Mary Reed - Four for a Boy

With an oath, Felix turned away. “Naturally! How can I be surprised when everyone else around here is blind and deaf?”

“There is one person we can be sure saw something.”

“Is that so? Who would that be?”

“The church doorkeeper who was stabbed just after Hypatius was murdered.”

The brick-built Hospice of Samsun crouched like a squat, homely beggar in the shadow of the Hagia Eirene. Devoted to healing the sick and broken bodies of the city’s poor, the hospice’s low-ceilinged rooms were inevitably crowded past capacity.

“It’s the doorkeeper of the Great Church I wish to talk to, Gaius,” Felix informed a ruddy-faced, harried-looking man in a bloodstained tunic. “Is he in fit shape to be questioned?”

They were standing in the entrance to Gaius’ surgery. The physician, an acquaintance of Felix’s, set a pottery bowl down with a thud on the long wooden table against one wall.

“Why bother to ask? Even if the poor man were at death’s door, you’d still insist on grilling him like St Lawrence. Doesn’t the Gourd have better things to do than pester my patients? And what’s this about you working for him anyway? Is it better than serving that doddering emperor of ours, or worse?”

John glimpsed Felix’s grin, hastily banished by a frown.

“My position in the Prefect’s office is temporary, I hope,” Felix replied. “As for Justin, he may be old and ill now, but he was once a mere excubitor like myself. He rose to his position by his own abilities. He deserves to be spoken about with respect for that if for nothing else.”

Gaius looked unconvinced. “A nice speech. Looking to rise yourself, are you? Justin may have been a man of some ability once, but he’s fading away by all accounts. Can’t even find his own boots in the morning, or so they say. I suppose it won’t be long before you’ll be coming around asking me where the emperor’s boots are!”

John, standing by the door, glanced down the corridor behind him. A hum of conversation, interrupted now and then by muted cries of pain, wafted along between its narrow plastered walls.

The hospice smelt of crowded humanity, sickness, and herbs, overlaid with the acrid, metallic tang emanating from the brazier at the far end of the corridor. He wondered if it was used to heat cauterizing irons.

The thought turned his attention to the surgery. Bare, whitewashed walls reflected such light as filtered in through a single window from a sky the color of a fresh bruise. Apart from the table and a low stool it was unfurnished. Scattered dark patches on the table told their own tale, as did the bloodied bronze scalpels in the bowl Gaius had just set down.

“What’s more, Felix,” the physician was saying, “it would be very helpful if next time you’re guarding Justin you could suggest that he occasionally authorize funds be diverted from paying for dancing girls for all those palace banquets or some such frippery into our meager coffers. We’re full to the very doors and still people arrive for help.”

Felix snorted. “Do I look like the quaestor to you? Or perhaps a Lord Chamberlain, that I would venture to speak to the emperor in such a fashion? Why would you think Justin takes financial advice from his guards?”

“They’d give better counsel than his dead wife, for a start! Oh yes, it’s no good scowling, it’s all over the city that the emperor talks to her shade. She should counsel him about stopping the street violence. It was bad enough when the Blues and Greens fought each other. At least the Greens could give a good account of themselves and so kept the Blues in check. Now they maim and murder at will.”

“Not if the Prefect can help it.”

“He puts on a good show. He can’t burn every Blue in the city though. You think the judges won’t release any he arrests? There isn’t a magistrate who hasn’t been bought by Justinian. But it isn’t just the damned Blues keeping us busy. Most days we can depend on someone arriving with his scalp hanging half off. Hair caught in a winch at the docks or some other bizarre mishap you’d wager was impossible if you hadn’t seen the results. Others break their heads open brawling in the gutters. It never ends. We send one patient out, more or less patched up, and two more are sitting on the doorstep waiting to come in.”

Gaius took a breath and glanced curiously at John. “You haven’t introduced your friend.”

“Not a friend. A slave who’s working with me. John is his name.”

“I see.”

Looking at the physician John noticed his eyes seemed fever bright. He’d had an extra cup of wine, he guessed, and no wonder, given his work.

“Mind you, it’s not just beggars coughing up blood,” Gaius was saying, “or needing broken bones set or some such common repairs. No, the entire city is on edge. We’re seeing a lot more patients with knife wounds of late and that’s a sure sign of it, in my experience. People start drinking too so their humors are worse. Then they get argumentative and soon the blades come out. You should have been here a week or so ago. A man was brought in with the worst case of mortification I’ve ever seen. It was a miracle he wasn’t dead already. I had to take his leg off.”

“Very inconvenient for you, I’d imagine.”

Gaius sighed. “You military men have it easy. One clean thrust is all your job requires. Try sawing through a femur as fast as you can, before your patient wakes up and starts screaming. And how do you suppose he came to be in such a state?”

Felix admitted he had no notion.

“Got into a fight over a girl. He’ll certainly be a bit less hot-headed after he hops out of here, if he survives. Not that he’ll be fighting over women. They like their men with all their members. He claimed he was a soldier, but he must have been incompetent to lose a knife fight to a civilian. No more military campaigns for him.”

“He’ll leave well equipped to succeed as a beggar,” Felix pointed out. “A missing leg’s much more effective for getting sympathy and a coin or two than any amount of rubbing dirt into sores or borrowing malformed babies or cutting chunks of flesh out of the face.”

Gaius stared at the instruments in the bowl. “You’d have more sympathy if you had my job, Felix. We see innumerable children. Not that long ago we had one poor child brought in whose head was crushed in a cart accident. Often there’s nothing you can do but watch them die, wash them down, and send them home for burial. At least Hypatius saw a few years!”

“Yes, yes, I do see your point,” Felix replied. “But, as I said, we need to speak to the doorkeeper.”

Gaius finally fell silent and led them down corridors as difficult to navigate as the Bosporos, thanks to the patients lining them, some leaning against the walls and others stretched out on the floor. They crossed a bare courtyard where untainted air swirled briefly around their faces. Then they plunged back into the warm, malodorous atmosphere of the far wing. John glanced into the doorless cell-like rooms they passed. Each contained three or four patients lying on thin pallets under threadbare blankets. Even so, he reflected, many must be in better quarters than wherever they lived outside the hospice.

In one room, a cluster of solemn children stood around an emaciated, white-bearded man who lay comatose, his face covered in sores. Stentorian breathing rattled in his throat. In his mercenary days, John had heard the sound often from the lips of the dying. The man was not long for the world.

Gaius showed the two men into a room no different from the rest except that it was so narrow that it had space for only two pallets. Only one was currently occupied. Perhaps, John mused, the doorkeeper’s roommate had just been discharged, either from the hospice or from earthly pain, and that very recently. After ascertaining that the room’s sole occupant was awake and lucid, Gaius left.