The procession wound its slow way out of the alley and into the broader street beyond. Nicole happened to be close to the front, not far in back of Sextus Longinius lulus, who walked behind the bier. He carried his son in his arms, the son for whose life his wife had given her own. He looked eerily calm.
She debated disturbing him now or waiting till later. Later might not come; now was here. She said it, then, and hoped for the best: “Is there anything I can do?”
He shook his head. “Oh, no. The funeral club is paying for everything. I’ve put in my
“Oh,” Nicole said, feeling oddly foolish. “How — forethoughtful.” The funeral club sounded like the closest thing to life insurance she’d heard of since coming to Carnuntum. Not that she could imagine genuine life insurance in a world like this one. The premiums would have been murderous. If somebody as young and healthy as Fabia Ursa could die from a simple infection… If Fabia Ursa could die like that, nobody was safe. Nicole shivered, though the day was warm as days went in Carnuntum.
“We have the babies buried under the stairs,” Longinius lulus said in conversational tones. “If it weren’t for the pollution, I’d have put Fabia beside ‘em, but adults have to go outside the city wall.”
For a moment Nicole wondered how, except by its size, an adult’s body would produce pollution but a baby’s wouldn’t. Decay was decay, regardless of the scale.
It dawned on her belatedly that he had to mean religious, not environmental, pollution. As far as she could tell, all the Romans wanted to do with the environment was exploit it.
The funeral procession made its way through the city to the gate that led to the amphitheater. Once outside, however, it swung southeast toward the graveyard Nicole had seen on the day she went to the beast show. A woman stood waiting there, in a tunic that shone blinding white in the sun. A priestess, Nicole thought. Sexists or no, the Romans had female priests. The Catholic Church rather emphatically didn’t, nor did most of the other conservative Christian denominations.
“Isis,” a man said off to the side, dismissively. “Isis is a women’s god.”
“Well, and what do you expect?” said the man beside him. “It’s a woman we’re burying. If it had been a man, now, we’d be saying our prayers to a proper god.”
“Mithras,” the first man said. “Yes, there’s a god for men.” The way he said it, men were so far above women in the food chain that there just was no comparison.
“And no women allowed, either,” his friend said. “That’s a proper god for a soldier, that is.”
They sounded so smug, and so perfectly certain of their god’s superiority, that Nicole would have loved to tell both of them where to go, with detailed instructions on how to get there. But this was a funeral procession. All she could do was shoot a glare at the men, who took no notice whatsoever and steam in silence.
Rather belatedly, she recalled that Titus Calidius Severus followed Mithras. And what did that say about him? He was in the procession: not too far behind her, in fact, though he hadn’t intruded on what must have looked like a fiercely private grief. That was a degree of sensitivity she wouldn’t have granted most sensitive Nineties guys in L.A., let alone a Roman of the second century.
As her eye caught his, his own lit up, but he didn’t go so far as to smile. She couldn’t tell if he heard the two men talking. He must have. If so, he wasn’t passing judgment, or at least, not that she could see.
Maybe he didn’t want to. He was a veteran, she knew that. Should she give him the benefit of the doubt? She shrugged. Maybe.
The procession made its way into the cemetery. It had spread out along the road; now, as it passed among the stones, it formed into a straggling line.
The priestess waited for them. She hadn’t moved at all except for the wind tugging at her robes. Nicole wondered how, in a world bereft of bleach or detergent, she managed to keep them so blindingly white.
Nicole needed a little while before she could see past that white and shining shape to the darkness beside it. The priestess stood near the edge of a newly dug grave. The men who must have dug the grave sprawled on the grass not far away, passing a jar back and forth.
No folding chairs here, and nowhere to sit but on a gravestone — which no one went so far as to try. The mourners stood around the grave, each seeming somehow to stand a little apart from the others. They’d seemed pathetically few in the city and on the road. Here they closed in and made a sizable crowd. Nicole had to slip between two taller neighbors to keep her eyes on the priestess.
The mourners had fallen silent. Nicole hadn’t realized how intensely irritating their shrieking and keening was until it stopped, and she luxuriated in silence. The undertaker’s assistants brought the bier down from their shoulders with a little too much evident relief. One’s bones cracked as he bent to lower body and bier into the grave. The body rocked slightly, shifting sideways. Nicole caught her breath. But the bier steadied; it sank down into the dark earth.
It hadn’t been real before, not really. Somehow that one bobble, that almost-fall, brought it home to Nicole. Fabia Ursa was dead.
The priestess hadn’t moved at all, or spoken a word, or seemed aware that any of them was there. Just as the body sank below the level of the ground, she raised her hands to the heavens. The voice that came out of her was strong, a little harsh, with a flatness in it that was vaguely familiar. So too were the words she spoke. “Queen Isis is she that is the mother of the nature of things, the mistress of all the elements, the initial progeny of the ages, highest of the divine powers, queen of departed spirits, first of the gods in heaven, the single manifestation of all the gods and goddesses.”
It was no prayer Nicole had ever heard before, but it had that odd, familiar feel. “The luminous summits of the sky, the wholesome breezes of the sea, and the lamented silences of the dead below, Isis controls at her will. Her sole divine power is adored throughout the world in many guises, with differing rites, and with differing names, but the Egyptians, preeminent in ancient lore and worshipping her with their special rites, give Mother Isis her truest name.”
Fabia Ursa’s baby began to cry. Sextus Longinius lulus passed him to the woman next to him, a nondescript woman of indeterminate age. She slid her arm out of one sleeve of her tunic and exposed a breast, thereby informing Nicole, and anyone else with eyes to see, who she was and what she was doing here. The baby’s cries subsided into gurgles.
Nicole, distracted by the baby and his nurse, had missed a few words of the priestess’ prayer, declamation, whatever she wanted to call it:“ — take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and cherish it. May Isis take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and comfort it. May Isis take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and give it peace and rest and tranquility forever.”
“So may it be,” several of the people gathered around the grave said in unison. The hired mourners took up their racket again, wailing and beating their breasts. The musicians kept them company with a racket that certainly made Nicole sad — sad that she had to listen to such a ghastly imitation of music.
Fabia Honorata had carried a covered jar to the graveside. Now that Longinius lulus’ arms were free of the baby, she handed the jar to him. He took it as if he didn’t know quite what to do with it; then with a start he seemed to remember where he was. He was still in shock. He bent stiffly, and set the jar in the grave beside his wife’s shrouded body. “My dear wife,” he said with the same flatness Nicole had heard in the priestess, the flatness of rote, “I offer you food and drink to take with you on your journey from this world to the next.”
His voice was steady. But as he knelt beside the grave, looking down at the shape that lay within it, something in him crumpled. For a moment Nicole thought he would faint, or fling himself into the grave with Fabia Ursa’s body.
Of course he did no such thing. He straightened painfully, as if he were a very old man. As he turned his face again to the sun, Nicole saw tears streaming down his cheeks.
That, it seemed, was all there was to the funeral. As Longinius lulus stepped away from the grave, the two gravediggers woke from what had looked like a fairly complete stupor, picked up their spades, and ambled toward the grave. They didn’t pay attention to the rapidly dispersing group of people, nor did they show any notable concern for the solemnity of the occasion. Without a word, they dug spades into the pile of earth beside the grave and began to fill it in. Dirt thudded down onto the shrouded body of the woman who had been Umma’s friend, and whom Nicole had liked well enough.
