“No more honey, Domina,” he chided gently. “I’m going to prescribe a vinegar drink. It won’t taste very good, but perhaps we can soon substitute wine. Not a sweetened one, though. My wife will rub your legs with a vinegar solution, and you must continue this at home. She will also give you a list of things to eat and those not to eat. Fabius, see that your mother follows my instructions.”
“I’m not always there.”
“Your father?”
“Dead ten years this Nativity,” Felicitas lamented.
“Then a neighbor must help you.” Getorius tried to be encouraging. “We must make you slim again, like Venus. Leeks, cucumbers, green beans…vegetables will do it.”
“No pork?” she asked, squinting at him in disappointment.
“Especially no pork,” he warned with mock severity. “I want you to be able to walk, no, dance around the church on the Feast of Palms.”
“Felicitas, I’ll take you into the clinic now,” Arcadia said. “Your son can go back to the waiting rooms.”
After his patient was gone, Getorius tasted her urine again. Galen believed that food processed by the liver converted into pneuma physikon, an animating spirit transmitted to the body through a hollow network of nerves. I’ve seen organs other than the liver in animals I’ve dissected, but what in the name of Aesculapius are they all for?
Galen had written that all the body’s organs were perfect parts of a whole. Getorius also believed this, so it followed that these mysterious organs played a role of which he was totally ignorant. One of them must control Felicitas’s imbalance. He felt his anger rise, stood up, and went to the row of jars and held one up.
“If the bishop would permit human dissection I could at least try to determine what function these organs played. His prohibition is endangering citizens’ health.”
Getorius turned when Primus came in carrying an armload of moss and kindling for the stove, an interruption that added to his frustration. He had only a short time while Arcadia treated Felicitas and then brought in the next patient, and he wanted to look over Behan’s manuscripts.
“Hurry up with that stove,” he ordered, handing Primus the flask of urine, “then take this out to the fuller’s shop and take that basket to the kitchen.”
Getorius went back to his desk and slid the scrolls from their case. He unrolled the one with Latin text that was penned in the elegant Celtic script.
“Father, the dawn watch has come,” he read aloud. It continued:
I living in them, You living in me, that our union may be complete. So will the world know that You sent me to them, and that You love them as You love Me.
“Sounds like a prayer of Christ for unity,” he muttered, scanning the second verse.
Father, the dawn watch has come. Give glory to your son. I pray for those who will believe in me that all may be one. I pray that they may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent me.
Getorius had begun reading the third of the verses when Arcadia returned.
“I let Felicitas out through the small courtyard. What have you there?” She came to look over his shoulder. “Behan’s manuscripts. I might have guessed.”
“Look at this third section. Read the others first, then tell me what you think.”
He had realized that the last part was different. The meter of the third and fourth verses was shorter and the text of both was little more than half as long as the other two.
After reading, Arcadia looked up. “The last one sounds like a kind of prophecy.”
“Good. That’s what I thought.”
Father, the dawn has now come, the hour when the proof of your love will finally be revealed. Proof that I love them, as You commanded me, is in the Testament of John. Let your Will, manifested at the Nativity, be fulfilled.
“The change is pretty obvious,” Arcadia agreed, “but what does it mean?”
“That’s what I want to ask Theokritos. Do I have another patient?”
“Varnifrid, a fisherman. He cut his hand at the thumb joint. It looks serious.”
Getorius barely concealed his impatience. “So, send him in.”
Varnifrid followed Arcadia into the office, cradling his left arm and a freshly caught mullet with the other hand. A clump of bloody moss was packed around the injured thumb. Fish scales glistened on the man’s soiled vest and the smell of his trade came in with him. He eyed the room suspiciously, as might an animal put in a cage, but sat on the stool where Arcadia pointed.
“This mullet will be fine as payment.” She smiled as she took the fish from him.
“Careless with a knife were we?” Getorius asked with sarcasm he regretted as soon as Arcadia glared at him.
“He speaks Gothic,” she said. “I barely understood him, but you can see what happened.”
“A Goth raiding mere fish? What wonders will we see next? Get that bloody packing off and put a bowl under his hand. I’ll need to probe.”
The wound was jagged, with shreds of flesh from a saw-toothed knife framing the cut. When Arcadia worked loose the clotted fibers that covered it, fresh blood oozed out. Getorius sponged it away and concentrated on assessing the damage to the tendons.
“Put a leather strap around his wrist and twist it,” he ordered Arcadia. “Even if I can save the hand, he’ll never use it again much, but I have to stop the bleeding before I can do anything.”
Varnifrid grunted and tried to pull away. Getorius grasped his wrist. “Lekeis,” he said, using the Gothic word for physician and pointing to himself, but the man only stared at him in fright. “This is ridiculous. Calm him down with a measure of eupatorium wine.”
“I did. In the atrium.”
“Then the sedative should be taking effect. Hold still, Verna…”
“Varnifrid.”
“Yes.”
Probing for tendon damage, Getorius recalled what Nicias had taught him about the
