Household Gods

13

For a day or two, nothing much happened. Nobody fell over dead in front of the tavern. None of Nicole’s customers brought in rumors that people were dropping dead anywhere else in Carnuntum. She began to hope Dexter was wrong after all. As Titus Calidius Severus had said, doctors didn’t know everything. That was true in the twentieth century, and a hell of a lot truer here in the second.

When she went to the market, it seemed she heard an awful lot of people coughing and sneezing. More people than usual? She wasn’t sure. Her nerves were on edge. She was hypersensitive, jumping on every hack and sniffle.

The next day, when she took Aurelia to the baths, she told herself the same thing. Nobody was looking any more or less healthy than he ever had. Sometimes she even believed it, and held onto the belief for an hour or two — until someone else started sneezing and started a chain reaction, or a walk down the street sounded like a percussion section.

The night after that — the night after a men’s day at the baths — Titus Calidius Severus came across the street at sunset and stayed on after the children and Julia had gone off to their beds. Julia sauntered upstairs with elaborate casualness. Nicole had to work hard not to notice it.

She and Calidius Severus didn’t linger long over the last of the wine. There was so much to say, they ended up not saying much of anything. In a little while they went upstairs, she leading, he following — for the view, she supposed, such as it was. Next time she’d insist on following him. He had a nice ass, as she had good reason to know.

At the top of the stairs, she paused for an instant. The children were snoring in two high, unmusical tones. No sound came from Julia’s room.

Nicole shrugged. Silence would do. “Come on,” she said, as she had on every night after a men’s day at the baths since the mime show. Her bedroom was waiting, and Calidius Severus was in it. She slipped in behind him, and barred the door.

She was easy enough with Calidius now to leave the lamp burning on the chest of drawers while they made love. Her body wasn’t a whole lot in this culture, but in her own it was enough to be proud of. She put some of that pride in the way she held herself. If she could have been really clean, if she’d had access to shampoo, makeup, moisturizers, even plain old soap, she’d have been really something, but as it was, she wasn’t bad. She liked the tautness of her stomach, and thighs that had never heard of cellulite. Her breasts were small and pointed but rather nice, and not too soft in spite of two children — not nursing one’s own did make a difference.

He was enjoying the view, as he must have done on the stairs. She took time to return the favor. He had a good body, better than her own by current standards, and not bad at all for an old man, as he liked to say. The dyes he worked in had stained his hands and arms indelibly, and there were spatters on his feet. They made him interesting. She liked to follow the patterns with her finger, to stroke upward to the clean olive flesh of his upper arm, and across his shoulders where a soft furze of black hair grew, then down his back and around to the rampant thing in front, that Romans liked to call the “little man.” He was ticklish down the line of his spine, would wriggle and fuss if she ran a nail along it, but he loved to be massaged deep and painful-hard in the broad muscles of his shoulders.

There were scars. Sometimes he’d tell her where he’d got them: the arrow in the arm, the sword-thrust that grazed his ribs, the deep pitted hollow in his thigh where the spear had struck. Each one recalled pain that people in her world seldom knew, not just the pain of the wound but the pain of treatment, and no drugs but wine and, once in a while, poppy juice — crude opium, nowhere near as effective as the modern arsenal of painkillers. Wine was the only antiseptic, too, and no antibiotics to back it up. It was a miracle he’d survived, and not only that, that he walked without a limp. “Except in the dead of winter,” he’d told her a time or two back. “Then everything stiffens up. Price of old age, and being an old soldier.”

He wasn’t so old in bed, as she liked to reassure him. “Boys are always in a hurry,” she said. “Men take their time.”

“That’s good,” he’d say then, “because it takes me a little more time to warm up and a little more to cool down, these days.”

When Nicole made love, the world went away. The yammering of thoughts went quiet, and she was spared, for a little while, the constant strain of living somebody else’s life.

Tonight they joined with an urgency that had as much to do with holding fear at bay as with any kind of bodily passion. They clasped each other tight, he driving hard and deep, she urging him on, legs locked about his middle, holding him even after she’d come to climax and felt the hot rush of him inside her.

Only then did it strike her. The twist of wool and the box of resin lay on the chest, untouched, forgotten.

At the moment she couldn’t find it in her to care. Next to the fear she’d lived with since the day in the amphitheater, this was nothing. If she had caught something, so to speak, she didn’t doubt that Julia would know how to take care of it. Unlike the pestilence. The pestilence — it put her in mind of the plague, the great plague of long ago (or a long time coming, from this end of time) — no one could stop.

She was holding him so tight, he gasped for breath. Reluctantly, she let him go. They lay nested in the narrow bed, and he managed a shallow gust of laughter. He groped for her hand and pressed it to his chest. His heart was still drumming hard. “You see, woman? You wear me out.”

Bless him for knowing just what to say, and how to say it, to shake her out of her megrims. She seized on the mood, and let it take her over. It was amazingly easy. She snorted. “Oh, nonsense. If the baths took women every morning and men every afternoon, you’d be over here bothering me every night.”

He poked her in the ribs. She squeaked, then clapped a hand to her mouth. Damn — she’d have bet an amphora of Falernian that Julia was lying in her bed across the hall, laughing her head off.

“Can’t think of a better reason to want to go to the baths,” Calidius Severus said. Nicole snorted again. He went on, “Likely just as well they do things this way. Any man past forty who says every other day’s not easier is lying through his teeth.”

She liked him very much, just then. Loved him? Maybe. But love was easy; it was mostly hormones. Liking was harder to come by. As far as she’d ever known, the handful of men who weren’t convinced they were permanently nineteen would sooner have faced cross-examination by Johnnie Cochran than said as much out loud, especially to a woman. Honesty was novel, and highly refreshing.

Without warning, and without a word, she kissed him. He widened his eyes at her. “What was that for?” he asked.

“Just because,” she said.

He laughed. “Good enough reason for me.”

His laughter didn’t last. Little by little, it leached from his face. She’d been holding onto her bright mood by sheer force of will, but he’d run out of stamina. Slowly, he said, “The attendants had to carry somebody out of the cold plunge today. He had a rash on his face and neck, and on his chest, too. He looked like the woman at the show.”

Nicole went still. If her heart could have stopped, it would have. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“No, I’m not sure,” he answered, but he didn’t sound any more reassured than she felt. “I didn’t see either one of them for very long, and I didn’t get a very good look at them. But the rash is hard to miss — and they both had it.”

“It probably was, then.” Nicole spoke the words like a judge passing sentence. Maybe she was passing sentence — on Carnuntum. She shivered. She’d been shivering a lot lately, though it was summer, and warm enough by Carnuntum’s standards.

When he clasped her to him, she felt the cold in him, too, the chill that had nothing to do with the air’s temperature. He warmed quickly enough, all the way to burning. Over forty or no, he had it in him to go a second round.

“It’s the company I keep,” he said when they’d slipped apart again, each a little more winded than the last time.

“You’re just being sweet,” she said. She could have flattered herself into thinking her own allure made him so randy. So maybe that did have something to do with it. But she knew the sick man in the baths was as much in his mind as in hers.

He yawned. “Now look at me. I’ll want to sleep till noon, and Gaius will have to drag me out of bed to get the day’s work done.” Gaius would tease his father too, probably, about old men and young ambitions.

The lamp guttered abruptly and went out. Nicole cursed: she’d forgotten to fill it before she went to bed. Going to bed with company could do that, distract her from life’s smaller concerns.

Titus Calidius Severus cursed more pungently than she, as he groped for his sandals in the dark. Nicole found her own tunic conveniently near to hand and slipped it over her head, smoothing it down her body. Her hands paused of their own accord. She was all warm still from making love.

Her eyes had adapted to the tiny amount of light that slipped through the shuttered window. She had no trouble seeing her way to the door, or unbarring it and peering out. She listened, head cocked, then nodded. Julia was snoring, a deeper counterpoint to the children’s diatonic scale.

She padded barefoot down the stairs. Calidius Severus followed so close he almost trod on her heels. She plotted a path through the tables and stools between the stairs and the door, and cheered herself under her breath when they both reached the door unscathed. She saw his crooked grin in the light of a wan moon. He hugged her tight. “I’ll get through tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that,” he said. “I’ll just go on and on. Just the way we all do.”

She sighed, and nodded. She, too. There was no other way to get through life in Carnuntum and still keep herself within shouting distance of sanity. “You have good sense, she said.

“Do I?” He shrugged. “What am I doing here in the middle of the night, then?” He started to chuck her under the chin, but caught himself, and kissed her instead. “Kissing’s better,” he said, “after all.”

She could hardly argue with that. It was hard to let him go; hard, maybe, for him to let her go. But they were practical people. They parted briskly enough. He went to his own place and his son and his work. She went to hers. Day after tomorrow, when it was again a men’s day at the baths, he’d be back. She could count on that, as sure and as regular as the clockwork that Rome had never known.

The next morning, when Nicole opened her door for business, the amphorae were out in front of Calidius Severus’ shop. Maybe Gaius had put them there, she thought, until she saw movement inside, and recognized the bristle of Titus’ beard. She felt logey and slow. He must feel much the same. For the first time in a while, she’d have given a great deal for a pot of coffee and a pair of mugs, and a jump-start for both of them.

As she scooped salted olives from their amphora into a wooden bowl, Dexter the doctor trudged past. He had his leather satchel in his hand: not quite a little black bag, but close. On impulse she left the bar, went quickly to the door and called to him: “Dexter! How is the woman who took sick in the amphitheater?”

He paused in his stride. He didn’t seem as annoyed to be stopped as he might. He looked tired, she thought, and pale. Up all night, probably, practicing his trade.

“The woman in the amphitheater?” he asked. “They buried her yesterday.”

Nicole stood flatfooted. She’d expected it. She’d dreaded it. And yet…

He didn’t wait for her to get her wits back. “I’m off to another case now,” he said. “Aesculapius grant me better fortune.” As he turned to go, a storm of sneezing overtook him, and a rattle of coughing in its wake.

Oh Lord. He had it, too. Nicole caught herself wiping her hands frantically on her tunic, though she hadn’t touched him at all. How many people had that woman infected at the show? How many of them were sneezing and coughing, but hadn’t yet broken out with the rash that signaled full onset of the disease? How many people were going to catch the disease in the baths? Just about everyone in Carnuntum went to the baths; they were always crowded. A plague couldn’t ask for a better breeding ground.

Nicole’s last bastion of optimism crumbled. She shook her head and turned back to the tavern. There was a cold feeling in her stomach, and an ache that wasn’t hunger. She was familiar with it from this and that: an accident on the freeway, the California bar exam. It was fear.

Julia was up at last, a little late — and was that a sign she was getting sick? Nicole quashed that stab of worry. Julia was cleaner than she’d been when Nicole first arrived in Carnuntum, now she had money and a little time for the baths, but she still had a fondness for tight tunics and a disgusting tendency to wake up cheerful and stay that way till the rest of the world caught up with her. Or not; Julia didn’t care.

Her curiosity was as sharp as ever, too. “What were you talking to Dexter about?” she asked as she worked flour into the first batch of the day’s bread.

Nicole started chopping nuts and raisins for sweet cakes. She took her time in answering. “We were talking about the woman who got sick when Titus and I were at the mime show,” she said. She didn’t really have to, or particularly want to, but Julia was the closest thing she had to a female friend in this world. She had a pressing need, suddenly, to share the worry with someone else.

Julia didn’t appear to know or care that there was something to worry about. She smiled at Nicole’s use of Titus Calidius Severus’ praenomen. She’d made it clear long since that she thought the two of them were a good match. If she could see them married off, Nicole was sure, she’d be the happiest freedwoman in Carnuntum. “How is the woman?” she asked.

“Dead, ‘ Nicole answered baldly.

Julia didn’t go pale, or reel, or seem at all shocked. “Oh,” she said without much evident emotion. “That’s too bad.”

People in Carnuntum were on very much more intimate — and much more casual — terms with death than people were in the United States of the late twentieth century. Julia’s offhand observation was one more signpost on a well-marked road. She took for granted the possibility that a person could get sick and drop dead, just like that. From what Nicole had seen of the state of the medical art, that wasn’t the least bit surprising.

They worked in silence, in the well-worn groove of two people who’d been coworkers for so long, they no longer needed to think about how they shared this task or that. Just as the bread came out of the oven, the first of the morning’s regulars showed up at the door. He hawked and spat before he came in, and coughed.

Nicole had let down her guard a little. Her stomach had even begun to unclench. Now it went as tight as a fist. Julia, oblivious, served the man his regular cup of one-as wine and his half-loaf of bread with olive oil to dip it in.

As he thanked and paid her, a confusion of distant sound resolved itself into sense. A funeral procession made its sorrowful way toward and then past the tavern. Professional mourners wailed and keened. Musicians thumped and tootled their dirges. Friends and relatives of the deceased straggled behind the bier. They’d gone for an older extravagance than Fabia Ursa’s funeral party had: faces streaked with ashes, tunics ceremonially rent. Under the marks of formal grief, their expressions were set, stunned. Just outside the doorway, one of them said, “But he was so young!”

So, Nicole thought numbly. People could think like that here, too. She resisted an urge to run out and ask what the boy had died of. People did die of things other than pestilence. Young people especially, and children most of all.

She was not reassured. When the procession had passed and faded into the background hum of the city, someone in the street sneezed. She jumped like a startled cat.

Right behind her, Lucius sneezed explosively. Her heart leaped into her throat. She whirled. “Are you all right?” she practically shrieked at him.

When she’d first come to Carnuntum, that concern would have been partly feigned. Not now. Little by little, by almost imperceptible stages, Lucius and Aurelia had become hers. And if one of hers was sneezing -

But he looked at her as if she’d gone demented, and laughed at her expression. “Oh, Mother! I’m fine.”

Julia glared at him, and shook her finger under his nose. Which, Nicole happened to notice, had a somewhat dusty look to it. “He was trying to breathe flour,” she said. “I saw him grab a pinch.”

“Oh, he was, was he?” Nicole said in a dangerous purr. “You did, did you?”

Lucius might be silly, but he wasn’t stupid. He recognized the sort of question that meant he should make himself scarce.

He didn’t recognize it quite soon enough. Nicole caught him by the arm as he scooted past. Her free hand applied a fundamental lesson to his seat of knowledge. His squawk had more surprise in it than pain. Her second whack remedied the imbalance.

She let him go. He scampered off, not much the worse for wear. He didn’t indulge in the tears and histrionics that an American child would have gone in for. Less than a minute later, he was laughing again.

Children were tough little creatures: tougher than Nicole had realized. She was the one who stood as if poleaxed, staring at her own hand. Why in the world had she just done that? She never had before. She would have been appalled if she’d thought before she did it. She was worried, that was it. Worried half to death. That worry had magnified her anger at what was, at worst, mild misbehavior.

It didn’t seem reason enough. It probably wasn’t. But it also probably hadn’t been child abuse. Nicole wouldn’t have said that before she came to Carnuntum. It was happening again: the Romans she lived among had infected her with their own attitudes.

It was better than being infected with measles, or whatever this new and deadly disease was.

She was still thinking about that when Sextus Longinius lulus came in and sat at one of the tables near the door. “Let me have a cup of your one-as wine, would you, Umma,” he said, “and some olives, too, if you please.”

When she’d given him what he asked for and he’d paid her, she paused. He looked all right — not wonderful, not happy, but not broken down with grief, either. People who couldn’t deal with death wouldn’t last long in this world. “How’s your son?” she asked.

He spat out an olive pit and drank a swallow of wine. “He seems healthy enough, the gods be praised. Fabia Honorata’s looking after him right now.”

Nicole suppressed a stab of guilt. She should have gone over there days ago and seen if she could help. But she’d been busy, the tavern took up most of her time, she had her own kids to raise -

No, she thought. Face it. She hadn’t gone over because she hadn’t known what to say, and she couldn’t be bothered with a baby on top of everything else.

She raised an eyebrow at the baby’s father. “Fabia Honorata? Not the wet nurse?”

“No, not the wet nurse,” Longinius lulus answered. He did look a little haggard after all. “That’s the other reason I came in here. She’s sick. It’s the new sickness that’s been going around, the one that really hits you hard. Gods only know if she’ll pull through. I wanted to ask you who nursed Aurelia. That wasn’t so long ago — she might still be in business.”

Nicole’s first thought was pity. What a life for a woman, going from baby to baby, no more valued for herself than a milk cow, and not too different from one either. Perpetually full and aching breasts, no relief from baby howls and babyshit, and no time off unless she wanted her livelihood to dry up.

Hard on the heels of that came fear. If the wet nurse was down with the pestilence, that meant she’d brought it into the tinker’s shop. Even now it might be fighting a still-silent war against his body’s defenses. And if that was so, then he was breathing it right into her face.

She didn’t want to feel what she felt — it wasn’t noble at all. She wanted him to go away. She gave what answer she could, as patiently as she could, considering. “I don’t really remember the name of the woman who nursed Aurelia,” she said. “It’s been a bit of a while, after all. Julia, do you recall?”

Julia came to the rescue as she so often had before, with the ingrained habit of obedience, and a nature that accepted whatever people chose to throw at her. “Wasn’t that Velina, the wet nurse who used to live on the other side of the place where the town council meets?” she said. “Didn’t she and her husband move back to Vindobona last year, to be with his kin?”

“Yes, she did. I remember that,” Longinius lulus said. Nicole nodded and hoped her face didn’t look too blankly foolish. She’d had to do that again and again when pretending to recall things Umma certainly would have remembered. Sooner or later, someone was going to trip her up over it.

Not today. Please God, not tomorrow either, or the day after.

“What will you do now?” she asked Longinius lulus.

He sighed. “Have to look for somebody else, I suppose,” he answered. “I can’t feed him myself, though I wish to heaven I could. It’d be a lot easier and cheaper. If Fabia Ursa had lived — “ He broke off, took a deep breath, blinked rapidly but held in the tears. “It’s the gods’ will. Isis’ priestess said it, so it must be true.”

But it wasn’t the gods’ will. It was plain old ignorance and lack of sanitation. Fabia Ursa needn’t have died.

If Nicole had told anyone how antibiotics could cure childbed fever, they’d have thought she was mad. And she couldn’t prove that it worked. She knew that it worked, but not why it worked or how to make it work. It had been just the same with the measles vaccine, and with the concept of antisepsis, of touching a woman in labor with absolutely clean hands so that she wouldn’t pick up the germs that caused childbed fever. Nobody here believed that such a thing could exist. And she had no way to show them.

If she’d stopped to think at all, before she lived this life, she’d have thought that she could save the world with all the things she knew. But she didn’t know anything that really mattered — anything that could help, or that anyone would let her use to help.

“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning all of it, more than he could ever know.

“I’m sorry, too,” Longinius lulus said. “I miss Fabia.”

And yet, even as he said it, and seemed to mean it, his eyes slid toward Julia, who stood at the hand mill grinding grain into flour. Julia couldn’t even be conscious of the way the tunic clung to her body as she worked, or how her breasts bounced, big double handfuls that had never been softened or slackened by the bearing or nursing of a baby.

All Nicole’s sympathy for him evaporated. Was that why he missed Fabia Ursa: because she was available whenever he wanted a stroke? Did he think he could go upstairs with Julia, someday when Nicole wasn’t around to say no?

Nicole scowled. She was angry at him, but at herself too. He’d loved his wife — he’d worn it on his face when he looked at her, and in his voice when he spoke of her. If he was still a normal man, if he still could want what a woman gave, who was she to fault him for it? Nicole hadn’t exactly shut herself down when Frank walked out, either.

I didn’t go looking for a prostitute, she thought starchily. But there’d been that fast-talking son of a bitch who’d made all that noise about being the youngest man in his firm to make senior partner, except of course he hadn’t made it yet, but everybody knew it was just a matter of time. She couldn’t even remember his name. She’d let him talk her into bed just to prove that she could still get a man; that a man could still want her, even if Frank had traded her in on a younger model. Compared to that, a straightforward transaction with a whore didn’t look quite so bad.

At long last Longinius lulus finished his wine. “Thanks, Umma,” he said, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic. “I’ll head over to the market square, I guess. Either I’ll find a wet nurse there who can take on another baby, or else I’ll find somebody who knows one.”

“Ask at Sextus Viridius’ stall,” Julia said. “I heard one of his daughters might be setting up as a wet nurse, since her husband walked out on her and left her with a newborn baby.”

Longinius lulus looked ready to kiss her, but either he was too shy or he had more self-control than Nicole might have credited him with. “I’ll try that,” he said. “Thank you, Julia.”

She smiled. He waved impartially at them both, but mostly at Julia, and left in rather better spirits than Nicole might have expected.

She let out a long sigh. Part of it was sympathy for the tinker’s plight. The rest was a desire to rid her lungs of as much of the air he’d breathed at her as she could.

Julia echoed her sigh. “He’s having a hard time,” she said. “First his wife, now his baby’s nurse — you’d think he’d done some god a bad turn. And yet he’s such a nice man. If I had any luck to spare, I’d give it to him.”

“Would you?” Nicole said slowly.

Julia nodded. Her eyes were wide and earnest. What was she thinking of, taking Longinius lulus upstairs as a personal act of charity?

Nicole actually caught herself thinking, Maybe, the next time he comes and the place isn’t busy, I’ll find myself an errand to run. Just once. As a gift to him. She wasn’t even particularly shocked to catch herself at it. Julia wasn’t being coerced. She honestly wanted to do something for him, and that something was all the gift she had to give. He’d be happy. She’d be happy. Nicole could live with it, if she had to.

On the day when Julius Rufus was due for his regular beer delivery, he showed up as he always did, leading a small and tottery donkey with four large barrels of sour beer strapped to its back. Nicole caught sight of them outside the tavern, in between one customer going out and another coming in, and reached the door in time to see him unfasten one of the barrels from its cat’s cradle of leather lashings and ease it to the ground. He tipped it on its side and rolled it into the tavern. She had to jump aside or it would have rolled over her toe.

“Good day, Mistress Umma,” he said as he always did. “Good thing my next stop is close by, or poor old Midas here would get all lopsided.” He laughed, but he wasn’t his usual hearty self. He looked as worn as his joke, and his cheeks were flushed. He heaved the barrel up on its end beside the bar, and leaned there for a moment to get his breath back. “Let me have a cup of your two-as wine, would you? Gods, it’s hot today.”

Nicole hadn’t particularly noticed. After Indianapolis and especially after L.A., none of the summer weather she’d seen in Carnuntum struck her as anything more than warm. A lot of it, today included, didn’t even measure up to that.

She slipped past him behind the bar and dipped up his cup of wine. When she turned to bring it to him, he’d sunk down onto a stool. He was scratching the side of his neck between the edge of his beard and the neck opening for his tunic, and frowning. “Has something bitten me there?” he asked her. “It itches.”

Nicole peered at the reddened skin. It wasn’t just the scratching that had turned it that angry shade. “It doesn’t look like a bite,” she said. “It looks more like some kind of a… rash.” She swallowed. She felt as if she’d just done a one-and-a-half gainer into a dry pool. Yes, it looked like a rash. The kind of rash that went with the measles. She’d seen it at several rows’ distance in the amphitheater, and marked the resemblance. Now, from close up, there was no mistaking it.

Her thoughts must have shown in her face. Or maybe Julius Rufus had been coughing and sneezing for the past three or four days, and all the while done his best to tell himself he was fine, he was just coming down with a cold. As his eyes met hers, they went wide. He knew what a rash could mean. His voice lowered to a whisper. “Is it the pestilence?”

“I don’t know,” she lied — a white lie, she told herself. She debated the next thing, but really, if she was going to get it, she would; she couldn’t be any more exposed than she had been by now. And wasn’t measles one of the diseases that was contagious before the symptoms showed? Whether it was or it wasn’t, the damage by now was done. As if he were a sick child, she said, “Here. Let me feel your forehead.”

Obediently, he raised his head and tilted it back. Nicole laid her palm on his forehead. Even before she touched him, she felt the heat radiating from his skin. She had to will herself not to jerk away in alarm. God, he was hot. 104 degrees? 105? 106? She couldn’t tell, not exactly. She hadn’t felt that kind of fever often enough to gauge the temperature. She didn’t ever want to again, either. He was burning up.

“Have I got a fever?” he asked.

She felt the hysterical laughter rising, but she had a little control left. She didn’t let it out. Why on earth hadn’t he passed out right there in front of her, as the woman in the amphitheater had done?

She answered him, because she had to say something, and he was waiting. “Yes,” she said. “You are pretty warm.” And the Danube is damp, and the sun is bright, and… As surreptitiously as she could, she wiped her hand on the coarse wool of her tunic. Too late, of course. Much too late. But she couldn’t stop herself. “Maybe you shouldn’t deliver the rest of your beer this morning,” she said as tactfully as she could. “Maybe you should go home and lie down.”

He shook his head, and wobbled when he did it, so that he almost fell off the stool. “Oh, no, Mistress Umma. Even if it is the pestilence, I can’t do that. Too much work to do. Besides, I hear it kills you if you’re lying down, same as if you’re standing up. Got to keep going.” He shook his head again, this time vaguely, as if he didn’t know where he was going even if he was going there.

Nicole wanted to shake him, but if she did, she’d knock him clean over. There wasn’t anybody around to pick him up, either. One way and another, anybody who’d been in the tavern had managed to make himself scarce. Julia was nowhere in evidence, nor the kids either. She was alone with a very, and perhaps deathly, ill man.

She did what she could, which was damned little. “If you rest, you’ll be more able to fight off the disease,” she said.

“I can’t help it,” he said with the kind of mulishness she’d seen before in people too ill to think straight. “I’ve got to go on.” It took him two tries before he could stand up. “Thank you for the wine.” He’d had only the one cup, but he staggered like a man far gone. Which he was — but not in wine.

Nicole stayed where she was as he made his listing, swaying his way to the door. She couldn’t make herself move, still less lend him a hand. A kind of horror held her rooted, a sick fascination. This is what death looks like, a small voice said in the corner of her mind.

The donkey waited patiently under its somewhat lightened burden. Julius Rufus took its leadrope with something that, at a distance and in bad light, might have been taken for his usual briskness. The donkey, well habituated to its rounds, took a step forward. Julius Rufus crumpled to the ground, right there in the middle of the street. The donkey stopped and stood, head low, ears drooping. Very well, its stance said. If one step was all it needed to take, then one step it would be.

Nicole couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the fallen man till a shadow fell across his body. Gaius Calidius Severus stood there, staring down. He must have been watching from inside the dyer’s shop.

Something about him, maybe just his presence, freed Nicole. She could move, could make her way out of the tavern and stand on the doorstep while an oxcart rattled and creaked its way down the street. The man in it caught her eye as he came closer. His expression was blankly hostile, the expression of a driver on a California freeway, going where he was going and God help anyone who got in his way. But oxcarts being what they were, wide open and dead slow, he had time to bellow at her as he came on: “Get that cursed drunk out of the road, lady, or I’ll roll right over him.”

“He’s not drunk, he’s sick, and you’ll be a lot sicker if you try running over him,” Nicole snapped — with no little satisfaction. On the freeway, you never got to answer back, or if you tried, you got shot.

She was threatening the drover in fine L.A. fashion: Don’t Tread On Me, and I’ll clobber you if you try. But he didn’t get the nuances. His ox had brought him within peering distance of the fallen man. “Gods and goddesses,” he said, “he’s got the pestilence!” He plied his stick on the ox with ferocious vigor. The ox bent its head and pressed on at half a mile an hour instead of a quarter, steering as wide around the crumpled body as it could. Nicole didn’t see it slacken, but the drover redoubled his efforts once he’d passed the obstacle. The ox lowed in protest. The cart’s axle squeaked and groaned. The man in it looked over his shoulder till the street bent and took him out of sight, as if the death in the street could follow him, and be beaten off if it came too close.

Gaius Calidius Severus stood watching him go, just as Nicole had done. When he was gone, the young dyer turned back to Nicole. “Has he got the pestilence, Umma?” he asked.

“Yes,” Nicole answered. She didn’t try to soften it for him. Maybe she should have. He was her lover’s son, after all. But right at the moment, she had no softness in her. She rolled Julius Rufus onto his back, got a grip on his armpits, and set about dragging him back toward the tavern.

“Here,” Gaius Calidius Severus said, “you don’t need to do that all by yourself.” He got hold of Julius Rufus’ ankles and lifted while she dragged. Between the two of them, they carried the sick man into the tavern.

Nicole was more than glad of the help, but she wished Gaius Calidius Severus hadn’t exposed himself to the disease. She also wished she hadn’t exposed herself, but it had been too late to worry about that since Julius Rufus rolled her barrel of beer into the tavern.

She eased the unconscious brewer down next to the wall by the door, where no one would step on him, and thanked her helper with honest gratitude. He blushed a bit and shuffled his feet. “Any time, “ he said. “There was too much of him for you to haul by yourself, I could see that. Mithras teaches that a man shouldn’t just think what’s right: he should do what’s right.”

Nicole liked that. Yet Mithraism, from all she’d heard, had no place for women.

She shrugged. This was hardly the time to worry about the finer points of religious doctrine.

Julia was back in the tavern from wherever she’d been: women’s day at the baths, from the look and smell of her. The place was empty of customers, a stroke of good luck for which Nicole was deeply grateful.

Julia’s eyes were a little too wide, her stare a little too fixed. But she had wits enough not to burst out in hysteria. Nicole brought her to order with a sharp word. “Julia — do you know where Julius Rufus has his brewery?”

“I — think so,” Julia answered hesitantly.

“I do,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. “I know just where it is. Do you want me to take the donkey back and let his family know he’s — indisposed?”

“Would you?” Nicole said. And had to add: “Will your father mind if you take so much time off from work?”

“Not if I’m doing a favor for you,” he answered. That flustered her more than she might have expected. Of course he knew what was going on. There couldn’t be much of anybody who didn’t.

Her nod was sharper than his comment deserved. He bobbed his own head by way of reply, with no irony that she could discern, and went to take charge of the donkey.

“He’s very nice,” Julia said. “A little too young, but very nice.”

She hadn’t thought he was too young when she went upstairs with him on the day of her manumission. Nicole found she’d come to forgive him that, or most of it. You really couldn’t expect a man that young not to think with his crotch. It was like expecting a cock not to crow at sunrise: you could hope for it, even pray for it, but it wasn’t bloody likely.

Lucius and Aurelia came tearing in from some game out back, and stopped short to stare at Julius Rufus. They didn’t know or care enough to be scared, as Julia was. “What’s wrong with him?” Aurelia wanted to know. But, tavernkeeper’s daughter that she was, she found a logical answer to her own question: “Is he too drunk to go home?”

“No, “ Nicole said flatly. “I’m afraid he’s got the pestilence.”

The rash was coming out on his cheeks and forehead, developing almost like Polaroid film. Aurelia and Lucius had seen plenty of drunks at the tavern, but a man with the pestilence was new and therefore interesting. They edged closer for a better look.

Nicole caught them both with a braced arm. Lucius stopped, but Aurelia pushed against her, scowling. Aurelia never liked to be thwarted.

Nicole didn’t, right now, give a damn what Aurelia liked or didn’t like. “You stay back,” she said to the two of them, sternly enough that she hoped they’d listen. “This is a bad sickness. You can get it if he just breathes on you. Stay away from him.”

“But you brought him inside,” Lucius pointed out. “You and Calidius carried him. Does that mean you’ll get the pestilence, too?”

“I hope not, ‘ Nicole answered, three of the most sincere words she’d ever spoken.

While she was distracted with the kids, a customer came briskly in. He glanced at Julius Rufus, there on the floor, and raised his eyebrows. “He’s got it, has he?” He passed the sick man without evident qualm and sat at a table near the middle of the tavern. “A cup of your two-as wine,” he said, “and some bread and oil.”

Julia served him with a kind of numbed efficiency. While she did that, the kids slipped free of Nicole’s tiring grasp, but didn’t try to get any closer to the sick man. They did hover, big-eyed, clearly waiting for him to do something — bleed, maybe, or vomit spectacularly, or die.

The customer ate, drank. He paid for his order in exact change, and walked out. Either he was as phlegmatic a man as Nicole had met, or he was just plain callous. Or maybe he was both at once.

Nicole had just scrambled herself together and taken thought for spelling Julia at the bar, when Julius Rufus let out a small sigh. A second or two later, Lucius wrinkled his nose. “I think he’s gone and shit himself,” he said matter-of-factly.

The odor that wafted toward Nicole was unmistakable. She felt her own nose wrinkle, and her gorge start to rise. Damn, she thought as she watched a wet spot spread on the front of Julius Rufus’ tunic. “He’s wet himself, too,” she said.

Lucius snickered. “Just like a baby.”

If he’d been within Nicole’s reach, she might have slapped him silly. The impulse was so strong it scared her. “It’s not funny, she said when she could trust her voice. “He’s not doing it on purpose.” She turned to Julia, who was hanging about as if she couldn’t tear herself away. “Fetch me some damp rags, will you? I can’t leave him lying here in his own filth.” Cleaning him was the last thing she wanted to do, but what choice did she have? Unlike Julia, she’d already touched him, already had his breath in her face. She knew she was exposed to the pestilence; she didn’t know whether the freedwoman was. Best not to make it a sure thing.

She swallowed the sour taste of bile, and breathed shallowly so as not to take in more of the combined reek of ammonia and ripe shit. His mouth had fallen open. His eyes were open, too, wide and staring. A moment after she realized she didn’t see him blinking, she noticed she didn’t hear him breathing.

She dropped the dripping rags and snatched his wrist. It was hot, as hot as his forehead had been — maybe hotter. Her finger found the spot outside the tendons, below the fleshy swell at the base of the thumb.

Nothing.

She bore down on the spot, the pulse-spot, where she should feel the beating of his heart. The only pulse she felt was her own. She pressed her palm to the left side of his chest. Nothing there, either. Nothing at all.

“He’s dead,” she said in dull wonder.

“I was afraid of that,” Julia said. “When his bowels let go… that happens, you know. Every time.”

Lucius and Aurelia stared more avidly than ever. A sick man was interesting. A dead one was absolutely riveting.

Gaius Calidius Severus came back while Nicole was still trying to figure out what to do, bringing with him a woman about Julius Rufus’ age and two young men who strongly resembled the brewer. They also had the donkey, from which they’d removed the barrels. Obviously, they’d intended to pack the unconscious man on the donkey’s back, and get him home more easily than if they’d had to carry him.

Nicole had been dreading the moment when she had to tell them the man was dead. It was just as bad as she’d imagined. The men began to bellow, the woman to shriek and wail. “What will we do without him?” she shrilled, over and over. “What are we supposed to do?”

Nicole could think of just one thing. She retreated to the bar and pulled out a toppling pile of cups, and filled them pretty much anyhow. Alcohol was the only tranquilizer the Romans knew. She administered it liberally.

They didn’t thank her for it, or pay her either, but they drank it down. It quieted them somewhat, though the woman couldn’t stop asking what she was supposed to do. Cope, Nicole wanted to snap at her, but refrained.

Still sniveling and weeping, Julius Rufus’ two sons took up his body and draped it over the donkey’s back. It slipped and slid bonelessly; they had to tie it in place. Still without a word of thanks, they set off on their sad journey home, or more likely to the undertaker’s.

People stared as they made their slow way down the street. The cries of Julius Rufus’ widow faded with distance, and sank into silence.

“Times will be hard for them now,” Gaius Calidius Severus said as he paused in the doorway on his way back to work. “I remember how things were when Mother died. They weren’t much different for you, were they, when you lost your husband?”

How would I know? Nicole almost asked, but caught herself in time. Instead, she said, “Times will be hard for the whole city now, if this pestilence is as bad as they say.”

“I’m afraid it’s worse, “ Gaius Calidius Severus murmured, but he managed a smile at Nicole.

To her amazement, she found a smile in return. “Thank you for your help, Gaius,” she said. “It was very, very kind of you.”

She’d been a bit daring in calling her lover’s grown son by his praenomen, but he didn’t protest. He dipped his head to her, that was all, and went quickly across the street.

Nicole stayed by the door, staring at the space where he had been. It was better than what she wanted to stare at, which was the place where the brewer had collapsed.

She hadn’t known how long she stood there, until Julia asked, “Are you all right, Mistress?”

“No, I’m not all right,” Nicole said, “but I’m not sick, either, if that’s what you mean.”

Julia didn’t look too greatly reassured. Nicole didn’t have any reassurance to give her. All she had had drained away when she looked into Julius Rums’ face, and saw that he was dead.

If anyone had asked her afterwards, she couldn’t have said how she got through the day. When sunset came at long last, and business slowed and then mercifully stopped, she did something that she’d have been horrified to contemplate, back in West Hills. But in this place and time, it was the only reasonable or rational thing to do. She got quietly and systematically drunk.