Gaius Calidius Severus nodded. His relief was still palpable. It made him seem to take refuge in a change of subject. “Mistress Umma, you know Gaius Attius Exoratus, don’t you? He came to call on me, and I asked him over here.”
Nicole remembered the face: he’d eaten and drunk in the tavern a few times, though he wasn’t a regular. She hadn’t remembered his name, if she’d ever heard it. But she could say “Of course I do,” and even sound as if she meant it.
Attius Exoratus nodded. “Aye, we know each other, lad.” His voice was a bass rumble, like falling rocks. “I’d have come anyhow, whether you chanced to be here or not.” He pinned Nicole with a hard stare under a bristle of brows. “It’s a cursed shame he’s gone, Umma. That’s all I’ve got to say. He was one of the good ones.”
Titus Calidius Severus, he meant; he had to mean. “That he was.” Nicole got herself some wine — dipping up a cup seemed so natural now, she didn’t even notice herself doing it half the time — and stood next to the two men. “That he was,” she repeated quietly.
“And young Calidius tells me you just put your daughter in the ground.” Gaius Attius Exoratus let out a long sigh. “Life’s hard. I’m sorry for that, too.”
“Thank you,” Nicole said. There seemed to be more that she should say, but she couldn’t imagine what.
He didn’t seem to find her response inadequate, at least. “We’ve all done too much mourning lately,” he said. Nicole nodded, unable to find words to respond to that. He went on, “I only came by to tell you, it did my heart good to see how happy you made my old mate. We fought side by side, you know, and mustered out within a couple of weeks of each other, then moved here from the legionary camp down the river.” He pointed east. “He was as happy a man as I ever saw, when this lad’s mother was alive. I was afraid he’d never be happy again after he lost her. But you took care of that. He’s not here anymore to thank you for it, so I reckoned somebody ought to.”
“He did let me know,” Nicole said. That was true for her, and had surely been true for Umma. Still, there was more that needed saying, and this time she managed to say it. “It’s very good of you to make sure it’s taken care of.”
“I know how these things should go,” Attius said.
Nicole nodded again. They sat, she stood leaning lightly against a table. She thought about sitting, but she wasn’t in the mood just yet.
Attius was looking at her. Staring, really. Giving her the eye, she thought. So: was he going to try hitting on her, now his old war buddy wasn’t in the way? She took a deep breath, to laugh in his face. She had no interest in anyone right now, new or old, and less than no interest in sex. The only thing even vaguely related to it that she cared for at the moment was lying down. Alone.
Gaius Attius Exoratus lowered his eyes, grunted, and got to his feet. “I’d better get on home,” he said. “My wife will be waiting for me.”
Nicole almost choked on the breath she’d been holding. Was he sending her a message? Or had he just been trying to remember her face, to keep his memory clearer? Maybe he did have the hots for her.
If he did, he wasn’t going to act on it. Wife, was it? “I hope she stays well,” Nicole said. “And you, too, Attius.”
“Thank you kindly,” he answered. He drained the cup of wine that Gaius Calidius Severus must have dipped for him, and set it down, and belched. Then, wrapping his cloak around him and pulling a fold of it over his graying hair, he went out into the rain.
“He’s a good fellow, Attius is,” Gaius Calidius Severus said after a judicious few moments. “My father liked him a lot.”
“I understand why,” Nicole said; and she did. “He was very nice.” She hesitated. Then she said, “And I want to thank you, too, for taking care of me and for taking care of all of us. For everything.”
She didn’t feel like going into any more detail than that. He understood what she meant; like his father, he wasn’t stupid. He coughed a time or two, maybe in embarrassment, maybe in something worse. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “It was easier when you didn’t wake up, but when you did — I guess that meant you were starting to get over it.”
“I think so,” Nicole said. “I wasn’t out of my head anymore after that.” She still felt as if the least puff of breeze would blow her away; she wouldn’t be all the way better for a long time yet. The tears that filled her eyes were partly tears of weakness, but only partly. “I wish your father had made it, too. I wish Aurelia had. I wish — “
“Everybody,” Gaius Calidius Severus said somberly. Nicole nodded. When he spoke again, he almost seemed surprised at himself, as if such large concerns were new to him: “I wonder what Carnuntum will be like after this. “
“Your father told me it was killing one in four, sometimes one in three, down in Italy,” Nicole said. “It’s not over yet, not here.”
“I know it’s not,” young Calidius Severus answered with a touch of impatience, and a touch — just a touch — of fear. “He told me the same thing.”
As if to underline the thought, a funeral procession went by outside, not much bigger than Aurelia’s and even more miserable: the rain was coming down in sheets.
“Harvest wasn’t very good this year,” Gaius Calidius Severus mused, “even before the farmers started getting sick. That’s going to make things even harder.”
“I’ve heard people talking about that,” Nicole said. It hadn’t seemed particularly real at the time, but for some reason, now she understood. No farmers meant no one to bring in the harvest. No one to bring in the harvest meant no food in the market. And no food in the market meant…
Young Calidius Severus laughed. It sounded like a man whistling in the dark. “I hope there’s enough in the granaries to keep us fed till spring.”
“If there’s not,” Nicole said with a renewal of hope, “they’ll bring it in from somewhere else.” But as soon as she’d said it, she saw the hole in it. “If farmers elsewhere aren’t too badly hit by the pestilence, and they have any grain left over.”
Young Calidius Severus nodded. As if it were some kind of game, he found yet another hole, one that Nicole hadn’t thought of: “And if they can get the grain to us. “
But Carnuntum lay by the Danube, and dumped raw sewage into the river every day — downstream, she admitted; she was always amazed when the Romans paid even the most basic attention to sanitary matters. Barges and boats plied it. If the pestilence hadn’t touched anybody farther west…
Before she made a fool of herself by speaking of it, her clouded memory brought her up short. The west wasn’t safe, either. Even if the pestilence hadn’t reached it, war had. What were the names of the people the Romans were fighting? “The Quadi and the Marcomanni,” she said, half to herself.
Gaius Calidius Severus looked as grim as his father had when he watched the German tribesmen swagger through the market square. “And the Lombards, too,” he said. He peered north past his own shop, toward the Danube, and looked grimmer yet. “I only hope they don’t come over the river here, too, once they’ve had word of all our losses. They’re like vultures, those barbarians. They love to flock around a carcass.”
Nicole shuddered at the image, and tugged at the neck of her tunic. Before she quite realized what she was doing, she’d spat onto her bosom.
He followed suit, turning aside the ill omen. “The pestilence has to be going through the legions in the camp east of here and at Vindobona, the same way it’s going through this city. The barbarians will know it, too. Curse them.”
“Maybe it’s going through them, too.” It was neither compassionate nor politically correct to wish an
