Ruth Downie: Medicus

"She's fainted," added someone else.

"She always faints when there's work to be done," grumbled the man who had been shouting at her. He bent as far down as his belly would allow and yelled in the girl's ear, "Get up!"

"She can't hear you," remarked Ruso evenly. His gaze took in the copper slave band around the girl's upper right arm. Below the elbow, the arm vanished into a swathe of grimy rags. The pale hand emerging at the other end was what had silenced the crowd. It was sticking out at a grotesque and impossible angle. Ruso frowned, unconsciously fingering his own forearm. "What happened to her arm?"

"It wasn't us!" assured a voice in the crowd. "We was only trying to help!"

The grumbler turned his head to one side and spat. "Silly bitch fell down the steps."

"Fell down the steps, sir," corrected Ruso, restraining an urge to seize the man by the ear.

"Yes, sir. Didn't look where she was going, sir."

"It should have been set right away."

"Yes, sir."

"Get it done."

"On my way now, sir."

The girl groaned. The man grabbed her good arm and hauled her to her feet. She fell against him. Caught off balance, he struggled to stay upright. Ruso was uncomfortably aware that he was now at the center of this entertainment. Whatever he did, he must not admit to being a doctor. Nor did he intend to waste his afternoon being soaked and muddied by dragging a sick slave around.

"You there!" He pointed to a greasy-haired youth who was lolling against a wall trying to dislodge something from his ear with his forefinger. "Yes, you! Give him a hand."

The youth withdrew the finger, opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. He slid a reluctant hand under the girl's good arm. He and the girl's owner began to drag the limp body along the pavement.

Ruso scowled at the crowd, which began to disperse.

"The fort's the other way!" he shouted after the owner.

No reply.

He overtook them, blocking the path. The trio paused. The girl slumped lower.

"She needs to go to the fort hospital. Now."

"Yes, sir," agreed the owner. "But the thing is, sir…"

The thing was that he was short of cash. The girl's last owner had driven away with a cartload of his best-quality woolens and palmed a slave off on him who was lazy and useless. Now she had gone and broken her arm and he couldn't even sell her. A harder man would have thrown her out into the street, but everyone knew Claudius Innocens was a man too soft for his own good. He knew the hospital at the fort had an excellent reputation-"Get on with it!" prompted Ruso-but it was too expensive for a poor trader. He had heard there was a good healer on the Bridge road. He was going there now.

"I just have to do a little business on the way, sir," he added. "So I can pay for the treatment."

Ruso had only been stationed in Deva for four days, but already he knew that the local healer wouldn't be able to do anything with that arm. He said nothing. It was not his problem. He had only come out for a drink and a flask of bath oil. The girl's face was horribly pale: she probably didn't have long left anyway. The healer would have henbane, or mandrake. Perhaps some imported poppy juice.

Ruso glanced around to make sure no one was looking, then undid his purse and placed two sestertii into the hand of Claudius Innocens. "Take her there now," he ordered. "Buy her a dose of something for the pain."

"You're a kindhearted man, sir!" Innocens's jowls bulged outward in a smile that failed to affect his eyes. "Not a lot of gentlemen would see a poor man in need and-"

"See to it!" snapped Ruso, and walked away, checking that his oil flask was still tied to his belt and had not been subtly removed by someone in the crowd. He was not feeling like a kindhearted man. He was a man who was deeply exasperated. He was a man who needed a good night's sleep. And before that, he needed a trip to the baths.

In a few minutes, stretched out on a warm couch with a soft towel beneath him, he would forget the merchant's slimy gratitude and the grisly shape of his slave girl's arm. He would forget the screams of the recruit this morning as his arm was put back into its socket. Distracted by the splash of the cold plunge and the murmur of gossip, his thoughts would drift away from the puzzle of that unknown woman lying in the mortuary. The perfumed oil would clear the stench of decay from his nostrils. The masseur's practiced hands would pummel away the tension of problems, which, when he thought about them logically, all belonged to other people.

There was no sign of the young soldiers at the tables in Merula's. The doorman pretended not to recognize Ruso. He must have overheard the warning about the food.

An elderly slave was limping past the place where the girl had collapsed. The stink of the two buckets swaying on the pole over his shoulders was unmistakable. The man stopped to scrape up the pile of dung Ruso had almost trodden in earlier.

Half the world, decided Ruso, raising his fingers to his nose again, spent its waking hours engaged in cleaning up the mess made by the other half. That girl's owner, like whoever had dumped that corpse in the river, had been a mess maker. Not fit to be in charge of a dead dog. That disgusting bandage had been on her arm for days.

Ruso stopped so suddenly that a child running along behind him collided with the back of his legs, tumbled full-length on the paving stones, and, refusing his offer of help, ran off howling for his mother.

That girl hadn't fallen down any steps. She had raised her arm to shield herself from the blows that had blackened her eye. The wool trader would pocket the money and leave town, and before long another unclaimed body would be found floating down the river. Gaius Petreius Ruso had just been swindled out of two sestertii.

It did not take long to find the unattractive trio again. The wet trail led away from the fountain and down a side street, weaving unsteadily around the legs of scaffolding poles. The scrape and slop of shovels mixing mortar announced yet another row of new shops. Ruso strode around the far side of the building site, entered the street from the opposite end, picked his way down past a burned-out building awaiting demolition, and came face-to-face with the shuffling threesome.

"The Bridge road is the other way!" he shouted over a sudden burst of hammering, stabbing his forefinger in the direction from which they had just come.

The girl opened her eyes and looked at him.

She couldn't see him, of course. It was an illusion. The eyes were blank; like the eyes of a sleepwalker. For the first time Ruso noticed the delicate shape of her nose, the tiny dimple in an earlobe where jewelry had once hung. And those eyes. The color of-what were they the color of? Like… like the clear deep waters of… Ruso's tired mind groped for a description that didn't sound like the work of a bad poet, and failed to find one.

The merchant was still talking. The youth was examining the toe straps of his sandals. Only Ruso seemed to be interested in the girl.

"If you don't get help for her soon, this slave is going to die."

He realized it was a mistake as soon as he had said it. The trader bent forward and dragged down the girl's lower eyelid with a dirty thumb.

Then he forced her jaw open and peered into her mouth. He was clearly not a man to waste two sestertii on dying livestock.

"It's not the state of her teeth you need to worry about."

Innocens turned and looked at him curiously "You wouldn't be a medical man yourself, by any chance, sir?"

Ruso glanced up, wishing he believed in the sort of theatrical gods who swooped down from the heavens at difficult moments and set humanity to rights. But the gods, if they were watching, were hiding in the gray British clouds beyond the scaffolding poles, leaving him to his fate. And then, as if inspired by something beyond himself, Ruso had an idea.