Tilla is spirited, courageous and intelligent. The Legion has limited interest in finding their killers. The two murdered women worked at a local brothel. But at heart, he’s a caring man whose compassion often gets him involved in lost causes. Ruso is irreverent, world-weary and rebellious when it comes to senseless bureaucracy. In no time at all, Priscus, the hospital administrator, is pressuring him to sign over the new slave girl as collateral for his loans. In attempting to persuade Innocens to get her treatment at the fort hospital, Ruso finds himself buying her.īuying the girl puts him deeper in debt, so he takes out a loan from a Legion fund. Ruso realizes that her arm was broken when she tried to protect her head from blows.

Her owner, Claudius Innocens, a slave trader, claims she fell down some steps. When Ruso pushes through the crowd he sees that she’s been beaten and has a broken arm.

Ruso has been in Deva only four days when he finds himself with the bodies of two dead women, one fished from the river and the other burned beyond recognition in a building slated for demolition, and saving an injured slave girl, Tilla. While doing so, he must battle hospital administrators more concerned with records and audits than saving lives and the manipulations of his colleague and roommate Valens.īut the biggest burden of all is supporting his bankrupt family back in Gaul. Gaius Petreius Ruso is a much put-upon doctor with Rome’s 20th Legion, stationed in the city of Deva in Britannia.ĭaily he works to patch up soldiers, their families, Britons who can pay, builders and camp followers.

Medicus by ruth downie