Altar of Blood: Empire IX Read online

  He gestured to the hulking giant waiting silently beside the ex-soldier who was apparently guarding the door in the absence of the doctor’s assistant, who had failed to return to the room having summoned the patient and his associates.

  ‘Come forward, Lugos, and show the doctor here your leg.’

  The medicus studied the scars that pitted the massive thigh muscles before him, consulting a book from his shelves before voicing an opinion.

  ‘I can’t claim to be any sort of expert on the matter of wounds incurred on military service, but what I see here would appear to be a pair of arrow perforations to the upper leg that seem to have been expertly treated, presumably by a legion’s doctor, and which, given the time required, seem to have healed as well as might be expected for such intrusive damage to the muscles involved.’

  He switched from Greek to Latin.

  ‘I noticed that you limped as you crossed the room – do you have any residual pain from the wounds?’

  The giant looked at the man who was presumably his owner with a look of bafflement.

  ‘Forgive me, Doctor, my colleague here is from Britannia, and still finds our language a little difficult to understand on occasion.’

  The equestrian spoke slowly to the subject of their discussion.

  ‘Does it still hurt?’

  The big man shook his head, his voice a deep rumble.

  ‘No. Only a little stiff.’

  The doctor nodded sanguinely.

  ‘To be expected. Letting blood from around the wounds will reduce the stiffness, I diagnose. I’ll be happy to perform the procedure.’

  He sat back with a smile.

  ‘And the other matter? You mentioned childbirth? Perhaps we might start with your name, sir?’

  The equestrian nodded equably.

  ‘My name, Doctor, is Gaius Rutilius Scaurus. I was until recently the commander of the Third Gallic legion, but now I am little more than a private citizen awaiting his next imperial duty. I have been away in the east, with my colleagues here, fighting the Parthians and restoring the emperor’s rule over those parts of the empire that were disputed by our enemies.’

  The doctor inclined his head respectfully at his client’s evident eminence.

  ‘Then you are to be congratulated, sir. How might I be of service to so celebrated a client?’

  The man before him fixed him with a stare of uncompromising directness, clearly intent on communicating the seriousness of whatever it was he wished to discuss.

  ‘As I said, it is a matter of an unresolved debt, I’m afraid, a debt incurred to yourself during a matter of childbirth.’

  The doctor nodded slowly, his expression becoming suitably grave.

  ‘I think I know the matter in question, Rutilius Scaurus. A childbirth early last month?’

  ‘Yes, not far from here on the Viminal hill.’

  ‘Indeed. In truth I’d written the debt off, in the light of the lady’s unfortunate demise.’

  He paused, looking at Scaurus with the expression of a man intent on setting the right tone for their discussion.

  ‘In which case, Doctor, I may bear the resolution you had given up hope of receiving. All you have to do is ask, and I will pay you out the sum owed, plus a consideration for your lost custom this morning.’

  ‘Ah …’

  The medicus thought for a moment, then smiled with evident gratitude.

  ‘In which case I will be happy to accept twenty-five denarii for my services that fated evening and declare the slate to be wiped clean.’

  ‘You’re sure? A gold aureus will suffice?’

  The doctor nodded magnanimously, and Scaurus reached into his purse, placing a single coin on the table before him.

  ‘Then the account is paid.’

  He stood, looking down at the doctor with that same serious expression that might have been mistaken for a glare under other circumstances.

  ‘Paid from my side, that is. Having accepted my gold in return for services which, it seems, were never offered freely, there remains the question of the way in which you discharged your responsibility to your patient.’

  He raised the scroll he’d been reading in the waiting room.

  ‘A responsibility made very clear by the writings of the imperial physician Galen. There also remains the other question, as to what should be the reckoning for your evident shortcomings. How, to be blunt, you are to make amends for your errors and failures that cost a dear friend of mine her life.’

  The doctor started, sweat beading his forehead.

  ‘You took money, Doctor, for attending the birth of a child to the wife of a good friend of mine. In the course of which my friend’s wife died.’

  The other man looked up at him, his face reddening.

  ‘She died because she left it too long to call for me. It’s not my fault if my clients hold off seeking help in order to save themselves money.’

  Scaurus stood up and leaned forward, placing his bunched fists on the table and staring down intently into the doctor’s face.

  ‘Her companion sent a man to your house shortly after dark, by which time she’d been in labour for 12 hours, more or less. And you arrived when, exactly?’

  ‘Soon enough!’

  The hard-faced aristocrat shook his head slowly.

  The runner deduced your location by talking to your slaves, then tracked you down to the house of a friend where you had just started dinner and delivered the suitably worded and urgent summons to your patient’s bedside directly to you. He waited, at your instruction, and accompanied you to the lady’s house three hours later. By which time you had consumed enough wine to have made you less than steady.’

  His answer was a terse laugh.

  ‘I’d like to see you prove that. And where’s this runner, for a start—’

  He fell silent as Scaurus gestured to Cotta, who opened the consulting-room door to admit a vaguely familiar man who had been waiting outside.

  ‘Here. And the fact you don’t recognise him seems like something of a giveaway. But let us consider the facts. You tried to turn the baby and then, when that was a failure, you cut the lady open in order to conduct a caesarean birth, performing the operation with sufficient butchery that she died shortly afterwards. You were drunk—’

  ‘No!’

  The doctor had surged out of his chair, but froze when he saw the expression on Scaurus’s face, then sank back into a sitting position. When he resumed, the equestrian’s voice was cold.

  ‘You waited three hours to answer your patient’s call for help, and by the time you arrived at her house you were too drunk to operate safely. You killed the lady, as surely as if you’d handed her a cup of hemlock. Had you been working for nothing, helping a patient in distress, I might have seen fit to let the realisation of your incompetence be your punishment.’

  Silence fell over the room as the doctor stared down at the gold coin before him.

  ‘But you weren’t working for the public good, were you? You expected payment. You harassed the dead patient’s friend for the money every day for a week, and when she wouldn’t pay you, you gave coin to some aged crone to put a curse on her.’

  He dropped a thin folded sheet of bronze onto the table in front of the doctor, shaking his head in disgust.

  ‘My men found it pushed into a slot that had been gouged out of the mortar in the wall that surrounds her house, and after that it wasn’t hard to find the witch who’d placed it there. She retracted the curse quickly enough, of course, when the alternative became clear to her. Indeed she very promptly replaced it with one directed to yourself.’ He tossed a second bronze wafer onto the table before the doctor. ‘I believe it suggests that you turn your instruments on your own body, which I found rather instructive. Funny how we take inspiration from the most unlikely of sources, isn’t it?’

  Turning away from the sweating physician, he walked to the other end of the room before turning back to face the object of his ire.

  ‘My
travels to the east took me to Nisibis, a city with a substantial population of Christians, and while I’m sworn to the service of Mithras, I’m not above talking to followers of other religions, if only to understand what motivates them. I soon enough realised that they’re not all that different from we followers of the one true faith, especially in the area of their beliefs about retaliative justice. The one phrase they have that really struck me the first time I heard it was their idea of “an eye for an eye”. If you wrong me, the same wrong should be visited back upon you. How do you find that concept, Doctor?’

  The medicus looked up at him in disbelief.

  ‘You can’t—’

  ‘No indeed, I can’t. The obvious repercussions might well lead to an equally harsh penalty being visited upon me, were I to be implicated in your murder. But that’s of no concern, because I don’t intend killing you. I’m going to leave that to you. After all, you’re the expert in the field of inflicting death.’

  The doctor shook his head slowly.

  ‘You expect me to … kill myself?’

  Scaurus pursed his lips and shrugged.

  ‘It may seem a little outlandish, I suppose. But let’s consider the facts, leaving aside any debate as to whether you were responsible for your patient’s death. Or rather one simple fact. You see, the good lady in question was married to a young man who has been blessed and cursed in life. Blessed with quite remarkable skills with a blade and having been born as Marcus Valerius Aquila, the son of a family wealthy enough to develop that talent, but equally cursed by the destruction of that family on false charges of treason. So now he’s forced to live under an assumed name, as Marcus Tribulus Corvus, a wanted man, while the emperor who condemned his family to death uses their rather grand villa on the Appian Way as his country palace.’

  The doctor shook his head with a horrified expression.

  ‘Why … why are you telling me these things?! Stop it, I don’t want to—’

  ‘You don’t want to know because it makes you party to a felony that could see you executed if you don’t promptly inform on the man. Don’t worry, it won’t come to that.’

  He stared at the doctor until he was sure the other man wasn’t going to open his mouth again.

  ‘So, to continue my story, my friend was just starting to find a place for himself in the sun again, with the love of a good woman, when you managed to undo all that by bringing about the death of his wife. I didn’t bring him with me today because, to be frank, I’m not sure I could have kept him from killing you as soon as he laid eyes on you. Which would have been temporarily satisfying for all of us, but also a little self-defeating in terms of the consequences. So, as you can see, I’m actually doing you a favour in allowing you to choose the way you’re going to leave this life, once you’ve written a note explaining why you’re doing it in order to obviate any responsibility that might cling to myself and my colleagues. You can slit your wrists if you like, we’ve all the time needed to make sure you do the job right. Or perhaps a swift-acting poison would suit you better? I’m sure you’ve something suitable in your medicine pots. So, either you choose, or I will.’

  He looked down at the doctor in silence for a moment.

  ‘Making sure that you’re dead before we leave isn’t going to do the lady’s husband much good, obviously, since it won’t bring her back, but it will stop him brooding on yet another person he needs to bring to bloody justice. It’s a long enough list without adding your name to it. And besides, nobody wants to spend the rest of their short span of days looking over their shoulder for the man who’ll end it for them, do they? Were you to have avoided death today you’d only have spent the rest of what’s left of your life dying small deaths a dozen times a day, every time someone caught your eye or jostled you in the street. This way really is so much kinder. So, what’s it going to be, Doctor?’

  Scaurus took a sideways look at his subordinate as the two men sat waiting for their summons into the imperial chamberlain’s presence. Marcus kept his gaze fixed on the mural on the room’s far side, the painted figures illuminated by the soft glow of the late afternoon sun through a window above their heads, his lips twitching into a humourless half smile.

  ‘Don’t worry, Legatus. I’m not going to tear Marcus Aurelius Cleander’s throat out. Not today.’

  The older man returned his own stare to the painting before them, grimacing at the artist’s representation of two lines of men facing off across an open piece of ground with half a dozen bodies strewn between the two forces.

  ‘I’ve often wondered just who advises these artists as to what happens in a battle. Anyone who’s never served the empire could go away with the impression that it’s a big game of push and shove, and that we all walk away afterwards.’

  The two men stared at the bloodless scene in silence until Marcus turned his head to look at his superior.

  ‘Cotta told me what you did to Felicia’s doctor this morning …’

  Scaurus shrugged, his smile bleak.

  ‘Disappointed you weren’t there to watch him die? We all take revenge in our own ways, and I knew that mine was likely to be a good deal more subtle than yours, and less likely to invite the attention of the city authorities. Whether we like it or not, our only outward reaction to this outrage has to be one of stoic acceptance of the fates that the gods visit upon us. And besides, your wife was a friend of mine too.’

  A tunic-clad slave crossed the chamber and stopped before them with a bow.

  ‘The Chamberlain will see you now, gentlemen. Please follow me.’

  As he led them towards the door that led into Cleander’s office, he spoke softly over his shoulder, a hint of caution in his voice.

  ‘I gather you’ve been away for a year, Legatus, in which case I should advise you that the chamberlain has come to favour open shows of respect in his audiences with supplicants such as yourselves. A bow, perhaps, or—’

  Scaurus nodded tersely.

  ‘The power does it to them all, given enough time. And I do not consider myself to be that man’s supplicant …’

  Ignoring the slave’s raised eyebrow, he led Marcus into the audience chamber past a pair of armed Praetorians who closed the doors behind them. Seated before them, on the far side of a desk large enough to have served as a bed for two people given a mattress, the imperial chamberlain was writing on a sheet of paper, intent on the words he was inking onto the smooth, pale surface. He spoke without looking up, the quill tracking across the silky smooth surface without interruption.

  ‘One moment, gentlemen.’

  Scaurus stared hard at him for a moment before snapping to attention, his example swiftly followed by Marcus, and waiting impassively while the man who effectively ran the empire completed his message, passing it to his letters slave for folding and sealing.

  ‘For immediate dispatch to the governor of Germania Inferior.’

  The slave bowed respectfully.

  ‘And to be carried by a different messenger to the other letter, Chamberlain?’

  Cleander smiled glacially, with very little humour evident.

  ‘I think so. Best not to risk the two being mixed up.’

  He looked up at Scaurus, sitting back in his chair in silence for a moment.

  ‘It has become customary for the granting of an audience with the imperial chamberlain to be acknowledged by some small show of respect, Legatus.’

  Scaurus nodded.

  ‘Your appointments secretary was good enough to suggest it to us, Chamberlain.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘I chose to ignore his suggestion.’

  Cleander grinned broadly, lounging back in his chair.

  ‘And that’s what I like about you, Rutilius Scaurus. No pretence, nothing but the most blunt of opinions stated in such a matter-of-fact way that only the most irascible of men could take offence. And trust me, a year of governing this empire on behalf of a man like Commodus has been more than enough to make me irascible.’

&nb
sp; He opened his arms to highlight the fact that the three men were alone.

  ‘Under which circumstances I would have at least expected some appreciation of the fact that you have my undivided attention? No bodyguards, no Praetorians to stand between us …’

  ‘Nobody to overhear whatever it is that you want from us this time? Besides, we know you well enough. Were we to offer you violence your revenge would be spectacular in both reach and method.’

  The chamberlain smiled again, shaking his head in an affectation of sadness.

  ‘Cynical, Legatus. But true enough. So, to business.’

  He reached for a waiting sheet of paper covered in script, dipping his quill into a small gold pot of ink and signing it.

  ‘You are hereby discharged from the rank of legatus, with the heartfelt thanks of a grateful emperor for having managed to quell the threat from the Parthians and secured the status of our colony of Nisibis.’

  Looking up from the paper for a moment, he nodded soberly.

  ‘A job genuinely well done, by the way. I read your report of the battle you fought with the King of Kings’ son and his allies, and it seems as if you provided the man with the most salutary of military lessons. I also noted that this young man’s diplomatic efforts seem to have resulted in a fresh lease of life for the current holder of the Parthian throne, one way or another, which is very much to the liking of the men who advise me on these matters, given his age and disinclination towards war. All in all, an excellent result.’

  Scaurus nodded tersely.

  ‘However …?’

  Cleander nodded.

  ‘Indeed … however. In the short time between your arrival in Antioch and your departure for the border with Parthia, you seem to have caused no small degree of upset among the men of the senatorial class with whom you interacted.’

  He waited for Scaurus to comment, and when the soldier showed no signs of doing so a hint of irritation crept into his voice.