Dear and Glorious Physician (12 page)

All of the flesh of Lucanus was stinging as though it had been seared with flame, and the pulses in his temples throbbed visibly. One of the merchants cried, “Five hundred sesterces! It is robbery, Master. I myself offer one thousand.” He half rose from his chair, eagerly.

Then Keptah spoke quietly. “The boy is not for sale.”

Linus colored darkly, and leaned towards him. “Not for sale?” he repeated. “This slave is not for sale — for a fortune? Are you mad?”

“One thousand sesterces!” shouted the other merchant, approaching the table.

The others in the wineshop applauded, whistled, protested, laughed. Hearing the commotion, the shopkeeper ran into the room, carrying a tray of fresh hot pastries. Keptah crooked a finger at him, and said, “My good Sura, you will please go to the next street, at once, and tell the young captain, Sextus, that Keptah, physician to the noble tribune, Diodorus, requests his presence immediately.”

The shopkeeper bowed, and ran into the street. Linus sprang to his feet, swearing. He shook his fist under Keptah’s immovable nose. The others fell silent, gaping. “You accursed Egyptian!” shouted Linus. “I shall have your throat cut!” He shook with fury, and his servants came to him at once, their knives in their hands.

Keptah was not disturbed. “I am not an Egyptian, my good man of many abominable and unknown bloods. Nor am I a man who desires the blood of another. Hasten, and leave at once, before the captain arrives with his men. You have not understood. This boy is the apple of the proconsul’s eye, and he is as a son, and born free in the household of Diodorus.”

The others rushed out of the wineshop in trepidation, not wishing to be present when the soldiers arrived, and fearful of brutality. Linus was left alone with his servants. He looked at Lucanus, and his lean hands made unconscious grasping movements, as if he would seize him and bear him away at once. His breath came harshly. Then he whirled, and his rich garments of crimson and green blew about him. He left the inn like the wind, his servants racing after him. Keptah and Lucanus were alone. The boy sat down slowly, and his white face streamed with beads of sweat, and his eyes were bitter-cold and filled his eye sockets with wrathful color.

Keptah unconcernedly picked up a bunch of dates and chewed them with appreciation. The pile of gold coins lay on the table, and twinkled in the blue gloom. Keptah’s attention came to them, and he smiled. “The rascally merchant did not stay to pay his bill,” he remarked. “Nevertheless, he generously left this money, and I shall pay his bill from it and keep the rest. No doubt he graciously intended it so, and I am not a man to refuse such a gift.”

“How dared you!” cried Lucanus, and now he was very young again, and close to tears. “You are not only a liar, Keptah, but you are a thief and a scoundrel!” He wept, and rubbed away the tears with the backs of his hands. Keptah studied him thoughtfully. Finally he put down the bunch of dates, and his face changed sternly and his enigmatic eyes were chill and remote.

“You betrayed me!” sobbed the boy. “You shamed and degraded me! And I thought you were my friend as well as my teacher.”

“Listen to me, Lucanus,” said Keptah, in a hard and quiet tone, and Lucanus dropped his hands from his eyes and stared at the physician.

“You are no longer a child, for you have seen and heard and felt evil,” said the physician. “It is good that you have known it, for a knowledge of evil brings manhood, and aversion. You are now armed.” He moved a few of the coins with a thin finger.

“You were born into freedom in a virtuous household, where the slaves are treated with kindness. Never have you seen them treated cruelly, but only with justice. This is most unusual; the household of Diodorus is not the normal household.”

A fierce cold flash darted from under his hooded lids. “You were shamed, your humanity treated ignominiously, your dignity as a man insulted. You have seen the scars on the hands of your father, who was once a slave, and, like a child, you have accepted them serenely, as a child, and commonplace. Have you ever asked your father what it means to be a slave, to be treated as less than a man, less, even, than a valuable horse or a good dog? Have you asked him of his own young ignominy, his own shame, his own bitterness, when his humanness was debased? Do you know what it is like to be a slave?”

Lucanus was very still. A glistening tear or two remained on his pale cheeks. Then he said in a low voice, “No. No. Forgive me. I did not understand. I was a child, and I did not understand. You have taught me.”

Keptah smiled sadly. “Learning comes with tears and grief and pain. That is just, for man cannot understand God when he is young and happy and ignorant. He can only know God through sorrow, his own sorrow and the agony and sorrows of others.”

“No man henceforth will be a slave in my eyes, but a man of dignity, and I shall hate slavery with all my heart and soul,” said Lucanus, in a trembling voice.

Keptah put his hand on the boy’s shoulder gently. “I exposed you to evil so that you would no longer be defenseless. I exposed you to the vile air of slavery so that never again will you countenance it. And now here is our good Sextus, with his two good soldiers. Ah, Sextus, please wait for a moment and drink some of this excellent wine with us. We have been annoyed by a despicable person, and we are in some danger. We desire your escort. Our asses are tied up at a little distance, and are no doubt somewhat impatient, the poor beasts.”

“What rascality have you blown up now?” asked the young captain, with good humor, and some cynicism. He poured himself a goblet of wine and drank it down quickly, and Keptah’s mouth twisted in reproof. “You drink that wine as if it were not distilled from the grapes of heaven itself,” he said, “and as if it were only the cheap red wine from your barracks.”

Sextus smacked his lips, considered, and inclined his helmeted head to one side. “It has no particularly excellent flavor,” he said. “You are a mountebank, Keptah.” He winked at Lucanus. Then he was concerned at the pallor of the boy. “Is the child ill?” he asked.

“Very ill,” said Keptah, rising. “But he will not die of it.”

He was timidly approached by the shopkeeper, and he grandly counted out his bill, and Linus’, and left an extra gold piece as a gratuity. The shopkeeper was delighted. “Good Master,” he said, “I am sorry that you were disturbed. It will not happen again.”

“Do not make rash promises,” said Keptah. “This has been a most enlightening afternoon.” He filled his pouch with the remaining gold pieces. “And now, Lucanus, let us go.”

Diodorus Cyrinus awoke to three dismal awarenesses: The husband of Aurelia’s older sister, the Senator Carvilius Ulpian, was an unwelcome come guest in the house. He had arrived last night, and was patronizingly affectionate, and he had apparently forgotten that though he was a member of a very noble and ancient family he had married Cornelia for her money. This money had not only assisted him in becoming a senator (by bribery only, Diodorus would say savagely) but had enabled him to indulge his passion for Egyptian art. He had heard of some excellent vases and small statues dating back to the Second Dynasty, and was on his way to Egypt to negotiate for them. The second miserable fact facing Diodorus this morning was that this was the day of the month when he had to meet with Syrian magistrates in the Hall of Justice, and to hear the complaints of local nobles and landowners and chieftains, about the taxes exacted from the province, and especially from themselves, and to listen to the reports of the rascally tax collectors, whom Diodorus hated more than he hated any other breed of man. To Diodorus a tax collector, though apparently necessary in these degenerate days, was scurvier than the dirtiest jackal, and had something of the jackal’s habits, upon which Diodorus would dwell in a loud voice in the company of the officials, and in the lewder phrases of the military. This invariably cheered the victims of the tax collectors.

The third misery was that he had a headache. He knew these headaches, which tormented him usually on this particular day, and all Keptah’s arts could barely relieve them. He had awakened with the dastardly sudden flash of light before his eyes, then the following nausea, then the sharp cleavage of vision and the temporary dimming of sight, and then the accursed one-sided headache. The fact that Keptah could learnedly tell him it was a migraine, and that Hippocrates had written a long and exact treatise on it, did not abate one retching, one hammer stroke on the left side of his head, or one sensation that death was at hand and not unwelcome. “May Hades swallow your Hippocrates!” he would say wrathfully to Keptah. “No, no more of your stinking effusions and your potions!” He would invariably submit to both the effusions and the potions, and then would triumphantly vomit before Keptah and glare at him accusingly. The migraine would not forsake him until evening. He had only to leave Antioch on the way home and it was gone, except for a not unpleasant weakness which anticipated Aurelia’s loving ministrations and concern. Basking under these, he would say to Keptah, “You see, a woman’s hands are wiser than any physician, you mountebank.” To which Keptah would only smile. He had once told Diodorus that the headaches were his protest against the magistrates and the tax collectors, whom he detested, but Diodorus had been so enraged at this insinuation of womanishness that Keptah never repeated the indiscretion. Diodorus, the virtuous Roman, believed a responsible household rose before dawn. The senator did not rise at dawn, and Aurelia, who had affection even for her brother-in-law, would not permit the slaves their usual noisy and ebullient assault on pillar and floor and wall with mops and brooms until the senator had called for his breakfast in bed. This, to the tribune, was heaping degradation on degradation. A dirty house and breakfast in bed! It was typical of modern Rome, of course. The senator’s retinue, pampered slaves and secretaries (he was always writing letters even when he was visiting Diodorus — ‘making certain that his clients will not forget to keep his coffers filled during his absence’), were invariably assigned the best rooms in the quarters of the household slaves. He usually brought two beautiful young slave women with him, which increased Diodorus’ rage, and the tribune would cloister the girls grimly. “There will be no orgies in this house!” he would say to the indulgently smiling senator, who was always surprised that the pretty slave girls in this barbarous household never caught the master’s eye.

Moreover, the senator used spikenard and attar of roses, and Diodorus would say loudly, “Not only a filthy house and breakfast in bed, but perfumes!” He affected to find the senator incredible, which convinced the senator that Diodorus should remain in Syria, in spite of his letters to Rome. This was a matter about which the senator had not as yet talked with his host. He felt he needed a prolonged rest first. He had been seasick all the way to Antioch. And Diodorus was a difficult man.

The headache had been extraordinarily severe this morning, and Keptah, mixing potions while his master bellowed in denial, understood that Carvilius Ulpian was adding extra torture to the affliction. He gave Diodorus the cup and said, soothingly, “A student of Hippocrates once asked the great physician, ‘Would a permitted murder not assuage the pangs of the victim?’ To which Hippocrates replied, ‘Certainly’.”

“Are you asserting that if I could murder — let us say, anyone at random, without a qualm, that I would lose my headache?” Diodorus demanded, outraged, sitting up in bed.

Keptah nodded. Diodorus began to swear, then he smiled longingly, thinking of his brother-in-law. “Attar of roses!” he muttered. “Pfui!” He sank back on his pillows and gave himself up to a pleasant fantasy. The migraine subsided a little and this time Diodorus did not vomit up the potion. Still, he was in a bad condition and in a bad temper when he emerged from the house in the fresh and gleaming morning, without breakfast, which he could not eat when afflicted. The son of a whole line of pigs could at least have brought Cornelia, he thought, to visit my wife, instead of mere letters. But Cornelia, as simple, sturdy and unimaginative as Aurelia, would have inhibited the senator’s diversions to some extent. Diodorus consoled himself that the senator’s visits were very few and very far between.

Migraine, after its first dimming of the vision, always made Diodorus see too clearly, too sharply, so that seeing was in itself a pain. This heightened awareness depressed him. He heard laughter, and winced, putting his hand to his head. Who could laugh while the master of the house was dying on his feet, and fearing the rumble and swaying and rattling of the chariot which would soon arrive to take him to Antioch? Grumbling words he never used before anyone but tax collectors, he left the outer court and went into the gardens. His daughter, Rubria, and Lucanus were playing ball with two young slaves and making noise enough to wake the dead, that is, thought Diodorus, enough to wake anyone but the fragrant senator with his oils.

It was a pretty sight, that of the dark-eyed maiden in her long rosy tunic running to catch the ball Lucanus or a slave girl threw, her cheeks pink and her black hair flowing. In contrast, Lucanus was a golden, youthful god, complementing her, and the slave girls, dressed as simply as their young mistress, and as charming, were like nymphs, their white feet sparkling with dew, their red and brown tresses streaming behind them like banners. All about the young people the garden was a garden fresh from the hands of Ceres, the palms blowing and bowing in a scented wind, the statues glowing, the fountains leaping like liquid silver, and the arch of the sky most ineffably blue.

For a moment Diodorus’ bad temper became milder. He watched the girls and the boy, and he thought, How wonderful it is to be innocent and beautiful. Then he was angry again. No one had a right, even a maiden and a boy, to be innocent in this foul world which was composed of perfumed senators, vile tax collectors, magistrates, and officials and Caesars who would not answer urgent letters.

The chit is fourteen; she should be betrothed now and preparing for marriage, thought Diodorus resentfully. The fact that the senator had discreetly mentioned one of his own sons, now seventeen and ready for marriage, and that this mention had made Diodorus look like a veritable Mars with a red dart in his eyes, was completely forgotten by the tribune. Rubria, though still too slender, and given to attacks of breathlessness and pallor about the lips when tired, had a round little bosom and her legs, immodestly flashing from under the blowing tunic, were definitely the legs of a woman. Diodorus was aghast both at this new aspect of his daughter and that she was not as yet betrothed. He was also furious at Lucanus for some obscure reason.

He lifted his voice to a stentorian tone. “What is this play? Is it not time for the schoolroom? Why this wantonness?”

The slave girls looked at him with fright, and fled from him to the rear of the house like petals scattered by the wind. Rubria, still smiling, stood with the ball in her slender brown hands, and Lucanus colored.

“It is not time, Father,” said the girl, and ran to him for a kiss. She wound her arms about his neck, and he could not refrain from responding to her. But he glowered at Lucanus. “Sixteen years old!” he exclaimed. “And playing with girls! Can you find no worthier playmates among your own sex?”

Rubria contentedly kissed him again in her mother’s fashion, but her father scowled blackly at Lucanus over her shoulder. The youth stood in silence, his yellow head held proudly, his face cold and remote.

“And with whom shall he play?” asked Rubria, her hands smoothing her father’s arms comfortingly. She was not disturbed; she had learned from her mother to treat Diodorus like a beloved but occasionally fractious child. “None of the slave boys are his age, and there are no families with sons near us.” She gave Lucanus a laugh and a mischievous glance. “He is also too sober.”

“Not too sober to neglect his lessons and engage in puppyish antics,” said Diodorus. He did not like the youth at all this morning. “Must one wait until the hourglass has dropped an exact number of grains of sands before one studies? Is it on such an irresponsible that I must spend my money?”

Lucanus looked at him with a hard blue light in his eyes, and he opened his mouth to answer angrily, then he saw that Diodorus was a sickly yellow and that he had not shaved. His beard was dark under his coarse skin. Lucanus remembered that this was the day for the magistrates and the tax collectors, and that Diodorus was inevitably bad-tempered on these days. The unshaven beard could be relied upon as accurately as a water clock.

So Lucanus said mildly, “You do well to reprove me, Master.”

He went away, stepping high and gracefully, and Diodorus watched him go and was more depressed than ever. “Go to your mother, girl,” he said with unusual roughness to his daughter. Now his chariot was coming. He could hear the infernal clang and rumble, and winced again, and groaned. Rubria kissed him, patted his cheek, gave him a glance of loving commiseration, and ran off. Diodorus followed her with his eyes until she was out of sight, and there was a pain in his heart. Yesterday she was a babe at her mother’s breast; today she was a woman, and would soon leave her parents. It was one of nature’s most unbearable tricks. He thought again of Lucanus, and now his obscure anger returned. He had seen Rubria’s ardent glance at the youth, he had seen Lucanus reply with a deep smile. Diodorus lashed his horses, and was frightened. If he could not be relieved of this polluted place himself he would send Rubria and Aurelia to Rome, and even the senator’s son, who was a frail, studious youth and not to Diodorus’ exacting fancy, would not be untenable as a son-in-law. At least some of the money will return to the family, thought the tribune, who considered it outrageous that Carvilius Ulpian should be able to spend one penny of it.

An old pride came back to the Roman, and his heart hardened with affront. He was incensed now that Lucanus, that son of a freedman, should even look upon his daughter lovingly. He forgot, in his gathering black anger, that Lucanus was the son of Iris, whom he had not seen for a long time except at a far distance, and then only fleetingly. Diodorus decided to have a very stern talk with Aurelia tonight. He, Diodorus, would keep his promise to educate the youth — in order that he could serve the household humbly. A slave girl of some promise, modesty and household arts would be freed and a marriage arranged between her and Lucanus. The Roman master had only to command, and command he would. Let Lucanus take his wife to Alexandria with him and let her keep a humble house for her student husband and bake his bread, and serve him a properly inferior wine. I have been soft and weak, thought the tribune, biting his thick underlip and lashing his horses. I have forgotten that I am a Roman in this soft, sweltering, depraved province. I have treated slaves as equals.

He had also forgotten many other things. The face of Aeneas rose before him — that sly, mealymouthed, weak-spoken imitation of a man! — and his anger made his eyes blind for a few moments and his heart beat as if he had been unbearably humiliated. And an old anguish, without a face, returned to him like teeth in his chest.

He was in a fine, vengeful mood when he arrived in Antioch. He had never killed a man, except in battle, but he longed to kill now. If only he were Hercules! He would tear this city apart with his bare hands, To his nostrils, assaulted by the stenches of the city, urine seemed the dominant stench. A urinous city! And what was a Roman proconsul doing driving his own chariot here, like a mean merchant? Did no one respect him? Where were his officers, his soldiers? He forgot that this was all of his own choosing, and that he had often said that he was a simple soldier and not a lady-man of modern Rome, and that Cincinnatus had ridden into the Imperial City on the back of an ass, and without attendants save those poor farmers like himself. There will be changes! Diodorus promised in silent grimness.