Semper Fidelis

Chapter 29

After last night’s costly mistake, Tilla did not order the evening meal until her husband turned up. At the same moment a local man and his nephew arrived to show him a limp and complain of a bellyache. Then the stew came, and he ate in silence, listening to his own thoughts. It did not seem the best time to ask for a slave so she could learn to be a medicus, so she said, “How is your difficult patient?”

“Mm?”

“Your patient. Austalis. How is he?”

“Desperate to keep the arm. I’m leaving him for one more night.”

“Perhaps he will improve.”

“And perhaps I’ll have killed him.”

So that was what was troubling him. “I went to see Corinna’s boy again,” she said. “He was asleep.”

“Mm.”

“She told me something I did not understand.”

He tore a chunk off the bread and dropped it into the liquid.

“Shall I tell you what it was?”

“Uh-what? Yes.”

“She said Tadius and Victor were good friends, but then they had a fight.”

He scooped the bread out on his spoon. “Friends fall out.”

“She says there are things we don’t know.”

“Maybe we don’t need to know them.”

“Did you think about that centurion?”

He looked at her. “That centurion knows why we had to go to Gaul.”

She put her spoon down. “But how-”

“Apparently he’s been asking around. It’s not exactly a secret, is it? Metellus circulates his security lists. That’s the point of them.”

Her throat was suddenly dry. “I thought that was all forgotten.”

“So did I.”

“I always knew that centurion was-”

“I know what he is!”

The force of his reply startled her.

“Sorry,” he said. “Don’t worry. You’re none of his business, and Metellus will be busy up on the border, arresting anyone who isn’t a loyal subject of Hadrian.”

As she said, “I hope so. That man is a snake,” there was a rap on the door and a slave announced more visitors for the Medicus. Tilla sighed and put the bread platter over his bowl in the faint hope that the stew might not be stone cold when he finished.

The back sufferer turned out to have tried every remedy that was suggested and refused to believe that gentle exercise would help. The child who could not speak was deaf. She had devised her own gestures to communicate with her family, and seemed to have accepted the situation far more readily than they had.

Tilla had just lifted the bread platter from his bowl when they both looked up, uncertain. He called, “Come in!” and the movement of the latch confirmed that there was indeed somebody there.

A bent and wrinkled slave shuffled in. Tilla recognized the figure she had seen hoeing the weeds out of the rose beds, but when she greeted him with “You are the gardener!” he shrank away and begged them not to tell anyone he was there. The reason became apparent as he explained his symptoms: stiffness in the hips, painful knees, difficulty in movement, hot and swollen joints in the hands … None of these was desirable in a gardener. He was terrified of being sold and replaced with someone younger and fitter.

Tilla, seated on the bed and halfheartedly scanning the poetry scroll in the poor light, reflected that any decent owner would buy a boy who could learn from the older slave and take over the heavy work. But while the old man had worked in the mansio gardens for as long as he could remember, managers came and went. And new men liked to make sweeping changes.

She glanced up and saw that her husband was scratching one ear in the way he did when he was thinking. The treatment she had seen him recommend for this sort of thing would be of no use to a slave who was more likely to sleep in a damp bed than be able to lie in a hot bath. And if he managed to scrape together regular warm fomentations of bark and barley meal, where would he find the privacy to apply them?

Finally she heard “Tilla, can you get me the bottle of mandrake in wine, and a spoon?” and, to the patient, “Do you grow dill? And rue?”

“Dill, yes. Rue smells. I could find a patch outside.”

While Tilla rummaged inside the case, her husband explained how to boil the herbs together to make a medicine that was good for easing joint pain.

When she handed the bottle across, he checked the thin wooden label tied around the neck as usual and frowned. “Mandrake,” he repeated, handing it back.

She took it, glanced at the two bubbles near the base of the thick green glass, and offered it back to him. “Mandrake,” she confirmed.

Silently he pointed to the label.

“Mandrake,” she insisted.

He gave her a look of mild alarm that said, You don’t read the labels? and reached for the case himself, picking out one of the three remaining bottles he usually carried with him.

“That is iris, for purging!” she whispered, placing her hand over his. The patient, who was sitting on the end of the bed nearest the window, was beginning to look worried.

She placed both bottles on the table, pulled out a stopper, and sniffed before passing the bottle to him. He lifted it to his nose, paused, and turned to the patient. “Sorry about that. Have you finished work for the night?”

The man nodded.

“One and a half spoons in a cup, please, Tilla.” To the patient he said, “I don’t recommend you take a lot of this, but for once it should give you a decent night’s sleep.”

Tilla handed over the cup with a warm smile that defied any questions about whether this traveling medicus and his woman really knew what they were doing.

After the slave had drunk the medicine and gone, Tilla watched her husband line up all four bottles on the table and scowl at them. “You must be more careful, Tilla.”

“Me? I am the one who got it right!”

“Just as well.” Leaving the bottles on the table, he snapped the case shut and tightened the strap so that the buckle slid into the groove it had made in the leather.

The stew bowl was barely warm, although he had not had time to find that out when there was yet another rap at the door.

Tilla called, “The Medicus is eating! Come back tomorrow!”

“The tribune wants him.”

Tilla would have told the tribune to wait, but her husband was already on his feet. That was the sort of thing they were trained to do in the army: obey without question or delay. When they were ordered to swim across a swollen river, they did it. Or died trying.

“Can you sort those bottles out while I’m gone?”

“I did not tie the wrong labels on.”

“But it’s obvious you don’t read them.” He scooped a last mouthful of stew.

“Why bother when it is quicker not to?” She reached for the bottle of purgative and examined the knot in the twine. “This is someone else’s work, husband. I always leave a loop and an end so it undoes easily.”

He was not listening. “If there’s a message about Austalis, tell them where I am and tell them they absolutely must interrupt.”

And then he was gone.