Household Gods (55 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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The night was bad. Nicole alternately burned with fever and shook with chills. Coughing fits racked her. It was like the worst flu she'd ever had. But no antibiotics here, no painkillers, nothing but willow bark and tincture of time.
Morning came none too soon, and somewhat to her surprise. She was alive. She didn't feel any worse when she staggered out of bed than she had when she fell into it, which was maybe good, and maybe just delusion.
Titus Calidius Severus was standing in his doorway when she opened up. He seemed as proud as she was, to be on his feet and moving.
The day was gray and nasty and chilly. She was almost glad of the fever that burned inside her. When the chills hit, they'd be all the worse, but meanwhile she didn't need more than the tunic she'd put on when she got up.
Toward midmorning, the rain came, hard and cold. The wind—a wind with teeth in it—drove it lashing sideways. No mild summer downpour, that. It had a taste of winter. In Indianapolis, the next storm would have brought ice with it. Nicole thought that might be the case here as well.
Even the fever wasn't enough to keep her warm in that. She put on the thick wool cloak that had lain in the drawer since she'd come to Carnuntum. She put on socks, too. Even with them, she shivered. She would have been cold had she been healthy. Sick as she was, she felt as if she were walking naked through a meat locker in a supermarket.
No supermarkets. No meat lockers. No way to get warm, either.
From somewhere, Julia dug out a couple of square brass contraptions. They looked like hibachis. “Time to light the braziers,” she said. She filled them with charcoal and got them going. When Nicole stood right next to one, she almost started to thaw. When she moved more than two feet away, she froze solid again. She remembered Indianapolis, and getting the furnace going, and staying warm no matter how cold the winter got.
But she seemed to remember—hadn't the Romans had central heating?
Not here. Not for the poor, at least. Braziers—the space heaters of this world—were all anyone had.
The next day was more of the same, only worse: maybe because the bad weather lingered, maybe because Nicole couldn't escape the truth. She was sicker. Two funeral parties squelched through the noisome mud outside. If the pestilence didn't get the mourners, pneumonia would finish them off just as conclusively.
 
That night, Nicole didn't bother to bar her bedroom door. Some of the last bits of rationality left in her warned that,
come morning, she might be in no shape to get up and unbar it.
Her sleep was uneasy, broken with fragments of dreams, stray bits of nightmare, memories so real that she sat up with a gasp. She'd been reaching for a coffee cup in the office, or nuking a hotdog for Justin, or throwing a load of laundry in the dryer. There was nothing romantic about these moments at all. They were relentlessly, blissfully mundane.
Then she'd wake and the manifold stink of Carnuntum would hit her like a blow to the face. No coffeemakers, no microwave ovens, no clothes dryers. No drugs, either, to fight this disease that was eating her from the inside out. Once she actually stared at her hand in the nightlamp's flicker, looking for the lines of flame that must mark the muscles and the bones. But it was only Umma's thin long-fingered hand, with its olive skin and its work-worn palms.
She drifted for a long time between sleep and waking, not sure at all that she wanted to wake, but unable to cling to sleep. At last, sleep shrank and vanished. The waking it left her with was a cold and pallid thing. She was shivering so hard she couldn't even sit up. All she could do was lie there and scrabble feebly, pulling the blankets around her as tightly as she could. Her teeth chattered as if she'd been standing naked in an icy wind.
After what seemed like a very long time, someone tapped on the door. Nicole tried to tell whoever it was to come in, but the sound that came out bore little resemblance to intelligible words.
It didn't matter. The door opened somewhat tentatively. Julia's round Germanic face and big blue eyes peered around it. The eyes went as round as the face. “Oh, no, Mistress,” she said.
Oh, yes, Julia,
Nicole thought. She tried to say it, too, because it was surely the wittiest thing she'd come up with in—why, forever. All she got for her trouble, again, was an unintelligible croak.
Julia ventured fully into the room, chattering as she came, as if words could hold the horrors at bay. “When you didn't
come down to open up or to eat breakfast, I was afraid you were too sick to get out of bed. As soon as I get the fires built up, I'll bring you some warmed wine and some soup.”
Nicole had owned this woman. No, dammit,
Umma
had owned her. Sick as she was, Nicole insisted on the distinction. Julia could have done nothing, or next to it, and let her former mistress die in bed. No one would have said a word. Not with the harvest the pestilence was reaping. But, in spite of having been another human being's property, Julia was doing what she could to keep Nicole going. Maybe she was a genuinely nice person. Maybe Nicole didn't understand exactly how slavery worked. Maybe both of those things were true at once.
Warm wine slid down Nicole's throat with surprising ease. The soup tasted strongly of leeks, rather less so of salt pork. It was warm, which counted for more than its flavor.
“I'll look in on you every so often, Mistress,” Julia promised.
Nicole nodded. The soup and wine made her feel a little more alive. But when Julia pressed a hand to her forehead, the freedwoman looked grave, as Nicole had herself when she'd felt the heat that radiated from Julius Rufus.
The touch didn't hurt, but it felt strange, as if there should be pain somewhere: an odd, twitchy, uncomfortable feeling. When Julia left the room, through the fog that blurred Nicole's sight these days, she saw the slow headshake, and the slight slump of the wide meaty shoulders.
On the way downstairs, Julia sneezed and then coughed, twice in a row.
Julia, too. Nicole didn't know why she should be surprised. Part of her tried to grieve, or at least to be scared, but she was too weak for either. She'd begun to shiver again under the blankets and the heavy cloaks. Her wits drifted away. This time, she lacked the strength of will or the strength of body to call them back. They were going. She wasn't. Her eyes slid closed.
Some time later—she had no idea how long—she found herself floating weightlessly above the body she'd been inhabiting.
Its face was reddened and roughened with the telltale rash of the pestilence. Its chest still rose and fell, rose and fell, shallow but steady. She could feel the heat coming off the body, and yet, every now and again, it shivered.
From her vantage above it all, she wondered how Titus Calidius Severus was doing. As quickly, as easily as that, she was no longer hovering above her body, but above his. He writhed and tossed in a bed not too different from her own—and why, she asked herself, hadn't she ever seen it before? Now and then, a hoarse cry escaped him. Anger, it might have been, or alarm, or remembered battle. His face and neck bore the same scarlet marks as Umma's cheeks and chin and forehead.
Sextus Longinius lulus' baby, she thought. She didn't know why it mattered, but she wanted to see him, to see how he was. No sooner had the thought crossed her mind, than she was in the tinker's house. And there was the baby, nursing at the fat pale breast of a woman who looked more nearly Irish than Roman. Baby and nurse both seemed healthy: no coughing or sneezing, and no rash on face or breast.
That sight comforted Nicole more than she'd thought possible. Even knowing the sickness could strike those two within the day, even within the hour, she still was glad to see them safe. The next thing, the thing she should have done, to look in on her own—Umma's own—children, she couldn't bring herself to do. If they were well, then that was well. If they weren't, she didn't want to know. She couldn't do anything to help them. And she'd drive herself wild, like a bird against a window, beating and beating herself for no purpose at all.
She was drifting while she maundered, floating as if in water. One way and another, she found herself once more above Umma's body. As unattractive as the prospect was, she knew she should find her way back into it. Spirit belonged in body. Spirit alone was air and nothingness. Was—dead.
But when she tried to slip back as she'd slipped out, it was like pressing one pole of a magnet into the same pole
of another. Some force thrust her softly but irresistibly back, as if to tell her,
This place is not safe for you.
Had Umma's mother journeyed like this? Was that how she'd known a stranger looked out at her from her daughter's eyes? If Atpomara had done that, she had managed to rejoin her body. And then, almost at once, she had died.
Nicole's mind in its disembodied state was more distractable even than it had been through the haze of fever. It fled the thought of Atpomara, and Atpomara's death, toward the much wider world. If Carnuntum was in such straits, all the way out by the Danube, what was it like in Rome itself?
Somewhat to her dismay, she didn't shift to the imperial capital. She'd left the tavern behind, but escaped only as far as the amphitheater, to the seat from which she'd watched the mime show with Titus Calidius Severus. From there she looked south, across the fields to the darkness of a forest that, some part of her knew, went on for miles. That was as close as she'd come to Rome. It was as far in that direction as her spirit could go.
And where else could she go? Her mind stretched across alternatives, and seized on the wildest one, the one she'd have thought craziest of all if she'd heard this story from the comfort of West Hills. God—gods, how she wished Liber and Libera had never brought her to Carnuntum.
And there they were, floating before her in a vast expanse of nothingness. They looked just as they had on the memorial plaque beside her soft, clean, blessedly vermin-free California bed: rather plump, naked, and pleased with themselves. Their eyes were fixed on some rosy distance, far away from Nicole and her inescapably mortal self.
She didn't even think before the words poured out of her.
Let me go home. Let me go back. I don't belong here. I belong there. This
—and God, it hurt to say so, to admit she'd failed at anything—
this was a mistake. I should never have come here. I want to go home!
When she'd shaped a wish into a prayer back in West Hills, not even knowing she'd done it, Liber and Libera had responded in an instant. Why not? They'd had nothing better
to do—probably hadn't for centuries. Who believed in them enough to pray to them? Nicole hadn't, either, but she'd wanted out so badly, and been so absolutely desperate, that it hadn't mattered who or what answered her prayer.
Now she was in their world, a world full of believers, and therefore of prayers. Nicole could dimly sense others winging their way to the god and goddess, as she sometimes heard the ghosts of other conversations on the phone when she waited for a long-distance connection to go through. She might as well have been calling Ticketmaster, trying to land seats for a hot show. Sometimes your call went through right away. But if everyone decided to jam the lines at once, you'd get a busy signal … again and again and again.
Just as she rang—dialed—prayed again, driving the force of her need at the unheeding gods, her spirit made its own, completely unwanted connection. As suddenly as it had left, it was in Umma's body again, trapped in the reddish dark behind her eyelids. Someone had taken the covers off her. She was freezing cold. Hands groped under her tunic, tugging at her drawers.
Her eyes flew open. Gaius Calidius Severus loomed over her, the face so like his father's, the pitting of adolescent acne on the cheeks, the beard that was still coming in in patches. She gasped, coughed, choked.
Gaius
violating her? Was he out of his mind? Was she? No way in the world she could fight him off. But—Gaius—
He raised his eyes from what he was doing with her drawers, and caught her stare. “Oh, good,” he murmured in profound relief. And then, louder: “Can you understand me, Mistress Umma?”
It took several tries—her head was as heavy as one of the gaudy statues in the baths—but at last she managed a nod. His expression lightened immeasurably. “My father made me promise to look after you,” he said. “Everyone else is too sick to help. You've—fouled yourself.” He blushed while he said that, like the boy he was, but he went on gamely: “I'm going to clean you off and get you a fresh pair of drawers. I'm doing the same thing for him. By the gods, that's all I'm
going to do. Do you understand? Is that all right?”
She sighed faintly, relaxing a tension she hadn't known she had, and nodded, a little more easily this time. He pulled the soiled drawers off her, strode to the window, undid the shutters, and pitched the drawers out. They landed with a wet splat. He turned back into the room, leaving the shutters open to let in a pale gray light, and rummaged through the chest. He emerged with a rag, which he wet in the washbasin, and wiped Nicole clean. She got the strong impression he would have averted his eyes if he hadn't needed to see what he was doing. The water on the rag felt icy cold on her burning skin.

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