She ran for the door. The fat one got there first. She dodged behind a stack of barrels. He came after her. She tried to scramble out. The barrels were crashing down and rolling across the floor. She tried to leap free but her feet slipped in something wet. The smell of beer mingled with the stink of the fat one's breath as he loomed above her, raising the crowbar, his mouth twisted with the shouting. She tried to shield herself. The crowbar swung down. She heard the crack. Felt herself jolt with the blow.
She was in the white room again. The familiar pain was pulsing through her arm, but instead of her own bones looking back at her, the arm was hidden inside a thick bandage and strapped across her chest.
So. She was still in this world.
The door was opening. She closed her eyes. A hand was laid on her forehead. In the ugly sounds of Latin the man announced that it was not a fever.
'She's having bad dreams,' he said, apparently talking to someone else. She pretended to be asleep, trying not to flinch as the bandages were tweaked and tidied while two men talked about postoperative fevers and swelling and things she did not understand.
Bad dreams.
She must have called out. She hoped she had not spoken in Latin. She tried to remember, but her mind had been traveling to strange places, fleeing from the pain and the bitter medicine the man kept making her drink. He had told her she was safe from the fat one, but what did he know? When the medicine gave her sleep, the fat one returned.
There were other dreams too. A man dressed in green who held her down and whispered in her ear while wolves tore at her arm. Voices echoing behind closed doors. Birds singing. The sun with four corners-
No. She must try to think clearly. The sun has no corners. The white room has a square window in the outside wall. I am in a white bed. A tall thin table stands beside the bed. A black cup and a jug are on the table. Behind the door is a stool. The man who brought the medicine had pulled a stool beside the bed and had sat down to ask, 'Quid nomen tibi est?' as if he were talking to a small child.
When she had failed to answer, he repeated the question. She had continued to stare at his dark eyes, at his unshaven chin, as if she could not understand what he was saying. His Greek was easier to ignore because she genuinely did not understand it. She did not recognize his third attempt at all until, reciting it in her mind after he had given up and left, she began to suspect that it could be a mangled version of her own tongue, impossible to grasp unless you had first heard him ask in Latin: What is your name?
She had not heard her real name spoken since she had been captured. For two winters she had been 'girl' at best, the Northerners at first deliberately refusing to honor her with the use of her name and later, she supposed, forgetting what it was. When the other slaves had asked what to call her, she had invented something. She had spoken to them-to everyone-as little as possible. But Romans were full of questions.
How old are you? Where do you come from? Do you understand what I'm saying? Does it hurt when I do that? Do you need to pass water? Did you really fall down the stairs? Do you know a girl with red hair? They seemed to have lost interest in the girl with red hair now. But they persisted with the other questions. Quid nomen tibi est?
She was not about to offer her name up to a stranger. It was almost the only thing she possessed that nobody had stolen.
A voice was asking, 'How much poppy are you giving her?'
The left side of the bed heaved as the blanket was tucked in. 'No more until nightfall.' She felt herself being rolled the other way as he tucked in the opposite side. 'I want her awake enough to eat.'
8
Ruso was considering trying a different poultice on an infected thumb that he didn't much like the look of when Valens knocked on the door to announce that the Sirius was coming in to dock on the midday tide.
The Siriusl After three months, Ruso and his possessions were about to be reunited. The last time he had seen them was when he had left Africa, fully expecting to return to his comfortable rooms after his leave. Instead, he was sharing condemned lodgings at the opposite end of the empire with the untidiest medic in the army
He said, 'I'll get down to the docks when I've finished ward rounds.'
'I'll go down now,' Valens offered. 'To make sure they don't drop anything.'
Several patients later, Ruso finally escaped from the hospital. As he nodded to Aesculapius on the way out, he thought he heard the patter of claws on floorboards. He turned to see something brown and hairy and just above knee height vanishing around the corner of the front entrance. When he got outside, there was no sign of it.
There was no time to investigate. He hurried along the Via Praetoria to the cashier's office, where the chief clerk beckoned him past the line and into the office to tell him that the donation to the Aesculapian Fund was very generous.
'Donation?' Ruso frowned, wondering if the man was being sarcastic about his two and half denarii.
'From the owner of Merula's bar, sir. In gratitude for the hospital's services to the deceased.'
Ruso remembered. The grim-faced Bassus had arrived early this morning with a cart to carry away the body of poor silly Saufeia. Afterward he had mentioned making some sort of contribution to the hospital fund and Ruso had told him to go to the cashier's office. 'Do you know where that is?'
'Know it?' Bassus had snorted. 'I built it.'
Ruso, encouraged by the size of the gift Bassus had delivered and the clerks' apparent belief that he was the cause of it, increased the size of the loan he had come to request. No doubt the clerks would talk, but with luck the rumors of his cash problems would not travel too far before they were brought to a halt by Hadrian's promised double bonus. As the trumpet was blaring the change of watch, he emerged from the west gate of the fort with an advance in his purse that was enough to redeem his possessions many times over.
On the way to the docks he passed a couple of bars that made Merula's look like a high-class establishment for country gentlemen. Glancing at a rusty cage hung outside a door, he saw a bird with scraggly feathers and a vicious-looking beak. He thought of Claudia's singing bird: the pampered pet released by a hired slave girl in a misguided fit of kindness. The next morning a noisy bunch of squabbling sparrows had been shooed away to reveal the little songster bedraggled and lifeless on the pavement. Claudia's fury had been vented on Ruso, since he had sent the slave back to her owner with a demand for compensation before Claudia had a chance to punish her.
Saufeia, it seemed, had understood no more about the dangers of freedom than the hapless songbird. She must have been very naive indeed to abandon the protection of Merula's graceless but efficient 'boys' to take her chances on the narrow streets of a military port like Deva. It struck him that whoever was charged with tracking down the culprit was going to have a difficult job. She would have been a target not only for vicious customers, but for the owners of businesses who did not want the competition.
Between the baths and the riverside warehouses, one of those businesses was displaying its merchandise. White shoulders and big earrings and fat ankles gleamed in the late September sunshine. Other establishments relied upon lurid paintings beside an open street door, but perhaps the owner of the fat-ankled and big-earringed couldn't afford a painter. Either that, or he believed the valiantly grinning females sprawled across the bench outside his crumbling walls were genuinely tempting. Ruso wondered how long a man would have to be at sea before he would agree.
His mood lifted as he approached the wharf, passing an altar to Neptune and a couple of surprisingly elegant houses probably built by traders wanting to enjoy the sight of the sea god safely delivering their latest cargoes. Ahead of him, a light breeze was lifting the broad river into a glitter around the silhouettes of fat-bellied merchant ships and a scatter of fishing boats. A slender trireme was moored at the distant end of the wooden jetty. Ruso paused to watch as a fishing boat, which had turned in from the main course of the river, dropped its sail and began to row in under the stern of the trireme. The shriek of gulls rose above faint shouts of orders and a chant of One! Two! Three! from a team shifting something heavy.
A man who had seen little of the world might think this was a beautiful view. A man who had never stood by a sea that was translucent, under a sky so brilliantly blue it hurt the eyes, would probably think this was a grand place to be.
