Free Arthur Britannicus by Paul Bannister Page A

was in the base hospital at Mainz, a place sunlit in the summer mornings, cool in the day’s heat, in a room that smelled pleasantly of the lemons used to repel moths; a haven soothed by the murmuring of bees in the herb garden outside. He spent his days asleep or drowsing, healing gangrene-free, passing the time in a drifting half-world of hurt and recovery. Several weeks went by. He’d made a few tries to walk the quadrangle but putting weight on the mutilated foot was still painful and he’d always have a limp, he supposed, but he was healing. 
    One person was largely responsible for the soldier’s recovery. Campana, a female pharmacist who was a Briton like himself, took a special interest in the big man and used her considerable skills to help him through the process of healing. She gave him henbane and poppy seed to ease his wounds, cleaned them daily with sour wine, hyssop and comfrey and re-bandaged them with fresh Spanish linen.  She eased with infusions of Illyrican iris the terrible headaches that beset him and made concoctions of herbs for other specifics. She employed sage to reduce his fevers, created a broth of ginger to ease inflammation, gave him wild cucumber to control pain and a broth of thyme for nausea. She used plenty of fennel, that herb favoured by gladiators, which they believed gave them courage and stamina, as a general tonic, and she flavoured his food with expensive pepper brought far overland from the Indies to Baghdad and onwards to the northern Italian trading centre of Ticinum. Satisfied with her efforts, she watched with proprietary pride as the soldier’s condition improved, week by week.  
    Carausius also took daily hot baths in salt water, to ease his many aches and pains. The medical care, the rest and the excellent barracks food, which included ham, venison, cheese, and plentiful vegetables all combined to help the injured man recover his strength and speed his recovery. Campana supplemented the barracks diet with soup made with barley and beef marrow, and sometimes with expensive but tasty chicken broth, which his nurse insisted had healing qualities. She also gave him a good supply of figs, olives and fermented fish sauce imported from Italy, delicacies she successfully employed to tempt his appetite.  The pharmacist had been to Italy and in one of their many conversations - in which they enjoyed speaking in their native British - spoke with awe of a feast she’d attended at the villa of a wealthy prefect. Swans, geese and duck were cooked  and served whole, she reported, with boiled parsnips, all of it served on vast platters and in great style. One note jarred her, though. The Romans ate it with their hands, she told him, with a small moue of distaste.
    But the feast!  She recalled it in loving detail. It had included a whole roasted wild boar, juniper sausage, cakes stuffed with live figpeckers, peas stewed in honey, and edible dormice covered in poppy seeds and honey. Her favourite dish had been a fruit sauce of damsons, prunes and dates from Jericho, she said. Carausius, now rested and relatively free of pain, was relaxed and mellow. He teased his nurse with his own tales of feasting. Once, he told her a story of ordering a lobster and being served with a crustacean possessed of only one claw. “I asked the slave; ‘why does this creature only have one claw?’ and he told me it had been in a fight and lost the other,” he said.
    “What did you say?” Campana obligingly asked.
    Solemnly, Carausius said, “I told him to bring me the winner.”
    He spoke, too, of the old Roman Marcus Gavius Apicius, a fabulously wealthy man with a big kitchen staff and an adventurous palate. “Seneca himself wrote of the appetites of Apicius,” Carausius told her. “He ate omelettes made with jellyfish; he consumed minced dolphin, boiled parrot and herb-stuffed mouse. He considered brine-pickled sows’ wombs a delicacy and he invented the world’s most expensive dish: a pie