Ruso and the Root of All Evils

33

Staying at home waiting to be accused of murder was the last thing Ruso intended to do. He needed to find out what poison had been used.

Moments later he was appalled to find himself facing an exhortation from G. Petreius Ruso, Veteran of the XX Victoria Victrix, urging the voters of Nemausus to support Gabinius Fuscus.

Fuscus’ publicity man had been busy with his paintbrush overnight. In the next four streets Ruso saw his own name three times. He was relieved to turn left into a narrow entrance where the walls were too grimy for election slogans and the mingled scents fell over him like a curtain: spice and vinegar and mint and roses and old wine. The street ahead widened into an area where the surrounding tall apartments trapped the babble of conversation and radiated the afternoon heat. The area was lined with the stalls of herbalists and drug-sellers. This was the place to find out about poisons.

The first stall had attracted a couple of women who were trying out cosmetics on the backs of their hands. Marvelling at the patience of shopkeepers hoping for a sale, Ruso found himself drawn into a crowd that had formed outside a booth next door. A half-naked man lay on a table under the shade, having something green and glutinous plastered on his chest by a leather-aproned physician.

One of the onlookers glanced down at Ruso’s stick and the toes poking out of his dusty bandage. ‘You’ll have to wait,’ she said, putting her arm around a thin child whose tunic was so big that he looked as though he had shrunk in the wash. ‘We’re next.’

‘And then it’s me,’ put in another voice, followed by a fit of coughing that did not sound as though it would have a happy ending.

Ruso nodded and moved on. There was nothing to be learned here beyond what he already knew: that if he survived to set up a practice in town, he would be facing stiff competition.

A wooden sign reading ‘No money, no medicine. No exceptions’ was nailed to the next stall. The welcome was similarly unfriendly, the buxom stallholder asserting that she didn’t sell poisons to people who didn’t know what they wanted. No, not even people claiming to be doctors. Rats, eh? If it was really for rats, why hadn’t he said that in the first place?

It was an admirable moral stance, but Ruso wondered how she managed to sell anything at all.

His next choice was hung with limp greenery drying in the sun and stacked with little limewood boxes and stoppered animal horns full of powders and creams. The trader welcomed him like an old friend. Ruso understood why when the man tried to persuade him that he wanted to buy frankincense.

‘Guaranteed pure, sir,’ the man added, handing over the box for examination. ‘Top quality. All the way from Arabia. Male, second harvest. Only the best.’

The man watched as Ruso held the pale lump of resin up to the light, rolled it between his fingers and sniffed.

‘It’s very expensive.’

‘I’m not saying you won’t see it cheaper elsewhere, sir,’ the man agreed, ‘but you’d be wasting your money.’ He leaned forward as if he was confiding a great secret. ‘You wouldn’t want to know what some of this lot round here put in theirs.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ promised Ruso. He closed the lid and handed the box back. ‘What I’m really interested in — ’ He was interrupted by a scream from further down the street. He turned, grasping the other end of his stick. A man who could not run was not much use in chasing a bag-snatcher, but if the culprit came this way … To his surprise, the scream was followed by cheering and applause.

‘The Marsi are in town,’ the man explained.

‘The Marsi?’ This was good news.

‘If it was up to me, I wouldn’t let ’em through the gates,’ grumbled the man. ‘It’s dangerous, bringing snakes into a place like this. One of these days someone’s going to get bitten. Then we’ll see what their cures are like. What was it you wanted?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Let me do you a deal on that frankincense, sir. I wouldn’t want you to be going home with some of the rubbish they sell down the road.’

‘Thanks, I’ll think about it,’ said Ruso, giving the man a smile that they both knew was no compensation for a lost sale.

Shoppers had begun to desert the stalls around him and drift towards the new crowd that was gathering. The women from the cosmetics counter tottered past, craning to see what the fuss was, clutching their baskets with pink-and-black-streaked hands.

Ruso could not move fast enough to get to the front, but the mountain-man’s shrill voice above the notes of the flute made it clear that the townsfolk were seeing the power of magic over the deadliest of snakes. The effect on the onlookers was conveyed by their gasps and exclamations of ‘Oh, look!’

Beside Ruso, a father lifted his small daughter on to his shoulders to get a better view. ‘Can you see the snake?’ he demanded, unable to see it himself. ‘What’s it doing?’

‘Snake!’ cried the child, pointing and wriggling. ‘Snake!’

Ruso leaned back against the shutters of a shop selling perfumed oils and bags of fresh lavender and rose petals. He had seen too many deadly snakes in Africa to want to watch one being provoked, magic or no magic. He hoped the performance was not going to go on too long. His foot was aching. His stomach was reminding him that it had been a long time since breakfast. But he needed to talk to the Marsi.

By the time the Italian mountain-men had finished their show and sold snake products to the eager crowd, several of the stallholders had begun to pack up for the day. The shoppers drifted away, heading for home or the baths, several pausing to slake their thirst in the shade of the nearest snack bar. The two Marsi, their skin already tanned to leather and their eyes as dark as those of the unblinking snake still draped around the older man, seemed not to notice the heat. The younger one was stacking up boxes that could have contained the performers or the remedies that were made from them. The older man looked up, lifted a fat coil of reptile from his shoulder and gave Ruso a gap-toothed grin before asking in a rough country Latin how he had enjoyed the show.

Ruso, unable to identify the species of snake, stepped forward to just outside striking distance. When he introduced himself as a medicus, the man’s smile widened.

‘Medicus, eh? We got what you want!’ The man gestured to his son to bring one of the boxes across. ‘A live helper of Aesculapius!’

Ignoring Ruso’s protests, he lifted the lid from the top of the box to reveal a set of dark coils with no discernable markings. ‘You’ve heard the stories. Get your hands on the real thing.’

‘I’d rather not,’ said Ruso.

‘Take a look. He don’t bite.’ The man slid one skeletal hand into the box by way of encouragement.

‘I think some of my patients would be frightened off.’

The man chuckled and tied the lid back over the snake. ‘So what else can we do for you?’ He lifted one of the pots stacked beside him on the pavement. ‘Snakeskins boiled in wine, good for earache and toothache.’ He placed it in front of Ruso and reached back for another pot. ‘Roast viper salts,’ he announced, showing the pot to the snake before placing it beside the other. ‘Recommended by Dioscorides himself. Sharpens the eyes, releases tight tendons, reduces swollen glands.’

Ruso bought a pot of the boiled skins, hoping they would not only cure earache but loosen the man’s tongue. ‘Perhaps you could help me with something else,’ he said.

‘Perhaps,’ agreed the man. ‘Who knows?’

The younger man had paused to listen.

‘I had a difficult patient the other day. Confusion, aggression, odd feelings around the mouth, vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of vision — ’

‘What happened to him?’ demanded the younger man, stepping forward.

‘He died.’

‘And you want my father to tell you what it was?’

‘What can you suggest?’

‘What I suggest,’ said the youth, ‘is that you take your skins and clear off. We’re honest traders. We got nothing to do with that sort of thing.’

‘I didn’t mean to imply — ’

‘That the Marsi know all about poisons? So why did you ask?’

‘Stop!’ The older man’s hand rose to silence his son. ‘The Medicus didn’t mean no harm. He’s here to learn. He reckons his patient got bit by a venomous beast.’

‘Exactly,’ said Ruso, although Severus had denied being bitten, and he had found no trace of a puncture on the body.

The youth glowered at him and said nothing.

The old man’s smile was not as broad this time. ‘We can’t help,’ he said. ‘We don’t know no snakes what give them symptoms.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t a snake,’ said Ruso. ‘Do you know anyone I could ask?’

‘No, we don’t.’

‘I’d pay.’

‘And I’d take your money,’ said the man, ‘but I still wouldn’t know nobody.’

Ruso sighed. He was not going to argue with someone wearing a large and unidentifiable snake, even though he was certain that the man was lying. At the moment, he couldn’t run fast enough.