Household Gods (59 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Antonina made gratified noises much like the ones she'd used herself. She and Nicole drank wine together. Good cheer reigned, as much as it ever did around Antonina. After a suitable interval, she said as cordial a good-bye as Nicole had ever heard from her, and went on out the door, bowl in hand.
As soon as she was gone, Julia picked up the dog and made a ghastly face—almost as ghastly as the dog's own. “By the gods, that's a hideous little thing, isn't it?”
“You think so, too?” said Nicole. “Well; one has to be polite. Maybe she thinks it's the height of fashion.”
“Hardly!” said Julia, in a tone so like a Valley Girl that Nicole almost burst out laughing. But there would have been no explaining the distinctive intonations of “As
if!
” to a second-century Roman freedwoman in the valley of the Danube.
It was a relief, actually, to know that she might get rid of
the ceramic tumor without offending local standards of good taste.
“I'll bet somebody gave it to her, and she's just getting rid of it to keep from spending any money on a decent present,” Julia said.
“Then we're even,” Nicole said, “because I pulled that bowl off the dresser and dusted it off, and there it was.”
“It wasn't a bad bowl,” Julia said. “But this …” She juggled the dog from hand to hand. It slipped; Nicole held her breath. But it didn't fall. Julia plunked it down on the bar, right by the bowl of nuts.
“It doesn't look half bad there,” Nicole observed.
“Maybe a customer will have a few too many and knock it on the floor,” said Julia.
“Maybe there's treasure hidden inside it.”
Julia's eyes gleamed. Then she laughed in disbelief. “No! Not if
Antonina
gave it to you. You can bet, if there'd been anything in there, she'd have winkled it out.”
“Dear old Antonina,” Nicole said with a theatrical sigh.
One way and another, the two of them spent a very pleasant half-hour dragging Antonina's name through the mud. There was plenty of that outside, and not a little inside, either. No point in letting it go to waste.
When the dishfest wound down, Nicole filled a bowl of soup and a jar of wine, and took them across the street to Gaius Calidius Severus. He was in no condition to romp on the sheets with Julia now. The pestilence had him fully in its grip. If she could get a little nourishment into him, he might be able to fight the disease. There wasn't much more she, or anyone else in Carnuntum, could do.
It was almost as chilly inside the shop as on the street. That was true in the tavern, too. Fires and braziers were all very well—when you stood right by them. If you didn't, you froze your backside off. That probably had a lot to do with the death rate. People who might have recovered if they could have got warm, shivered and sank and died. Please, God, Nicole thought,
don't let that happen to Calidius Severus.
Even in winter, the fuller and dyer's shop stank to high heaven. Nicole held her breath as she strode quickly through it and climbed the stairs to Gaius Calidius Severus' bedroom. There she had to breathe or turn blue, drawing in a whiff of a completely different stink: the sickroom reek of slops and sour sweat that Nicole had first smelled in the room where Umma's mother died, and then soon after in her own house.
Gaius Calidius Severus had kicked off most of the covers she'd tucked over him the last time she visited. He hadn't, fortunately, kicked over the chamber pot by the bed. Nicole scooped it up and dumped it out the window. “There,” she muttered. “That'll be better.”
The sound of her voice made him look in her direction. He wasn't altogether out of his head with fever, as she had been. But he wasn't quite connected to the real world, either. He proved it by asking, “What are you doing, Mother?”
“I'm just getting rid of what's in the chamber pot,” Nicole answered. She didn't say she was his mother, but neither did she say she wasn't. If thinking his mother was taking care of him made him feel a tiny bit better, that was good; let him think it.
It didn't seem to help a lot, if it helped at all. His expression changed; he began to wriggle, and then to thrash. She braced to leap, in case his fever had turned to convulsions, but as suddenly as he'd begun, he lay still. In a small voice full of shame, he said, “Mother, I'm afraid I've had an accident.”
Nicole's nose would have told her as much: the stink in the room had worsened, even though the chamber pot was empty. “Don't worry about it,” she said soothingly. “I'll take care of it.” Did he think he was a little boy just learning to use the pot? Or did he know how old he was, but not who she was? It didn't really matter. Either way, she had to clean him off, just as, last summer, he'd done for her.
In a way, it wasn't too awfully different from changing Justin's diaper after an especially messy load. In another, it was completely different. Gaius Calidius Severus was emphatically and rather impressively made like a man, not a
boy.
No wonder Julia likes him,
Nicole thought through the slight vertigo of trying not to breathe. “I'm sorry,” he kept saying. “I'm sorry.”
“It's all right,” she reassured him. “Everything will be all right.”
When he was as clean as he was going to be, and the remains tossed out the window with the rest, she let her hand rest for a moment against his cheek. As soon as she'd done it, she wished she hadn't. She didn't really want to know how high his fever was. But he let out a sigh and leaned very lightly against her palm. Maybe it was cool; maybe it comforted him. Either way, he seemed a little better, a little less troubled.
She spooned soup into him. When he'd taken all he was going to take, which was about a third of the bowl, she poured a cup of wine and held it to his lips. He coughed and spluttered. With a faint sigh, she dipped the spoon into that, too, and got it into him more successfully. One small swallow at a time, he did pretty well, all things considered: he took more than he had the last time, and much more than the time before that. It was progress. She'd take it.
Just as she was about to leave, when she thought he'd fallen asleep, he roused enough to speak. “Thank you, Mistress Umma.”
She turned in surprise. He still sounded like hell, but he knew who she was.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, more to be saying something than for any other reason. She knew how he felt: as if he had one whole foot and three toes of the other in the grave. She'd felt the same way herself not so long before.
“Terrible,” he answered, right on cue. He sounded it. He looked it. But he had recognized her, and that was a big step forward. He yawned. “Do you mind if I sleep?”
“Not even a little bit,” Nicole said warmly. That was good; oh, that was very good indeed. She'd slept, too, slept and slept, after she came out of her delirium. She'd awakened feeling lousy, but she'd been on the mend. Maybe he was, too.
She hated to leave him, but she had the tavern to run, and Julia was waiting. She broke the news as soon as she'd passed the door. Julia clapped her hands in delight. “Maybe we've turned the corner,” she said. “Maybe we've turned the corner at last.”
“Please,” Nicole said, not knowing Whom she was entreating, and not much caring, either, “let it be so.”
 
Gaius Calidius Severus lived. The first time he came across the street on his own, he looked like a tattered shadow of his usually vigorous self. But he was up and moving, and that was all that really mattered. Nicole gave him a plate of fried snails and a cup of Falernian, and wouldn't take an as for any of it. “Your father knew how far he'd get, arguing with me,” she said when he tried to protest. “Are you going to give me trouble now?”
“No, Mistress Umma,” he said meekly. He ate obediently, and drank, with the little widening of the eyes everyone got at the first wonderful taste of Falernian.
Julia sauntered past his table, putting everything she had into it, which was quite a lot. He didn't look up from the wine.
Well,
Nicole thought,
he isn't quite back to normal yet.
A little while longer, and a little way to go. But he was well on track, and that was good enough.
New Year's was celebrated not with horns and paper hats but with clay lamps stamped with the two-faced image of Janus. On the morning of the festival, Julia pulled a couple of them from the back of a shelf, dusted them, filled them with oil, and lit them.
“This year,” Nicole said, studying one of the images in the flicker of its flame, “I want to look ahead, not behind. Things will be better. They won't get worse.”
“May it be so,” Julia said fervently. And after a moment: “The gods know, it would be hard for things to get much worse.”
Half an hour couldn't have gone by before a funeral procession made its slow way down the muddy street toward Carnuntum's southwestern gate, the gate that led to the
graveyard. Nicole watched it for a moment, then deliberately turned her head. She'd already seen more death in half a year in Carnuntum than in her whole life in the United States. She didn't want or need to be reminded of it again. Not today. Not when there was a future to look forward to, and a life to live.
Since the day he got up from his bed to savor snails and Falernian, Gaius Calidius Severus had come over every day at about the same time. He was back to paying for his own food and drink, which dropped him down to bread and oil and onions and two-as wine, but he professed himself happy with it.
Today Nicole served him with a flourish, and gave him a smile to go with it.
Death doesn't win every time,
she thought.
Better and better: he took longer to eat than he might have, because his eye kept turning toward Julia. Nicole felt the smile stretch—not the least bit lessened by the small shock of realization. She was
glad
to see his tongue hanging out over her freedwoman again. It was another sign of his recovery—another sign of life, as it were.
That evening, she was presented with a different sign of life, and not a pleasant one, either. The tooth that had been hurting in a low-grade, steady way ever since she found herself in Umma's body decided it had had enough. Between one heartbeat and the next, a demon picked up a hammer and started trying to drive a tenpenny nail into her lower jaw. It didn't succeed on the first blow, or yet on the tenth. It was going to keep hammering away, it was clear, for as long as it took.
She'd been eating supper with Lucius and Julia. Julia was still in a daze, smiling dreamily—no doubt remembering her hour upstairs with Gaius Calidius Severus. Lucius, however, was alert, a little too much so. He left off babbling about his latest triumph with the game board, fixed her with a penetrating stare, and asked, “What's the matter, Mother? You look awful.”
“Toothache,” Nicole said thickly. “Bad toothache.” She
twisted her tongue back toward the throbbing tooth and prodded it as hard as she dared. The flesh there was hotter than it should have been, and felt puffy and loose. She nearly gagged at the taste. Without even thinking, she thrust fingers into her mouth and tried to twist the tooth a little, to make it more comfortable. That was a mistake. The demon gave up on hammering nails and resorted to railroad spikes. The tavern went dark for a moment—a darkness that had nothing to do with bad weather, three-o'clock sunset, or miserable excuses for lamps.
She sank down onto a stool. If one hadn't been close by, she would have settled for the floor. She would have sunk down through that, if it made the pain go away. But of course the pain had no intention of doing any such thing. It had moved in, lock, stock, and railroad spike.
Her fingers had snapped back as soon as the pain hit the red zone. She stared down at them. The tip of her index finger was smeared with something thick, semiliquid, and grayish yellow. After a moment of pure blankness, she recognized it. “Pus,” she said, which could have been either Latin or English. Whichever language it was in, it was not good news. She had to struggle to go on in Latin: “I've got an abscess back there.”
Julia shuddered. “Oh, Mistress! That's not good. No, not good at all. I'm afraid you'll have to have it pulled. If you don't, it will keep on festering, and as it festers it will spread. You'll lose a whole lot of teeth. You could even die.”
“Right!” said Lucius with altogether too much relish. “All your teeth fall out, and it festers and festers, and you fall over dead.”
Nicole narrowly resisted the urge to smack him. “Thank you so much, both of you,” she said frostily—but not through clenched teeth. That would have hurt like hell.
The worst of it was, she knew Julia was right. She shuddered just as Julia had. Even in Los Angeles, an abscessed molar wouldn't have been fun. But a dentist in Los Angeles would have had novocaine or a general anesthetic for the pulling, and pain pills for the aftermath. She would have had
antibiotics to shrink the abscess, and sterile instruments and rubber gloves and a surgical mask to keep infection away.

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