Medicus mi-1

by Ruth Downie

  The lines deepened around something approaching a smile when she greeted him.

  "Gaius Petreius Ruso," he announced, standing. "Medicus with the Twentieth."

  "Gaius Petreius. Ah yes, the new doctor. Did my girls offer you a drink?"

  He nodded. "Is there somewhere we could talk in private?"

  Merula clapped her hands and called, "Out!"

  Instantly the girls stopped what they were doing. Chloe threw the cloth down and beckoned Lucco to follow her into the kitchen.

  Merula said, "Thank you, boys."

  Bassus and Stichus glanced at each other, then retreated to stand guard outside.

  "Now, Doctor." Merula seated herself opposite him. "What can I do for you?"

  Ruso scratched his ear. There were good reasons why he was now facing the task of breaking bad news to this woman. Principal among them was that Valens was busy with morning clinic and the duty civilian liaison officer, whose job this surely was, was already late for a meeting. "You know the sort of thing," the man had explained from the back of his horse, swinging one leg forward so the groom could tighten the girth. "Just show them we take it very seriously, but whatever you do, don't promise we'll do anything about it."

  Ruso cleared his throat again, reminded himself that the woman wasn't a relative, and began. "I'm afraid I have bad news."

  Merula stared at him for a moment, then lowered her head and shaded her eyes with one manicured hand.

  "It's about-"

  She said, "Saufeia."

  "Yes."

  "I was afraid of this." The woman sighed. "No matter how many times you try to tell these girls, some of them just don't listen." She looked up. "What happened to her?"

  "Her body was found in the river the day before yesterday and brought into the hospital. She was identified late last night."

  "She had only been with us for ten days," said Merula, inadvertently explaining why none of the hospital staff, many of whom would be in' timately acquainted with the local tavern girls, had recognized her.

  "Did she drown?"

  "There were, uh…" Ruso hesitated. "There was some bruising around the throat," he said, "and her neck was broken."

  "I see." Merula paused, then shook her head. "Poor, silly Saufeia."

  Poor silly Saufeia, who had ended up naked and muddy and practically bald, unmourned until a gawker who shouldn't have been in the mortuary at all recognized the birthmark on her thigh.

  "Was there any family?"

  Merula shook her head.

  "I don't suppose you have any idea who might have-?"

  "Who might have taken advantage of a girl looking for business with no protection? Outside an army base?"

  There was no need to answer.

  Merula glanced through the open shutters to where one of the doormen was leaning against the wall of the bakery opposite, eating. "The boys will blame themselves, but they can't watch them day and night." A bitter smile twisted the red lips. "After we realized she'd gone, the girls were hoping she'd run off with a customer. It does happen."

  "You didn't report her as a runaway?"

  "We were busy. I suppose we might have passed her name on to a slave hunter sooner or later, but to be honest, I doubt she would have been worth the recovery fee. She wasn't really suitable for this kind of work."

  "When did you last see her?"

  "Five days ago. Early in the evening. She must have sneaked out when nobody was looking."

  Ruso said, "She appears to have died quite soon after that."

  Merula understood. "I will make the funeral arrangements as quickly as possible."

  Relieved, Ruso got to his feet. He acknowledged the woman's thanks with a nod. Her composure had made a difficult task much easier than it might have been.

  The girls emerged from the kitchen with a promptness that could only mean they had been listening behind the door. Ruso was passing Stichus in the doorway when a voice called, "Sir?"

  He turned. Chloe, with the lank-haired girl hovering behind her, said, "You don't know who did it, do you, sir?"

  Ruso shook his head. "I don't," he said. "But if you remember anything suspicious, you should go to the fort right away and ask for the duty civilian liaison officer."

  7

  She ran for the door. The fat one got there first. She dodged behind a stack of barrels. He came after her. She tried to scramble out. The barrels were crashing down and rolling across the floor. She tried to leap free but her feet slipped in something wet. The smell of beer mingled with the stink of the fat one's breath as he loomed above her, raising the crowbar, his mouth twisted with the shouting. She tried to shield herself. The crowbar swung down. She heard the crack. Felt herself jolt with the blow.

  She was in the white room again. The familiar pain was pulsing through her arm, but instead of her own bones looking back at her, the arm was hidden inside a thick bandage and strapped across her chest.

  So. She was still in this world.

  The door was opening. She closed her eyes. A hand was laid on her forehead. In the ugly sounds of Latin the man announced that it was not a fever.

  "She's having bad dreams," he said, apparently talking to someone else. She pretended to be asleep, trying not to flinch as the bandages were tweaked and tidied while two men talked about postoperative fevers and swelling and things she did not understand.

  Bad dreams.

  She must have called out. She hoped she had not spoken in Latin. She tried to remember, but her mind had been traveling to strange places, fleeing from the pain and the bitter medicine the man kept making her drink. He had told her she was safe from the fat one, but what did he know? When the medicine gave her sleep, the fat one returned.

  There were other dreams too. A man dressed in green who held her down and whispered in her ear while wolves tore at her arm. Voices echoing behind closed doors. Birds singing. The sun with four corners-

  No. She must try to think clearly. The sun has no corners. The white room has a square window in the outside wall. I am in a white bed. A tall thin table stands beside the bed. A black cup and a jug are on the table. Behind the door is a stool. The man who brought the medicine had pulled a stool beside the bed and had sat down to ask, "Quid nomen tibi est?" as if he were talking to a small child.

  When she had failed to answer, he repeated the question. She had continued to stare at his dark eyes, at his unshaven chin, as if she could not understand what he was saying. His Greek was easier to ignore because she genuinely did not understand it. She did not recognize his third attempt at all until, reciting it in her mind after he had given up and left, she began to suspect that it could be a mangled version of her own tongue, impossible to grasp unless you had first heard him ask in Latin: What is your name?

  She had not heard her real name spoken since she had been captured. For two winters she had been "girl" at best, the Northerners at first deliberately refusing to honor her with the use of her name and later, she supposed, forgetting what it was. When the other slaves had asked what to call her, she had invented something. She had spoken to them-to everyone-as little as possible. But Romans were full of questions.

  How old are you? Where do you come from? Do you understand what I'm saying? Does it hurt when I do that? Do you need to pass water? Did you really fall down the stairs? Do you know a girl with red hair? They seemed to have lost interest in the girl with red hair now. But they persisted with the other questions. Quid nomen tibi est?

  She was not about to offer her name up to a stranger. It was almost the only thing she possessed that nobody had stolen.

  A voice was asking, "How much poppy are you giving her?"

  The left side of the bed heaved as the blanket was tucked in. "No more until nightfall." She felt herself being rolled the other way as he tucked in the opposite side. "I want her awake enough to eat."

  8

  Ruso was considering trying a different poultice on an infected thumb that he didn't much like the look of when Valens knocke
d on the door to announce that the Sirius was coming in to dock on the midday tide.

  The Siriusl After three months, Ruso and his possessions were about to be reunited. The last time he had seen them was when he had left Africa, fully expecting to return to his comfortable rooms after his leave. Instead, he was sharing condemned lodgings at the opposite end of the empire with the untidiest medic in the army

  He said, "I'll get down to the docks when I've finished ward rounds."

  "I'll go down now," Valens offered. "To make sure they don't drop anything."

  Several patients later, Ruso finally escaped from the hospital. As he nodded to Aesculapius on the way out, he thought he heard the patter of claws on floorboards. He turned to see something brown and hairy and just above knee height vanishing around the corner of the front entrance. When he got outside, there was no sign of it.

  There was no time to investigate. He hurried along the Via Praetoria to the cashier's office, where the chief clerk beckoned him past the line and into the office to tell him that the donation to the Aesculapian Fund was very generous.

  "Donation?" Ruso frowned, wondering if the man was being sarcastic about his two and half denarii.

  "From the owner of Merula's bar, sir. In gratitude for the hospital's services to the deceased."

  Ruso remembered. The grim-faced Bassus had arrived early this morning with a cart to carry away the body of poor silly Saufeia. Afterward he had mentioned making some sort of contribution to the hospital fund and Ruso had told him to go to the cashier's office. "Do you know where that is?"

  "Know it?" Bassus had snorted. "I built it."

  Ruso, encouraged by the size of the gift Bassus had delivered and the clerks' apparent belief that he was the cause of it, increased the size of the loan he had come to request. No doubt the clerks would talk, but with luck the rumors of his cash problems would not travel too far before they were brought to a halt by Hadrian's promised double bonus. As the trumpet was blaring the change of watch, he emerged from the west gate of the fort with an advance in his purse that was enough to redeem his possessions many times over.

  On the way to the docks he passed a couple of bars that made Merula's look like a high-class establishment for country gentlemen. Glancing at a rusty cage hung outside a door, he saw a bird with scraggly feathers and a vicious-looking beak. He thought of Claudia's singing bird: the pampered pet released by a hired slave girl in a misguided fit of kindness. The next morning a noisy bunch of squabbling sparrows had been shooed away to reveal the little songster bedraggled and lifeless on the pavement. Claudia's fury had been vented on Ruso, since he had sent the slave back to her owner with a demand for compensation before Claudia had a chance to punish her.

  Saufeia, it seemed, had understood no more about the dangers of freedom than the hapless songbird. She must have been very naive indeed to abandon the protection of Merula's graceless but efficient "boys" to take her chances on the narrow streets of a military port like Deva. It struck him that whoever was charged with tracking down the culprit was going to have a difficult job. She would have been a target not only for vicious customers, but for the owners of businesses who did not want the competition.

  Between the baths and the riverside warehouses, one of those businesses was displaying its merchandise. White shoulders and big earrings and fat ankles gleamed in the late September sunshine. Other establishments relied upon lurid paintings beside an open street door, but perhaps the owner of the fat-ankled and big-earringed couldn't afford a painter. Either that, or he believed the valiantly grinning females sprawled across the bench outside his crumbling walls were genuinely tempting. Ruso wondered how long a man would have to be at sea before he would agree.

  His mood lifted as he approached the wharf, passing an altar to Neptune and a couple of surprisingly elegant houses probably built by traders wanting to enjoy the sight of the sea god safely delivering their latest cargoes. Ahead of him, a light breeze was lifting the broad river into a glitter around the silhouettes of fat-bellied merchant ships and a scatter of fishing boats. A slender trireme was moored at the distant end of the wooden jetty. Ruso paused to watch as a fishing boat, which had turned in from the main course of the river, dropped its sail and began to row in under the stern of the trireme. The shriek of gulls rose above faint shouts of orders and a chant of One! Two! Three! from a team shifting something heavy.

  A man who had seen little of the world might think this was a beautiful view. A man who had never stood by a sea that was translucent, under a sky so brilliantly blue it hurt the eyes, would probably think this was a grand place to be.

  Scanning the painted merchant ships tied up along the jetty, Ruso wondered which had brought the remains of his belongings, and how many years it would be before he could load them up again and have them sent to a posting back in civilization. The bars and the whorehouses would be the same wherever soldiers were stationed, but they didn't have to be set in a chilly place where gray sloppy waves retreated twice a day to leave the land and river separated by glutinous brown mud flats. No wonder the hospital was stocking up on cough mixture for the winter. Unfortunately the nature of the Britons was such that the army wouldn't let him prescribe a mass transfer of the legion to a healthier climate.

  Valens's letters had made Britannia sound entertaining. The islands, apparently, were bursting with six-foot warrior women and droopy-mustached, poetry-spouting fanatics who roamed the misty mountains stirring up quarrelsome tribesmen in the guise of religion.

  His own observation of Britannia now led Ruso to suspect that Valens had deliberately lured him here to relieve the boredom.

  The bizarre movements of the British seas had been a novelty, but not one with which he desired a better acquaintance. When his ship had docked in Rutupiae, the captain had offered him the chance to stay on board and sail to Deva. He had declined, taken a lift as far as Londinium with an eye surgeon who was on the way to operate on the governor's wife, then hired a horse and spent several days riding north. He had, he now realized, probably passed Chief Administrative Officer Priscus traveling in the opposite direction on his way to discuss contracts for army medical supplies. Had he but known, he would have seized Priscus and wrested the hospital keys from his grasp. As it was, the trip had been an interesting introduction to his new province.

  It had been hard to imagine the lush meadows and busy little towns of Britannia as the setting for the ghastly massacres witnessed by the old and toothless who could remember the rebellion. But by the fifth day of traveling, the hills had become steeper, the military traffic heavier, and the towns less welcoming. Here it was easier to see the problem with keeping order. The road passed through stretches of dark woods where the occasional column of smoke in the distance might have signaled charcoal burning or someone cooking breakfast or an unwary tax collector being ambushed. The farmland was rich still, but the houses were primitive: mud-plastered round huts squatting under mushrooms of thatch and not a window or a water tap in sight. At one point he passed a knot of grim-faced civilians being marched along the road under guard from a squad of auxiliaries, and half a day's ride farther north there was a double crucifixion at the roadside. More civilians huddled weeping underneath the bloodied figures, while a military guard gazed on with studied indifference, and an officer's horse, the only creature at the scene who was definitely innocent, raised its head and whinnied to Ruso's mount in the apparent hope that someone had at last come to take it away.

  The only trouble he had encountered on the journey north was a minor brawl in a roadside inn, but the civilians Ruso met on the road looked as sullen as the weather when they stepped aside to let him pass.

  And these were supposed to be the friendly tribes. Still, many a man had made his reputation at this moist and chilly frontier of empire, and Ruso, who had needed a change for reasons he wasn't intending to confide to anyone here, was happy to let it be thought that he considered Britain a smart career move.

  "Fresh fish, sir?" A woma
n who was out of breath from pushing a cart up the slope lifted a cloth to display glistening silver bodies. She grinned, showing a gap where her front teeth should have been. "Just caught in time for dinner!"

  Ruso shook his head.

  In the space of a hundred paces he also declined a bucket of mussels, a jar of pepper, a delivery of coal, a set of tableware, an amphora of wine, a bolt of cloth to make the finest bedspread in Deva, some indefinable things in the shape of small sausages, and an introduction to an exotic dancer. Stepping onto the quay, he dodged a trolley being pushed by a small boy who couldn't see over it. Behind him a voice shouted, "Tray of plums, sir?"

  It was comforting to know that he still had the appearance of a man with money to spend.

  The quay stank of fish with undertones of sandalwood. Somebody must have dropped something expensive. The crews were rushing to load cargoes while the tide was in, shifting crates and sacks and baskets of whatever it took to maintain civilization in this corner of the empire before the tide forced the captains to move their vessels farther out or be stranded in the mud. Ruso wove his way between carts and trolleys, skirting a pile of slate that must have come from the western mountains and would probably be someone's roof by the end of the week. The stack of jars labeled SALINAE would be loaded up and shipped out. He knew that not because he was interested in exports but because one of the legionaries guarding the salt springs had somehow managed to impale himself on a fencing spike, and Ruso had made him talk about his duties in great detail as a distraction from the efforts to remove it.

  A wide-eyed brown monkey peered at him from a crate, its childlike fingers wrapped around the bars of its prison. Farther along he passed a pale group of chained slaves. They looked even less thrilled to be here than the monkey was. A couple of them seemed to be gazing at the water heaving against the legs of the jetty and wondering whether to fling themselves into it. He hoped they would have enough sense to realize that since they were chained, they would only be fished out again