Household Gods

what he was going to say before he said it. She didn’t like him, let alone love him, but he was a creature in pain. “Here.” She dipped a cup of wine. “Drink this.”

“You’re sure you can spare such largess for your family?” The sarcasm didn’t keep him from taking the wine or from draining it in a gulp. It seemed to steady him. He let out a long, shuddering sigh, then gave her the news she expected: “She’s gone. It was peaceful, at the end. She breathed, then she stopped for a bit, and then, when I thought it was over, she breathed one more time, and that was the last.”

Nicole didn’t imagine that he told her this for her own sake. It was something he needed to remember, and to repeat to himself. “I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” she said truthfully. Then, remembering what Calidius Severus had said, she added, “I hope she’s happy in the next world.”

“The gods grant it be so,” Brigomarus said, and fell silent, staring down into his empty cup. Nicole didn’t choose to take the hint, if hint it was. Maybe he was simply preoccupied.

At length he said the other thing that weighed on his mind. “I’m afraid Flavius Probus is coming down with it.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicole said. She had very little use for Ila’s husband, but this wasn’t a disease she’d wish on anyone. “I hope he gets better. Some people do.”

“Yes, some people do.” Brigomarus looked at Nicole as if he was trying hard not to hate her. And what did he think she’d done now? With the air of a man who has run out of patience, he flung words at her. “This is our mother, Umma.”

So. She wasn’t acting mournful enough to suit him. And acting was what it would have to be. She hadn’t known Atpomara well, and certainly hadn’t liked her. But that didn’t remove the essential fact. As long as she wore Umma’s body, she had to act as Umma would be expected to act. She tried to imagine how she’d feel if her own mother died. The parallel wasn’t too far off: even in West Hills, she’d been distant in space and time and interests, and, since the divorce, the distance had grown worse. Sometimes she thought her mother regarded divorce as a fundamental moral failure — her own as much as Nicole’s.

Still, if her mother had died, she’d grieve. It was as Brigo had said: that was her mother.

Out of all that, she drew a sigh that shook a little, and rubbed her eyes that ached with tiredness and stress. “I’m sorry, “ she said. “It’s just… it doesn’t feel real. So many people are dying, so much death, till everybody’s numb. And to have her gone, of all people — didn’t we used to think she’d outlive us all?”

That was a gamble, a stab in the dark, but it found a target. Brigomarus nodded. Even so, he studied her. So many people in Carnuntum had measured her with that steady stare, she was about ready to rise up in revolt. At last he said, “We haven’t been happy with you, so I don’t suppose you’ve been happy with us, either. “ There he went, making her explanations for her, just as everyone else did who’d weighed her and found her wanting. “We’ll have to pull together, that’s all, however many of us are left alive after this pestilence goes back wherever it came from. “

“Yes,” Nicole said. That was safe enough, but she couldn’t bring herself to add to it.

However many of us are left alive. There was a phrase that did not belong to the twentieth century. People must have said it in the Black Death, and that was later than this, though she couldn’t remember offhand just how much later it was. This wasn’t the bubonic plague, either. California and the other southwestern states got occasional cases, much publicized on the TV news, so she had an idea of the symptoms, and these weren’t it. But this other plague, whatever it was, was hitting the whole Roman Empire just as the Black Death had hit medieval Europe.

Brigomarus was clouding up again. For a wonder, she managed to figure out why before the clouds turned to thunder and lightning. “When will the funeral be?” she asked.

“Tomorrow noon,” he answered, easing — yes, that had been the right question. “We’ll start the procession at the shop of Fuficius Cornutus the undertaker — down the street from the town-council building.”

“We’ll be there, “ she said. Lucius and Aurelia, too. From old Indiana memories, she knew the children would be expected to say good-bye to their grandmother. She wouldn’t have asked it of Kimberley and Justin, but these were older children, and tougher, and much more familiar with death. They’d lost their father, after all, and who knew whom else?

Brigomarus nodded, and startled her somewhat by thanking her for the wine. “Stay healthy,” he said as he went on his way. Just after he’d reached the door, he sneezed. Nicole hoped devoutly that he was only coming down with a cold.

Five funerals went on at the same time, here and there across the graveyard outside Carnuntum. Nicole wondered how many more there had been earlier in the day, and how many would follow in the afternoon. Too many — no doubt of that. The gravediggers lay limply on the grass, looking like men in the last stages of exhaustion. They must have taken the job as a sinecure: lie around, drink wine, dig a grave now and then. Now they were earning their keep a hundred times over. Did they get hazard pay? Or did the Romans have any such concept?

The priest who waited at the gravesite was male and not, it was clear, a devotee of Isis. Somehow it wasn’t surprising that Atpomara hadn’t entrusted herself to the women’s goddess. The prayer he gabbled out, in fact, was to Dis Pater and Herecura, deities whom Nicole had never heard of. From the wording of the prayer, she gathered they were consorts, rulers of the underworld. Parts of the prayer to Herecura weren’t even in Latin; the words came to her as mere noise. Did that mean Herecura was a local goddess? Then how had she acquired a Roman husband? Nicole couldn’t even ask: she’d have been expected to know the answer.

The prayer was short and rather perfunctory. Brigomarus laid a loaf of bread and a cheese and a bowl of dried nuts and dried fruit in the grave — an ostentatious gift compared to the one that Longinius lulus had given Fabia Ursa. Nicole suspected Atpomara’s shade would reckon it barely adequate.

Marcus Flavius Probus stood at the graveside, leaning on Ila’s arm, coughing and sneezing like a man with a nasty cold. His eyes were red and watery and blinked constantly, as if the murky daylight troubled them.

Nicole’s mouth twisted. Brigomarus had been right. Flavius Probus had the pestilence.

When Brigomarus straightened from offering tribute to the shade of Umma’s mother, the gravediggers struggled wearily to their feet and began spading earth onto the mortal remains. Nicole turned away. As with Fabia Ursa, the sound of earth thudding onto a shrouded corpse was too final to face with equanimity, too blunt a reminder. Dust we are, and unto dust we shall return. By ones and twos, the mourners straggled back toward Carnuntum. If not for Lucius and Aurelia, who had been soberly quiet through the brief service, Nicole would have been a one. Although she might have gained a point by coming and bringing the children, the rest of Umma’s family still didn’t want to have much to do with her. They hadn’t spoken to her in the procession, nor invited her to walk beside them in front of the bier. She’d taken a place just behind it, ignored if not forgotten.

She didn’t reach out to them, either. If they cared more for what a slave’s manumission might do to their financial and social status than for what was morally and ethically right, so be it. Let them stay estranged. They weren’t her family. She didn’t need them or want them, and she certainly didn’t like them.

As she neared the city gate, another funeral procession, a larger one, emerged from beneath its archway. She wouldn’t have paid any particular attention if one of the mourners hadn’t turned to stare at her. She was… no, not resigned to having men in Carnuntum give her the slow once-over, but she’d given up on trying to avoid it.

This stare was different. It hit her after the procession had passed, so that she stopped and turned to stare back at the young fellow who’d written the Christian graffito on the wall.

She should have known better than to think any of this would go unnoticed by her — that is, by Umma’s — offspring. “Who’s that, Mother?” Lucius asked.

Brigomarus had also noticed — she hadn’t even known he was behind her. “Who’s that, Umma?” he asked, echoing Lucius.

She wished he hadn’t spoken her name. The Christian might have heard it. After a moment, she realized how peculiar it was that she’d thought such a thing. This young man didn’t worship one or several of these implausible pagan gods. He worshipped the God she’d been brought up to worship; whether she did or not was beside the point. They should be companions in the spirit. Instead, she didn’t want him to know who she was, where she lived, anything about her. It was a visceral objection, and made no sense at all, but there was no getting around it.

“Who is he?” Lucius and Brigomarus asked again. Aurelia chimed in too, for the evident pleasure of ganging