Dear and Glorious Physician (8 page)

“For centuries, so many centuries that men have forgotten them, and they are steeped in dust, that Sign was known by the Kalü for what it is. I cannot tell you its meaning, for it is forbidden. The Kalü wore it on their breasts before the Jews were a nation or a people, before Egypt had a Pharaoh, before Greece was born, before Romulus and Remus were nursed by a she-wolf. Some of the Egyptian wise men brought it home to Egypt from Chaldea without knowing its meaning, and it can be seen in the Pyramids to this day, an occult sign understood by no one but the chosen of Chaldea. The priests of Greece knew of it vaguely, though not understanding, but under its influence they raised the altars to the Unknown God.”

Some unnamable emotion suddenly stirred in Lucanus. His eyes filled with tears. The cross seemed to expand on the palm of Keptah. Lucanus reached out and touched it with a trembling finger, and he was all at once suffused with a sense of indescribable sweetness and love.

“See!” cried Keptah, and Lucanus started. Keptah was pointing to the sky. The great and lovely Star was moving eastwards, inflexibly, as if with purpose. Lucanus watched, awe-struck. The soft pink of dawn lay below it like a lake, and it cast its beams upon it so that it sparkled. Keptah was weeping. “The chosen have been chosen,” he said, under his breath. “They are on their way. And I was not chosen.”

They watched until the Star fell slowly into the rosy sea of morning and was lost to them, and they were desolated.

“It is gone,” mourned Lucanus.

“No,” said Keptah, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, “never shall it be lost, never to the end of time.” He looked at the cross in his palm and thought, And this shall be spat upon, and despised, ignored and ridiculed, derided and blasphemed, but never shall it be forgotten, never explained away, never vanishing, despite the rage of races yet unborn, despite war and death and agony and blood and the darkness and fire of the last days, and the last senseless and despairing fury of men.

He turned to Lucanus, and for a moment felt envy. Blessed are you, child, he said in himself. And then he thought, Blessed am I that I am to teach you.

The cold austerity returned to Keptah’s face. The translucent dawn, the color of a poppy, stood behind the great trees and the palms clattered freshly in the morning wind. Keptah said:

“Rubria is afflicted by the white sickness and shall never see womanhood. Hark! Do not cry out in so loud a voice, and do not be so stricken. Why do you weep? Life is not so fair a thing for the multitudes of us. We are born darkly, we live darkly, and we die darkly, and at the end we depart across the same threshold by which we entered. But what I have told you must not be told to the tribune, Diodorus, lest his heart break before its season.”

Lucanus covered his face with his hands, and Keptah shook his head in compassion. To the young death is impossible, death is the supreme and unbelievable honor. He looked at the pearly sky, where the Star had stood, and he sighed.

“You must tell me where you found the herbs which brought release from pain for the Lady Rubria.”

“I found them in the fields, and beside the brooks, and I knew that they were good, Keptah.” The boy’s voice was only a whisper of fear.

“They are good. You must find more of them, to save her from her suffering, and I will powder and dry them and distill the essence from them, for they are precious.”

He stood up, tall and bony and remote, and Lucanus stood up with him. “It is morning,” said Keptah. “And your mother will be seeking you. Go, boy, and do not speak of what I have told you, for if you do I shall teach you nothing more.”

“Well, now, you are free,” said Diodorus testily, after he and Keptah had returned from visiting the praetor in Antioch. “But I am not bound to give you that large sum of gold until you are forty-five. That part of the promise to my father I shall keep.”

The day had been hot, the city particularly riotous and too colorful for the moral Roman. He sat now in his white marble hall and sulkily sipped at a goblet of cold wine and surlily sucked ripe figs which he lifted from the silver dish at his side. “Bah, this resinous Greek wine!” he exclaimed. He was in a bad temper. “I still believe you took advantage of a weak moment and imposed upon me. But let it go, let it go, you sly rascal! I am injured enough at the amount you set as your stipend. You will soon be as rich as one of the Levantines in the bazaar, and no doubt will set up your own establishment and buy your own slaves, and I will have to beg your indulgence to minister to my own house.”

Keptah concealed a smile. He stood before Diodorus and regarded him with dark humor. “Master,” he said, “I shall forever be grateful to you, and at your call, and where you go I shall go, and my life is still yours, at your command.”

“Nice words,” muttered Diodorus. His irate eyes sparkled upon his freedman with wrath. But he said, “I suppose the occasion calls for a celebration. May Hades swallow you! Beyond, on that table, is another goblet. If I may command, as you say, I command you to partake of that wine with me, and you may have a fig or two.”

“Master, I prefer the Roman wines, and I beg you to relieve me of the necessity to drink the Greek.”

Diodorus cursed under his breath, but he was slightly mollified. He glared at the wine in his goblet. “It is indeed wretched stuff,” he said. “I respect your taste. But the next ship will have good wines, and,” he added sarcastically, “I trust you will permit me to send a few bottles to your quarters for your delectation.”

He clattered his ironshod sandals on the snowy floor and peered at Keptah from under his bushy black eyebrows. “Have a fig,” he said.

Keptah bent his long body gracefully and took one of the fruit. Morosely, Diodorus stuffed another in his mouth. “By Pollux, that is a detestable city,” he said. “A mound of offal washed up from every gutter in the world. If I did not have so great a sense of duty I should ask to be relieved. But who else could deal as well with that crawling mass of maggots?”

“No one but you, noble Diodorus.”

Diodorus peered at him again, suspiciously. “There is such an oil in your voice. It flows and gleams, and it stings. Acid mixed with honey.”

“I am sorry I do not please you, Master.” Keptah smiled again.

“You could please Pluto no less,” said Diodorus, still smarting.

He took another fig, and sucked his fingers. “I shall order a sesterce to be given to each slave in your honor. What an arrogant dog you are, for all your pretense of humility! There is no one so wise as you, in your own opinion.”

Keptah retained his dignity for all his impulse to laugh.

“Doubtless you will give yourself even more airs than usual, but I warn you not to play such a trick as you did on those poor slaves again.”

Keptah studied him. Should he tell Diodorus the truth, that he had not in truth hypnotized the slaves, but only the tribune? He decided against it. Diodorus would never forgive him. He bowed and said, “I promise you, Master, that I shall play no more tricks. And now, if you will dismiss me, I must go to the Lady Rubria.”

Diodorus’ face cleared. “Ah, she is much better, is she not? She can now leave her bed, and there is a faint color, not of fever but of health, in her face. When do you consider she will be cured?”

Keptah hesitated. “I think, Master, that in another few days she may leave the house for the garden, and in another fourteen days she may resume her studies. With the tutor who will also teach Lucanus, son of Aeneas. And after those lessons it is understood that he will study with me?”

“For an extra stipend?” demanded Diodorus, angry again.

“No, Master, I shall teach him all I know in gratitude to you.”

Diodorus growled, and watched the elongated shadow of his freed-man flow across the marble wall as Keptah glided between it and the sun which poured through the short colonnade at the right. “I am too easy,” said Diodorus, after a pull at the goblet of resinous wine. “I treat my freedmen as equals and my slaves as freedmen. No wonder they do not respect me. I must flick the whip more regularly, and bring a little military discipline into this house.” But he knew in his heart that he was incapable of being brutal and unjust, just as his virtuous fathers had been so incapable, and had respected the lives and the persons of even the humblest men. Diodorus began to brood on modern Rome again, and made a face.

The armchair generals who could direct, petulantly, the campaigns of hardened commanders in distant fields, and devise tactics and strategies as if they knew anything about them! The soft pale senators in their molded togas, buying and selling in their stock exchange, after a long morning in the baths recovering from a night of debauchery, and partially restored by skilled slaves with lubricated hands who had massaged their flabby muscles! Buying and selling, the fatted dogs, what other men had given their lives to obtain for Rome, and wafting perfumed kerchiefs in their faces as they languidly bargained and bid and outsmarted each other, and in between bids related the latest obscene gossip of the city! Their whorish women, their concubines, their depraved wives who bore the noblest names in Rome and committed adultery as if it were a fashionable pastime — which it was. The parasites, the Augustales, who moved in and out of the Palatine, as aristocratic as statues, with rottenness in their bodies and harpies in their minds, and treachery and murder in their crafty souls! The golden litters, the pampered boy slaves kept for shameful purposes, the rapine and licentiousness of a once disciplined, frugal, modest, and heroic society, the slow disappearance of a sound middle class, a disappearance deliberately designed! The shining city, the mistress of the world — become a sewer of corruption, treason, greed, plotting, pleasure, and decay, a stench of foulness from which wafted the fevers and madness and disease which were polluting the farthest reaches of the Empire!

And the Roman mobs of many races! Even Julius Caesar had feared them, with reason, and had cowered before them, and had flattered them and placated them. The volatile, unstable, many-tongued, bloodthirsty, heartless, ravenous Roman mobs! Where once there had lived a sober and thrifty citizenry, proud of their founding fathers, jealous of their Republic, finding their full expression of being in work and family and their gods, and in their quiet homes and the shadows of their trees, there now lived a motley and rapacious rabble, quick to acclaim, quick to murder, quick to quarrel and as senselessly quick to approve, crowded in storied cesspools of houses, loathing work and preferring to beg and everlastingly calling upon the State to support them, fawning on vile politicians who catered to them and threatening the few honest men who opposed them for the good of Rome, and even for their own good; endlessly demanding bread and circuses, seeking mean pleasures, adoring mindless gladiators, and worshiping the newest racer or actor, or discus thrower as if he were the greatest of men; devouring, in their idleness, the crushing taxes imposed on worthier men for their support, when the world would have well been rid of them by starvation or pestilence — ah, the Roman mobs, the accursed mobs, fit masters and slaves of their patrons, their politicians, the gatherers of their votes!

No wonder there were now so few sound artisans, merchants, workers, and builders in Rome. The monstrous government sucked in the fruit of their labors in the form of taxes for an idle and screaming and devouring State-supported rabble. What mattered it to the slavering, bulging-eyed, open-mouthed man on the street that he had destroyed the heroic splendor of Rome, had defamed its gods, and had thrown dung on the statues of the fathers? Could he not, now, by howling and by marking on walls at night, get his bowl refilled with more beans and more soup and more bread, or watch bloodier spectacles in the Circus Maximus? The masters were worthy of their slaves, and the slaves their masters.

There was the aging soldier, Caesar Augustus, in the Palatine, a stern and moral man. But what could he do, surrounded as he was by corrupt senators and statesmen elected by an even more corrupt rabble? Diodorus suddenly remembered a letter he had received a few weeks ago from one of his friends, carefully sealed and sent by trusted messenger. (How long had it been since honest men had been forced to seal their letters from the prying and vindictive eyes of spies employed by the State?) The friend had written, “I fear me that Rome is dying. I, like you, dear friend, have believed too long, and with prayer, that the old virtues still flourished somewhere in the city, like excellent and beautiful flowers in a forgotten garden, preparing seed which would grow in the waste places once more. But the garden does not exist! It has been trampled into the mud by the mobs, and by their craven masters, who live on the favor of the mobs.”

Diodorus, sunken in a despondency and hopelessness he had never experienced before, thought of the gods of Rome. Once they had personified honorable labor, love, the sacredness of home and private property, freedom, grace, kindliness, the military qualities of devotion and duty, the cherishing of children, the respect between those who employed and those who were employed, patriotism, obedience to divine and immutable decrees, and the pride and dignity of the individual. But what had Rome done to these gods? She had made of them venal and unspeakable replicas of herself in all her aspects.

Diodorus flung his goblet from him, and it crashed against the marble wall. He leaped to his feet, and walked up and down the lonely white floors, his sandals hammering on them like the frantic beat of a drum.

He remembered the ending of his friend’s letter: “The only hope for Rome is a return to religious values ...”

Not a return to the befouled gods — But to what? To Whom? The ‘Unknown God’ of the Greeks? But who was He, and where was He? He, the Incorruptible, the Father, the Loving One, the Just? Why was He silent, if He existed? Why did He not speak to mankind, and reorder the reeking world and bring peace to the peaceless, hope to the hopeless, love to the loveless, fullness to those starving for righteousness? If He lived, this was the hour when He should manifest Himself, before the world smothered in its own dunghill, or died by its own sword.

Diodorus was filled with a wild hunger and impatience. He halted between two white columns, spreading his legs sturdily apart and standing as a soldier stands, and he looked at the sunset sky above the trees and the palms. His pain was stilled for a moment. Never had he seen so glorious a sunset before, so full of rosy light and golden lances, so brilliant and pure that the boughs of the trees, the shivering fronds of the palms, the columns of the house beamed with a radiance of their own and reflected the colors of the sky. Gentleness and majesty radiated from it, as if some mighty Voice had bestowed a benediction to all the world, as if a mighty Hand had been lifted in tenderness and love. The fierce face of Diodorus softened, became almost childlike. His disciplined mind told him that this was only an unusually resplendent sunset; his soul told him that a Word had been spoken.

Then he remembered the wild rumors in Antioch that day. A particularly vivid Star, brighter than the brightest moon, had appeared in the heavens the night before, and had been seen by many, even during the most shameful hours of the Saturnalia. There had been much fright, and mobs had run blindly through the streets in their terror, their gay garments streaming about them. But Diodorus had been informed by a priest in the temple of Mercury that it was only a comet, or a meteor, and he had spoken indulgently. “But where were you that you did not see it yourself?” Diodorus had asked. The priest had replied, “I was asleep, noble Tribune.”

Diodorus searched for the Star where he had been told it had stood. There was nothing there now but the evening star, twinkling mildly. But all at once he believed there had in truth been a Star. His heart lifted on a powerful wave of joy, and he was comforted, though he could not explain it.

The night-blooming jasmine awakened in a wave of fragrance, and Diodorus breathed it in as if it were incense. He felt humble and at peace, and full of strength. “I can do what I can do, live by the values and the truths I have been taught, by the virtues and the justice I know, and surely He will remember me though all the world goes mad.”

He walked between the columns along the marble path towards the women’s quarters. Then he encountered two of his officers in the courtyard, youths he loved for he had trained them himself, and he trusted them because of their honest faces, their candid eyes, their devotion to him and the ancient virtues. They came to attention when they saw him, and saluted smartly, and he paused, trying to frown at them, but loving them too much.

“How now, lads, why have you not returned to Antioch?” he asked, roughly. He never kept a bodyguard about his home, as other military commanders did, for he trusted in his own right arm and disliked too great a show of militarism.

“Noble Diodorus, we have heard alarming rumors in Antioch this day,” one of the soldiers replied. “Some of the rabble scream that the Star they pretended to believe they saw last night indicated the fall of Rome and the anger of the gods against all Romans. It is said the Star moved eastwards, away from the Imperial City, and this indicates, they declare, that Rome is about to fall. And when an empire falls, they reason, it is time for a subjugated country to rise and smite.”

“At ease, Sextus,” said Diodorus, and he laid his hand on the shoulder of the young captain. “Come, come, you are not afraid for me? Is that why you both disobeyed my express orders? I tell you, if Rome falls it will be because of the failure of disciplined minds.”

“Nevertheless, noble Tribune, we should prefer to remain on guard for some nights,” said young Sextus, stubbornly, but his devoted eyes pleaded.

Diodorus paused. He looked from Sextus to the centurion, and he saw their obstinacy. If I command their return to Antioch, he thought, they will lurk in the gardens, out of my sight, sleepless and foodless, and that will be a hardship on them. Is that a just return for what they consider their duty? He said, moved, “Well, then, you ox-minded young fools, remain for as long as you wish. I shall order quarters for you, and food, and you shall march about the house and guard the doors to your simple content. Not that I am not displeased by you,” he added, hastily, for the sake of discipline. “When I am at home I am not a soldier. I am only a peaceful householder.”

He reached the women’s quarters and was about to order a slave to summon the Lady Aurelia when Aurelia herself appeared, accompanied by Iris. They were laughing softly together as sisters laugh, and Aurelia’s hand rested lightly on the arm of Iris, who had never appeared so beautiful to Diodorus. It was at her he looked, and as if there had been something terribly revealing in his startled eyes, for her lovely face clouded and her own blue eyes misted as if with sorrow and distress.

To the ‘old Roman’, Iris the wife of a freedman was not a contemptible object, though formerly a slave. If worthy of love, she received love; if worthy of respect, she received respect. Aurelia and Iris were tender friends. But Diodorus had not known that Iris often visited his house in his absence. Aurelia was surprised and happy to see him.

“Am I late, Diodorus?” she asked, coming to him and taking his hand. “The sun is not completely set.”

“It is I who am early,” he replied. He wanted to kiss her red-brown cheek, to press his mouth against her full lips. She was a refuge from something which threatened him.

Aurelia began to chatter gaily, in her usual fashion. “Iris has been helping me weave the winter linens and woolens. Look at my fingers! They are calloused, almost bleeding.” She spread her hands before his eyes, and laughed. Her hair, dressed informally, hung over her shoulders in two shining black braids far below her waist, and there was a gleaming moisture on her face and about her temples, and little tendrils of youthful darkness curled on her brow and cheeks.