Medicus

26

Ruso had just persuaded his stomach to calm down after the unaccustomed riches of a good dinner when the answer to his prayers arrived, much too late. He was woken with the message that he was needed at the hospital. The unlucky patient had been on the way back to barracks from guard duty. In the dark he had tripped, landed badly, and dislocated his shoulder. He was finally drugged into semi-consciousness, then painfully and forcefully reshaped and bandaged. Ruso trod the couple of hundred steps back to his bed with more care than usual, only to be summoned an hour later to prescribe medicine for a man having a seizure. On return he left the message slate propped against his bedroom door with SLEEPING IN, DO NOT DISTURB scrawled across it.

Thus it was with neither joy nor enthusiasm that he opened the front door to urgent knocking shortly after dawn and found his clerk calling to ask whether there was anything he wanted done.

"What I want done," explained Ruso, summoning all the patience he could muster and wondering what sort of a clerk could fail to understand a staff rotation, "is for you to push off and not bother me until I tell you to. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Dismissed."

"Yes, sir," replied the man, saluting, but instead of pushing off as ordered he remained on the doorstep.

"I said, dismissed."

"Yes, sir."

"So?"

"Are you ordering me not to come, sir?"

"Of course I'm ordering you not to come! Is there something the matter with your hearing?"

"No, sir."

Ruso leaned against the door frame and yawned. "Albanus," he said, "are you deliberately trying to annoy me?"

The man looked shocked. "Oh no, sir."

"Do you want to be charged with insubordination?"

"Oh no, sir!"

"Then what is the matter with you?"

Albanus's shoulders seemed to shrink as he glanced around to make sure there was no one listening in the street. "Officer Priscus's orders, sir."

"Officer Priscus," explained Ruso, "has seconded you to me. So you do what I tell you."

"Yes, sir."

"So what's the problem?"

"Sir, he's my superior. So when he tells me to report to you in the morning, I have to do it."

Ruso sighed. "He only meant the first morning."

Albanus shook his head. "No, sir. He told me again yesterday."

Ruso ran a hand through his hair. "I'll talk to him. Now get lost."

Albanus nodded eagerly. "Shall I get lost anywhere in particular, sir?"