Free Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell Page A

sacrifice not two, but four cocks to Aesculapius!” exclaimed Diodorus, weak with relief. “And to his messenger, the glorious, light-footed Mercury, two hecatombs!”
     
    He swung to his physician, and forgetting he was master of this inscrutable slave, he seized his hand, blinking his eyes to keep back his tears. “Ah, Keptah, ask what you will! It shall be granted instantly for this night’s work!”
     
    Keptah paused as Diodorus wrung his hand. He reflected that only opportunistic men sought profit from what was not their own. But slaves had no other choice but expediency. He said, so softly that his lips hardly moved, “My freedom, Master.”
     
    Diodorus was taken aback. He compressed his mouth; he glared blackly at his slave. “Ah,” he said, in a threatening voice, “you would take advantage of my emotion, natural to a father?”
     
    Keptah shrugged. “It was you who suggested it, Master, not I,” he answered.
     
    Diodorus’ short hair bristled with that sudden anger of his. The nostrils of his beaked nose flared. Suspicion glittered in his eyes. “What a sleek rascal you are, Keptah! You know that it is promised to my father that you shall be given your freedom when you are forty-five years old, and enough gold for your ease. You would have me break my promise to my father?”
     
    Keptah could not hold back a smile at this sophistry, and seeing that smile, Diodorus felt greater anger, and considerable sheepishness. He flung away Keptah’s hand, pulled his shoulders heavily up to his ears, and stood obstinately, like a lowering bull. He attempted to stare his slave down, with umbrage. But Keptah stood in quiet dignity, fingering a fold of his robe.
     
    Diodorus forgot his sleeping daughter for a moment and shouted, “Very well, then, scoundrel! So be it. In a few days you shall go with me to the praetor.” He shook his thick finger in Keptah’s face. “But only on this contract, that you remain with me voluntarily until I dismiss you.”
     
    “Did you think I would desert you, Master?” asked Keptah, as if marveling. “Besides, is it not ordained that I remain in this house and teach the son of Aeneas?”
     
    But Diodorus was not appeased. He fumed, trying to intimidate the other. Keptah was not intimidated. “The praetor and you, Master, will no doubt agree on a just stipend, which I should prefer to suggest.”
     
    Diodorus was about to burst out again when he felt Aurelia’s fingers on his sweating arm. She was smiling up at him; her cheeks were ripe again, and a dimple twinkled beside her mouth. She looked like a girl, seated on the edge of her child’s bed, and her hair was curling moistly on her forehead and shoulders. “Never shall it be said of the noble Diodorus that he broke a promise,” she murmured.
     
    Her appearance, her love, touched Diodorus’ secretly soft heart. But it was necessary not to betray such an unmilitary weakness. He flung up his hands in a gesture of rageful surrender. “I have said, so be it!” he cried. “I shall also say that I despise an exigent man, be he master or slave. Keptah, I have respected you; now I have contempt for you.”
     
    “The contempt of such as you, Master, is worth the honor of all other men,” said Keptah, and Aurelia laughed aloud, as if with delight.
     
    Keptah waited for his dismissal, and when it was given he bowed deeply to Diodorus and Aurelia, and went at once to his own locked pharmacy, where he compounded his potions and ointments, and where he kept his powdered bodies and organs of animals and insects and strange herbs and dried blossoms and inorganic substances about which no other physicians knew, except those like himself.
     
    This pharmacy was part of his own quarters, far from the quarters of the other slaves. It was not necessary to warn them away; they were terrified of Keptah and his abstruse air and stateliness. They were even more terrified of the magic behind that locked door. They whispered that he