Ruth Downie: Medicus

Ruso cleared his throat again, reminded himself that the woman wasn't a relative, and began. "I'm afraid I have bad news."

Merula stared at him for a moment, then lowered her head and shaded her eyes with one manicured hand.

"It's about-"

She said, "Saufeia."

"Yes."

"I was afraid of this." The woman sighed. "No matter how many times you try to tell these girls, some of them just don't listen." She looked up. "What happened to her?"

"Her body was found in the river the day before yesterday and brought into the hospital. She was identified late last night."

"She had only been with us for ten days," said Merula, inadvertently explaining why none of the hospital staff, many of whom would be in' timately acquainted with the local tavern girls, had recognized her.

"Did she drown?"

"There were, uh…" Ruso hesitated. "There was some bruising around the throat," he said, "and her neck was broken."

"I see." Merula paused, then shook her head. "Poor, silly Saufeia."

Poor silly Saufeia, who had ended up naked and muddy and practically bald, unmourned until a gawker who shouldn't have been in the mortuary at all recognized the birthmark on her thigh.

"Was there any family?"

Merula shook her head.

"I don't suppose you have any idea who might have-?"

"Who might have taken advantage of a girl looking for business with no protection? Outside an army base?"

There was no need to answer.

Merula glanced through the open shutters to where one of the doormen was leaning against the wall of the bakery opposite, eating. "The boys will blame themselves, but they can't watch them day and night." A bitter smile twisted the red lips. "After we realized she'd gone, the girls were hoping she'd run off with a customer. It does happen."

"You didn't report her as a runaway?"

"We were busy. I suppose we might have passed her name on to a slave hunter sooner or later, but to be honest, I doubt she would have been worth the recovery fee. She wasn't really suitable for this kind of work."

"When did you last see her?"

"Five days ago. Early in the evening. She must have sneaked out when nobody was looking."

Ruso said, "She appears to have died quite soon after that."

Merula understood. "I will make the funeral arrangements as quickly as possible."

Relieved, Ruso got to his feet. He acknowledged the woman's thanks with a nod. Her composure had made a difficult task much easier than it might have been.

The girls emerged from the kitchen with a promptness that could only mean they had been listening behind the door. Ruso was passing Stichus in the doorway when a voice called, "Sir?"

He turned. Chloe, with the lank-haired girl hovering behind her, said, "You don't know who did it, do you, sir?"

Ruso shook his head. "I don't," he said. "But if you remember anything suspicious, you should go to the fort right away and ask for the duty civilian liaison officer."

She ran for the door. The fat one got there first. She dodged behind a stack of barrels. He came after her. She tried to scramble out. The barrels were crashing down and rolling across the floor. She tried to leap free but her feet slipped in something wet. The smell of beer mingled with the stink of the fat one's breath as he loomed above her, raising the crowbar, his mouth twisted with the shouting. She tried to shield herself. The crowbar swung down. She heard the crack. Felt herself jolt with the blow.

She was in the white room again. The familiar pain was pulsing through her arm, but instead of her own bones looking back at her, the arm was hidden inside a thick bandage and strapped across her chest.

So. She was still in this world.

The door was opening. She closed her eyes. A hand was laid on her forehead. In the ugly sounds of Latin the man announced that it was not a fever.

"She's having bad dreams," he said, apparently talking to someone else. She pretended to be asleep, trying not to flinch as the bandages were tweaked and tidied while two men talked about postoperative fevers and swelling and things she did not understand.

Bad dreams.

She must have called out. She hoped she had not spoken in Latin. She tried to remember, but her mind had been traveling to strange places, fleeing from the pain and the bitter medicine the man kept making her drink. He had told her she was safe from the fat one, but what did he know? When the medicine gave her sleep, the fat one returned.

There were other dreams too. A man dressed in green who held her down and whispered in her ear while wolves tore at her arm. Voices echoing behind closed doors. Birds singing. The sun with four corners-

No. She must try to think clearly. The sun has no corners. The white room has a square window in the outside wall. I am in a white bed. A tall thin table stands beside the bed. A black cup and a jug are on the table. Behind the door is a stool. The man who brought the medicine had pulled a stool beside the bed and had sat down to ask, "Quid nomen tibi est?" as if he were talking to a small child.

When she had failed to answer, he repeated the question. She had continued to stare at his dark eyes, at his unshaven chin, as if she could not understand what he was saying. His Greek was easier to ignore because she genuinely did not understand it. She did not recognize his third attempt at all until, reciting it in her mind after he had given up and left, she began to suspect that it could be a mangled version of her own tongue, impossible to grasp unless you had first heard him ask in Latin: What is your name?

She had not heard her real name spoken since she had been captured. For two winters she had been "girl" at best, the Northerners at first deliberately refusing to honor her with the use of her name and later, she supposed, forgetting what it was. When the other slaves had asked what to call her, she had invented something. She had spoken to them-to everyone-as little as possible. But Romans were full of questions.

How old are you? Where do you come from? Do you understand what I'm saying? Does it hurt when I do that? Do you need to pass water? Did you really fall down the stairs? Do you know a girl with red hair? They seemed to have lost interest in the girl with red hair now. But they persisted with the other questions. Quid nomen tibi est?

She was not about to offer her name up to a stranger. It was almost the only thing she possessed that nobody had stolen.

A voice was asking, "How much poppy are you giving her?"

The left side of the bed heaved as the blanket was tucked in. "No more until nightfall." She felt herself being rolled the other way as he tucked in the opposite side. "I want her awake enough to eat."

Ruso was considering trying a different poultice on an infected thumb that he didn't much like the look of when Valens knocked on the door to announce that the Sirius was coming in to dock on the midday tide.

The Siriusl After three months, Ruso and his possessions were about to be reunited. The last time he had seen them was when he had left Africa, fully expecting to return to his comfortable rooms after his leave. Instead, he was sharing condemned lodgings at the opposite end of the empire with the untidiest medic in the army

He said, "I'll get down to the docks when I've finished ward rounds."

"I'll go down now," Valens offered. "To make sure they don't drop anything."

Several patients later, Ruso finally escaped from the hospital. As he nodded to Aesculapius on the way out, he thought he heard the patter of claws on floorboards. He turned to see something brown and hairy and just above knee height vanishing around the corner of the front entrance. When he got outside, there was no sign of it.

There was no time to investigate. He hurried along the Via Praetoria to the cashier's office, where the chief clerk beckoned him past the line and into the office to tell him that the donation to the Aesculapian Fund was very generous.