Excerpt: Chapter 1
The Snake in the River
The Island was a place you did not go unless you absolutely had to.
It hulked like a stone ship moored between two bridges on the river Tiber, laden with imperial offices and with temples to every conceivable god of healing and oath-taking. It was crawling, people said, with snakes. Silvanus asked his guardian spirits for protection from fanged, slithering creatures, but remembered just in time not to let slip an offhand promise in return. On the Island, even a casual thought—please keep me from stepping on any snakes and I’ll buy two stacks of honey cakes for your altar—could whip back to bind you and kick you between the legs if you forgot to stop for the cakes on the way home.
If it were in a time of plague, which it was not, the island’s bridges would have been blocked by purifying cauldrons and by heavily armed guards. Today a parade of the injured, broken, polluted, and pocked staggered unhindered across the broad span. The sunlight, watery as it was that spring morning, was all that kept the procession from looking like a troop of shades crossing into the underworld. Silvanus moved with them toward a pillar rising mast-tall from the island’s central plaza, an obelisk stabbing the sky in brightly painted patterns and wound around with the symbol of the snake. Some of the afflicted reached out shaking fingers to touch the pillar as they passed, slowing wearing its base smooth.
Silvanus did not need a god bound solid in a column of stone. He needed the living god moving in his priests and through the airs of his temple. But some bored spirit pushed his booted toe against an uneven joint of paving stones, and as he staggered from the jolt to his knee he flung a hand out to catch himself on the polished column.
He leaned his weight against it a moment to let the reverberations fade from his leg. His left knee was swollen twice the size of the other one, taut as a melon, but he had walked on it, step by determined step, through crowded streets. A little bump was not going to stop him now. The day he had to use a litter or be dragged on the ground like a sack was the day he should be pushed backward over the edge of the island and into the river.
He shoved himself away from contact with the god’s mast and said hastily, “I take that back. That was not an oath.”
After the walk across the city, the knee was larger and tighter than ever before, the pain renewing with each step as if the snakes of the god had slipped off their column and wrapped around him, fangs stuck in deep. But staying immobile at home made very little difference, nor lying down, nor yelling at it. In the past he had waited out the swellings with warm soaks and years of patience. After a full, unbroken month of the pain growing worse and the swelling growing larger, his stamina cracked. “I’ll lance that for you,” the cook at the Faun’s Lips had offered, as if it were just an overambitious boil, but Silvanus believed in going to an expert on any important matter.
Since, after all, he was an expert in particular things himself, and earning enough for his daily meals at the sordid little drinking hole called the Faun’s Lips depended on other people respecting an expert’s expertise.
He expected to be given a bit to drink on his arrival at the temple, then to be invited to sleep in on the floor in the adjacent dormitory, then to consult a priest in the morning about his dreams to see what course of treatment the god had recommended. He was surprised when he was pulled out of the line of petitioners and taken to see a physician immediately.
A young priest led him across the courtyard to a building beside the temple. Inside it was one long room, narrow as an army barracks, divided into rows of cells by curtains loosely hung on lengths of twine stretched wall to wall. The priest handed him off to a pair of what he took to be temple slaves, one tall and one small. The men led him down the central corridor formed by the curtains, through clouds of smoke and incense, in and out of wafts of conversation from the cubicles.
“—pissing like a horse since winter—”
“—still have two of our six children—”
“—if the bleeding persists—”
“—of old age—”
“—keep four of your five toes—”
“—hold him down—”
“—can’t say no to what Master wants, so—”
. . . and moans that did not form words, and the occasional sob.
He ducked under the crisscrossing ropes, then ducked again into the curtained cell that the shorter man pointed him toward. Like the other cells they had passed it contained a simple cot and a wooden table, pots of assorted sizes from fruit bowl to foot bath on benches stacked with rolls of plain cloth, a large floor pitcher. An oil lamp burned smokily on the table, and censers hung precariously from stands. The man next gestured to the cot, so Silvanus sat, letting out an involuntary sigh when he took the weight off his bad leg.
“Well,” he said to the taller man to get things started, gesturing to the obvious fact of his swollen knee. The smaller man stepped forward—the man who, on closer assessment, wore clothing of much higher quality, a tunic dark enough so that it almost completely obscured the variety of butcher-shop stains in its pleats. Silvanus shook his head, annoyed at himself. He had confused which one was the assistant and which the actual physician, too focused on his leg. Another good reason to get the knee fixed and his mind back to how it should be working.
The assistant fussed at the table then emerged to wave a pot of smoking sulphur around the cubicle with one hand, and a bundle of burning herbs of a more flowery fragrance with the other hand. The odours combined into a nauseous mix.
“Your name?” asked the actual physician in a sharp-edged voice.
“Silvanus.” He did not offer more, and the physician did not ask. The assistant lifted a note tablet and stylus that dangled from a rope at his waist and made a few quick marks in the wax.
“Explain what ails you,” ordered the physician in the same sharp voice.
Getting immediately to the point was something Silvanus could appreciate. “My knee swelled up like this four days ago. Usually it goes down overnight, but it keeps getting bigger. I broke it years ago. Cracked my elbow too, but that never troubles me at all. That’s the sum of it.”
Physicians in Silvanus’s experience were old and wrinkled and tended to have a squint, except for field medics, who needed to be strong enough to pull a bone back into place or hack off a limb without or without the aid of slaves. The little man looking him over was neither old nor brawny. He had a round face, pleasant in spite of the brusqueness of his speech, either darkly tanned or moderately brown was his natural complexion. It was difficult to tell which it must be from the rest of his features, which gave away no specific homeland. He might have been the grandson of a fisherman from a rocky Greek island, or cousin to a cattle herder from the northern coast of Africa, or offspring of a farmer from the south.
It struck him as funny to imagine that a skilled physician could sprout from a family of farmers, but there was something sturdy and compact about the man that made it seem a more likely origin than being a well-to-do boy growing up in luxury in the shade. The man’s straight brown hair was uncombed, too long for short. His age was hard to judge, but he looked much too young for his role. Overall, he was simply a difficult man to place, as if his ancestors had been plucked from all across the Empire, tossed into a bag, shaken around, and told to mate at will. It all made him seem more like someone who should be fussing cheerily over a market vegetable stand.
The physician pressed his lips into a thin, critical, uncheery line and examined Silvanus down a long, thin nose, face stretched into a straight line of focus.
“What did you dream last night?” he asked. He squinted at Silvanus.
“Who remembers?” Silvanus grinned. “There was a woman.”
“Hm.” He held forward a small black bowl of highly polished stone. “Spit,” he ordered. Silvanus complied. The physician took a look at it, swirling the bowl in the palm of his hand a few moments before passing it to his assistant. He handed over a jug. “Piss,” he commanded. He sloshed that around, head bent to smell it. He handed Silvanus another bowl, slightly larger and flatter than the first. “Shit.”
Silvanus looked down at the bowl then back at the physician. “Really?”
“Do you feel you can move anything out right now?” the man asked perfunctorily.
“I don’t think so.” Silvanus made a silent self-assessment. Inconclusive. “I went this morning.”
“Hm. Loose, solid? Long? Pebbly?”
“Normal.” Silvanus interrupted before the man could come up with more descriptive terms. “The same as normal.”
“Smell?” the physician asked.
“Normal?”
The physician eyed him like an impatient rhetoric master with a particularly slow student. “Are you asking me? Or are you certain?”
“Normal.” It was not something Silvanus usually examined. In fact, he went to the public toilets for shitting so there would be no mess to deal with himself. It could be hard to sort one man’s smells from another’s if the water under the toilet was flowing briskly.
The physician handed the dish back to the assistant and crouched down. “Let’s have a closer look.”
He folded the bottom of Silvanus’s tunic out of the way and wrapped his hands first around the healthy knee, then around the bulbous swelling. With surprisingly strong fingers and thumbs he started kneading it firmly. Silvanus gritted his teeth at the sharp pain shooting from the man’s touch and fixed his eyes on watching the top of the brown-haired head bob, tilt, pause, tilt again. Hands still wrapped around the knee, the physician announced his assessment: “You are hard, hot, and moist.”
Silvanus decided that laughing would only insult the man.
After some arcane muttering between physician and assistant, a pair of young boys were called in to carry away the bowls and jug and bring back a variety of small pots. The assistant unrolled a bundle across the table; knives of all sorts of shapes and sizes flashed in a long array on the dark leather, lined up like soldiers, along with a few two-pronged and spoon-bellied instruments Silvanus could not identify, and curving things with hinges. The physician selected a blade that seemed about the right size for slicing a fruit. Such as a melon.
One of the boys held a clay bowl next to Silvanus’s knee, and with a quick, deep stroke the physician lanced the swelling. The blood came out thick, mottled red and pale. Silvanus scowled. The physician glanced up at him, face impassive.
“You could have warned me you were going to cut me,” Silvanus growled.
“You didn’t flinch at the examination,” the doctor said blandly. “I expected you to sit still for this as well. As you did.” He kneaded the swelling with the heel of his palm, drawing out a steady flow of offensive fluid, then spurting dribbles. Finally satisfied it was done, he waved the bowl and the assistant away. The skin around the knee, emptied of foul material, sagged, puckered and deflated like an old animal-bladder ball.
He smeared a paste made from two separate jars onto his hands and began to rub the gritty unguent into and around the cut he had made. The touch of his fingers and palm was first sore against the lanced skin, then soothing, then . . . Silvanus found himself at ease for the first time in many days.
The poultice smelled of oregano and garlic. It smelled like dinner, like exactly the sort of heavy herbs you would use to cover up meat that had gone off. The physician wrapped a strip of cloth over it all and tied it tight, helped Silvanus to his feet.
For all that the physician was built like a short man was typically built, when they stood close it turned out the man’s eye level was at Silvanus’s nose, which made him an average sort of height. He was just . . . packed into himself. Silvanus tested weight on his knee while the man watched him like he was a newborn horse getting its legs for the first time.
“There are several physicians set up around the city who see veterans,” the physician said, still watching him carefully. “Why didn’t you go to one of them? I’m sure that you could find one who specifically serves your legion. Some charge no fee, depending on the source of the injury and level of care.”
“Why would I go to one of them?” Silvanus asked, mildly amused by the assumption.
“Clearly you’re a veteran,” the man replied. “When you come to a temple, it’s for the god’s expertise. Most times you’ll end up seen by a freedman whose only training was emptying night-soil pots.”
Expertise. Silvanus raised an eyebrow. “Is that how you’d describe yourself?” He doubted that. His previous assumptions about the physician had reorganized themselves. The man had a shrewd look to him, a sureness to every movement. He reeked of education.
In fact, the man answered, with less pride than it deserved, “I trained in Alexandria and Athens. I’ve been inside of more bodies than any physician in the Third legion.”
Silvanus barked a laugh. “At least that freedman would know a lot about describing shit.”
“Shit’s important,” agreed the physician. He crouched in front of Silvanus, examining the knee again from both sides, a soft fall of hair brushing inside of Silvanus’s other leg. Silvanus felt a flash of discomfort. These were not the usual circumstances where he would have someone kneeling in front of him with his head tucked up so close. He looked off around the little curtained space, at the bowls on low wooden tables, the rolls of undyed clothes ready for bandaging, oil lamps, incense burners. Looking for distractions. The two slaves hovering obediently: one with eyes properly cast down, the other, younger one studying the physician’s every move eagerly, the little movements of his eyes following the little movements of the head bumping against Silavnus’s thigh. More distraction was needed. He thought about pots of shit. Long, solid, loose, and pebbly, all the variations, clogging the runnels on a hot day at the toilets. That worked. The discomfort ebbed away.
“So, you broke this knee,” the physician finally said, sitting back on his haunches and looking up at him. “In battle with the Third?”
Silvanus nodded. “I fell off a wall, and the knee got to the ground first.”
The physician satisfied himself with one more poke and stood again. “Impressive.”
“My knee, or my great skill at falling off walls?” Silvanus asked.
“How well it healed,” the man explained. “A knee fractured in multiple places is like a shattered pitcher. Even if you push all the pieces back into place, you shouldn’t expect it to hold water again. You had a remarkable physician.”
His voice sounded awestruck. Silvanus had seen his share of broken knees among other soldiers, had seen men permanently crippled, saw men whose legs festered and had to be removed, some of whom survived the removal. He had simply assumed that his injury was not so bad as those others, since he could still walk from his door to the toilets to the tavern to a warm bath and back again, and since this was the first time the swelling had grown so wretched he could no longer simply hope it away. But the end result, bad wound or middling wound, had been the same. “He didn’t get me back into the ranks.”
The other man harrumphed. “Praise him for helping you keep that leg at all.”
His assistant handed over a lidded clay pot, and the physician handed it over to Silvanus. Silvanus sniffed at the greasy substance inside, the stink of which immediately leapt up and attacked his nose. To put the crowning wreath on a morning filled with excrement, the concoction smelled as if dog shit had crawled into it to die. Silvanus looked up accusingly, and the physician quirked a slightly mocking smile. Too rough for you, soldier? it seemed to ask. Silvanus made a show of throwing off his discomfort with a shrug.
“The crocodile dung is imported,” the physician explained. “The rest of the ingredients we grow ourselves.”
Everything comes back to dung, Silvanus concluded. His dismay must have been painted all across his face—the man hurried to assure him, “You don’t have to eat it. The properties of these materials are cooling and drying. Soak a towel in cool water, as cold as you can acquire, make a poultice from the medicines, wrap your knee with it, keep your knee higher than your head—”
“My head?” He imagined an improbable regimen of standing with his leg raised high and his head bent down like an acrobat.
The physician gave an impatient huff. “While you’re sleeping. Head flat on your bed, knee propped up. Keep the poultice on until morning. It will dry and draw out the moistness with it. Portion the mixture so it lasts for seven days. Evenings have been cool, so if you have a window where you sleep, keep it open. No more hot soaks until you’ve completed the treatment.”
Silvanus grunted his understanding and consent into the pot, taking another strong whiff—it remained as foul and ill-tempered as the first sniff—then he closed the lid over it.
“Do you have a wife?” asked the physician.
It was spoken with the same mild disinterest his father’s voice held when he asked that same question, every time Silvanus stepped across the family threshold.
Spring visit: Do you have a wife?
Haven’t found one who’ll have me, sir.
Summer visit: Gotten yourself a wife yet?
Not yet this year, sir.
Harvest visit: Wife?
No, sir.
Silvanus gave the same weary answer: “No.”
“Good,” the physician replied, “this would drive her away.”
Silvanus had to agree.
His father’s reply was always an angry grunt and the same admonition: Go make some children.
Sylvanus planned to get right on that. Sometime. Not while he was covered in shit, though.
The physician picked up small clay vial with a wax-sealed stopper, then eyed him thoughtfully for a moment before passing the vial to him. “This you can use any time for the pain, but no more than a small sip every hour or so. A small sip, every hour,” he reiterated.
That deserved only a negative grunt. Silvanus tried to hand back the vial.
The physician narrowed bay-leaf green eyes at him. “Pain tells us there’s an injury. We’ve already heard and acted on the message. You don’t have to keep listening to it.”
He held the vial at eye level by its thin neck, briefly considering simply dropping it on the floor. “Anything else, physician?”
The man pursed his lips in annoyance. He took back the vial and exchanged it for the folded papyrus packet on the tray. “This.” Silvanus shook it curiously. It sounded full of sand. “Mix a pinch with a cup of wine at night before bed. After your knee is wrapped and you’re lying down.”
Silvanus regarded him suspiciously. “And what’s this?”
“Not for pain. Only to help you sleep. You’re not sleeping enough.”
“You don’t know that.”
A coolly smug look showed clearly what the physician was thinking—yes, I do know that—even before he answered: “You look dreadful and you’re in pain. Why not rest soundly a few nights?”
“I won’t be put in a stupor.” He did not want to sleep through anything that might creep up to his door, or climb to his window, or any of the hundred sudden emergencies from fire to flood to rioting mob that could befall in the middle of the night in a city like Rome.
“Think of it as wine with a little extra spice,” the physician advised.
Silvanus accepted the packet, with no intention of using it. He stuck it in with the assortment of coins in the small pouch around his neck, tucked the whole into his tunic.
“Trust me, it’s better than just drinking wine until you feel better,” the physician went on. “You’re doing much too much drinking.” At Silvanus’s inquisitive look, he explained, “It’s in your skin, your sweat.” Silvanus sniffed at himself, and at the folds of tunic bunched under his arm. He may have drank a bit much over the past few days, what with the knee, but he did not think he smelled like an inebriate. This physician had a subtle nose. A hand flashed out—empty, unthreatening, physician, diagnosing—to lie cool against his forehead for a brief touch, quickly withdrawn. “It’s making you too hot and damp.”
Silvanus gave a sigh. “What else? Should I buy a sacrifice? A dove?”
“If you wish,” the physician answered over his shoulder. He had turned away and turned his attention to sorting the instruments on the tray now, including the little melon-slicer.
“What about special prayers? Or a clay charm in the shape of a leg?” He waved toward the rope of pungent smoke twisting up from the censer. “Or some of this incense to burn around my bed while chanting?”
“If your bedroom has an unpleasant smell, by all means.” After the slightest pause, the physician added, “Though I recommend keeping the shutters open for fresh air instead.”
“Air isn’t so fresh where I live,” Silvanus told him.
“Breathe whatever you can find and come back after seven days,” the physician instructed him, dropping his lancet into a round-bottomed urn that looked like a cooking pot. “I want to check your progress. Ask for Martius Afer when you get here, and they’ll bring you right to me.” He turned back to his patient, hands set on his hips, gave Silvanus one more scrutinizing look, and then nodded. “I’ll arrange for a litter to take you home. It won’t cost much.”
Silvanus recalled his earlier accidental vow. Aside from the fact that any litter he was on would probably fall backward off the bridge, he truly did not feel a need for one, not now. “I walked here,” he told Martius Afer. “I can walk home.”
He tested weight on his leg again. The pain was of a different quality. The sort of pain he knew was in aid of healing could always be borne more comfortably. Even enjoyed, in an odd sort of way.
“What about payment?” he remembered to ask. “A contribution to the temple?”
The answer was the next thing to surprise him. “Optional,” the man said. “Decide when you return how well you’ve healed and how deeply your gratitude reaches.”
Midway to the exit, Silvanus was intercepted by the taller of the physician’s assistants. “You’re welcome to pay now,” the lanky man informed him. Silvanus grinned at him and limped on.
Not until he had made his way back across the bridge, not until the island of the snake was behind him and his feet were settled on true land again, did Silvanus realize the physician knew which legion he belonged to, or rather the one he had belonged to before the day that had shattered his knee and his fortune.
A lucky random comment was the easiest explanation, Silvanus decided. There were many things a physician’s nose could sniff out, but the shameful stink of the Third legion was not, as far as he knew, one of them.
• • •
Carolyne Chand 
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