderly, deftly kicking the door shut behind him. "The man who told me heard it from someone who got it from one of the kitchen staff in the legate's house. It'll be announced at parade this morning."
"How do the kitchen staff know?"
"The dispatch rider popped by for something to eat while the legate read through the message, sir."
Ruso suppressed a smile. "I suppose you know the cause of death?"
"Not sure yet, sir. All we know is, he had a funny turn on the way back from sorting the Parthians out."
They lowered the stretcher onto the table. "Do we know who's taken over?" asked Ruso, sliding out one of the carrying poles.
"The army are backing Publius Aelius Hadrianus, sir." The orderly slid out the other pole and stacked them both in the corner. "I'm told he's a very generous man when it comes to bonuses. Double the going rate is what I hear."
"Does anybody know what the going rate is?" asked Ruso. "Half the army wasn't even born when Trajan took over, let alone on the payroll."
"Hard to say, sir," said the orderly, "but in nineteen years it's bound to have gone up, isn't it?" He bent over the table. "Just lie on your left, now." As they rolled the girl first to one side of the table and then the other, slipping the stretcher sheet out from beneath her, he observed, "Nothing of her, is there?"
When they had settled the girl, the man hurried out to refill the water bucket, complaining that someone else should have refilled it the previous night. "You can tell Priscus isn't here."
Ruso waited, hearing distant voices. The clump of boots on floorboards in the corridors. The usual clatter from the kitchen. Window shutters crashing open to let in the new day A day the anonymous girl in the mortuary would never see. Ruso, who did not like to inquire too deeply into matters of religion, wondered vaguely if she and Trajan would meet each other on the voyage into the shadowy world of the departed. He eyed the girl lying on the table in front of him. It might have been kinder to let her join them.
Laid out under a crumpled linen gown that smelled faintly of lavender, she looked smaller than she'd appeared to him yesterday And younger. He wondered how old she was. She must have a name, a tribe, a language. The trader had been yelling at her in Latin but the words she had mumbled as the poppy juice carried her into oblivion sounded British.
That was the only time he had heard her speak. When he had put his head around the door of Room Twelve just after dawn and said, " 'Morning! Did you sleep well?" — She was alive! He must go and tell Valens-she had looked at him with those eyes that were the color of-well, whatever it was-as if she did not understand the question.
The eyes were open again now. The pupils had been shrunk to small black dots by the medicine he had given her. She was staring up at the dust motes floating in the sunshine that streamed in from the high windows. She showed no curiosity about where she was.
She did not seem to have grasped the purpose of the gleaming instruments laid out on the cloth beside the empty water basin. She was not alarmed by the rolls of bandages stacked on the shelves, nor did she seem to be wondering what so many empty bowls might be there to catch.
Ruso was pleased with himself. Deciding the right amount of poppy juice to administer had been a tricky business. The borrowed works he had hurriedly consulted last night had implied that in all respects that would matter this morning, women were the same as men, only smaller. In Ruso's experience, however, there was much about women that was dangerously unpredictable, and one of the attractions of army life was that he was no longer expected to live with one.
"Everything all right, sir?" The orderly was back, splashing clean water into the basin.
Ruso nodded. "I think she's about ready."
The orderly began to buckle a leather strap across the girl's legs. She lifted her head slightly.
"Nothing to worry about," said the orderly, who was a practiced liar.
The girl's head fell back. She closed her eyes and appeared to be drifting off to sleep.
The door opened. Valens's head appeared, then retreated. "Sorry!
Didn't know you were in here."
Ruso called after him, "What about that five denarii?"
Valens reappeared, glanced at the body on the operating table, and grinned. "You must have cheated."
"I could do with some help."
"I'm supposed to be doing rounds. What have you got?"
As the girl continued to doze while the orderly strapped her down, Ruso jerked a thumb toward the bandaged arm lying on top of the linen sheet. "Compound fracture of radius and ulna about halfway down. Probably three or four days old. I redressed what I could last night but it was too dark to operate."
"I like a challenge," said Valens, and closed the door behind him. "Have you heard? Trajan's dead."
"I know," said Ruso, who had private reasons to mourn the emperor's passing. "Sounds as though it's going to be Hadrian."
Ruso began to remove the bandaging he had put on last night. The girl's body jerked as she tried to raise herself. The orderly gripped her shoulders and held her down.
On the other side of the table, Valens stroked her good hand, leaned over, and said gently, "We're going to see to your arm. We'll be very quick."