Free Vita Brevis by Ruth Downie

Bloody Expensive , which is why he’s taken it with him.”
    Mara, pleased with the attention, laughed and waved her arms in the air. He grinned back. It was good to have an appreciative audience. His wife had been more than a little distracted lately. If she had even noticed the grazes on his sore knees, she had not bothered to comment.
    “What is expensive?” Tilla’s voice startled him.
    “Rome.” He flicked the soggy crust into the waste bucket, resisting the urge to tell her about Andromachus’s Special Improved Theriac Recipe for Nero, a man who was justifiably afraid of being poisoned. The less Tilla knew about men like Nero, or indeed men like Horatius Balbus, the better.
    Tilla held out a bowl of olives. He wiped his hands on a clean cloth. He was beginning to suspect that Kleitos had just bought the antidote mixture ready prepared whenever Balbus needed it. The gods alone knew who from. Always assuming, of course, that it was the genuine article and not just some concoction of his own that the little Greek brewed up in the kitchen when his wife wasn’t frying onions.
    She said, “That barrel outside, husband. Sabella at the bar is asking when we will move it.”
    He grunted his lack of interest and spat an olive stone into the bucket with satisfying accuracy.
    “It belongs to the other doctor, and it is starting to bring flies. She says it will put their customers off.”
    From somewhere in the distance, he heard the ninth hour sounding. “I can’t deal with it now,” he told her. “I’ve got a patient waiting.”
    “Her husband says if we can’t manage it, they can lend us a strong slave. I will ask—”
    “I’m quite capable of moving it.”
    Tilla took the baby away into the kitchen and left the olives. He called, “Have you seen a bottle of medicine anywhere back there? Dark brown, thick, smells as if it’s been scraped off the drains?”
    She had not.
    “Can you get that fire going, then? I need to make some.”
    He delved inside his medical case, brought out the jar of poppy and upended it into his palm. Nothing happened.
    “Tilla?”
    The sight of the jar brought a confession that she had used the last of it in a desperate attempt to get some sleep among the cockroaches.
    If he found the name of the theriac supplier, he might be able to hurry there and still deliver in time. He reached below the bench and pulled out the documents box again, laying out the scrolls and tablets where they would catch the light from the door. The scrolls seemed to be a collection of scraps not unlike the note he had received earlier. They contained sections of medical textbooks that Kleitos had perhaps bought cheap. He recognized a section of Celsus on dislocations, which looked and smelled as if it had been salvaged from a bonfire, with missing words added near the ragged edges in an untidy scrawl. On the back was the note Kleitos had made during their conversation about the useful properties of dock leaves. He fortified himself with more olives before tackling the note tablets.
    One or two tablets contained names that must have belonged to patients, but they were accounts for payment, not records of treatment, and Balbus’s name was not among them. Neither, for that matter, was Accius’s. Several more tablets in the same handwriting seemed to be detailed observations about anatomy. The delicate and complex bones of the wrist. How the main artery leading into the arm from the shoulder passes under the small pectoral muscle. Most of what Ruso could manage to make out seemedreassuringly sensible. He wished he had been able to spend more time with Kleitos. They could, he felt, have been friends. Perhaps one of the neighbors could suggest where to track him down so he could be asked where Balbus’s medicine came from.
    Setting the anatomy notes aside and swatting at another of the wretched flies, Ruso finally found a column of items and prices listed in quantities that could only mean he had found a record