Lady of the Light by Donna Gillespie

Author:Donna Gillespie [Gillespie, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780425212684
Amazon: 0425212688
Goodreads: 573817
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

The Fortress of Mogontiacum

On the following day Marcus Julianus insisted upon interrogating the dying Aelianus himself, with no recorders present. Maximus greeted this with grave doubts; this was a man who’d tried to murder Julianus twice, inspired by purest hatred—what did he hope learn from this madman?

The Mogontiacum Fortress’s hospital was a timber-and-stonework structure built in a rectangular shape about a vast courtyard. A slave-assistant to the First Physician greeted Julianus at its casualty reception center, and he was led over white marble tiles that glowed orange in the light of the four arched brick hearths along one wall, in which physicians purified their wound probes and surgeons’ tools. Beyond was a skylit operating room, empty now. They passed preparation rooms, where battalions of slaves were making ointments from animal fat, lead salts, and resins. The brisk, muffled staccato produced by a row of assistants pounding herbs was the sole sound as they entered the corridor opening to the hospital’s sixty wards, which flanked the whole of the circulating passageway. Each of these consisted of two private rooms and a latrine. Any cries that might have issued from the patients’ rooms were muted by double-timbered walls built between corridor and wards. Long ago, army physicians had learned that illnesses did not spread so quickly if the patients were put into separate chambers. Julianus’s eyes watered in the smoke of fumigants. The air was pleasantly oppressive with the insistent pungency of myrrh, but a faint stench of blood, tainted humors, and corruption hovered darkly beneath.

Casperius Aelianus had been taken to the row of wards reserved for officers. His sickroom was twice the size of a common soldier’s room, its walls gaudily abloom with paintings rendered in red and blue encaustic. The chamber was bare but for the bed on which Aelianus lay and a bench for a physician. The smell of wound medicines was thick and sweet on the air—pine resin, oils of cinnamon, and cassia. Aelianus’s half-opened eyes sought nothing more from the world; they put Julianus in mind of scummy pools at the bottom of a trench. His mouth was slack, his breathing staggered.

“I sewed him well, even the muscles inside,” the physician’s assistant, a prim Greek, said blandly as he made to depart, “but the blood has stagnated. He has the perforation that kills in a day and a night.”

Julianus knew enough of medical science to know this meant the stomach or colon was pierced. “Wait. He suffers,” Julianus said. “Is that the balm?” He indicated a squat jar of thick green glass on the floor by the bed. “Give him more of that.”

“You’ll not get any answers out of him if I do,” the young assistant objected. It contained a decoction of henbane and poppy juice. “The hyoscyamus ”—he used the physician’s name for henbane—“brings forgetfulness.”

“Do it anyway,” Julianus replied, too dismayed by the dire scene to say it diplomatically. His own recently dressed wound was pulsing viciously. The physician tilted the young man’s head to aid swallowing, and spooned some of the liquid into his mouth.

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