the door and called to him: “Dexter! How is the woman who took sick in the amphitheater?”
He paused in his stride. He didn’t seem as annoyed to be stopped as he might. He looked tired, she thought, and pale. Up all night, probably, practicing his trade.
“The woman in the amphitheater?” he asked. “They buried her yesterday.”
Nicole stood flatfooted. She’d expected it. She’d dreaded it. And yet…
He didn’t wait for her to get her wits back. “I’m off to another case now,” he said. “Aesculapius grant me better fortune.” As he turned to go, a storm of sneezing overtook him, and a rattle of coughing in its wake.
Oh Lord. He had it, too. Nicole caught herself wiping her hands frantically on her tunic, though she hadn’t touched him at all. How many people had that woman infected at the show? How many of them were sneezing and coughing, but hadn’t yet broken out with the rash that signaled full onset of the disease? How many people were going to catch the disease in the baths? Just about everyone in Carnuntum went to the baths; they were always crowded. A plague couldn’t ask for a better breeding ground.
Nicole’s last bastion of optimism crumbled. She shook her head and turned back to the tavern. There was a cold feeling in her stomach, and an ache that wasn’t hunger. She was familiar with it from this and that: an accident on the freeway, the California bar exam. It was fear.
Julia was up at last, a little late — and was that a sign she was getting sick? Nicole quashed that stab of worry. Julia was cleaner than she’d been when Nicole first arrived in Carnuntum, now she had money and a little time for the baths, but she still had a fondness for tight tunics and a disgusting tendency to wake up cheerful and stay that way till the rest of the world caught up with her. Or not; Julia didn’t care.
Her curiosity was as sharp as ever, too. “What were you talking to Dexter about?” she asked as she worked flour into the first batch of the day’s bread.
Nicole started chopping nuts and raisins for sweet cakes. She took her time in answering. “We were talking about the woman who got sick when Titus and I were at the mime show,” she said. She didn’t really have to, or particularly want to, but Julia was the closest thing she had to a female friend in this world. She had a pressing need, suddenly, to share the worry with someone else.
Julia didn’t appear to know or care that there was something to worry about. She smiled at Nicole’s use of Titus Calidius Severus’ praenomen. She’d made it clear long since that she thought the two of them were a good match. If she could see them married off, Nicole was sure, she’d be the happiest freedwoman in Carnuntum. “How is the woman?” she asked.
“Dead, ‘ Nicole answered baldly.
Julia didn’t go pale, or reel, or seem at all shocked. “Oh,” she said without much evident emotion. “That’s too bad.”
People in Carnuntum were on very much more intimate — and much more casual — terms with death than people were in the United States of the late twentieth century. Julia’s offhand observation was one more signpost on a well-marked road. She took for granted the possibility that a person could get sick and drop dead, just like that. From what Nicole had seen of the state of the medical art, that wasn’t the least bit surprising.
They worked in silence, in the well-worn groove of two people who’d been coworkers for so long, they no longer needed to think about how they shared this task or that. Just as the bread came out of the oven, the first of the morning’s regulars showed up at the door. He hawked and spat before he came in, and coughed.
Nicole had let down her guard a little. Her stomach had even begun to unclench. Now it went as tight as a fist. Julia, oblivious, served the man his regular cup of one-
As he thanked and paid her, a confusion of distant sound resolved itself into sense. A funeral procession made its sorrowful way toward and then past the tavern. Professional mourners wailed and keened. Musicians thumped and tootled their dirges. Friends and relatives of the deceased straggled behind the bier. They’d gone for an older extravagance than Fabia Ursa’s funeral party had: faces streaked with ashes, tunics ceremonially rent. Under the marks of formal grief, their expressions were set, stunned. Just outside the doorway, one of them said, “But he was so young!”
So, Nicole thought numbly. People could think like that here, too. She resisted an urge to run out and ask what the boy had died of. People did die of things other than pestilence. Young people especially, and children most of all.
She was not reassured. When the procession had passed and faded into the background hum of the city, someone in the street sneezed. She jumped like a startled cat.
Right behind her, Lucius sneezed explosively. Her heart leaped into her throat. She whirled. “Are you all right?” she practically shrieked at him.
When she’d first come to Carnuntum, that concern would have been partly feigned. Not now. Little by little, by almost imperceptible stages, Lucius and Aurelia had become hers. And if one of hers was sneezing -
But he looked at her as if she’d gone demented, and laughed at her expression. “Oh, Mother! I’m fine.”
Julia glared at him, and shook her finger under his nose. Which, Nicole happened to notice, had a somewhat dusty look to it. “He was trying to breathe flour,” she said. “I saw him grab a pinch.”
“Oh, he was, was he?” Nicole said in a dangerous purr. “You did, did you?”
Lucius might be silly, but he wasn’t stupid. He recognized the sort of question that meant he should make himself scarce.
He didn’t recognize it quite soon enough. Nicole caught him by the arm as he scooted past. Her free hand applied a fundamental lesson to his seat of knowledge. His squawk had more surprise in it than pain. Her second whack remedied the imbalance.
She let him go. He scampered off, not much the worse for wear. He didn’t indulge in the tears and histrionics that an American child would have gone in for. Less than a minute later, he was laughing again.
Children were tough little creatures: tougher than Nicole had realized. She was the one who stood as if poleaxed, staring at her own hand. Why in the world had she just done
It didn’t seem reason enough. It probably wasn’t. But it also probably hadn’t been child abuse. Nicole wouldn’t have said that before she came to Carnuntum. It was happening again: the Romans she lived among had infected her with their own attitudes.
It was better than being infected with measles, or whatever this new and deadly disease was.
She was still thinking about that when Sextus Longinius lulus came in and sat at one of the tables near the door. “Let me have a cup of your one-
When she’d given him what he asked for and he’d paid her, she paused. He looked all right — not wonderful, not happy, but not broken down with grief, either. People who couldn’t deal with death wouldn’t last long in this world. “How’s your son?” she asked.
He spat out an olive pit and drank a swallow of wine. “He seems healthy enough, the gods be praised. Fabia Honorata’s looking after him right now.”
Nicole suppressed a stab of guilt. She should have gone over there days ago and seen if she could help. But she’d been busy, the tavern took up most of her time, she had her own kids to raise -
No, she thought. Face it. She hadn’t gone over because she hadn’t known what to say, and she couldn’t be bothered with a baby on top of everything else.
She raised an eyebrow at the baby’s father. “Fabia Honorata? Not the wet nurse?”
“No, not the wet nurse,” Longinius lulus answered. He did look a little haggard after all. “That’s the other reason I came in here. She’s sick. It’s the new sickness that’s been going around, the one that really hits you hard. Gods only know if she’ll pull through. I wanted to ask you who nursed Aurelia. That wasn’t so long ago — she might still be in business.”
Nicole’s first thought was pity. What a life for a woman, going from baby to baby, no more valued for herself than a milk cow, and not too different from one either. Perpetually full and aching breasts, no relief from baby howls and babyshit, and no time off unless she wanted her livelihood to dry up.
Hard on the heels of that came fear. If the wet nurse was down with the pestilence, that meant she’d brought it into the tinker’s shop. Even now it might be fighting a still-silent war against his body’s defenses. And if that was so, then he was breathing it right into her face.
