Medicus mi-1

by Ruth Downie

  "Wait there." His voice echoed around the room as he made the gesture that Valens made when telling the dog to "sit."

  He lit only one lamp in the cold room: just enough to see by to walk through it. Ladies did not need a cold plunge. Claudia had always been very firm about that. Presumably slave girls could do without too.

  The atmosphere in the warm room made his tunic stick to his skin. He tripped on a discarded wooden shoe and almost turned his ankle. The lamp he was carrying swayed and spat as the oil spilled out onto the floor. He sent the shoe clattering across the tiles toward the hot room door, where the rising light revealed an empty rack looming over a jumble of discarded footwear. Another used towel dangled over the side of the massage couch. A strigil, edge glistening with the last oily scrapings of dirt, skin, and hair, lay on the rim of the tub. Ruso, who never used these baths and had never thought to inspect them, was willing to bet they didn't leave this sort of mess when the chief administrator was around. Evidently they weren't expecting him back before morning.

  He wiped the strigil on the towel, then dropped the towel to mop up the spilled lamp oil. The light caught an end-of-the-day rainbow sheen dappling the surface in the tub, but at least the water was still warm. He sniffed the contents of a couple of bottles that had been left on the shelf. Spice. Lavender. The girl could take her pick.

  The coals in the brazier of the hot room were almost out. The room smelled of overheated men. He had barely stepped inside when something landed on his head. He flinched and shot up a hand to brush it away, then realized, shook his head, and smiled. This was not Africa. There were so few biting and stinging creatures here that the hospital didn't even have its own poisons expert. What he had felt was only condensation dripping from the ceiling.

  Ruso abandoned the hot room, guessing the girl would not linger in there.

  When he went back he found she had edged along the bench and was huddled in the corner. She looked bewildered. It struck Ruso that since she had been unconscious when he carried her in, this was the first time she had seen anywhere outside Room Twelve.

  He turned to find her a clean towel, only to find himself facing an empty shelf. He did the sit gesture again and stepped out into the corridor just as an orderly was passing with a tray of water jugs.

  "Where's the clean linen kept?"

  "Third door on the left, sir." The orderly disappeared into a side corridor.

  Ruso flipped the latch and collided with the door, which had failed to open as expected. He rattled it to no avail, then realized there was a keyhole. When the orderly reappeared with an empty tray he said.

  "Where's the key?"

  "Officer Priscus will have it, sir."

  "He took the key to the linen closet?"

  "Officer Priscus is in charge of all the keys, sir."

  "That's ridiculous!"

  The orderly was too wise to comment. Ruso was wondering what to do next when he heard a familiar voice.

  Evidently Valens's social evening had been interrupted. He found him arguing about racing teams with a grizzled veteran whose leg was swathed in bandages from the hip down. Ruso said, "How do we get hold of clean linen when the administrative officer's not here?"

  Valens glanced up. "He usually leaves enough out to last till he gets back. There'll probably be some up from the laundry in the morning."

  "Surely he can't just disappear like this?"

  "Excuse me a minute," murmured Valens, and left the man's bedside.

  As they approached the door, Ruso heard a dog bark somewhere inside the hospital building. "Did you hear that?"

  "What?"

  Ruso wondered if he was starting to imagine things. "Never mind."

  "Priscus has a system," explained Valens. "Jupiter knows what it is, but nobody likes to interfere because as long he's left alone, everything turns up more or less when you need it."

  "I need it now. Why the hell isn't he here anyway?"

  "Apparently he went to Viroconium to negotiate a contract for delivery of hospital blankets."

  "Blankets? Gods above, surely any peasant with a couple of sheep and a wife can knock up a few blankets?"

  "Ah," agreed Valens, "you and I might think so. But they have to be the right specification to fit hospital beds."

  "Does anyone really believe that?" said Ruso.

  Valens shrugged. "You'll have to pinch what you want from someone else."

  Back in the corridor, Ruso contemplated the silent door of the linen closet. He had yet to meet Officer Priscus, but already he hated him. The man seemed to have turned hospital administration into an art form-something incomprehensible, overpriced, and useless. In the meantime, a sick girl was huddled in a corner of the changing room, facing a pile of wet towels.

  Ruso stood back, contemplated the latch for a moment, and moved. A splintering crash echoed down the deserted corridor. He helped himself before anyone could arrive to see who had just bypassed the hospital administration with a military boot.

  "Towels!" he announced, presenting them to her with a flourish.

  She seemed less impressed than he had hoped. He took her good arm and helped her up. As he opened the cold room door she tried to pull away. He tightened his grip. "You need to bathe," he insisted, walking her through into the warm room. He thought again how thin she was as he lifted her onto the edge of the massage couch. As he approached with the cleaned strigil and the two bottles of oil, her eyes widened. She raised herself up with her good arm and tried to sidle away down the couch.

  Ruso did the "sit" gesture again. "Stay still." He walked around to the other side of the couch, leaned across, and began to untie the sling that was knotted behind her slim neck. He felt her shoulders tighten and remembered how the pregnant Daphne had frozen at the touch of the doorman. "It's all right," he assured her. "You're safe here. Nobody is going to hurt you."

  He had carried this girl in through the east gate. He had put her to bed, and dressed her in the washed-out gray tunic she now wore. He had already seen the protruding ribs, the breasts shrunken by hunger, the yellowing bruises that shouldn't be there. He knew the sight of her body would arouse nothing in him but sympathy. Unable to explain that to her, he tapped the splint and said, "Don't get water on the bandages," then put the towels over her good arm and told her he would come back later.

  He had finished his records and there was not enough time to settle into "Treatments for Eye Injuries," so Ruso strolled down to the nearest of his wards. He looked at an abscess, got a concussed man to count the number of fingers he held up, ordered another poultice for the crushed foot, listened to a worrying cough, chatted to the signaler, checked up on recent surgical patients, and told the surprised staff not to expect this every night. In a small side room he examined a veteran centurion who had been brought in after collapsing, and decided he had been right this afternoon: It was pneumonia. The man was sixty-six. There was little they could do beyond trying to make him comfortable.

  He dared not leave the girl for too long in case she fainted in there. When he had made sure the gasping centurion was propped up on his pillows and had instructed the orderlies to check him every hour, he made his way back down the corridor to the bathhouse.

  His announcement of, "It's the doctor!" echoed through the rooms. The only response was the flicker of the lamps in the draft from the door.

  He found her perched on the side of the warm bath wrapped in a towel, skinny legs dangling, matted wet hair dripping down her face. "Enjoy that?" he asked, more out of habit than in any hope of an answer. He stood in front of her and frowned at the rough surface of the tangled hair. "Time we sorted this out," he announced. "Can't have you harboring lice." The girl's eyes met his. She showed no sign of understanding.

  He reached behind him for the shears he had tucked into his belt. They were usually used for cutting clothes off accident victims, but they were fairly small and sharp and he knew he had a steady hand. He lifted one side of the mat away from her ear. "Keep still."
<
br />   "No!"

  The shriek echoed around the empty blue walls.

  Ruso paused with the shears in midair. In his surprise he had let go of the hair. The girl was bent double, her good arm shielding the back of her head.

  The sound of the scream died away. The girl began to rock backward and forward, making a soft moaning sound.

  "I'm not going to hurt you!" Ruso insisted, hoping no one had heard the scream and wishing he had left this for another day. "I'm cutting the tangles out so you can tidy it up and let it grow back."

  The rocking continued. The moaning formed itself into, "No, no, no." The sniff that followed led Ruso to suspect that she was crying.

  "Oh, for goodness' sake!" He tucked the shears back into his belt. He was never sure how to deal with crying women, who roused within him an uncomfortable mixture of guilt and exasperation. The "No, no," had finally died into silence by the time it dawned on him that she might have overheard and understood something about the state of the girl dumped in the river.

  "Nobody here is going to hurt you," he repeated. "But you can't leave your hair in that mess. What do you want to do about it?"

  The girl sat up. She gave another loud sniff and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she squared her shoulders and looked him in the face.

  In a voice lower and hoarser than he had expected, she said, "I want to die."

  13

  An orderly was helping the blacksmith down from the treatment table early the next morning when Ruso put his head around the door to investigate the cause of the raised voices and running feet. The corridor was blocked by a crowd of cavalrymen. An unconscious man was being dragged along, his comrades simultaneously yelling for help and shouting at one another to get out of the way. Ruso was grabbed by a wild-eyed rider who insisted, "You'll look after him, right? There wasn't nothing we could do, I'm really sorry, right?"

  He learned later that they had been practicing a close-formation gallop when the patient's horse had stumbled. He had fallen under the hooves of the animals behind. There was, as the unfortunate rider had said, nothing the other men could do. There was nothing Ruso could do either. Despite everyone's efforts, the youth was on his way into the shadows even before they pulled the chain mail off to check his injuries.

  Ruso had hoped to spend any free moments of his duty with the girl. Instead, the crushed foot was looking worse, the old centurion was putting up a determined fight to die as slowly as possible, and he had to put a frightened patient into an isolation ward until Valens could confirm his diagnosis of leprosy. By the end of the afternoon he had managed only to hand the girl a bowl of porridge and a comb and say, "I'll be down later. I don't want to see that food when I come back," before heading back to the records room to write up his part of the Fatality Report.

  He was reaching for a pen when he distinctly heard something that was not human pattering across the tiled entrance hall. He leaped up from the desk and flung open the door. The corridor was empty. He took the few strides to the corner, around which he caught sight of Decimus the porter strolling in through the main doors.

  The man paused. "Can I help you, sir?"

  "I could have sworn I heard a dog."

  "Dog, sir?"

  "Running across the entrance hall."

  The man looked around as if the dog might leap out from behind Aesculapius. "Across the entrance hall, sir?"

  Ruso sighed. "Don't repeat everything I say. You were told to get rid of it."

  The man eyed him for a moment, evidently weighing what to say next. Finally he settled on, "I know we should have, sir, but me and some of the lads-"

  "We've got enough to cope with here. We don't need a dog running around the hospital."

  "Ah, but it's not an ordinary dog, sir. It does tricks. Cheers the patients up. And it's a champion ratter. We don't want rats running around the hospital either, sir, do we?"

  "You were told you couldn't keep it here."

  "Oh yes, Officer Valens told us what you said, sir."

  "What/said?"

  "Only he doesn't much mind it himself, sir. So we thought if it didn't get in the way-"

  "I've seen it. That's enough. And it barks."

  "But it never gets in the way, does it, sir? Me and the lads feed it on scraps. It's a grand dog, sir. It'd be a shame to get rid of it."

  Ruso closed his eyes. He had had to explain to a bunch of distraught and disbelieving cavalrymen that there was nothing he could do for their comrade. Now he had to go over it all again in writing. He was not in the mood to discuss the comparative desirability of dogs and rodents, and he could hardly point out that Officer Valens was using him as an excuse to wriggle out of giving an unpopular order. It seemed that the porter, having mislaid a woman, had replaced her in his affec- tions with a dog. Perhaps it was a sensible exchange. When he opened his eyes the porter began again.

  "Sir-"

  "Just keep it out of the treatment rooms and out of sight, you understand? The minute it's a nuisance, it goes."

  "Right-oh, sir," agreed the porter. "You won't have no bother with it. It'll be an invisible dog."

  "Well, if it becomes visible to Officer Priscus, you're on you own."

  Ruso thought he detected a slight hesitation before the porter said, "It's not true, then, sir, that he's got a posting with the governor?"

  "Not as far as I know. Now push off. I've got work to do, and I suppose there is a faint chance that you have as well."

  "Sir?"

  "What now?"

  "You don't happen to know when he's coming back?"

  "I haven't a clue," said Ruso. "Go and make sure the room lists are up to date in case he turns up this afternoon."

  Ruso shut the door of the records room and sat down again. Just as he picked up the pen, the latch clicked and Valens strolled in. He helped himself to the spare chair before enquiring whether Ruso had seen the younger sister of a recently appointed centurion. "She is stunning."

  "Even more stunning than the second spear's daughter?"

  Valens grinned. "That's a long-term project." He settled himself in the chair. "I heard you had a problem?"

  Ruso gave him a short run-down of the afternoon's events, leaving out the dog.

  "Not good," summarized Valens, putting his feet up on the desk and treating his friend to a display of gleaming hobnails surrounded by dried mud. "By the way, I dropped in on your Tilla just now. Since you were too busy."

  Ruso frowned. "My what?"

  "Tilla," repeated Valens. When there was no reply he shook his head sadly. "Gods above, Ruso, you are hopeless. What have I told you? First rule with women: Get the name right. Anyway, it looks as though you've got away with that arm. Too early to say whether it'll be of any use, of course."

  "Are you sure she's called Tilla?" persisted Ruso. "It doesn't look anything like that on the note of sale."

  Valens shrugged. "She said that's what you called her."

  "I didn't call her anything. I can't pronounce her name. It's got about fifteen syllables stuffed with g's and h's in odd places."

  "She seems to think you told her she'd be Tilla from now on. She seemed quite cheerful about it."

  "Did she?" There was no justice in the ways of the world. Ruso, who had saved the girl's life, was rewarded with weeping and "Let me die." Valens, who would have fixed her broken arm with a sharp saw, was granted a pleasant chat.

  "Well, she was smiling."

  "Good," said Ruso, with as much grace as he could muster.

  He should have guessed that Valens's idea of a medical checkup would include an attempt to charm the patient with his boyish good looks and his smooth bedside manner. He would probably smarm his way into the CMO's job in the same fashion. Even without any combat experience. Ruso folded his arms and leaned back against the wall. "I had an interesting conversation myself just now," he said. "Did you tell the staff they could keep that dog?"

  Valens scratched his head. "I may have said it didn't bother me. I can'
t remember."

  "Thanks very much. You're not the CMO yet, you know."

  "I did tell them what you'd said."

  "Only I hadn't, you had. And anyway they completely ignored it. Do we really want animals running around the hospital?"

  "Don't be miserable, Ruso. It's only a dog. Which reminds me"- Valens thrust out one foot and kicked the door shut before leaning closer-"speaking of miseries, have you heard this rumor about Priscus getting a posting with the governor?"

  "Just now. Is it true?"

  "You'd better hope so. Then he might not find out you've demolished his linen closet."

  "Gods above, he's only a pen-pusher! Who runs this place?"

  Valens pondered that for a moment and then said, "He doesn't interfere with the medical decisions."

  Outside, there was a clank of buckets. Someone called out something about stocking up dressings and footsteps trod down the wooden boards of the corridor.

  "Utilis, said Ruso suddenly. "Useful. Her Latin's a bit shaky. She got into a bit of a state last night. Thought she was never going to get bet ter and wanted to be off with the ancestors, or something. I told her she'd be utilis to me."

  "Well, that must have been a big comfort. So you aren't going to sell her, then?"

  "Of course I am. I don't need her."

  "She's cleaned up rather well, don't you think? A bit skinny, but surprisingly good teeth. Why don't we hold on till she's mended and give her a try?"

  "No."

  "So how is she going to be useful to you?"

  "How much would you say an attractive female slave would fetch here?"

  Valens's face betrayed his amusement. "Claudia would never have approved of this line of business, you know."

  "One of childbearing age?" persisted Ruso.

  Valens shrugged. "Two thousand, if you can find the right buyer. Three or four maybe, if she can actually do something."

  "Exactly," said Ruso, and dipped the pen in the inkwell.