Remembering Teresa Vance,
a good friend to Ruso, to me, and to many.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Medicus
Terra Incognita
Persona Non Grata
Caveat Emptor
Semper Fidelis
Tabula Rasa
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
… medicoque tantum hominem occidisse inpunitas summa est.
… only a doctor can kill a man with complete impunity.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History
VITA BREVIS
A NOVEL
IN WHICH our hero, Gaius Petreius Ruso, will be …
Accompanied by
Tilla, his wife
Mara, their daughter. See also “Entertained by/worried by/kept awake by”
Commanded by
Accius, a former legionary tribune
Entertained by
Mara, his daughter
Obeyed by
Esico, and Narina, two British slaves
Questioned by
Metellus, a security advisor
Disapproved of by
Sabella, a bartender
Worried by
Mara, his daughter
Puzzled by
Kleitos, a doctor
Birna, a man with a limp
Brushed off by
Curtius Cossus, a wealthy building contractor
Kept awake by
Mara, his daughter
Annoyed by
Simmias, a fellow medic
Sister Dorcas, a follower of Christos
Tubero the Younger, a poet
A slave from the Brigante tribe
Minna, Accius’s housekeeper (whom Tilla calls the Witch)
Employed by
Horatius Balbus, a property owner
Assisted by
Phyllis, the neighbor upstairs
Timotheus, Phyllis’s husband, a carpenter
Firmicus, Balbus’s steward
Used by
Horatia, Balbus’s daughter
Kept in order by
Latro, Balbus’s bodyguard
Informed by
Lucius Virius, an undertaker
Xanthe, an expert on medicines
Gellia, a slave girl
He will never know the real names of the following, who appear in the story without them:
Squeaky, a large man with a small voice
a boy, nephew of Birna
a building caretaker, married to Sabella
another building caretaker with scummy teeth
a third building caretaker with a jug of wine and high hopes
a porter with a stylus behind one ear
a pregnant girl from the fifth floor
a toy seller
a sausage seller
He will fail to meet the following characters whom his author devised but barely used:
Doctor Callianax, a medical demonstrator
Delia, Kleitos’s wife
And neither will he meet the following, even though he really did exist:
Marcus Annius Verus, the urban prefect, in charge of law and order in the emperor’s absence. Verus had family connections with Ruso’s hometown of Nemausus. This was something the author felt sure she could exploit but she never quite worked out how.
1
ROME, APRIL, 123 A.D.
The shortcut was a mistake. They had almost lost the barrel down the steps after it rolled over his uncle’s foot. The boy was still shaken by the thought of what might have happened. What if the two of them hadn’t been able to catch up as it clunked away in the gray morning light? The boy could picture it tumbling over and over and finally smashing against a wall, leaving the thing inside flopped out across the pavement among a scatter of wooden staves.
What he couldn’t picture was what they would have done next, and he thanked the gods that he didn’t have to. He had flung himself at the barrel, while his uncle—who had earlier made him promise not to say a word until they were safely home again—yelled curses that echoed between the walls of the apartment blocks. The boy put his weight against the barrel while his uncle hopped about on one foot, still swearing. There was a scrape of shutters above them. Someone shouted, “Keep the noise down!” and someone else wanted to know what was going on out there.
His uncle shouted, “Sorry!” It was a word the boy couldn’t remember ever hearing him use before, but it worked. The shutters slammed, and the alley returned to silence, except for the sound of the uncle sucking in air through his teeth when he put his foot back on the ground. Nobody bothered them as they eased the barrel down the last few steps and onto the main street. Then there was the long push up the hill, where it lurched about, sent this way and that by the great uneven stones and ruts in the road.
The noise of wheels on cobbles was more irregular now. The sun was almost up and the drivers of the last few delivery carts were hurrying to get out of the city gates by dawn. They were too busy avoiding traffic fines to pay any attention to a man and a boy delivering a barrel. A couple of slaves out early to fetch water eyed them for a moment and then turned slowly to go about their business, compelled to move gracefully by the weight of the jars perched on their shoulders.
The boy held his breath as a dung cart rumbled past, and then they rolled the barrel across the street. His arm hurt after that near miss at the steps. His uncle was still limping, his sandals slapping unevenly on the stones. They set the barrel against the lowest point on the curb and then heaved it up and under an arcade that ran in front of a row of shops.
“Right,” grunted his uncle. They swivelled it—the boy was getting the hang of steering it now—and t
hen trundled it past the closed shutters of the bar on the corner. His uncle gave the order to stop. They set the barrel upright and he gave two sharp taps on the nearest door with his knuckles.
The light was growing into day. Even under the gloom of the arcade the boy could make out the figure painted on the wall: a snake twisting around a stick. “This is a doctor’s!”
“What did I tell you about keeping quiet?” The uncle gave the two taps again. Louder.
“Perhaps he could look at your foot.”
“Very funny,” said his uncle.
The boy, who hadn’t intended to be funny, decided he would do as he was told and say nothing from now on. Nothing about what they had crammed into the barrel. Nothing about how pointless it was to keep quiet if his uncle was going to curse in the street and bang on doors. Nothing about how anyone who wasn’t as tightfisted as his uncle would have hired a donkey and cart to move a barrel this size. He wouldn’t say a thing, because Ma was right: A boy with a big mouth could get himself into a lot of trouble.
Ma also said that any work that paid money was honest work, and if he wanted to eat, he had better go and find some. He certainly did want to eat, but now look where it had got him. He wanted to tell her that his uncle ought to be paying him a whole lot more for this, but then the boy would have to tell her what this was, and the thought of telling anyone made his toes curl against the cold paving. He tried not to think about ghosts.
The slaves had stopped at the fountain on the corner, only a few paces away. He could hear the low murmur of voices and the splashing of water. While one was filling his jar, the other would be lolling against the wall and gazing at anything that might be the least bit interesting. Like a man knocking on an unanswered door.
Glad he was under the arcade, the boy leaned back against the broad pillar where the slaves couldn’t see him, folded his arms, and pretended he could read the faded letters painted on the wall. The uncle was using his fist on the door now. Then he put his mouth to the gap where the latch was and shouted, “Delivery!”
It was plain they were wasting their time. The household slave should have been awake, even if no one else was, cleaning out the hearth and getting breakfast.
The uncle was making too much noise to hear the creak of hinges from the bar next door. The boy stepped forward and tugged at the side of his tunic. A hefty woman came out of the bar and glanced across at them but said nothing. She started lifting the shutters from their grooves and moving them indoors, opening up the whole of the entrance. It was going to be another warm spring day.
Finally, to the boy’s great relief, his uncle stepped back from the door and beckoned him to follow. The woman called after them, “Hey! You can’t leave that there!”
“We’ll be back later,” the uncle told her without turning around.
The uncle was limping and scowling all the way home, which was a longer trip than it should have been, because he led the boy along a street that passed a big house and down beside the market halls before doubling back down an alleyway, like he always did when he thought somebody might be watching. The boy trudged along beside him in silence, cradling his sore arm and trying not to think about the dead man in the barrel outside the doctor’s front door.
2
Gaius Petreius Ruso gazed up at the outside of Rome’s colossal amphitheater. He could make no sense of what he was seeing. Were they preparing some sort of acrobatic performance up there? Or was it a bizarre and creative form of punishment, like the horrors this place was built to display?
Curious, he had lingered at the edge of the crowd that had gathered to stare up at the second tier of stone arches. Now he was hemmed in by a sweaty throng of morning shoppers, slaves on errands, inquisitive children, a man whose clean toga and annoyed expression suggested he was delayed on the way to something important, and others who looked and smelled as if they had nowhere better to go. Behind him, a couple of youths had somehow managed to scramble up onto the plinth of the sun god, and were mimicking the pose of the golden giant towering above them while trading insults with the crowd below.
Ruso shaded his eyes from the brilliant blue of the spring sky, squinting to see what was going on beside a statue that stood in the shade of the arch. A young woman swathed in layers of cloth like an Egyptian mummy had been tied to the ladder. A golden-haired man draped in bloodred was directing a pair of slaves whose plain tunics bore matching red stripes. They were checking the knots.
“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 pre
ss 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?”