Medicus

19

She was pretty. Old women said so to her mother, and her mother always laughed and replied, "And she knows it." Her brothers knew it too, although they would die before they said so. Sometimes her father came into the house smelling of beer, roared, "Where's my beautiful girl?" and lifted her onto his shoulders while her mother shouted at him to mind that child's head on the door. And for a few moments she would be a giant, lurching around the houses, reaching for the edges of the thatch, taller than the horses, and seeing right over the tops of people's fences until he put her down and ignored her pleas for "More!" because parents had things to do and because being pretty did not make you important.

When her mother muttered and sighed and tugged at the tangles with the comb, it was because shiny golden curls needed a lot of looking after. She tried not to smile. Her mother would want to know what she was smiling about, and she already knew it wasn't her cousins' faults that they were ordinary little girls whose hair fell down in straight brown lines and she had to remember to be nice to them and…

And the smell was wrong.

Somewhere outside, a man's voice was making ugly, solid sounds that fell like rough logs.

Someone was trying not to pull her hair. Someone was-

She remembered the stink of the bathhouse. The glint of metal blades.

"No!"

Her eyes snapped open as her free hand lashed out and clouted a crouching girl across the face. A jolt of pain shot through her injured arm as the girl squealed and fell backward in a flurry of brown skirt and dirty bare feet.

She had managed to pull herself up and lean against the wall by the time the other girl, who was dark and heavily pregnant, had managed to maneuver herself onto all fours and then haul herself up to sit on the wooden bench.

She remembered the bench. She remembered the room. She remembered what her name was supposed to be. She looked at the girl's hands, which were empty, rough, and red with work. Then she looked around the floor. There was no sign of any shears. She said, "Who are you?"

The girl shook her head and pointed to her mouth.

The question in Latin produced exactly the same gesture.

In Latin again: "Are you dumb?"

The girl nodded, raised her eyebrows in a question and pointed at her, but she did not answer. A name, even one you had only acquired yesterday, should not be so easily given.

"Did they tell you to cut my hair?"

The girl shook her head with a look of alarm. The hand pointed again, this time at a section of hair that had now been untangled. At the far end dangled a comb, trapped in a knot. The girl had been trying to help.

"My name," she said in Latin, "Is Tilla." This produced a welcoming smile, but the traditional request for help in her own language-"I am a stranger here"-was either not understood or ignored.

The girl heaved herself up from the bench, took the one pace necessary to cross the room, and lowered herself to sit next to the mattress. She had begun to attack the tangle again when the door burst open and two men walked into the room.

One had gray eyes and cropped iron-gray hair above a thick neck. The thinner one's hair had once been ginger. The deep brown of his eyes added to the impression that the rest of him was fading into middle age. Tilla had time to observe this while both men stood calmly examining what they could see of her. She also observed that the dumb girl had stopped work and shrunk back to sit beside her with her back to the wall. Instead of staring back at these men who had not had the manners to knock (and whose muscle, Tilla noted, was running to fat around the belly), the girl had her eyes firmly fixed on the gray one's heavy army sandals.

"Stand up," ordered the gray one.

When Tilla failed to move, the girl tapped her arm and translated the order into a hasty scoop of one hand toward the ceiling, at the same time nodding encouragement.

"You want to listen to Daphne," suggested the gray one. "She don't say a lot but she knows what's good for her."

Tilla, noting the girl's anxiety, pulled her knees up and managed to get to her feet on the mattress. Slowly, she forced her trembling legs to push her upward. Her head felt as if it were full of dry sand that was draining away down her body as she stood. Fighting to stay upright, she slumped against the wall. With her eyes closed, she did not see him approach. She was only aware of the sudden cold as the hem of the tunic was lifted, the struggle to keep her balance as the hands groped and probed, and the urge to vomit as the hands withdrew and a voice whispered in her ear, "Show us your smile."

Clenching her teeth, she managed to open her eyes.

"Smile," repeated the gray man, who was not smiling.

The other girl was on her feet now, moving around to where Tilla could see her, nodding eagerly and grinning, making upward gestures at the corners of her mouth.

As Tilla's eyes drifted shut she thought, Whatever you do to me here will speed me on my way to the next world, and it was this thought that made her beam with pleasure.

By the time she was alone again, the light through the barred window was fading. Food had been brought, but no one had offered a light. The rattle of the lock had confirmed that she could not leave this darkening room until someone came to let her out.

Tilla fingered the long braids that now held her hair under control and listened to the many voices downstairs. She heard the tramp of feet on stairs. The creak of the floorboards. The false laughter. She understood what sort of place the Roman healer had brought her to. She understood too that none of this mattered, because she had lost all sense of hunger now, surely a sign that she would be in the next world very soon. But she had matters to attend to here first. The gray one had said he would come back.

She reached for the bowl and balanced it against the bandaged arm. Then she picked up the spoon. The lukewarm soup slipped down her throat, sending the strength of the slaughtered ox into her body She closed her eyes and promised her mother and brothers that she would see them in the next world very soon. In the meantime she would not be shamed in this one. It seemed she was, after all, destined to die in a fight.