Dear and Glorious Physician (21 page)

The physician held her in too much honor to lie to her. He said, “Lady, suppose it is the wish of Diodorus that you survive and the child die?”

Her puffed and blood-streaked lips smiled sadly. “The child will comfort him. And he will have another consolation, and I bless that consolation, and if it is permitted me when I cross the Styx I shall pray for his happiness. For he has been more to me than father and mother, brother and sister and child.”

Keptah bowed to her with the reverence one gives to a goddess, and held the goblet to her lips, and she drank the contents in one painful swallow, for her throat was constricted. Then over Keptah’s shoulder she saw someone, and her glazed eyes immediately became intent, yet deeply loving and pleading. Keptah followed her long glance and saw that Iris had come into the room, wrapped in white wool against the chill, her golden braids flowing almost to her knees.

The Grecian woman came at once to Aurelia, and smoothed the wet dark hair with gentle solicitude, her blue eyes studying the cyanotic and bloated face of the sufferer. Aurelia forgot everyone else in the room but her friend. She lifted her shaking hand and took Iris’ hand, and between the two women passed an eloquent if unheard exchange.

Then Aurelia fell back on her cushions and looked straightly at Keptah. “It is said that Julius Caesar was cut from his mother’s dying womb in order to save his life. Can you not do this to me? What is my life compared with my husband’s happiness?”

“What I have given you will induce almost immediate labor, Lady,” said Keptah, avoiding her eyes. “The result is with God only.”

“But the child is far from term,” groaned the unhappy lady.

“Not too far, hardly less than seven weeks,” said the physician. “I have seen younger survive.”

Lucanus came into the chamber and stood beside the physician, his face streaked with the evidence of his tears. He and his mother filled the room with beauty and stateliness and stature, and even the tall and patrician Keptah was diminished. The cool late winter wind blew out the curtain at the window. Covered brass bowls of hot embers were wrapped in wool and placed about Aurelia’s convulsed body. Her mind brightened as death approached. Iris knelt beside her, for Aurelia would not release her hand. She said to the freed-woman, in a feeble voice, “All that I have I deliver to you. Do not weep. You have been my friend, and friends are more than birth, more than money, more than station, more even than Rome itself. I beg of you what you will give in any event: devotion and love, and all your heart.”

Lucanus, standing beside the waiting Keptah, was confusedly amazed. What was this that Aurelia was telling his mother? What meant this strange and cryptic conversation, and why did his mother only cry silently and not question? Then he forgot all this in his passionate concern for Aurelia, for a change had come over her face, a starkness as though she were listening to something only she could hear with her soul. Her swollen body grew instantly rigid, and she threw out her arms, arched her back in a sudden convulsion. Her neck stretched, her shoulders raised themselves, and a vast subterranean groan came less from her throat than somewhere deep in her flesh. Her eyes protruded; her tongue lashed at her purpling lips.

“Watch,” said Keptah in a low voice to Lucanus. He threw aside the rugs on the bed and turned back Aurelia’s shift. The mounded bluish belly, veined like marble, was palpitating strongly; muscular waves ran over it. Then from her birth canal there issued a swift gush of mingled blood and water, and the chamber was filled with the smell of it. Keptah thrust his long lean fingers into the poor lady’s body, and she groaned again, and Iris took both the writhing hands and held them tightly. One of the nurses began to whimper, and the other two fell on their knees and helplessly prayed. Now Aurelia gave herself up to a steady groaning until the sound seemed part of the chamber itself, and part of the equinoctial wind.

Lucanus knew what to do. He pressed both his hands at the top of the mound and rhythmically assisted the rippling muscles in their attempts to thrust the child from its mother’s flesh. But the muscles were strictured by Aurelia’s convulsions; they were like resisting iron under Lucanus’ hands. He closed his eyes and let his sensitive hands and fingers do their office, and when a muscular wave weakened he gave it his strength.

The convulsions of Aurelia’s disease were preventing the child’s delivery, but still Keptah hesitated before the awful thing he now knew he must do. He had a most terrible decision to make. The child would most probably die upon delivery, or be born dead. Still, there was a chance it would be a viable birth, and a slighter chance that the child would survive. In order that this could happen, however, the convulsed cervix would have to be enlarged by the knife and the child forcibly delivered. Aurelia, then, would die of hemorrhage, her parts severed. The child’s head could not be reached by forceps in this present condition, for it had not as yet descended to the mouth of the womb because of its prematurity, and also the convulsions of Aurelia’s body. Worse still, Keptah now believed, on a fresh examination, that the child was presenting itself improperly in a breech position. “Oh, my God!” he moaned aloud.

On a signal from Keptah, Lucanus put his ear to Aurelia’s heaving breast. He looked with alarm at the physician, for the lady’s heart was perceptibly weaker, even though it bounded like a terrorized thing. Moreover, Aurelia’s agony was becoming more than she could bear. When Lucanus saw Keptah’s dusky and trembling hand reaching for a short sharp knife he bit his lip strongly, and he was filled with a wild and impotent rage.

He bent over Aurelia then, and took her icily wet face in his hands. By force of his will he brought her glaring eyes to his, and he began to murmur hypnotically. “You have no pain,” he repeated, over and over. “The pain has gone. You are very sleepy and tired. The pain has gone — you are very sleepy — you are relaxing — the pain has gone — you will sleep now.....”

Aurelia saw his eyes and heard his voice. His eyes were like brilliant blue moons to her, swimming in darkness. They filled all the universe, brightening instant by instant. And everything rocked gently to his voice; she could feel that she was floating on a lightless but infinitely comforting sea, without pain. A blissful sensation encompassed her, a lightness, a delivery from anguish. All was explained, all was understood, all was joy and peace. She did not feel the slashing of the knife in her vitals, nor the cataract of her blood. She was without body. She smiled, and the smile seemed to be returned from some far depth that was rising to meet her, a depth pervaded by love and tenderness and compassion. “Mama,” she said faintly, and with contentment, and then she was still.

Lucanus lifted his head and looked at Keptah, and he was filled with the very corroding gall of bitterness. “She has gone,” he said.

But Keptah was drawing the legs of the infant from the mother’s body, thin, grotesquely bent legs, small to doll-likeness, and bluish. Now its minute belly appeared with increasing speed, then its tiny chest, and then its blood-wet head, hardly larger than an apple. Its face was a wax face, streaked with blood, as was all of its body, and the puppet eyes were closed, its mouth breathless.

Then the child lay between its mother’s dead legs, as motionless as she and in a pool of her blood. Iris put her head beside Aurelia’s still cheek, and her wails filled the room in which the groaning had ceased, and it was like a continuation of the lamentable sound.

It was over; none of the lives had been saved. Keptah covered his face with his hands as he knelt at the foot of the bed. Lucanus straightened up rigidly. His very body seemed to burst with cold fury and detestation and outrage. Two had died meaninglessly, and for no good purpose. Two, again, had been done to death by the savage hand of God. “No!” cried Lucanus, vehemently. “No!”

He ran to the foot of the bed and lifted the unbreathing child in his arms. For an instant its lightness appalled him. It weighed less than the puppet he had given Rubria years ago. Its flesh was cold and pallid, its face blue, its head lolling. Lucanus forced open the infantile lips and thrust his finger into the throat. He drew out a coil of blood and mucus. No one heeded him as he caught up a warmed rug and wrapped the child in it. He opened the incredibly small mouth again, held the child to his face and forced deep breaths into its throat and lungs. He concentrated all his attention, all his will, on the babe. Iris continued to wail, and Keptah to kneel and pray for the two souls which had left their bodies, and the nurses lamented, their heads pressed to the floor.

“Live!” Lucanus commanded the child, and great drops of sweat poured from his flesh and drenched his garments. And his strong breath went in and out of the throat of the infant, like life itself, grim and purposeful, not to be denied. His fingers gently but firmly circled the child’s chest, compressing then quickly relieving as he held the little one against his heart with his left hand and arm and breathed steadily into its throat.

Iris drew a coverlet over Aurelia’s dead and quiet face, and her wailing died away as she saw the faint and peaceful smile on her mistress’ lips. The patch of gray sky darkened with a coming storm; there was the distant sound of thunder, and then a flash of lightning. The slave nurses continued to sob and groan and pray for the dead. Keptah sat back on his heels, his head fallen. The wind and thunder mingled their voices.

Then Keptah started and leaped to his feet. For there was a new sound in the room, frail and thin as the cry of a young fledgling. It died away, then rose stronger. Keptah ran to Lucanus and exclaimed with awe, “The boy lives! He is not dead!”

But Lucanus did not see or hear him. His fingers moved steadfastly; he poured his breath and his will and his life into the infinitesimal body. The child stirred against his heart, fragilely, like a struggling bird. Its bloodstained face lost its pallor, flushed deeply. One hand, unbelievably minute, thrust against the woolen rug.

“It lives!” cried Keptah, overcome with joy. “It breathes! It is a miracle from God!”

No one but Iris saw Diodorus enter the room, staggering like a drunken man. She went to him and fell on her knees before him and wound her arms about his own knees, and wept aloud.

Lucanus was reading the seventh book of Herodotus, in which he had written of Xerxes, who had wept at a victory. Then the uncle of Xerxes, Artabanus, had come to him in consolation, and said, “Sire, first you congratulate yourself and then you weep,” to which Xerxes replied, “I was struck with pity at the thought of the brevity of all human life, when I realized that, out of these multitudes, not a single individual will still be alive a hundred years from now.”

Artabanus had replied, “In life we have other experiences more pitiable than that. Our lifetime is indeed as brief as you say, and yet there is not a single individual, either in this army or in the world, so constitutionally happy that in this span, brief as it is, he will not find himself wishing, not once but many times over, that he were dead and not alive.”

“Yes.” Lucanus put aside the book and leaned his head on his hand and stared blankly at a hot yellow beam of summer sunshine falling on his sandaled foot. He studied much at home now, fleeing from the schoolroom the moment lessons were over to escape the slaves, who persisted on bowing to him, or touching his garments, or falling on their knees before him, imploring for his intercession with the gods. It horrified and repelled him that he, who was so hopelessly estranged from God, should be begged to be the intermediary between the suffering and Him. He shrank from adoring eyes and lifted hands. He wanted to shout, “I tell you, He hates us! He gives us life so that we may die in darkness; He gives us eyes so we may see the ugliness of death; He gives us love so that He may destroy us! Better to worship Charon than Him!”

But he could not speak this, though it seethed desperately in his heart. Since he had saved the life of little Priscus the slaves devoutly believed that he had been touched divinely. He could go no longer to the hospital, nor would he visit a sick slave in the company of Keptah. This had gone on for six months. He would soon leave for Alexandria, where he would be only one of many anonymous and browbeaten students, the son of a former slave, the protege of a kindhearted Roman. In the meantime he kept his door shut against those who came humbly to it; he would put his hands over his ears that he might not hear their importunities spoken to his mother and her sad and pitying replies. He studied dead drawings of anatomy with Keptah, but he would not listen to the living. When Keptah had once reproached him he had cried out frantically, “Shall I tell them what I believe, that God is their Enemy? Surely I will say that if you press me to talk with them! And what will it avail them then? I am no liar.”

“You are like a Parthian archer, who, retreating, hurls poisoned darts over his shoulder,” said Keptah. “I tell you, He pursues you and you shall not escape Him. Your darts wound Him, but still He pursues in His love, not His hatred.” Nevertheless, the physician understood with the deepest pity.

A bee hummed through the uncurtained window and lighted on the rolled book near Lucanus’ slack hand. Its golden wings trembled; it daintily explored the scroll. Its delicate legs wandered nervously. All at once it lifted itself and lighted on the back of Lucanus’ fingers. He saw its huge and brilliant eyes, and he sighed. He rose gently and slowly and went to the window and let the little creature fly from him, and he watched its shining flight until it disappeared. There was a great aching in him, and a parchness in his eyes. Oh, the innocent who lived only that they might die! Lucanus rested his forehead on the window sill and felt in himself a tremendous compassion and love for all that lived, was tortured, withered, and fell into dust, from a bee to a man, from a leaf to a child, from a tree to an ox, from a star to a spider. He wanted to encompass life in his arms, to console it, to murmur love and comfort to it, and, holding it thus, to challenge its Destroyer.

He became acutely aware of the house sounds, and a child’s laughter. The child was very young, the daughter of a slave woman who was nursing little Priscus. Iris was the guardian now of the son of Diodorus; she had carried him to this house a few hours after his birth, bringing with her the wet nurse and another slave. It was Iris who fondled Priscus and tended him, never leaving him a moment during the first precarious month of his life. It was Iris who saw his first toothless smile and heard his first affectionate murmur. She dandled him on her knee; she slept beside his little bed. His faintest sound brought her running. She wove his garments and sewed them. She rocked his cradle when he was fretful; she hovered over him, crooning. She washed his tiny body. She was never apart from him.

Lucanus heard his mother’s voice now, and the gurgling answer of the infant boy. Her aureate head passed outside Lucanus’ window; she was carrying Priscus in her arms, tight against her breast. The child’s face looked over her shoulder, and his eyes met the eyes of Lucanus. The youth winced, for the small face was the face of Rubria, and he could not endure it. Priscus grinned joyously, for he was a merry soul with affability towards all. In spite of himself Lucanus smiled in answer. The baby threw back his head and screeched joyously, and nuzzled Iris’ ear. She was taking him into the cool of the small garden at the rear of the house. There she would sit under a great tree, murmuring and singing until the boy slept. The sun rode towards the west, and the air was wide, diffused with gold, humming with secret life. The scent of earth, of flowers, of grass mingled with the tawny light, and somewhere a slave woman hummed as she went about her duties. Palms clapped and swayed, and birds arrowed from tree to tree, the sunlight on their wings like gilt.

Lucanus went out into the garden. Iris had picked a white flower, and Priscus, on her knee, was busily examining it. He was still small for his age, but he was plump and restless and eager, his dark eyes brimming with delight in being and seeing. He was naked except for a white napkin; his little breast was broad and brown. Black tendrils curled about his ears and neck and forehead. Small though he was, he had strength that was almost incredible in one so young, and in one born prematurely. He looked like a minute warrior, but his smile was Rubria’s smile, winning and sweet, with a hint of mischief, and the expression in his eyes, melting and seeking, was Rubria’s. For this reason Lucanus usually avoided the child. Priscus saw him before Iris did, and he screeched happily again and waved the flower as if in greeting.

Iris smiled at her son, hiding her constant anxiety for him. “See,” she said, “is this not an archer, or a wrestler, or a charioteer? His muscles are veritable breastplates.” The child’s mouth was still milky from his recent nursing, and he bounced on Iris’ knee so that she laughed as she restrained him. Lucanus held out a finger, and Priscus seized it, examined it keenly, then put it into his mouth. Lucanus smiled. He felt towards the child as a father. Then he frowned. “It is strange that Diodorus remains in Rome so long. One would consider he would give thought to his son.”

He exclaimed, “Eheu! He has teeth!”

“Four,” said Iris, proudly. “Is it not marvelous?” Her face was as purely colored and as young as a girl’s. After a moment she said abstractedly, “Diodorus? Yes, it is almost six months. This time he will not return until he has permission to leave Antioch. So he has written to me. I imagine,” she added, with a faint smile, “that he is browbeating Carvilius Ulpian without mercy, and haunting the Palatine. He can bear Syria no longer, and is determined to retire to his estates. I believe he has now worn Caesar to a shadow, for he is an obstinate man and has considerable influence.”

She smoothed the baby’s agile head. Diodorus had carried the ashes of his daughter and his wife to Rome for entombment in his family’s cemetery. Iris knew that this had been a dolorous journey, and one without comfort. Diodorus, after Aurelia’s death, had become speechless, and then had left for Rome, and it was many weeks before he had written briefly to tell of his plans and to inquire after his son. There had been indifference in the inquiry; he had seen Priscus only a few times and had betrayed no emotion of any kind. But his last letter had quickened. He was convinced that Syria was malefic with regard to his family. When he returned, it would be only to gather up his household and to brief his successor, and then he would leave this ‘malignant’ land forever. His child would be brought up in the land of his fathers, in the sight of the Seven Hills, under the protection of his gods.

He had written only one line pertinent to Iris: “I trust that you, my old playmate, my sister in spirit, will consent to return with me, to continue to mother my son.”

Iris sighed. She hoped for much more than that! But her own son would be far in Alexandria, her son so driven, so haunted, so unremittingly grief-stricken, so somber and desolate. Ah, she thought, but he is young, and there is much study and much to be learned. She realized that Lucanus was very like herself in nature as well as in appearance: patient, dedicated, deeply if calmly loving, reserved in speech and in action, living a hidden if vital life, disciplined and somewhat rigid in temperament. He had not yet acquired her present flexibility, her gentle resignation, her profound faith that God was good and not malevolent.

They had always communicated less in speech than in eloquent glance, a slight smile, the smallest gesture, the least inclination of head. There had always been the most profound understanding between them, until Rubria had died. Then Lucanus had withdrawn even from his mother and had stood coldly and repudiatingly at a distance. He had refused to be interested in the child he had saved until today, though Iris tenderly guessed that this was less coldness than a fear of becoming involved once more in personal love for anything, for in love, he believed, there was an ever-present danger and threat of disaster.

She was intensely moved when Lucanus suddenly squatted on his heels in order to bring his face on a level with the baby’s. Priscus was delighted. He reached out and seized Lucanus’ nose. “He has a hand like a gladiator!” exclaimed the young man. “And talons like an eagle!”

Priscus screamed with joy. He released Lucanus’ nose and grasped the young man’s curling forelock and pulled. Lucanus marveled at his strength. Here was a child who only six months ago had lain in his arms like a limp puppet, breathless and blue, limp as melting wax. All at once Lucanus was filled with pride and affection. He held out his arms for the boy, and Priscus promptly threw himself into them. The warmth of his small and sturdy body pierced to Lucanus’ very heart; he kissed the bare brown shoulders, the dimpled knees and elbows. He kissed the eyes so like Rubria’s, and then, very tenderly, the mouth that was a small replica of hers. His eyelids prickled, and his throat tightened. Oh, let me not love again! he prayed to some faceless deity.

He put the protesting infant into Iris’ arms, rose abruptly, and went away. Iris followed him with a long and mournful glance, yet she was consoled.

The morning after the evening of Diodorus’ return to Antioch the tribune commanded that Keptah attend him. The physician entered his master’s library, and his hooded eyes instantly appraised his mental and physical condition. Diodorus’ face was worn and paler, and years seemed to have been added to his features, yet there was a grim quietness about him, and his beaked face had acquired a harder maturity. He was more the Roman than ever, and less simple than he had ever been.

“I am in good health,” he said abruptly, before Keptah could even greet him. “It is not necessary for your medical eyes to scan me. Enough. Within four weeks I shall leave for Rome, with all my household. You are no longer a slave. I understand you have been buying vineyards and olive groves in this vicinity, and that you have some investments in Rome itself. I have no time to waste. I cannot command you as a freedman, I can only ask you. Will you return with me to Rome?”

“Is it necessary to ask me that, Master?”

Diodorus said nothing for a moment. Then he said with that new quietness of his, “I have learned one thing in all those seven months in Rome: a man can never trust another man. If he does, it is at his own peril, and he who denies this is either a liar or a fool. Who was the philosopher who said, ‘Be friendly with all, be intimate with none’? It is not only, as some have said to me in Rome, that man is intrinsically evil, it is that he is never the same man from hour to hour, from day to day. My question was not an insult to you. I was merely inquiring.”

Keptah did not answer. He was full of compassion for this thinner and less vehement man, whose fierce eyes were still dimmed and fixed with grief. A certain buoyancy had gone from the tribune, and his vitality was in abeyance. Yet there was a ferocity and gloom about him.

Diodorus went on, “I thought that when I went to Rome I would foregather with my old comrades, and that they would remember me affectionately. You see what a fool I was. It is true that they greeted me with an affectation of much pleasure. That is because they recalled that I have much influence even with that Tiberius who at least remembers that I am an excellent soldier if not a human being. I thought I would find some surcease in Rome — ” He paused, and a dark shadow ran over his face. He stood up and poured a goblet of wine, then motioned to Keptah to help himself.

“In short, Master,” said Keptah, after he had respectfully sipped his wine, “you discovered that men are no different in Rome than they are in Syria, or in Britain or in Gaul or in Judea or Egypt or in Greece.”

Diodorus put down his goblet slowly, and not with his usual thump. There was a lack of his former emphasis in his manner and his voice. He said, “That is quite true. But then I had been away from Rome a long time, and I had forgotten. I will speak to you about that later.” He began to walk up and down the library with a heavy and sluggish tread. “Why are intelligence and intellect so rare? Why does one have to seek them as one seeks gold?”

“The gods,” said Keptah, wryly, “are still jealous of their wisdom. It is Promethean fire, and when it burns in any man the gods punish him, but his fellows punish him more. It has also been said that you cannot teach a man anything; you can only assist him in finding it within himself. If he has no mind, then all your exhortations, all your lessons, all you attempt to do to improve his environment, all your sacrifices and your ideals will not stir him from his beasthood. For your presumption that he has a mind because he has the shape of a man he will turn and rend you. And I find that a just retribution.”

Diodorus gave him a sharp glance. He poured another goblet of wine and drank deeply of it. Then he looked at the bottom of the goblet and seemed to address it and not Keptah. “I need a mother for my son.”

Keptah’s face changed in alarm. “You have found such a lady in Rome, Master?” He thought of Iris with consternation. But Diodorus was a Roman!

“I have done a vile thing,” said Diodorus, as if Keptah had not spoken. Now he looked at his physician, and his face was stern. “Why do I trust you, you a man who may betray me tomorrow? Shall I bribe you to keep your peace and not bruit it about in Rome? Can I depend on it that you will not whisper it into some trollop’s ear when in your cups — if you are ever in your cups? Will you guarantee that you will not become my enemy this year or next? I think it better for you not to return with me to Rome after all.”

“As you will, Master,” said Keptah, and there was some anger in his voice.

Now Diodorus cast the goblet down with some of his old fire. “After all,” he said, “who would take the word of a former slave against the word of Diodorus?”

Keptah folded his robed arms across his breast. “That is true,” he said. “Therefore you need not confide in me, Master. I have asked for no confidence. For your own peace of mind I prefer that you do not give it.”

“Still, I would feel safer with you in Rome as my physician. I have heard tales! They may not be true, but it is said that Tiberius has rid himself of some intransigent men, including two senators, by bribing their physicians. It is most likely a lie; Tiberius may be coldhearted, but poison is not a soldier’s way of dealing with enemies, even if he does employ informers. However, I have it on excellent authority that many rich and depraved rascals in high places in Rome have bribed the physicians of men whose wives they have coveted, or estates, or some political advantage.” He gave Keptah an odd smile. “When the scandal leaked out, it was not the bribers who were punished. The physicians were usually found in the Tiber a short time later.”

Keptah could not prevent himself from smiling broadly. “The Tiber does not attract me as a burial place, Master.”

Diodorus laughed shortly, without merriment. “May the Furies take you! You have not yet understood. I need a friend. And I must go to a freedman for one! Is that not ironical?”

“And you found no friend among your comrades in arms, and in your own rank, Master?” asked Keptah.

“No.” Diodorus sat down and regarded the marble floor between his legs. “I see you have answered my question. However, to insure your presence with my household in Rome, and to keep you faithful, I will triple your stipend and give you a house of your own on my estates.”