Vita Brevis

by Ruth Downie

  “So you can’t help me?” Balbus prompted.

  “Sir, if Kleitos hasn’t left a record of the recipe, prescribing a different one could put you in just as much danger as the poison you’re trying to avoid.” Balbus responded with a cold stare that he had probably honed on tenants who were late with the rent. Ruso, who had spent years dealing with angry centurions, concentrated his gaze on the top of the man’s bald head. “If I can’t trace it,” he continued, “I don’t want to ask around and publicize the fact that you’ve run out.”

  Only Balbus’s lips moved. “I was hoping you would be useful.”

  “If I can’t find it, I can mix up something harmless that looks like it. That way you’ll be seen taking your regular protection until Kleitos comes back.”

  Balbus’s expression softened very slightly. “And nobody will get any clever ideas.”

  “Exactly, sir.”

  “And you’ll keep this conversation to yourself.”

  “I will, sir.”

  Balbus shifted his position on the bench. “Deliver it to me in person at the building site on the Vicus Cuprius just before the tenth hour.”

  Ruso agreed, wondering whether Balbus really did have dangerous rivals around every corner, or whether he made enemies by insinuating that his hosts were trying to poison his dinner. Maybe gangs of angry tenants were plotting against him. Maybe he just had a vivid imagination.

  “Two things for you to remember,” Balbus added. “Don’t tell anyone else you don’t know much about poisons. And don’t ever speak to my daughter again without my permission.”

  Firmicus appeared beside Ruso on the way out, eyebrows raised in query. “Everything all right, Doctor?”

  “I’m delivering some medicine to your master just before the tenth hour at a building site on the Vicus Cuprius.”

  The steward showed no surprise at this complicated arrangement, saying only, “Make sure you get there on time. Horatius Balbus is a man who means what he says.”

  11

  Ruso’s pleasure at seeing his wife in a decent home— albeit a sparsely furnished one—was tempered by the news that he had missed several potential patients and that his choices for a late lunch were

  I.bread, kindly donated by the neighbor upstairs, or

  II.bread and fried onion, or

  III.bread and raw onion, or

  IV.bread with oil

  “Or just onion,” Tilla offered, putting the finishing touches to a pile of kindling under the grill. He went to shove Kleitos’s document box back beneath the workbench after a quick and fruitless search. It was half full of battered scrolls, fragments of parchment, and writing tablets. He suspected someone in a hurry had picked out all the important items and thrown the rest back in the box.

  Tilla called through from the kitchen, “I could fry it if you like.”

  “Onion soup?”

  There were not enough sound onions for soup. There had been no time to buy anything else, and Tilla had very little money, because she had spent it all paying the porters.

  He swatted at a fly before handing over a couple of sesterces without comment. She must already know she had been swindled, and the porters were long gone. So was the acquaintance of Accius’s doorman, who had recommended them to him in exchange for an undeserved tip.

  Tilla slid the coins into her purse. “Will you watch Mara while I fetch something from the bar?”

  “Can’t you take her with you? I’m working.”

  She said, “It is only next door!”

  “Exactly!”

  “I will not be gone long.”

  Ruso sighed. Ever since Mara had been weaned and the wet nurse had left for other duties, he and his wife had become the servants of a small and highly unreasonable mistress. It was ridiculous. Surely no man—certainly no former legionary officer—should have to participate in games of pass-the-baby like this? Tilla had been desperate for a child, but now that they had one, she did not seem anywhere near as desperate to look after her all the time, and she kept expecting him to help.

  He weighed his purse in his palm. Most of it was copper, but presumably Balbus would pay him something for the theriac—genuine or otherwise—and Accius might be prepared to give him an advance now that he had work. It was clear from the emptiness of the apartment that Doctor Kleitos was expecting to be away for some time. “Tomorrow,” he called, “I’m going to find us a slave.”

  Tilla paused in the doorway. “Sabella from the bar says if the debt collectors come, tell them the other doctor is gone away and everything here is ours, and if they don’t believe you, to send them to her. She will frighten them off. And we must do something about that barrel out there.”

  He looked up from Mara’s attempts to sink both her teeth into a fistful of bread crust. “What debt collectors?”

  Tilla flapped a hand across her face to get rid of a fly. “They might not come.”

  Debt collectors. Ruso glanced around the half-empty living space with fresh understanding. The story about the sick father had been a polite fiction. The family had taken everything of value that they could carry and fled. Yet even in the midst of disaster Kleitos had remembered the needs of his patients, and of a colleague who was out of work. Be careful who you trust was probably a warning not to borrow money from people who would turn nasty if you couldn’t pay them back. Best not to risk taking loans from strangers. If Accius didn’t come up with the cash to buy a slave, Ruso would have to sell his army kit after all.

  “I’ll call you if she cries,” he said, because it was important to establish the proper order of domestic life.

  When his wife had gone, he propped the baby up on her sheepskin and cushions in the corner of the surgery where she could reach up to play with the dangling bandages. Then he tore off a chunk of bread for himself and began to work his way methodically around the room, starting with the left wall. He had bought himself some time with Balbus by suggesting a substitute, but he needed to find that medicine, or else some note of its name in Kleitos’s records. The trouble was, while Kleitos had handed over his practice and his lodgings, there was no sign of any attempt to hand over any information about his patients.

  The workbench creaked under his weight as he scrambled up to check the top shelf. The scatter of jars there held only dust and the shambolic corpses of spiders. Lower, the bowing of the shelves testified to a store of medicines far greater than the sparse collection of green glass bottles that now remained, not all of which were labeled.

  A wail from the corner caused him to glance down. Two chubby feet were kicking from beneath a mound of white linen.

  “Oh hell!” He leapt down, lifted off the tangle of bandages that should have been rolled and put away, and prized the end of one out of his daughter’s hand. “You weren’t supposed to pull them off the line,” he told her. He piled them on the operating table, the white now soiled with dirt from the floor. Mara’s chunk of bread had fallen on the floor and was filthy. He tossed it into the waste bucket and fetched her a fresh piece. That slave could not come soon enough.

  Along the back of the bench, a perfect row of dust-free circles in diminishing sizes betrayed the absence of a set of bronze cupping vessels. Above and to one side was an empty hook exactly where he would have stored his own leather apron to protect his clothes during surgery.

  Eyeing a tattered broom propped against a half-empty sack of sawdust—both of them cumbersome, low value, and not worth taking—Ruso thought about the number of hasty and desperate decisions Kleitos’s family must have taken, and how much worse that same process would have been for his own ancestors.

  Rome’s Great Fire had been a catastrophe, but for Ruso’s forebears it was a timely blessing. They never found out who had denounced them to Nero’s brutal enforcers. It could have been a business rival. It could have been the couple next door, taking malicious revenge for the family’s complaints about their noisy parties and drunken quarrels. It could have been a distant acquaintance, giving up a
name that meant nothing to him in the hope of saving himself. The result had been the same.

  The story went that, in a desperate attempt to protect his fleeing household, Ruso’s great-grandfather had bequeathed all his nonhuman property to the emperor and was on the verge of taking his own life when the smell of burning wafted from the direction of the Palatine Hill. As the air filled with the crashes of falling buildings and the screams of fleeing humans and beasts, Great-grandfather slid his knife back into its sheath. He abandoned his best toga for a work tunic left behind by one of his slaves, and joined the crowds who were heading out of the city.

  The family arrived in Gaul with only what they and the slaves could carry, less the items they had been forced to sell to buy their passage. One of the “items” was the children’s much-loved tutor. Of all the sacrifices suffered by the ten-year-old who would later become Ruso’s grandfather, that had been the greatest. Determined that his own family should never endure such a loss, Grandfather had grown up with an eye for a business opportunity and a horror of debt and waste. Unfortunately Ruso’s father had inherited neither of them.

  Ruso eyed the abandoned remains of another family’s livelihood and wondered if Grandfather would have been disappointed in him too. Despite his best efforts, the family farm was still burdened with debt. And now here he was, a grown man, having to mind the baby while his wife went shopping, because he did not have the cash to buy even one slave.

  “Somewhere,” he informed Mara, not because she needed to know but because he suspected she never heard Latin unless he was in the house, “it’s all gone very wrong.”

  Mara stared at him as if she were considering a wise and helpful reply, then busied herself with the bread. Ruso shooed a fly off the table, turned back to the shelves, and resumed the hunt for the medicine that would keep Horatius Balbus one step ahead of his real or imagined enemies.

  Several minutes later he reported to Mara that he couldn’t find it. “It might be labeled Theriac,” he told her, “or Mithridate, or Antidote”—he turned his attention to the opposite side of the room—“or it might have Balbus written on it, or Andromachus’s Special Recipe …” But the shelves here held only dusty boxes of bandages and dressings.

  He bent down and wiped a lump of soggy crust from his daughter’s cheek. “On the other hand,” he told her, “it might just be labeled Bloody Expensive, which is why he’s taken it with him.”

  Mara, pleased with the attention, laughed and waved her arms in the air. He grinned back. It was good to have an appreciative audience. His wife had been more than a little distracted lately. If she had even noticed the grazes on his sore knees, she had not bothered to comment.

  “What is expensive?” Tilla’s voice startled him.

  “Rome.” He flicked the soggy crust into the waste bucket, resisting the urge to tell her about Andromachus’s Special Improved Theriac Recipe for Nero, a man who was justifiably afraid of being poisoned. The less Tilla knew about men like Nero, or indeed men like Horatius Balbus, the better.

  Tilla held out a bowl of olives. He wiped his hands on a clean cloth. He was beginning to suspect that Kleitos had just bought the antidote mixture ready prepared whenever Balbus needed it. The gods alone knew who from. Always assuming, of course, that it was the genuine article and not just some concoction of his own that the little Greek brewed up in the kitchen when his wife wasn’t frying onions.

  She said, “That barrel outside, husband. Sabella at the bar is asking when we will move it.”

  He grunted his lack of interest and spat an olive stone into the bucket with satisfying accuracy.

  “It belongs to the other doctor, and it is starting to bring flies. She says it will put their customers off.”

  From somewhere in the distance, he heard the ninth hour sounding. “I can’t deal with it now,” he told her. “I’ve got a patient waiting.”

  “Her husband says if we can’t manage it, they can lend us a strong slave. I will ask—”

  “I’m quite capable of moving it.”

  Tilla took the baby away into the kitchen and left the olives. He called, “Have you seen a bottle of medicine anywhere back there? Dark brown, thick, smells as if it’s been scraped off the drains?”

  She had not.

  “Can you get that fire going, then? I need to make some.”

  He delved inside his medical case, brought out the jar of poppy and upended it into his palm. Nothing happened.

  “Tilla?”

  The sight of the jar brought a confession that she had used the last of it in a desperate attempt to get some sleep among the cockroaches.

  If he found the name of the theriac supplier, he might be able to hurry there and still deliver in time. He reached below the bench and pulled out the documents box again, laying out the scrolls and tablets where they would catch the light from the door. The scrolls seemed to be a collection of scraps not unlike the note he had received earlier. They contained sections of medical textbooks that Kleitos had perhaps bought cheap. He recognized a section of Celsus on dislocations, which looked and smelled as if it had been salvaged from a bonfire, with missing words added near the ragged edges in an untidy scrawl. On the back was the note Kleitos had made during their conversation about the useful properties of dock leaves. He fortified himself with more olives before tackling the note tablets.

  One or two tablets contained names that must have belonged to patients, but they were accounts for payment, not records of treatment, and Balbus’s name was not among them. Neither, for that matter, was Accius’s. Several more tablets in the same handwriting seemed to be detailed observations about anatomy. The delicate and complex bones of the wrist. How the main artery leading into the arm from the shoulder passes under the small pectoral muscle. Most of what Ruso could manage to make out seemed reassuringly sensible. He wished he had been able to spend more time with Kleitos. They could, he felt, have been friends. Perhaps one of the neighbors could suggest where to track him down so he could be asked where Balbus’s medicine came from.

  Setting the anatomy notes aside and swatting at another of the wretched flies, Ruso finally found a column of items and prices listed in quantities that could only mean he had found a record of supplies. This was more like it. Tipping the tablet toward the light from the door, he began to reread it more slowly, running a finger down each line and searching for any hint of a source for Balbus’s precautionary antidote. He had just reached the last line without enlightenment, when a shadow fell across the writing and a nasal voice said, “I’ve come to see the doctor.”

  “I’m the doctor today. How can I—?”

  “The other doctor,” interrupted the man.

  “He’s not here. Can I help?”

  “It’s about my money.”

  Tilla’s instant appearance from the kitchen suggested she had been listening for her cue. “The other doctor is gone away,” she announced, “and all his things have gone with him.”

  “He was here yesterday.”

  “Ask at the bar next door: They will tell you the same.”

  “What about my money?”

  “His debts are not ours.”

  The man craned to see past her, as if Kleitos might be hiding in the kitchen. “Where is he, then? When’s he coming back?”

  Still clutching the tablet, Ruso stepped in between them. “I’ve got his records here. What’s your name?”

  “Cash on delivery, it was.”

  “You’ll be paid,” Ruso promised, not wanting the practice to get a reputation for poor payment. “What was it you delivered?”

  To his surprise the man retreated into the arcade. “I’ll come back when he’s here.”

  “Was it that barrel?” Tilla followed them both outside. “Because whatever it is, it has gone off. You can take it away again.”

  The man raised his hands. “Nothing to do with me, miss.”

  Ruso tried again. “If you give me your name, I’ll give him a message.”

  But th
e man was already limping away down the arcade, the lurch in his step exaggerated by the slanting shadows that the columns cast across the sunny paving.

  Tilla said, “He was not much of a debt collector.”

  “No,” Ruso agreed, privately congratulating himself on the ease with which he had seen the man off.

  “Just as well. It is no good if I tell people we do not know where Kleitos is, and then you tell them you will give him a message. Husband, we must do something about that barrel. It is not—”

  Seeing there would be no peace, he stepped past her, warning her to mind out as he tipped the barrel up onto its rim and maneuvered it awkwardly toward the door. Then he stopped. He recognized that smell. Tilla was right. He certainly did need to do something about it. But he had made a promise to meet Horatius Balbus before the tenth hour. Time was passing. He couldn’t find the medicine or anywhere to buy some, and Horatius Balbus was a man who meant what he said. Whatever this was—and it was definitely not good—it would have to wait. He rolled it back to its former position.

  “But, husband—”

  “I’ll see to it later,” he said, stepping back indoors. “Stay away from it. Don’t let anyone interfere with it, and don’t breathe the air near it.”

  He put on the leather apron. He needed to concentrate on Balbus’s medicine. He was lining up bottles on the table and wondering what sort of brown liquid burned onions mashed with black olives and dates would make, or if he should simply adulterate a mild cough mixture, when Tilla emerged from the kitchen clutching one of the fire irons. “I said I’ll deal with it,” he repeated, but she took no notice.

  He hung the weighing scale from the hook Kleitos must have used for the same purpose, and surveyed the jars of potential ingredients his predecessor had left behind. Finally he checked the contents of a jar where most of the word POPPY was faintly visible in faded Greek on the outside, and was relieved to find that one dark lozenge of dried poppy tears remained inside. He sniffed it, then dropped it into the pan of the weighing scale, and licked his fingers, grimacing at the familiar bitter taste. Outside, he heard the sound of something scraping against wood and the screech of nails being prized out.