Household Gods

Good grief, thought Nicole. She’d done it. She’d surprised the by now unsurprisable Julia.

She nodded slowly, letting the moment stretch. “Good,” she said again. No one ought to be too predictable.

Saturnalia felt amazingly like Christmas. No one had ever heard of a Christmas tree, which was too bad; Nicole loved the glitter of the tree, and one would have looked — well, interesting over by the bar. But everything else was remarkably similar.

The resemblance extended all the way to getting a present from someone for whom she hadn’t bought one in return. Skinny, short-tempered Antonina presented her with a glazed pottery dog that was one of the ugliest things she’d ever seen — and that included her mother’s set of Staffordshire dogs. Even those were more appealing than this thing was.

“Thank you so much,” she said as warmly as she could. For all she knew, the damn critter was the height of swank in these parts. “Wait just one moment, would you? I have your present upstairs.”

She hurried up the stairs in a haze of desperation, with the rags of her smile still clinging to her face. Her bedroom offered little enough sanctuary. But — for a wonder, her eyes lit on just the thing. She snatched the terra sigillata bowl from the set on her chest of drawers, dusted it off hastily, and trotted back down the stairs. She was getting stronger at last: she didn’t even think about passing out from so much exertion. With as much of a flourish as she could muster, she presented the bowl to her neighbor.

Antonina made gratified noises much like the ones she’d used herself. She and Nicole drank wine together. Good cheer reigned, as much as it ever did around Antonina. After a suitable interval, she said as cordial a goodbye as Nicole had ever heard from her, and went on out the door, bowl in hand.

As soon as she was gone, Julia picked up the dog and made a ghastly face — almost as ghastly as the dog’s own. “By the gods, that’s a hideous little thing, isn’t it?”

“You think so, too?” said Nicole. “Well; one has to be polite. Maybe she thinks it’s the height of fashion.”

“Hardly!” said Julia, in a tone so like a Valley Girl that Nicole almost burst out laughing. But there would have been no explaining the distinctive intonations of “As if!” to a second-century Roman freedwoman in the valley of the Danube.

It was a relief, actually, to know that she might get rid of the ceramic tumor without offending local standards of good taste.

“I’ll bet somebody gave it to her, and she’s just getting rid of it to keep from spending any money on a decent present,” Julia said.

“Then we’re even,” Nicole said, “because I pulled that bowl off the dresser and dusted it off, and there it was.”

“It wasn’t a bad bowl,” Julia said. “But this…” She juggled the dog from hand to hand. It slipped; Nicole held her breath. But it didn’t fall. Julia plunked it down on the bar, right by the bowl of nuts.

“It doesn’t look half bad there,” Nicole observed.

“Maybe a customer will have a few too many and knock it on the floor,” said Julia.

“Maybe there’s treasure hidden inside it.”

Julia’s eyes gleamed. Then she laughed in disbelief. “No! Not if Antonina gave it to you. You can bet, if there’d been anything in there, she’d have winkled it out.”

“Dear old Antonina,” Nicole said with a theatrical sigh.

One way and another, the two of them spent a very pleasant half-hour dragging Antonina’s name through the mud. There was plenty of that outside, and not a little inside, either. No point in letting it go to waste.

When the dishfest wound down, Nicole filled a bowl of soup and a jar of wine, and took them across the street to Gaius Calidius Severus. He was in no condition to romp on the sheets with Julia now. The pestilence had him fully in its grip. If she could get a little nourishment into him, he might be able to fight the disease. There wasn’t much more she, or anyone else in Carnuntum, could do.

It was almost as chilly inside the shop as on the street. That was true in the tavern, too. Fires and braziers were all very well — when you stood right by them. If you didn’t, you froze your backside off. That probably had a lot to do with the death rate. People who might have recovered if they could have got warm, shivered and sank and died. Please, God, Nicole thought, don’t let that happen to Calidius Severus.

Even in winter, the fuller and dyer’s shop stank to high heaven. Nicole held her breath as she strode quickly through it and climbed the stairs to Gaius Calidius Severus’ bedroom. There she had to breathe or turn blue, drawing in a whiff of a completely different stink: the sickroom reek of slops and sour sweat that Nicole had first smelled in the room where Umma’s mother died, and then soon after in her own house.

Gaius Calidius Severus had kicked off most of the covers she’d tucked over him the last time she visited. He hadn’t, fortunately, kicked over the chamberpot by the bed. Nicole scooped it up and dumped it out the window. “There,” she muttered. “That’ll be better.”

The sound of her voice made him look in her direction. He wasn’t altogether out of his head with fever, as she had been. But he wasn’t quite connected to the real world, either. He proved it by asking, “What are you doing, Mother?”

“I’m just getting rid of what’s in the chamberpot,” Nicole answered. She didn’t say she was his mother, but neither did she say she wasn’t. If thinking his mother was taking care of him made him feel a tiny bit better, that was good; let him think it.

It didn’t seem to help a lot, if it helped at all. His expression changed; he began to wriggle, and then to thrash. She braced to leap, in case his fever had turned to convulsions, but as suddenly as he’d begun, he lay still. In a small voice full of shame, he said, “Mother, I’m afraid I’ve had an accident.”

Nicole’s nose would have told her as much: the stink in the room had worsened, even though the chamberpot was empty. “Don’t worry about it,” she said soothingly. “I’ll take care of it.” Did he think he was a little boy just learning to use the pot? Or did he know how old he was, but not who she was? It didn’t really matter. Either way, she had to clean him off, just as, last summer, he’d done for her.

In a way, it wasn’t too awfully different from changing Justin’s diaper after an especially messy load. In another, it was completely different. Gaius Calidius Severus was emphatically and rather impressively made like a man, not a boy. No wonder Julia likes him, Nicole thought through the slight vertigo of trying not to breathe. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she reassured him. “Everything will be all right.”

When he was as clean as he was going to be, and the remains tossed out the window with the rest, she let her hand rest for a moment against his cheek. As soon as she’d done it, she wished she hadn’t. She didn’t really want to know how high his fever was. But he let out a sigh and leaned very lightly against her palm. Maybe it was cool; maybe it comforted him. Either way, he seemed a little better, a little less troubled.

She spooned soup into him. When he’d taken all he was going to take, which was about a third of the bowl, she poured a cup of wine and held it to his lips. He coughed and spluttered. With a faint sigh, she dipped the spoon into that, too, and got it into him more successfully. One small swallow at a time, he did pretty well, all things considered: he took more than he had the last time, and much more than the time before that. It was progress. She’d take it.

Just as she was about to leave, when she thought he’d fallen asleep, he roused enough to speak. “Thank you, Mistress Umma.”

She turned in surprise. He still sounded like hell, but he knew who she was.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, more to be saying something than for any other reason. She knew how he felt: as if he had one whole foot and three toes of the other in the grave. She’d felt the same way herself not so long before.

“Terrible,” he answered, right on cue. He sounded it. He looked it. But he had recognized her, and that was a big step forward. He yawned. “Do you mind if I sleep?”

“Not even a little bit,” Nicole said warmly. That was good; oh, that was very good indeed. She’d slept, too, slept and slept, after she came out of her delirium. She’d awakened feeling lousy, but she’d been on the mend. Maybe he was, too.

She hated to leave him, but she had the tavern to run, and Julia was waiting. She broke the news as soon as she’d passed the door. Julia clapped her hands in delight. “Maybe we’ve turned the corner,” she said. “Maybe we’ve turned the corner at last.”