Vita Brevis

by Ruth Downie

  The next screech came not from the nails, but from his wife.

  12

  The only person who was not disturbed by the opening of the barrel was the man inside it, because he must have been dead since sometime yesterday. Even Ruso, who was as accustomed to dealing with the end of life as Tilla was with the beginning, was shaken. Not that the sight was gory: The man’s eyes were closed and the cropped blond head rested against the wooden staves as if he had crept in there for a sleep. But who curled up naked in a barrel and then nailed a lid on from the outside?

  Tilla was gripping Ruso’s arm as if she was afraid she might faint. He put his hand over hers and said, “It’s all right,” although if she had asked him exactly what was all right, he would not have been able to answer. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “Go and sit down.”

  Even as he said it, strangers drawn by her screams were gathering around the barrel and there were fresh cries of horror. He said, “Does anyone know who it is?” but nobody seemed to be listening. The crowd’s exclamations drew new onlookers from the street, and now it seemed most of the drinkers from the bar on the corner were pushing their way forward to get a look so that they too could recoil in shock.

  “Go and sit down,” he urged Tilla, but instead she released her grip on his arm and bent to retrieve the lid.

  “We must show respect!” She was trying to place the lid back in its original position, but the loosened nails snagged in the ends of the staves and other hands grabbed at it to hold it up.

  Voices were demanding, “Let me see!” and “Is it anyone we know?” and “Ugh, these flies!” and then he heard the woman from the bar with “Let me through!”

  He needed to take charge here before his new workplace became the center of a street show even more distasteful than the one he had witnessed this morning. “Stand back!” he ordered. “Back, everybody.”

  One or two people began to move but Sabella, who had forced her way to the front, placed both hands on the rim of the barrel and bent to peer at what could be seen of the man’s face. “It’s all right,” she announced, straightening up. “It’s nobody from ’round here.”

  “Stand back!” Ruso urged again, not for the first time frustrated by the inability of civilians to obey a simple order. To Sabella he added, “You shouldn’t touch anything or breathe the air. You don’t know what killed him.”

  Sabella let go of the barrel as if it were hot, and hid her hands behind her back. “You heard the doctor! Don’t all stand there gawping. It’s nobody we know anyway.”

  She would have made a promising centurion.

  As the crowd shuffled back, Ruso squatted to position the lid over the nail holes. Then he retrieved the fire iron that Tilla had dropped, and used the end to hammer everything back into position.

  “Nothing to see!” Sabella declared to the disappointed onlookers. “You can all go home!” To Ruso and Tilla, she said, “I’ll get my husband. He’ll have to see to it.”

  The crowd began to disperse, several of them pausing to point out the barrel to people who had arrived too late to see anything.

  Suddenly realizing what they might be thinking, Ruso announced loudly to nobody in particular, “It was here when we got here!” One or two people turned to look, and he knew that nothing he said would make much difference: The doctor’s emblem beside him on the wall, the stains on the leather apron, and the unlucky man in the barrel had combined to produce a very unfortunate first impression.

  13

  The Vicus Cuprius was near the amphitheater, which was just as well. Ruso, as distracted as any man might be whose wife had just found a naked corpse inside a barrel, found it hard to concentrate on where he was going.

  The site was barely more than leveled rubble crammed between two soaring apartment blocks. Someone was busy adding to a complicated web of twine that was pegged out on the ground. He was cautiously stepping backward over the existing lines. Two more men stood beside a wooden leveling instrument that had been placed upright in the rubble. A flimsy table had been unfolded in the middle of the site, and beyond it Ruso recognized the bald head of Horatius Balbus. His solid frame looked younger and slimmer inside a plain work tunic. Next to Balbus was a man wearing the same battered straw hat that Ruso had seen on the crane supervisor by the amphitheater this morning.

  Balbus’s bodyguard was leaning against the wall of the next apartment block, surveying the scene with his thumbs stuck in his belt and showing no interest in what the builders were doing.

  Ruso approached and held out the bottle of thick brown liquid, wrapped in a cloth because it was still hot. “Horatius Balbus’s medicine.”

  The man eyed him as if he were an interesting insect. “Delivery in person.”

  “I’m here in person,” Ruso pointed out. “And I’ve got patients waiting.” It sounded better than I’ve left my wife in a new apartment with a screaming baby, a crowd of nosy neighbors, and a corpse.

  “Wait.”

  Out in the middle of the site, Balbus and the man in the straw hat peered at whatever was laid out on the desk. Then the man in the straw hat stepped across to the surveying instrument and squinted at the plumb lines dangling from the top. Ruso, who had watched military engineers doing this countless times and much faster, tapped one foot on the rubble, as there was the inevitable left-a-bit-right-a-bit exchange. Despite the girl’s assertion earlier that “Pa always knows everything,” his patient did not seem to have noticed that Ruso was here as requested. Ruso coughed as loudly as he dared. At least delivery in person meant he would be able to tell Balbus that a body had been delivered to his absent freedman.

  Finally the man in the straw hat jabbed his forefinger downward. A boy dropped into a crouch at the feet of a workman holding a pole. The workman stepped back. The boy shrank away, leaving one outstretched hand holding a peg in position, and a second man swung a hammer down. The line of the future wall, or drain, or whatever it was, was set. The workmen moved away across the rubble, heads down, followed by the boy carrying a bag of supplies.

  Balbus clapped the man in the straw hat around the shoulders as if they were old friends, and set off toward his doctor. The bodyguard said, “Go,” and Ruso picked his way forward over the lines that crisscrossed the site like trip wires.

  He was aware of the man in the straw hat calling, “Five thirteen to seven ten,” and the measurement was echoed from somewhere across the site.

  Balbus reached for the bottle in its cloth. “You look nervous, Doctor.”

  Ruso opened his mouth to explain, but before he could begin, Balbus said, “You haven’t told anyone about our conversation?”

  “No.”

  Balbus raised the bottle, tipped it sideways, and watched the liquid level itself out.

  “Sir, about Doctor Kleitos—”

  “No sign of him, I suppose?”

  “No, sir. But there’s a problem at the surgery. There was this barrel—”

  “Talk to Firmicus.” Balbus winced as his fingers met the hot glass, then he twisted out the stopper and sniffed. Ruso was struck by the absurd notion that he could be handing over a poison in the guise of medicine. His patient was right: He was nervous. Ever since he had realized what was in the barrel, Be careful who you trust had taken on a sinister new significance.

  “As I said, my people will look after you. This smells disgusting. What’s in it?”

  Ruso forced himself to concentrate. “Not theriac,” he admitted as Balbus wiped the neck of the bottle with the cloth and put the stopper back. “I couldn’t get hold of any. It’s mashed burned onions, wine, honey, and … some other things, thickened with flour.” He could not remember what the other things were. It had been difficult to concentrate on boiling up medicine while Tilla fended off a crowd of neighbors, all of whom wanted to see the body for themselves.

  “So is it any use at all?”

  He remembered to explain that he had put poppy tears in there. “If you’ve been taking poppy daily, it’s not
wise to make a sudden change.”

  “So Kleitos told me.”

  That was reassuring. Repeating what he had inked on the wooden label tied around the neck, Ruso said, “One small spoonful every evening, and make sure you shake the bottle first.”

  Balbus nodded. “Firmicus will pay you.”

  He had almost escaped when a hand landed on his arm. “You said you didn’t know anybody in the city?”

  “Not really, sir.”

  “Come with me. I’ll introduce you to Curtius Cossus. He’s the man I’ll be dining with tomorrow evening.”

  It was a sign of how distracted Ruso was that they were halfway across the building site before he realized that he had been ordered to deliver the medicine to the Vicus Cuprius at this hour precisely because Balbus had wanted Curtius Cossus to watch.

  14

  “Where’s it gone?” Ruso shut the door behind him before peering around in the heavily scented dusk of the surgery.

  Tilla’s shrug indicated both ignorance and indifference, but he noticed she had the little carved horse from home still clutched in the hand that wasn’t cradling Mara. “Sabella said her husband would tell someone to take it away,” she told him. “And now it is gone. So you cannot look at it.”

  “Me? Why would I want to look at it?”

  “You always want to look.”

  “Only when there’s a problem,” he told her. “Someone’s bound to come asking questions. I might have been able to help.”

  But his wife was not interested. “I have told the neighbors, husband, and I told the slaves who came to fetch it, and now I am telling you. It has nothing to do with us, and I am tired of talking about it.”

  “But—”

  “You do not have to deal with everyone’s problems here. You are not in the Legion now. This filthy city has slaves to do everything. There is probably a Department of Dead Bodies with slaves who will bury it.”

  “They’re called undertakers.” He made his way toward the kitchen and sniffed. “Rose oil?”

  Tilla lowered Mara onto her fleece. “I want to get that other smell out of my nose.”

  “We need to open the shutters,” he told her, striding across the kitchen and matching the action to the words. “Why—”

  The gaggle of children outside stepped back, looking as surprised as he was. Then a small voice piped up, “Are you the new doctor?”

  “I am. Can I help?”

  But they were already running away, shrieking and giggling.

  “This is how it has been.” Tilla reached past him to close the shutters again, but he held her back.

  “I’m here now,” he told her, hoping that would make a difference, “and we’re not living in the dark. They’ll get over it.”

  Before either of them could speak there was a knock at the door. “I’ll go,” he said, guessing the children had run ’round to the front.

  The buxom woman on the threshold had her arms folded as if he had already insulted her. “You’re this new doctor, are you?” He had barely opened his mouth to agree when she announced, “People are very upset.”

  He said, “Already?”

  Her head receded into her neck in a manner that reminded him of a pigeon. Her two companions shifted closer, ready to support or possibly hide behind her if the new doctor turned nasty. She repeated, “Very upset!” and glanced at the other women for support. “Aren’t they?”

  “Very,” said the woman on her left as the other gave a vigorous nod.

  “Vibia’s mother’s had a funny turn and my neighbor’s uncle fell on the stairs, and he’s never done that before, even with knees like he has, and a dog ’round the corner just had two dead pups. If that isn’t bad luck, I don’t know what is!”

  Ruso said, “Perhaps I can help—”

  “This is a decent area,” the talkative one continued. “People here make an effort. Not like down in the Subura.”

  “I see.”

  “We’re not fussy,” she said. “We don’t mind Greeks and Syrians and Gauls, as long as they work, and we put up with followers of Christos, but this is too much.”

  “What is?”

  “Her, keeping dead bodies!”

  “Her?”

  “Her!” She gestured toward the surgery. “That woman in there!”

  That woman? Ruso took a deep breath and forced himself to unclench his fists while the visitor carried on talking. “It’s disgusting, that’s what it is. You’re not in Germania now, you know. This is Rome. We honor the gods.” She turned to her companions, who nodded eager confirmation but said nothing at all.

  “I see.”

  “It’s no use saying I see. What are you going to do about it?”

  He said, “What needs to be done, exactly?”

  The woman glanced at her companions, then back at him. He guessed she was summoning the courage to repeat whatever had been said between them. “At the very least,” she said, as if it was a concession, “the whole place ought to be purified by a proper priest.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And then we want the old doctor back. It’s bad enough with that lot upstairs holding illegal meetings. We’ve nothing against you personally, but we can’t have the place full of barbarians bringing bad luck with their filthy ways.”

  Ruso pulled the door closed behind him in the hope that Tilla might not be listening. “Is that so?” he asked, wondering what the woman would think if he shared his own suspicions about why the dead body was there. “You yourself—I don’t recall you telling me your name—is that what you think?”

  The woman bristled. “We’re only telling you what everyone’s saying. We’ve taken the trouble to come ’round and be helpful. If you don’t want to listen, that’s your problem.”

  “In that case,” Ruso told her, tightening his grip on the door because he could feel Tilla tugging at the other side, “let me tell you some things, and perhaps you can pass them on to all these other people who are too afraid to talk to us.” He could feel his voice getting louder despite himself. “Nobody in my family has ever been to Germania. Doctor Kleitos himself asked me to come here, and I’ve got the full approval of his patron, Horatius Balbus. My wife is a citizen of Rome by the emperor’s personal decree, and nobody in these apartments has as much right to be upset as she has, arriving here with our baby to find a dead stranger outside the—”

  “Doctor!”

  Ruso twisted ’round, fully prepared to tackle a fresh complainant while keeping a grip on the door and ignoring the urgent whispers behind him and the pain from whatever his wife was poking into his back through the latch hole. To his relief, he recognized Balbus’s steward.

  “Ladies.” Firmicus raised his remarkable eyebrows. “I see you’ve met our new doctor.”

  The women glanced at one another. The main complainant unfolded her arms and took a step back. “We were just talking, sir.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt.”

  “They were telling me about a couple of patients,” Ruso said, but nobody seemed to be listening.

  The woman said, “Sir, about my cousin.”

  Tilla was that woman, but Firmicus was sir.

  “Sir, is there any—”

  “Three blocks north of the Forum of Augustus, opposite the bakers,” Firmicus told her. “It’s a nice room. She’ll like it. Tell her to tell Felix I sent her.”

  Perhaps encouraged by this, one of the companions put in, “Sir, the balcony over the—”

  “Didn’t we get that fixed last month?”

  “They came and did something, sir, but it’s still loose.”

  “Talk to the caretaker.”

  “We did, but—”

  “Am I the caretaker?”

  The women hurried away. Ruso envied Firmicus his power. For some reason groups of angry women always seemed far more alarming than groups of angry men. Meanwhile Ruso’s own angry woman had wrenched the door open behind him and was demanding to know why he had not let her out to deal with
them.

  “I didn’t want to see a fight.”

  Tilla bristled. “I wanted to tell them all those things myself,” she said. “And there is already a priest coming like they want. The magistrates will send one before sunset.”

  Before Ruso could reply, Firmicus turned to him. “We need to talk, Doctor.”

  “I was just coming to find you,” Ruso assured him, ushering him indoors and closing the door on the outside world.

  The steward repeated, “We need to talk, Doctor.”

  Tilla did not take the hint. Ruso said, “Thank you, wife.”

  Tilla gave him a look that said he would be sorry for this later, and retreated. She could have had no idea how cheered Ruso was by the way she shut the kitchen door: with a calculated firmness that said she was highly annoyed but was not going to make an exhibition of herself by slamming it. A couple of days ago she would have wandered out and barely noticed whether or not it was closed behind her.

  15

  Firmicus planted both hands on the operating table and leaned across to address Ruso in a low voice. “What did the master say to you back at the house?”

  Ruso was aware of the clatter of crockery from the kitchen and Tilla’s voice launching into one of her interminable songs about her ancestors. “Always stay one step ahead of your enemies.”

  Firmicus’s attempt at a cold stare was almost as good as his owner’s. “Don’t try to be clever, Doctor.”

  A doctor who was trying to be clever was surely better than one who was resigned to being stupid, but pointing this out would only compound the offense, so Ruso said nothing.

  “Tell me what’s going on here.”