pretend to be.
She didn’t like him any better for it, at all, but it was an honest pleasure to walk into a room that smelled of clean new wood, fresh lumber and sawdust, and the sweet subtle odor of wax that was rubbed into the finished article. She took the first voluntary deep breath she’d taken in Carnuntum, and let it out again.
Umma’s brother-in-law crouched in a patch of sunlight, dressed in a tunic like anybody else, no toga in sight. He was pounding a peg into the end of a table leg. The table itself waited for the leg, leaning against a wall nearby.
She watched him with some interest. Roman carpentry, she’d noticed, used lots of pegs and very few nails. Nails here were made one by one, by hand, and were ridiculously expensive.
As she stood watching and breathing the scent of sawdust, another odor crept in under it. It wasn’t just the reek of the city. It was closer, and subtly fouler: a sickroom odor that had raised her hackles even before she was conscious of its existence. She denied it even as she once more breathed shallowly to avoid it — a mixture of full chamberpot and sour sweat.
Brigomarus asked the question that Nicole probably should have: “How is she?”
“About the same,” Flavius Probus answered. He didn’t quite look at Nicole, or acknowledge her, but he said, “So she decided to come, did she?”
Brigomarus nodded. Nicole rode over anything he would have said. “Yes, I’m here, and I’m quite capable of speaking for myself.”
Umma’s brother-in-law snapped erect, as if he’d been slapped. Then Nicole saw the pompous ass who’d acted as if the tavern wasn’t good enough for him, and heard him, too. “I am not accustomed to being addressed in that particular tone, least of all by a woman.”
Nicole didn’t laugh, though she was sorely tempted. “Aren’t you?” she said. “Then maybe it’s time you learned. There’s this thing called politeness. Have you ever heard of it?”
Even after his earlier encounter with her, he obviously hadn’t expected quite that degree of independence. Brigomarus, who’d seen rather more of her, sighed and shrugged. “She’s like that these days,” he said. “Short of hauling her out and horsewhipping her, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it.” He paused, shook his head, went on in a slightly different tone. “Still. Mother asked to see her, and she’s not likely to get another chance.”
Flavius Probus nodded curtly, again without acknowledging Nicole, and bent again to his table leg. His work was meticulous, his hands deft and skilled, as if the pretentious idiot who lived in his head bore no relation to the craftsman in his hands.
They’d been dismissed. Nicole might have made an issue of it, but Brigomarus was headed toward the stairs. She almost didn’t follow. Even needling Flavius Probus was preferable to paying a last visit to someone else’s mother. But the sooner she got it over with, the sooner she was out of there and back in the tavern that, for better or worse, she’d come to think of as home.
The stairway was less rickety than the one she used every day. Marcus Flavius Probus kept it in good repair. The hallway at the top, however, was just like the one in her house, narrow and malodorous and nearly pitch-dark. Aside from its porch and its wretched columns, this building was no fancier than her own.
Brigomarus turned into the first door on the right-hand side of the hall, the one that corresponded with Nicole’s in the tavern. The master bedroom, then? Interesting, she thought, that the old woman had it. Though not at all surprising.
While she paused in the hallway, letting her eyes adjust to the brighter light within, she heard Brigomarus say, “Here she is, Mother. She came after all, as you asked.” His voice had the odd, uncomfortable gentleness that people often put on in front of the sick.
The sickroom reek was stronger here. Nicole nearly gagged on it as she stepped into the bedroom. Umma’s sister was perched on a stool by the bed on which her mother lay. Ila favored Nicole with a venomous look and a sarcastic, “So good of you to join us.”
It was going to be a united front, Nicole could see. Some part of her knew she should make some effort to smooth things over — but to do that, she’d have to undo Julia’s manumission. And that wasn’t possible.
She settled for a long, cold glare at Ila, and a silence that, she hoped, said more than words. Then she forgot Umma’s sister. The woman huddled in the bed, the woman who’d given birth to Umma, the woman who Nicole thought was an ancestor of her own, looked more nearly dead than alive. Atpomara’s skin clung like parchment to her bones; the fever had boiled most of the water from her flesh. Along her forehead and cheek, the rash that marked the pestilence was red as a burn.
But, whereas Julius Rufus had died almost at once when the fever exploded in him, Umma’s mother still clung to life, still had some part of her wits about her. She stretched a clawlike finger toward Nicole. Her eyes bored into — bored through — the woman who inhabited her daughter’s body. “You are the cuckoo’s egg.” Her voice was a dry rasp. “Cuckoo’s egg,” she repeated.
“Ungrateful daughter, ungrateful sister,” Ila hissed from beside her.
Nicole hardly heard. She stared at the woman who had given birth to the body she now inhabited. What did Atpomara mean? Just that Nicole was ungrateful, as Ila said? Or could she somehow sense that a stranger’s spirit now dwelt in Umma’s body? Were the fever and perhaps the approach of death letting her own spirit roam wider than it might have otherwise?
“Have a care, cuckoo’s egg,” Atpomara said. “If you and your own eggs fall, if the shells break before you hatch — “ She had to stop; a paroxysm of coughing wracked her.
“Her wits are wandering,” Brigomarus murmured to Ila, who nodded. Neither of them spoke to Nicole.
She didn’t mind. She didn’t want to speak to them, either. She didn’t want to be here at all. She hoped Brigomarus was right: she hoped Atpomara’s wits were wandering. If they weren’t, the dying woman’s words made sense — disturbing sense.
Almost since the day she’d come to Carnuntum, Nicole had believed Umma was a distant ancestor of hers. If Umma died of the pestilence, and if Lucius and Aurelia — one of them, at least, also an ancestor, difficult as it was to believe of so young a child — also died of the pestilence… where did that leave Nicole Gunther of Indianapolis, who would marry Frank Perrin and live to regret it?
Nowhere?
Umma’s mother seemed to gather herself. Her hand rose again, finger stabbing at Nicole. “Go back,” she rasped. “I am done. Go back.” Did she mean,
It was like a blow in the solar plexus. Nicole actually gasped. Go
But she was not in California. She was in Carnuntum, with only a tiny splash of water — and polluted water, at that — in the bottom of her glass.
“Why are you still standing there?” Ila snapped at her. “Didn’t you hear Mother? She doesn’t want you here anymore. I never wanted you here.”
Nicole looked at this woman, this stranger who was her own, if distant, kin. She saw nothing there that she could relate to. And from the look and sound of it, this wasn’t new hostility. It was much older than Nicole’s presence here, and than Nicole’s freeing of a slave. Umma hadn’t received any better treatment than Nicole was getting, nor ever had.
“Sweetheart, “ Nicole said for both of them, “the sooner I leave your sour face behind, the happier I’ll be. “
She’d guessed right about Ila: the woman could dish it out wholesale, but she couldn’t take it. The splutters were utterly gratifying. They followed her all the way out of the room and down the stairs.
And there stood the other half of the act, even less witty than his wife. “Good riddance,” he growled to the table leg that he was fitting to its table. Nicole started to flip him off, but she hadn’t ever seen the one-fingered peace sign here. She replaced it with the two-fingered gesture a muleteer had given an oxcart driver in front of the tavern a day or two before.
Flavius Probus staggered back as if she’d struck him a physical blow. “Don’t you put the evil eye on me,” he
