Household Gods

say next. “How are Julia and Lucius doing?”

Titus Calidius Severus would have put Umma’s son ahead of the freed-woman, but he hadn’t gone to bed with her, either. Again Nicole noted the difference without rising to it. The question was kindly meant. That was real concern — real friendship.

She answered him warmly then, and fully. “They’ll pull through, I think. Both of them. They’re almost to the point I was at yesterday when you found me. But Aurelia — “ She stopped to pull herself together. That ordeal would come the day after tomorrow. Even in the fall chill, it wouldn’t wait any longer. “They should be there, and I have to be there. Somehow.”

“They won’t be able to come. ‘ Gaius Calidius Severus spoke with some of his father’s authority. He was right, too; Nicole knew it. She wasn’t any more pleased by that than she’d been when Titus was too damnably right for his own good. “I’ll look after them, don’t worry about that. And as for you, “ he said, shaking a finger under her nose, “hire a sedan chair to take you to the graveyard and back. You should be strong enough by then to manage that. No one will think it’s ostentatious, not when you’ve just got over the pestilence, and not for your own daughter’s funeral.”

Nicole didn’t want to argue with him. She was too tired. She got out of there somehow, not too discourteously she hoped, and crawled back to the tavern and her two charges.

Titus Calidius Severus’ funeral procession rocked and wailed its way down the street that afternoon. Nicole watched it from her doorway, standing very still, holding to the doorpost when her knees started to buckle. There were a few people in the procession after all, and a whole quartet of hired mourners, and two flute players who vied with one another to see how far off key they could go and still be somewhere within shouting distance of a tune. Titus would have had something wry to say about that, and a smile to go with it, warm and a little crooked.

That wasn’t Titus on the bier, that still and shrouded shape. No. It wasn’t anyone she knew. Titus was still alive somewhere. Her skin could still remember the touch of his hands, the way his beard tickled when he kissed her, the sound of his voice in her ear, murmuring words that made her giggle even while they made love. Had she loved him with a grand passion? Hardly. But she’d liked him. She missed him, his dry wit, his comforting presence, even his habit of always being right, rather more than she missed taking him up to her bed on nights after men’s day at the baths.

She still didn’t have any tears. She gave him memory instead, and the strength she could spare to stand in the doorway till the last of the procession had rounded the corner and vanished. Then she turned, and walking slowly, making her way from table to bench to stool to bar, she made her way back up to the two of hers who were still alive, and the one who waited, wrapped in a blanket, for the undertaker’s assistants to come and take her away.

Nicole ended up taking Gaius Calidius Severus’ advice. The sedan chair was like a four-man stretcher with a seat. Riding in it was beastly uncomfortable, but it was far easier than walking — particularly as half the way was sloppy with mud. The sky was ugly as unwashed wool, heavy and gray and full of rain, but none was falling just then. If they were lucky, they’d get there and back again before the threat of rain became reality.

Gaius Calidius Severus had been right about what people would say, or not say, of Nicole’s resorting to a sedan chair. Ila said not a word as she walked along beside the litter. If Umma’s sister didn’t complain about something Nicole did, it wasn’t worth complaining about.

Ila probably had other things on her mind, at that. She was sneezing and coughing in a way that made Nicole’s stomach clench. Brigomarus wasn’t there; he was down with it, which explained why he hadn’t come to help Nicole as he’d promised. She’d been fool enough to hope he was just being censorious again, or that he’d found some new reason to be aggravated with her. His absence mattered more than she would have expected. He’d been a sort of constant in this world, as close to family as she could get, arguments and all. She didn’t want him hanging about playing Big Brother, but she didn’t want him dead, either.

Along with Ila came Sextus Longinius lulus, who hadn’t caught the pestilence in spite of everything; Ofanius Vaiens, who’d survived a milder bout than Nicole’s; and sharp-tongued Antonina and her husband, a mousy little man whose name Nicole never had learned. As funeral processions went in these days, it was a largeish gathering, and kindhearted. None of these people needed to be here; they all must be worn out with attending funerals. And still they’d come to see Aurelia to her rest.

Nicole had refused to hire mourners — another thing that Ila had declined to comment on; really, she had to be ill, if she kept quiet about that — but she had asked the undertaker to arrange for a priest. The one provided was a type that must be universal: thickset, florid, with a well-padded middle and an even more well-padded vocabulary. He mouthed platitudes about innocence plucked too soon, and flowers cut down before their prime, and the golden hope of a better world. She’d heard just about the same words, in just about the same plummy tone, on a Sunday-morning Gospel hour. All this man lacked was the shiny suit and the pompadour.

Nicole tuned him out as best she could. She’d asked for a priest, after all. She should have expected what she got. It wouldn’t have been any different in the twentieth century; it hadn’t been when her grandfather died. He’d been a determined non-churchgoer, but the family had been just as determined to give him a Christian sendoff. The priest they found hadn’t known the man at all, had given a eulogy so generic as to be ludicrous, and had referred throughout to the deceased, whose name was Richard Uphoff, as “our dearly departed Bob Upton.”

At least this man got Aurelia’s name right, if nothing else about her. Nicole fixed her eyes on the bier, on the small shrouded figure, seeming so much smaller in death. No larger, really, than Kimberley had been, the night before Nicole vanished out of that world and into this one. This dream turned nightmare, this life suddenly so full of death.

Nicole’s throat was aching-tight. She couldn’t cry. She wanted to scream. Someone else was, away across the cemetery: shrieking and wailing. It wasn’t the voice of a hired mourner; those had their own style, almost like a religious chant. This was too wild, too unrestrained.

That wasn’t the American way of death. Even in a world that had never heard of America, Nicole couldn’t bring herself to indulge in it. She sat in the sedan chair in silence while the undertaker’s assistants laid the body in the small, muddy hole that was all the grave Aurelia would get. Then she had to get out of the chair, and, though she tottered like an old woman, lay one of Julia’s good loaves and a jar of raisins and a jug of heavily watered wine in the grave. She’d wanted to bring Aurelia’s favorite honeyed cake, but she’d thought of it too late. There’d been no time to make one.

It was ridiculous to think the dead child could notice what was missing, or care; and yet it mattered very much. Too much, maybe. The wine was Falernian — that much Nicole could give her. Poor little Aurelia, who’d never had the chance to have much, at least had that to take into the grave with her.

As Nicole knelt by the grave, unable to muster the strength to rise, the skies at last gave up their burden of rain. “Even the heavens are weeping,” He said, proving the Romans were no more immune to sentiment than to the pestilence.

The gravediggers hadn’t been lazing on the grass on this of all days.

Even before Nicole was ready to stand up, they were standing over the grave, spades shouldered like rifles. So shoot me, Nicole thought bitterly. Somehow, she got to her feet, slipping a little on the muddy grass, and wrapped her cloak about herself. Stiffly, unsteadily, she half climbed, half fell back into the covered chair. “Take me home,” she said to the bearers. They hardly grunted as they lifted her. She’d never been other than lean, and now, with the sickness, she was skeletal. And they must be eager to get in out of the rain.

Gaius Calidius Severus was sitting in the tavern, holding the fort as he’d promised. He’d acquired reinforcements since she left: a vaguely familiar man of about his father’s age. They’d been drinking wine: there were cups in front of them. Maybe they’d put brass in the cash box, maybe not. Nicole wasn’t going to worry about it. Calidius Severus was doing her a favor by being here at all. Two cups of wine, or however many it turned out to be, was small enough price to pay.

He greeted Nicole with a smile that seemed just a little bit too glad. He was just a boy, after all, and she’d left him with a heavy responsibility. “Julia and Lucius are asleep, Mistress Umma,” he said. “They woke up for a while, and I gave them some gruel and a little bit of bread sopped in wine, and they even ate a bite each. But they’re still pretty weak. The least little thing flattens them.”

Nicole drew a faint sigh. She hadn’t known till she heard him, that she’d been expecting him to tell her they were worse; they were sinking, they’d soon be dead. But they were better. Notably so, if they were eating and drinking, however little they might be keeping down. “The least little thing flattens me,”