by Judith Tarr
She hadn’t answered Calidius Severus, and she didn’t have an easy answer handy. Julia grinned at her. “He’s got you, Mistress Umma.”
“And glad of it, too,” Calidius Severus said with a grin just as wide and rather more wicked.
Nicole bit her lip and tried not to look as if she were fretting. If she had any more good to say of Christianity, both of them would start to wonder why.
She chose a safer way out. “Titus told me once I sounded like a philosopher. Now I get to tell him the same thing.”
“What? Me? An old soldier up to his elbows in piss? I get to tell you that’s nonsense. ‘ He sounded gruff, almost angry. Underneath that, he sounded very pleased. He threw another piece of walnut shell at Lucius. Lucius, greatly daring, threw it back. Titus Calidius Severus laughed. Nobody talked anymore about religion, Christian or otherwise.
Two days later, Brigomarus came into the tavern again. The look in his eyes, blank and shellshocked, told her what he was going to say before he said it. She didn’t like him, let alone love him, but he was a creature in pain. “Here.” She dipped a cup of wine. “Drink this.”
“You’re sure you can spare such largess for your family?” The sarcasm didn’t keep him from taking the wine or from draining it in a gulp. It seemed to steady him. He let out a long, shuddering sigh, then gave her the news she expected: “She’s gone. It was peaceful, at the end. She breathed, then she stopped for a bit, and then, when I thought it was over, she breathed one more time, and that was the last.”
Nicole didn’t imagine that he told her this for her own sake. It was something he needed to remember, and to repeat to himself. “I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” she said truthfully. Then, remembering what Calidius Severus had said, she added, “I hope she’s happy in the next world.”
“The gods grant it be so,” Brigomarus said, and fell silent, staring down into his empty cup. Nicole didn’t choose to take the hint, if hint it was. Maybe he was simply preoccupied.
At length he said the other thing that weighed on his mind. “I’m afraid Flavius Probus is coming down with it.”
“I’m sorry,” Nicole said. She had very little use for Ila’s husband, but this wasn’t a disease she’d wish on anyone. “I hope he gets better. Some people do.”
“Yes, some people do.” Brigomarus looked at Nicole as if he was trying hard not to hate her. And what did he think she’d done now? With the air of a man who has run out of patience, he flung words at her. “This is our mother, Umma.”
So. She wasn’t acting mournful enough to suit him. And acting was what it would have to be. She hadn’t known Atpomara well, and certainly hadn’t liked her. But that didn’t remove the essential fact. As long as she wore Umma’s body, she had to act as Umma would be expected to act. She tried to imagine how she’d feel if her own mother died. The parallel wasn’t too far off: even in West Hills, she’d been distant in space and time and interests, and, since the divorce, the distance had grown worse. Sometimes she thought her mother regarded divorce as a fundamental moral failure — her own as much as Nicole’s.
Still, if her mother had died, she’d grieve. It was as Brigo had said: that was her mother.
Out of all that, she drew a sigh that shook a little, and rubbed her eyes that ached with tiredness and stress. “I’m sorry, “ she said. “It’s just… it doesn’t feel real. So many people are dying, so much death, till everybody’s numb. And to have her gone, of all people — didn’t we used to think she’d outlive us all?”
That was a gamble, a stab in the dark, but it found a target. Brigomarus nodded. Even so, he studied her. So many people in Carnuntum had measured her with that steady stare, she was about ready to rise up in revolt. At last he said, “We haven’t been happy with you, so I don’t suppose you’ve been happy with us, either. “ There he went, making her explanations for her, just as everyone else did who’d weighed her and found her wanting. “We’ll have to pull together, that’s all, however many of us are left alive after this pestilence goes back wherever it came from. “
“Yes,” Nicole said. That was safe enough, but she couldn’t bring herself to add to it.
However many of us are left alive. There was a phrase that did not belong to the twentieth century. People must have said it in the Black Death, and that was later than this, though she couldn’t remember offhand just how much later it was. This wasn’t the bubonic plague, either. California and the other southwestern states got occasional cases, much publicized on the TV news, so she had an idea of the symptoms, and these weren’t it. But this other plague, whatever it was, was hitting the whole Roman Empire just as the Black Death had hit medieval Europe.
Brigomarus was clouding up again. For a wonder, she managed to figure out why before the clouds turned to thunder and lightning. “When will the funeral be?” she asked.
“Tomorrow noon,” he answered, easing — yes, that had been the right question. “We’ll start the procession at the shop of Fuficius Cornutus the undertaker — down the street from the town-council building.”
“We’ll be there, “ she said. Lucius and Aurelia, too. From old Indiana memories, she knew the children would be expected to say good-bye to their grandmother. She wouldn’t have asked it of Kimberley and Justin, but these were older children, and tougher, and much more familiar with death. They’d lost their father, after all, and who knew whom else?
Brigomarus nodded, and startled her somewhat by thanking her for the wine. “Stay healthy,” he said as he went on his way. Just after he’d reached the door, he sneezed. Nicole hoped devoutly that he was only coming down with a cold.
Five funerals went on at the same time, here and there across the graveyard outside Carnuntum. Nicole wondered how many more there had been earlier in the day, and how many would follow in the afternoon. Too many — no doubt of that. The gravediggers lay limply on the grass, looking like men in the last stages of exhaustion. They must have taken the job as a sinecure: lie around, drink wine, dig a grave now and then. Now they were earning their keep a hundred times over. Did they get hazard pay? Or did the Romans have any such concept?
The priest who waited at the gravesite was male and not, it was clear, a devotee of Isis. Somehow it wasn’t surprising that Atpomara hadn’t entrusted herself to the women’s goddess. The prayer he gabbled out, in fact, was to Dis Pater and Herecura, deities whom Nicole had never heard of. From the wording of the prayer, she gathered they were consorts, rulers of the underworld. Parts of the prayer to Herecura weren’t even in Latin; the words came to her as mere noise. Did that mean Herecura was a local goddess? Then how had she acquired a Roman husband? Nicole couldn’t even ask: she’d have been expected to know the answer.
The prayer was short and rather perfunctory. Brigomarus laid a loaf of bread and a cheese and a bowl of dried nuts and dried fruit in the grave — an ostentatious gift compared to the one that Longinius lulus had given Fabia Ursa. Nicole suspected Atpomara’s shade would reckon it barely adequate.
Marcus Flavius Probus stood at the graveside, leaning on Ila’s arm, coughing and sneezing like a man with a nasty cold. His eyes were red and watery and blinked constantly, as if the murky daylight troubled them.
Nicole’s mouth twisted. Brigomarus had been right. Flavius Probus had the pestilence.
When Brigomarus straightened from offering tribute to the shade of Umma’s mother, the gravediggers struggled wearily to their feet and began spading earth onto the mortal remains. Nicole turned away. As with Fabia Ursa, the sound of earth thudding onto a shrouded corpse was too final to face with equanimity, too blunt a reminder. Dust we are, and unto dust we shall return. By ones and twos, the mourners straggled back toward Carnuntum. If not for Lucius and Aurelia, who had been soberly quiet through the brief service, Nicole would have been a one. Although she might have gained a point by coming and bringing the children, the rest of Umma’s family still didn’t want to have much to do with her. They hadn’t spoken to her in the procession, nor invited her
to walk beside them in front of the bier. She’d taken a place just behind it, ignored if not forgotten.
She didn’t reach out to them, either. If they cared more for what a slave’s manumission might do to their financial and social status than for what was morally and ethically right, so be it. Let them stay estranged. They weren’t her family. She didn’t need them or want them, and she certainly didn’t like them.
As she neared the city gate, another funeral procession, a larger one, emerged from beneath its archway. She wouldn’t have paid any particular attention if one of the mourners hadn’t turned to stare at her. She was… no, not resigned to having men in Carnuntum give her the slow once-over, but she’d given up on trying to avoid it.
This stare was different. It hit her after the procession had passed, so that she stopped and turned to stare back at the young fellow who’d written the Christian graffito on the wall.
She should have known better than to think any of this would go unnoticed by her — that is, by Umma’s — offspring. “Who’s that, Mother?” Lucius asked.
Brigomarus had also noticed — she hadn’t even known he was behind her. “Who’s that, Umma?” he asked, echoing Lucius.
She wished he hadn’t spoken her name. The Christian might have heard it. After a moment, she realized how peculiar it was that she’d thought such a thing. This young man didn’t worship one or several of these implausible pagan gods. He worshipped the God she’d been brought up to worship; whether she did or not was beside the point. They should be companions in the spirit. Instead, she didn’t want him to know who she was, where she lived, anything about her. It was a visceral objection, and made no sense at all, but there was no getting around it.
“Who is he?” Lucius and Brigomarus asked again. Aurelia chimed in too, for the evident pleasure of ganging up on her mother.
Nicole grabbed at the first lie that came into her head. “I don’t know his name,” Nicole answered. “He’s come to the tavern a time or two, and had a cup of wine.”
“I never saw him,” Lucius said.
“Me, either,” Aurelia said.
Nicole drew a steadying breath — and pulled rank: a thing she’d sworn she’d never do, every time her own mother did it. “You haven’t seen everything that goes on in the world, even when you think you have,” she said.
The kids shut up, which was exactly what she’d wanted, and Brigomarus said, “Oh. Well then. I guess there’s nothing to worry about, though he looks a little crazy to me. Staring at you like that — you’d think he had designs on you.”
Damn him, just when she’d thought he’d leave well enough alone, he had to turn into the overprotective brother. He was supposed to be at odds with her; not butting into her life as if he had every right to do it.
She couldn’t even speak in the young Christian’s defense. It was too dangerous — for him and for her. And, she had to admit, he did look a little crazy. “He hasn’t given me any trouble,” she said rather lamely.
“Good.” Brigomarus started to turn away, then hesitated. “Stay well. If you don’t, send your slave — “
“My freedwoman,” Nicole said sharply.
He made a sour face. “Your freedwoman. Send your freedwoman to me or to Ila or Tabica. We’ll do what we can for you, in spite of everything.”
They would, too, though they’d make her pay in guilt for every minute. Still — after all, and however reluctantly, he meant well. She thanked him, which he took as no less than his due, and gathered up Lucius and Aurelia. “Come on, chicks. We’ve got a tavern to run.”
Julia had things well in hand. She also had a mark on the side of her neck, which Nicole knew hadn’t been there when she took the children to the funeral. Nicole couldn’t decide whether to ream the woman out or to burst into laughter. In the end, she didn’t quite do either. She was disappointed to discover that she couldn’t find a precise Latin equivalent for hickey.
Business — hers, if not Julia’s — was slow. People were staying away from taverns for fear of catching the pestilence, or else were too sick to leave their beds. Whichever it was, the place wasn’t bringing in much in the way of cash.
“We’re not using so much, either,” Julia said when Nicole commented on it — complained, really, if she wanted to be honest. “A lot of what we sell won’t go stale. It will keep till things pick up again.”
Nicole nodded. That was true — if things ever did decide to improve again.
She spent much of the afternoon grinding flour, until her shoulder started grinding, too. She was stockpiling, figuring to get ahead of the game; then she could have a few relatively easy days later on. The prospect of a break of any kind, relatively easy days, made her work all the harder. She hadn’t had much time off since she came to Carnuntum.
Deafened by the gritty rumble of the quern, she didn’t notice the man who came into the tavern until he rapped the table at which he was sitting. She put on her company face, the one she reserved for customers, with a smile still bright after the long slow day — until she recognized the eyes that lifted to meet hers. Her smile evaporated. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
“Yes, Mistress Umma.” The young Christian smiled. “It is I.” The smile was a little wider than it might have been; his eyes glittered even in the gloom of the tavern. Nicole had seen smiles like that on Hare Krishnas at airports, on Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to the door. The people behind the smiles were usually harmless, but…
She did her best to hide her unease. “What can I get you?” she asked him.
“Bread and wine,” he answered. He was watching her closely — too closely. He noticed how she hesitated on hearing those words. His smile widened. There was triumph in it. “You know the meaning of bread and wine?”
“What if I do?” she said roughly.
“Then you are one of us,” he answered. “You are one of those who know the name of Jesus Christ. You are one of those who know about his Passion, through which we too are resurrected. You are one of those who know judgment is coming for everyone, for even the heavenly hosts, the cherubim and seraphim, if they have no faith in the blood of Christ.”
“What if I do?” Nicole repeated. The young man wasn’t saying anything she hadn’t heard in church and in Sunday school. And yet, there, the world to come had been mentioned, but it hadn’t been at the heart of all her lessons. This world, and living one’s life in clean and godly fashion, had counted for more.
Living in the material world had been easy in the United States. Nicole hadn’t thought so at the time, but now she had a basis of comparison. Titus Calidius Severus had had a point, after all. When times were good, this world was easier to live in, and the next seemed distant, irrelevant.
Times weren’t good now, and they were getting worse. And if the young Christian eating bread and drinking wine in her tavern wasn’t a wild-eyed fanatic, Nicole didn’t know what he could possibly be. “Do not cleave to those who believe not, Umma, even if they be of your own flesh and blood, “ he said with quivering urgency. “Do not, I beg you in the name of the risen God. They go to torment eternal. This pestilence is the sword of God. When you are close to the sword, you are close to God. When you are surrounded by lions, you are close to God. Soon you will meet him face to face.”
“How about when you’re writing things on the wall?” Nicole inquired acidly. “Did you want to be surrounded by lions then? You should have stayed and let someone catch you.”
His head drooped. When it came up again, to her astonishment there were tears on his cheeks. “My body was weak,” he whispered. “My spirit was weak. Here and now, as I speak in life, I should yearn for death with a lover’s passion. I want to eat the bread of God, the flesh of Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, which is love undying. I pray to be found worthy of martyrdom. And so,” he said, leaning toward her, trembling again with the zeal of the proselyte, “should you.”
His voice, his manner, were compelling. He believed with his whole heart and sou
l that every word was the absolute truth. Gospel truth, she thought in a kind of dim alarm. And he was determined that Nicole should believe as he did, should take as little notice of this life as she could, the sooner and the better to get on with the next one.
He scared the hell out of her. If somebody gave him the keys to a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil, maybe he wouldn’t push the button when the time came — he had, after all, run from her. But maybe he would, too, if he nerved himself first. Even the possibility was terrifying.
Carefully, she said, “You owe me three asses.”
He looked so astonished, she almost laughed in his face. It took him several tries, and a fair bit of spluttering, before he could say, “You would put the coin of Caesar ahead of the salvation of your soul?”
“Don’t you fret about my soul,” she said. “That’s no one’s business but my own.”
The Christian’s astonishment changed in tone and intensity. Twentieth-century individualism hit people here hard… the way wine hits people who aren’t used to drinking, Nicole thought with experience she hadn’t had, or wanted, before she came to Carnuntum. She took a deep breath and drove the point home. “And, since my soul is still in my body, I need those three asses.”
Maybe the look in his eyes was pity and love. It seemed a lot more like outrage. He got up, dug in the leather pouch he wore on his belt, found three copper coins, and slammed them down on the tabletop. The tavern’s earthen floor didn’t help him much when it came to stamping noisily out, but he gave it his best shot. His back was as straight — and as stiff — as a redwood.
Julia came in from the market just after he’d flung himself out the door, carrying a jarful of raisins and a bunch of green onions. “What was bothering him?” she wanted to know.
Nicole shrugged as casually as she could manage. “Oh,” she said, “just another dissatisfied customer.”
