Vita Brevis (2 page)

“One moment, friends!”

The group around the girl all turned to see where the voice was coming from. The crowd also shifted its attention to an arch farther along, where a slave with his arms held aloft was shouting, “This time tomorrow, friends! In the Forum of Nerva, a live anatomy demonstration from the famous Doctor Callianax! See the doctor separate a living pig from its squeak and bring it back again!”

The rest was lost as the red-striped slaves appeared in the archway, pounced on the intruder, and attempted to separate him from his own squeak, but his work was done. The crowd cheered. The anatomist would have a good audience tomorrow.

Back in the original archway, a pale woman leaned over to speak into the ear of the mummy and groped under the cloth for a hand to grasp.

“They’d better have measured that rope,” observed an unshaven man at Ruso’s side. His tone suggested a certain relish at the prospect of what would happen if they had forgotten. “I heard they drop them headfirst.”

Ruso said, “They drop them? What for?”

“
Succussion
, they call it,” said someone else.

“What?” Ruso twisted to face him. “Are you sure?”

“It’s a cure for bent backs,” his informant told him. “It comes from Hippocrates. He was a famous doctor.”

“Hippocrates didn’t approve of it,” Ruso said, glancing at the crowd and wondering what to do.

“Know all about bent backs, do you?”

“Enough.”

Someone in front of them managed to turn ’round far enough to ask, “What would you do, then?” When Ruso did not answer he said, “Eh? If you’re the expert, what would you—Hey! There’s no need for that! Come back here!”

But Ruso was already out of his reach, worming his way forward by a combination of shoving, apologizing, treading on toes, and shouting the surprisingly effective “Let me through! I’m a doctor!”

Up in the archway, an older man who might have been the mummy’s father or husband stepped forward and laid a hand on her shoulder.

Below, Ruso was still some distance from the front. “Let me through! I’m a—”

“Piss off, mate. We were here first.” A man with a military bearing and a bad haircut moved to block Ruso’s progress.

“I need to get past!” Ruso craned over the enormous shoulder in front of him. Up in the archway, the red-striped slaves stepped forward and lifted the ladder. They tilted it over the edge of the railing so the young woman’s head hung above the street. The crowd gasped.

“I’m a doctor,” Ruso urged, trying to squeeze sideways around the man. “And I have to get to the front!”

A hand clamped onto his shoulder. “I’m a wrestler,” said a voice in his ear. “And no, you don’t.”

The murmur of the crowd grew louder. Above them, the patient was vertical, with her swathed head pointing toward the stone paving and the soles of her feet toward the sky.

“We have to stop this! Let me through!”

A voice said, “Let him through!” and someone else said, “
You
let him through!”

The young woman’s relatives were leaning forward to watch, the man gripping the railing, the woman with her hands pressed against her face.

Below, more slaves were shouting at the crowd to stay clear of the drop. Ruso found himself forced to shuffle backward. “Stop!” he yelled as loudly as he could, writhing free and fighting to clamber onto the shoulders around him. He managed, “Don’t do it! You could kill her!” before he was dragged down into the heaving, airless press of bodies.

Struggling to get back on his feet, the noise of the crowd above him coalesced into a roar of “Go! Go! Go!”

He managed to get his head up in time to see the ladder shoot down the side of the building. It jerked to a shuddering halt a few feet from the ground. A scream rang out into the sudden silence. Then one of the slaves in the street reached up and briefly drew back the white cloth from the patient’s face. He shouted something up to the waiting group in the archway.

The master embraced the patient’s family. Cheering and applause broke out in the street, and the crowd surged forward again, pushing and shoving to get a better look. Everyone except the
slaves now gathering up the loose rope had vanished from the arch: The others must be scurrying down the stone steps.

Ruso finally managed to catch a glimpse of the patient through the excited crowd. To his amazement, she was neither in a state of collapse nor in obvious agony. Instead she was massaging the back of her neck with both hands and smiling, while her parents embraced her—from either side, so as not to spoil the spectators’ view—and led her forward. The girl broke away from them and removed her stole to reveal the perfect alignment of her shoulders. Then she delighted both parents and crowd with an impromptu twirl before rejoining her family to walk away.

“It’s a miracle!” declared someone nearby.

“It’s a trick,” Ruso told him, convinced that the slaves must have put extra padding on a healthy girl beneath the mummy wrapping. “The only miracle is that she can still walk.”

“Eh? So the straight back, that’s a trick too, is it?”

“Did you know her before? Did anybody?”

“We all saw what she was like,” insisted the believer.

“It’s a trick!” Ruso called, louder.

“My friends!”

Everyone turned. The man draped in red had somehow managed to get across to the sun god. The youths had vanished, and he had been hoisted up onto the plinth in their place. “Many of you think you just saw a miracle.” He waited for the cheering to die down before continuing. “And some, like our friend here, will say you saw a trick.” He lowered his voice. “Let me tell you this. You saw neither.” He let the suspense build for a moment, then continued. “What you saw here, friends, in front of a thousand witnesses, was a cure. A cure that other doctors said was impossible, and why?”

“Because it doesn’t work!” Ruso shouted.

Several people turned to glare at him, but the man was smiling. “Because other doctors don’t know how to make it work,” he said. “Because they listen to people like our friend here, who can’t accept the evidence of his own eyes, and to their own ignorant teachers, instead of studying for themselves!”

A murmur of appreciation ran through the crowd. The speaker bent forward, surveying them as if he were addressing them one by one. “Tell me now, friends. How many times have you heard of a
gang of doctors standing ’round some poor patient’s bed and arguing with one another?”

Judging from the laughter, everyone knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Friends …” His voice grew quieter, so that they had to strain to listen. “I’m not one of these so-called healers who wastes his time criticizing his rivals. I’m not part of some fancy school of philosophy that I have to defend because I have a book to sell. You deserve better than that! And that’s why I’ve spent years of study and travel finding out for myself
what works
.”

Ruso felt his teeth clench. Like the most pernicious lies, the man’s claims had a superficial coating of truth and an appeal to common sense.

“You saw it for yourself, friends! Let us see if we can help you like we helped this young lady. Every medicine I will give you is guaranteed blessed by the goddess Angitia, every treatment taken from the genuine writings of Hippocrates himself! No problem is too large or too small! We’re only passing through, so seize your chance—don’t go home today without speaking to me!”

“Stay away from him!” Ruso shouted. “He’s dangerous!”

He was aware of a silence falling on the crowd. People were turning to stare as the showman offered him an even broader smile.

“Might you be a medical man, my friend?”

Vaguely aware of the distant tramp of marching boots, Ruso took a deep breath. Leaving out the word
former
, he called, “Medical officer with the Twentieth Legion.”

The showman extended an arm from on high as if to present Ruso to the crowd. “My friends, you see how it is! Jealousy! Your own doctors don’t want you to come to me and be cured. And why not? You know why not! Because they’d rather keep taking your money!”

The sound of boots on stone was louder now. Someone had called out the troops of the urban cohort to keep order. Ruso yelled, “If you’re so good, why don’t you stay in—” But
one place?
was lost under the relentless rhythm of sword hilts beating on shields and the cries of the crowd. The men of the cohort charged. The people fled. In moments Ruso was standing alone in an empty expanse of paving with only a scatter of debris and the stink from a trampled dog turd to indicate that anyone had been there.

Having averted the riot, the cohort was reassembling under the deserted sun god. Ruso leaned against the plinth to rub his grazed knees and pull his tunic straight.

“You there!” roared a voice, its owner striding toward him. “You deaf or what? Clear off home!”

Eyeing the centurion’s raised stick, Ruso chose not to argue. He had barely taken ten paces when a voice from a shadowed doorway across the street said, “I see you’re still causing trouble, Ruso.”

Brown hair, average height, faded tunic, battered sandals … had it not been for the voice, Ruso would never have noticed him. How long had he been standing in that doorway?

Metellus, looking faintly amused, nodded a greeting to the centurion. Then he took Ruso by the elbow as if they were old friends and steered him toward the clatter that had resumed on the demolition site across the road now that all the excitement was over. “I heard you were in Rome.”

Anyone who did not know Metellus would have taken this to mean
someone happened to mention you.
Anyone who had served in Britannia during Metellus’s time as security advisor to the governor would interpret it as
I have an informer at the port who sends me lists of disembarking passengers.

“So,” Ruso said, because it was best to be the one asking the questions, “what are you doing these days?”

“Oh, this and that,” said Metellus. “Fortune has been kind. You?”

“I’ve made some useful contacts,” Ruso assured him, wondering if Metellus wanted to know anything in particular, and for whom, and how to avoid telling him.

“Really?” Metellus sounded surprised. “Who?”

“I can’t say anything just yet,” Ruso told him. “You know how it is.”

“Indeed.”

Ruso hoped he didn’t. “Sorry I can’t stop and chat,” he said, waving past the sun god in the direction of the emperor Titus’s splendid baths, and not caring that this was an obvious lie from a man who moments ago had been loitering in the street. “I have to see a man about a job.”

Metellus said, “I’ll walk with you.”

Ruso glanced across at the demolition site, where a man in a battered straw hat was supervising a crane team as they cranked up a boulder to load into a waiting cart. Pushing aside a fantasy of what might happen if Metellus stood underneath it, he headed in the direction of the baths. His destination was up the Oppian Hill and with luck Metellus would get bored before they got there. If not, well, Kleitos was the sort of doctor who would happily spend an hour talking about the medicinal properties of thistles or the finer points of treating prolapsed hemorrhoids. That should see him off.

They waited for two men to lug a bulbous oil amphora past, and then stepped into the street. Metellus said, “And how is your wife enjoying Rome?”

“She’s very busy with the baby,” said Ruso.

“Oh, dear, yes. I heard something about that.”

“Parenthood is a marvelous thing,” Ruso assured him. “You should try it yourself.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Metellus told him. “Especially after the rumors.”

Ruso said, “It never pays to listen to rumors.”

“Actually, I find it pays rather well.”

Ruso tried, “And what are they saying about you?” but there was no reply.

Smells of woodsmoke and perfume and stale sweat wafted into the street from Titus’s bathhouse and the one behind it which, being built by a later emperor, was of course spectacularly bigger.

“I was told,” Metellus began smoothly, “that the child isn’t yours.”

Ruso took a slow breath, savoring the memory of the day his patience had snapped and he had shoved Metellus into the nearest river. “She’s not Tilla’s either,” he said. “We adopted.”

“Ah. I did wonder, but one never knows what to expect with the Britons.”

“My wife is a Roman citizen now,” Ruso reminded him.

“Of course,” Metellus continued smoothly. “Remarkable. I don’t think I ever congratulated her. Please pass on my good wishes.”

Ruso had no intention of ruining Tilla’s day by telling her the man who had once put her on a security list of Undesirables to Watch was in Rome.

“If there’s anything I can do,” Metellus continued, “just ask. I know one or two people who could offer you work.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”

“I do hope you aren’t relying on Publius Accius just because he encouraged you to come here—I believe that’s how it was?” When Ruso did not reply, Metellus added, “Accius was a big man back in Britannia, but you’ll need far better connections than that to get on in Rome. Especially with his tendency to make unfortunate remarks after too much wine.” He glanced back at the amphitheater. “I take it you’ve tried the gladiator school?”

“I’m on their list.”

Metellus said, “I may be able to help with that.”

“Please don’t.” Facing a crocodile was one thing. Putting your head between its jaws was something else entirely.

Metellus shrugged. “As you wish. But the offer is there. You can always contact me via the urban prefect’s office. Your wife won’t want to stay in that rather unpleasant boarding house forever.”

And with that the man was gone, brown hair and average height and faded tunic lost among the shoppers in a shady side street. The whole exchange might have been a hallucination, except now the tightness of Ruso’s fists and the soreness of his grazed knees was accompanied by a deep feeling of unease.

He forced himself to take a couple of deep breaths and relax his shoulders. He was not involved in anything that could possibly interest the urban prefect, whose job it was to keep order in the city while the emperor was away on another of his foreign tours. If indeed Metellus really was working for the prefect. No, it was far more likely that Metellus had been drawn by the crowd, had spotted an old adversary, and decided to enjoy spoiling his morning.