how the pregnant Daphne had frozen at the touch of the doorman. 'It's all right,' he assured her. 'You're safe here. Nobody is going to hurt you.'
He had carried this girl in through the east gate. He had put her to bed, and dressed her in the washed-out gray tunic she now wore. He had already seen the protruding ribs, the breasts shrunken by hunger, the yellowing bruises that shouldn't be there. He knew the sight of her body would arouse nothing in him but sympathy. Unable to explain that to her, he tapped the splint and said, 'Don't get water on the bandages,' then put the towels over her good arm and told her he would come back later.
He had finished his records and there was not enough time to settle into 'Treatments for Eye Injuries,' so Ruso strolled down to the nearest of his wards. He looked at an abscess, got a concussed man to count the number of fingers he held up, ordered another poultice for the crushed foot, listened to a worrying cough, chatted to the signaler, checked up on recent surgical patients, and told the surprised staff not to expect this every night. In a small side room he examined a veteran centurion who had been brought in after collapsing, and decided he had been right this afternoon: It was pneumonia. The man was sixty-six. There was little they could do beyond trying to make him comfortable.
He dared not leave the girl for too long in case she fainted in there. When he had made sure the gasping centurion was propped up on his pillows and had instructed the orderlies to check him every hour, he made his way back down the corridor to the bathhouse.
His announcement of, 'It's the doctor!' echoed through the rooms. The only response was the flicker of the lamps in the draft from the door.
He found her perched on the side of the warm bath wrapped in a towel, skinny legs dangling, matted wet hair dripping down her face. 'Enjoy that?' he asked, more out of habit than in any hope of an answer. He stood in front of her and frowned at the rough surface of the tangled hair. 'Time we sorted this out,' he announced. 'Can't have you harboring lice.' The girl's eyes met his. She showed no sign of understanding.
He reached behind him for the shears he had tucked into his belt. They were usually used for cutting clothes off accident victims, but they were fairly small and sharp and he knew he had a steady hand. He lifted one side of the mat away from her ear. 'Keep still.'
'No!'
The shriek echoed around the empty blue walls.
Ruso paused with the shears in midair. In his surprise he had let go of the hair. The girl was bent double, her good arm shielding the back of her head.
The sound of the scream died away. The girl began to rock backward and forward, making a soft moaning sound.
'I'm not going to hurt you!' Ruso insisted, hoping no one had heard the scream and wishing he had left this for another day. 'I'm cutting the tangles out so you can tidy it up and let it grow back.'
The rocking continued. The moaning formed itself into, 'No, no, no.' The sniff that followed led Ruso to suspect that she was crying.
'Oh, for goodness' sake!' He tucked the shears back into his belt. He was never sure how to deal with crying women, who roused within him an uncomfortable mixture of guilt and exasperation. The 'No, no,' had finally died into silence by the time it dawned on him that she might have overheard and understood something about the state of the girl dumped in the river.
'Nobody here is going to hurt you,' he repeated. 'But you can't leave your hair in that mess. What do you want to do about it?'
The girl sat up. She gave another loud sniff and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she squared her shoulders and looked him in the face.
In a voice lower and hoarser than he had expected, she said, 'I want to die.'
13
An orderly was helping the blacksmith down from the treatment table early the next morning when Ruso put his head around the door to investigate the cause of the raised voices and running feet. The corridor was blocked by a crowd of cavalrymen. An unconscious man was being dragged along, his comrades simultaneously yelling for help and shouting at one another to get out of the way. Ruso was grabbed by a wild-eyed rider who insisted, 'You'll look after him, right? There wasn't nothing we could do, I'm really sorry, right?'
He learned later that they had been practicing a close-formation gallop when the patient's horse had stumbled. He had fallen under the hooves of the animals behind. There was, as the unfortunate rider had said, nothing the other men could do. There was nothing Ruso could do either. Despite everyone's efforts, the youth was on his way into the shadows even before they pulled the chain mail off to check his injuries.
Ruso had hoped to spend any free moments of his duty with the girl. Instead, the crushed foot was looking worse, the old centurion was putting up a determined fight to die as slowly as possible, and he had to put a frightened patient into an isolation ward until Valens could confirm his diagnosis of leprosy. By the end of the afternoon he had managed only to hand the girl a bowl of porridge and a comb and say, 'I'll be down later. I don't want to see that food when I come back,' before heading back to the records room to write up his part of the Fatality Report.
He was reaching for a pen when he distinctly heard something that was not human pattering across the tiled entrance hall. He leaped up from the desk and flung open the door. The corridor was empty. He took the few strides to the corner, around which he caught sight of Decimus the porter strolling in through the main doors.
The man paused. 'Can I help you, sir?'
'I could have sworn I heard a dog.'
'Dog, sir?'
'Running across the entrance hall.'
The man looked around as if the dog might leap out from behind Aesculapius. 'Across the entrance hall, sir?'
Ruso sighed. 'Don't repeat everything I say. You were told to get rid of it.'
The man eyed him for a moment, evidently weighing what to say next. Finally he settled on, 'I know we should have, sir, but me and some of the lads-'
'We've got enough to cope with here. We don't need a dog running around the hospital.'
'Ah, but it's not an ordinary dog, sir. It does tricks. Cheers the patients up. And it's a champion ratter. We don't want rats running around the hospital either, sir, do we?'
'You were told you couldn't keep it here.'
'Oh yes, Officer Valens told us what you said, sir.'
'What/said?'
'Only he doesn't much mind it himself, sir. So we thought if it didn't get in the way-'
'I've seen it. That's enough. And it barks.'
'But it never gets in the way, does it, sir? Me and the lads feed it on scraps. It's a grand dog, sir. It'd be a shame to get rid of it.'
Ruso closed his eyes. He had had to explain to a bunch of distraught and disbelieving cavalrymen that there was nothing he could do for their comrade. Now he had to go over it all again in writing. He was not in the mood to discuss the comparative desirability of dogs and rodents, and he could hardly point out that Officer Valens was using him as an excuse to wriggle out of giving an unpopular order. It seemed that the porter, having mislaid a woman, had replaced her in his affec- tions with a dog. Perhaps it was a sensible exchange. When he opened his eyes the porter began again.
'Sir-'
'Just keep it out of the treatment rooms and out of sight, you understand? The minute it's a nuisance, it goes.'
'Right-oh, sir,' agreed the porter. 'You won't have no bother with it. It'll be an invisible dog.'
'Well, if it becomes visible to Officer Priscus, you're on you own.'
Ruso thought he detected a slight hesitation before the porter said, 'It's not true, then, sir, that he's got a
