Dear and Glorious Physician (31 page)

“I must get into those galleys,” said Lucanus, after he had summoned Cusa at midnight. He had listened for hours to slaves and seamen hunting and destroying rats and washing down the ship with lye.

Cusa said, “You are insane, of course. I will heat some wine for you and spice it.”

Lucanus considered him. “You are a clever man, my Cusa. How fast could you pick the lock to the galleys?”

Cusa refused to take him seriously, or rather refused to show that he took Lucanus seriously.

“I pick a lock, Lucanus?” He laughed merrily. Then he gave a mighty yawn. “Why did you wake me at this hour? Was it to exchange pleasantries?”

“You wily Greek,” said Lucanus. “Certainly you are an expert lock-picker. There was not a coffer or a chest or a closet safe from your prying in Antioch. You call Calliope a gossip; you are the worst gossip of all! I used to watch you admiringly, I confess, from a distance, when I was a child. I remember your talents well. Do not look so wounded.” He listened a moment. The squealing of the pursued rats was gone; the ship creaked and groaned and swung listlessly. Only the call of the watch could be heard here and there.

Lucanus began to muse aloud. “The ship sleeps, except for the galley slaves and the watch and the officers on deck. From past observation, Cusa, I should judge that a few moments would suffice for you to unlock that door in the bowels of the ship and let me in with my medicines.”

Now Cusa was greatly alarmed. “Master! Consider if you become infected yourself. Ah, yes, you have already said you have considered it. Am I to deliver a dead body to Diodorus? Your face is set like iron. Let us then consider more practical aspects of the situation. Gallo has refused you admission to the galleys, and I apologize to him because I had considered him a gross person to whom to offer good wine is a blasphemy. He has supreme command over this ship. Should the watch discover me tampering with the lock, the captain would throw me in irons, and that is only what I should deserve. You and he, then, would maintain an icy silence while I languished, waiting for the day when we landed so I could be dragged off to prison. Yes, yes,” and he lifted a delicate palm, “I understand that you would take the blame. But Gallo would not put Lucanus, son of Diodorus, in irons. He might confine you to quarters, which he ought to have done the moment we sailed. I have a wife and child; the prospect of prison for violating maritime law does not invite me. Consider the wife and child, Lucanus.”

Lucanus became impatient. “I have considered everything,” he said. “I will go with you to the door, and if we are caught I shall tell the captain that you did what I asked under the most ferocious of threats, and you can then ask the captain to protect you against my madness. If irons are still the result, Diodorus will have you freed in a twinkling.”

“I doubt it!” cried Cusa. “You know what a stickler for law he is!”

Lucanus’ face brightened, and he snapped his fingers. “Bring me Scipio, the younger of the centurions!”

“At this hour?”

“At this hour. Hasten, Cusa. Your arguments bore me.”

Shaking his head dolefully, Cusa left the smoky cabin and soon returned with Scipio, who, though red-faced with sleep and swollen of bleary eye, had first put on his armor and his helmet and his sword, as befits a soldier. He lifted his right arm in salute to Lucanus, and Lucanus returned the salute. “Sit beside me, my excellent Scipio,” he said. “I wish to talk with you.”

Cusa stood by the door and listened, scratching himself under his night tunic and full of anxiety. Lucanus said, “Scipio, as a soldier you have no high opinion of seamen, have you?”

“Master, as a soldier I despise them. They are fit only to maneuver warships into good positions so that soldiers may attack.” Scipio’s black eyes began to shine with interest, but as a military man he did not question why he had been called at midnight. Lucanus, to him, was proxy for that powerful soldier, Diodorus, whose name was reverenced by all soldiers.

“Seamen are so arrogant,” said Lucanus, sighing. “Do you know that Gallo threatened me tonight, threatened to bolt me in my quarter s because I differed in opinion with him? He shouted at me that he was king on this ship.”

Scipio was outraged. “He spoke like that to you, Master, you, the son of Diodorus Cyrinus?” He could not believe this monstrous thing.

Lucanus sighed again. “He did. In the presence of his slave.”

“In the presence of his slave!” Scipio’s young face blackened, and he put his hand on the hilt of his sword and started to rise.

“Now,” groaned Cusa, throwing up his hands, “who is the wily Greek now?”

Lucanus ignored him. “I am a physician, Scipio, and surely a physician is more intelligent than a mere captain of a cargo ship, and certainly more valuable. There is plague aboard.”

At this, Scipio paled, and slowly sat down again. “Unless I can check it in the galleys the whole ship will become infected, and perhaps we all shall die. Have you seen cases of the plague, Scipio? Ah, it is most frightful. Your glands distend, become suffused with pus; your body rots; you vomit blood; you cough blood. You hurl yourself, in delirium, into the most dangerous situations. That is what confronts all of us. Death. There is little chance for survival when one acquires the plague. But that puppethead of a captain refuses to permit me to treat and stop the disease! Is that not incomprehensible?”

The simple young soldier was incredulous. “But what can one expect of a miserable sailor, Master?” He was becoming excited.

“May I speak?” asked Cusa.

“You may not,” replied Lucanus, hastily, and Scipio scowled at Cusa.

“Naturally, as a physician, and a man of nobility and family, you wish to ignore the orders of that swinehead of a captain,” said Scipio, boiling with wrath.

“Scipio, you are a young man of the most astute understanding,” said Lucanus, with admiration.

“Eheu,” groaned Cusa. “I have been accused of having a serpentine nature, but here is one who puts to shame the very serpents of Isis!”

Lucanus continued to ignore him. Scipio said in a trembling voice of rage, “How dare he presume to give orders to the son of Diodorus Cyrinus?”

Lucanus nodded mournfully. “He shouted his authority at me; he beat his fist on the table. He threatened me with — what did you call it, Cusa? Ah, yes, irons.”

Scipio sprang to his feet. “Someone shall pay for this!” he exclaimed.

“And all I wished was to protect all of us from the plague. We fly the yellow flag, Scipio. We may not even be allowed to land in Italy. We may even be returned to Alexandria, or left to float at sea until we are all dead. You know how rigorous those doctors of Rome are. How long has it been since you have seen your sweetheart, Scipio, and your parents, and Rome, where Romans are Romans and not guardians of a whole ungrateful world?”

Tears filled Scipio’s eyes. He could have murdered Gallo at once.

Cusa gaped at Lucanus with astonished admiration. The valorous idiot was as subtle as an Oriental!

“I need your help, Scipio. There may be a watch at the locked door leading to the galleys. Or the patrolling watch may make his rounds before my wonderful Cusa here picks the lock.”

Picking locks was reprehensible. For a moment Scipio’s face showed doubt. Then it cleared. What was lock-picking to a Greek?

“So,” said Lucanus, with a wave of his hand, “all that is necessary is for you, Scipio, to be sleepless or commanded by me to guard me tonight because I am a very nervous man at times and subject to nightmares. So you wander suspiciously over the ship. You come to the door of the galleys; you discover for me if the door is guarded. If so, you will have no trouble in luring away the guard. Then you will divert the patrolling watch while Cusa picks the lock. I need but an hour or two. Cusa will tell you when I emerge from the galleys. Naturally, as he is a pusillanimous man, he would not venture in there.”

“Being pusillanimous has nothing to do with it!” cried Cusa. “It is a matter of law!”

Lucanus regarded him more in sorrow than umbrage. “Cusa, you have forgotten what it means to be a soldier of Rome, who is executor of the supreme law.”

“We are the law,” said Scipio, giving Cusa a curdling glare. “Do you think a sailor’s order is more important than we?” But Cusa only looked at him with pity for being the victim of a scheme he thought not only dangerous but nefarious.

“I command you to be silent, Cusa,” said Lucanus.

“Be silent!” said Scipio. “You have heard your master speak.”

“Eheu, yes. But he has not told you — ”

Lucanus interrupted. “It is very quiet now, Scipio. Take my thanks and go. Do we not wish to arrive home well, and soon?”

“And in irons,” said Cusa, desperately.

“Go also, Cusa, and bring that little black leather bag of yours, with those fine lock-picking tools you probably bought from a thief,” said Lucanus, smiling. “And, Cusa, I charge you not to attempt to whimper your cowardly fears in the ear of a soldier of Rome when you are out of my sight.”

“Master,” said the young centurion, proudly, “a Roman is deaf to the conversation of a freedman.”

Cusa returned alone with his black bag. Lucanus was busily examining the contents of his physician’s pouch. “Naturally,” said Cusa, with bitterness, “you will send some of my fine wine to Scipio, to console him, when the captain throws him in irons. And you will neglect to send the same wine to me.”

“You worry too much,” said Lucanus. He was as alert and brisk as if he had newly arisen. His cheeks were rosy; his eyes flashed with satisfaction.

“I never thought that my pupil would condescend to the degradation of lies,” said Cusa.

Lucanus checked his scalpels. “I never uttered a single lie,” he said.

“No, no, of course not. You are a Sophist. You reek with virtue. That makes you a Stoic, too. You are a man of many parts, Lucanus, and I confess that I have underestimated the streak of villainy in you. And so, as your teacher, I admit I was full of illusion, which was very foolish of me.”

“Very foolish,” agreed Lucanus, with a youthful grin.

Scipio returned, glowing with satisfaction. “The galley door is not guarded, Master. Evidently it was not thought necessary. As for the patrol, I discovered that he is a pleasant acquaintance of mine, whom I have been instructing in military procedures. I think,” added Scipio, with the shine of a conspirator, “that a small jug of wine, drunk in my company, on the upper deck, will sharpen his interest in military campaigns.”

“A jug of wine,” said Lucanus to Cusa, who, groaning like one in extreme pain, went to fetch it. Scipio agreeably discovered that it was a full jug, and went off on his work of luring away the patrol and keeping him quiet. “The captain will hang the patrol from the mast or the yardarm or whatever the heathen thing is,” said Cusa. “That, naturally, will not disturb you. You’ve forgotten the officer on watch on the upper deck.”

“Scipio is an intelligent young officer,” said Lucanus, dismissing this. “He, like you, loves gossip, and knows all the officers on board, and so there will be happy conversation among all of them. How lonely it must be to be on watch in such a becalmed sea. Come, let us go. Within three hours it will be dawn. Ah, wait a moment. I need two buckets for water. Do not move like an old man, Cusa. You are not about to be executed.”

“That, I doubt,” said Cusa, miserably.

They took the lantern in the cabin and carried it into the narrow corridor outside. Lucanus was sorry both for Cusa’s fear and the teacher’s belief in absolute authority, and his unquestioning acceptance of it. While the captain had the right of death and life over those on his ship, for the sake of others themselves in the face of an unpredictable and capricious element where danger was always present there was, even more important, a moral law which no man had the right to abridge. The captain had his laws; they became not laws but oppressions when he denied to these poor slaves any succor or alleviation or the right to life.

Lucanus remembered the many authentic stories of ships such as this, when galley slaves became ill of a violent and fatal disease and so were locked below without help. Those of passengers and other slaves who had not become infected were permitted to disembark after examination by public health officers, and then the ship was towed out to sea with its burden of imprisoned, dying, and hopelessly stricken galley slaves and set afire. He shuddered at the remembrance. This was the fate in store for the poor wretches in the hold.

The young Greek had covered his legs with tight strips of linen, and his arms and hands also. He was enveloped in his mantle, with the hood pulled over his head. Cusa held the smoking lantern high. The narrow wooden passageways were absolutely silent and dark as the two men crept down them. Scipio had done his work well; they encountered no watch. As they slipped past shut doors, holding their breath and walking as lightly as possible, they could hear the far and rhythmic plying of oars deep in the ship, the creak and moaning of timbers, and distant snores. The whole ship reeked of lye and tar and assorted stenches of cargo and humanity and oil and the past day’s heat and salt. The floor of the passageways, as they moved like ghosts down the ladders deeper into the vessel, were almost as still as earth. The ship slid over the face of the ocean with barely a perceptible movement.

Deeper and deeper they descended, and the rank stenches became almost overpowering. Now was added another stink: the odor of death and disease. The roof of the last passageway became so low that Lucanus had to bend his tall head. He saw that bilge was seeping here in little black rills, infinitely nauseating to the nostrils. In an effort to halt the creeping infection herbs and spices and noxious substances had been burned down here, adding to the smokiness, the choking heat, and the foulness of the air. The lantern threw shadows behind the two men which crawled over the polluted floor and rotting wooden walls and dripping ceiling.

Lucanus became conscious of a sound like a ceaseless wind, wild yet muted, sonorous and melancholy. It was the voice of the slaves in the galleys, the hopeless voice, less than human and yet filled with the agony of all humanity. Cusa stopped, affrighted. “It is only the slaves,” whispered Lucanus, comfortingly. But Cusa was trembling. Lucanus pushed him on gently; the lantern swayed in Cusa’s hand. Cusa whispered, “How can we keep this from the ears of the captain? There are many slaves, and an overseer, down there. It will leak out.”

“Probably,” answered Lucanus. “But a fact accomplished is a fact accomplished, and I, only, will be seen. However, if I succeed, and I feel I will succeed, the captain will be the first man to be congratulated by the authorities, and be assured he will not mention my part in it!”

The corridor was so narrow that they had to file behind each other, and it was very short. At the end stood a thick wooden door, bolted and locked. Lucanus motioned to Cusa, who crept towards it, opening his bag of clever little tools. “Do not kneel,” whispered Lucanus. “There is infection in the water.” Cusa bent over the lock and began to work on it, his wet and agile hands shaking, the sweat running into his eyes. Lucanus held the lantern close, and kept glancing over his shoulder. The lamentations of the slaves beyond the door seemed to be part of the very air, and the walls and floor and ceiling vibrated in them. Other slaves were confined in an adjoining corridor, for theirs was the duty of bringing food to the galley slaves, and water, and they were held to replace those who died. Most of them were those Lucanus had seen being brought aboard the day of sailing. They had been condemned to death, without fault, by the captain, and they knew it. Lucanus could hear the muffled sobs of their women and the cries of their children through the walls.