by Judith Tarr
For the first time, Nicole wished Liber and Libera had brought her body here as well as her soul, spirit, self, whatever it was. Her body was a pasty, doughy, only moderately attractive thing, but it had had measles. Umma’s hadn’t. As long as Nicole lived in this body, she was as susceptible as anyone else in Carnuntum.
When she’d wished herself here, she’d given up more than she’d ever imagined. Would she have to give up her life, too?
Until now she’d been coasting, living a long, generally not very pleasant dream. She’d been too busy just surviving, and too tired out from it, to think much past the moment. And, to be honest, she’d been too stubborn to admit that she’d made a mistake; that she’d been dead bone ignorant about the past. Maybe not any past — but this one certainly wasn’t anything like what she’d expected.
She didn’t want out. Not yet. She was stubborn enough for that. But she was beginning to think that she might be healthier, if not happier, back in West Hills.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she whispered, more to herself than to Titus Calidius Severus.
He nodded, a little too vigorously. “Maybe it won’t,” he said. He reached to take her hand just as she reached to take his. They clung to each other as they made their way through the clamor and stinks, the flies and smoke of Carnuntum.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she said again, in the street in front of the tavern. But she knew what crouched there in the dark, however loud she whistled. She gave it a name: “I’m scared.”
“So am I, “ Titus Calidius Severus said.
13
For a day or two, nothing much happened. Nobody fell over dead in front of the tavern. None of Nicole’s customers brought in rumors that people were dropping dead anywhere else in Carnuntum. She began to hope Dexter was wrong after all. As Titus Calidius Severus had said, doctors didn’t know everything. That was true in the twentieth century, and a hell of a lot truer here in the second.
When she went to the market, it seemed she heard an awful lot of people coughing and sneezing. More people than usual? She wasn’t sure. Her nerves were on edge. She was hypersensitive, jumping on every hack and sniffle.
The next day, when she took Aurelia to the baths, she told herself the same thing. Nobody was looking any more or less healthy than he ever had. Sometimes she even believed it, and held onto the belief for an hour or two — until someone else started sneezing and started a chain reaction, or a walk down the street sounded like a percussion section.
The night after that — the night after a men’s day at the baths — Titus Calidius Severus came across the street at sunset and stayed on after the children and Julia had gone off to their beds. Julia sauntered upstairs with elaborate casualness. Nicole had to work hard not to notice it.
She and Calidius Severus didn’t linger long over the last of the wine. There was so much to say, they ended up not saying much of anything. In a little while they went upstairs, she leading, he following — for the view, she supposed, such as it was. Next time she’d insist on following him. He had a nice ass, as she had good reason to know.
At the top of the stairs, she paused for an instant. The children were snoring in two high, unmusical tones. No sound came from Julia’s room.
Nicole shrugged. Silence would do. “Come on,” she said, as she had on every night after a men’s day at the baths since the mime show. Her bedroom was waiting, and Calidius Severus was in it. She slipped in behind him, and barred the door.
She was easy enough with Calidius now to leave the lamp burning on the chest of drawers while they made love. Her body wasn’t a whole lot in this culture, but in her own it was enough to be proud of. She put some of that pride in the way she held herself. If she could have been really clean, if she’d had access to shampoo, makeup, moisturizers, even plain old soap, she’d have been really something, but as it was, she wasn’t bad. She liked the tautness of her stomach, and thighs that had never heard of cellulite. Her breasts were small and pointed but rather nice, and not too soft in spite of two children — not nursing one’s own did make a difference.
He was enjoying the view, as he must have done on the stairs. She took time to return the favor. He had a good body, better than her own by current standards, and not bad at all for an old man, as he liked to say. The dyes he worked in had stained his hands and arms indelibly, and there were spatters on his feet. They made him interesting. She liked to follow the patterns with her finger, to stroke upward to the clean olive flesh of his upper arm, and across his shoulders where a soft furze of black hair grew, then down his back and around to the rampant thing in front, that Romans liked to call the “little man.” He was ticklish down the line of his spine, would wriggle and fuss if she ran a nail along it, but he loved to be massaged deep and painful-hard in the broad muscles of his shoulders.
There were scars. Sometimes he’d tell her where he’d got them: the arrow in the arm, the sword-thrust that grazed his ribs, the deep pitted hollow in his thigh where the spear had struck. Each one recalled pain that people in her world seldom knew, not just the pain of the wound but the pain of treatment, and no drugs but wine and, once in a while, poppy juice — crude opium, nowhere near as effective as the modern arsenal of painkillers. Wine was the only antiseptic, too, and no antibiotics to back it up. It was a miracle he’d survived, and not only that, that he walked without a limp. “Except in the dead of winter,” he’d told her a time or two back. “Then everything stiffens up. Price of old age, and being an old soldier.”
He wasn’t so old in bed, as she liked to reassure him. “Boys are always in a hurry,” she said. “Men take their time.”
“That’s good,” he’d say then, “because it takes me a little more time to warm up and a little more to cool down, these days.”
When Nicole made love, the world went away. The yammering of thoughts went quiet, and she was spared, for a little while, the constant strain of living somebody else’s life.
Tonight they joined with an urgency that had as much to do with holding fear at bay as with any kind of bodily passion. They clasped each other tight, he driving hard and deep, she urging him on, legs locked about his middle, holding him even after she’d come to climax and felt the hot rush of him inside her.
Only then did it strike her. The twist of wool and the box of resin lay on the chest, untouched, forgotten.
At the moment she couldn’t find it in her to care. Next to the fear she’d lived with since the day in the amphitheater, this was nothing. If she had caught something, so to speak, she didn’t doubt that Julia would know how to take care of it. Unlike the pestilence. The pestilence — it put her in mind of the plague, the great plague of long ago (or a long time coming, from this end of time) — no one could stop.
She was holding him so tight, he gasped for breath. Reluctantly, she let him go. They lay nested in the narrow bed, and he managed a shallow gust of laughter. He groped for her hand and pressed it to his chest. His heart was still drumming hard. “You see, woman? You wear me out.”
Bless him for knowing just what to say, and how to say it, to shake her out of her megrims. She seized on the mood, and let it take her over. It was amazingly easy. She snorted. “Oh, nonsense. If the baths took women every morning and men every afternoon, you’d be over here bothering me every night.”
He poked her in the ribs. She squeaked, then clapped a hand to her mouth. Damn — she’d have bet an amphora of Falernian that Julia was lying in her bed across the hall, laughing her head off.
“Can’t think of a better reason to want to go to the baths,” Calidius Severus said. Nicole snorted again. He went on, “Likely just as well they do things this way. Any man past forty who says every other day’s not easier is lying through his teeth.”
She liked him very much, just then. Loved him? Maybe. But love was easy; it was mostly hormones. Liking was harder to come by. As far as she’d ever known, the handful of men who weren’t convinced they were permanently nineteen would sooner have fa
ced cross-examination by Johnnie Cochran than said as much out loud, especially to a woman. Honesty was novel, and highly refreshing.
Without warning, and without a word, she kissed him. He widened his eyes at her. “What was that for?” he asked.
“Just because,” she said.
He laughed. “Good enough reason for me.”
His laughter didn’t last. Little by little, it leached from his face. She’d been holding onto her bright mood by sheer force of will, but he’d run out of stamina. Slowly, he said, “The attendants had to carry somebody out of the cold plunge today. He had a rash on his face and neck, and on his chest, too. He looked like the woman at the show.”
Nicole went still. If her heart could have stopped, it would have. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“No, I’m not sure,” he answered, but he didn’t sound any more reassured than she felt. “I didn’t see either one of them for very long, and I didn’t get a very good look at them. But the rash is hard to miss — and they both had it.”
“It probably was, then.” Nicole spoke the words like a judge passing sentence. Maybe she was passing sentence — on Carnuntum. She shivered. She’d been shivering a lot lately, though it was summer, and warm enough by Carnuntum’s standards.
When he clasped her to him, she felt the cold in him, too, the chill that had nothing to do with the air’s temperature. He warmed quickly enough, all the way to burning. Over forty or no, he had it in him to go a second round.
“It’s the company I keep,” he said when they’d slipped apart again, each a little more winded than the last time.
“You’re just being sweet,” she said. She could have flattered herself into thinking her own allure made him so randy. So maybe that did have something to do with it. But she knew the sick man in the baths was as much in his mind as in hers.
He yawned. “Now look at me. I’ll want to sleep till noon, and Gaius will have to drag me out of bed to get the day’s work done.” Gaius would tease his father too, probably, about old men and young ambitions.
The lamp guttered abruptly and went out. Nicole cursed: she’d forgotten to fill it before she went to bed. Going to bed with company could do that, distract her from life’s smaller concerns.
Titus Calidius Severus cursed more pungently than she, as he groped for his sandals in the dark. Nicole found her own tunic conveniently near to hand and slipped it over her head, smoothing it down her body. Her hands paused of their own accord. She was all warm still from making love.
Her eyes had adapted to the tiny amount of light that slipped through the shuttered window. She had no trouble seeing her way to the door, or unbarring it and peering out. She listened, head cocked, then nodded. Julia was snoring, a deeper counterpoint to the children’s diatonic scale.
She padded barefoot down the stairs. Calidius Severus followed so close he almost trod on her heels. She plotted a path through the tables and stools between the stairs and the door, and cheered herself under her breath when they both reached the door unscathed. She saw his crooked grin in the light of a wan moon. He hugged her tight. “I’ll get through tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that,” he said. “I’ll just go on and on. Just the way we all do.”
She sighed, and nodded. She, too. There was no other way to get through life in Carnuntum and still keep herself within shouting distance of sanity. “You have good sense, she said.
“Do I?” He shrugged. “What am I doing here in the middle of the night, then?” He started to chuck her under the chin, but caught himself, and kissed her instead. “Kissing’s better,” he said, “after all.”
She could hardly argue with that. It was hard to let him go; hard, maybe, for him to let her go. But they were practical people. They parted briskly enough. He went to his own place and his son and his work. She went to hers. Day after tomorrow, when it was again a men’s day at the baths, he’d be back. She could count on that, as sure and as regular as the clockwork that Rome had never known.
The next morning, when Nicole opened her door for business, the amphorae were out in front of Calidius Severus’ shop. Maybe Gaius had put them there, she thought, until she saw movement inside, and recognized the bristle of Titus’ beard. She felt logey and slow. He must feel much the same. For the first time in a while, she’d have given a great deal for a pot of coffee and a pair of mugs, and a jump-start for both of them.
As she scooped salted olives from their amphora into a wooden bowl, Dexter the doctor trudged past. He had his leather satchel in his hand: not quite a little black bag, but close. On impulse she left the bar, went quickly to the door and called to him: “Dexter! How is the woman who took sick in the amphitheater?”
He paused in his stride. He didn’t seem as annoyed to be stopped as he might. He looked tired, she thought, and pale. Up all night, probably, practicing his trade.
“The woman in the amphitheater?” he asked. “They buried her yesterday.”
Nicole stood flatfooted. She’d expected it. She’d dreaded it. And yet…
He didn’t wait for her to get her wits back. “I’m off to another case now,” he said. “Aesculapius grant me better fortune.” As he turned to go, a storm of sneezing overtook him, and a rattle of coughing in its wake.
Oh Lord. He had it, too. Nicole caught herself wiping her hands frantically on her tunic, though she hadn’t touched him at all. How many people had that woman infected at the show? How many of them were sneezing and coughing, but hadn’t yet broken out with the rash that signaled full onset of the disease? How many people were going to catch the disease in the baths? Just about everyone in Carnuntum went to the baths; they were always crowded. A plague couldn’t ask for a better breeding ground.
Nicole’s last bastion of optimism crumbled. She shook her head and turned back to the tavern. There was a cold feeling in her stomach, and an ache that wasn’t hunger. She was familiar with it from this and that: an accident on the freeway, the California bar exam. It was fear.
Julia was up at last, a little late — and was that a sign she was getting sick? Nicole quashed that stab of worry. Julia was cleaner than she’d been when Nicole first arrived in Carnuntum, now she had money and a little time for the baths, but she still had a fondness for tight tunics and a disgusting tendency to wake up cheerful and stay that way till the rest of the world caught up with her. Or not; Julia didn’t care.
Her curiosity was as sharp as ever, too. “What were you talking to Dexter about?” she asked as she worked flour into the first batch of the day’s bread.
Nicole started chopping nuts and raisins for sweet cakes. She took her time in answering. “We were talking about the woman who got sick when Titus and I were at the mime show,” she said. She didn’t really have to, or particularly want to, but Julia was the closest thing she had to a female friend in this world. She had a pressing need, suddenly, to share the worry with someone else.
Julia didn’t appear to know or care that there was something to worry about. She smiled at Nicole’s use of Titus Calidius Severus’ praenomen. She’d made it clear long since that she thought the two of them were a good match. If she could see them married off, Nicole was sure, she’d be the happiest freedwoman in Carnuntum. “How is the woman?” she asked.
“Dead, ‘ Nicole answered baldly.
Julia didn’t go pale, or reel, or seem at all shocked. “Oh,” she said without much evident emotion. “That’s too bad.”
People in Carnuntum were on very much more intimate — and much more casual — terms with death than people were in the United States of the late twentieth century. Julia’s offhand observation was one more signpost on a well-marked road. She took for granted the possibility that a person could get sick and drop dead, just like that. From what Nicole had seen of the state of the medical art, that wasn’t the least bit surprising.
They worked in silence, in the well-worn groove of two people who’d been coworkers for so long, they no longer needed to think about how they shared this
task or that. Just as the bread came out of the oven, the first of the morning’s regulars showed up at the door. He hawked and spat before he came in, and coughed.
Nicole had let down her guard a little. Her stomach had even begun to unclench. Now it went as tight as a fist. Julia, oblivious, served the man his regular cup of one-as wine and his half-loaf of bread with olive oil to dip it in.
As he thanked and paid her, a confusion of distant sound resolved itself into sense. A funeral procession made its sorrowful way toward and then past the tavern. Professional mourners wailed and keened. Musicians thumped and tootled their dirges. Friends and relatives of the deceased straggled behind the bier. They’d gone for an older extravagance than Fabia Ursa’s funeral party had: faces streaked with ashes, tunics ceremonially rent. Under the marks of formal grief, their expressions were set, stunned. Just outside the doorway, one of them said, “But he was so young!”
So, Nicole thought numbly. People could think like that here, too. She resisted an urge to run out and ask what the boy had died of. People did die of things other than pestilence. Young people especially, and children most of all.
She was not reassured. When the procession had passed and faded into the background hum of the city, someone in the street sneezed. She jumped like a startled cat.
Right behind her, Lucius sneezed explosively. Her heart leaped into her throat. She whirled. “Are you all right?” she practically shrieked at him.
When she’d first come to Carnuntum, that concern would have been partly feigned. Not now. Little by little, by almost imperceptible stages, Lucius and Aurelia had become hers. And if one of hers was sneezing -
But he looked at her as if she’d gone demented, and laughed at her expression. “Oh, Mother! I’m fine.”
Julia glared at him, and shook her finger under his nose. Which, Nicole happened to notice, had a somewhat dusty look to it. “He was trying to breathe flour,” she said. “I saw him grab a pinch.”
“Oh, he was, was he?” Nicole said in a dangerous purr. “You did, did you?”
