Vita Brevis (27 page)

Ruso rolled over, punched a lump in the mattress, and wondered how a reasonable man such as himself could have let things come to this. Now even sleep was beyond his control. The medicinal wine he had prescribed for himself on top of an empty stomach—that bastard had stolen his supper, and the bar was closed—had certainly made him drowsy, but it did nothing to answer the principal question that was keeping him awake: How could he get them all out of this mess?

Tilla’s only suggestion after all the fuss had died down and everyone had gone away was, “We should go home to my people.”

To which, rather than say,
It’s not that simple
, he had answered, “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

Then she put her hand on his arm and said with an air of quiet concern that warmed him inside, “Are you all right?”

He assured her that he was, but he was glad when she didn’t believe him. Being worried about was the best thing that had happened to him all day.

“Are you sure? You look pale.”

“So do you,” he said, putting his own hand over hers in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. “It’s been a difficult day.” The last
thing his wife needed to hear was that he was exhausted and angry and confused. That he felt humiliated. That he had fallen out with his patron, he didn’t know what to do, and he was afraid of what might happen next. That he too wanted to run back to Britannia where they both had friends, and where her family really weren’t that bad.

He did not want to tell her any of these things. What he wanted was to take her to bed and for a few brief moments, to forget he had ever been unwise enough to bring them here. He said, “I think we should all try and get some rest.”

“Yes,” she said, gently lifting his hand away. “I am thinking, if you are sure you are all right, perhaps Narina and Mara should come in the bedroom with me and you can be in the kitchen to guard the door.”

“What?”

She cuddled Mara closer. “I keep thinking about that man with the knife.”

“She’s safe now,” he assured her, bending to kiss the top of Mara’s head and not sure whether he was doing that because he was fond of the baby, or because it seemed the easiest way to retain the attention of his wife.

So that was how they had ended up as they were now: Esico with a bandaged head, lying on a straw mattress in the surgery, secure behind a street door that had the operating table pushed up against it until Christos’s carpenter could fix it tomorrow. Ruso had the mattress on the kitchen floor, guarding the back door even though it was already securely barred and he was certain that the undertakers would not be back tonight.

He had spent all that money on a baby-minder and instead of the baby being moved out of the bedroom, the baby-minder had been moved in.

A dog was barking in a nearby apartment. There was that cry again from somewhere around the courtyard: the third or fourth time since he had become aware of it. A woman giving birth. He hoped Tilla wasn’t awake to be counting the gaps and wondering if she should go and see if she was needed. She would be mustering the courage to venture out in the dark, and doubtless wishing she were on a damp and windy island a long way from Rome.

She was right, of course. They should never have come here.
But leaving was not as simple as she seemed to think. Tomorrow, he would have to explain to her why a doctor could not flee the city while the death of his chief patient was under investigation. Especially when that investigation was being carried out by Metellus, who had contacts all over Britannia and access to the official postal service.

So, if leaving was not an option, he was back to the question: How to get out of this mess?

He must think logically.
First, define the problem.

Where to start?

One: the body in the barrel. His own attempts to distance himself from whatever Kleitos and Simmias had been up to had been a spectacular misfire. It had never crossed his mind that Simmias—it must be Simmias—would go to the undertakers after what had been meant as a friendly warning. He could only assume that there was some sort of regular order for bodies that had to be canceled, and Simmias was so frightened of Squeaky that when he went to cancel it, he had trotted out some excuse about Ruso threatening to call in the authorities. So now Ruso had a bunch of professional torturers demanding six hundred sesterces in three days’ time, and even with the money he was holding back to pay Xanthe for the theriac that Balbus no longer needed, he could not muster more than a hundred and thirty-five to pay them.

No wonder Kleitos had run away from these people.
Be careful who you trust
indeed! Ruso was feeling less and less kindly inclined to the little Greek and his masterly grasp of understatement with each hour that passed.

Two: Accius, his only friend in moderately high places, had been driven away by another of Ruso’s attempts to offer helpful advice. He should have learned the first time.

Three: the death of Balbus. Even thinking about that medicine made him feel nauseous. Nauseous and ashamed of how desperate he was to cover up his carelessness. Balbus’s tenants had been right to be suspicious: Ruso had spent much of the afternoon trying to find a way to blame them for their landlord’s death.

Meanwhile Accius, instead of abandoning his misguided attempt to chase Cossus away from Horatia, had now put Metellus in sole charge of it. If Cossus were to retaliate by making his own enquiries, someone would surely ask why a doctor who admitted to
knowing very little about poisons had been mixing up something that he had apparently presented to his patient as theriac.
And if it wasn’t theriac, Doctor, then what exactly was it?

If only he had thought to keep some of the mixture back instead of filling the bottle. The only sample must be somewhere in Balbus’s house. It was hard to see how he could get hold of it without arousing suspicion. Anyway, what would he do with it? Tip it down the nearest drain? Replace it with something definitely safe, in case anyone asked? Ask Xanthe what she thought of it? No: She might talk. The only way to find out in secret was to drink it and see what happened.

Ruso squeezed his eyes tight shut and tried to silence the echoes of Xanthe’s dramatic warnings, but telling himself that he very probably hadn’t poisoned his chief patient did not provide a great deal of comfort in the lonely dark of the kitchen.

The patient trusted you, Doctor. And where is the patient now?

Dead, sir.

The woman cried out again.

Everything depended on finding Kleitos. Kleitos could reassure him that what was in that pot was simply normal-strength poppy. Kleitos could sell some of the possessions he’d taken away with him on that vegetable cart and pay off the undertakers for their unwanted and illegal delivery.

Christos had already been roped in to join the hunt. Perhaps they should try a wider appeal for divine help. It could do no harm. He had met people who were sure they had been healed after presenting some god with a clay replica of the affected part of the body. The priests in the temple over on Tiber Island asked the patients to do little more than lie down and sleep and think good thoughts, and their eager scribblings on the walls testified to the cures that had come to them in dreams.

He turned to face the little shrine on the wall where Tilla had put the oak leaves and the little horse and the statue of Mercury. “The gods who lived here before you,” he whispered to the dark, “where has Kleitos taken them?” But the oak leaves and little horse and the statue of Mercury remained stubbornly silent: only the woman cried out.

Why was he even thinking like this? It was insane. The gods
were the invention of storytellers: the product of collective imaginings that only existed because people agreed to believe in them.

He yawned, punched the wretched lump in the mattress again, and had just closed his eyes when he heard Esico moving about in the surgery. Moments later the door was pushed open and someone was shuffling across the kitchen, feeling his way around the furniture.

Ruso spoke in British. “How’s the head, Esico?”

The slave gasped in fright and crashed into something.

“Sorry.”

“The head hurts, master. And now my foot.”

“Do you feel sick? See flashing lights or seeing double?”

“No, master.”

He heard the rustle of the curtain being pushed back and a sigh as Esico sat on the pot. The slave had not had the best of evenings, either. His new family’s home had come under threat for the second time in two days, and in trying to defend it he had practically been knocked senseless. He had managed to blunder out into the courtyard and tried to explain to a passing neighbor but it was not until Narina arrived to translate that help had been summoned.

“You see,” Tilla had observed, tucking in the knot on the bandage around Esico’s freshly stitched forehead, “It is good to have slaves who speak the same tongue.”

The curtain was pulled back into place. Esico said into the darkness, “Will you sell me, master?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Narina says those men want money.”

Ruso was not proud of imagining a torrent of coins rolling toward him in exchange for a loyal and healthy slave who was bound to get a grip on Latin before long. “Go back to bed, Esico.”

Esico shuffled out. The woman shrieked.

Ruso lay down, closed his eyes, and put his fingers in his ears. If the boy had to go, he deserved to go to a good home. That was what any decent man did when disposing of loyal members of his household. But the trouble was, Esico would be sold only if things were desperate, and that very desperation might mean he had to go to whoever would pay. Once that happened, his former owners would have no more control over how he was treated than they would if they had sold a dog.

He needed to find Kleitos. He needed reassurance and information and he needed hard cash.

It was impossible to get comfortable with his fingers in his ears. As he removed them he heard a bloodcurdling scream. Then a silence, followed by the scratchy and irritable wail of a new soul forced out to cope in a messy world.

Everyone was up early. Narina was making proper porridge with milk. Esico’s head was still sore and the first shadows of a black eye were showing, but he seemed keen to work. He even took on a woman’s job, going out to the fountain for water.

While the slaves were busy Tilla joined her husband in the surgery. As she had feared, he refused to think about going back to Britannia. He looked so tired that she decided to leave that argument for later, but as she told him, if they were to stay, they needed a plan. Or six hundred sesterces. Or some way of earning in two days what an ordinary person might hope to earn in many months.

“As rich men say,” he told her, “it’s only money. Careful!” He reached out to hold her back, then crouched to pick up a tiny sliver of glass and wipe it off his finger into the bucket.

“If we do not leave today,” she said, “we must find Kleitos, or some new patients who are very rich, and you must go to Accius.”

“I don’t want to involve Accius.”

“But you must! He needs to know. Someone is threatening his man. It is an insult to him.”

“I’m not sure I am his man anymore. Besides, I can’t go today. It’s the funeral.”

She had forgotten the funeral. She needed to find something dark to wrap around Mara, and she must remember to take the gray cloak and her own night blue tunic out of the trunk and hang them to get rid of the creases. She would tell the slaves to stand on either side of them. The household needed to look respectful for her husband’s sake, even if the dead man had allowed people to live in homes overrun with cockroaches.

“You can see him tomorrow, then,” she said. “He must be able to do something. Can he not talk to somebody?”

“It was talking to people that got us into this.” He lowered his voice. “I can’t explain why Squeaky wants money without telling Accius what was going on here, and once he knows, he’s implicated in covering it up. I’m supposed to help his career, not drag him into scandal.”

“Tell him something else. Tell him you need money because one of our slaves ran away and—wait!”

For a moment he looked hopeful. Then when she told him her idea, and he explained why it would not work, she felt foolish. Of course the dealer’s famous six-month money-back guarantee was only a promise that the slave was
as described
. You could not complain when someone who bore the label
runaway
ran away. “Tell Accius one of them died and we need to buy another one,” she suggested. “He is a rich man with a big house—he will hardly notice it.”

“He’s not as rich as you imagine. And I already owe him for the slaves we still have.”

She swallowed. It was her fault, so she should be the first to say it. “If you want to sell them …”

“I don’t. Yet.”

“I will tell everyone I am taking on patients now we have Narina. And you could earn some money with the night watch. Those men said there was a job.”

“They know that because it was one of the watch’s doctors who brought them down on us. Besides, I’m not leaving you here overnight.”

She wanted to shout,
Then what
are
you going to do?
but as the words formed in her mind she heard an echo of them in her mother’s voice. “This is what bullies do,” she said, remembering the raised voices around the fire night after night while she and her
brothers were supposed to be sleeping. “This is what my people did when the Legions came. Nobody knew what to do.” And then, something she had never spoken aloud before. “It was not the soldiers who broke us,” she said. “It was we ourselves with our quarreling.”

“We’re not quarreling. We’re having a discussion.”

“No,” she told him, even more annoyed now. “I am having ideas and you are saying no to them. You have been like this ever since that patient died, and he was not a nice man anyway. I am going to stop talking to you until you have an idea of your own.”

She leaned back against the workbench and folded her arms. He did the same. She wondered if he had thought about the box of soldiers’ kit under the bed: the valuable kit that he would need if they were to go back to Britannia. Soldiers always needed doctors. If Accius could get him out of the Legion, Accius could surely get him back in. She knew she could suggest selling it, and she knew she was not going to. Not yet.