She read my mind, or more likely my sick face.
"Don't worry, Falco, I'll bury you properly!"
XXIX
I thought I was back at the mines.
No. Another world. I had left the mines, though they will never quite leave me.
I was lying on a high, hard bed in a small square room at a legionary hospital. Unhurried footsteps sometimes paced the long corridor round the courtyard at the back of their administration block. I recognized the evil reek of antiseptic turpentine. I felt the reassuring pressure of neat, firm bandaging. I was warm. I was clean. I was resting in tranquillity in a quiet, caring place.
Yet I was terrified.
What had woken me was a trumpet on the ramparts, sounding the night watch. A fort, I could cope with a fort. I heard the spiteful squawk of sea gulls. Must be Glevum. Glevum stood on the Estuary. She had done it then. For hours now I had been asleep in the Second Augusta's big new headquarters base. The Second. I belonged to them; I was home.
I wanted to cry.
"Thinks he's back on army service," said the dryly amused voice of the procurator Flavius.
I never saw him. I was a felled log surging through warm barley soup, though my legs and arms could hardly thrash against the bumbling grains; they had filled me with poppy juice to kill the pain.
"Marcus, rest now, I've had your report from Vitalis; I've been able to act on it already. Well done!"
Gaius, my friend; my friend, who sent me there…
I struggled abruptly; someone else gripped my arm. "Hush! It's over; you're quite safe."
Helena, his niece, my enemy. My enemy, who came and fetched me back…
"Lie still, Falco; don't make such a fuss…"
The dependable vindictiveness of Helena's voice swung with me through delirium. To a freed slave, tyranny can be oddly comforting.
XXX
Awake again.
Their opium had ebbed away. When I moved pain shot back. A red tunic, brooched on one shoulder with the medical snake and staff, loomed over me, then sheered off again when I stared him in the eye. I recognized the complete absence of bedside manner: must be the chief orderly. Pupils stretched their necks behind him like awestruck ducklings jostling their mother duck.
Tell me the truth, Hippocrates!" I jested. They never tell you the truth.
He tickled me up and down my ribs like a moneychanger on an abacus. I yelped, though not because his hands were cold.
"Still in discomfort that will last several months. He can expect a great deal of pain. No real problems if he avoids getting pneumonia…" He sounded disappointed at the thought that I might. "Emaciated specimen; he's vulnerable to gangrene in this leg." My heart sank. "Best amputate, whilst he has some strength." I glared at him with a heartbreak that brightened him up. "We can give him something!" he consoled his listeners. Did you know, the main part of a surgeon's training is how to ignore the screams?
"Why not wait and see what develops!" I managed to croak.
"Your young woman asked me that' Now he sounded quite respectful; probably impressed to discover someone even more bad mannered than him.
"She's not mine! Don't insult me," I growled viciously, letting myself get annoyed over the girl as a way of fighting off what he had said. But it had to be faced. "Do what you have to then take the leg!"
I went back to sleep.
He woke me up again.
"Flavius Hilaris wants to interview you urgently. Is that all right?"
"You're the doctor."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Leave me alone."
I went back to sleep again.
They never leave you alone.
"Marcus Flavius Hilaris. He wanted me to tell him again everything about the mine that I had already passed on through Rufrius Vitalis. He was too polite to say he was taking formal evidence now in case I died under surgery but I understood.
I told him all I knew. Anything to make him go away.
As far as the plot went, Gaius told me that Triferus the contractor was refusing to talk. It was deep winter now, snow in the hills. No chance of trailing the waggons that turned south no waggons moving, probably for many weeks. Gaius would lock Triferus in a cell and abandon him; try again when I could help. I would be carried to the Sacred Springs to convalesce if I lived.
He sat for a long time at my bedside, grasping my wrist; he seemed upset. He said he had told Rome they should pay me double rates, I smiled. After thirty years of service he should have known better than to try. I remembered thinking a long time ago, it could be him! I smiled again.
I drifted back to sleep.
The surgeon was called Simplex. When they introduce themselves by name, you know the intended treatment is at best a drastic gamble and at worst very painful indeed.
Simplex had spent fourteen years in the army. He could calm a sixteen-year-old soldier with an arrow shot into his head. He could seal blisters, dose dysentery, bathe eyes, even deliver babies from the wives the legionaries were not supposed to have. He was bored with all that. I was his favourite patient now. Among his set of spatulas, scalpels, probes, shears, and forceps, he owned a shiny great mallet big enough to bash in fencing stakes. Its use in surgery was for amputations, driving home his chisel through soldiers' joints. He had the chisel and the saw too: a complete tool bag all laid out on a table by my bed.
They drugged me, but not enough. Flavius Hilaris wished me luck, then slipped out of the room. I don't blame him. If I hadn't been strapped down to the bed with four six-foot set faced cavalrymen grappling my shoulders and feet, I would have shot straight out after him myself.
Through the drugs I saw Simplex approach. I had changed my mind. Now I knew him for a knife-happy maniac. I tried to speak; no sound emerged. I tried to shout.
Someone else cried out: a woman's voice.
"Stop it at once!" Helena Justina. I had no idea when she came in. I had not realized she was there. "There's no gangrene!" stormed the senator's daughter. She seemed to lose her temper wherever she was. "I would expect an army surgeon to know gangrene has its own distinctive smell. Didius Falco's feet may be cheesy, but they're not that bad!" Wonderful woman; an informer in trouble could always count on her. "He has chilblains. In Britain that's nothing to wonder at all he needs for those is a hot turnip mash! Pull his leg as straight as you can, then leave him alone; the poor man has suffered enough!"
I passed out with relief.
They tried twice to pull my leg straight. The first time I ground the pad of cloth between my teeth in shocked silence while hot tears raced down either side of my neck. The second time I was expecting it; the second time I screamed.
Someone sobbed.
I gurgled, but before I suffocated, a hand presumably attached to one of the heavy-squad holding me down removed the pad from my mouth. I was drenched in perspiration. Someone took the trouble to wipe my face.
At the same time a shaft of piquant perfume pierced my senses, marvelous as that Regal Balsam concocted for the kings of Parthia from the essences of twenty-five individual fine oils. (I had never been there, but any spare-time poet knows about the long-haired rulers of Parthia; they are always good for enlivening a limp ode.)
It was not Regal Balsam, but still a wonderful smell. I remember thinking cheerfully, some of these fifteen-stone horse guards are not all that they appear…
XXXI
At Aquae Sulis I spent five weeks under the care of the procurator's personal physician. Hot springs gushed out of the rock at a shrine where puzzled Celts still came to dedicate coinage to Sul, gazing tolerantly at the brisk new plaque which announced that Roman Minerva was assuming management. There was that furtive atmosphere of commerce disguised as religion which always hangs around shrines. Rome had replaced some basic native equipment with a proper lead-lined reservoir, yet I could not believe that anything could ever be made of this place. Oh there were plans, but there are always plans. We sat in the reservoir, which was full of sand thrown up by the spring, drank flat, tepid water laden with foul-tasting minerals" and watched red-nosed building surveyors clambering about the cliffs, trying to convince themselves there was scope for a vibrant leisure spa.