as if she’d had a dreadful sunburn. Someone — Ofanius Valens? — had told her that could happen. She was almost proud that she remembered.
Her hair was like sweat-matted straw. When she raised her free hand to brush it back from her forehead, clumps of it came away between her fingers. He’d told her about that, too. “My God,” she muttered in English. That so much of her hair was dead told her more clearly than anything else, how close she’d come to dying.
The water in the
She lurched to the doorway. She had to rest there, leaning against the wall. When she could breathe again, more or less, she opened the door. It was as heavy as the city gate, and about as tractable. Another lurch propelled her across the hall to Julia’s room. No sound came through the curtain. She set her weight to it and pulled it aside.
Julia sprawled across the bed. Light poured across her from a shutter that she hadn’t fastened, or that had come unfastened while she was too ill to tend to it. In her fever, she’d kicked off the covers. Her tunic was hiked up almost to her hips, but a man would have had to be a necrophiliac to want her then.
Still — she was alive; her breast rose and fell in the rapid, shallow breathing that Nicole remembered all too well. She didn’t look ready to stop at just that moment. Nicole went on, fighting to keep her breathing quiet, to concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other.
Lucius and Aurelia lay in their beds. Lucius moaned and thrashed in delirium. Aurelia lay very still. At first, Nicole was relieved. Sleeping, then, and maybe on the way to recovery.
But Umma’s daughter lay too still. Julia, even unconscious, had looked alive somehow, and her breathing had been visible from the doorway. Aurelia lay like a doll that some enormous child had discarded.
Step by step, Nicole made her way to the bed. Her hand shook uncontrollably as she reached to set it on Aurelia’s forehead.
Aurelia did not have a fever, not any longer. Her flesh was cool, almost cold. It would never be warm again.
Nicole wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. She groped for the bird-frail wrist, searching for a pulse. She found what she’d found with Julius Rufus: nothing.
She wanted, very much, to cry. Crying would loosen the knot in the middle of her, the hard, cold, hurting thing that had swelled in her when she saw Aurelia’s stillness. But the tears wouldn’t come. Her body was too ravaged. There was no water in it to spare.
If she was truly descended from Umma, then it must be through Lucius. If Lucius died of this pestilence… what then? Atpomara had warned her.
No ancestor, no descendant. Not just death but nonexistence. Nothingness. Complete oblivion.
She would have been afraid for Lucius’ life even if he’d been nothing to her, but for the dozens, maybe hundreds of lives that would come after him, her fear mounted to terror. She bent over him, breathing hard, and struggling for composure. His drawers were wet and stinking. She changed them and cleaned him, as Gaius Calidius Severus had done for her. He tried to fight her off, but his body wasn’t paying much attention to what his brain told it.
At least, she thought, he had enough strength in him to fight.
Julia didn’t, when Nicole did the same for her. But she was still breathing, and her body was still fever-warm. As long as she had breath and heat in her, there was hope. Genuine unselfish hope, unconnected with Nicole’s very existence. It felt almost virtuous.
One slow step at a time, Nicole made her way downstairs. The tavern was dark and quiet. There were half a dozen loaves of bread by the oven. All were stale, at least three days old, maybe more. Nicole didn’t care. She tore a chunk off a loaf and ate it with a cup of wine, soaking bits of the hard, dry stuff in the sweet heavenly liquid. The bread sat in her stomach like a stone. The wine, though, the wine was rain in a desert. Her body absorbed the moisture with joyous gratitude, and began to bloom.
She dipped up a second cup. When she’d got about halfway through it, the front door swung open. Gaius Calidius Severus strode in in a gust of wind and a scent of rain. The hood of his tunic was up, darkened with wet. Mud caked his booted feet.
He was well into the tavern before he saw Nicole standing by the bar, holding onto it to keep from tilting over. “Mistress Umma!” he cried in glad surprise. “Mithras be praised — you’re on the mend. And the others?”
“Lucius and Julia are very sick, but they’re still alive. Aurelia is… Aurelia is…” Nicole couldn’t make herself say it.
“He died yesterday,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. Just like that, baldly, without any effort to soften the blow. Once Nicole would have thought he didn’t care, but she knew better now. He was numb; running on autopilot. Saying what he had to say, and getting it over with. “In the end, it was a mercy. I was going to find an undertaker after I came here. It’ll take some looking, from what I hear. A lot of them are dead.”
Black humor, Nicole thought. It was even slightly funny, and yet she wanted to laugh.
She called herself to order. She couldn’t crack up. She didn’t have time. “If you find an undertaker,” she said, “let me know his name. I’ll need him, too. Because — because — “
With the wine inside her, at last, she could cry. For Aurelia, who had become her daughter. For Titus Calidius Severus, whom she had — loved? Yes, loved. For the world in which she was trapped, the world from which she couldn’t escape, the world that was falling to pieces all around her.
Gaius Calidius Severus wept with her. He’d been carrying the same leaden burden, the same crushing weight of grief. Tears didn’t wash any of it away, but they lightened it a little. A very little.
When they’d both run out of tears, they stood in the gloom of the shuttered tavern, in the drumming of the rain, and stared bleakly at one another. “It can’t get worse than this,” she said. “It can’t.”
15
The next day, Titus Calidius Severus was laid in the cemetery outside the city’s walls. Nicole was still too weak to leave the tavern, let alone walk so far. Just crossing the street that morning to sit with Gaius Calidius Severus left her exhausted. But that much she could do, and that much she did. She was glad she had: the young dyer was all alone in the shop, sitting in the reek of ancient piss and the muddle of colors on the floor and walls and on the sides of the vats. He wasn’t doing anything, hadn’t tried to ease his sorrows with work. He was simply sitting there, on a bench by the wall, as she’d seen people wait in bus stations, with a kind of blank and bovine patience.
He brightened at the sight of her, jumped up with something of his old energy, took her arm as if she’d been an ancient grandmother, and helped her to the bench he’d just vacated. She breathed shallowly to keep from gagging; her stomach was delicate enough without adding the dyer’s effluvium to it. But he was so glad to see her, she couldn’t bring herself to turn and bolt back out into the relatively fresh air of the street.
When she’d caught what breath she could manage, she said, “I wanted — I should go to the cemetery with you. But — “
Gaius Calidius Severus patted her arm awkwardly. “No. No, don’t fret about it. You’ve got your boy and your freedwoman to take care of. And Father wouldn’t want you to put yourself in any more danger, not after you’ve come through this far. We’d need another funeral if you did. He’d hate that.”
Nicole swallowed. Her throat hurt. “Thank you,” she said when she could trust her voice. She felt as if she’d received absolution. But it needed a little more. After a moment she said, “You’re a lot like him, you know.”
Gaius Calidius Severus blushed and ducked his head. Was he remembering the times he’d gone upstairs with Julia? Maybe, maybe not. And, Nicole thought, his father would probably have done the exact same thing at his age. There wasn’t anything wrong with him that a decade and a few cold showers wouldn’t fix. “Now I thank you,” he said. “It’s better than I deserve, but thank you for saying it.” He paused, as if to nerve himself for what he meant to
