Free Four for a Boy by Mary Reed, Eric Mayer Page B

been here a week or so ago. A man was brought in with the worst case of mortification I’ve ever seen. It was a miracle he wasn’t dead already. I had to take his leg off.”
    “Very inconvenient for you, I’d imagine.”
    Gaius sighed. “You military men have it easy. One clean thrust is all your job requires. Try sawing through a femur as fast as you can, before your patient wakes up and starts screaming. And how do you suppose he came to be in such a state?”
    Felix admitted he had no notion.
    “Got into a fight over a girl. He’ll certainly be a bit less hot-headed after he hops out of here, if he survives. Not that he’ll be fighting over women. They like their men with all their members. He claimed he was a soldier, but he must have been incompetent to lose a knife fight to a civilian. No more military campaigns for him.”
    “He’ll leave well equipped to succeed as a beggar,” Felix pointed out. “A missing leg’s much more effective for getting sympathy and a coin or two than any amount of rubbing dirt into sores or borrowing malformed babies or cutting chunks of flesh out of the face.”
    Gaius stared at the instruments in the bowl. “You’d have more sympathy if you had my job, Felix. We see innumerable children. Not that long ago we had one poor child brought in whose head was crushed in a cart accident. Often there’s nothing you can do but watch them die, wash them down, and send them home for burial. At least Hypatius saw a few years!”
    “Yes, yes, I do see your point,” Felix replied. “But, as I said, we need to speak to the doorkeeper.”
    Gaius finally fell silent and led them down corridors as difficult to navigate as the Bosporos, thanks to the patients lining them, some leaning against the walls and others stretched out on the floor. They crossed a bare courtyard where untainted air swirled briefly around their faces. Then they plunged back into the warm, malodorous atmosphere of the far wing. John glanced into the doorless cell-like rooms they passed. Each contained three or four patients lying on thin pallets under threadbare blankets. Even so, he reflected, many must be in better quarters than wherever they lived outside the hospice.
    In one room, a cluster of solemn children stood around an emaciated, white-bearded man who lay comatose, his face covered in sores. Stentorian breathing rattled in his throat. In his mercenary days, John had heard the sound often from the lips of the dying. The man was not long for the world.
    Gaius showed the two men into a room no different from the rest except that it was so narrow that it had space for only two pallets. Only one was currently occupied. Perhaps, John mused, the doorkeeper’s roommate had just been discharged, either from the hospice or from earthly pain, and that very recently. After ascertaining that the room’s sole occupant was awake and lucid, Gaius left.
    “Come by when you have a free hour or so,” he told Felix on his way out. “We’ll resume our tour of the city’s taverns.”
    John had only glimpsed the wounded doorkeeper in the Great Church. There the old man had been nothing more than a pile of discarded robes in the shadows. Here, swathed in a coverlet, he appeared not much different. His thin, leathery face reminded John of a preserved holy relic.
    “Who are you, good sirs?” The doorkeeper’s eyes were bloodshot. His gaze darted back and forth between his visitors in terrified fashion.
    Felix made his usual introduction. His mention of the Prefect elicited a peep of horror. “And what is your name?”
    “Demetrios.”
    “You were one of the doorkeepers on duty the day that the man Hypatius was murdered in the Great Church?”
    “My job was to guard the door. Not the vestibule. The villains stabbed me too.” The man pulled himself up into a sitting position, revealing wrists as thin as a kalamos. He was shaking.
    “I’m sure you’re not responsible in any way for Hypatius’ death, Demetrios. We just