Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  Sextus Longmius laughed as if she’d just made the best joke in the world. He got to his feet somehow — she doubted even he knew how — and reeled across the alley to his shop.

  Nicole followed more sedately, but quickly enough to evade the customers, and Julia, who wanted to know every detail. “Later,” she flung at them. No one chased her down, at least. As she left the tavern, she heard someone call for a round in the new father’s name. And probably, she thought uncharitably, on his tab, too.

  No one in the tinker’s shop seemed to find his condition in any way remarkable. They took little enough notice of him, even Fabia Ursa, though he half fell on her and deposited the sloppy kiss he’d tried to bestow on Nicole. She fended him off with an indulgent smile and sent him veering toward the cradle and the baby.

  While he wavered over it, struck mercifully mute, Aemilia and Fabia Ursa went on with their conversation. They were discussing wet nurses. “No, not the one I had last time,” Fabia Ursa said. “I don’t see any way what happened could have been her fault, but — “

  “But,” Fabia Honorata said. “There’s always that but, isn’t there? No, you don’t want her. Let me think — I didn’t much like the one I used for my youngest, though Lucina knows she had plenty of milk. How about the one you used, Antonina? Was she reliable?”

  The others chimed in on that, batting names back and forth. Women in Rome didn’t nurse their own babies, Nicole realized, even those who were far from rich. Everybody hired wet nurses. There must be a whole industry devoted to it — the Roman equivalent of bottles and baby formula.

  At least the baby would have real milk from a woman’s breast, though it wouldn’t be his mother’s. That had to be better than the twentieth-century alternative.

  The party broke up not long after. Sextus Longinius snored on the floor beside the baby’s cradle. Fabia Ursa had fallen asleep rather abruptly, and almost in midsentence. Her sister went to see if the wet nurse they’d decided on was available. The other women had children to tend and work to do. Only Aemilia showed signs of staying, which assuaged Nicole’s conscience. She didn’t particularly want to babysit for exhausted mother and blotto father, though if she’d had to she would have done it. Fabia Ursa and Sextus Longinius had looked after Lucius and Aurelia often enough.

  Nicole was free to go home, and glad to do it, too. It was still daylight, rather to her surprise. The tavern was in between the noon crowd and the sundown rush, an interlude of quiet, with one or two dedicated drinkers in the corners, but no demands on Julia’s time.

  Julia wanted to know all about the birthing. “Not that I know anything about birthing babies,” she said. “But maybe someday.”

  Nicole widened her eyes. “What do you mean, you don’t know anything about birthing babies?” Then, because she’d had a great deal of wine next door, she came out and said it. “Gods know you’ve had plenty of opportunity to make one.”

  Julia wasn’t visibly offended. “Not if I can help it,” she said. “I don’t need a fatherless brat dragging at my hem. I smear a twist of wool with pine resin and stuff it up there before I start.” The angle of her eyebrows said that Nicole should know about this rough-and-ready form of birth control, but if Nicole wanted to play at ignorance again, Julia wasn’t of a mind to stop her.

  Nicole wondered what the FDA would say about pine resin as a spermicide. Better than nothing, was her guess. She didn’t think a twist of wool would be as effective as a proper diaphragm, either, but it was also likely to be better than nothing. Put them together and they probably made a halfway decent — or perhaps a halfway indecent — contraceptive.

  Several times that night, the baby’s crying across the alley woke her from a sound sleep. The first time or two, she lay with all her nerves jangling, ready to leap up and look after her baby. But slowly it sank in even on her sleep-drugged senses that this wasn’t her baby. She didn’t have to do anything about it except listen to it. Fabia Ursa, on the other hand…

  Aemilia had left her to it just before dark. Nicole had served the midwife a cup of the two-as wine for the road, as it were, and seen her on her way to a well-deserved rest. “And that’s if nobody takes it into her head to pop tonight, “ Aemilia had said as she headed for the door.

  Nicole recalled only too vividly how frazzled she’d been after Kimberley and Justin were born. She hoped Longinius lulus and Fabia Honorata and the wet nurse were giving the poor woman some help. Nicole would look in on her, she thought fuzzily. In the morning.

  She woke with the memory clear in her head, and no sound coming from next door. As soon as she’d got the tavern going and set Julia in charge of it again, she went next door to see how Fabia Ursa was doing. She found Fabia Honorata there already, and Longinius lulus fixing the dented pot against which the image of Isis had leaned. With each stroke of the hammer, he winced. He must have the headache from hell, and well earned, too.

  The baby lay asleep in his cradle, swaddled like a mummy. Fabia Ursa sat on a stool nearby. Nicole was shocked at the sight of her. She knew what a woman was supposed to look like just after she’d given birth: as if a truck had run over her. Fabia Ursa looked worse than that. Her eyes had a hectic glow that raised Nicole’s hackles. “Are you all right?” she asked sharply.

  Fabia Ursa didn’t respond. It was her sister who said, “You see it, too, don’t you, Umma? I’m afraid she’s got the fever.”

  Nicole couldn’t see that either Fabia Ursa or her husband had heard a word that either of them said. She crossed the room and laid her hand on Fabia Ursa’s forehead. If the woman wasn’t running a temp close to 102, Nicole would have been astonished. Aloud and in some frustration she said, “She’s awfully warm.”

  “She’s burning up,” Fabia Honorata said. Worry made her tactless, or else she didn’t think her sister could hear.

  Nicole recalled how often Aemilia had slid her hands inside Fabia Ursa, how much pushing and prodding the midwife had done, and how few pains she’d taken to keep her hands clean. If Fabia Ursa had an infection, what could anybody in Carnuntum do about it? There were no antibiotics here. Aspirin? The willow-bark decoction was the closest thing to it, but it wouldn’t do anything about the actual cause of the fever. Bed rest and hope for the best, Nicole thought. The thought made her uneasy. She hadn’t ever known anybody who’d died in childbirth, but she’d heard enough about the mortality rate before the advent of antisepsis. Puerperal fever was nothing to take lightly.

  “Is there something we can — “ Nicole began, without much hope, but she had to ask.

  Fabia Ursa interrupted her. “I’ll be all right,” she said.

  She didn’t sound all right. She didn’t merely sound exhausted, either. She sounded sick, with the same whining, dragging quality to her voice that Nicole’s kids had when they were coming down with something. It reminded her so vividly of Kimberley that last day in West Hills, her heart contracted. If she could be back there, right now — if she could be right there, with all the troubles she’d had, and the stink of vomit, and every other delight of that awful day — oh, God, what she wouldn’t give to have it all back again.

  She’d never wanted it so much. At first she’d been too elated. Later she’d been too busy surviving. Now…

  Now she couldn’t indulge herself. “I have some willow bark,” she said with a tinge of desperation. “Wait here; I’ll go get it.” As if they could do anything but wait. They didn’t say so. Both Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Honorata nodded gratefully. Fabia Ursa sat mute, sunk again in that frightening lethargy.

  Julia frowned when Nicole asked for the decoction. “Fabia Ursa?” she asked. Nicole nodded. “That’s not good,” Julia said. “Fever after you have a baby — that can kill you.”

  “I know,” Nicole said irritably. She didn’t, not down in her bones where real belief was, but she’d seen Fabia Ursa. That was a very sick woman. Sick, she thought, as a dog.

  Julia fetched the willow-bark decoction from its storage place, moving q
uickly, but not nearly quickly enough for Nicole’s peace of mind. She snatched the jar with scant thanks and hurried back to the tinker’s shop.

  Fabia Ursa had gone upstairs — a good sign, maybe, if she could travel that far: now wasn’t it? Sextus Longinius lulus took the painfully inadequate jar with gratitude that made Nicole want to burst into tears. “Thank you, Umma,” he said. “You’re a good neighbor.”

  Nicole started to brush him off, but caught herself. He needed to be grateful more than she needed to be comfortable about it. “I’ll bring you a loaf of bread every day,” she said, “and food your wife might like. All you’ll have to worry about is getting her well.”

  She’d done it now: he looked ready to fall at her feet. “You are the best of neighbors,” he said. “The gods blessed me and my family when they set us next to you.”

  Nicole mumbled something and fled. It was cowardly, and she really should have gone upstairs with him to make sure Fabia Ursa took the medicine, but she’d had all she could stand.

  It wasn’t cowardice, she told herself, not really, that kept her away all the rest of that day and all the next. There was the marketing, there was the laundry, there was a flood of customers that ran her flat out from dawn to dusk. It was two days before she could scrape out enough time to get away. She had managed to send food over, once by Lucius and a time or two by Julia. She’d kept her promise in that much.

  She found the tinker’s shop deserted. The same pot he’d been mending before, or another just like it, lay forgotten on the workbench. As she stood hesitating in the doorway, a man’s voice floated down the stairs: “ — warm fomentations on the belly, an enema of warm olive oil, and gruel for nourishment. If she should show improvement, thin, sour wine would be best. “

  A doctor, Nicole realized. A few moments later he trod briskly down the stairs. He looked like his voice: thin, intense, and profoundly preoccupied. He was younger than she would have guessed. His brows were drawn together. He did not look either pleased or hopeful. With a curt nod in her general direction, he left in a quite unmistakable hurry. To his next patient? Nicole wondered.

  None of what he’d told Longinius lulus sounded unreasonable, though Nicole wouldn’t have wanted an enema if she felt like hell. But they were all things she would have done for the flu in L.A. They weren’t much good for anything more serious.

  He was trying to make Fabia Ursa as comfortable as he could, because he couldn’t make her well. Nobody could do that, except Fabia Ursa herself. And that included Nicole.

  She wavered, debating the good sense of going up to see if there was anything after all that she could do. But in the end she didn’t go. She left the loaf of Julia’s fresh-made bread and a bowl of stewed pears on the counter, and retreated to the tavern.

  The rest of the day passed in a blur. The night again was broken by the baby’s crying, quickly suppressed: the wet nurse was doing her job, Nicole had to suppose.

  Fabia Honorata was downstairs in the shop when Nicole went over the next morning, sitting on the tinker’s bench, looking as if she hadn’t sat down or rested in days. She looked up as Nicole came in, and managed a greeting, but not a smile.

  Nicole asked the question she had to ask. “Fabia Ursa?”

  “Not good,” Fabia Honorata said, too exhausted for anything resembling dramatics. “She doesn’t recognize any of us. She thrashes in the bed. The fever burns her like fire. Pray to whoever you think will hear you. I’d even pray to the Christians’ blustering fool of a god if I thought it would do any good.”

  Nicole felt as if she’d been hit in the stomach. It didn’t matter that she’d been expecting such news. She’d hoped — against hope, she’d known from the start — that she’d find Fabia Ursa sleeping, the fever broken, and everything as well as it could be.

  She should have known that this world didn’t have much to do with hope. Again she left the food she’d brought, again she fled to the sanctuary of the tavern. There in the comforting smells of bread and wine and humanity, she prayed as Fabia Honorata had asked her to. She did it halfheartedly, self-consciously. Somewhere on the road out of childhood, she’d lost the knack. But she tried. She hoped that would count for something.

  That evening, as she was closing the tavern, she discovered what it had counted for. A storm of weeping and wailing broke from the shop next door. Fabia Honorata ran out in its wake, hair awry, tunic torn. “She’s dead!” she cried. “My sister’s dead!”

  12

  The next day dawned bright and warm, by no means as common a thing in that part of the world as it was in California. Nicole had come to welcome sun through the newly opened shutters of a morning, instead of taking it for granted. But today, as she squinted in the bright light after the stuffy dimness of her bedroom, the smile died as soon as it was born. There was an empty place in the world, a vacancy where Fabia Ursa had been. She’d been a constant, almost daily presence in Nicole’s life, not drinking much, but eating like a teenager, packing it away somewhere in that bird-boned frame. Her voice had washed over Nicole while she went about the business of the tavern, a half-annoying, half-comforting rattle of gossip, opinions, hearsay, and cheerful nonsense. She’d always had something to say to the kids, and had looked after them when Nicole needed an extra hand, without complaint and without asking to be paid. Nicole had found ways: a bowl of stew or a chunk of bread with olive oil on the house, or a cup of wine for her husband if he happened by.

  Now she was gone. The funeral was this morning, just late enough to let her open the tavern and yet again leave Julia to look after it while she went elsewhere. Julia didn’t object. She liked the sensation of being the owner of the place, Nicole thought; and if she was turning tricks for spending money, she could do it a whole lot more easily when Nicole was away.

  Nicole didn’t want to think about that today. She didn’t want to think about death, either, but death wasn’t so easily evaded.

  Most of the neighbors had turned out for the funeral procession. They seemed like a decent crowd as they gathered in the alley, waiting for the body to be carried out of the house, but there couldn’t have been more than a couple of dozen in all. Two women whom Nicole couldn’t immediately place by name or face took their places at the head of what would be a small, sad procession. They were hired mourners, she realized, in garments artistically rent and with hair almost too dramatically disarrayed. As two strapping undertaker’s assistants carried the body out of the house, wrapped in a linen shroud and laid on a wooden bier, the mourners began to keen. A pair of flute-players, one with a large instrument, one with a small, joined in just out of synch. The combined racket put Nicole in mind of scalded cats.

  The procession wound its slow way out of the alley and into the broader street beyond. Nicole happened to be close to the front, not far in back of Sextus Longinius lulus, who walked behind the bier. He carried his son in his arms, the son for whose life his wife had given her own. He looked eerily calm. Shock, Nicole thought. It wasn’t real to him yet. Later, when it hit, he’d fall hard, but for now he was well in control of himself.

  She debated disturbing him now or waiting till later. Later might not come; now was here. She said it, then, and hoped for the best: “Is there anything I can do?”

  He shook his head. “Oh, no. The funeral club is paying for everything. I’ve put in my sesterces for years; now it’s my turn to get the use of them.”

  “Oh,” Nicole said, feeling oddly foolish. “How — forethoughtful.” The funeral club sounded like the closest thing to life insurance she’d heard of since coming to Carnuntum. Not that she could imagine genuine life insurance in a world like this one. The premiums would have been murderous. If somebody as young and healthy as Fabia Ursa could die from a simple infection… If Fabia Ursa could die like that, nobody was safe. Nicole shivered, though the day was warm as days went in Carnuntum.

  “We have the babies buried under the stairs,” Longinius lulus said in conversational tones. “If it weren’t for the p
ollution, I’d have put Fabia beside ‘em, but adults have to go outside the city wall.”

  For a moment Nicole wondered how, except by its size, an adult’s body would produce pollution but a baby’s wouldn’t. Decay was decay, regardless of the scale.

  It dawned on her belatedly that he had to mean religious, not environmental, pollution. As far as she could tell, all the Romans wanted to do with the environment was exploit it.

  The funeral procession made its way through the city to the gate that led to the amphitheater. Once outside, however, it swung southeast toward the graveyard Nicole had seen on the day she went to the beast show. A woman stood waiting there, in a tunic that shone blinding white in the sun. A priestess, Nicole thought. Sexists or no, the Romans had female priests. The Catholic Church rather emphatically didn’t, nor did most of the other conservative Christian denominations. And what does that say? she thought.

  “Isis,” a man said off to the side, dismissively. “Isis is a women’s god.”

  “Well, and what do you expect?” said the man beside him. “It’s a woman we’re burying. If it had been a man, now, we’d be saying our prayers to a proper god.”

  “Mithras,” the first man said. “Yes, there’s a god for men.” The way he said it, men were so far above women in the food chain that there just was no comparison.

  “And no women allowed, either,” his friend said. “That’s a proper god for a soldier, that is.”

  They sounded so smug, and so perfectly certain of their god’s superiority, that Nicole would have loved to tell both of them where to go, with detailed instructions on how to get there. But this was a funeral procession. All she could do was shoot a glare at the men, who took no notice whatsoever and steam in silence.

  Rather belatedly, she recalled that Titus Calidius Severus followed Mithras. And what did that say about him? He was in the procession: not too far behind her, in fact, though he hadn’t intruded on what must have looked like a fiercely private grief. That was a degree of sensitivity she wouldn’t have granted most sensitive Nineties guys in L.A., let alone a Roman of the second century.