Household Gods

The show ended not long after the woman’s departure. Applause was sparse, abstracted. The actors tried to drum it up, strutting and gesticulating on the stage. One, who’d played a comic villain, favored the amphitheater with an obscene gesture and a flash of his bony behind.

Nobody but Nicole seemed to take any notice. Some of the audience kept glancing toward the place where the woman had been sitting, uneasily, as if something dark might be lurking there still. Others craned their necks, peering at anyone who might be inclined to keel over.

Titus Calidius Severus’ sigh had a wintry sound to it, though it was still only August. “So,” he said. “It’s come here after all. I was hoping it wouldn’t. From everything I’ve heard, it’s been bad — very bad — in Italy and Greece.”

“It looked like the — “ Nicole broke off. The Latin she’d been gifted with when Liber and Libera sent her to Carnuntum had no word for measles. No word, she’d learned, meant no thing. But measles, even before there was a shot for it, had been a common childhood disease. You were sick, and maybe there were side effects, but you didn’t usually die of them. That had been true, her mother had said, for as long as anyone remembered. How could there be no word for the disease in Rome?

No. That was the wrong question. If the Romans didn’t have a word for it, what did that mean? That it wasn’t a common childhood disease here and now? If that was the case… For the first time, Nicole felt a stab of fear. Sometime not too long before she left TV behind for good, she’d watched a show — on the Discovery Channel? A E? PBS? — about the European expansion. It might have been much less easy for the sun never to set on the British Empire if the Native Americans and the Polynesians had had any resistance to smallpox or measles. The British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, brought their diseases as well as their trade goods and their guns. As often as not, the bacteria and viruses did the conquering, and the Europeans took over what was left. Native populations had, the documentary said, died like flies.

And here she was in a world that had no name for measles, and Calidius Severus was staring at her, obviously waiting for her to go on. “It looked like the what?” he asked. “I didn’t think anybody’d ever seen anything like this before. Do you know something I don’t?”

Sudden tears stung her eyes. The world blurred about her. I know so many things you don’t, Titus, she thought in a kind of grief. And what good did knowing them do? Knowing that there could be such a thing as a measles vaccine was a hell of a long way from knowing how to make one. She wasn’t like the hero in a time-travel movie. She didn’t come equipped with every scientific advance and the means to manufacture it. All she had was day-today, more or less random cultural knowledge, which could flip a light switch but couldn’t begin to explain what made it work.

What had Dexter told the sick woman’s companion? Take her home and make her comfortable? Nicole couldn’t have given better advice, not here. That was all anybody in second-century Carnuntum could do. It was all the physician had been able to do for Fabia Ursa. And Fabia Ursa was dead.

Calidius Severus was waiting, again, for her to answer. He always did that. She still wasn’t used to it — to having a man listen to her. God knew Frank never had. She hadn’t always listened to Frank, either, but then Frank was a bore.

She gave Calidius Severus an answer, though maybe not the answer he was looking for. “No, I don’t know anything special,” she said. All at once, to her own amazement, she hugged him fiercely. “I just want us to come through all right.”

“So do I,” he said. He didn’t sound overly convinced. “That’s as the gods will — one way or the other. Nothing much we can do. Maybe Dexter was wrong. Physicians don’t know everything, even if they like to pretend they do. Or maybe he was right, but there’ll be only the one case. It won’t be an epidemic.”

“Maybe,” Nicole said. She grasped at the straw as eagerly as he had, and with as little conviction. Maybe saying it would make it true.

Or maybe not.

They left the amphitheater in silence that extended well beyond the two of them, and walked back toward the city. On the way in, everyone had been lively, cheerful, chatting and calling back and forth. Now only a few people spoke, and that in low voices. The rest slid sidewise glances at them, peering to see if they looked sick.

For the first time, Nicole wished Liber and Libera had brought her body here as well as her soul, spirit, self, whatever it was. Her body was a pasty, doughy, only moderately attractive thing, but it had had measles. Umma’s hadn’t. As long as Nicole lived in this body, she was as susceptible as anyone else in Carnuntum.

When she’d wished herself here, she’d given up more than she’d ever imagined. Would she have to give up her life, too?

Until now she’d been coasting, living a long, generally not very pleasant dream. She’d been too busy just surviving, and too tired out from it, to think much past the moment. And, to be honest, she’d been too stubborn to admit that she’d made a mistake; that she’d been dead bone ignorant about the past. Maybe not any past — but this one certainly wasn’t anything like what she’d expected.

She didn’t want out. Not yet. She was stubborn enough for that. But she was beginning to think that she might be healthier, if not happier, back in West Hills.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she whispered, more to herself than to Titus Calidius Severus.

He nodded, a little too vigorously. “Maybe it won’t,” he said. He reached to take her hand just as she reached to take his. They clung to each other as they made their way through the clamor and stinks, the flies and smoke of Carnuntum.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she said again, in the street in front of the tavern. But she knew what crouched there in the dark, however loud she whistled. She gave it a name: “I’m scared.”

“So am I, “ Titus Calidius Severus said.

13

For a day or two, nothing much happened. Nobody fell over dead in front of the tavern. None of Nicole’s customers brought in rumors that people were dropping dead anywhere else in Carnuntum. She began to hope Dexter was wrong after all. As Titus Calidius Severus had said, doctors didn’t know everything. That was true in the twentieth century, and a hell of a lot truer here in the second.

When she went to the market, it seemed she heard an awful lot of people coughing and sneezing. More people than usual? She wasn’t sure. Her nerves were on edge. She was hypersensitive, jumping on every hack and sniffle.

The next day, when she took Aurelia to the baths, she told herself the same thing. Nobody was looking any more or less healthy than he ever had. Sometimes she even believed it, and held onto the belief for an hour or two — until someone else started sneezing and started a chain reaction, or a walk down the street sounded like a percussion section.

The night after that — the night after a men’s day at the baths — Titus Calidius Severus came across the street at sunset and stayed on after the children and Julia had gone off to their beds. Julia sauntered upstairs with elaborate casualness. Nicole had to work hard not to notice it.

She and Calidius Severus didn’t linger long over the last of the wine. There was so much to say, they ended up not saying much of anything. In a little while they went upstairs, she leading, he following — for the view, she supposed, such as it was. Next time she’d insist on following him. He had a nice ass, as she had good reason to know.

At the top of the stairs, she paused for an instant. The children were snoring in two high, unmusical tones. No sound came from Julia’s room.

Nicole shrugged. Silence would do. “Come on,” she said, as she had on every night after a men’s day at the baths since the mime show. Her bedroom was waiting, and Calidius Severus was in it. She slipped in behind him, and barred the door.

She was easy enough with Calidius now to leave the lamp burning on the chest of drawers while they made love. Her body wasn’t a whole lot in this culture, but in her own it was enough to be proud of. She put some of that pride in the way she held herself. If she could have been really clean, if she’d had access to shampoo, makeup,