Household Gods

dead-fish stare at Lucius, who broke up in giggles.

Julia started to laugh again. It was like a yawn: contagious. Nicole caught herself just as Julia’s eye caught hers. Their laughter died. They’d been startled into it the first time. They couldn’t invoke it with conscious effort. Lucky Lucius, to be so young and so untroubled.

“Off I go,” Ofanius Valens said. “The gods grant you all good health.” He made one more fish-face at Lucius, who crowed with delight, nodded to Nicole, and blew Julia a kiss. She blew one back. Whistling a jaunty tune, he went on his way.

“He’s a nice man,” Lucius said.

“He is nice,” Julia said with the hint of a sigh. She meant something — several different somethings — other than what Lucius did. Nicole gave her a sharp look, which she ignored. Julia thought with her body first and her mind definitely second.

Business that morning was brisk. Asses, dupondii, sesterces, even a couple of silver denarii clanked into the cash box. Nicole was pleased, but not so pleased as she might have been. Every time somebody coughed, every time somebody sneezed, she jumped. People had been coughing and sneezing in the tavern ever since she’d come to Carnuntum, and no doubt for many years before that. Now she wondered if each cough and sneeze meant a case of pestilence brewing — and if viruses were flying her way, or toward her children, or toward Julia.

A little before noon, Brigomarus came into the tavern. “Uncle Brigo!” Lucius and Aurelia cried out in delight. Nicole, on the other hand, was somewhat less than delighted to see Umma’s brother. By the way he stood, as if he was only there under duress, and by his cold nod, he wasn’t delighted to see her, either.

“How are you?” he asked politely enough, and then the question that seemed more important in Carnuntum than any other: “Have you been well?”

Nicole could answer that, if only to meet politeness with politeness. “Yes, all of us here have been fine, thank heaven,” she said. “And you?”

“I’m as you see. If I’d caught this horror of a disease, I wouldn’t be up and about.” Brigomarus took a deep breath, nerving himself for what he had to say next. “Mother is down with it. I don’t know what her chances are. If I had to guess, I’d say they weren’t good. She still has her wits about her, and she wants to see you. Ila didn’t even want to let you know, but I said I would do it. Just because you wronged the family doesn’t mean we have any business wronging you.”

“I had every right to do what I did, and I was right to do it,” Nicole said stiffly.

“You’re — “ Umma’s brother checked himself. “Never mind. I didn’t come here to start the quarrel over again. Will you come see Mother or not?” To hell with you if you don’t, his tone and posture plainly said.

A deathbed visit to Atpomara, Umma’s disagreeable mother, was about the last thing Nicole wanted. Visiting anybody who was likely to give her the pestilence didn’t rank high on her list, either. But, things being as they were, she didn’t see that she had a choice. She was wearing Umma’s body. She had to take on at least the bare minimum of Umma’s obligations. “I’ll come,” she said.

“Well, good.” Brigomarus sounded pleasantly surprised, as if he’d made the call expecting to be turned down flat. “Let’s go, then.”

“Aren’t you going to stay and play, Uncle Brigo?” Aurelia asked plaintively.

“I can’t,” he told her with more gentleness than Nicole might have expected. “Your grandmother is sick, and she wants to see your mother.”

“Is she going to die?” Lucius asked. In California, a child would have asked the question in tones of disbelief. Lucius merely sounded curious. He knew people died. In Carnuntum, nobody could help knowing it.

“That’s in the hands of the gods,” Brigomarus said. “She wants to see your mother. We have to go.”

The children didn’t beg to go with them, which Nicole found somewhat odd. She’d thought Lucius might, at least. But he stood with his sister and watched them go. They were both unusually quiet, unusually wide-eyed. They’d seen too much death, she thought. They didn’t need to see any more.

Nicole followed Umma’s brother out of the tavern. He strode along for a while with his head down, until they both had to wait as a funeral procession went past. Whoever the deceased was, he’d been important; most of the mourners wore togas, not tunics. Instead of lying on a bier, the corpse was carried in a sedan chair, so that he surveyed the city with his unseeing eyes. A dozen musicians brought up the rear of the procession, making a tremendous racket.

Nicole resisted the urge to clap her hands over her ears. When the procession had passed, while her ears were still ringing with the noise, Brigomarus sighed. “In times like this, I don’t want to quarrel with anyone in my family. Who knows what will happen tomorrow?”

“Nobody,” Nicole answered. That was true in California, too, but seemed truer in Carnuntum. It was also, she realized a little more slowly than she should have, an offer of truce. “All right, Brigomarus,” she said. “I won’t argue with anyone if no one argues with me.”

He pursed his lips. He might have been expecting more, though what else he could want, she couldn’t imagine. Then he nodded. “That will have to do.”

Damn him, she thought in a rise of temper. She was being generous, and he made her generosity seem a paltry thing.

She made herself relax. However grudging his acceptance, nevertheless, he had accepted the gift. It would, as he’d said, have to do.

Two streets farther on, another funeral procession went past. This one delayed Nicole and Brigomarus less than a minute. Two shrouded corpses, one large, one small, lay side by side on the bier. A woman and a youth on whose cheeks the down was just beginning to darken paced behind it. Both of them wore the blank, car-wreck look of sudden disaster. A few friends and relatives followed them. They had no musicians. Maybe they couldn’t afford any; they looked poor. Maybe the rich man’s family had hired all the musicians in town for his sendoff. And maybe, too, there weren’t so many healthy musicians left to hire.

The bereaved woman sneezed several times, violently, and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her tunic. Her son coughed rackingly and continuously, as if he had no power to stop.

“They’re coming down with it, too,” Brigomarus said bleakly. People in the city hadn’t needed long to recognize the early signs of the pestilence.

“Not everyone who gets it dies from it,” Nicole said. “I’ve heard of people getting better.” A couple of heartbeats after she should have, she added, “I hope Mother will be one of them.”

Brigomarus noticed the lapse. He opened his mouth as if to call her on it, then sighed instead. She glared at him. He glared back. They walked side by side, each obviously wishing the other were a hundred miles away.

He led her down a street not too much different from the one Nicole herself lived on, to a combination house and shop that differed from her own only in having a narrow porch supported by half a dozen undistinguished columns. They weren’t even well made; in fact, they looked as if they’d been hacked out of limestone with a blunt chisel. They reminded her irresistibly of the sort of house one found in tackier parts of L.A., cheap pop-up housing designed for people with large pretensions and relatively small bank accounts: plastic marble and gold-painted faucets, and indications of cut corners in closets and under sinks. The plastic cracked inside of a year, and the paint flaked off the faucets, but they got their point across.

Brigomarus sounded just like the owner of one of those as he declared, “Ila and Marcus Flavius Probus, now — they have a proper Roman facade.”

It was a sore temptation, but she didn’t laugh in his face. She might as well have been living in a trailer park for all the status she could claim, and he was making sure she knew it. She didn’t say what she was thinking, either, which was that after meeting the inhabitants, she’d expected a noble villa, and not this cheap excuse for a house. At least Umma’s tavern was honestly downscale.

She looked him in the eye, and was gratified when he looked away. “Take me in to Mother,” she said with something that might, just possibly, have been taken for gentleness.

He obeyed her, somewhat to her surprise, and without quibbling, either. Had she shocked him with her display of backbone? She hoped so.

The nobly named Marcus Flavius Probus, she saw as Brigomarus led her past the ill-made pillars, was nothing more or less than a woodworker. In West Hills he’d have been much admired: handcrafted this, that, and the other was all the rage. In Carnuntum he was an artisan, which set him considerably below the patrician he liked to