Dreaming the Hound (22 page)

‘Remind young Gaius that he may have forgotten to add the cost of bandaging to the bill and perhaps he might like to recalculate the sum. I would suggest an additional three hundred sesterces might be appropriate. Remind him also that if he forgets to book veteran Servillius in for the changes to his dressings, our patient may yet lose his leg to gangrene, possibly even his life, and that would be a grave misfortune to fall on the head of a clerk.’

The physician smiled coolly, as befitted a man of learning. The rotund apprentice, less restrained, allowed himself a momentary grin of undiluted wickedness, cleared it and crossed the room to deliver his message with a commendably straight face. A moment later, Theophilus heard the man whose life and limb depended on the physician’s continued good favour agree a schedule of payment that would ensure the health and long life of this year’s crop of infants and their mothers and pay for the physician’s lodgings and those of his staff for the remainder of the year. It was a better start to the morning than he had imagined.

The non-citizens’ ward was small and lacked windows. It was not yet obscenely overcrowded but then the quarries had not yet opened and building work on the temple to which they supplied their flint and sand had not yet begun for the day; the minor abrasions and broken fingers and greater, life-wrecking calamities had therefore not yet started to flow in. With luck, they might not do. The numbers injured had been fewer since spring when work on the roof itself had begun, having reached a peak in midwinter when the oaf of an Alexandrian overseer had considered it constructive to take men with no experience of stonework and set

them to building the columns that would support the roof.

The crush injuries - those sustained by falling masonry, or by men falling onto masonry - had begun as the columns reached half-height and increased as they neared completion. When Theophilus had sent a complaint to the governor, he had been reminded that he had complained in the spring that able-bodied men had been taken away from the sowing, and in the autumn that they had been taken away from the harvest, and that if he were going to complain in winter also, then when, exactly, did he think the temple to the God Claudius might be built?

Over dinner at his villa three days later, in more congenial circumstances, Theophilus had been informed that the emperor required that the temple be built in time for the twentieth anniversary of the invasion and that if Theophilus wanted to make a direct representation to Nero himself explaining why it was madness to build of stone in a place where no stone had ever been used; and where skilled labourers brought in from the continent died of cold or disease or simply took the next ship home to wine and warmth; and where the natives were penniless and were yet expected to pay for the construction of a temple to honour the man who had defeated them, he was more than welcome but he might like to write his will first.

Theophilus, not being noticeably tired of life, did not make any such representation to the emperor. Instead, when spring opened the shipping lanes, he sent to Athens for texts on building and read them at night and in the spare hours of the day that he might make suggestions to improve safety on the construction site. It was not required of him as a physician, but he had long ago been taught that an injury averted was a life preserved and he considered it his moral duty to do his best for his patients.

In the smaller, more crowded ward he found evidence of three patients for whom he had done his best and failed. Two had died in the night and one, a child of eight with coughing sickness, would be dead by noon. For the protection of the others, it would have been good to transfer the child to a separate room, but none was available. Theophilus had him moved to the far end of the ward, to the bed of one of the two women who had died before him, and turned his attention to the combination of injury, malnutrition and disease that afflicted the rest of his charges.

As had always been the case, a suite of small private rooms facing into the inner courtyard was reserved for officers and their families. Few of them appreciated being woken in the early morning and so, saving emergencies, these rooms were routinely left until last. Washed and dressed in a fresh, clean tunic, the physician moved along in reverse order, starting at the southern end

and moving north up the corridor, saving the best for last.

The frost had melted by the time he reached the door at the north end of the corridor; a film of drying moisture shined the tiles on the roof. The door to the room had been repainted many times since the days when four legions and their auxiliary cavalry had all made this place their home. On each occasion, in an act of uncharacteristic superstition, he had asked that the eye of Horus be repainted in blue on the lime-washed white. In his mind, it had always been Corvus’ room and was so still. Of all the army’s officers Theophilus had met, some of whom he had liked, the dark, scarred cavalry prefect was the one who seemed to him least Roman and most Greek; the greatest accolade the physician could bestow. That the prefect was back in Camulodunum made the days brighter. That he was injured, and there as a patient, dulled them only a little.

A brazier burned in the room and someone had thrown cedar chips on it recently. The smell lightened the corridor as one approached the room. With something of his earlier cheer, the physician pushed open the door.

‘Good morning.’

The man who had been left under absolute instructions not to leave his bed stood by the window looking into the inner courtyard. He stood carefully, bearing the weight of his left leg on a stick. A linen bandage bound over the left side of his head looked unnaturally pale against the black hair and olive skin. His smile was as drily intelligent as it had always been. He turned a little away from the window as the door closed.

‘How is your headache?’ Theophilus asked.

‘Better than it was.’

‘You said that yesterday.’ The physician’s long fingers probed his patient’s skull. ‘But not gone?’

‘Not quite. And, before you ask, my leg is healing well. I looked under the bandage this morning. Your rosewater and honey are working well. There has been no poison in the wound for three days now and it hardly throbs at all overnight. I think it may be time to dispense with the poppy.’

‘You mean you have already stopped taking it?’

Corvus, prefect of the cavalry wing, the Ala Quinta Gallorum, currently assigned to the XXth legion in the west, had the good grace to look guilty. ‘I didn’t drink last night’s dose.’

Theophilus sighed theatrically. ‘Remind me to have Nerus whipped for failing to see that a patient was treated as prescribed. If you want to be a physician, you should tell me. You can have my job with pleasure and I’ll go home to Athens.’ The bandage came away and the head wound was, indeed, clean and healing. Theophilus considered the air and decided to replace it with one of lighter linen weave. Moving to the leg bandage he said, ‘And how is your other project?’

They had not spoken of it in over a year. It was a mark of their mutual respect that, after a moment, Corvus answered, ‘Valerius? I don’t know. He was taken to Hibernia after the others returned to Mona but I have no idea what happened to him afterwards. Segoventos refuses to talk to me and no-one I have sent has been able to find him.’

‘Hibernia is not a small island.’

‘It’s big enough for a man who wishes himself dead to achieve it with nobody any the wiser.’

‘Do you think he’s dead?’

‘No. But I think he is living as if he is. Can we talk of something else?’

‘If you like. Or you can sit down and display your famed stoicism while I clean the wound on your ankle?’

Corvus sat on the bed. Theophilus probed with care at the healing spear wound in the man’s calf. The blade had penetrated just above the ankle, sliding between the tendon and the bone. A finger’s breadth either side, and the prefect would have lost the use of his foot. As it was, he would ride again as ably as ever, if he would never walk as well as he once had.

The wound was a month old and close to healing. Theophilus applied himself to a newer, smaller dressing and listened for sounds of distress in the other’s breathing. When it seemed the pain of his intervention was less, he said, ‘I understand there is to be a demonstration of Caesar’s justice in the theatre after tomorrow’s ceremonies?’

‘So I heard. The governor wishes to demonstrate to his favourite client kings that the law falls equally hard on those who have attained Roman citizenship as on those who have not.’

‘So a man will die to prove to a group of high-born traitors that they made the right choice.’

‘Not the kings - they know exactly who they need and

who needs them. The people still to be convinced are those who plan rebellion in their forest groves and think we know nothing of it. So two men will die; one of ours and one of theirs, to make it even-handed. Marcellus who led the second cohort of the Ninth at the invasion will be hanged for the murder of his stockman, although he claims the man was trying to kill him and it was selfdefence—’

‘It may well have been.’

‘It probably was. He had just ordered the ploughing of a site that has been sacred for as long as the Trinovantes can remember. I’d have tried to kill him too. But he shouldn’t have struck the man down in broad daylight with three of the governor’s household and any number of tribesmen as witnesses.’

‘And the other? The brother of the man he tried to kill, perhaps?’

‘No, he’s already dead; Longinus Sdapeze had to kill him to stop him running amok amongst the remaining garrison - we can’t afford a riot now. I don’t know who the second man will be. I suspect the governor may not yet know. They’ll pick some poor bastard at random and make up a charge. If one of the client kings wears a knife half a thumb’s length too long, he’ll live long enough to regret it.’

Theophilus finished binding the dressing and stood back to observe his patient. ‘Or they could choose you simply for looking disreputable. As your doctor, I would suggest that if you’re intent on going to listen to small men make speeches of no significance, you should wear something warm that doesn’t look as if you’ve fought a battle in it. We are supposed to be a province at peace.’

‘Thank you. One day someone will tell the warriors of the west and we can all go home.’ Corvus stood, smiling sourly, and flexed his ankle, testing. His face showed no obvious pain at the result. Leaning ostentatiously on his stick, he said, ‘In view of which I should make the most of my time in Camulodunum’s version of peace before I return to the western kind. With your permission, I would like to go to the baths and then to find a dresser who will make me a set of clothes fit to greet a delegation of royalty on behalf of my legate and my men. Do I take it I may go?’

‘Of course. I only kept you here because I wanted to talk to you. And if you don’t need the stick, throw it away. I hate to see a man pander to his doctor when he doesn’t really need to.’

They hid very little from each other and there was much that did not need to be said. Some things, however, should be explicit. As he was leaving, Theophilus turned. ‘You know the Eceni are

coming?’

‘Of course. Prasutagos is the model client to which all other kings aspire; friend to two emperors and every governor since Plautius. But Valerius won’t be with him. Wherever else he is in the world, that man does not live in the care of his people. It doesn’t matter if the others recognize me; we’re allies now. We can afford to share the entertainments of a trial and judgement and take dinner afterwards and recall old times in friendship.’

XIII.

CAN YOU STAND, DO YOU THINK?’

‘You asked me that yesterday.’ Bellos, blond child of the Belgae, had grown dark through a winter without the sun on his hair. His skin, always fine, had become translucent, so that the vessels beneath showed blue against white, and the whole was coated with a fine sheen of sweat that never seemed to dry. He lay on a mat of rolled and woven straw on the turf between the small stone hut and the stream that ran to the west of it, shielded from sight of the great-house and the war-weary warriors of Mona.

The seclusion was not solely for the boy. Julius Valerius had spent fifteen years of his life fighting the warriors of Mona. He had slain their shield-mates and their soul-friends on the battlefield in fair combat and hanged them off it in circumstances that were fair only by the standards of an invading nation. He had taken captive those who were wounded and given them neither Briga’s clean death nor healing, but nursed them alive to the legions’ inquisitors and laid their bodies afterwards on the high peaks with dream marks and items of clothing for recognition so that, even when flesh and features had been burned, torn and flayed beyond all knowing, their kin might still find them and know how they died.

If Valerius regretted anything, he did so in the quiet corners of his heart where the fire of his mind shed no light. He had not come to Mona by choice and he did not stay by choice. He did not, either, make any effort to heal the running sore that was his presence among those who continued the fight against Rome. Luain mac Calma was Elder of elders; throughout the free tribes, his word was law and his word had ensured Valerius’ continued safety. Without it, the once-Eceni would have died over days for his betrayal of his people, and the boy Bellos with him, so much had been made plain.

Given this, they could never have lived in the great-house with the other warriors; mac Calma would not so have insulted his people and, in any case, in the early days Bellos had hovered on the cusp of death and had needed solitude and the peace that only solitary living

could afford. The small stone hut at the stream’s edge had been made ready for them at mac Calma’s request and if the neophyte dreamers who swept it and laid the fire and scattered rushes on the floor had done so with their eyes averted and making the sign to Nemain as they left, Valerius had chosen not to comment.

He had been naive then, and sick from the sea crossing, and that part of his mind not obsessed with Bellos’ welfare had been concerned with care of the red mare and the stocky bay cob, which had been turned out in a small paddock for watching, in case they brought hidden disease to the gods’ island.