Household Gods

“It’s good with you,” she said, and raised her hand to stroke his cheek. In the light of the one lamp on the chest of drawers, the arm’s shadow leaped and swooped.

His own free arm slid slowly along her flank, tracing the smooth, economical curves of Umma’s body. One corner of Nicole’s mouth twisted. In Los Angeles, this body would have been sleek. Here, it was skinny. Just one more example of you can’t win no matter how hard you try syndrome.

“You make me a happy man,” he said, and, as if to prove it, tilted her face up and kissed her. He wasn’t after a second round. He was just… enjoying himself. So, for that matter, was she. He was good in bed, and she didn’t think she was too bad there either; but more than that, they liked one another. They took pleasure in each other’s company.

Idly, she wondered why she’d been lucky enough to find a good lover when so little in the rest of Carnuntum had turned out to be any good at all. Polluted water, lead everywhere, slavery, brutality, sexism, appalling notions of medicine — and, in the middle of all that, as good a lover as any she’d ever known in the United States. She pondered Calidius’ shadowed face the way a D.A. pondered a piece of evidence that didn’t fit a pattern.

And then, after a moment, it did, or she thought it did. In their waterworks, in their pottery glazes, in their political and legal institutions, in what their doctors knew — in all those things and more, the Romans lacked eighteen hundred years of collective experience she’d taken for granted. She’d had no idea how much she’d taken it for granted, either, till she’d had her face rubbed in it.

But sex wasn’t something that tended to improve through collective experience. It was something everybody learned for herself or himself over the course of a lifetime. It might get more athletic, it might get more esoteric — she remembered some rather interesting nights when she was in law school, when she and a certain young man had worked their way through the greatest hits of the Kama Sutra — but when it came down to it, it could be just as good in plain vanilla as in the fanciest flavor you could imagine. Maybe that meant Alley Oop the caveman had been able to keep Mrs. Oop happy, too. For Mrs. Oop’s sake, Nicole hoped so.

She laughed a little. The exhalation stirred the hair on Calidius Severus’ chest. He raised an eyebrow. “What’s funny?”

“I think I’ve figured out why you’re so good,” she answered.

“And that’s funny?” He snorted. “You didn’t need to go and do any figuring for that. I could have told you: it’s the company I keep.”

Nobody had ever said anything remotely like that to her. Frank certainly hadn’t. Most of the men she’d dated since Frank had been too busy thinking about either themselves or their chances of getting laid to imagine saying such a thing. For a stretching instant, she wanted to cry. Then she wanted something else. She was amazed to discover how much she wanted it. Well, she thought, aphrodisiacs are where you find them.

Getting what else she wanted took considerable effort, but, in the end, it turned out to be effort well spent. She was, she thought, pretty well spent herself. So was Titus Calidius Severus. He peered up at her while she still sat astride him. “You can be my jockey any day,” he said.

She reached down to stroke his cheek again. Her hand lingered, savoring the crispness of his beard and the smoothness of the cheek above it, then paused. Almost of itself, it went to his forehead. “You’re warm,” she said in sudden sharp suspicion. No afterglow this time; alarm killed it even though he still nestled, shrinking, inside her.

He laughed and made light of it: “After what we’ve been doing? You’d best believe I’m warm.” Without warning, he pinched her. She jerked and squeaked. He flopped out of her.

She let him jolly and cajole her as he got into his tunic and sandals. But she knew the sweaty feel of skin after love; that was how her own skin felt now. He hadn’t felt like that. He’d been warm and dry, the way Kimberley and Justin sometimes were before they came down with something. If you came down with something in Carnuntum now…

“I’m fine,” he said downstairs in the doorway, as they embraced. They’d taken to doing that, safe enough in the shadow of the entrance, but this night or very early morning, it lasted a little longer, and held a little tighter. He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her. “Fine. See? Fit as can be, and ready to whip my weight in lions.”

He still felt warm, or Nicole thought he did. She wasn’t quite sure. Maybe she was a little warm herself. Or maybe she was letting her imagination and her fear run away with her. She hoped so.

Titus Calidius Severus coughed sharply, several times, as he crossed the street. When he got back to his own door, he looked over his shoulder. Nicole stared at the dim white smudge of his face in the dawn. His eyes were almost preternaturally dark. He shook his head and went inside. His step had a jaunty bounce to it, as if to prove to her that there was nothing wrong with him. No, nothing at all.

Nicole fled upstairs. Behind the barred door of her bedroom, she gave way to the brief luxury of tears. They were more tears of rage, rage that the pestilence might come between her and most of the good she’d found in Carnuntum, than tears of fear.

She sneezed. A moment later, she sneezed again. And again. It didn’t feel like a cold coming on. It felt like the flu. It felt like a killer flu.

She wished she hadn’t thought of it that way. The tears that came next were tears of fear.

She slept for a little while, maybe, a heavy sleep, full of formless dreams. When she got up, she still felt fluish, fluish and a little hung over, too; though she hadn’t drunk that much the night before, the light hurt her eyes as it had when she’d deliberately got plastered with Julia. The tavern seemed too bright, though it must have been almost totally dark. When she opened the front door, she had to blink several times against the glare.

While she was blinking, Titus Calidius Severus emerged from his shop with his amphorae. They waved to each other. “How are you? ‘ they said, each an echo of the other. It was not a simple morning pleasantry. They both really wanted — needed — to know.

“Fine,” they answered, both at the same time. Nicole knew she was lying. And so was Titus Calidius Severus. If he didn’t know that, she would have been astonished.

She went back inside, welcoming the dimness after the blaze of the morning. Julia was just coming downstairs, heavy-eyed and yawning. She swallowed her yawn, nearly choked on it, in embarrassment at finding Nicole there ahead of her. “I’m sorry, Mistress,” she said, sounding genuinely apologetic but not terrified, the way she had before Nicole manumitted her: one small step at a time, she was learning to be free. “How are you this morning?”

“Fine,” Nicole answered, as she had for Titus Calidius Severus. If she said it often enough, if she made other people believe it, maybe it would turn out to be true.

She failed before she’d begun. Julia stiffened at the sound of her voice, and peered at her. “Fine? Are you, Mistress Umma?” She strode to a window and set hand to the shutters. “Come over here, “ she said sharply, “and let me take a look at you.” She might have been talking to Lucius or Aurelia.

That was irritating, but Nicole lacked the energy to rise to it. Julia flung the shutters wide. Daylight streamed in, dazzling her. Tears of pain ran down her cheeks. She started to flinch away from it, but forced herself to hold still. Even so, she raised a hand to shield against the worst of the glare.

Julia clicked her tongue. “Oh, Mistress,” she said. She laid her hand on Nicole’s forehead. When she lowered it, her face was tight with worry. “Oh, Mistress,” she said again. “I’m afraid you’ve got — “ She didn’t say it. Instead, she tugged at the neckline of her tunic and spat onto her bosom.

“I’m afraid I’ve got it, too,” Nicole said. She didn’t say the word, the one whose ill omen Julia had tried to cast aside: pestilence. She let out a sigh that, she realized too late, had probably sent a few million viruses into Julia’s face. She sighed again, this time averting her face. “Whether I do or I don’t, I’ve got to keep going as long as I can.”

It wasn’t bravery, not really. It was denial. Julius Rufus had said it while he stood in front of her with a fever hot enough to bake bread. Bare minutes later, he’d collapsed in the street. Within the hour, he was dead, slipped away quietly while he lay just inside the doorway of the tavern.

That was a nice, cheerful note on which to start the morning.

Nicole was sicker than a dog, but she wasn’t close to collapse. Yet. She didn’t think. When Lucius and Aurelia came down for breakfast, Nicole examined them like a hawk — from a distance, to minimize the chance of breathing disease onto them. They both seemed fine: hungry and rowdy. She didn’t know how much that proved. She’d been