Household Gods

“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.

A Roman dentist wouldn’t be a she. A Roman dentist wouldn’t have any of those things, either antisepsis or analgesics.

And it didn’t matter. Whatever a dentist could do to her, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what her own tooth was putting her through. She shuddered again at the thought of what she faced tomorrow, but living with this hammering pain would be far, far worse.

She even thought, for a longish while, of finding someone to do the job tonight. But it was dark already, and rain was dripping off the eaves. From the sound of it, it was turning to sleet. No way she could venture out in that, nor was any dentist likely to want to try it, even if she’d had a way to get him over here without sending herself or one of her family out into the dark and the wet.

She had to get drunk before she could sleep that night. The wine didn’t make the pain go away, but it did shove it off to one side. As long as she didn’t have to stare it in the face, she could cope. Mostly. If she had another cup of the one-as wine. And another to chase that one down, because it tasted so godawful. Then a third, just because. And…

She woke long before sunrise. Her body was a perfect symmetry: a pounding headache exactly matched the toothache. She stumbled downstairs, lit a lamp with shaking hands, and drank another cup of wine. It tasted just as horrible as she’d expected. She poured another cup, but couldn’t bring herself to drink it. She nursed it instead, hunched miserably on a stool, until at long last a gray and leaden light filtered through the slats of the shutters.

Julia’s robust footfalls on the stairs beat a counterpoint to the pounding in her head and the throbbing in her mouth. She glowered at the freed-woman.

“Oh my,” Julia said. “It’s too bad the pestilence got Dexter. He was supposed to be very good at pulling teeth.”

Nicole wanted to knock Julia’s head off, and her bright, healthy voice with it, but she chose to focus instead on the words, and on the thoughts behind them. Focusing helped. “There’s that physician named Terentianus,” she said, “not far from the market square. I’ve gone by his place often enough.”

Julia shrugged. “I haven’t heard much about him, good or bad,“ she said. “If he’s still alive, you might as well try him. They’re all pretty much the same.”

That wasn’t true in L.A. It was sure to be an even greater lie in Carnuntum, which had no licensing arrangements of any sort. Here, if you hung out a sign and said you were a doctor, you were. Even the good doctors here were pathetically bad. The bad doctors were right out of the ballpark.

But Nicole didn’t have an awful lot of choice. Her tooth had grown worse as the morning went on. Her whole body ached in sympathy. “If he’s still breathing,” she said, “I’ll try him.”

He was in the shop — office didn’t quite seem to fit — that she’d seen so often: a skinny little man with a nose that looked even larger than it was, because the rest of him was so small. He greeted