Medicus (11 page)

19

S
HE WAS PRETTY. Old women said so to her mother, and her mother always laughed and replied, "And she knows it." Her brothers knew it too, although they would die before they said so. Sometimes her father came into the house smelling of beer, roared, "Where's my beautiful girl?" and lifted her onto his shoulders while her mother shouted at him to
mind that child's head on the door.
And for a few moments she would be a giant, lurching around the houses, reaching for the edges of the thatch, taller than the horses, and seeing right over the tops of people's fences until he put her down and ignored her pleas for "More!" because parents had things to do and because being pretty did not make you important.

When her mother muttered and sighed and tugged at the tangles with the comb, it was because shiny golden curls needed a lot of looking after. She tried not to smile. Her mother would want to know what she was smiling about, and she already knew it wasn't her cousins' faults that they were ordinary little girls whose hair fell down in straight brown lines and she had to remember to be nice to them and . . .

And the smell was wrong.

Somewhere outside, a man's voice was making ugly, solid sounds that fell like rough logs.

Someone was trying not to pull her hair. Someone was—

She remembered the stink of the bathhouse. The glint of metal blades.

"NO!"

Her eyes snapped open as her free hand lashed out and clouted a crouching girl across the face. A jolt of pain shot through her injured arm as the girl squealed and fell backward in a flurry of brown skirt and dirty bare feet.

She had managed to pull herself up and lean against the wall by the time the other girl, who was dark and heavily pregnant, had managed to maneuver herself onto all fours and then haul herself up to sit on the wooden bench.

She remembered the bench. She remembered the room. She remembered what her name was supposed to be. She looked at the girl's hands, which were empty, rough, and red with work. Then she looked around the floor. There was no sign of any shears. She said, "Who are you?"

The girl shook her head and pointed to her mouth.

The question in Latin produced exactly the same gesture.

In Latin again: "Are you dumb?"

The girl nodded, raised her eyebrows in a question and pointed at her, but she did not answer. A name, even one you had only acquired yesterday, should not be so easily given.

"Did they tell you to cut my hair?"

The girl shook her head with a look of alarm. The hand pointed again, this time at a section of hair that had now been untangled. At the far end dangled a comb, trapped in a knot. The girl had been trying to help.

"My name," she said in Latin, "Is Tilla." This produced a welcoming smile, but the traditional request for help in her own language—"I am a stranger here"—was either not understood or ignored.

The girl heaved herself up from the bench, took the one pace necessary to cross the room, and lowered herself to sit next to the mattress. She had begun to attack the tangle again when the door burst open and two men walked into the room.

One had gray eyes and cropped iron-gray hair above a thick neck. The thinner one's hair had once been ginger. The deep brown of his eyes added to the impression that the rest of him was fading into middle age. Tilla had time to observe this while both men stood calmly examining what they could see of her. She also observed that the dumb girl had stopped work and shrunk back to sit beside her with her back to the wall. Instead of staring back at these men who had not had the manners to knock (and whose muscle, Tilla noted, was running to fat around the belly), the girl had her eyes firmly fixed on the gray one's heavy army sandals.

"Stand up," ordered the gray one.

When Tilla failed to move, the girl tapped her arm and translated the order into a hasty scoop of one hand toward the ceiling, at the same time nodding encouragement.

"You want to listen to Daphne," suggested the gray one. "She don't say a lot but she knows what's good for her."

Tilla, noting the girl's anxiety, pulled her knees up and managed to get to her feet on the mattress. Slowly, she forced her trembling legs to push her upward. Her head felt as if it were full of dry sand that was draining away down her body as she stood. Fighting to stay upright, she slumped against the wall. With her eyes closed, she did not see him approach. She was only aware of the sudden cold as the hem of the tunic was lifted, the struggle to keep her balance as the hands groped and probed, and the urge to vomit as the hands withdrew and a voice whispered in her ear, "Show us your smile."

Clenching her teeth, she managed to open her eyes.

"Smile," repeated the gray man, who was not smiling.

The other girl was on her feet now, moving around to where Tilla could see her, nodding eagerly and grinning, making upward gestures at the corners of her mouth.

As Tilla's eyes drifted shut she thought,
Whatever you do to me here will speed me on my way to the next world,
and it was this thought that made her beam with pleasure.

By the time she was alone again, the light through the barred window was fading. Food had been brought, but no one had offered a light. The rattle of the lock had confirmed that she could not leave this darkening room until someone came to let her out.

Tilla fingered the long braids that now held her hair under control and listened to the many voices downstairs. She heard the tramp of feet on stairs. The creak of the floorboards. The false laughter. She understood what sort of place the Roman healer had brought her to. She understood too that none of this mattered, because she had lost all sense of hunger now, surely a sign that she would be in the next world very soon. But she had matters to attend to here first. The gray one had said he would come back.

She reached for the bowl and balanced it against the bandaged arm.Then she picked up the spoon. The lukewarm soup slipped down her throat, sending the strength of the slaughtered ox into her body She closed her eyes and promised her mother and brothers that she would see them in the next world very soon. In the meantime she would not be shamed in this one. It seemed she was, after all, destined to die in a fight.

20

T
HE KITCHEN BOY took Ruso's message to Merula, who paused with the kitchen door half-open, reached up to a shelf inside, and handed over a heavy iron key.

Ruso frowned. "My girl is locked in?"

The painted eyes widened. "You don't want her locked in?"

"I appreciate your caution," he said, understanding that a business that had lost two girls in a few months would be nervous, "but she's not in a fit state to run away."

"It's for her own protection," said Merula. "Some of the customers like to go exploring."

Ruso clattered briskly up the wooden stairs with a lamp in one hand and a medical case in the other, trusting it would be apparent to the idlers lolling at the tables beneath that he was not a customer going exploring, but a doctor come to treat a patient. He strode along the landing, passing two cubicles with their doors closed. From behind one came a male voice and a female giggle that sounded like the girl Chloe.

He had to probe with the key before it engaged and he could push the bolt out of place, swing the door open, retrieve his case, and enter the room.

His greeting died as something hard smacked against his head. The case fell from his hand. His foot exploded in pain. He was staggering sideways, trying to keep his grip on the lamp, when something shoved him off balance and he crashed onto the floorboards.

For a moment he lay stunned, blinking at the wavering flame of the lamp, which had somehow remained upright. Cutting through the reverberations inside his skull was a pulsing agony in his foot. He managed to lift his head. The girl was squatting behind the door, wide-eyed, hands to her mouth.

He rolled over. The big toe of his right foot, which should surely have been a bloody pulp, looked pale but otherwise surprisingly intact. He rubbed the back of his head. A lump was developing already, and blood was making a sticky mess of his hair. Ruso brought his hand forward and squinted at the damp fingers. The blood seemed an odd color.

The girl was still in the corner, apparently too frightened to move. Ruso sniffed at the blood, diagnosed soup, rubbed his head again, curled forward, and sat up to clutch his injured foot. His case lay on the floor, undamaged after his toe had broken its fall. Scattered across the floor were the shards of what appeared to be a bowl. It occurred to him that the bowl must have been what she had used to hit him. It also occurred to him to ask himself whether he was seeing double, whether any dancing lights were appearing in front of him, or whether he felt sick. He was disappointed to note that despite deserving all these symptoms, he did not seem to have any of them.

He heaved himself up on one leg and hopped to the doorway. No one seemed to have noticed that he had been attacked. He closed the door and leaned against it, keeping one eye on the girl as he unlaced his sandal and made a closer assessment of the damage. The toe was turning crimson now. When he put the foot back on the floor it felt as though someone was boring into the toe with a hot fire iron.

He sensed a movement and glanced across to see the girl crawling toward him. He made a grab for her wrist just as she pulled the medical case out of his reach. The lid fell back. The pain banged at the back of his skull. He watched the girl's hand hovering above the neat rows of sharpened instruments. It occurred to him that perhaps she was mad. The unlovely Claudius Innocens might, after all, have been sorely provoked.

He was tensed, ready to kick the scalpel out of her hand, when he saw that what she had picked up was a white roll of wadding.

The girl dipped the wadding into a cup beside the bed. Then she reached up and stroked it across the back of his head, exclaiming as she felt the lump.

Ruso snatched the wadding from her. "I'll do that."

The girl retreated to sit on her bed. He pressed the cool damp wadding against the back of his head and rested his head on his knees. There was some water left in the cup. He splashed some of it across his toes. It made cold trails inside his sandal but no difference to the pain.

He could make no sense of it. He had done everything in his power to help this girl.

He sat up straight. The girl shrank farther back into the corner, eyes darting between his face and his hands, evidently waiting for the beating to start. He noted for the first time that her hair now hung in two long braids that left wispy curls around her temples.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Master?" she whispered, twisting the end of one of the braids around her finger.

"Are you insane, or do you have a good reason for wanting to murder me?"

"No, Master." Her Latin, he noted, seemed to have undergone a sudden improvement. He wondered in what other ways she had tried to deceive him.

"Do you know what happens to slaves who attack their masters, Tilla?"

The braid twisted tighter. Her lower lip began to tremble. "No, Master."

He hoped she wasn't about to cry. "Well let me tell you," he growled, his head and his toe throbbing in grim unison. "First every slave in the household is arrested. Then the questioners are sent for. It is the questioners' job to extract the truth, and they will carry on their work for several hours, whether their victim talks or not"—in fact it felt as if they were currently in action in the area of his big toe—"because nobody believes that a slave will tell the truth without torture. And because it is not enough to punish the guilty. A message must be sent to all the other slaves who might be thinking of knocking their masters and mistresses on the head. An example must be set." He glared at her. "Is that what you want? To be an example? Or can you explain yourself?"

He removed the wadding and cooled it again in the cup. The pain was clanging inside his skull like a clapper in a bell.

The girl swallowed. "I am going to the next world."

"If I call the questioners, young woman, you will go very, very slowly. And be hard to recognize by the time you get there."

She seemed to be giving this careful thought. Finally she said, "I do not think it is you who comes."

"You thought I was somebody else? I suppose it didn't occur to you to find out first?"

She lifted her good hand to touch one ear. "Soldier boots," she said, pointing to his feet. "Bad man."

Ruso stared at the pale figure with sudden comprehension. He said, "You were going to fight off one of Merula's customers with a soup bowl?"

She nodded.

He cleared his throat. "You are completely wrong," he informed her, arranging his words carefully because the ringing in his head was growing louder and threatening to jumble them. "You are my patient, under my protection. I apologize if that was not explained to you. Clear up the mess and get back into bed. You will not be punished—this time."

The girl crawled across the floor, gathering the broken shards of the bowl. Then she eased herself onto the mattress and pulled up the covers. Ruso noted that the bright blankets seemed to be reserved for the public rooms: This one was ordinary sheep-brown.

"You are here to rest until you get better," he said. "The door is locked to keep you safe."

The girl glanced at the bars on the window, then closed her eyes, as if she was tired of trying to understand.

"Is your arm painful?"

She nodded.

He crouched beside her and checked the bandages. She was lucky:

The splint had held. There was no sign of movement. He placed his fingers and thumb around her upper arm. No swelling or heat. He laid her hand between his.

"Move your fingers." He felt the ends of the fingers twitch between his palms. "Good. Are you eating the food?"

She nodded again.

"Light diet, no flesh, no strong drink, no seafood, and you must drink plenty."

"Beer," she ventured.

"Beer?" He cleared his throat, aware that a professional should not allow wispy curls and a borrowed tunic slipping down over one shoulder to distract him from his work. He recalled his mind to his duty. "Absolutely no beer, nor anything like it." He gestured toward the lidded bucket in the corner, glad that she had not had the strength to use it as a weapon. "Are you passing water?"

She nodded.

"Good."

He reached into the open case. "I'll give you something for the pain, then you can sleep." He measured a few drops into the empty cup and handed it to her.

She took a sip and wrinkled her nose.

"Drink," he ordered, miming the gesture.

She tipped her head back. He retrieved the cup and measured himself a potent dose of the same painkiller, then stood up and closed the shutters. The room was chilly. She had only one blanket.

Downstairs, a lyre player was competing with the din of voices, the to-and-fro slap of the kitchen door, and the clatter and scrape of crockery. From the balcony Ruso could see only two serving girls for all the tables. Both looked harassed. There was a shout of laughter from the far side of the room, where Merula was pouring drinks for a group of officers.

Ruso turned away. The noise was making his head worse. There was still one cubicle with an open door. He limped in and whipped a rich blue blanket off the bed. He picked up a cushion as well. In the doorway he paused and tossed the cushion back onto the bed. There was no point in making her too comfortable.

When he returned the girl was lying flat on the bed with her eyes closed. He laid the blanket over her and tapped her shoulder. "Before you go to sleep," he said, sliding the key into her hand, "make sure you use this."