Vita Brevis (8 page)

The story went that, in a desperate attempt to protect his fleeing household, Ruso’s great-grandfather had bequeathed all his nonhuman property to the emperor and was on the verge of taking his own life when the smell of burning wafted from the direction of the Palatine Hill. As the air filled with the crashes of falling buildings and the screams of fleeing humans and beasts, Great-grandfather slid his knife back into its sheath. He abandoned his best toga for a work tunic left behind by one of his slaves, and joined the crowds who were heading out of the city.

The family arrived in Gaul with only what they and the slaves could carry, less the items they had been forced to sell to buy their passage. One of the “items” was the children’s much-loved tutor. Of all the sacrifices suffered by the ten-year-old who would later become Ruso’s grandfather, that had been the greatest. Determined that his own family should never endure such a loss, Grandfather had grown up with an eye for a business opportunity and a horror of debt and waste. Unfortunately Ruso’s father had inherited neither of them.

Ruso eyed the abandoned remains of another family’s livelihood and wondered if Grandfather would have been disappointed in him too. Despite his best efforts, the family farm was still burdened with debt. And now here he was, a grown man, having to mind the baby while his wife went shopping, because he did not have the cash to buy even one slave.

“Somewhere,” he informed Mara, not because she needed to know but because he suspected she never heard Latin unless he was in the house, “it’s all gone very wrong.”

Mara stared at him as if she were considering a wise and helpful reply, then busied herself with the bread. Ruso shooed a fly off the table, turned back to the shelves, and resumed the hunt for the medicine that would keep Horatius Balbus one step ahead of his real or imagined enemies.

Several minutes later he reported to Mara that he couldn’t find it. “It might be labeled
Theriac
,” he told her, “or
Mithridate
, or
Antidote
”—he turned his attention to the opposite side of the room—“or it might have
Balbus
written on it, or
Andromachus’s Special Recipe
…” But the shelves here held only dusty boxes of bandages and dressings.

He bent down and wiped a lump of soggy crust from his daughter’s cheek. “On the other hand,” he told her, “it might just be labeled
Bloody Expensive
, which is why he’s taken it with him.”

Mara, pleased with the attention, laughed and waved her arms in the air. He grinned back. It was good to have an appreciative audience. His wife had been more than a little distracted lately. If she had even noticed the grazes on his sore knees, she had not bothered to comment.

“What is expensive?” Tilla’s voice startled him.

“Rome.” He flicked the soggy crust into the waste bucket, resisting the urge to tell her about Andromachus’s Special Improved Theriac Recipe for Nero, a man who was justifiably afraid of being poisoned. The less Tilla knew about men like Nero, or indeed men like Horatius Balbus, the better.

Tilla held out a bowl of olives. He wiped his hands on a clean cloth. He was beginning to suspect that Kleitos had just bought the antidote mixture ready prepared whenever Balbus needed it. The gods alone knew who from. Always assuming, of course, that it was the genuine article and not just some concoction of his own that the little Greek brewed up in the kitchen when his wife wasn’t frying onions.

She said, “That barrel outside, husband. Sabella at the bar is asking when we will move it.”

He grunted his lack of interest and spat an olive stone into the bucket with satisfying accuracy.

“It belongs to the other doctor, and it is starting to bring flies. She says it will put their customers off.”

From somewhere in the distance, he heard the ninth hour sounding. “I can’t deal with it now,” he told her. “I’ve got a patient waiting.”

“Her husband says if we can’t manage it, they can lend us a strong slave. I will ask—”

“I’m quite capable of moving it.”

Tilla took the baby away into the kitchen and left the olives. He called, “Have you seen a bottle of medicine anywhere back there? Dark brown, thick, smells as if it’s been scraped off the drains?”

She had not.

“Can you get that fire going, then? I need to make some.”

He delved inside his medical case, brought out the jar of poppy and upended it into his palm. Nothing happened.

“Tilla?”

The sight of the jar brought a confession that she had used the last of it in a desperate attempt to get some sleep among the cockroaches.

If he found the name of the theriac supplier, he might be able to hurry there and still deliver in time. He reached below the bench and pulled out the documents box again, laying out the scrolls and tablets where they would catch the light from the door. The scrolls seemed to be a collection of scraps not unlike the note he had received earlier. They contained sections of medical textbooks that Kleitos had perhaps bought cheap. He recognized a section of Celsus on dislocations, which looked and smelled as if it had been salvaged from a bonfire, with missing words added near the ragged edges in an untidy scrawl. On the back was the note Kleitos had made during their conversation about the useful properties of dock leaves. He fortified himself with more olives before tackling the note tablets.

One or two tablets contained names that must have belonged to patients, but they were accounts for payment, not records of treatment, and Balbus’s name was not among them. Neither, for that matter, was Accius’s. Several more tablets in the same handwriting seemed to be detailed observations about anatomy. The delicate and complex bones of the wrist. How the main artery leading into the arm from the shoulder passes under the small pectoral muscle. Most of what Ruso could manage to make out seemed
reassuringly sensible. He wished he had been able to spend more time with Kleitos. They could, he felt, have been friends. Perhaps one of the neighbors could suggest where to track him down so he could be asked where Balbus’s medicine came from.

Setting the anatomy notes aside and swatting at another of the wretched flies, Ruso finally found a column of items and prices listed in quantities that could only mean he had found a record of supplies. This was more like it. Tipping the tablet toward the light from the door, he began to reread it more slowly, running a finger down each line and searching for any hint of a source for Balbus’s precautionary antidote. He had just reached the last line without enlightenment, when a shadow fell across the writing and a nasal voice said, “I’ve come to see the doctor.”

“I’m the doctor today. How can I—?”

“The other doctor,” interrupted the man.

“He’s not here. Can I help?”

“It’s about my money.”

Tilla’s instant appearance from the kitchen suggested she had been listening for her cue. “The other doctor is gone away,” she announced, “and all his things have gone with him.”

“He was here yesterday.”

“Ask at the bar next door: They will tell you the same.”

“What about my money?”

“His debts are not ours.”

The man craned to see past her, as if Kleitos might be hiding in the kitchen. “Where is he, then? When’s he coming back?”

Still clutching the tablet, Ruso stepped in between them. “I’ve got his records here. What’s your name?”

“Cash on delivery, it was.”

“You’ll be paid,” Ruso promised, not wanting the practice to get a reputation for poor payment. “What was it you delivered?”

To his surprise the man retreated into the arcade. “I’ll come back when he’s here.”

“Was it that barrel?” Tilla followed them both outside. “Because whatever it is, it has gone off. You can take it away again.”

The man raised his hands. “Nothing to do with me, miss.”

Ruso tried again. “If you give me your name, I’ll give him a message.”

But the man was already limping away down the arcade, the
lurch in his step exaggerated by the slanting shadows that the columns cast across the sunny paving.

Tilla said, “He was not much of a debt collector.”

“No,” Ruso agreed, privately congratulating himself on the ease with which he had seen the man off.

“Just as well. It is no good if I tell people we do not know where Kleitos is, and then you tell them you will give him a message. Husband, we must do something about that barrel. It is not—”

Seeing there would be no peace, he stepped past her, warning her to mind out as he tipped the barrel up onto its rim and maneuvered it awkwardly toward the door. Then he stopped. He recognized that smell. Tilla was right. He certainly did need to do something about it. But he had made a promise to meet Horatius Balbus before the tenth hour. Time was passing. He couldn’t find the medicine or anywhere to buy some, and Horatius Balbus was a man who meant what he said. Whatever this was—and it was definitely not good—it would have to wait. He rolled it back to its former position.

“But, husband—”

“I’ll see to it later,” he said, stepping back indoors. “Stay away from it. Don’t let anyone interfere with it, and don’t breathe the air near it.”

He put on the leather apron. He needed to concentrate on Balbus’s medicine. He was lining up bottles on the table and wondering what sort of brown liquid burned onions mashed with black olives and dates would make, or if he should simply adulterate a mild cough mixture, when Tilla emerged from the kitchen clutching one of the fire irons. “I said I’ll deal with it,” he repeated, but she took no notice.

He hung the weighing scale from the hook Kleitos must have used for the same purpose, and surveyed the jars of potential ingredients his predecessor had left behind. Finally he checked the contents of a jar where most of the word
POPPY
was faintly visible in faded Greek on the outside, and was relieved to find that one dark lozenge of dried poppy tears remained inside. He sniffed it, then dropped it into the pan of the weighing scale, and licked his fingers, grimacing at the familiar bitter taste. Outside, he heard the sound of something scraping against wood and the screech of nails being prized out.

The next screech came not from the nails, but from his wife.

The only person who was not disturbed by the opening of the barrel was the man inside it, because he must have been dead since sometime yesterday. Even Ruso, who was as accustomed to dealing with the end of life as Tilla was with the beginning, was shaken. Not that the sight was gory: The man’s eyes were closed and the cropped blond head rested against the wooden staves as if he had crept in there for a sleep. But who curled up naked in a barrel and then nailed a lid on from the outside?

Tilla was gripping Ruso’s arm as if she was afraid she might faint. He put his hand over hers and said, “It’s all right,” although if she had asked him exactly what was all right, he would not have been able to answer. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “Go and sit down.”

Even as he said it, strangers drawn by her screams were gathering around the barrel and there were fresh cries of horror. He said, “Does anyone know who it is?” but nobody seemed to be listening. The crowd’s exclamations drew new onlookers from the street, and now it seemed most of the drinkers from the bar on the corner were pushing their way forward to get a look so that they too could recoil in shock.

“Go and sit down,” he urged Tilla, but instead she released her grip on his arm and bent to retrieve the lid.

“We must show respect!” She was trying to place the lid back in its original position, but the loosened nails snagged in the ends of the staves and other hands grabbed at it to hold it up.

Voices were demanding, “Let me see!” and “Is it anyone we know?” and “Ugh, these flies!” and then he heard the woman from the bar with “Let me through!”

He needed to take charge here before his new workplace became the center of a street show even more distasteful than the one he had witnessed this morning. “Stand back!” he ordered. “Back, everybody.”

One or two people began to move but Sabella, who had forced her way to the front, placed both hands on the rim of the barrel and bent to peer at what could be seen of the man’s face. “It’s all right,” she announced, straightening up. “It’s nobody from ’round here.”

“Stand back!” Ruso urged again, not for the first time frustrated by the inability of civilians to obey a simple order. To Sabella he added, “You shouldn’t touch anything or breathe the air. You don’t know what killed him.”

Sabella let go of the barrel as if it were hot, and hid her hands behind her back. “You heard the doctor! Don’t all stand there gawping. It’s nobody we know anyway.”

She would have made a promising centurion.

As the crowd shuffled back, Ruso squatted to position the lid over the nail holes. Then he retrieved the fire iron that Tilla had dropped, and used the end to hammer everything back into position.

“Nothing to see!” Sabella declared to the disappointed onlookers. “You can all go home!” To Ruso and Tilla, she said, “I’ll get my husband. He’ll have to see to it.”

The crowd began to disperse, several of them pausing to point out the barrel to people who had arrived too late to see anything.

Suddenly realizing what they might be thinking, Ruso announced loudly to nobody in particular, “It was here when we got here!” One or two people turned to look, and he knew that nothing he said would make much difference: The doctor’s emblem beside him on the wall, the stains on the leather apron, and the unlucky man in the barrel had combined to produce a very unfortunate first impression.

The Vicus Cuprius was near the amphitheater, which was just as well. Ruso, as distracted as any man might be whose wife had just found a naked corpse inside a barrel, found it hard to concentrate on where he was going.

The site was barely more than leveled rubble crammed between two soaring apartment blocks. Someone was busy adding to a complicated web of twine that was pegged out on the ground. He was cautiously stepping backward over the existing lines. Two more men stood beside a wooden leveling instrument that had been placed upright in the rubble. A flimsy table had been unfolded in the middle of the site, and beyond it Ruso recognized the bald head of Horatius Balbus. His solid frame looked younger and slimmer inside a plain work tunic. Next to Balbus was a man wearing the same battered straw hat that Ruso had seen on the crane supervisor by the amphitheater this morning.