‘Bite on this.’
Diomedes placed a stick between the child’s teeth before rubbing the mixture of salt, saltpetre, wine and vinegar into the wound on his shin. The boy’s eyes watered, but he didn’t murmur even when Diomedes began to set the fracture with palm fibre splints. Behind them, the boy’s mother hovered like a broody hen, clucking and soothing her chick and throwing out a big, brave smile every now and then, and although it wasn’t her intention, it was she who was largely responsible for the boy’s courage. He’d have gone through surgery without poppy juice before letting his mum know the doctor was hurting him.
Diomedes tied the last knot in place. ‘And next time you play blind-man’s-buff, stay away from the cliffs. That could have been a jolly sight worse, you know.’
He ruffled the boy’s hair and, taking pity on the pinched, white face, popped a pastille into his mouth. He used them in the main for the expulsion of bladder stones, but they were flavoured with honey and wouldn’t do the lad any harm.
‘Take half a cup of this twice a day-’
‘Cor, that stinks!’
It was the first time the child had flinched and Diomedes wasn’t surprised. The root of the white mandrake had a stench which alone was often quite sufficient to put a person out. Even Diomedes had not grown inured to it.
The boy’s mother pushed herself between her son and the physician. ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. He’ll take it, sir, twice a day, like you said.’
‘Be careful with it, it’s very strong. No more than half a cup. Once in the morning, once at night.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
The slave woman backed clumsily out of the room, the boy already feeling the painkilling effects as he hobbled off on his bandaged leg, his mind busy with what capital he might make out of his injury among his peers.
Diomedes closed the door behind them. At least it made a change from the usual toothaches and stomach problems he was presented with. He wiped his hands on a towel and began to mix up a saffron salve for Gelon’s inflammation. Gelon was the head fuller and Diomedes didn’t know why those slaves who worked in the fuller’s yard had more eye problems than those in the weaving sheds, or why the dyers seemed to suffer more from hardening of the limbs than anyone else, and frankly he didn’t care. Collatinus ran so many slaves-far more than he had realized when he accepted the job-that it was tough enough simply keeping abreast of the coughs and colds, sores and swellings. Now there was an outbreak of whipworm to contend with, an intestinal parasite he was having serious trouble controlling. Zeus forbid it ever got into the house, his head would be on the block for that. The old man wasn’t renowned for swingeing acts of forgiveness and he’d already made no bones that he hadn’t wanted Diomedes here in the first place.
‘Waste of bloody money, all you know is blood letting. I could have bought my own doctor from the auctions for a fraction of what I pay you.’
Diomedes had continued to massage the wasted muscles. ‘An unqualified slave with a few quack remedies is no good,’ he pointed out. ‘Look at the trouble the last one gave you.’
The old man had snorted. ‘Cured my warts, didn’t he?’
Diomedes turned him over. ‘What did he prescribe when you had the fever, eh?’ Cat dung and owls’ toes tied to the body of a cat killed just before the moon waned!
Would Eugenius accept he’d recovered naturally? ‘Pah! I tell you, if physics were any good, there wouldn’t be three of the buggers buried up in Sullium-and not one of ’em a day over thirty.’
Diomedes had long since concluded it was Aulus who had pushed for his appointment, but Aulus would have no sway if the whipworm spread any further…and Diomedes didn’t fancy moving on again.
Not yet.
Not alone.
Not since Claudia Seferius walked into his life.
He ceased rubbing saffron into the beeswax. She was beautiful and no mistake. A straighter back he’d rarely seen and she moved with the grace of a panther. She had a reputation for being prickly, but he’d only ever found her witty and charming. Then again-he recommenced his mixing-she had a reputation for that as well. She was reputed to have charmed half the men in Rome, and Diomedes found that very easy to believe.
He transferred the ointment into a small ceramic pot, set it aside for when Gelon called during his meal break, and began measuring milk into a cup. Claudia was waiting for something, but to ask outright would mean showing his hand and he’d made one terrible mistake already. He ought to have remembered she’d recently been widowed and would still be grieving for Gaius. Zeus, he shouldn’t have tried to kiss her last Tuesday! On the footpath in broad daylight, what was he thinking of? At the time, though, she appeared so full of life, so full of laughter, that he thought the signals he’d picked up were from a woman not just wanting to be kissed, but expecting to be kissed. Diomedes, he told himself, you’re a fool to think you could rush a woman like Claudia Seferius.
In the corner a small bronze container bubbled on the brazier. Diomedes lifted it off and poured the boiling water over a pile of crushed peppermint leaves, oblivious of the aromatic scent. When it was cool, he would strain it and add it to the milk and, with any luck, there should be enough of the mixture to cure a week’s worth of indigestion in the Collatinus household. Ordinarily he would have passed the half hour’s waiting either reading or catnapping, but today there was too much to catch up on and he set about making another infusion, this time of horehound with wine for the cook’s cough.
He’d spent as much time as he could with Claudia over the last few days, more time than he should, in fact, but it was important to him. Dare he risk a second kiss? Progress was good-look how grateful she’d been because he’d nursed that floozy Cypassis back to health. She could have taken that grainship yesterday. Why hadn’t she? She hinted her stay concerned business with the old man, but Diomedes knew that wasn’t the whole truth. From what he’d overhead, Eugenius’s business with Claudia (and no one except the two of them seemed privy to exactly what this entailed) was pretty well concluded to the satisfaction of both parties.
Could her reluctance to go, he wondered, his heartbeat increasingly rapid, have any connection with himself?
There was one other hint, the most solid yet. If she wasn’t interested in him, why spend so much time in his company?
Flimsy excuses. First she needed balsam, then she was back to enquire as to the efficacy of chalk in bathwater. She’d even demonstrated a close interest in the tools of his trade, selecting a pair of forceps with long, slender handles, hollowed jaws and interlocking teeth and asking, ‘What’s this for?’
When he told her they were pilecrushers, it was truly comical to note the speed with which she dropped them.
Another time she said, ‘They found that child, you know,’ and he pretended not to know about the missing kid. That way she was forced to spend yet more time with him as she recounted the story of the child-a boy, as it turned out-who had been frightened by the storm, ran for shelter then got himself hopelessly lost. He was eventually found over in Fintium by an old fisherman whom he cajoled into taking him out next day, little suspecting there was a storm of a very different kind awaiting his return.
Diomedes had smiled at the way she’d ended the story by saying, ‘I’d have scalped the little bugger if he’d been mine.’ She injected such energy into things!
Had he been born either wealthy or aristocratic, it would have been easy. Instead, as a Greek, he was acutely aware of the disadvantages weighed against him. Setting the cook’s horehound infusion to one side, he moved across to his desk and opened an envelope of papyrus. Shaking a dozen or so tiny oval seeds of fenugreek into his mortar, he began to pound them with his pestle. In a poultice, they should sort out Antefa’s boil once and for all. Yes, if only he’d been born patrician!
His lips pursed instinctively whenever he thought of Marcus Cornelius Orbilio. Everything about the man screamed class. Class and breeding, and he hadn’t realized Claudia knew him so well until he saw the two of them together on Thursday night-Orbilio in his fancy scarlet cloak, Claudia in that sensuous midnight blue creation.
Impossible to find words to describe the sense of loss, of failure, that he experienced in that split second. They were two of a kind. Same class, same background-what chance did a Greek physician stand?
That night Diomedes had prayed to Aphrodite-oh, how he had prayed-for help, and to his utter astonishment the goddess dismissed Orbilio the very next day, demonstrating in that one Olympian gesture that there was no stigma attached to being a doctor. It’s a respectable profession, Aphrodite was telling him, requiring skill and qualifications well beyond the abilities of the average man. You should not feel shame.
Thus his spirits lifted and his confidence soared with them.
But however buoyed up he was by Aphrodite’s support, Diomedes appreciated it was far too soon to moot the subject of marriage. Nevertheless, he worked on it as skilfully as he worked on his remedies. Claudia was young, beautiful, suggestible even, and Diomedes more than most understood the immense power of sex. It could pull a person against their will, draw them like a fish on a line-and women, especially, were susceptible. His Claudia would be no different.
Content with progress on both his love life and Antefa’s troublesome boil, he decided it was time to stretch his legs. Automatically patting the little stone statue of his healing god, Asklepios, he turned left to follow the dusty track up the hill. The view from his quarters might not be the worst in the world, but even a physician grew sick of certain smells and the stink of urine from the adjacent fuller’s yard was one of them.
The scenery was breathtaking, the air redolent with pine and spurge and wild rosemary. The African Sea, today as blue as forget-me-nots, tickled the sands under a cloudless sky while sheep bleated contentedly beneath the noonday sun. He would miss this land, he thought, but come spring it would be time to move on. To move on, the way he had always moved on, forever seeking his sacred goal. So often in the past he had been on the point of giving up, fearing his aim to be as unattainable as immortality itself-but now, since meeting Claudia, he was not so sure. He felt his fists clench. If only-
The raucous cry of a jackdaw cut in and he paused to look down on the villa, its red roof dwarfed by the distance between them. Miniature figures dashed hither and thither, always at someone else’s beck and call. So many of them! When he took on the job, Diomedes had no conception of the size of the Collatinus empire, nor that he would be required to doctor the entire contingent of slaves single-handed. For the most part, his previous positions had entailed little more than pandering to the problems of over-indulgence by prescribing fresh air and exercise and a decent diet. Well, excess was no problem in this family, quite the contrary, but he hadn’t expected to have to earn his living as a slave doctor. Diomedes plucked a blade of grass to chew on and continued his climb.
These rocks, these coves, these shrouded mountain ridges seemed to him more Greek than Roman, even down to the reserved and sombre townspeople, and he felt very strongly that the island ought to have remained in his countrymen’s hands. Instead it had been wrenched from their grasp, and it was unfortunate that the very people who had founded democracy should have taken this rugged and beautiful island from the Sicels and then promptly allowed it to be ruled by a succession of tyrants. As a result it fell under Roman dominion and now his own land, too, was a Roman province. He was taught as a child to be proud to be a part of the Empire. Well, he wasn’t. He was Greek, and as such he was viewed by Romans-especially Romans like that arrogant bastard Orbilio-as second rate. Diomedes pursed his lips. We shall see, he thought. We shall see who’s top and who’s not.
A fat, stripey bee came buzzing up to check whether this newcomer was a walking pollen factory, decided he wasn’t and buzzed off elsewhere.
One thing had been bothering him these past two days. A small matter, but it nagged him like an obstinate itch.
Someone had been in his room.
In the few months since his arrival, Diomedes had become aware that someone was regularly filching one of his eye drugs. Minute quantities were being taken at a time, but he had quickly noticed that one particular copper vessel was getting gradually lighter and now he weighed it once a week on his balances to prove it. This didn’t bother him. Someone in the house had poor eyesight but was shrewd enough to correct it and stealthy enough to ensure no one else found out. Sooner or later the supply would run dry and the culprit (he suspected it was Senbi) would be forced into the open. Diomedes was content to wait.
The other business was altogether different.
It was Thursday, the day it rained. He had been in Sullium on a private commission, checking on the lead beater’s daughter who had swellings in her neck. During his absence his room had been searched.
The minute he returned home, he knew he’d had a visitor. The rain had cleared the air outside, sharpening his sense of smell, and the instant he opened the door his nostrils picked out the recent burning of lamp oil over and above the usual and familiar medicinal scents. The eye-drop thief called only during the daytime but it was possible an exception had been made, so Diomedes had weighed the little copper container on his balances-and found no change. Immediately on his guard, he checked his drugs and poisons before moving on to his instruments, but these were where he had left them, neatly facing outwards or upwards to suit his requirements.
It was only when he opened the box in the corner that he made his discovery. His old (and indeed blunt) double-ended scalpel, the one with the bronze handle, was lying upside down. It could not have been a mistake on his part-he always laid his instruments in a precise manner and since this was a dissection scalpel, never used, its position never varied. The handle end doubled as a spatula, and as such faced up. The person who had gone through the box was a layman and would be unaware of this when he replaced it…spatula down.
No, there was no mistake. The question was, what should he do about it?
As he paused to catch his breath, Diomedes realized he was almost upon the exact spot where Sabina had been killed. The flattened grass, parched and yellow, had sprung up again after the rain, there was absolutely nothing to suggest anything sinister had taken place, yet in spite of himself and his profession, he shivered.
Claudia was of the opinion that the family were not touched by their kinswoman’s death, but she didn’t know them the way he knew them. Sabina had been away for thirty years, they had practically forgotten her existence and when she did return they neither liked nor understood her. They might not be driven by grief, but they had been undermined by another emotion. Fear.
Fear of what, he didn’t know. Fear that because Sabina’s sanity had left her, the same might happen to them? Fear of a monster on the loose? Perhaps just fear of the unknown? Even as their doctor he was unable to plumb those intimate depths, but the Collatinus clan did what many families do in times of crisis.
They pretended nothing had happened.
To his right, a small bird warbled from the top of a thorn bush. He ought to be getting back, he thought. One of the weavers was calling about his infected toe, Dexippus had promised to repay those two denarii, and the Penates ceremony was scheduled for dusk. But the Greek’s eyes remained fixed to the place where Sabina had died.
Many people had seen the corpse in its raw and shocking state, not only himself and Claudia, but when the news was out, the entire family clambered up here to gawk.
Yet there was something very wrong about Sabina’s corpse.
Diomedes wondered who else had noticed the discrepancy.