moisturizers, even plain old soap, she’d have been really something, but as it was, she wasn’t bad. She liked the tautness of her stomach, and thighs that had never heard of cellulite. Her breasts were small and pointed but rather nice, and not too soft in spite of two children — not nursing one’s own did make a difference.
He was enjoying the view, as he must have done on the stairs. She took time to return the favor. He had a good body, better than her own by current standards, and not bad at all for an old man, as he liked to say. The dyes he worked in had stained his hands and arms indelibly, and there were spatters on his feet. They made him interesting. She liked to follow the patterns with her finger, to stroke upward to the clean olive flesh of his upper arm, and across his shoulders where a soft furze of black hair grew, then down his back and around to the rampant thing in front, that Romans liked to call the “little man.” He was ticklish down the line of his spine, would wriggle and fuss if she ran a nail along it, but he loved to be massaged deep and painful-hard in the broad muscles of his shoulders.
There were scars. Sometimes he’d tell her where he’d got them: the arrow in the arm, the sword-thrust that grazed his ribs, the deep pitted hollow in his thigh where the spear had struck. Each one recalled pain that people in her world seldom knew, not just the pain of the wound but the pain of treatment, and no drugs but wine and, once in a while, poppy juice — crude opium, nowhere near as effective as the modern arsenal of painkillers. Wine was the only antiseptic, too, and no antibiotics to back it up. It was a miracle he’d survived, and not only that, that he walked without a limp. “Except in the dead of winter,” he’d told her a time or two back. “Then everything stiffens up. Price of old age, and being an old soldier.”
He wasn’t so old in bed, as she liked to reassure him. “Boys are always in a hurry,” she said. “Men take their time.”
“That’s good,” he’d say then, “because it takes me a little more time to warm up and a little more to cool down, these days.”
When Nicole made love, the world went away. The yammering of thoughts went quiet, and she was spared, for a little while, the constant strain of living somebody else’s life.
Tonight they joined with an urgency that had as much to do with holding fear at bay as with any kind of bodily passion. They clasped each other tight, he driving hard and deep, she urging him on, legs locked about his middle, holding him even after she’d come to climax and felt the hot rush of him inside her.
Only then did it strike her. The twist of wool and the box of resin lay on the chest, untouched, forgotten.
At the moment she couldn’t find it in her to care. Next to the fear she’d lived with since the day in the amphitheater, this was nothing. If she had caught something, so to speak, she didn’t doubt that Julia would know how to take care of it. Unlike the pestilence. The pestilence — it put her in mind of the plague, the great plague of long ago (or a long time coming, from this end of time) — no one could stop.
She was holding him so tight, he gasped for breath. Reluctantly, she let him go. They lay nested in the narrow bed, and he managed a shallow gust of laughter. He groped for her hand and pressed it to his chest. His heart was still drumming hard. “You see, woman? You wear me out.”
Bless him for knowing just what to say, and how to say it, to shake her out of her megrims. She seized on the mood, and let it take her over. It was amazingly easy. She snorted. “Oh, nonsense. If the baths took women every morning and men every afternoon, you’d be over here bothering me every night.”
He poked her in the ribs. She squeaked, then clapped a hand to her mouth. Damn — she’d have bet an amphora of Falernian that Julia was lying in her bed across the hall, laughing her head off.
“Can’t think of a better reason to want to go to the baths,” Calidius Severus said. Nicole snorted again. He went on, “Likely just as well they do things this way. Any man past forty who says every other day’s not easier is lying through his teeth.”
She liked him very much, just then. Loved him? Maybe. But love was easy; it was mostly hormones. Liking was harder to come by. As far as she’d ever known, the handful of men who weren’t convinced they were permanently nineteen would sooner have faced cross-examination by Johnnie Cochran than said as much out loud, especially to a woman. Honesty was novel, and highly refreshing.
Without warning, and without a word, she kissed him. He widened his eyes at her. “What was that for?” he asked.
“Just because,” she said.
He laughed. “Good enough reason for me.”
His laughter didn’t last. Little by little, it leached from his face. She’d been holding onto her bright mood by sheer force of will, but he’d run out of stamina. Slowly, he said, “The attendants had to carry somebody out of the cold plunge today. He had a rash on his face and neck, and on his chest, too. He looked like the woman at the show.”
Nicole went still. If her heart could have stopped, it would have. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“No, I’m not sure,” he answered, but he didn’t sound any more reassured than she felt. “I didn’t see either one of them for very long, and I didn’t get a very good look at them. But the rash is hard to miss — and they both had it.”
“It probably was, then.” Nicole spoke the words like a judge passing sentence. Maybe she was passing sentence — on Carnuntum. She shivered. She’d been shivering a lot lately, though it was summer, and warm enough by Carnuntum’s standards.
When he clasped her to him, she felt the cold in him, too, the chill that had nothing to do with the air’s temperature. He warmed quickly enough, all the way to burning. Over forty or no, he had it in him to go a second round.
“It’s the company I keep,” he said when they’d slipped apart again, each a little more winded than the last time.
“You’re just being sweet,” she said. She could have flattered herself into thinking her own allure made him so randy. So maybe that did have something to do with it. But she knew the sick man in the baths was as much in his mind as in hers.
He yawned. “Now look at me. I’ll want to sleep till noon, and Gaius will have to drag me out of bed to get the day’s work done.” Gaius would tease his father too, probably, about old men and young ambitions.
The lamp guttered abruptly and went out. Nicole cursed: she’d forgotten to fill it before she went to bed. Going to bed with company could do that, distract her from life’s smaller concerns.
Titus Calidius Severus cursed more pungently than she, as he groped for his sandals in the dark. Nicole found her own tunic conveniently near to hand and slipped it over her head, smoothing it down her body. Her hands paused of their own accord. She was all warm still from making love.
Her eyes had adapted to the tiny amount of light that slipped through the shuttered window. She had no trouble seeing her way to the door, or unbarring it and peering out. She listened, head cocked, then nodded. Julia was snoring, a deeper counterpoint to the children’s diatonic scale.
She padded barefoot down the stairs. Calidius Severus followed so close he almost trod on her heels. She plotted a path through the tables and stools between the stairs and the door, and cheered herself under her breath when they both reached the door unscathed. She saw his crooked grin in the light of a wan moon. He hugged her tight. “I’ll get through tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that,” he said. “I’ll just go on and on. Just the way we all do.”
She sighed, and nodded. She, too. There was no other way to get through life in Carnuntum and still keep herself within shouting distance of sanity. “You have good sense, she said.
“Do I?” He shrugged. “What am I doing here in the middle of the night, then?” He started to chuck her under the chin, but caught himself, and kissed her instead. “Kissing’s better,” he said, “after all.”
She could hardly argue with that. It was hard to let him go; hard, maybe, for him to let her go. But they were practical people. They parted briskly enough. He went to his own place and his son and his work. She went to hers. Day after tomorrow, when it was again a men’s day at the baths, he’d be back. She could count on that, as sure and as regular as the clockwork that Rome had never known.
The next morning, when Nicole opened her door for business, the amphorae were out in front of Calidius Severus’ shop. Maybe Gaius had put them there, she thought, until she saw movement inside, and recognized the bristle of Titus’ beard. She felt logey and slow. He must feel much the same. For the first time in a while, she’d have given a great deal for a pot of coffee and a pair of mugs, and a jump-start for both of them.
As she scooped salted olives from their amphora into a wooden bowl, Dexter the doctor trudged past. He had his leather satchel in his hand: not quite a little black bag, but close. On impulse she left the bar, went quickly to
