Household Gods

After an eternity of white-hot agony, she heard and felt a snap. Her eyes snapped open. Terentianus staggered back with something clenched in the forceps: the cartoon-simple shape of a tooth, with a horror-comic smear of pus and blood. Blood flooded Nicole’s mouth, thick and foul. She spat scarlet, barely missing the grinning bastard who held her legs.

Terentianus stood back, safely out of reach, and examined his prize. “Very nice,“ he said. “Very neat job, if I say so myself.” He fished around in a basket and handed Nicole a square of wool that must have been part of a tunic once, long ago. “Here you are. Keep it pressed to the wound until the bleeding stops. Rinse your mouth out with wine two or three times a day – it will heal better if you do. You might say a prayer or two to Aesculapius, see if it helps. It certainly couldn’t hurt.”

Nicole spat again, another bright splash of blood on the rammed-earth floor. The ape who’d held her arms not only let her go, he gave her a sympathetic pat on the back. “It’s not easy,” he said. “Terentianus did one of mine a couple of years ago, and it hurt like a red-hot poker.”

She stared blankly at him. Sympathy was the last thing she’d expected, and just about the last thing she wanted. She couldn’t bring herself to thank him. She nodded, which was the best she could do, and spat once more, and took the cloth from Terentianus. Her hand trembled uncontrollably. The pain had diminished a little, but it still lapped at every corner of her world. Wine and poppy juice had taken the edge off her toothache. Against the pain of this minor surgery, they were no better than a child’s sand-dike against a tidal wave.

Terentianus patted her shoulder lightly. “Sit there as long as you need to,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”

Good thing he didn’t charge by the hour, she thought. She was vaguely aware of him thanking his helpers, paying them an as apiece, and sending them on their way. The cloth turned more nearly red than gray. Little by little, the bleeding slowed. She should go, she thought. She should get back to the tavern. She stood up. Her head reeled. She sat down again, in a hurry.

A fat man stalked through the door, backed Terentianus up against a table, and let go with a litany of complaint about his hemorrhoids. “That cream you gave me didn’t do a bit of good,” he said indignantly.

Terentianus might be cornered, but he wasn’t cowed. “It’s the best I have, Pupianus,” he said. “The only other choice is the scalpel.”

“No, thank you!” the fat man said with the air of a man who knew what he wanted and, more to the point, what he didn’t. “I’m not letting anybody near me with a knife, and that’s flat.”

Terentianus shrugged. Pupianus balled up his fists and looked ready to challenge him to a round, but clearly thought better of it. With a loud snort and a stamp of his foot, he turned and stalked out.

Nicole knew exactly how he felt. If she hadn’t been ready to fall over with pain, she wouldn’t have let Terentianus near her with his forceps, either.

She wasn’t in pain any longer. She was in agony. The pain wouldn’t have gone away if she hadn’t had the tooth pulled. She could only pray that the agony would fade.

After a while, the length of which she was never exactly sure of, she found she could get to her feet and stay there. Terentianus had been watching her between patients: he had a damp cloth waiting, to wipe her face. It came away stained rusty red. “You were brave,” he told her.

“You bet I was,” she said thickly. The wine and the opium were still in her, making it very hard to care what she said. She pressed a hand to her throbbing jaw – which didn’t make it feel better, but kept it from feeling worse as she moved – and headed for the door. Terentianus didn’t try to stop her. He was probably glad to see the last of her.

As she made her slow, painful way back to the tavern, with every step sending a fresh twinge through the empty socket, she found some degree of distraction in the graffiti on the walls. There seemed to be a lot of them, and many of that lot seemed to be Christian. At first she thought her bleared eyes were playing tricks, but it was hard to mistake the two curved strokes of the fish, or a row of crosses with something biblical scrawled beneath. She found herself standing with her nose almost pressed to a wall full of such scribblings. The letters writhed and wriggled, but even so, they made a disturbing lot of sense. They were all about the Last Judgment, and they were downright ferocious. Their tone might have given even a Pentecostal preacher pause.