Five for Silver: A John, the Lord Chamberlain Mystery (11 page)

John raised inquiring eyebrows.

“What happens is, well,” Isis continued, lowering her voice and leaning toward him, “afterwards he insists on reciting his dreadful, whining poetry. Can you imagine? Of course, he is charged for the extra time, but if you ask me, having to pay whores to listen to your poems is the gods’ way of indicating you should find another profession.”

Chapter Thirteen

“You’ll never become a physician, Farvus. What do you think you’re doing? The poor child will be sorry she was brought here!” Gaius irritably pushed aside the young man laboring over the injured girl.

Hypatia had found Gaius in a room at the back of the hospice, futilely attempting to teach his assistant how to bind up a broken arm. Farvus’ face, Hypatia noted, was paler than that of the patient he’d been trying to assist.

“You have to place the first part of the bandage on the fracture itself, to drive the humors into the extremities. As I told you, if you don’t do that, the humors end up in the fracture. You do at least have the right amount of cerate on the compresses this time.”

Gaius began rewinding the woolen strips around the girl’s arm. She winced and bit her lip, but remained silent. “You see? Start wrapping at the fracture and move outwards. The further from the fracture, the less the compression. It’s easy to remember if you concentrate. Here, do you want to try again?”

The injured girl’s eyes widened with alarm.

“Oh, never mind,” snapped Gaius. “I’ll finish it myself. Get about your regular business.”

His assistant left the room.

“Hypatia, come in.” Gaius wound the bandage nimbly around his patient’s arm. “Broken bones can be disconcerting for a beginner, even though from a medical viewpoint, they’re simple enough to treat. They usually take care of themselves so long as you get the bones aligned properly from the outset.”

He finished the task and murmured a few words of encouragement to the girl before motioning Hypatia to follow him out into the hallway.

“The girl was found in the Augustaion, screaming like the Furies. Children will insist on trying to climb statuary. She belongs to one of the shopkeepers around there, but we can’t spare anyone to go and find the parents. Eventually someone will turn up looking for her.”

He rubbed his eyelids. His eyes were red. He looked exhausted. “So you have taken up my kind invitation? I’m more than happy to see you, even if my expression doesn’t show it.”

His face, Hypatia noted, was as red as if it had been cooked, his nose as dark as a carbuncle. She would make him a batch of invigorating Pharaoh’s Elixir, she decided as she followed the lumbering physician along the corridor, stepping deftly around sad clusters of people squatting or lying outside rooms filled to overflowing with patients who were presumably even sicker.

“We’ve got very few of our usual sorts of clients,” Gaius noted as they turned a corner and threaded their way between several patients fortunate enough to have been allotted cots, if not rooms in which to put them. “Not so many cart accidents, there being fewer carts and people about the streets, for example. I suppose we should be grateful for that.”

A hoarse shriek rose wavering into the malodorous air.

Gaius gave Hypatia a wry grin. “Sounds as if a patient is calling. He probably needs more of our pain-killing potion. Could you see to that?”

He nodded toward the room at the end of the corridor. “The colleague overseeing this wing mentioned a young man who emerged alive from one of the towers being used to dispose of the dead, according to the excubitor who brought him here. Seems the patient had a bucket of lye emptied over his head as he emerged, but was lucky enough to keep his eyesight. Not that he’ll consider himself lucky when he sees the face he’ll live with from now on. All we can do is keep him as free from pain as possible and hope he eventually heals. Haven’t attended on him myself. I’ve been busy enough looking after those who need some expert care. Now, do you think you can cope with an injury like that?”

“I’m not as squeamish as your assistant,” Hypatia responded.

“Good. You’ll like it here.”

***

The young man lying half-naked on a soiled pallet may well have once been handsome. Now his face, arms and shoulders were a mass of angry red burns and blisters. As Hypatia carefully carried the prescribed painkiller to him, he gripped the sides of his pallet and shrieked again.

“Shut up, you noisy bastard!” the man sitting on the next bed shouted. “Did you expect to be a lady’s man all your life? How can we get any rest with all that racket you’re making?”

His sentiments brought forth a chorus of agreement from two neighbors. All three were nursing broken limbs.

“Ah, but he’s found himself a lady friend already,” one of the sufferer’s roommates remarked.

“The wheel that protests gets the greasing. I’m in agony over here, girl. Why don’t you help me instead?” leered the first speaker.

“Wait until she gets a good look at his face,” his friend callously observed. “She’ll run for the shelter of your outstretched arms.”

“They’re both broken, you bastard!”

Hypatia ignored them and knelt down by the suffering man, whose dark eyes stared at her pitifully. Tears rolled down his raw cheeks.

Hypatia offered the cup, wondering if salt from his weeping would worsen the pain from his ravaged face.

“Drink this,” she said. “It will help.”

He greedily drained its contents, thanked her in a hoarse whisper, and began crying again, much to the obscenely vocal delight of his fellow patients.

Hypatia looked around angrily. “Be quiet!” she ordered. “Or I shall be forced to ask Gaius to immediately send you all home, even if you have no homes to go to.”

The trio looked at each other and then resumed awkwardly throwing knucklebones on their pallets, pointedly ignoring Hypatia. The man with two bandaged arms protested bitterly that his friend had not shaken the bones enough to his liking before throwing them for him.

“Thank you,” the young man said again. “It’s hard to be helpless.” He glanced over at the players and clenched his fists. “As soon as I am well, they will pay mightily for their behavior.”

***

By the time Hypatia emerged from the hospice, the foul atmosphere in the city streets seemed fresh by comparison.

She stood in the middle of the great expanse of the Augustaion, pulling in big mouthfuls of salt-tinged air. She would have to change her tunic as soon as she got home, for the stench of the hospice had clung to it. She feared it also lingered in her thick hair, but she would have to forgo the baths for now.

She had an urgent errand.

Dill. She must find dill.

Peter had obviously taken the notion to torture himself over its absence. Doubtless his friend’s death had made him unlike his usual self. She hated to see his grief exacerbated by the lack of something so minor.

She walked down the Mese. Most of the emporia gracing its colonnades were closed, protective grates pulled down and locked to rings protruding from the concrete walkways. The ripe, overpowering odor of spoilt produce assailed her.

So many hungry in the city and food going to waste.

Gaius had kept her out of the plague wards, away from most of the hospice in fact, even though he claimed no one had fallen ill simply from nursing victims. She had therefore spent her time there treating patients with more usual and tractable conditions, applying poultices and ointments or administering painkilling potions.

Even after all the wounds and infirmities she’d witnessed that day, the face of the pitiful burnt man clung in her memory.

When she arrived in Constantinople from her native Egypt she had entered a new, alien, and harsher environment. She suspected the young man, so changed in appearance by his terrible injuries, would find himself in a far different world than the one to which she supposed he had been accustomed.

She had looked in on him just before she left. He had been mercifully sleeping, his rest brought about by Gaius’ potion.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a boy who darted out of an alleyway, calling to an unseen friend. “Quick! I found one! Back here! See, I told you so!”

The friend emerged from another alley further down the street. “Aw, you’re always finding them. Why do I never get there first?”

“That’s four for me and only one for you.”

“You always get the best alleys,” his friend grumbled.

“Shut up and come and see this one. It’s really horrible! All puffy and smelly, with worms and everything.”

The two boys scurried out of sight down the narrow way.

Searching for bodies? To rob them, Hypatia wondered, or simply because they were young and foolish?

She kept walking and arrived at the long hill leading into the Strategion. She started down, allowed her strides to lengthen. On a sudden impulse she decided to run. Her hair lifted back over her shoulders and flapped out behind her. She felt as if she were flying.

Those over a certain age did not usually race through the crowded capital. The streets were not thronged today, however, and in a city where children made a game of searching for corpses, there no longer seemed to be such a thing as a recognized standard of appropriate behavior.

The sound of women wailing, accompanied by the mournful sound of flutes and snatches of song, floated from the side street Hypatia was approaching, and she came to a halt behind a pair of men who stood on its corner.

A funeral procession moved slowly down the hilly byway toward them, led by three musicians ambling in front of a pair of singers whose melody was largely drowned by the lamentations and weeping emanating from further back in the shuffling line.

A dozen men—servants, Hypatia thought, or perhaps slaves newly freed—trod proudly along after the singers, and behind them came the departed, a richly dressed and bejewelled woman lying upon a narrow couch carried on the shoulders of four bearers. A dozen adults dressed in mourning followed the couch of death. The women beat their breasts and ululated their sorrow.

“They’re burying their dead in the old Roman style,” a florid-complexioned man near Hypatia gasped in horror. “And it’s a woman at that! They’re obviously pagans! Pagans, I say, and parading their foul practices around the city at a time like this!”

“And where’s the Prefect’s men when you need them? This should be stopped immediately!” declared his companion, a pale man with scanty hair and even less flesh on his bones.

“Yes, well, when you get down to it, nobody in authority particularly cares how the dead are buried, with rites or without them, Christian or pagan, just as long as they’re not in the way when they go about the streets,” his friend remarked.

“The household have obviously all lost their senses,” returned his friend.

“Nonsense! They’re just taking advantage of lack of civic order, that’s all! They should be punished!” The man picked up a stone as the musicians drew level with the small knot of onlookers.

Hypatia stepped back a few paces, offering a prayer to the gods of her country for the departed woman.

Just as the outraged pedestrian prepared to hurl his missile, a man in a filthy, hooded cloak erupted from an alley a short way up the street, dashed past the musicians, and grabbed the woman from the couch.

With a discordant clash of music and even louder screams and curses, the procession immediately halted. Several men leapt forward to grab the interloper, but the cloaked figure whirled around out of their grasp with a clumsy, dancing step.

The dead woman’s head lolled backwards, her heavy, golden necklaces bouncing on his chest as the man began to sing a mournful hymn and continued to dance, forcing the woman clasped to him to move in a mimicry of life.

The onlookers stood frozen in place, uncomprehending, faces aghast as the blasphemous scene unfolded.

Hypatia stared hard at the dancing man, but the hood drawn over his head allowed only the merest glimpse of a face that was brown and criss-crossed by a myriad of lines that reminded her of cracks on a sun-baked mud flat along the Nile.

“Demon!” one of the women mourners screamed.

“Blasphemer!”

“Kill him!” one of the musicians shrieked.

The few passing pedestrians began to gather on the corner, shouting imprecations at the dancing man and his pitiful partner.

“Desecration!”

“Stop him! Do something!”

“What’s the matter with you, you fools? There’s only one of him!”

Just as it appeared to Hypatia that the small crowd were preparing to attack the man, he dropped his victim, swayed, and toppled forward. He hit the cobblestones face down with the crack of a shattering amphora and lay there motionless.

A few brave souls sidled over to look at him.

“Take care,” someone whimpered. “It’s a demon.”

“Not so! That was nothing more than his own death fit,” remarked a new arrival knowledgeably. “That’s all it is. Sometimes people stricken with the plague have hallucinations and become quite crazed. My physician mentioned this very thing to me only yesterday and he has treated the emperor on occasion, so his word is hardly to be doubted.”

The pompous speaker nudged the demon with the toe of his boot.

Bringing it immediately back to life.

The cloaked figure leapt to its feet, flourishing the dead woman’s gold necklaces.

“You call me a demon?” the creature shouted at the horrified crowd. “Don’t you believe the dead will rise on the day of the resurrection? Which of you would refuse to dance with your savior on that glorious day? You can say I’m a fool for reminding you of your sins, but you’d do better to look around the city and tremble at the warning being given. I say, the faster off to bed, the sooner the blessed morning arrives. Today buboes, tomorrow the heavenly banquet!”

***

“Peter. I found some dill!” Hypatia called as she pattered lightly upstairs.

There was no answer. The house was silent.

The fire in the kitchen brazier was almost extinguished. Peter’s well-scrubbed pots and cooking utensils lay undisturbed on their shelf. None of the comfortingly familiar smells of a cooking meal hung in the air. A neatly jointed chicken sitting on a platter on the kitchen table was the only sign Peter had been at work.

By now the fowl should have been boiling in a pot for John’s simple evening meal. Instead, it provided a feast for a swarm of flies.

“Peter!” she called again.

There was still no reply.

A pause for thought and then the young woman ran along the hallway and upstairs to the third floor to pound on the closed door of Peter’s room.