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nomen tibi est?" as if he were talking to a small child.
    When she had failed to answer, he repeated the question. She had continued to stare at his dark eyes, at his unshaven chin, as if she could not understand what he was saying. His Greek was easier to ignore because she genuinely did not understand it. She did not recognize his third attempt at all until, reciting it in her mind after he had given up and left, she began to suspect that it could be a mangled version of her own tongue, impossible to grasp unless you had first heard him ask in Latin: What is your name?
    She had not heard her real name spoken since she had been captured. For two winters she had been "girl" at best, the Northerners at first deliberately refusing to honor her with the use of her name and later, she supposed, forgetting what it was. When the other slaves had asked what to call her, she had invented something. She had spoken to them—to everyone—as little as possible. But Romans were full of questions.
    How old are you? Where do you come from? Do you understand what I'm saying? Does it hurt when I do that? Do you need to pass water? Did you really fall down the stairs? Do you know a girl with red hair? They seemed to have lost interest in the girl with red hair now. But they persisted with the other questions. Quid nomen tibi est?
    She was not about to offer her name up to a stranger. It was almost the only thing she possessed that nobody had stolen.
    A voice was asking, "How much poppy are you giving her?"
    The left side of the bed heaved as the blanket was tucked in. "No more until nightfall." She felt herself being rolled the other way as he tucked in the opposite side. "I want her awake enough to eat."

8
    R USO WAS CONSIDERING trying a different poultice on an infected thumb that he didn't much like the look of when Valens knocked on the door to announce that the Sirius was coming in to dock on the midday tide.
    The Siriusl After three months, Ruso and his possessions were about to be reunited. The last time he had seen them was when he had left Africa, fully expecting to return to his comfortable rooms after his leave. Instead, he was sharing condemned lodgings at the opposite end of the empire with the untidiest medic in the army
    He said, "I'll get down to the docks when I've finished ward rounds."
    "I'll go down now," Valens offered. "To make sure they don't drop anything."
    Several patients later, Ruso finally escaped from the hospital. As he nodded to Aesculapius on the way out, he thought he heard the patter of claws on floorboards. He turned to see something brown and hairy and just above knee height vanishing around the corner of the front entrance. When he got outside, there was no sign of it.
    There was no time to investigate. He hurried along the Via Praetoria to the cashier's office, where the chief clerk beckoned him past the line and into the office to tell him that the donation to the Aesculapian Fund was very generous.
    "Donation?" Ruso frowned, wondering if the man was being sarcastic about his two and half denarii.
    "From the owner of Merula's bar, sir. In gratitude for the hospital's services to the deceased."
    Ruso remembered. The grim-faced Bassus had arrived early this morning with a cart to carry away the body of poor silly Saufeia. Afterward he had mentioned making some sort of contribution to the hospital fund and Ruso had told him to go to the cashier's office. "Do you know where that is?"
    "Know it?" Bassus had snorted. "I built it."
    Ruso, encouraged by the size of the gift Bassus had delivered and the clerks' apparent belief that he was the cause of it, increased the size of the loan he had come to request. No doubt the clerks would talk, but with luck the rumors of his cash problems would not travel too far before they were brought to a halt by Hadrian's promised double bonus. As the trumpet was blaring the change of watch, he emerged from the west gate of the fort with an advance in his purse that was