Vita Brevis (37 page)

Accius said, “I’d put a spy in to open the gates.” Seeing the look on her face, he added, “Create a diversion at the front and send men with ladders up over the walls.”

The diversion would be easy enough. For a moment she wondered if Accius could persuade the night watch to lend them a tall ladder, but then she supposed they would send men with it, and the watch were surely not allowed to break into a house unless … “We could set fire to something,” she said. That was how the soldiers forced people out of their houses at home.

When Accius said straightaway, “There’s no thatch,” she knew he must have been thinking the same thing. “Besides, they’ve got water. They’ll put it out.”

He strode back down the alley to the point where she had heard the fountain. “Doctor!”

The yell was so loud it made her jump.

“Ruso, this is Accius. Are you in there? Ruso? I need to talk to you!”

“We have come for the doctor!” Tilla shouted, her own voice weak by comparison. There were other, more useful things she
could have shouted, but only if she could be certain who was listening. Otherwise she could make things very much worse. “The doctor is needed at home! There is a patient!”

A couple of pigeons fluttered up over the walls and flew away, but if any humans heard, none of them responded.

“This is hopeless,” said Accius.

Esico said something she did not catch. She asked him to repeat it.

“We do not need to burn the house, mistress,” he said. “Only the door.”

“There are too many people about,” she explained. “And that door will take hours to burn.”

“But the smoke and the smell go through the cracks,” he said in a way that told her he had seen it done. “And then what will the man inside do?”

Elysium. Paradise. Heaven. This was what all those inadequate words were trying to describe. He was a part of it at last. The joyful serenity that he had never understood, but secretly longed to share.

How he pitied the poor unbeliever that he had once been. How he pitied all the others, with their wizened brains and their tricky questions. If only they could see all the troubles of the anxious world in their proper place, as he did now.

An urgent thought came to him. He must share this. He must write it down. Others must know. Tilla. And the little wriggly one, whatever her name was.

But the voices were getting louder, starting to distract him with idle chatter. Something seized his shoulder and shook it. He tried to tell them to stop, but his throat was dry and nothing came out.

“He’s waking up! Run and fetch my cousin.”

He tried to say
No, I was awake then, but you are dragging me back into this body
.

Footsteps. A door banged. A voice said, “Water.”

Blessed coolness was splattering across his parched lips but he pressed them shut. He must not be distracted. He must write it all down before—

“Take some water, Doctor,” a voice urged him. “It will do you good.”

A blurry face leaning over him, dark eyebrows and a faint gritty cascade of—was that ash falling on his skin? Then the water again.

He managed to raise a hand but he was not strong enough to push the cup away. A soft voice said, “He doesn’t want it.”

“It’ll do him good,” said the first voice. “Not that he deserves it.”

A hand took hold of his. The soft voice said, “Welcome back, Doctor. We were afraid we’d lost you.”

And then he was struggling to the surface, knowing something but not knowing why he knew it. He squinted upward. Faces. One, two, three faces. The one with the eyebrows. He was holding the water. The dark-haired girl with black around her wrist. And Metellus. Always Metellus, watching from the shadows.

Ruso said, “The water—”

“Here,” The man was holding out the cup again.

More faces appeared: a skeleton still in his skin and a girl whose face held all the flesh that her companion lacked. The skeleton wanted to know what was happening.

Good question.

He had only to open his lips and liquid would soothe his rasping tongue and cool his throat. The man tipped it toward him. He turned his head away. “The water,” he said, feeling it trickle over his jaw and down behind one ear. “Where from?”

“Firmicus brought it for you from the fountain,” the soft voice said. “He thought you would be thirsty when you woke up.”

“Don’t want it. Don’t drink it.”

The man with the water said, “He’s still groggy. He’ll be all right in a moment.”

And then, with a huge effort, Ruso managed to pull himself up onto one elbow and say, “Nobody drink the water. You, um—”

“Horatia,” she prompted.

“You get some fresh. New cup.”

“The mistress does not fetch water!” said the man.

“Fresh from the spout,” he said, collapsing back onto whatever was underneath him and trying to remember how he knew that the man with the drink was dangerous.

Anyone who glanced down the alleyway beside Balbus’s house would know those people were up to no good: two slaves, a smart young man, and a blond woman all huddled around something on the ground, whispering. But unlike a real fortress, Balbus’s house had no guards on patrol, and anyone who saw anything suspicious had more sense than to interfere.

Accius’s man bought the oil from a supplier farther along the street and the basket from the shop next door, where he also managed to beg for dry offcuts of willow and reed to fill it. Tilla tore a linen cloth into strips and then pulled out her knife and cut the strips into small pieces. Accius struck the spark from the steel in his purse, remarking that if there was one thing soldiering had taught him, it was never to be without fire.

Nobody seemed to notice the clean flame in the sunlight. The slave carried the basket around the corner and knelt to place it in front of the door before standing casually in front of it, chatting to his master and a gangly youth with a black eye. Then Tilla dropped on the handful of weeds that Esico had fetched, and joined the others just as thick stinking smoke began to rise, along with shouts of alarm from the shops and people in the street.

The broom and the flapping cloths were easy enough to beat aside in the confusion, the owners of stamping feet not hard to knock off balance while more people were piling in to help and everyone was shouting at everyone else to be careful and get out of the way. Somewhere in the house, a bell was clanging. And then she heard Accius shout, “Now!” and through the smoke she saw the door open and Accius lunge forward just as the torrent of water came out and hit him. She screamed, “No!” and tried to claw her way forward but someone knocked her aside and the door was closing again and Accius was still on this side of it and she could not get there in time and—

And a big figure was shouldering his way in, his high-pitched voice sounding above the uproar, “Undertaker to see the steward!”

They slipped in unhindered in the wake of Squeaky, who reached up and stilled the bell. “Undertaker to see the steward,” he repeated, and the doorman, stumbling backward away from him, said, “Just wait there, sir,” but nobody did.

Several household slaves were running toward them, with Firmicus striding along behind.

Squeaky said, “I need a word with you.”

Firmicus looked at him for a moment, then ordered everyone else back to work. Meanwhile Horatia came running across the entrance hall and flung herself into Accius’s wet arms. “I knew you would come! I knew it!” The little woman who cried, “Mistress Horatia!” in shocked tones might as well not have bothered.

Tilla said, “Where is my husband?” but nobody answered. So she ran past Accius and the others, calling for him in the entrance hall, and past all the statues and out into the second courtyard, and there he was, being dragged toward the fountain by Metellus.

“Leave him alone!”

His clothes were creased, his hair was sticking up, and he was grinning at her as if he were a small boy. She held him tight and he started to giggle.

Metellus said, “It’s the medicine. He says it’ll wear off.”

“It’s all right,” her husband assured her, reaching out to cup one hand under a stream of the fountain and slurping the water before wiping his wet palm over his face. “It’s all right. It was just ordinary
poppy all along.” He glanced around before leaning closer to whisper, “Got to watch out for the steward.”

“I know,” she told him. “That’s what Kleitos said to Simmias. I came to tell you.”

He blinked. “Say that that again,” he said. “Slowly.”

It did not take Accius long to decide that since he was an aristocrat and a former military tribune and a man, he must be in charge. He unwound himself from Horatia, who was now very damp, gave his doctor a friendly slap on the shoulder that nearly knocked him over, and announced that he needed a word with the skull-faced cousin. The cousin muttered something about him being banned and about needing another bodyguard—and where was that steward when he was wanted?—but nobody seemed to take any notice. All the staff had either vanished or were scuttling about, making themselves look busy. When Horatia followed them into her father’s old study to hear the word Accius was about to have, her cousin did not even try to send her away.

Tilla stood close to her husband as he scooped more water from the fountain spout. Gellia, very pale, was leaning over the opposite side and gazing at the fish as if she had nothing better to do. Esico was standing awkwardly by a pillar, trying to hide his black eye while he waited to be given orders. Metellus had disappeared, but he was like a pet snake: If you knew he was out of his cage somewhere you could never rest easy.

There was a cup abandoned on the marble seat. Tilla stepped
across to collect it and Gellia suddenly seemed to wake up. “Not that one, miss.” The girl hurried across and snatched it from her. “I’ll get you a clean one.”

Tilla supposed that was the way they did things in a house with too many servants. People did not even know how to rinse a cup for themselves. She took her husband by the arm. “This is the last time you take your own medicine.”

“It was only a very low dose of poppy.”

“It could have killed you! Look at you! You are not even used to taking it like that man would have been.”

“Only poppy,” he repeated, grinning at her. “Four times the minimum dose, but only…”

“That was what I told you all along,” she said, not entirely certain that she had. “Now, talk to me about that steward.”

“Kleitos said not to trust him.”

“I just told you that! What else do you know?”

So then he explained, with pauses to collect his thoughts that made her want to poke him to hurry him up.

When Gellia returned with the cup Tilla passed it to her husband and told her to stay.

“I need to talk to you about Latro.”

Gellia raised her chin. “I am not talking about him.”

“Yes, you are. This is important.” Tilla was ashamed not to have seen the lie for herself yesterday. Nor even when she had repeated the story to her husband over breakfast. “Who told Latro that he would be freed in the master’s will?”

Gellia frowned. “The master, I suppose.”

“Think very hard about this, Gellia. Do you think it is likely that a master who depends on someone to help him stay alive would tell that someone that he will benefit from the master’s death?”

Gellia did indeed look as though she was thinking very hard about it, possibly because she did not understand the question.

“Gellia, if I am your master and you are my bodyguard, will I tell you that things will go well for you if I die?”

“Oh, I see!”

“Are you quite sure it was the master?”

She was not. She had just supposed it must be.

“And if it was not the master, who was it?”

She said in a very small voice, “The only one who would know what was in the will was Firmicus.”

The empty cup clapped down onto the side of the fountain. “That’s what I thought as well,” Ruso said. “The two men guarding Balbus when he died.”

“Husband, not now!”

He said it anyway. “The steward who knew he would benefit from the death, and the bodyguard who …” He paused, scratched his head, and said, “The bodyguard who thought he would be freed too.”

Gellia said, “Latro always looked after the master, he wouldn’t…”

Tilla said, “My husband is just guessing.”

But all the remaining color had drained from Gellia’s face. Tilla reached out to take her arm but she spun away out of reach, racing across the courtyard and thundering up a wooden staircase. Tilla followed. By the time they reached the room beyond the courtyard balcony she was already shouting, “You! It was you! You made him do it!”

Tilla caught a glimpse of Firmicus and Squeaky staring at Gellia from either side of a pile of denarii before the slave girl stepped forward, and the desk rose up and silver coins were glinting in the air all around them and pattering over the floor like hail.

Gellia would have done better to press home the attack. Instead she faltered, hands covering her mouth, staring at what she had done.

Firmicus stood without speaking, and righted the fallen table. His eyes were cold. Gellia took a step backward.

“Get back to work,” he told her, adding in a voice that Tilla could barely hear, “I’ll have you brought to me later.”

Accius strode into the steward’s office looking even more annoyed than usual. Meanwhile Horatia and her cousin had followed him up the steps. By the time Firmicus finished counting out the money he had rescued from the floor, the little room was crammed with people, and Ruso, who had got there before them, had to shift farther along to let them in.

Despite being only two paces away, Squeaky seemed not to have recognized either him or Tilla. Perhaps the big man was hoping they might mistake him for somebody else. When Firmicus handed him the newly filled purse he twisted the drawstring around his wrist, cupped the weight in his palm, and blundered toward the door.

To Ruso’s surprise Tilla stepped into Squeaky’s path. “What is that money for?”

Firmicus said, “Payment for the master’s funeral.”