by Judith Tarr
“Thank you,” Nicole said. There seemed to be more that she should say, but she couldn’t imagine what.
He didn’t seem to find her response inadequate, at least. “We’ve all done too much mourning lately,” he said. Nicole nodded, unable to find words to respond to that. He went on, “I only came by to tell you, it did my heart good to see how happy you made my old mate. We fought side by side, you know, and mustered out within a couple of weeks of each other, then moved here from the legionary camp down the river.” He pointed east. “He was as happy a man as I ever saw, when this lad’s mother was alive. I was afraid he’d never be happy again after he lost her. But you took care of that. He’s not here anymore to thank you for it, so I reckoned somebody ought to.”
“He did let me know,” Nicole said. That was true for her, and had surely been true for Umma. Still, there was more that needed saying, and this time she managed to say it. “It’s very good of you to make sure it’s taken care of.”
“I know how these things should go,” Attius said.
Nicole nodded again. They sat, she stood leaning lightly against a table. She thought about sitting, but she wasn’t in the mood just yet.
Attius was looking at her. Staring, really. Giving her the eye, she thought. So: was he going to try hitting on her, now his old war buddy wasn’t in the way? She took a deep breath, to laugh in his face. She had no interest in anyone right now, new or old, and less than no interest in sex. The only thing even vaguely related to it that she cared for at the moment was lying down. Alone.
Gaius Attius Exoratus lowered his eyes, grunted, and got to his feet. “I’d better get on home,” he said. “My wife will be waiting for me.”
Nicole almost choked on the breath she’d been holding. Was he sending her a message? Or had he just been trying to remember her face, to keep his memory clearer? Maybe he did have the hots for her.
If he did, he wasn’t going to act on it. Wife, was it? “I hope she stays well,” Nicole said. “And you, too, Attius.”
“Thank you kindly,” he answered. He drained the cup of wine that Gaius Calidius Severus must have dipped for him, and set it down, and belched. Then, wrapping his cloak around him and pulling a fold of it over his graying hair, he went out into the rain.
“He’s a good fellow, Attius is,” Gaius Calidius Severus said after a judicious few moments. “My father liked him a lot.”
“I understand why,” Nicole said; and she did. “He was very nice.” She hesitated. Then she said, “And I want to thank you, too, for taking care of me and for taking care of all of us. For everything.”
She didn’t feel like going into any more detail than that. He understood what she meant; like his father, he wasn’t stupid. He coughed a time or two, maybe in embarrassment, maybe in something worse. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “It was easier when you didn’t wake up, but when you did — I guess that meant you were starting to get over it.”
“I think so,” Nicole said. “I wasn’t out of my head anymore after that.” She still felt as if the least puff of breeze would blow her away; she wouldn’t be all the way better for a long time yet. The tears that filled her eyes were partly tears of weakness, but only partly. “I wish your father had made it, too. I wish Aurelia had. I wish — “
“Everybody,” Gaius Calidius Severus said somberly. Nicole nodded. When he spoke again, he almost seemed surprised at himself, as if such large concerns were new to him: “I wonder what Carnuntum will be like after this. “
“Your father told me it was killing one in four, sometimes one in three, down in Italy,” Nicole said. “It’s not over yet, not here.”
“I know it’s not,” young Calidius Severus answered with a touch of impatience, and a touch — just a touch — of fear. “He told me the same thing.”
One in four, sometimes one in three. That wasn’t simply a disease. It was more like a nuclear war. Nicole tried to imagine a disaster on the same scale in the United States. Seventy-five or eighty million people dead in a few months — the country would fall apart. No doubt about it. The different parts of the Roman Empire weren’t so tightly connected as those of the U.S.A., but even so, this had to be a staggering blow.
As if to underline the thought, a funeral procession went by outside, not much bigger than Aurelia’s and even more miserable: the rain was coming down in sheets.
“Harvest wasn’t very good this year,” Gaius Calidius Severus mused, “even before the farmers started getting sick. That’s going to make things even harder.”
“I’ve heard people talking about that,” Nicole said. It hadn’t seemed particularly real at the time, but for some reason, now she understood. No farmers meant no one to bring in the harvest. No one to bring in the harvest meant no food in the market. And no food in the market meant…
Young Calidius Severus laughed. It sounded like a man whistling in the dark. “I hope there’s enough in the granaries to keep us fed till spring.”
“If there’s not,” Nicole said with a renewal of hope, “they’ll bring it in from somewhere else.” But as soon as she’d said it, she saw the hole in it. “If farmers elsewhere aren’t too badly hit by the pestilence, and they have any grain left over.”
Young Calidius Severus nodded. As if it were some kind of game, he found yet another hole, one that Nicole hadn’t thought of: “And if they can get the grain to us. “
No trucks, she reminded herself. No trains. Transportation by land was hideously expensive and even more hideously slow when everything went by muleback or oxcart; she saw that every time she bought a new amphora of Falernian. Mules and oxcarts couldn’t carry that much, either, not when you were talking about feeding thousands of people.
But Carnuntum lay by the Danube, and dumped raw sewage into the river every day — downstream, she admitted; she was always amazed when the Romans paid even the most basic attention to sanitary matters. Barges and boats plied it. If the pestilence hadn’t touched anybody farther west…
Before she made a fool of herself by speaking of it, her clouded memory brought her up short. The west wasn’t safe, either. Even if the pestilence hadn’t reached it, war had. What were the names of the people the Romans were fighting? “The Quadi and the Marcomanni,” she said, half to herself.
Gaius Calidius Severus looked as grim as his father had when he watched the German tribesmen swagger through the market square. “And the Lombards, too,” he said. He peered north past his own shop, toward the Danube, and looked grimmer yet. “I only hope they don’t come over the river here, too, once they’ve had word of all our losses. They’re like vultures, those barbarians. They love to flock around a carcass.”
Nicole shuddered at the image, and tugged at the neck of her tunic. Before she quite realized what she was doing, she’d spat onto her bosom.
He followed suit, turning aside the ill omen. “The pestilence has to be going through the legions in the camp east of here and at Vindobona, the same way it’s going through this city. The barbarians will know it, too. Curse them.”
“Maybe it’s going through them, too.” It was neither compassionate nor politically correct to wish an epidemic on people she didn’t know. But if it came to a choice between pestilence and war…
Not in my backyard, people in Los Angeles shouted when they didn’t want a jail or a housing project or a nuclear-power plant or anything else necessary but unpleasant built anywhere near them. Mean-spirited, Nicole had thought them. Selfish. Deficient in humane impulses.
To hell with humane impulses. Carnuntum was just barely making its way through a pestilence. Death was walking through the streets. Famine stared it in the face. There was only one horseman of the Apocalypse missing, and she’d be damned if she’d wish a war on the city as well. As trivial as they suddenly seemed, she shaped the words in her mind regardless. Not in my backyard. Please, God, not in my backyard.
“Maybe the barbarians are as bad off as we are,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. “Let’s hope they
are. Let’s pray for it.” He levered himself to his feet, moving like a much older man. He had to be as worn out as she was. “Here, I’d better do some work. You take care of yourself, Mistress Umma, and don’t push yourself too hard. If you need help, call. I’ll come.” He pulled his hood up over his head, hunched his shoulders, and ducked out into the rain.
She watched him go. He detoured a bit, down the sidewalk to the stepping stones, to cross as dry as he could. He paused when he reached the narrow walk on the other side, as if to gather his forces, then strode on up it and into the shop. He and his father had lived above it in all apparent amity; no squabbles that Nicole had ever seen or heard. And now he was alone.
No wonder he’d paused. It was hard enough for her to go up those back stairs, knowing there’d be one fewer sleeper above, and praying that neither Julia nor — please God — Lucius had taken a sudden turn for the worse and died while she was fuddling about below. What it must be like to walk into those rooms, to know there was no one else there — she didn’t want to imagine it, and yet she couldn’t help herself.
She wanted to leap up, run, make sure Lucius and Julia were alive and recovering. The best she could do was a slow crawl, creeping like an old woman, taking each step with trembling care, and resting every few steps. She couldn’t even spare the energy for frustration. Patience, she willed herself. Patience. That should be her watchword for this whole, primitive, maddeningly slow-moving world.
All through the fall and winter, the pestilence lashed Carnuntum. Both Lucius and Julia recovered — ever so slowly, as Nicole did herself. Losing one in four in her household left her statistically average, as best she could tell. She would have given anything to escape that tyranny of numbers. Aurelia’s absence was an ache behind her breastbone.
She’d taken little enough direct notice of the child while she was alive; life had been too busy, her head too strained with the effort of living in a world so totally foreign. But Aurelia had been a part of the world in ways that Nicole hadn’t even noticed until she was gone. Waking up in the morning, beginning the day, marking its completion by the kids’ tramping down the stairs and demanding their breakfast — without coffee, it had become a waking ritual of its own. She’d become accustomed to Aurelia’s presence. She’d grown fond of the little dark-haired girl with the gap where one front tooth had been, who loved to go with Nicole to women’s day at the baths. Who’d got into Nicole’s makeup box once, and painted herself to look a perfect horror, and been so proud of her achievement that Nicole didn’t dare laugh at her. Who had fought with Lucius as only siblings could, and not always been the one to make up — she’d been the tougher-minded of the two, Nicole had often thought.
And now she was gone, and Nicole ached with the loss. Would she have ached any more for Kimberley or Justin? Had she, ever, since she came to Carnuntum?
Ah, but they were alive, somewhere in time — alive and, if there were gods, and if those gods had any mercy, well. She missed them still, in unexpected moments, or in the dark before dawn. But neither of them was dead. She missed them. She didn’t grieve for them, for the lives they’d never have, or the death that had taken them so ungodly soon.
Their safety on the other side of time was her anchor, the thing that made it possible for her to live in this world without them. She hadn’t known till too late that Lucius and Aurelia had been the counterweight. While she had those two in her care, she could tell herself she had a clear purpose here. With one of them gone… how could she hold? She had to; Lucius needed her, and Julia needed her, and even Gaius Calidius Severus seemed to rely on her presence across the street. And yet she could feel herself slipping. She had to hold on, but it grew harder rather than easier, the longer it went on.
Brigomarus pulled through, though so narrowly that he looked like a ghost of himself. Ila died — which Nicole had a great deal of difficulty pretending to be sorry for. Tabica and Pacatus never took sick at all.
Nicole heard that with almost resentful envy. She was glad they didn’t come to the tavern to flaunt the accident of their good health. Brigomarus came, more than once, never very cordially, but as he said, family was family. And maybe he wasn’t terribly fond of his sister and her stick of a husband, either. Umma, or Nicole in Umma’s body, might actually be preferable, day for day and scowl for scowl.
Some of her neighbors and customers came through the sickness better than Umma’s family had. The wet nurse had brought the pestilence into Sextus Longinius lulus’ house, but both he and his son escaped it. Sometimes he would bring the baby with him when he came over for a cup of wine or a bowl of whatever Nicole or Julia had on the menu. Longinius lulus the younger was a happy baby. He was always smiling or gurgling with laughter. He knew nothing of pestilence, or of death. For that, Nicole envied him.
Ofanius Valens, that cheerful little man, bounced back fast from his dose of the sickness. He came in nearly every day, bringing this dainty or that for Julia: figs candied in honey, cuts of ham that were more fat than meat. He was perfectly open as to his motive. “Got to put some flesh on you, sweetheart,” he said to Julia in Nicole’s hearing. “You’re nothing but skin and bones. I’m not too terribly fond of lying on a ladder.”
He was fattening her like a goose. Nicole wanted to get angry at him, and at Julia, too. She did manage a small flare of temper, but it died down as soon as it rose. It was the sickness, she told herself. It left behind a lassitude that was terribly slow to pass.
That was even true — to a degree. She had neither the energy nor the inclination for a truly towering outrage. And if she had — what could she do? Short of throwing Julia into her room and walling up the entrance, she didn’t see how she could keep the freedwoman from doing what she obviously wanted to do.
Lassitude or no, Nicole kept a weather eye on Lucius. If he so much as headed for the door, she pounced. “Have you got your heavy cloak on? Put the hood up, you’ll freeze. Go back and put on your socks!”
He put up with it better than she would ever have expected from a boy his age: for the first day or two he suffered without complaint, but on the third day, as she came swooping out of the upper reaches with an extra pair of socks in hand, he planted his feet and put on a ferocious scowl. “Mother! I’m not made of glass. I won’t break.”
“Maybe you won’t,” she fired back, “but you’re all I’ve got in this world. I’m going to look out for you, and that’s that.”
He rolled his eyes and shook his shoulders — less a shrug than a shedding of her suffocating concern — and ran off to play with the remnants of the old noisy gang of neighborhood boys. As children will, he was recovering much faster than an adult. He came in from playing earlier than he used to, and fell into bed without even token protest, but his appetite was voracious and he was gaining strength by the day.
“Mind you don’t get wet!” she called after him, “or I’ll give you something to remember it by.”
He didn’t even acknowledge the threat. Brat. He knew she wasn’t up to chasing after him and giving him the swat he deserved, either.
Nicole stood with the socks still in her hand, turning and twisting them in her fingers. The rough burn of knitted wool kept part of her mind in the world where it belonged, but the rest was wandering afield.
All I’ve got in this world. If Nicole was in fact descended from Umma, that was true in more ways than she could explain to Lucius. If something happened to him, if the chain broke, what would become of her? Would she disappear? Would it be as if she had never been? There was no way to tell, and no way she wanted to test it. She’d keep Lucius safe whether he wanted it or no, for her sake as well as his own.
The price of grain rose. It never got above a level she could afford, but it did rise enough that she had to charge more for bread. Customers grumbled. She lost a few, but they came back when they discovered that bread wasn’t any cheaper elsewhere. “It’s criminal,” one of them said, “but you still make the best loaf in Carnuntum.”
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��You get what you pay for,” Nicole said — and was a little startled by the pause, the stare as he worked it out, and then the burst of laughter. Another twentieth-century cliche that people here had never heard before.
Even with people coming back for the best bread in Carnuntum, business was not what it had been in the 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?
