Ruth Downie - Medicus

An elderly man with one leg was lurching toward the bakery on crutches, managing to balance despite a bulging sack tied over one shoulder. Seeing Ruso's interest in the bar he called, "You're too hasty, boss!"

Ruso turned, but his scowl failed to stop the cackle of laughter and the announcement that, "Them girls don't get up till it's time to go to bed!"

The last thing Ruso wanted this morning was a close encounter with them girls, or indeed with anything female. He was about to leave when another handcart came rumbling along the street. It paused outside Merula's. Its owner, a whistling man in a paint-spattered tunic, unloaded a box and put it down in front of the shutters.

"Don't get up till it's time to go to bed, hah!" chortled the one-legged man for the benefit of anyone who had missed it the first time, and lurched off down the street.

Ruso sat down again. For reasons he could not articulate, he wanted to see the dead girl's name removed from that wall.

The painter fetched a cloth out of the box and cleaned the word SAUFEIA and the scrubbed patch next to it. Then he stepped back and surveyed the rest of the wall.

Ruso stepped across to join him. "You need to take that name off, not clean it up."

The painter squinted at the wall. "Mariamne Bites. That'd better go too." He stepped forward again and rubbed at the words, which had been scratched on with charcoal. "Keeping me busy, this lot are. Can't keep the staff, see?"

He bent over the box and lifted a brush. He paused to finger a silver charm in the form of a phallus which was slung around his throat, then, with one stroke, he reduced Saufeia's name to a red shadow showing through the white.

"Bad luck, having that up there," he observed. "Might as well finish off the other one too."

"Other one?"

"The one that run off with the sailor." He reached up and obliterated the faint outline of ASELLINA with a fresh brushstroke of white paint. "She won't be back."

"I think I've met somebody who knew her," said Ruso. It had not occurred to him that the porter's missing girlfriend might have worked in a place like this.

The man grinned. " 'Round here, you'll have met quite a few."

Asellina had probably weighed the offers of several admirers, and the luckless porter had not been at the top of the list.

The painter stepped back and squinted at the wall. "Looks a bit patchy, don't it? I told 'em the whole lot wants doing again, but her inside won't part with the money Knew that Saufeia, then, did you?"

"No."

"Something funny going on there. I reckon she had a premonition."

Ruso, who spent much of his professional life battling against superstition, could not resist asking, "Why?"

"I never took much notice at the time, but she stuck her head 'round the door while I was working, took one look, and said in that posh voice of hers, 'You've spelt me wrong.' I'd gone and put two f's in, see? So I went to put it right and she said, 'You really needn't bother; I shan't be here much longer.' "

The man touched the charm again, then recharged the brush and ran it across the wall again. In its wake, Saufeia's name, correctly spelled with one "f," grew fainter still. "Course, I changed it anyway," he said. "I like to do a proper job." He put the brush back in the pot. "Might as well not have bothered."

He picked up the red brush. "Here's something to cheer the lads up." In the space where MARIAMNE BITES could still faintly be read, he sketched out in large letters the words NEW COOK.

"Merula says I got to put it in big letters," he explained, "So everybody knows. She don't want a bad name after them oysters."

"She's sacked the old cook?" said Ruso.

"Packed her off to the dealer. Lucky that doctor didn't drop dead, or they'd all be facing the inquisitors."

"How many people were ill?"

"Just the one," replied the painter, frowning with concentration as he led the brush down the first stroke of the "N." "That were lucky, weren't it?"

"Not for the doctor."

"That's what they're saying," agreed the painter. "Peculiar, like, just him and no one else. Anyway, won't happen again. New cook, see?"

It had been a day where everything was more complicated than it should have been. When he reached the baths Ruso found he was the wrong sex and had to wait outside ("Women only till the sixth hour, sir-it is on the door, sir…") This afternoon a signaler who had been sent to have a head cut stitched turned out to have tripped on something he hadn't seen. Alerted by the young man's reluctance to meet his gaze, Ruso had insisted on checking his eyesight after the wound was treated. Within seconds he had discovered not only the advancing shadow of cataract in both eyes, but some inkling of the desperate and complex cover-up undertaken by the man and his comrades. Blindness would be the end of any soldier's career, but a signaler with failing eyesight would be invalided out sooner than most.

"I can manage all right, Doc."

"Really?" Ruso gestured toward a notice on the surgery wall. "Read me some of that."

The man turned and stared: not at the notice, but at the blank wall to its left. Then he moved his head and eyed the periphery of the notice from the other side. Finally he said, "The light's not very good in here, is it?"

Ruso said nothing.

The man lowered his bandaged head into his hands. "My girl thinks it's an illness," he said. "She thinks I'll get better."

"Have you spoken to any of the other medics?"

The man shook his head. "I don't need to," he said. "I watched this happen to my father."

It was too early to disclose the idea forming in Ruso's mind. He said merely, "I'll have a word with my colleague."

The man gave a bitter laugh. "Does he work miracles? Because if he does, you tell him I've got a little lad of two and a pregnant girlfriend to support."

Ruso said, "What about other family?"

"None of mine. Her people want me to go for a promotion so we can get properly married." He paused, not needing to explain the irony. He would never be promoted now, and the medical discharge that would free him for marriage would also render him an undesirable son-in-law. He looked up. "We need the money, Doc. Can't you just… keep quiet for a bit?"

Ruso frowned. "If you're sent out into the field, you'll be as much danger to us as to the enemy."

"I've managed so far."

"And who's been covering up for you?"

The signaler said nothing.

Finally Ruso said, "You've had a serious bang on the head. I'm recommending you stay here for two days for observation."

Ruso sent the man down to one of the wards. As soon as the rest of his patients wete dealt with he went straight to the records room and scrawled an urgent letter to the eye specialist he had met on the ship. He was not optimistic. Even if the specialist agreed to take the case, the delicate surgery required would be terrifying for the patient and difficult for the doctor, and would possibly hasten the blindness it was supposed to cure.

On the way back to his lodgings, Ruso glanced across at the builders working on the roof of the bathhouse. He wished he had chosen a trade where almost anything that went wrong could be fixed with a hammer.

He was about to turn the corner when a voice called after him, "Sir?"

He stopped. One of the hospital orderlies was hurrying after him. "You're wanted, sir!"

"Officer Valens is on duty now," said Ruso, who had been hoping to get on with the Concise Guide.

"No, sir, it's you who's wanted."

"Who by?"

"The second spear, sir. You're to report to him straightaway."

Stand easy, doctor." The second spear settled into his seat, rested muscular arms on a desk that seemed too small for him, and gave Ruso the kind of look that said nonsense would not be tolerated.