Mary Reed: Five for Silver

John found himself studying his friend closer. When had Gaius gained so much in girth? The physician had always been stout. Now he looked obese, his stride laborious. He had obviously resumed his worship of Bacchus. Yet could anyone blame him, given the terrible scenes the man witnessed every hour spent at the hospice, ministering to patients who persisted in dying in horrible agonies, no matter how much Gaius and his colleagues labored to save them?

“You’ve been examining me ever since you arrived, John,” Gaius said in an irritated tone. “Do you think I haven’t noticed? Don’t worry, I haven’t caught the plague. There’s no danger from working with my patients so far as I can tell. In fact, we don’t even known how the illness is contracted. It seems entirely capricious. We see carters bringing the sick here day after day and they stay perfectly healthy, even though the rest of the time they’re hauling the remains of cautious folks found rotting away behind locked doors and boarded windows. Mind the stairs, John. They’re slippery.”

Before they could step through the doorway, a dark-haired young man with a face the color of bread dough came running down the hall toward them, stepping at a dangerous speed in and out among the haphazardly arranged patients blocking his course. He came to an awkward, stumbling halt.

“Are you one of the new volunteers come to help us?” The young man waved frantically at nothing in particular and thrust his pasty face as close to John’s as he could contrive, considering he was a head shorter. His hot breath smelled of wine. It was obvious he had over-indulged. John drew back slightly.

“Take care, Farvus!” Gaius said. “This man isn’t here to help you burst pustules. This is John, Lord Chamberlain to Justinian.”

“John! Of course! The friend you’ve spoken about. The one the gossips call John the Eunuch.” The young man leaned toward John again. “Well, John, at least you don’t have to worry about bringing children into this terrible world.”

“You’re impertinent! As a matter of fact, the Lord Chamberlain has a daughter. Go about your business immediately,” Gaius barked at the young man, before turning toward John.

“Now you’re examining me,” John observed.

“Do you mind if I don’t discipline the fellow? We need all the help we can get. Death tends to make people forget who holds authority or the proper manner in which to address them. I’ve even seen aristocrats begging slaves for a last cup of water.”

John shrugged. “Shall we attend to our own business?”

They descended the steep, stone stairway into a cool atmosphere redolent of corruption underlain by a rich, unmentionable sweetness. John would have choked, had the smell of death not become so familiar in the past weeks. Resinous torch smoke massed beneath the vaulted roof.

“You could preserve fish down here with all this smoke,” Gaius remarked. “It does mask the smell a little. They say Hippocrates drove the plague out of Athens with fire. Perhaps what we need is a riot. If the Blues and Greens put the torch to the city again, it might do some good for a change.”

John did not reply, but glanced at the large club leaning against the wall at the foot of the stairway.

“Rats,” Gaius explained.

His companion looked around the dimly lit vault. The dead, laid out in tidy rows between the columns holding up the roof of the disused cistern, were as silent as they were still.

The air, however, was murmurous.

John thought of the spring meadows alive with bees behind Plato’s Academy, where he had studied as a young man. It reminded him of the ancient belief equating bees with souls. However, in the cistern of the dead it would not be bees which buzzed, John reminded himself as he slapped at a fly that hit his cheek like a fat raindrop. Perhaps flies were more likely vessels for souls than bees. They seemed to emerge from death as if from thin air.

Gaius led the way through flickering shadows. The recumbent forms they passed might have been statues, their eyes as blank as those of the marble philosophers and mythological figures decorating the city’s public baths.

“These patients all died from the plague,” Gaius noted. “However, there are still a few ingenious souls in Constantinople who manage to find other ways to depart. We’ve placed them together at the back in case the City Prefect’s men show any interest. Which they haven’t so far.”

An archway, low enough to force John to bend his head, opened into a small chamber housing perhaps a score of bodies.

Gaius scanned them as if he were a shopkeeper surveying the stock on his shelves. “Here’s someone who drowned. Probably not of interest? And this man died in a fall, although-”

“Never mind. Gaius. I’ve found Gregory.”

John gazed down at an aged man with a sharp, beaked nose. Not hawk-like. More like a fallen sparrow, dusty, gray, and still. “How did he die?”

Gaius lumbered over to John’s side. “Ah yes. This one was, in fact, murdered. A knife blade expertly inserted between the ribs and straight into the heart. I couldn’t have done it more accurately. It was an easier death than the plague.”

“Do you recall where he was found?”

“Not exactly. It was in one of those streets running off the Mese, I believe. I’ll look it up in the records. But this isn’t the man you’re seeking, John. And just as well, if you ask me, because otherwise we would have to start believing in supernatural visitations.”

“It’s definitely Gregory.”

Gaius shook his head. “From what you told me, that can’t be. Let me show you something.”

A long wooden table against the far wall held a number of baskets. Gaius rummaged in one and then another.

“It’s astonishing,” he remarked as he searched. “The dead are piling up so fast in the streets thieves don’t have time to rob them all. I’ve been storing such items as came in with or on the departed although no one’s claimed anything yet. There are even a couple of full coin pouches, if you can believe such a thing. Ah, here it is.”

He flourished the scroll he had retrieved from the last basket investigated.

“I’m absolutely certain that is the man I saw come to my door to visit Peter from time to time,” John said.

“Impossible.” Gaius handed the scroll to John. It bore an official seal. “This was found on the murdered man. Your impression is that Peter’s friend has endured hard times, but that can’t be said of this fellow, judging from the documents he carried. Strangely enough, though, his name is also Gregory. However, I can guarantee he certainly wasn’t the sort to make a habit of visiting servants, old friends or not, let alone taking charitable gifts of food from them. This particular Gregory was a high-ranking customs official and therefore a man of considerable means.”

“And you’re certain he didn’t suffer, master? That was surely heaven’s mercy.” Peter made the sign of his religion.

John paused, anticipating further questions about Gregory’s death, but Peter said nothing. The only sound in the garden was the chuckling gurgle of water spilling into the pool from the mouth of an eroded and unidentifiable stone creature set in its center.

“You should rest, Peter,” John continued. “Hypatia can prepare the evening meal.”

“If you please, master, I would prefer to continue with my duties. Hypatia sometimes over-spices the food. Besides, she has enough to do here.”

It was true. Since the young Egyptian woman had come to work for him a few years earlier, John had noticed many more herbs and flowers stealing in amidst bushes and shrubbery. Most of the new plantings were a mystery to the Lord Chamberlain, who could identify the workshop that created a silver chalice by its imperial stamp, but knew nothing of horticulture.