"I've no idea," he answered with a shrug, and moved to the table that held wine and green glass cups. He picked up the silver ewer beaded with moisture and began to pour as he spoke. "She may be resting. It took me more than an hour to find you. Never occurred to me that you might be here in the house. Here." He handed me a cup of wine. "I am not making free with the Lady's hospitality. She bade me pour you a drink if she were not here when we arrived."
"Thank you." I sipped, and then gulped the ice-cold wins thirstily. "God, that's good!" I whispered, feeling the delicious pain of iciness in my throat. I waited until it passed, and then took another sip before adding, "I had no idea you were an intimate of my aunt, Lucanus."
"I'm not," he answered, smiling, "but we spoke at length today."
"On procedural matters."
His answering look to that was as sardonic as my tone had been. "Yes."
"Which particular procedures were you discussing?"
It was his turn to drink before answering. At length he put down his cup and looked straight at me. "Your father's burial."
Pain flared in me anew. I had not seen my father since I had tried to lift him back onto his bed. I cleared my throat; trying to swallow the lump there and control my voice, but I was unable to return Lucanus's direct look. "Where is he now?"
"Here in the house. I have bathed and changed him, and he is laid out in dignity in Publius Varrus's bedchamber."
"How? He was rigid. I tried to move him, but couldn't."
Lucanus nodded. "No longer. The rigor has worn off. I was able to cover and conceal his wounds. He looks.. .asleep, no more."
I gulped and nodded. "Thank you for that."
"No need, Commander. He was my Legate and my friend."
"Thank you, anyway. My thanks, as his son."
Lucanus inclined his head. "It was my pleasure, painful as it was. More wine." It was not a question, and I held out my cup for him to fill it. Watching him as he did so, it occurred to me that there was far more to this senior physician than I had ever been aware of. He reinforced that conclusion immediately, straightening up and asking me, "How had you thought to dispose of his remains?"
"Dispose of...?" I blinked, shaking my head. "I...I hadn't..." I hadn't thought of it at all, was what I started to say, but I changed the words as they sprang to my tongue, "I hadn't really seen any need to dwell on it. He will be buried beside his father and Publius Varrus. Here in the fort."
"Naturally, and very properly, Commander, but may I make a suggestion? With all due respect?"
"You would have something different?"
"In a measure, yes. Not completely different, but signally different."
I drew a deep breath, feeling a resurgence of the impatience I had felt earlier. "You are talking in riddles, and I am talking about my father's funeral. Make sense, Lucanus."
"I will, if you will hear me."
"I'm listening,"
"We are burying men by the thousands, down on the plain."
"So? What does that have to do with the Legate Picus Britannicus?"
"Nothing, and everything." He moved to the fire and stirred the logs with the toe of his boot. "Every man being buried down there died, directly or indirectly, because Picus Britannicus was in command of this fortress, is that not so?"
"In a manner of speaking, of course. What of it?" I was sitting erect now, wondering where this conversation was headed.
"Then is it not fitting that the manner of Picus's passing, the occasion of his death and the events surrounding it, should be markedly different from those thousands of others?"
"For a certainty! But they will lie in mass graves. He will lie here in the fortress."
He pursed his lips and moved from the fire to sit on a high-backed couch, across from me, sitting well back and raising his arm to rest his cup against the arm before responding. "Then let his ashes lie here in the fortress, Caius! Beside his father and his uncle."
"What?" I heard the amazement in my own tone, but his voice drove on over my objections before I could form them.
"Cremate him as a Legate. Burn his body, Commander! In a grand conflagration. In the style of the old Legions, who honoured their dead Legates with the purifying flames of Mithras." I subsided into my chair now, slouched, as he leaned forward and continued, "I know burial is the Christian way, Commander, but the people—our people!— need a symbol, a rallying point. What is one more burial among all these thousands, no matter where it takes place? Our army has been battered and savaged, and our home almost burned to the ground, but we survive!" He paused and then swigged savagely at his wine before going on, "The people of this Colony are stunned. There's hardly a soul left alive who has not lost someone in this carnage. Everyone is devastated, and life holds little meaning right now. The soul seems to have gone out of all of us, including you. Titus and Flavius are now the senior officers of the garrison, next to you and Uther, when he is here. Both of them are excellent men. You know that and I know it. But they are lost, Caius, lost without your father, who has been their father, too, in a very real sense for more than twenty years."
"I hear what you are saying, Lucanus, and I understand what moves you, but this cannot be! We are Christians, as you said, and the Church teaches us that men must be buried whole, to rise again on the Day of Judgment."
"Balls! We are soldiers, Caius Britannicus, and we still pray to Mithras—who is still the god of soldiers—when we march into battle. The gentle Christ had little time for soldiers."
"But—"
He cut me off. "No buts, Commander. You were there when your father dealt with those noxious priests! Have you forgotten the logic he brought to bear on them? Have you forgotten all we were taught that led to that confrontation?
"We believe—and for our beliefs we are labelled Pelagians and not Christians—that God created man in his own image with the divine spark that makes man godly in and of himself! That spark is his immortal soul... Immortal!.. .It cannot be destroyed. It cannot be defaced, or broken, or rent apart. It is a man's soul that will stand before God at Judgment time. The body falls to dust, and so do the bones that shape it." He broke off, eyeing me strangely. "Or do you think all that has changed? Do you believe Bishop Alaric lies in the ground intact, as on the day he died? Or your grandfather? Or Publius Varrus? Need we dig them up to see?" He shook his head, denying me the comfort of that thought. "Eight years, perhaps ten. That's as long as a human body lasts, once it's been buried. After that, there's nothing but loose bones for animals to dig up. There is no wholeness, or wholesomeness, after death. That is medical—and natural—fact, and the churchmen cannot change it by merely issuing edicts."
I was gazing at him now, wide-eyed. "What kind of physician are you, Lucanus?"
His head jerked at the unexpectedness of my question, but it did not distract him from his path. "Physician? What kind of physician am I?" He paused, as though considering his answer, and then continued with a gentle, slightly bitter smile. "I am not a physician at all. A physician deals in herbs and potions; in the diagnosis of sickness and the distillation of cures; in the cure of ulcers and lesions and the application of leeches." He placed his cup gently on the table and then looked up at me from his half-bent position, that small smile still in place. "What I really am, Caius Britannicus, is a surgeon, a healer of bodies broken internally and externally." Now he straightened and I heard the pride in his voice. "And I am one of the best in the world, because I am a product of the Medical Corps of the Roman Army. Physicians, even the best of them, work mostly on faith, bolstered by observation of the ailments that beset even the healthiest of people. Surgeons, on the other hand, operate securely in the faith that they have learned through study of the human body and the bones and organs that sustain it. The Army Medical Corps, composed almost wholly of surgeons, is the only corps that has grown in stature and ability as the Legions declined. It has carried medicine, and the repair of broken human bodies, to a level never known on this earth until now.