Getorius gulped a swallow, then rubbed hard to wash away bits of flesh with the wine she splashed on his hands. Afterward, he dried them on a towel, more vigorously than he needed to, in order to purge the clammy sensation.
“How do you feel?” he asked her.
“Probably just a little less queasy than you.” Arcadia glanced toward the covered body. “What will you do now with the…with Marios?”
“Bury him, just as I promised.”
“His body is mutilated, how will you get him out of here? Even vagrants are given a presbyter’s final rites at the graveside.”
“I could say he died of plague. Few presbyters would risk it, and no one would ask questions.”
“Getorius, a lie, too?” Arcadia admonished softly.
“Right. Let me think.” He reflected a moment, and then reached for her hand. “Send Brisios to the docks for a piece of sailcloth. We’ll wrap Marios in that, a shroud, with just his face showing for the anointing. Then we’ll get Presbyter Tranquillus from Holy Cross basilica. He won’t see anything of the actual body.”
“Good. Now try to get a little rest before your first patient. I don’t imagine you’ll be eating breakfast?”
“Ah…no. Tell Agrica that I’m not feeling well.”
“Alright. And then I’m joining you in bed for a while.”
Getorius stared at the bedroom ceiling in the half-light and pondered on what he had discovered. There was no reservoir of phlegm in the dead man’s skull, yet the fluid had unmistakably originated in his head. Where? Was there another cavity, perhaps above the nose, where phlegm was produced? Galen described it a result of the Cold-Moist imbalance that developed in people who had been exposed to too much cold. That had surely brought on the condition in Marios.
The man’s lungs were sopping wet. Had the evaporation process Galen described gone wrong, or was the physician’s basic theory flawed? Perhaps human lungs worked differently.
When Arcadia joined her husband on the bed, she reached over to touch his face. “I know what you’re thinking, Getorius. You’ll want to do this again, but you can’t let it become another obsession.”
“Pandora,” he said, chuckling.
“Who? And why are you laughing?”
“Pandora,” Getorius repeated. “If we ever speak of today again—of Marios—we’ll use the name Pandora.”
“The first perfect Roman woman.”
“Greek, actually, and she couldn’t contain her curiosity either.”
“Like you.” After a pause, Arcadia turned to him. “Getorius, one day I’d like to open a clinic just for women.”
“What gave you that idea?”
“Soranus’ book on gynecology. I’m sure many women don’t come in for treatment just because you’re a man.”
“I can’t help that. Besides, they can hire midwives.”
“For births. I’m thinking of other illnesses.”
Getorius raised himself on an elbow and kissed her forehead. “You’re doing well in the clinic, Arcadia, but you need much more experience. Dissecting—Pandora—shows that I do too.”
“I could hire the best midwives in town to—”
He shushed her with a finger against her lips. “We’ll talk of it later. How many patients do you suppose we have?”
Arcadia eased herself off the bed, annoyed at his indifferent attitude. “I’ll get them ready.”
Getorius lay back again and closed his eyes. Although he had been clever to disguise the dissection by referring to it with the name of a girl in a Greek myth, if he talked about the dissection, he now recalled that curiosity had almost been the undoing of the first Pandora.
The weather turned dank. Dark clouds scudded in from the northeast, bringing sleet and snow down from the Norican Alps, which blew across the broad valley of the Padus River and into Ravenna itself. Fountains were glazed over, forcing slaves to break through the ice in the mornings to draw water. If children enjoyed the novelty of licking the white fluff off evergreen branches, and sliding on icy streets, their parents cursed the slush and mud tracked into houses and shops. Glittering marshes around the city walls were crusted with a coating of ice well into the day. Work on the docks ceased as stevedores clustered around fires instead of unloading snowbound cargoes from the last galleys that had arrived.
Ancient medical writers, and some philosophers, agreed that the body’s functions were controlled by warm, cold, dry and moist conditions. The abrupt change in the autumn climate, from warm and clear, to cold and wet, was proof. A larger number of patients came to Getorius for relief. At best, they suffered from an increase in phlegm imbalances that caused headaches, fevers and constantly runny noses. At worst, older people went home to die in cold rooms before the imbalance could be leveled again.
Marios’ linen-wrapped body was hardly noticed among those of the many vagrants who died from exposure and were given a hasty burial in the paupers’ cemetery near the Church of the Apostles.
Feletheus returned the manuscripts without coming to a conclusion. Getorius decided that Theokritos’s lack of interest stemmed from cynicism—he had said that all cults had their own prophets. The old forum philosopher had once ridiculed a prediction that the world would end in the five-hundredth year after Christ’s birth. The date was still some six decades away, but other more recent predictions of deadlines for Armageddon had passed without incident. Bishop Chrysologos occasionally warned against consulting ‘seers, wise women and self-styled prophets,’ especially those who used a copy of the Testaments for divination.
Getorius started to believe that Behan’s enigmatic ‘prophecy,’ announcing an imminent event of earthshaking consequence, was no more than the delusion of a lonely monk.
Chapter six
Arcadia was at the Lord’s Day service when she caught a glimpse of Publius Maximin wearing a toga—a lingering prerogative of his senatorial rank—and suddenly remembered the invitation to Galla Placidia’s dinner, which was only six days away. She felt the Senator was too important a man to approach for advice on clothing, so the next day she went to the senate house in the old forum with her seamstress, Veneranda, to look at statues of past emperors and civic officials.
“Have you made a toga before?” Arcadia asked Veneranda,
