I grew comfortable with Amalberga and her ladies, and with the attendants at the hospital and a few of the patients — though there were too many of them for me to know any of them really well. I had to speak Gothic all the time, and got better at it; after a month or so I was speaking it even to Amalberga and Edico. I did miss my friends, and thought of them when I had the time, but I couldn’t communicate with them, and I was sufficiently busy that the world outside Carragines began to seem unreal. I did hear some news of Sebastianus; the Goths were full of talk about what the Roman commanders were doing. Though none of them were doing much except waiting for reinforcements.
I thought often of Athanaric, wondering what he had discovered and where he was now. I couldn’t help it: I wanted to see him now that I had been exposed as a woman. Though I feared that he would find me monstrous, or, worse, that he would try to treat me as some unknown gentlewoman, still I wanted to meet him and say, “Look. This is what I am, and perhaps you guessed it. Do you like me this way?” But there was no news of him. Amalberga and Fritigern were both eager to see him, eager for news of where he was. The first passion of plunder and revenge was passing, and the Goths wanted to negotiate a truce with the empire and expected Athanaric to come to talk with them. But it seemed that the empire was determined not to speak to the Goths until it had enough forces in the field to crush them. So we in Carragines waited for reinforcements too, and I was on the whole too busy to wonder much about myself or where it would all end.
Then one beautiful May morning, while I was examining new patients outside the hospital, Edico came up and said he needed to talk to me. I had a large group waiting for my attention, so I asked him whether it was urgent. He looked down and muttered that it wasn’t. “Then we can discuss it at lunch,” I said, and turned back to my patients. He stood staring at me for a minute or so longer, looking embarrassed, then went away.
At lunch in the drugs room of the hospital, I expected him to bring up whatever it was immediately, but no, he sat there munching his bread and sausage and avoiding my eyes until I asked him what he needed to talk to me about. Then he looked even more embarrassed.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked at last.
I stared in astonishment, wondering whether he had encountered some dreadful sexual disease. “Yes,” I said at last. “But I’ve read Hippocrates on the subject of sex. Why?”
He did look up at this, met my eyes briefly, then looked down again. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wasn’t sure. King Fritigern wants me to marry you, and I agreed, provided that you were a virgin. I couldn’t marry somebody else’s woman, even if it is you.”
I was left totally speechless, and I sat there gaping at Edico.
“You are freeborn?” he asked me hopefully, after a minute or so.
I could feel my face growing hot. “That is quite a lot for Fritigern to ask of you, isn’t it?” I said, ignoring his question. “To marry a foreigner of dubious reputation and unknown parentage. And you’re of good family, too — what will your family think of it?”
He shrugged. “My aunt won’t mind, and my father is dead. My mother has no say in the matter. And you won’t have to live with her anyway.”
“Oh, well then! And I’m sure the king will provide the dowry? A big one, to compensate you for the sacrifice?”
“Well — yes.” Edico took another bite of bread. “Quite a big one. But it’s not a sacrifice, really. You’re attractive, and an excellent doctor.”
“I’m pleased you think so. But you can tell Fritigern that before he goes playing matchmaker again, he’d better check whether the bride will go along with the arrangements.” Edico glanced at my face again, saw that I was furious, and looked astonished. “I will not marry you. There, is that a relief?”
He swallowed, then frowned. “Why not? I don’t see that you have anything to object to in me.”
I bit my lip to hold the words in. “You’re a lot better than the last man I was supposed to marry,” I said after a minute. “But I don’t want to marry you, and you don’t want to marry me, and I don’t really see that Fritigern comes into it at all. Why did he suddenly suggest this?”
“He thinks you’re a very clever doctor, and he wants to keep you here. What do you mean, the last man you were supposed to marry? You just said —”
“I didn’t marry him. I ran off to Alexandria to avoid him. And I’ll run off again if I have to. Why in the name of all your gods did you agree to such a stupid idea?”
He looked offended. “There’s nothing stupid about it! We’re colleagues, I’m a gentleman, the king wants to adopt you as one of our people. There’s nothing more natural.”
“Oh by Artemis the Great! We’re colleagues, and we’d better leave it that way. Do you think I’m going to settle to being a good Gothic wife, keeping your house and bearing your children, with maybe a bit of midwifery on the side? I know twice as much medicine as you do!”
He waved this claim aside. “We’ll have slaves to keep the house.”
“Be honest: you can’t look me in the eye and say you really want a woman who taught you your trade and gave you orders for two years, whom you believed to be a man. You want some pretty Gothic girl a few years younger than you, who’ll keep your house running and admire your intelligence.”
He didn’t look me in the eye and say it. He looked at the ground and said nothing.
“Go back and tell the king that the match is off.”
He looked up. “Very well. But what are your objections?”
“I don’t want to get married. I like my independence. If that’s not enough to satisfy him, lie. Tell him that I said I was a whore from a brothel on Market Street in Ephesus, or whatever you like, so long as you get out of it. This match would make us both miserable.”
“I’ll tell him the truth,” said Edico, and got up. “You’re quite right.” And he went off looking relieved. I sat there for a minute or so, trying to calm myself. I was still holding my piece of bread and sausage, but I couldn’t eat it. I was too frightened — and it was fear, now that Edico was gone, not just anger. Fritigern wouldn’t trust me to Amalberga’s management and love of the art he wanted me shackled, firmly under the control of one of his men. Married, and no doubt soon pregnant with Gothic children. I’d had the name of Chariton stripped away, and he wanted to take Charis as well, to make me “Edico’s wife.” I might keep the art, but I’d lose myself that way, lose myself forever. Edico wouldn’t oblige; would Fritigern try to find someone else?
“I won’t have him,” I said aloud, to reassure myself. And I went out of the ivy-scented pharmacy and threw my piece of bread and sausage to one of the camp’s dogs. Another crowd of patients was waiting in front of the hospital for attention: tired old men and women sitting stiffly on the earth; a few wounded warriors off by themselves, looking superior; thin, worn-out women clutching sick babies or soothing tearful, feverish children. I wiped my hands on my dress and beckoned them over.
I don’t know what Fritigern said to Edico, but that evening Amalberga called me over to her and discussed the matter. “My husband wants to establish you in your own house,” she told me.
“You mean he wants to give me to a Gothic husband who can keep me under control and make sure I don’t run off. What’s happened? Have the Roman reinforcements arrived?”
She winced, then nodded unhappily. “Several legions brought from Armenia are marching from Constantinople. And it’s rumored that troops are marching from Gaul as well.”
“So Fritigern wants to tie me firmly to the Goths before they arrive. Well, tell him that I am more likely to want to stay if I am free than if I’m subjected to an unwelcome marriage.”
Amalberga sighed. “I thought Edico would be a good match. You are both good doctors, and he respects your judgment and would not interfere in your practice.”
I stared. “It was your idea, then?”
She nodded. “My husband said he wanted you to marry one of his men, so I suggested your colle
ague. My dear, you will have to marry someone. It might as well be Edico.”
“I am not going to marry anyone! I swear by the most glorious Trinity that if you force me into some man’s bed, I will take the first chance I get to run. You will not be able to trust me, and my usefulness to you will be at an end.”
“You would not hurt your patients,” Amalberga said flatly.
“I might refuse to take them,” I replied. “You may get service out of a carthorse by blinkering and beating it, but a racehorse won’t run if you crush its spirit.”
She looked at me searchingly. “Why does it matter so much, if you mean to stay anyway? It isn’t so dreadful, marriage. Or are you just afraid to marry a Goth?”
I started to tell Amalberga some lie, then decided to speak the truth: the truth was always the better course, with her. “I don’t want to marry anyone, and I particularly don’t want to marry a Goth. I am a Roman, an Ephesian, trained at the Museum in Alexandria! I’m nobody’s slave. I didn’t come here of my own free will; you had me taken prisoner. Well, I am here, I’ve made the best of it — and done you some service, as you know. You said you were sorry for the earlier injustice. Don’t compound it by having me married against my will.”
“Is there some other man?” she asked.
“Other men have nothing to do with it! I am not yours and Fritigern’s to dispose of, and I won’t be anyone else’s property either.”
Amalberga sighed and held up her hand for peace. “It is late,” she said. “Leave it for now, then. I promise you, I will not force you into a marriage you detest. But I think still that you ought to marry, soon, someone who will respect you. Otherwise my husband will settle you with one of his companions, who might not understand or care anything about medicine.”
“Then I will run away,” I said. “Listen: I was resigned to staying here, before. I have nothing to go back to among the Romans. I would even be willing to swear an oath to stay, if Fritigern doesn’t believe that being allowed to practice the art is tie enough. But I will not marry at your command. Whoever you choose will have to rape me, and I won’t answer for what I do afterward.”
Amalberga sighed again. “I will talk to my husband,” she promised. “And we will see what the Romans do.”
The Roman legions from Armenia came into the south of Thrace, marching from Constantinople. They had a number of sharp clashes with Gothic forces in the southern provinces, and forced the raiding parties to retreat back into the north. But they did not have nearly enough strength to fight the entire Gothic army, so they settled in Hadrianopolis and waited for reinforcements from the West. These were slow in coming. The whole Rhine—Danube frontier was unsettled: there was not a place along it where there hadn’t been a war at some time in the past fifteen years, and it was difficult to draw troops away from any province without putting that province at risk. The Pannonian and transalpine auxiliaries arrived in early summer, but their commander was disabled by gout — or so he claimed — and on arriving they did nothing. Some Gaulish troops were supposed to be coming, but they were in no hurry, and half of them deserted rather than leave their home province unprotected. Fritigern called in the raiding parties and waited.
I stayed in Carragines. There was no more talk of marriage, and I was busy. Even with the drains, the dirty and crowded conditions of the camp bred disease. Many of the Roman slaves, in particular, were ill. They had suffered greatly from being captured, and were kept, often chained, in crowded and filthy huts where they contracted illnesses ranging from infected wounds to typhoid. They needed attention, and I was pleased to be able to give it to them, to do something for my own people, even among the barbarians.
Then, one day in July, I was summoned to see the king.
I was just about to start a very delicate operation, a Caesarean section. Philon had showed me a way of doing this used among the Alexandrian Jews, a way that about half the women survive, and I judged it to be the best chance this patient had. She’d been in labor for two days when I was called in, but the baby seemed to lie athwart the womb, and she could do nothing. So I had the attendants boil plenty of water, and boil some bandages as well, and I washed my hands, boiled my knives, washed the woman’s stomach with a cleansing solution, and tied her down. Then Fritigern’s damned messenger knocked on the door and said that the king wished to see me.
I went to the door and looked at him. “I’ll come when I’m finished here,” I told the man. He was one of Fritigern’s “companions,” a high-ranking warrior.
“The king wishes to see you at once,” he replied reprovingly.
“This woman has been waiting nine months and two days,” I said. “The king can wait an hour. Go away.”
Behind me the woman had another contraction and screamed. I’d given her mandragora, but she’d lost it all. I would have sold the clothes off my back for some Indian hemp.
Fritigern’s companion looked uncertain. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Cutting a child out of her belly,” I said, and closed the door. He didn’t try to follow me. I washed my hands again and did the operation as quickly and cleanly as I could. I handed the baby to the midwife and stitched the woman up. She lay there with tears of anguish running down her face, groaning — a fairly good sign, actually. She was alive, and strong enough to groan. The baby had seemed dead when I took it out, but just as I was bandaging the woman’s stomach I heard it start to cry. The woman heard too, and stopped groaning, her eyes opening with astonishment.
The midwife gave a chortle, and brought the child over to her. “You have a son!” she told the woman, and the woman said “Oh!” and reached out her arms for him. Sure enough, the baby was red and bruised-looking, but alive. He clung to his mother, and she to him, in terrible pain still but crying now with exhaustion and relief. It was more likely that the woman would live now that she knew she had not suffered for nothing. I had the sense one has sometimes, in the art, that God had granted me the gift of working a miracle.
I took off my apron and washed my hands, meanwhile giving the woman’s family strict instructions about hygiene and threatening them with dire consequences if they used unboiled water or shoved any filthy magic charms into the wound. Then I picked up my skirts and ran to Fritigern’s house. Kings don’t like to be kept waiting.
I arrived disheveled and out of breath, and the guards admitted me to the audience room at once. The room was full of people. Fritigern, his colleague Alavivus, and Colias, the former commander of the federate troops at Hadrianopolis, were all sitting on their couches on the dais, and their attendants ringed the room; Colias was saying something about Roman legions. Amalberga was standing behind the dais; she looked up and nodded to me as I came in. Another man was standing in the center of the room, his feet on the mosaic sun in the center of the zodiac pattern. His back was to me, but even so the brown hair and the arrogant angle of the head were instantly familiar. I hadn’t placed a name to them, though, when the attendants struck the butts of their spears against the floor to signal my entrance. The man turned, and I saw that he was Athanaric.
I stopped short, staring at him. It had been nearly a year since I had seen him, and I had hoped that time and the calamities of the state had killed my passion, but when his eyes met mine I could neither move nor speak, and it was as though the rest of the room disappeared. Then I thought, stupidly and irrelevantly, that I must look a sight, with my half-grown-out hair coming loose from its pins, my cloak pulled off my shoulder by my medical bag, and blood on my arms and probably my face as well. Athanaric stared at me with a strange expression — pleasure, relief, satisfied curiosity. I became aware that Colias had stopped talking.
“Here is the lady, then,” said Fritigern. “As you can see, she is unharmed. Now will you discuss what terms your masters would accept for a truce?”
Athanaric turned back to the dais. “I have told you that I am not authorized to discuss anything, that I have been posted elsewhere, that I have taken leave from my du
ties to come here, and that no one at the court will listen to me anyway. You can forget the truce: you won’t get one, and everything you’ve insisted on telling me since I arrived doesn’t count for anything. I came here, as I said, to discuss a ransom for this lady on behalf of her friends.”
“Which friends?” asked Alavivus.
“Duke Sebastianus and the lady’s family,” Athanaric said promptly. “The sum is a hundred pounds in gold.”
“Who are the lady’s family?” asked Fritigern, surveying me.
“I am not at liberty to say,” Athanaric returned. “Ephesians, and persons of distinction.”
“A hundred pounds of gold is fairly distinguished,” Colias said, grinning. “I’d sell any of my prisoners for that, Fritigern.”
Fritigern shook his head. “She’s worth more than that. She’s saved more than that number of lives since she came here. No.”
“Two hundred pounds,” said Athanaric.
Fritigern’s eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “I need doctors more than I need gold. We’ve taken plenty of gold, but no doctors.”
“Four hundred pounds.”
Murmurs. Colias whistled. I stood there like a slave on the block, wondering how far Athanaric would have to go, not sure whether I was pleased or dismayed.
“Why is Duke Sebastianus interested?” asked Fritigern suspiciously.
Athanaric glanced at me, shrugged a kind of apology. “He was this woman’s commanding officer when it was thought she was a man, and he feels responsible for her captivity.”
Laughter around the room. “He was a fool not to realize what he was commanding,” said Alavivus.
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