Household Gods

epidemic on people she didn’t know. But if it came to a choice between pestilence and war…

Not in my backyard, people in Los Angeles shouted when they didn’t want a jail or a housing project or a nuclear-power plant or anything else necessary but unpleasant built anywhere near them. Mean-spirited, Nicole had thought them. Selfish. Deficient in humane impulses.

To hell with humane impulses. Carnuntum was just barely making its way through a pestilence. Death was walking through the streets. Famine stared it in the face. There was only one horseman of the Apocalypse missing, and she’d be damned if she’d wish a war on the city as well. As trivial as they suddenly seemed, she shaped the words in her mind regardless. Not in my backyard. Please, God, not in my backyard.

“Maybe the barbarians are as bad off as we are,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. “Let’s hope they are. Let’s pray for it.” He levered himself to his feet, moving like a much older man. He had to be as worn out as she was. “Here, I’d better do some work. You take care of yourself, Mistress Umma, and don’t push yourself too hard. If you need help, call. I’ll come.” He pulled his hood up over his head, hunched his shoulders, and ducked out into the rain.

She watched him go. He detoured a bit, down the sidewalk to the stepping stones, to cross as dry as he could. He paused when he reached the narrow walk on the other side, as if to gather his forces, then strode on up it and into the shop. He and his father had lived above it in all apparent amity; no squabbles that Nicole had ever seen or heard. And now he was alone.

No wonder he’d paused. It was hard enough for her to go up those back stairs, knowing there’d be one fewer sleeper above, and praying that neither Julia nor — please God — Lucius had taken a sudden turn for the worse and died while she was fuddling about below. What it must be like to walk into those rooms, to know there was no one else there — she didn’t want to imagine it, and yet she couldn’t help herself.

She wanted to leap up, run, make sure Lucius and Julia were alive and recovering. The best she could do was a slow crawl, creeping like an old woman, taking each step with trembling care, and resting every few steps. She couldn’t even spare the energy for frustration. Patience, she willed herself. Patience. That should be her watchword for this whole, primitive, maddeningly slow-moving world.

All through the fall and winter, the pestilence lashed Carnuntum. Both Lucius and Julia recovered — ever so slowly, as Nicole did herself. Losing one in four in her household left her statistically average, as best she could tell. She would have given anything to escape that tyranny of numbers. Aurelia’s absence was an ache behind her breastbone.

She’d taken little enough direct notice of the child while she was alive; life had been too busy, her head too strained with the effort of living in a world so totally foreign. But Aurelia had been a part of the world in ways that Nicole hadn’t even noticed until she was gone. Waking up in the morning, beginning the day, marking its completion by the kids’ tramping down the stairs and demanding their breakfast — without coffee, it had become a waking ritual of its own. She’d become accustomed to Aurelia’s presence. She’d grown fond of the little dark-haired girl with the gap where one front tooth had been, who loved to go with Nicole to women’s day at the baths. Who’d got into Nicole’s makeup box once, and painted herself to look a perfect horror, and been so proud of her achievement that Nicole didn’t dare laugh at her. Who had fought with Lucius as only siblings could, and not always been the one to make up — she’d been the tougher-minded of the two, Nicole had often thought.

And now she was gone, and Nicole ached with the loss. Would she have ached any more for Kimberley or Justin? Had she, ever, since she came to Carnuntum?

Ah, but they were alive, somewhere in time — alive and, if there were gods, and if those gods had any mercy, well. She missed them still, in unexpected moments, or in the dark before dawn. But neither of them was dead. She missed them. She didn’t grieve for them, for the lives they’d never have, or the death that had taken them so ungodly soon.

Their safety on the other side of time was her anchor, the thing that made it possible for her to live in this world without them. She hadn’t known till too late that Lucius and Aurelia had been the counterweight. While she had those two in her care, she could tell herself she had a clear purpose here. With one of them gone… how could she hold? She had to; Lucius needed her, and Julia needed her, and even Gaius Calidius Severus seemed to rely on her presence across the street. And yet she could feel herself slipping. She had to hold on, but it grew harder rather than easier, the longer it went on.

Brigomarus pulled through, though so narrowly that he looked like a ghost of himself. Ila died — which Nicole had a great deal of difficulty pretending to be sorry for. Tabica and Pacatus never took sick at all.

Nicole heard that with almost resentful envy. She was glad they didn’t come to the tavern to flaunt the accident of their good health. Brigomarus came, more than once, never very cordially, but as he said, family was family. And maybe he wasn’t terribly fond of his sister and her stick of a husband, either. Umma, or Nicole in Umma’s body, might actually be preferable, day for day and scowl for scowl.

Some of her neighbors and customers came through the sickness better than Umma’s family had. The wet nurse had brought the pestilence into Sextus Longinius lulus’ house, but both he and his son escaped it. Sometimes he would bring the baby with him when he came over for a cup of wine or a bowl of whatever Nicole or Julia had on the menu. Longinius lulus the younger was a happy baby. He was always smiling or gurgling with laughter. He knew nothing of pestilence, or of death. For that, Nicole envied him.

Ofanius Valens, that cheerful little man, bounced back fast from his dose of the sickness. He came in nearly every day, bringing this dainty or that for Julia: figs candied in honey, cuts of ham that were more fat than meat. He was perfectly open as to his motive. “Got to put some flesh on you, sweetheart,” he said to Julia in Nicole’s hearing. “You’re nothing but skin and bones. I’m not too terribly fond of lying on a ladder.”

He was fattening her like a goose. Nicole wanted to get angry at him, and at Julia, too. She did manage a small flare of temper, but it died down as soon as it rose. It was the sickness, she told herself. It left behind a lassitude that was terribly slow to pass.

That was even true — to a degree. She had neither the energy nor the inclination for a truly towering outrage. And if she had — what could she do? Short of throwing Julia into her room and walling up the entrance, she didn’t see how she could keep the freedwoman from doing what she obviously wanted to do.

Lassitude or no, Nicole kept a weather eye on Lucius. If he so much as headed for the door, she pounced. “Have you got your heavy cloak on? Put the hood up, you’ll freeze. Go back and put on your socks!”

He put up with it better than she would ever have expected from a boy his age: for the first day or two he suffered without complaint, but on the third day, as she came swooping out of the upper reaches with an extra pair of socks in hand, he planted his feet and put on a ferocious scowl. “Mother! I’m not made of glass. I won’t break.”

“Maybe you won’t,” she fired back, “but you’re all I’ve got in this world. I’m going to look out for you, and that’s that.”

He rolled his eyes and shook his shoulders — less a shrug than a shedding of her suffocating concern — and ran off to play with the remnants of the old noisy gang of neighborhood boys. As children will, he was recovering much faster than an adult. He came in from playing earlier than he used to, and fell into bed without even token protest, but his appetite was voracious and he was gaining strength by the day.

“Mind you don’t get wet!” she called after him, “or I’ll give you something to remember it by.”

He didn’t even acknowledge the threat. Brat. He knew she wasn’t up to chasing after him and giving him the swat he deserved, either.

Nicole stood with the socks still in her hand, turning and twisting them in her fingers. The rough burn of knitted wool kept part of her mind in the world where it belonged, but the rest was wandering afield.

All I’ve got in this world. If Nicole was in fact descended from Umma, that was true in more ways than she could explain to Lucius. If something happened to him, if the chain broke, what would become of her? Would she disappear? Would it be as if she had never been? There was no way to tell, and no way she wanted to test it. She’d keep Lucius safe whether he wanted it or no, for her sake as well as his own.

The price of grain rose. It never got above a level she could afford, but it did rise enough that she had to charge more for bread. Customers grumbled. She lost a few, but they came back when they discovered that bread wasn’t any cheaper elsewhere. “It’s criminal,” one of them said, “but you still make the best loaf in Carnuntum.”

“You get what you pay for,” Nicole said — and was a little startled by the pause, the stare as he worked it out, and then the burst of laughter. Another twentieth-century cliche that people here had never heard before.

Even with people coming back for the best bread in Carnuntum, business was not what it had been in the