Vita Brevis (16 page)

“Do you swear not to speak of it?”

They were huddled close together on the bed in the only room where no slaves would be listening, but even so Phyllis was whispering.

“I swear.”

“Timo says it is nobody else’s business, and I know I should obey him, but I have to talk to somebody.”

“Does he know you are here?”

“He is at work,” Phyllis whispered, but she still glanced up at the rafters as if he might be lying in the upstairs apartment with one ear pressed against the floor.

“What work does he do?” Tilla asked, not because she wanted to know but because it was best to start with easy questions.

“He is a carpenter. He works for Curtius Cossus. The one who is building the new temple down by the amphitheater and wants to marry Horatius Balbus’s daughter.”

Everyone around here seemed to have some connection to Horatius Balbus. Tilla supposed that lots of men wanted to marry a rich man’s daughter. “It is good to have a man with steady work,” she said. “How long have you been married?”

Phyllis looked startled. “You can tell?”

“I can tell nothing,” Tilla assured her, although the girl’s reaction made it easy to guess. “How can I help?”

The girl’s shoulders slumped. “It has been five years,” she said, “and still it is just us.”

“I am sorry.”

“Everyone else … Timo says he is doing everything right.”

“Do you think that is true?”

Phyllis shrugged. “It is as other women say it is. I have tried fasting and bathing and not fasting and not bathing, and celery seeds and burned pine and wine, but Timo would not go near me after the garlic, and everyone prays for me, but still nothing changes.”

Tilla ran through the usual questions about bleeding and dates and diet and did an examination, pushing away any thoughts of how much more she might know if she had taken the terrible path
followed by the doctor who had lived here before, and opened up dead bodies to see what was inside them.

It was useless to tell a follower of Christos to pray to any other gods, so she went into the surgery for the pot she had seen labeled
CUMIN
with some other writing in Greek. Instead of seeds, it held some sort of green powder. She put it to one end of the shelf to remind herself to ask her husband if he knew what it was and returned to the bedroom. “There are other medicines I can suggest,” she said, remembering the ashes of hare’s stomach and roast sparrow in wine back in Britannia that had been a waste of money and wildlife. “They are said to work for some women. But I have nothing here, and to be honest, none of them worked for me.”

“But you have—”

“Mara is the daughter of a friend. She is adopted.”

“Adopted?” Phyllis paused to think about this news. “And your husband was willing to adopt a girl?”

“He was willing to adopt a baby,” said Tilla, knowing he had wanted a son.

“My husband says adopting would not be the same. But when I think of all the poor abandoned little babies we could bring home…”

“It is a different start on the same unknown path,” Tilla assured her, but Phyllis had not finished.

“Sister Dorcas says it is because there is unforgiven sin.”

“Unforgiven sin?” Tilla repeated, puzzled. This was a cause of barrenness that she had never considered. Then she thought of all the thousands of women who were not followers of Christos and had never confessed any of their sins to the One True God and yet who, like Sabella and her own sister-in-law, had more children than they knew what to do with.

“But I have repented of everything I can think of,” Phyllis continued, “and Timo says he has too, and he is not doing any more.”

No wonder he was reluctant to discuss their lack of offspring with anyone else.

Phyllis continued. “I told him last night he must stay away from me until he has confessed everything. But he said if he does that he will have lustful thoughts, and then we had a big argument, and now I don’t know what to do.”

“What does Sister Dorcas know about these things?” Tilla demanded. “Is she a medicus or a midwife?”

“She was given a word from the Lord.”

“Then I shall pray that the Lord sends her a word to mind her own business,” said Tilla, wondering if Sister Dorcas had designs on Phyllis’s husband.

Phyllis squirmed. “But it is true. There is unforgiven sin.”

“You have done something to offend Christos?”

“I try to change. But I keep failing.”

Tilla wondered what this nervous young woman could possibly have done to offend her god, or indeed anyone else.

In a whisper, Phyllis confessed. “I do not love Sister Dorcas.”

Tilla tried to hold back the laughter and could not. “Of course you do not love her! She is an interfering troublemaker! You think she loves you?”

“We are commanded to love our enemies.”

“Well, you may have to love them,” Tilla told her, “but I’m sure Christos never said you have to like them.” At least, if he had, then he should not have. “And you don’t have to listen to them, either.”

“Timo’s mother says—”

“It is no business of Timo’s mother’s.”

But Phyllis was not that easily reassured. “She says if there is no hope, that if he will never gain the rights of a father, I am holding him back and he should find a new wife.”

“I am sure Christos would not say that.”

Phyllis stared at her lap. “I don’t know what to do.”

So much of a healer’s work was not healing at all, but comforting. Tilla said, “Perhaps we could try a different way. If I have your leave to speak about this to my husband, he will perhaps meet yours by chance on the stairs, and they will talk about the things men talk about, and perhaps my husband will speak of his daughter with pride, and somehow your husband will find out that she is adopted.”

“If he knows I have spoken of this…”

“He will not,” Tilla promised. “But you must share his bed, or nothing any of us does will help.”

Later, straightening the bedcover, Tilla pondered her own empty womb and wondered if unconfessed sin might be sealing the entrance. The gods sometimes made strange demands in return
for their favors. At home they wanted gifts to the earth and the waters. Here, they wanted great stone temples and high arches that seemed to be trying to trap the heavens. And parades and dead animals and—no, it was the humans here who seemed to want to fill the arena with dead people. But what if Sister Dorcas was right, and her peculiar word from the Lord applied to other women as well as Phyllis?

There would be a long list to confess. It would include much that was half-forgotten, and things of which she was not proud.

She gave the last corner of the cover a sharp tug. The past was best left where it was: buried. She had Mara to look after now, and more important things to worry about.

As Ruso walked back toward the Vicus Sabuci, it struck him how provincial he had become. If this business had happened in Britannia, someone would have known someone who was a friend of the third cousin of the deceased’s brother-in-law, and within a week everyone would know who had been in the barrel and be ready to offer some version of how he had got there. With enough persistence, it would be possible to find the link between the body and the man Birna at the undertakers’, who had almost certainly delivered it. And also the whereabouts of a missing Greek doctor, who could surely not hide for long in a land largely populated by Britons and soldiers.

He inhaled deeply as he passed a bakery, trying to get the smell of the undertakers’ out of his nose. In Rome, where it was impossible to know everyone, it was said that people could live on the same street and still be strangers. Small wonder that its inhabitants were eager to amass vast wealth, attach themselves to powerful men, form some sort of professional club, or get into a group like the night watch or the undertakers. The best you could hope for was to be part of something that was stronger than you were. Otherwise, it was every man for himself, and if you failed—well, Rome was a
place where they genuinely needed a system for collecting the remains of the unwanted and unmissed. This was a place where a corrupt undertaker could deliver a dead man to someone’s house and expect payment. A dead man who—if Lucius Virius was telling the truth—did have a family to mourn him after all.

He wriggled to unstick his tunic from the small of his back. It still felt clammy with sweat after that awkward encounter in Sabella’s kitchen, which had added an unwelcome complication to a situation that was already disturbing and distasteful. Tilla was right, though: Whatever unsavory activity Kleitos had been up to, they were going to have to keep it quiet. Since anyone could call himself a doctor, a good reputation was all that distinguished the well-intentioned healer from the dangerous charlatan. Once his patients’ trust was gone, a man might as well pack up and leave. So, he and Tilla must cling to their story and ignore any objections that Sabella might raise about the doctor moving out before the barrel arrived.

What they wanted everybody to believe was that the body had been put there because Kleitos was being intimidated by some very determined debt collectors. The truth, he supposed, was that the undertakers had been asked to deliver when they had a suitable body, and Kleitos had fled the city—for whatever reason—without remembering to cancel the order.

Back in the Vicus Sabuci, the British youth was standing outside the surgery door with his gangly arms folded and his head held high, as if he were daring any debt collectors to approach. Ruso sighed. The sight of him was enough to send all but the boldest patients scurrying in the opposite direction. Since there was no way to make him smaller, he would have to stand inside. Or Ruso would have to find something else he could usefully do. But not just yet. There was one more call to make.

Trajan’s vast bathing complex was as magnificent inside as the soaring entrance porch had suggested. Ruso promised himself that one day he would make time to splash about in the swimming pool, take a long massage, and dawdle in the libraries under the marble gaze of poets and philosophers. Today was strictly utilitarian: He needed to find an attendant to guard his things, work up enough sweat to scrape off the dirt of the long walk, and dunk himself in the cold plunge before finding Simmias’s poisons expert.

None of his fellow bathers knew how Doctor Kleitos might be contacted with an urgent message. The majority had never heard of him. Of those who had, several had heard of Ruso too. Wasn’t he the one who had found the—

He tried to interrupt with “Yes,” before the word
body
aroused more interest, and then took refuge in “It’s all being dealt with by the officials.” The mention of officials was enough to silence further questioning. Fortunately nobody asked exactly which officials those might be.

Ruso left the changing rooms feeling cleaner, but back in the same slightly clammy outfit. The poisons expert was called Xanthe, and she was somewhere in the row of shops that opened onto the far side of the exercise area, beyond a couple of noisy ball games and a scatter of grunting weight lifters.

He skirted the yard, envying several youths who were lolling about in the sun on the library steps. No doubt a library was a fine and respectable place for a young man to meet a young lady, which might explain Accius’s newly acquired reading habit.

Meanwhile, the marble glare of the philosophers reminded him how quickly joy evaporated. Two days ago he had been convinced that he would be perfectly content if he had a job, a baby-minder, and a bedroom with no cockroaches in it. Now he had all of them. There had been brief moments of elation, it was true, and yet still he was dissatisfied and more than a little worried. Perhaps it was the fate of mankind to be forever searching. Perhaps he was just naturally miserable. Or perhaps the gods in whom he didn’t quite believe were getting their revenge on him. How else could a man make sense of being offered a decent medical practice only to find a looming disaster in a barrel on the doorstep? Not to mention an all-powerful patient who wanted one of the few things he had no idea how to supply.

The first woman he asked looked insulted at the implication that she might be Xanthe. When he found the real Xanthe behind a curtain at the back of a bathing-oil shop four doors down, he understood why.

She could have been any age between fifty and ninety, with skin of creased leather and hands that reminded him of chicken’s feet. When she reached up to draw him closer, the claws were cold on his forearm.

“Come by the lamp, where I can see you.” The words were Greek: their edges softened by the absence of teeth.

Standing above her, he had a sensation not dissimilar to that of being inspected on parade.

“Who are you?”

He explained.

“Who sent you?”

He explained again.

“Simmias. Ah.”

“Kleitos asked me to take over his patients while he’s away.”

He had hoped for, “Kleitos, ah!” as some sign of recognition, but instead she gestured toward his case. “Open it. Let me see.”

Puzzled, he knelt in front of her and opened the case. Xanthe ran one claw along a probe and lifted a scalpel closer to the lamp for inspection. Pointing to an artery clamp, she demanded to be told what it was for. He told her. “And this?”

“Catheter.”

“I am told that in Britannia there is a spiky hedge plant used to treat the heart.”

“Hawthorn?” he guessed. “Don’t use it with foxglove.”

She nodded. “Good. You seem to be who you say you are.”

Be careful who you trust
seemed to be a general rule of conduct around here. He hoped this woman was as reliable as Simmias had said. He had no way of telling. In the past he had rarely needed to venture beyond the Legion’s approved suppliers of antidotes for snakebites and scorpion stings. There had been the traveling snake tamers back in Nemausus, but they were regular visitors who had sold all manner of remedies in the street. This was very different. Still, Xanthe’s caution was reassuring. A woman known to have expertise in poisons was walking very close to the edge of the law, and she was wise to make a show of being careful whom she supplied.