please. She’d treated Julia like a… like a slave again.
No time to waste in feeling guilty. Both children were groaning, a sound she knew too well. At the same time, the lamp guttered and went out. There was no moonlight on this side of the house, no way to see anything. She tracked the kids by their moans and their heavy breathing, and a little catch that must have been a sob. She barked a shin against the hard side of a bed, swallowed a curse — damn, that hurt! — and bent to feel for a forehead. She found one, and another next to it. Hot. Hers was probably hot, too, not that she had time to care. Kids first.
The lamp Julia brought was marginally brighter than the one Nicole had left by the door after it burned out. It still shed about as much light as a nightlight back in West Hills.
Julia set it down on a stool and stepped back against the wall and waited.
That was what guards did in Frank’s pet old movies. The gesture must mean the same here as there. It was Nicole’s show. She looked around a little desperately. So now what?
In West Hills, she had known what to do. Here — Here, her own toothache, which hadn’t gone away, which as far as she could tell would never go away, had already taught her Latin didn’t have a word for Tylenol. It didn’t have a word for aspirin, either. By unpleasant but perfect logic, no word meant nothing.
Back in West Hills, she wouldn’t have thought of giving aspirin to kids with fever anyhow, because of the small but real risk of Reye’s syndrome. Back in West Hills, she’d had other, better choices. Her mother, who hadn’t, and who hadn’t known about Reye’s syndrome, either, had given Nicole aspirin plenty of times. Nothing bad had happened. Nicole would have given it to Lucius and Aurelia — and taken some herself — without a qualm, if only she’d had any.
Julia stirred, probably deciding Nicole wasn’t thinking straight because she was sick. “Shall I get the willow- bark decoction, Mistress?” she asked.
Julia was waiting for her to say something. “Yes,” she said more impatiently than she’d meant. “Yes, go on, go get it — please,” she added a bit belatedly.
Julia seemed almost relieved to be snapped at, though the politeness of the last word made her eyes roll briefly before she darted back down the stairs.
The children might be sick, but they weren’t too sick to make a whole range of revolted noises. “Willow bark!” said Lucius, who seemed the livelier of the two. “Ick! Ick ick ick!”
“Be quiet,” Nicole said to him. No, snapped at him. She was too blasted sick herself to be nice about it. Somewhat to her surprise, he shut up, though he kept making horrible faces.
Julia came back none too soon with a bottle and a tiny cup. The stuff she poured out looked horrid and smelled worse, but Nicole held her nose and gulped it down regardless. Its taste was even worse than its smell — gaggingly, throat-wrenchingly bitter.
The kids were staring at her as if she’d done something ridiculously brave. Taking medicine, it seemed, was no more popular in Carnuntum than it had been in California. That might have been funny, had she felt less like dying.
She’d expected the stuff to be nasty. It was. It was also familiar, which she hadn’t expected. When she’d had a sore throat, her mother had made her gargle with a couple of aspirins dissolved in warm water. God, she’d hated that! This taste wasn’t far from it.
Nicole made the kids take the decoction anyway. If it tasted like aspirin, maybe it had something like aspirin in it. Hadn’t she heard or read somewhere that aspirin came from some folk remedy or other? Maybe it came from this one.
“Julia, you’re feeling all right,” Nicole said tiredly, “and I’m not.” Even in the dim lamplight, she saw how smug Julia looked. She lacked the energy to call her on it. “Would you take care of the chamberpots in here and in my room, please?”
“Yes, Mistress,” Julia said. Her method of taking care of a pot was to pick it up, carry it to the window, and dump it out on the ground below. She went back to Nicole’s bedroom and did the same thing with the one in there, or so the second wet splat declared.
The words were shocked right out of Nicole’s head. If there’d been any to be found, they would have come out in a shriek. No toilets was one thing. No sewers — but Rome had sewers! She’d seen a documentary. Where were Carnuntum’s sewers? Didn’t these people know anything about sanitation?
No wonder flies buzzed in through her window. And no wonder at all that Carnuntum smelled the way it did — and the water wasn’t fit to drink.
The willow-bark decoction made her feel better — not a lot better, but some. And the kids’ foreheads were cooler. They’d stopped groaning and subsided into a fretful doze. She hugged them and, after a little hesitation, kissed them. They didn’t object. She felt strange: half like a babysitter, taking care of children not her own; half like a mother. If these had really been her own -
She didn’t know any Latin lullabies. On sudden inspiration, and because she couldn’t think of anything else, she hummed “Rockabye Baby.” Even without the English words, maybe the tune would do the trick. Apparently it did. First Aurelia’s breathing, then Lucius’, slowed and deepened into the cadence of sleep.
“That’s a nice song, Mistress,” Julia whispered as they tiptoed out of the children’s room. “Has it got words?”
“If it does, I don’t know them,” Nicole answered, with a small stab of guilt at the lie — or maybe it was her gut clenching again. “I’m going to go back to sleep now myself, or try. If I do, you’ll be on your own for a while in the morning. I hope you can — “
“I understand,” Julia said. “I’ve managed before. Rest if you can, Mistress.”
Lumpy mattress. Scratchy blanket. Leftover stink from the dregs in the pot. Nicole didn’t care. Her belly wasn’t churning so hard. Next to that, nothing else counted. She yawned, stretched, wiggled… slept.
When Nicole woke up, daylight was streaming in through the window. She still didn’t feel good, not even close, but, after she used the chamberpot a little less explosively than she had in the nighttime, the buffaloes decided to end their stampede through her insides and head off somewhere to graze.
There was nowhere to dump the chamberpot except out the window. “Sewers,” she muttered. “This town needs sewers.” She gritted her teeth and dumped the pot as Julia had the night before.
She dressed quickly in a fresh loincloth and tunic, and looked at herself in the mirror in the makeup kit. She looked like a chimney sweep. Most of the smoke that hadn’t gone through the hole in the roof the day before had clung to her.
She washed her face with water from the
The water was bad, no arguing with that — or with the reek that lingered around the emptied chamberpot. So what was she supposed to drink? Wine? She could water it, she supposed — wouldn’t the alcohol kill germs as easily as it slaughtered brain cells? She’d get a lower dose then, too. Maybe she could work out a formula as to how little wine she could get away with before the water went toxic.
She still didn’t like it. She liked even less that the kids had to drink the stuff in any proportion. Maybe she could talk them into drinking milk after all, and never mind the Marcomanni and the Quadi, whoever they were.
She studied her newly washed face in the mirror. Not a chimney sweep, not anymore. Now she just looked like hell. “That,” she said to nobody in particular, “is why God made makeup.”
Women here, she’d observed, powdered and painted themselves as heavily as a geisha in full regalia — and into much the same dead-white mask. The makeup Umma had used was less finely ground than the pricey Clinique that Nicole had held onto even when money got tight, as her one by-God extravagance. Its texture and color made her think, rather disjointedly, of quite another white powder, one that had been distressingly common in L.A. Rome might lack flush toilets and bathroom tissue — but it was also blessedly free of cocaine.
It was free of powderpuff and makeup brushes, too. She smoothed the powder on as best she could with a bit of rag — no cotton balls, either. Who’d have thought there’d be a world without cotton balls? Or swabs? Or -
Or eyebrow pencils, or lipsticks. Her finger had to do for both, and the rag growing grubbier with each step in the ritual. No cold cream, either, to remove mistakes or clean her fingers. If she could figure out how all those things were made, she’d be willing to bet there’d be a market for them.
