I stared at him in horror. In my wanderings of the past few days I had heard nothing, no reports of plague, and was unsure whether to give credence to the man. But if what he said was true, that Matilda was on her deathbed, then I had very little time. I backed away cautiously from the man as he watched me curiously, still smiling, then tossed him a gold piece, which landed on the ground at his feet.
'Let me in to see the prisoner. I have my orders.'
He kept his eyes on me, not even glancing down at the coin. 'I have my orders too, which is to let no man see her, and for four years that's the way it's been. Only way I know she's still alive is that each day the bread disappears and the slop is flung out that window above you.'
I glanced warily at the air slit just over my head, and sidled a few steps away. I tossed him another coin.
'Treatment for the cholera's expensive, my lord,' the man said quietly, almost threateningly.
Exasperated, I untied the small coin pouch from my belt and flung the entire parcel at him, which landed with a satisfying thud against the wall at his feet. He nodded silently, and without deigning even to pick it up, he brushed past me roughly, drawing a large, rusted key from a ring at his belt. He fumbled for a moment at the lock before it clicked and the door swung inward on rusty, long-unused hinges. I entered and heard the metal shriek in protest as the door swung back and closed behind me.
I stood still for a moment, adjusting my eyes to the darkness, which was broken only by the narrow beam of daylight streaming down at a steep angle through the barred and cobwebbed slit above. Thousands of tiny dust motes floated lazily and aimlessly through the bridge of light, as if undecided whether to stay in the known environment of the cell or to make their way up the shaft to the freedom beyond, the only beings herein allowed such a choice. On the far wall where the narrow beam fell, a tiny lizard sat motionless, bathing itself in a brightness that to it must have felt the ultimate luxury. Before my eyes had entirely focused, however, and while still unwilling to tear my gaze from the familiarity and safety of the floating particles, I felt a hand on my ankle, and a wheezing voice floated up to me from the ground.
'So, the great physician Caesarius stoops to visit his colleague and accompany her in her death sentence.'
I paused. The voice in the dark was expected, though the words were not. There was no need to enter into a debate with this madwoman, for she had been unable to keep to a thought even when in her right mind four years before. My orders were clear, to ascertain her physical condition and ability to travel.
'I am not your colleague, and I am not under a death sentence. Nor are you for that matter, yet. I'm here to examine you.'
At this there was a weak sigh. 'You are a trained physician, though in your career you have had perhaps three patients. I was merely a midwife's apprentice, but have delivered thrice that number in a single day. You bring life, and you bury it as well. So too did I, though among the humble and unwashed rather than among caesars and emperors, and in exchange for a basket of eggs rather than a palace sinecure. Who are you to deny your affinity to me — colleague?' And she drew a deep, rattling breath that broke in midgasp into a racked series of coughing and retching.
I listened silently to her gagging, gauging the depth from within her chest that the phlegm was rising, judging by the bitter, ironlike smell the quantity of blood and sloughed-off lung tissue she was spitting up with each hacking bark. Cholera, hell. She had pneumonia. And it would be a miracle if she lasted the night.
I knelt on the ground beside her in the darkness, and with dismay felt my knee sink into a soft, moist substance, and I reached out my hand to palpate her chest. There have been very few times when I have actually felt utter repugnance for a patient or a medical procedure, even during the autopsies of my most heavily fermented research subjects, though on this occasion it was difficult to feel anything but revulsion. I grasped her thin shoulder, the dry, scaly skin barely covering the birdlike bones, and I could feel death resting upon her like a shroud.
'I have buried no emperors,' I muttered absentmindedly, 'except for the future one your mother killed, and there is no sentence of death hanging over me.'
Another spasm of breathing broke down to a fit of sobs and coughs. I rested my palm lightly on her emaciated chest, feeling the spasmodic gasping and heaving of her fluid-filled lungs as she struggled to regain her breath.
'You're still… young,' she retorted with great effort, gasping with every word, 'like me. We have our entire lives before us, do we not? There is ample time… to bury emperors aplenty. As… as for the one you say Mother killed — you are mistaken, dear colleague. You are blaming the knife… for the deed of the butcher.'
Plague or no plague, the woman was disgusting to the extreme, but she was my patient nonetheless, and I had sworn an oath, both on the spirit of Hippocrates after my studies, and on that of Christ during my baptism, to do everything in my power to help unfortunates such as her. I opened my kit, which I had inadvertently set down into another suspiciously odoriferous substance, and began rummaging in it with one hand for something that might relieve the pain of her congestion during her last few hours. More with a view to making idle conversation to soothe her than to performing any serious inquiries, I pursued her last remark.
'And who might the butcher be?' I asked, instantly regretting the question for fear that it might provoke in her unhinged mind another lengthy coughing attack, this time fatal. I would be forced to live with the sin of killing a woman by having engaged her in small talk.
But the coughing, this time, did not come. Instead, she lay in silence for a moment, grasping my hand, which still lay on her heaving chest, in her own thin fingers, with a strength surprising for one so fragile. So long did she lie there clutching my hand that I thought perhaps she had drifted into unconsciousness before I was even able to slip her the draught, and I was about to stand up and step away when the rate of her breathing changed, and I could feel her clearing her throat to say something. I paused where I was.
'Better to have examined the coins than the body,' she said simply, and fell silent but for her wheezing breath. I was puzzled. The coins? The only coins I could think of were the gold pieces in the pouch Flaminia was carrying when she had been captured fleeing the city. I had had only a fleeting glimpse of them in the soldier's hands before Paul had confiscated them to the treasury. The girl was raving.
'What are you talking about?' I asked softly, all my senses on edge now. 'What coins?'
'The blood money,' she whispered back. 'The Julians… the bloody Julians.'
I strained to recall the events of that horrible night; a glimmer of understanding was beginning to form. The 'Julians' — this was the term used to describe the gold coins minted by Constantius to honor Julian's crowning as Caesar of the Western Empire. But I was not a numismatist — what did they have to do…?
Suddenly it all became clear. The coins had been minted almost five years ago in Milan. Julian had received a proof set inlaid in a special box shortly afterwards as a gift from the Empress Eusebia. But due to the normal slow pace of production and the gradual spread of currency throughout the Empire from its original place of minting, the coins had only recently begun to show up in general circulation in northern Gaul — within this past year. This was a fact I had noticed because of the remarkably good likeness of the Caesar on the obverse of the coin. But where had Flaminia obtained an entire pouch of the new coins almost four years ago, and why had Paul not noticed or investigated their origin, unless…
A searing pain shot through my head as I seized Matilda's face between my two hands. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
'Matilda — where did your mother get those coins? Who sent them to her? Tell me, girl, you're dying, you know that, you must tell me who sent those coins…' But my words were drowned out again by her moan of despair, and a fit of harsh, gurgling coughing from which I knew, this time, she would not recover. For long moments she hacked and choked until she could breathe no more and then, wheezing, gradually sucked in sufficient air to begin another round of spitting and croaking. Great globs of fluid and tissue bubbled from her mouth and down the side of her face as I stared at her dark form in the shifting shadows. The fading shaft of light still made its way through the high slit, its angle flattening as it climbed inexorably up the side of the inner wall, the lizard following it imperceptibly like a lost woodsman following a trail home, like a released soul following the path of light to its reward.
Matilda's coughing finally subsided to a harsh wheeze, a belabored breathing that brooked no attempt at voice, so she whispered the final words she would ever communicate to a colleague: 'The arms of Eusebia are long.'
When I left the cell in the late-spring twilight, the lightness and effervescence of the air, compared with the fetid heaviness in the cell, almost overwhelmed me, and for a moment I felt dizzy and bewildered, my eyes dazzled
