Household Gods (56 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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He found another pair of drawers, and awkwardly, with much shifting and fumbling, got them onto her. She was as weak as a baby; she couldn't even lift her hips to help him. When he was done, she was as glad as he must have been. “There you go,” he said. “Wine?” She nodded; words were still a long way beyond her.
He held the cup to her lips. She drank, a few swallows' worth. Even that little exhausted her.
He didn't try to force more wine into her, but let her lie back. He slipped his arm free of her, laid the blanket and the cloak over her, and stood for a while, as if he couldn't think what to do next. Then it came to him. He turned without a word and all but fled.
She lay where he'd left her, clean, drowsy, and almost warm. He'd been real, then. Her spirit was secure in Umma's body again, or as secure as it could be with the disease eating away at it. She tried to slip free once more, but the anchor was sunk, the chains secured. She sighed. No more out-of body experiences—or more likely, no more being out of her head from fever. She'd tried to telephone Liber and Libera, hadn't she? She could remember something. Lines busy.
All our representatives are currently assisting customers. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. A representative will take your call as soon as …
If she wasn't out of her body any longer, she was still just a little bit out of her head. What had Gaius Calidius Severus
said? Everyone here was too sick to take care of her? Julia? Lucius? Aurelia? All sick? All—dying? Flying? Traveling around Carnuntum, seeing the astral sights?
She slapped herself back into something resembling coherence. They were sick. They couldn't take care of her. She had to take care of them. She had to get—up—
With every ounce of strength she had, she rolled halfway over. The effort overwhelmed her. Unconsciousness hit her like a blow to the head.
When she woke, it was dark.
Night,
she realized after a terribly long while. That same night, or the one after, or the one after that? She had no way of knowing. Her hand moved leadenly, but it moved. She touched her drawers. They were dry. Gaius might have come in again and changed her without her waking.
She felt terrible: thirsty, hungry, feverish. Steamrollered. It was the best she'd felt since she woke up and realized that there was no way she was getting up to face the world. “I think I'm going to live,” she whispered, mostly because she could. Her lips and mouth were desert-dry, her tongue a sand-coated bolt of flannel. Even so, she heard the wonder in the ruins of her voice.
Her eyes closed again, and she slept—really slept this time, as opposed to passing out. She woke some time in the morning: light was leaking through the shutters. She sat up. The room spun around her, but she didn't keel over. After a while, it steadied. Could she stand? The first time she tried, she sat down again in a hurry. But she tried again. Darkness came and went; spots swam in front of her eyes. She stayed on her feet. When the world stayed more or less steady, she ventured a step. Once she'd done that, she had to finish, or fall. She fetched up against the chest of drawers, and leaned against it, panting as if she'd finished a marathon.
She had to look in on the others. She couldn't stay here. For one thing, there was water in the
terra sigillata
pitcher by the bed, but no wine to kill the germs in it, and no food. She had to eat. She had to make sure the others were—weren't—
She couldn't go any farther for a while, not till she gathered what rags of strength she had. While she did that, she could see how
she
was. She fumbled in the drawer for the makeup kit, and pawed it open. The mirror nearly slipped from her shaking fingers, but she caught it somehow and propped it on the chest.
Her eyes widened in horror. The eyes of the concentration-camp survivor in the bronze mirror widened, too.
She'd been fashionably slim for a West Hills matron. Now she was skeletal. Skin stretched drumhead-tight over cheekbones and jaw. The rash lingered on her neck and in the hollows of her cheeks. Some of it was peeling, as if she'd had a dreadful sunburn. Someone—Ofanius Valens?—had told her that could happen. She was almost proud that she remembered.
Her hair was like sweat-matted straw. When she raised her free hand to brush it back from her forehead, clumps of it came away between her fingers. He'd told her about that, too. “My God,” she muttered in English. That so much of her hair was dead told her more clearly than anything else, how close she'd come to dying.
The water in the
terra sigillata
pitcher tempted her—Christ, she was thirsty!—but not enough to make her drink. Another bout of the runs would kill her.
She lurched to the doorway. She had to rest there, leaning against the wall. When she could breathe again, more or less, she opened the door. It was as heavy as the city gate, and about as tractable. Another lurch propelled her across the hall to Julia's room. No sound came through the curtain. She set her weight to it and pulled it aside.
Julia sprawled across the bed. Light poured across her from a shutter that she hadn't fastened, or that had come unfastened while she was too ill to tend to it. In her fever, she'd kicked off the covers. Her tunic was hiked up almost to her hips, but a man would have had to be a necrophiliac to want her then.
Still—she was alive; her breast rose and fell in the rapid, shallow breathing that Nicole remembered all too well. She
didn't look ready to stop at just that moment. Nicole went on, fighting to keep her breathing quiet, to concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other.
Lucius and Aurelia lay in their beds. Lucius moaned and thrashed in delirium. Aurelia lay very still. At first, Nicole was relieved. Sleeping, then, and maybe on the way to recovery.
But Umma's daughter lay too still. Julia, even unconscious, had looked alive somehow, and her breathing had been visible from the doorway. Aurelia lay like a doll that some enormous child had discarded.
Step by step, Nicole made her way to the bed. Her hand shook uncontrollably as she reached to set it on Aurelia's forehead.
Aurelia did not have a fever, not any longer. Her flesh was cool, almost cold. It would never be warm again.
Nicole wouldn't believe it. She couldn't. She groped for the bird-frail wrist, searching for a pulse. She found what she'd found with Julius Rufus: nothing.
She wanted, very much, to cry. Crying would loosen the knot in the middle of her, the hard, cold, hurting thing that had swelled in her when she saw Aurelia's stillness. But the tears wouldn't come. Her body was too ravaged. There was no water in it to spare.
If she was truly descended from Umma, then it must be through Lucius. If Lucius died of this pestilence … what then? Atpomara had warned her. No ancestor, no descendant. Not just death but nonexistence. Nothingness. Complete oblivion.
She would have been afraid for Lucius' life even if he'd been nothing to her, but for the dozens, maybe hundreds of lives that would come after him, her fear mounted to terror. She bent over him, breathing hard, and struggling for composure. His drawers were wet and stinking. She changed them and cleaned him, as Gaius Calidius Severus had done for her. He tried to fight her off, but his body wasn't paying much attention to what his brain told it.
At least, she thought, he had enough strength in him to fight.
Julia didn't, when Nicole did the same for her. But she was still breathing, and her body was still fever-warm. As long as she had breath and heat in her, there was hope. Genuine unselfish hope, unconnected with Nicole's very existence. It felt almost virtuous.
One slow step at a time, Nicole made her way downstairs. The tavern was dark and quiet. There were half a dozen loaves of bread by the oven. All were stale, at least three days old, maybe more. Nicole didn't care. She tore a chunk off a loaf and ate it with a cup of wine, soaking bits of the hard, dry stuff in the sweet heavenly liquid. The bread sat in her stomach like a stone. The wine, though, the wine was rain in a desert. Her body absorbed the moisture with joyous gratitude, and began to bloom.
She dipped up a second cup. When she'd got about halfway through it, the front door swung open. Gaius Calidius Severus strode in in a gust of wind and a scent of rain. The hood of his tunic was up, darkened with wet. Mud caked his booted feet.
He was well into the tavern before he saw Nicole standing by the bar, holding onto it to keep from tilting over. “Mistress Umma!” he cried in glad surprise. “Mithras be praised—you're on the mend. And the others?”
“Lucius and Julia are very sick, but they're still alive. Aurelia is … Aurelia is …” Nicole couldn't make herself say it.
Wouldn't
make herself say it. Instead, she asked, “How is your father? How's Titus?”
“He died yesterday,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. Just like that, baldly, without any effort to soften the blow. Once Nicole would have thought he didn't care, but she knew better now. He was numb; running on autopilot. Saying what he had to say, and getting it over with. “In the end, it was a mercy. I was going to find an undertaker after I came here. It'll take some looking, from what I hear. A lot of them are dead.”
Black humor, Nicole thought. It was even slightly funny,
and yet she wanted to laugh.
A lot of them are dead.
A lot of everybody was dead. Butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers. Except they didn't have candles here. They had lamps. Lamp-oil vendors. Tavernkeepers. Fullers and dyers. Fine and gentle men. Lovers.
She called herself to order. She couldn't crack up. She didn't have time. “If you find an undertaker,” she said, “let me know his name. I'll need him, too. Because—because—”
With the wine inside her, at last, she could cry. For Aurelia, who had become her daughter. For Titus Calidius Severus, whom she had—loved? Yes, loved. For the world in which she was trapped, the world from which she couldn't escape, the world that was falling to pieces all around her.
Gaius Calidius Severus wept with her. He'd been carrying the same leaden burden, the same crushing weight of grief. Tears didn't wash any of it away, but they lightened it a little. A very little.
When they'd both run out of tears, they stood in the gloom of the shuttered tavern, in the drumming of the rain, and stared bleakly at one another. “It can't get worse than this,” she said. “It can't.”
 
 
T
HE NEXT DAY, TITUS Calidius Severus was laid in the cemetery outside the city's walls. Nicole was still too weak to leave the tavern, let alone walk so far. Just crossing the street that morning to sit with Gaius Calidius Severus left her exhausted. But that much she could do, and that much she did. She was glad she had: the young dyer was all-alone in the shop, sitting in the reek of ancient piss and the muddle of colors on the floor and walls and on the sides of the vats. He wasn't doing anything, hadn't tried to ease his sorrows with work. He was simply sitting there, on a bench by the
wall, as she'd seen people wait in bus stations, with a kind of blank and bovine patience.
He brightened at the sight of her, jumped up with something of his old energy, took her arm as if she'd been an ancient grandmother, and helped her to the bench he'd just vacated. She breathed shallowly to keep from gagging; her stomach was delicate enough without adding the dyer's effluvium to it. But he was so glad to see her, she couldn't bring herself to turn and bolt back out into the relatively fresh air of the street.
When she'd caught what breath she could manage, she said, “I wanted—I should go to the cemetery with you. But—”
Gaius Calidius Severus patted her arm awkwardly. “No. No, don't fret about it. You've got your boy and your freedwoman to take care of. And Father wouldn't want you to put yourself in any more danger, not after you've come through this far. We'd need another funeral if you did. He'd hate that.”
Nicole swallowed. Her throat hurt. “Thank you,” she said when she could trust her voice. She felt as if she'd received absolution. But it needed a little more. After a moment she said, “You're a lot like him, you know.”
Gaius Calidius Severus blushed and ducked his head. Was he remembering the times he'd gone upstairs with Julia? Maybe, maybe not. And, Nicole thought, his father would probably have done the exact same thing at his age. There wasn't anything wrong with him that a decade and a few cold showers wouldn't fix. “Now I thank you,” he said. “It's better than I deserve, but thank you for saying it.” He paused, as if to nerve himself for what he meant to say next. “How are Julia and Lucius doing?”
Titus Calidius Severus would have put Umma's son ahead of the freedwoman, but he hadn't gone to bed with her, either. Again Nicole noted the difference without rising to it. The question was kindly meant. That was real concern—real friendship.
She answered him warmly then, and fully. “They'll pull
through, I think. Both of them. They're almost to the point I was at yesterday when you found me. But Aurelia—” She stopped to pull herself together. That ordeal would come the day after tomorrow. Even in the fall chill, it wouldn't wait any longer. “They should be there, and I have to be there. Somehow.”
“They won't be able to come.” Gaius Calidius Severus spoke with some of his father's authority. He was right, too; Nicole knew it. She wasn't any more pleased by that than she'd been when Titus was too damnably right for his own good. “I'll look after them, don't worry about that. And as for you,” he said, shaking a finger under her nose, “hire a sedan chair to take you to the graveyard and back. You should be strong enough by then to manage that. No one will think it's ostentatious, not when you've just got over the pestilence, and not for your own daughter's funeral.”
Nicole didn't want to argue with him. She was too tired. She got out of there somehow, not too discourteously she hoped, and crawled back to the tavern and her two charges.
Titus Calidius Severus' funeral procession rocked and wailed its way down the street that afternoon. Nicole watched it from her doorway, standing very still, holding to the doorpost when her knees started to buckle. There were a few people in the procession after all, and a whole quartet of hired mourners, and two fluteplayers who vied with one another to see how far off key they could go and still be somewhere within shouting distance of a tune. Titus would have had something wry to say about that, and a smile to go with it, warm and a little crooked.
That wasn't Titus on the bier, that still and shrouded shape. No. It wasn't anyone she knew. Titus was still alive somewhere. Her skin could still remember the touch of his hands, the way his beard tickled when he kissed her, the sound of his voice in her ear, murmuring words that made her giggle even while they made love. Had she loved him with a grand passion? Hardly. But she'd
liked
him. She missed him, his dry wit, his comforting presence, even his habit of always being right, rather more than she missed taking
him up to her bed on nights after men's day at the baths.
She still didn't have any tears. She gave him memory instead, and the strength she could spare to stand in the doorway till the last of the procession had rounded the corner and vanished. Then she turned, and walking slowly, making her way from table to bench to stool to bar, she made her way back up to the two of hers who were still alive, and the one who waited, wrapped in a blanket, for the undertaker's assistants to come and take her away.
 
Nicole ended up taking Gaius Calidius Severus' advice. The sedan chair was like a four-man stretcher with a seat. Riding in it was beastly uncomfortable, but it was far easier than walking—particularly as half the way was sloppy with mud. The sky was ugly as unwashed wool, heavy and gray and full of rain, but none was falling just then. If they were lucky, they'd get there and back again before the threat of rain became reality.
Gaius Calidius Severus had been right about what people would say, or not say, of Nicole's resorting to a sedan chair. Ila said not a word as she walked along beside the litter. If Umma's sister didn't complain about something Nicole did, it wasn't worth complaining about.
Ila probably had other things on her mind, at that. She was sneezing and coughing in a way that made Nicole's stomach clench. Brigomarus wasn't there; he was down with it, which explained why he hadn't come to help Nicole as he'd promised. She'd been fool enough to hope he was just being censorious again, or that he'd found some new reason to be aggravated with her. His absence mattered more than she would have expected. He'd been a sort of constant in this world, as close to family as she could get, arguments and all. She didn't want him hanging about playing Big Brother, but she didn't want him dead, either.
Along with Ila came Sextus Longinius Iulus, who hadn't caught the pestilence in spite of everything; Ofanius Valens, who'd survived a milder bout than Nicole's; and sharp-tongued Antonina and her husband, a mousy little man
whose name Nicole never had learned. As funeral processions went in these days, it was a largish gathering, and kind-hearted. None of these people needed to be here; they all must be worn out with attending funerals. And still they'd come to see Aurelia to her rest.
Nicole had refused to hire mourners—another thing that Ila had declined to comment on; really, she had to be ill, if she kept quiet about that—but she had asked the undertaker to arrange for a priest. The one provided was a type that must be universal: thickset, florid, with a well-padded middle and an even more well-padded vocabulary. He mouthed platitudes about innocence plucked too soon, and flowers cut down before their prime, and the golden hope of a better world. She'd heard just about the same words, in just about the same plummy tone, on a Sunday-morning Gospel hour. All this man lacked was the shiny suit and the pompadour.
Nicole tuned him out as best she could. She'd asked for a priest, after all. She should have expected what she got. It wouldn't have been any different in the twentieth century; it hadn't been when her grandfather died. He'd been a determined nonchurchgoer, but the family had been just as determined to give him a Christian sendoff. The priest they found hadn't known the man at all, had given a eulogy so generic as to be ludicrous, and had referred throughout to the deceased, whose name was Richard Uphoff, as “our dearly departed Bob Upton.”
At least this man got Aurelia's name right, if nothing else about her. Nicole fixed her eyes on the bier, on the small shrouded figure, seeming so much smaller in death. No larger, really, than Kimberley had been, the night before Nicole vanished out of that world and into this one. This dream turned nightmare, this life suddenly so full of death.
Nicole's throat was aching-tight. She couldn't cry. She wanted to scream. Someone else was, away across the cemetery: shrieking and wailing. It wasn't the voice of a hired mourner; those had their own style, almost like a religious chant. This was too wild, too unrestrained.
That wasn't the American way of death. Even in a world
that had never heard of America, Nicole couldn't bring herself to indulge in it. She sat in the sedan chair in silence while the undertaker's assistants laid the body in the small, muddy hole that was all the grave Aurelia would get. Then she had to get out of the chair, and, though she tottered like an old woman, lay one of Julia's good loaves and a jar of raisins and a jug of heavily watered wine in the grave. She'd wanted to bring Aurelia's favorite honeyed cake, but she'd thought of it too late. There'd been no time to make one.
It was ridiculous to think the dead child could notice what was missing, or care; and yet it mattered very much. Too much, maybe. The wine was Falernian—that much Nicole could give her. Poor little Aurelia, who'd never had the chance to have much, at least had that to take into the grave with her.
As Nicole knelt by the grave, unable to muster the strength to rise, the skies at last gave up their burden of rain. “Even the heavens are weeping,” Ila said, proving the Romans were no more immune to sentiment than to the pestilence.
The gravediggers hadn't been lazing on the grass on this of all days. Even before Nicole was ready to stand up, they were standing over the grave, spades shouldered like rifles.
So shoot me,
Nicole thought bitterly. Somehow, she got to her feet, slipping a little on the muddy grass, and wrapped her cloak about herself. Stiffly, unsteadily, she half climbed, half fell back into the covered chair. “Take me home,” she said to the bearers. They hardly grunted as they lifted her. She'd never been other than lean, and now, with the sickness, she was skeletal. And they must be eager to get in out of the rain.
Gaius Calidius Severus was sitting in the tavern, holding the fort as he'd promised. He'd acquired reinforcements since she left: a vaguely familiar man of about his father's age. They'd been drinking wine: there were cups in front of them. Maybe they'd put brass in the cash box, maybe not. Nicole wasn't going to worry about it. Calidius Severus was doing her a favor by being here at all. Two cups of wine, or
however many it turned out to be, was small enough price to pay.
He greeted Nicole with a smile that seemed just a little bit too glad. He was just a boy, after all, and she'd left him with a heavy responsibility. “Julia and Lucius are asleep, Mistress Umma,” he said. “They woke up for a while, and I gave them some gruel and a little bit of bread sopped in wine, and they even ate a bite each. But they're still pretty weak. The least little thing flattens them.”
Nicole drew a faint sigh. She hadn't known till she heard him, that she'd been expecting him to tell her they were worse; they were sinking, they'd soon be dead. But they were better. Notably so, if they were eating and drinking, however little they might be keeping down. “The least little thing flattens
me,”
she said, “and I was getting better days before they did.”
Gaius Calidius Severus nodded. His relief was still palpable. It made him seem to take refuge in a change of subject. “Mistress Umma, you know Gaius Attius Exoratus, don't you? He came to call on me, and I asked him over here.”
Nicole remembered the face: he'd eaten and drunk in the tavern a few times, though he wasn't a regular. She hadn't remembered his name, if she'd ever heard it. But she could say “Of course I do,” and even sound as if she meant it.
Attius Exoratus nodded. “Aye, we know each other, lad.” His voice was a bass rumble, like falling rocks. “I'd have come anyhow, whether you chanced to be here or not.” He pinned Nicole with a hard stare under a bristle of brows. “It's a cursed shame he's gone, Umma. That's all I've got to say. He was one of the good ones.”
Titus Calidius Severus, he meant; he had to mean. “That he was.” Nicole got herself some wine—dipping up a cup seemed so natural now, she didn't even notice herself doing it half the time—and stood next to the two men. “That he was,” she repeated quietly.
“And young Calidius tells me you just put your daughter
in the ground.” Gaius Attius Exoratus let out a long sigh. “Life's hard. I'm sorry for that, too.”
“Thank you,” Nicole said. There seemed to be more that she should say, but she couldn't imagine what.
He didn't seem to find her response inadequate, at least. “We've all done too much mourning lately,” he said. Nicole nodded, unable to find words to respond to that. He went on, “I only came by to tell you, it did my heart good to see how happy you made my old mate. We fought side by side, you know, and mustered out within a couple of weeks of each other, then moved here from the legionary camp down the river.” He pointed east. “He was as happy a man as I ever saw, when this lad's mother was alive. I was afraid he'd never be happy again after he lost her. But you took care of that. He's not here anymore to thank you for it, so I reckoned somebody ought to.”

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