Medicus (3 page)

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

W
HAT 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

A
RE 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."

Ruso wished he had remembered to say that himself.

They began to soak the rag that had been stuffed into the wound.

"I met him once," mused Ruso.

"Hadrian?"

"Trajan. InAntioch."

"I suppose he'll be the Divine Trajan soon."

"No doubt," agreed Ruso. At least, none that he was foolish enough to express in public.

"May he rest among the gods," added Valens.

"Among the gods indeed, sir," echoed the orderly.

Ruso left a brief silence that could have been respect or rebellion, then murmured, "Water."

The orderly refilled the jug.

"Think Hadrian'll try and take the North back?" asked Valens.

"Why not?" Ruso said. "He'll be wanting to make an impression.

Britannia's big enough to count, but remote enough not to matter."

"He'll have to send more legions if he's serious about it. We're spread pretty thin here."

"He might not go for it. He's Trajan's man. He might just carry on the Divine Trajan's policies." Ruso glanced at the orderly. "No doubt the kitchen staff will let us know. Here it comes . . . " He lifted off the rag and dropped it into the wastebasket.

Both men leaned forward to peer at the swollen and blood-caked mess that had once been an arm.

Valens brought one hand down over his own elbow with a chopping motion and raised his eyebrows in question.

Ruso shook his head. "It looks clean. The wrist's intact."

Valens strolled around the table, looking at the injury from a different angle. "I wouldn't," he murmured. "You'll only make a worse mess and end up taking it off anyway."

"It might work. If you broke your arm—"

"I'd pray I didn't get some would-be hero like you."

"I think we should try."

There was a pause.

"She's my patient," added Ruso.

Valens shrugged. "Fine. She's your patient. So, do we know how much Hadrian values his loyal troops?"

"He'll be doubling the usual bonus, apparently."

"How much is that?"

"Not a clue."

As they began to clean the wound, the girl gasped. Her face twisted into a grimace of pain.

"Try and lie still," said the orderly, tightening his grip and glancing to check that all the straps were fastened.

"We'll be very quick," promised Ruso, wishing he could make patients believe it the way Valens did.

"My friend's famous for being quick," added Valens. "Ask all the girls." He glanced at Ruso. "What's she called?"

"I don't know."

"Ruso, only you could round up two women and not know the names of either of them."

"Next time," said Ruso, "I'll tell them my friend would like to be introduced." He picked out a stray thread of rag with the tweezers. The girl gave a low moan.

"Shush now," said the orderly.

Ruso hoped she wouldn't be a whimperer. Whimperers were worse than screamers. Screamers made him cross, which made him work faster. The sound of a whimperer trying to be brave was a distraction.

The girl didn't whimper. She clenched her teeth and didn't make another sound.

There was a rap at the door.

"What?" snapped Ruso. A very young soldier appeared, swallowed, and announced, "Urgent message for Gaius Petreius Ruso."

"That's me."

"Sir, there's a man at the east gatehouse. He says you promised to pay fifty-four denarii first thing this morning."

"It was fifty," said Ruso, not looking up. "And I'm busy."

The youth did not reply. He was staring at the operating table.

"Tell him I'll be down later," said Ruso.

The youth swallowed again. "He said to tell you the extra is the tax and the cost of drawing up the documents, sir."

Ruso nodded toward the mangled mass of the girl's arm. "If you don't get out right away, I shall do this to you too."

The youth fled.

Ruso aimed the tweezers at the wastebasket, missed, and said, "I think that's clean."

Valens laid a hand on the girl's forehead. "We like this arm so much, young woman, we're going to put it back together for you."

The orderly leaned down until his face was almost touching the girl's.

"Breathe deeply now," he ordered. "Ready? In, out—In, out. . ."

Ruso had rehearsed his speech all the way down to the gatehouse, but when he got there he found his time had been wasted. Instead of the wool trader, the guards presented him with an elderly slave with no teeth who made it clear that if he failed to return to his master with the right money, his life would not be worth living. Ruso, who had neither the time nor the inclination to get in line at the tax office, paid up. He also sent a message to say that if Claudius Innocens ever showed his face in Deva again he would be instantly arrested, but he doubted the slave would have the courage to deliver it.

The clerk of the Aesculapian Thanksgiving Fund gave him a receipt for the two and a half denarii that Valens had borrowed from someone who had borrowed them from someone else who had very possibly borrowed them from the Aesculapian Thanksgiving Fund in the first place.

Ruso went to thank the god personally. Standing in front of the statue, he fingered the two receipts tucked into his belt. One said that in gratitude and fulfillment of a vow, Gaius Petreius Ruso had paid the Aesculapian Thanksgiving Fund two and a half denarii. The other confirmed Gaius Petreius Ruso as the new owner of an injured and sickly girl with indescribable eyes and a name that seemed to be a series of spelling mistakes.

Ruso gazed up at the statue of the god who had answered his prayer. For the first time he noticed that the painter had not just performed the usual touch-up over the rough spots. The god had been completely repainted. Ruso stood to take a closer look, and as he gazed into the brown eyes of Aesculapius he had the distinct impression that the god of healing was looking back at him, and laughing.