Household Gods

summer. Part of that was the fault of the pestilence, but part, she realized, was the season. When she’d come into this world, spring was gliding into summer; the sun rose very early and set very late. Now that was reversing itself. Without the aid of watch or clock, she couldn’t be sure of the days’ length as winter drew near, but they seemed far shorter than in Los Angeles, and in Indianapolis, too. Eight hours of daylight? Nine at the most? Damned little, in a world lit only by fire.

But even that was deceptive, because it assumed the sun shed much light when it did deign to scurry above the horizon. What with rain and sleet and occasional snow and endless masses of dirty-gray clouds and fogs off the Danube that sometimes didn’t break up till nearly noon and sometimes didn’t break up at all, Carnuntum was shrouded in gloom.

The outer weather mirrored Nicole’s inner climate. With the coming of winter, she felt, as she hadn’t since the first days after she arrived, how very much she missed artificial light. No torch or oil-burning lamp could compare to a plain old forty-watt bulb. They barely lifted the skirts of the dark. They couldn’t ever drive it away.

She wanted it driven away. She needed it driven away. It pressed on her, weighing her down. She was always gloomy, always depressed. She couldn’t get herself moving in the morning; she went to bed as soon as the light was out of the sky. She snapped at people for no reason. Her mood was filthy, and filthier as the winter went on.

Sometime in December, a phrase came back to her from the part of herself that she’d shut away in the dark, her lightbulb-lit, daylight-bright twentieth-century self: seasonal affective disorder. If she didn’t have it, she sure as hell had its first cousin. Had Umma been the same way — was it her physiology responding to the lack of light? Or was it Nicole herself reacting more strongly because she wasn’t used to it?

Either way, she amazed herself with how much she could sleep. She might almost have been a hibernating animal. When slate-gray gloom turned black, she would wrap herself in her blankets, and not know another thing till black lightened again toward gloom. After a while even a bursting bladder couldn’t wake her; she slept straight through, woke and half-fell on the pot, and staggered downstairs to scrape out another day’s living.

As December advanced, Julia and Lucius started to get excited about something called the Saturnalia. With all that they said about it, Nicole understood how and why the English word came to be associated with revelry. It was a whole week’s festival, centered on the winter solstice; it celebrated the sun’s turn back toward the north. Sunreturn — inch by inch, day by day, creeping once again toward the long brilliant days and brief starlit nights of summer.

No wonder they made a festival out of it. Even the dim vague dream of honest daylight was enough to perk Nicole up, though the dirty-gray reality of the days dragged her down soon enough.

Then Lucius started dropping hints. “Did you see the game board old Furius Picatus has in his shop around the corner? It’s hollow, and it’s got a set of dice in the middle. Jupiter! The games I could play, if I had that.”

Why, Nicole thought, Saturnalia was like Christmas. People gave presents — and kids dropped hints. A game board and dice were preferable to the latest media tie-in, hands down, no questions asked. So — had Christmas presents begun in the tradition of the Saturnalia? Did they really go that far back?

She’d always loved Christmas, even when it was trendy to emulate Ebenezer Scrooge. Choosing and buying presents, hiding them, waiting to see the faces when they were unwrapped at last — she was like a little kid. “About the only time you ever were,” Frank had said to her after the divorce. At this distance, she could grant that maybe he was right. But better to be a kid once a year than never to be a kid at all.

Yes, even in a year that had brought so much shock, and so much death. This was a time for warmth, and for such light as there could be. She wouldn’t forget grief, or put the dead out of her mind completely, but she could give herself, at least for this season, entirely to the living.

She bought the board and dice for Lucius, bargaining Furius Picatus down to a price that was almost reasonable. Then she found a little greenish glass jar of rosewater for Julia, packaging that would have been the height of trendiness in Neiman-Marcus, and a pair of sandals for Brigomarus. She measured his feet from prints he left on the muddied tavern floor — pretty damn clever, if she thought so herself. For Gaius Calidius Severus she bought a belt of woven leather, very fine and fancy, with a gleaming brass buckle. She was vastly pleased with that, and with the price she’d got the leather-worker down to — her bargaining skills were honed by now to a wicked edge.

Two days before the first day of the festival, Gaius Calidius Severus came over for a cup of wine. He hadn’t been by for a day or two: busy, she’d supposed, with orders for gifts. He greeted her less brightly than usual, and stumbled as he sat down. Then, as she brought him his cup of two-as wine, he doubled up in a fit of sneezing and coughing. It looked — oh, God, it looked like the pestilence.

He straightened, wiping his eyes. Something in his face told her not to say anything. He drank his wine, made small talk that she forgot as soon as the words had gone through her head, and went back home, mumbling something about a dye lot that had to come out right then, and he hoped it was the right shade, too; it was for one of his pickier customers.

Nicole stood by the bar, watching him go. There was no one else in the tavern just then, only Julia kneading a batch of the best bread in Carnuntum. “It’s not fair,” Nicole said to her, bursting out with it before she even had time to think. “It’s not right. He took care of his father. He took care of us. The sickness passed him by. Now it’s been gone for months — and he’s got it. Why?”

Julia shrugged. She knew as well as Nicole did, there wasn’t any answer to that. After a bit, she said, “He didn’t seem too bad yet, did he?”

“No,” Nicole said, “not yet. But we know it gets worse. Don’t we?”

“Oh, yes.” Julia didn’t say anything more than that. She didn’t need to. Her cheekbones still showed sharp as wind-carved rock under her skin, with no padding of flesh to smooth their outline. She’d have been a knockout in certain parts of Beverly Hills, where you could never be too rich or too thin, but in Carnuntum Ofanius Valens was right: she was a creature in sore need of feeding up.

She finished kneading the lump of dough on the countertop, washed her hands in a bowl of water, and dried them on her tunic. Then, in a tone that said she’d made her decision and that was that, she said, “He took care of me when I was sick. I’m going over there to take care of him. I’ll be back in a bit.”

Nicole blinked, startled. Julia had never asserted herself this way before. Nicole should be welcoming it as a declaration of freedom. Instead, she found herself — annoyed? No, of course not. She was being practical, that was all. There was work to do here. “If he’s not that bad, he won’t need to be taken care of yet,” she said.

Julia looked at her. They were both speaking Latin, but they were not speaking the same language. As if to make that clear, the freedwoman said, “He’ll still enjoy it now. Later… who knows? He may never have another chance.” While Nicole was still groping for a reply, Julia walked calmly out of the tavern and down the sidewalk, toward the stepping stones.

Nicole opened her mouth to call out, but closed it again. Julia was a free woman, and an adult. Even if she was Nicole’s employee, her mind and her decisions were her own. As Nicole watched, she came up the walk on the far side of the muddy street and opened the door to the shop where Gaius Calidius Severus now worked alone. She closed the door after her. Nicole couldn’t see any more than that, but she didn’t need to. Her imagination worked perfectly well.

She’d never used sex to say thank you even to Frank, let alone to a neighbor who’d been nice to her. Most of the time, Julia’s freewheeling approach to such things made her want to pound her head against the top of the bar. This once, she resolved to say not a word.

Frank would have been amazed. She was the epitome of the Midwestern prude, he’d told her often enough. “Judge plenty, and be damned sure nobody judges you,” he’d said. She didn’t even remember what she’d replied. Something lame, she was sure.

Julia came back not too long after — an hour, maybe; maybe less. She wasn’t any more or less kempt than ever, but there was a flush on her cheeks that hadn’t been there before. It almost made her look like her old robust self.

Nicole didn’t ask, but Julia answered regardless. “Tomorrow might have been too late,“ she said, “but today — it was fine. “

That practically forced Nicole to say a word. She found one: “Good.” Julia shot her a quizzical glance. Nicole wondered why. Umma, surely, would have said the same thing. But Nicole had been in Umma’s body for more than six months now. Julia had got used to her odd, squeamish reactions to perfectly normal and acceptable things.