Household Gods

14

Hard times through the whole city. When Nicole had said that to Gaius Calidius Severus, she’d had only an intellectual understanding of what it meant. Over the next month or two, as summer passed into autumn, as sunlight softened and morning mists from the Danube began filling the streets of Carnuntum with fog, she felt the meaning of hard times in her belly as well as her head.

In the early days of the pestilence, hardly an hour seemed to go by without the shrieking and moaning of professional mourners, as funeral processions made their somber way out of the city and toward the burial ground. After a while, however, the sounds of formal lamentation, almost as formal as the Mass, began to diminish.

Ofanius Valens explained that to Nicole when he stopped by for breakfast one morning. “From what I hear,” he said, “so many of the mourners are dead, the rest can’t come close to keeping up with all the funerals.”

“That’s horrible,” Nicole said.

“It’s not good,” he conceded, taking an unenthusiastic mouthful of bread and oil. “My family’s been lucky so far, the gods be praised. I’ve only got one cousin down with it, and she doesn’t look like dying. If you make it through the rash, they say, you’re likely to get better, and she’s done that. Half her hair fell out, and she’s peeling like the worst case of sunburn you ever saw, but she’s still with us. How about your kin, Umma?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t heard a word.” And she wouldn’t have much cared if she had, she thought but didn’t add. Whatever Umma thought of her relatives, Nicole had no earthly use for any of them.

Ofanius Valens looked shocked. Everyone in Carnuntum was shocked when someone failed to keep minutest track of anything that had to do with family. But, after a moment, his face cleared. “That’s right.” He nodded as he reminded himself. “You had that squabble with them after you manumitted Julia. Still haven’t made it up, eh?”

Nicole shook her head. “I’m the bad apple in the barrel, as far as they’re concerned.” She straightened. ‘‘They can think whatever they please, for all of me. I’ll get along just fine.”

“You certainly seem to be getting along.” Ofanius Valens spoke with no small wonder. “I’ve known other people who fought with their families. Most of them act like fish hauled out of the Ister” — by which he meant the Danube. He imitated a fish out of water with such popeyed aplomb, Nicole couldn’t help laughing.

Julia laughed, too. So did Lucius, who’d come downstairs while Ofanius Valens was eating. Nicole said, “It’s good to hear people laughing. Not much of that sound in the city these days. “

“Not much reason for it these days,” Ofanius Valens said. “Let’s see what we can do about it.” He aimed his dead-fish stare at Lucius, who broke up in giggles.

Julia started to laugh again. It was like a yawn: contagious. Nicole caught herself just as Julia’s eye caught hers. Their laughter died. They’d been startled into it the first time. They couldn’t invoke it with conscious effort. Lucky Lucius, to be so young and so untroubled.

“Off I go,” Ofanius Valens said. “The gods grant you all good health.” He made one more fish-face at Lucius, who crowed with delight, nodded to Nicole, and blew Julia a kiss. She blew one back. Whistling a jaunty tune, he went on his way.

“He’s a nice man,” Lucius said.

“He is nice,” Julia said with the hint of a sigh. She meant something — several different somethings — other than what Lucius did. Nicole gave her a sharp look, which she ignored. Julia thought with her body first and her mind definitely second.

Business that morning was brisk. Asses, dupondii, sesterces, even a couple of silver denarii clanked into the cash box. Nicole was pleased, but not so pleased as she might have been. Every time somebody coughed, every time somebody sneezed, she jumped. People had been coughing and sneezing in the tavern ever since she’d come to Carnuntum, and no doubt for many years before that. Now she wondered if each cough and sneeze meant a case of pestilence brewing — and if viruses were flying her way, or toward her children, or toward Julia.

A little before noon, Brigomarus came into the tavern. “Uncle Brigo!” Lucius and Aurelia cried out in delight. Nicole, on the other hand, was somewhat less than delighted to see Umma’s brother. By the way he stood, as if he was only there under duress, and by his cold nod, he wasn’t delighted to see her, either.

“How are you?” he asked politely enough, and then the question that seemed more important in Carnuntum than any other: “Have you been well?”

Nicole could answer that, if only to meet politeness with politeness. “Yes, all of us here have been fine, thank heaven,” she said. “And you?”

“I’m as you see. If I’d caught this horror of a disease, I wouldn’t be up and about.” Brigomarus took a deep breath, nerving himself for what he had to say next. “Mother is down with it. I don’t know what her chances are. If I had to guess, I’d say they weren’t good. She still has her wits about her, and she wants to see you. Ila didn’t even want to let you know, but I said I would do it. Just because you wronged the family doesn’t mean we have any business wronging you.”

“I had every right to do what I did, and I was right to do it,” Nicole said stiffly.

“You’re — “ Umma’s brother checked himself. “Never mind. I didn’t come here to start the quarrel over again. Will you come see Mother or not?” To hell with you if you don’t, his tone and posture plainly said.

A deathbed visit to Atpomara, Umma’s disagreeable mother, was about the last thing Nicole wanted. Visiting anybody who was likely to give her the pestilence didn’t rank high on her list, either. But, things being as they were, she didn’t see that she had a choice. She was wearing Umma’s body. She had to take on at least the bare minimum of Umma’s obligations. “I’ll come,” she said.

“Well, good.” Brigomarus sounded pleasantly surprised, as if he’d made the call expecting to be turned down flat. “Let’s go, then.”

“Aren’t you going to stay and play, Uncle Brigo?” Aurelia asked plaintively.

“I can’t,” he told her with more gentleness than Nicole might have expected. “Your grandmother is sick, and she wants to see your mother.”

“Is she going to die?” Lucius asked. In California, a child would have asked the question in tones of disbelief. Lucius merely sounded curious. He knew people died. In Carnuntum, nobody could help knowing it.

“That’s in the hands of the gods,” Brigomarus said. “She wants to see your mother. We have to go.”

The children didn’t beg to go with them, which Nicole found somewhat odd. She’d thought Lucius might, at least. But he stood with his sister and watched them go. They were both unusually quiet, unusually wide-eyed. They’d seen too much death, she thought. They didn’t need to see any more.

Nicole followed Umma’s brother out of the tavern. He strode along for a while with his head down, until they both had to wait as a funeral procession went past. Whoever the deceased was, he’d been important; most of the mourners wore togas, not tunics. Instead of lying on a bier, the corpse was carried in a sedan chair, so that he surveyed the city with his unseeing eyes. A dozen musicians brought up the rear of the procession, making a tremendous racket.

Nicole resisted the urge to clap her hands over her ears. When the procession had passed, while her ears were still ringing with the noise, Brigomarus sighed. “In times like this, I don’t want to quarrel with anyone in my family. Who knows what will happen tomorrow?”

“Nobody,” Nicole answered. That was true in California, too, but seemed truer in Carnuntum. It was also, she realized a little more slowly than she should have, an offer of truce. “All right, Brigomarus,” she said. “I won’t argue with anyone if no one argues with me.”

He pursed his lips. He might have been expecting more, though what else he could want, she couldn’t imagine. Then he nodded. “That will have to do.”

Damn him, she thought in a rise of temper. She was being generous, and he made her generosity seem a paltry thing.

She made herself relax. However grudging his acceptance, nevertheless, he had accepted the gift. It would, as he’d said, have to do.

Two streets farther on, another funeral procession went past. This one delayed Nicole and Brigomarus less than a minute. Two shrouded corpses, one large, one small, lay side by side on the bier. A woman and a youth on whose cheeks the down was just beginning to darken paced behind it. Both of them wore the blank, car-wreck look of sudden disaster. A few friends and relatives followed them. They had no musicians. Maybe they couldn’t afford any; they looked poor. Maybe the rich man’s family had hired all the musicians in town for his sendoff. And maybe, too, there weren’t so many healthy musicians left to hire.

The bereaved woman sneezed several times, violently, and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her tunic. Her son coughed rackingly and continuously, as if he had no power to stop.

“They’re coming down with it, too,” Brigomarus said bleakly. People in the city hadn’t needed long to recognize the early signs of the pestilence.

“Not everyone who gets it dies from it,” Nicole said. “I’ve heard of people getting better.” A couple of heartbeats after she should have, she added, “I hope Mother will be one of them.”

Brigomarus noticed the lapse. He opened his mouth as if to call her on it, then sighed instead. She glared at him. He glared back. They walked side by side, each obviously wishing the other were a hundred miles away.

He led her down a street not too much different from the one Nicole herself lived on, to a combination house and shop that differed from her own only in having a narrow porch supported by half a dozen undistinguished columns. They weren’t even well made; in fact, they looked as if they’d been hacked out of limestone with a blunt chisel. They reminded her irresistibly of the sort of house one found in tackier parts of L.A., cheap pop-up housing designed for people with large pretensions and relatively small bank accounts: plastic marble and gold-painted faucets, and indications of cut corners in closets and under sinks. The plastic cracked inside of a year, and the paint flaked off the faucets, but they got their point across.

Brigomarus sounded just like the owner of one of those as he declared, “Ila and Marcus Flavius Probus, now — they have a proper Roman facade.”

It was a sore temptation, but she didn’t laugh in his face. She might as well have been living in a trailer park for all the status she could claim, and he was making sure she knew it. She didn’t say what she was thinking, either, which was that after meeting the inhabitants, she’d expected a noble villa, and not this cheap excuse for a house. At least Umma’s tavern was honestly downscale.

She looked him in the eye, and was gratified when he looked away. “Take me in to Mother,” she said with something that might, just possibly, have been taken for gentleness.

He obeyed her, somewhat to her surprise, and without quibbling, either. Had she shocked him with her display of backbone? She hoped so.

The nobly named Marcus Flavius Probus, she saw as Brigomarus led her past the ill-made pillars, was nothing more or less than a woodworker. In West Hills he’d have been much admired: handcrafted this, that, and the other was all the rage. In Carnuntum he was an artisan, which set him considerably below the patrician he liked to pretend to be.

She didn’t like him any better for it, at all, but it was an honest pleasure to walk into a room that smelled of clean new wood, fresh lumber and sawdust, and the sweet subtle odor of wax that was rubbed into the finished article. She took the first voluntary deep breath she’d taken in Carnuntum, and let it out again.

Umma’s brother-in-law crouched in a patch of sunlight, dressed in a tunic like anybody else, no toga in sight. He was pounding a peg into the end of a table leg. The table itself waited for the leg, leaning against a wall nearby.

She watched him with some interest. Roman carpentry, she’d noticed, used lots of pegs and very few nails. Nails here were made one by one, by hand, and were ridiculously expensive.

As she stood watching and breathing the scent of sawdust, another odor crept in under it. It wasn’t just the reek of the city. It was closer, and subtly fouler: a sickroom odor that had raised her hackles even before she was conscious of its existence. She denied it even as she once more breathed shallowly to avoid it — a mixture of full chamberpot and sour sweat.

Brigomarus asked the question that Nicole probably should have: “How is she?”

“About the same,” Flavius Probus answered. He didn’t quite look at Nicole, or acknowledge her, but he said, “So she decided to come, did she?”

Brigomarus nodded. Nicole rode over anything he would have said. “Yes, I’m here, and I’m quite capable of speaking for myself.”

Umma’s brother-in-law snapped erect, as if he’d been slapped. Then Nicole saw the pompous ass who’d acted as if the tavern wasn’t good enough for him, and heard him, too. “I am not accustomed to being addressed in that particular tone, least of all by a woman.”

Nicole didn’t laugh, though she was sorely tempted. “Aren’t you?” she said. “Then maybe it’s time you learned. There’s this thing called politeness. Have you ever heard of it?”

Even after his earlier encounter with her, he obviously hadn’t expected quite that degree of independence. Brigomarus, who’d seen rather more of her, sighed and shrugged. “She’s like that these days,” he said. “Short of hauling her out and horsewhipping her, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it.” He paused, shook his head, went on in a slightly different tone. “Still. Mother asked to see her, and she’s not likely to get another chance.”

Flavius Probus nodded curtly, again without acknowledging Nicole, and bent again to his table leg. His work was meticulous, his hands deft and skilled, as if the pretentious idiot who lived in his head bore no relation to the craftsman in his hands.

They’d been dismissed. Nicole might have made an issue of it, but Brigomarus was headed toward the stairs. She almost didn’t follow. Even needling Flavius Probus was preferable to paying a last visit to someone else’s mother. But the sooner she got it over with, the sooner she was out of there and back in the tavern that, for better or worse, she’d come to think of as home.

The stairway was less rickety than the one she used every day. Marcus Flavius Probus kept it in good repair. The hallway at the top, however, was just like the one in her house, narrow and malodorous and nearly pitch-dark. Aside from its porch and its wretched columns, this building was no fancier than her own.

Brigomarus turned into the first door on the right-hand side of the hall, the one that corresponded with Nicole’s in the tavern. The master bedroom, then? Interesting, she thought, that the old woman had it. Though not at all surprising.

While she paused in the hallway, letting her eyes adjust to the brighter light within, she heard Brigomarus say, “Here she is, Mother. She came after all, as you asked.” His voice had the odd, uncomfortable gentleness that people often put on in front of the sick.

The sickroom reek was stronger here. Nicole nearly gagged on it as she stepped into the bedroom. Umma’s sister was perched on a stool by the bed on which her mother lay. Ila favored Nicole with a venomous look and a sarcastic, “So good of you to join us.”

It was going to be a united front, Nicole could see. Some part of her knew she should make some effort to smooth things over — but to do that, she’d have to undo Julia’s manumission. And that wasn’t possible.

She settled for a long, cold glare at Ila, and a silence that, she hoped, said more than words. Then she forgot Umma’s sister. The woman huddled in the bed, the woman who’d given birth to Umma, the woman who Nicole thought was an ancestor of her own, looked more nearly dead than alive. Atpomara’s skin clung like parchment to her bones; the fever had boiled most of the water from her flesh. Along her forehead and cheek, the rash that marked the pestilence was red as a burn.

But, whereas Julius Rufus had died almost at once when the fever exploded in him, Umma’s mother still clung to life, still had some part of her wits about her. She stretched a clawlike finger toward Nicole. Her eyes bored into — bored through — the woman who inhabited her daughter’s body. “You are the cuckoo’s egg.” Her voice was a dry rasp. “Cuckoo’s egg,” she repeated.

“Ungrateful daughter, ungrateful sister,” Ila hissed from beside her.

Nicole hardly heard. She stared at the woman who had given birth to the body she now inhabited. What did Atpomara mean? Just that Nicole was ungrateful, as Ila said? Or could she somehow sense that a stranger’s spirit now dwelt in Umma’s body? Were the fever and perhaps the approach of death letting her own spirit roam wider than it might have otherwise?

“Have a care, cuckoo’s egg,” Atpomara said. “If you and your own eggs fall, if the shells break before you hatch — “ She had to stop; a paroxysm of coughing wracked her.

“Her wits are wandering,” Brigomarus murmured to Ila, who nodded. Neither of them spoke to Nicole.

She didn’t mind. She didn’t want to speak to them, either. She didn’t want to be here at all. She hoped Brigomarus was right: she hoped Atpomara’s wits were wandering. If they weren’t, the dying woman’s words made sense — disturbing sense.

Almost since the day she’d come to Carnuntum, Nicole had believed Umma was a distant ancestor of hers. If Umma died of the pestilence, and if Lucius and Aurelia — one of them, at least, also an ancestor, difficult as it was to believe of so young a child — also died of the pestilence… where did that leave Nicole Gunther of Indianapolis, who would marry Frank Perrin and live to regret it?

Nowhere?

Umma’s mother seemed to gather herself. Her hand rose again, finger stabbing at Nicole. “Go back,” she rasped. “I am done. Go back.” Did she mean, Go back to the tavern? Did she mean, Go back to Los Angeles and the end of the second millennium?

It was like a blow in the solar plexus. Nicole actually gasped. Go back? Back to Los Angeles? God; if only she knew the way. The past she’d dreamt of, wished for so desperately, prayed for till she found herself in it, was nothing like what she had imagined. It was crammed full of ignorance and drudgery, filth, superstition, disease and brutality and more sheer blatant sexism than she’d ever thought possible. In California, she’d been oh so sure that her glass was half empty. Now she saw, with painful clarity, that it had been more, much more, than half full.

But she was not in California. She was in Carnuntum, with only a tiny splash of water — and polluted water, at that — in the bottom of her glass.

“Why are you still standing there?” Ila snapped at her. “Didn’t you hear Mother? She doesn’t want you here anymore. I never wanted you here.”

Nicole looked at this woman, this stranger who was her own, if distant, kin. She saw nothing there that she could relate to. And from the look and sound of it, this wasn’t new hostility. It was much older than Nicole’s presence here, and than Nicole’s freeing of a slave. Umma hadn’t received any better treatment than Nicole was getting, nor ever had.

“Sweetheart, “ Nicole said for both of them, “the sooner I leave your sour face behind, the happier I’ll be. “

She’d guessed right about Ila: the woman could dish it out wholesale, but she couldn’t take it. The splutters were utterly gratifying. They followed her all the way out of the room and down the stairs.

And there stood the other half of the act, even less witty than his wife. “Good riddance,” he growled to the table leg that he was fitting to its table. Nicole started to flip him off, but she hadn’t ever seen the one-fingered peace sign here. She replaced it with the two-fingered gesture a muleteer had given an oxcart driver in front of the tavern a day or two before.

Flavius Probus staggered back as if she’d struck him a physical blow. “Don’t you put the evil eye on me,” he gasped. “Don’t you dare!”

He was white as a sheet. He really did believe she could do it. It wasn’t nice of her at all, and it might blow up in her face later as family quarrels had a way of doing, but she didn’t care. It felt good to scare the spit out of that pompous ass and his bitch of a wife.

She was smiling as she turned back toward the tavern. Brigomarus hadn’t followed. None of them had. Were they all that superstitious? Or were they just as glad to be shut of her as she was of them?

She walked slowly, with frequent glances about her. Ila and her husband lived in one of the mazes that made Carnuntum a warren between the main streets of its grid. Nicole had paid close attention to the route Brigomarus took once he left the grid, or thought she had. But when she should have been turning back onto one of those main streets for an easy walk home, she found herself in a twisting alley instead.

The alley was deserted except for a skinny young man in a threadbare tunic of no color in particular. He had a lump of charcoal in his hand, and was scribbling on a wall with it. At the sound of her step, he whipped about. His face was as thin as the rest of him, set with a pair of enormous eyes. They fixed on her, and held her rooted.

In Los Angeles, a meeting with a tagger could be dangerous. In Carnuntum…

The young man flung down the charcoal and bolted as if the whole nation of barbarians were on his tail. She’d never seen anybody run so fast.

He was scared right out of his wits. Nicole couldn’t imagine why. If the penalties for writing graffiti were that severe, surely there wouldn’t be any graffiti — and the walls of Carnuntum were covered with scribbles and scrawls and amateur art.

She moved closer to see what he’d written that was so dangerous. I am the resurrection and the life, she read. He who believes in me, even if he should die, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me shall not die, not ever. The simple Latin lacked the flavor of the English Bible she knew, but that text was unmistakable. Even if it hadn’t been, the young man had drawn a cross on one side of the passage and on the other a two-stroke fish like those she’d seen in gold plastic mounted on car bumpers.

Nicole frowned. The message seemed perfectly harmless — until she remembered what people in Carnuntum thought of Christians. That young man had taken his life in his hands to scribble the graffito. If she’d recognized him, if she’d raised a hue and cry here, or given his name to the town council…

If she’d done that, maybe fat Faustinianus, at some future beast show, would have announced the just and proper execution of So-and-So, convicted of the heinous crime of Christianity. Lions? It was always lions in the Sunday-school stories. From what she’d seen with Calidius Severus, bears or wolves would do as well.

She left the alleyway a little too quickly, as if someone could guess that she too, in the spirit, was born and raised a Christian. Foolish fear; a Christian in the world she came from was as solid a citizen as a pagan here.

Still, she was glad to leave that wall behind, and gladder yet to find that the alley opened onto a street, which opened onto one of the long, straight main avenues. That one, she recognized. She was deeply relieved to see no sign of the young Christian with the extraordinary turn of speed.

Titus Calidius Severus was in the tavern, eating walnuts, and now and then tossing bits of shell at Lucius, who thought it was great sport. He had a cup of wine in front of him, from which he’d clearly been sipping. “How’s your mother?” he and Julia asked in the same breath.

She’s not my mother! Nicole knew better than to say. She mustered a sigh, and an expression that, if not devastated, was at least grave. “She’s got it, no question. Maybe she’ll get better. Maybe — “ She shrugged.

Calidius Severus nodded in evident sympathy. “Don’t say it. That way you won’t have words of evil omen on your conscience if — “ He didn’t say it, either.

“Get me a cup of the one-as, would you, Julia?” Nicole sat at the table with the fuller and dyer. He set a hand on her shoulder, reassuringly, just for a moment, then let it drop. She was more comforted than she might have expected, and surprised, because she hadn’t expected to need comfort. When Julia brought the wine, she emptied half the cup in a long, dizzying swallow.

Her trouble wasn’t what they had to be thinking. She felt nothing for the loss of a mother she’d never known, who’d never been hers. Atpomara was a horrible old woman, rude and high-handed, with not a jot of compassion in her. Nicole hated her guts.

The wine didn’t dim the thing that bothered her. She couldn’t forget what Atpomara had said. She couldn’t make herself believe the woman had been out of her head from fever, either, however much she wanted to believe just that.

And there wasn’t a single person she could talk to, whom she trusted enough to share even part of her secret. Titus Calidius Severus would reckon her mad. Or, worse — he might believe her. He’d think her possessed by a demon. Who knew what he might do then? He was a reasonable man, as men went here. But in a situation that went beyond reason, he’d turn on her. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t.

In part to break the silence, in part to turn her mind aside from fretting to no useful purpose, she mentioned the Christian she’d surprised. It was stupid, maybe, but it did turn the conversation onto a new track.

“I’ve seen those scrawls,” Julia said. “I didn’t know what the words say, but I’ve seen the fish and the cross. There’ve been more of them lately than there used to be.”

“There have, haven’t there?” Titus Calidius Severus said. “I can read the words. Bunch of cursed nonsense, if you ask me. The Jews go on and on about only having one god, so how can that god have a son, especially a son who’s a crucified rebel? If you ask me, too many people don’t think these things through. Even the Jews can’t buy this one.”

Nicole had never considered herself religious; if anything, she’d been an agnostic. But this was not just the faith but the culture she’d been raised in, and here was this urine-reeking man with his hands dyed blue to the elbows, dissecting it as if it were just another crazy cult. The nerve he’d struck was almost as painful as the one in her sore tooth.

“If it’s all nonsense,” she asked him tightly, “why are there more Christian slogans on the walls these days? Doesn’t that sound as if more and more people are believing what the Christians say?” She knew it; she had eighteen hundred years of hindsight. Not one of which she could safely claim — but that, for the moment, was beside the point.

“Maybe more people are believing in it,” the fuller and dyer answered, “but maybe they aren’t. Times are hard, with the pestilence and with the war against the Germans off to the west of here. The world’s not a very nice place right now. When things go bad in this world, it’s only natural for people to worry more about the next one. And if that Christian nonsense were true, it’d be easier to have a happy afterlife as a Christian than any other way I can think of. No wonder light-minded folks drift that way.”

So there, Nicole thought. The annoying thing was that, as he had a way of doing, Calidius Severus made a lot of sense. His own Mithraism, for instance, seemed to be for men only, and especially for soldiers. From what the men at Fabia Ursa’s funeral had said, Isis-worship was a women’s cult. Would Christianity triumph for no better reason than that it was the religion of the lowest common denominator, the network television of its day?

Whatever the reason, she knew Christianity had triumphed — would triumph. Did Calidius’ argument mean it had triumphed in part because more hard times were ahead for the Roman Empire? If they were, how soon? Not for the first time, she caught herself wishing she’d paid a lot more attention to history. If she had, she might know more about the world and times in which she was living.

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 soul 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.”

Julia raised an eyebrow, but mercifully didn’t ask questions. Sometimes, Nicole reflected with a twinge of residual guilt, it wasn’t too inconvenient that Julia had been a slave. Slaves learned, better and faster than most, when it didn’t pay to be curious.

Lazy in the afterglow, Nicole sprawled next to and on Titus Calidius Severus. Her head lay on his chest, one arm stretched across his belly, one thigh draped over him so the rest of her leg lay between his. She was, emphatically, a satisfied customer.

“It’s good with you,” she said, and raised her hand to stroke his cheek. In the light of the one lamp on the chest of drawers, the arm’s shadow leaped and swooped.

His own free arm slid slowly along her flank, tracing the smooth, economical curves of Umma’s body. One corner of Nicole’s mouth twisted. In Los Angeles, this body would have been sleek. Here, it was skinny. Just one more example of you can’t win no matter how hard you try syndrome.

“You make me a happy man,” he said, and, as if to prove it, tilted her face up and kissed her. He wasn’t after a second round. He was just… enjoying himself. So, for that matter, was she. He was good in bed, and she didn’t think she was too bad there either; but more than that, they liked one another. They took pleasure in each other’s company.

Idly, she wondered why she’d been lucky enough to find a good lover when so little in the rest of Carnuntum had turned out to be any good at all. Polluted water, lead everywhere, slavery, brutality, sexism, appalling notions of medicine — and, in the middle of all that, as good a lover as any she’d ever known in the United States. She pondered Calidius’ shadowed face the way a D.A. pondered a piece of evidence that didn’t fit a pattern.

And then, after a moment, it did, or she thought it did. In their waterworks, in their pottery glazes, in their political and legal institutions, in what their doctors knew — in all those things and more, the Romans lacked eighteen hundred years of collective experience she’d taken for granted. She’d had no idea how much she’d taken it for granted, either, till she’d had her face rubbed in it.

But sex wasn’t something that tended to improve through collective experience. It was something everybody learned for herself or himself over the course of a lifetime. It might get more athletic, it might get more esoteric — she remembered some rather interesting nights when she was in law school, when she and a certain young man had worked their way through the greatest hits of the Kama Sutra — but when it came down to it, it could be just as good in plain vanilla as in the fanciest flavor you could imagine. Maybe that meant Alley Oop the caveman had been able to keep Mrs. Oop happy, too. For Mrs. Oop’s sake, Nicole hoped so.

She laughed a little. The exhalation stirred the hair on Calidius Severus’ chest. He raised an eyebrow. “What’s funny?”

“I think I’ve figured out why you’re so good,” she answered.

“And that’s funny?” He snorted. “You didn’t need to go and do any figuring for that. I could have told you: it’s the company I keep.”

Nobody had ever said anything remotely like that to her. Frank certainly hadn’t. Most of the men she’d dated since Frank had been too busy thinking about either themselves or their chances of getting laid to imagine saying such a thing. For a stretching instant, she wanted to cry. Then she wanted something else. She was amazed to discover how much she wanted it. Well, she thought, aphrodisiacs are where you find them.

Getting what else she wanted took considerable effort, but, in the end, it turned out to be effort well spent. She was, she thought, pretty well spent herself. So was Titus Calidius Severus. He peered up at her while she still sat astride him. “You can be my jockey any day,” he said.

She reached down to stroke his cheek again. Her hand lingered, savoring the crispness of his beard and the smoothness of the cheek above it, then paused. Almost of itself, it went to his forehead. “You’re warm,” she said in sudden sharp suspicion. No afterglow this time; alarm killed it even though he still nestled, shrinking, inside her.

He laughed and made light of it: “After what we’ve been doing? You’d best believe I’m warm.” Without warning, he pinched her. She jerked and squeaked. He flopped out of her.

She let him jolly and cajole her as he got into his tunic and sandals. But she knew the sweaty feel of skin after love; that was how her own skin felt now. He hadn’t felt like that. He’d been warm and dry, the way Kimberley and Justin sometimes were before they came down with something. If you came down with something in Carnuntum now…

“I’m fine,” he said downstairs in the doorway, as they embraced. They’d taken to doing that, safe enough in the shadow of the entrance, but this night or very early morning, it lasted a little longer, and held a little tighter. He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her. “Fine. See? Fit as can be, and ready to whip my weight in lions.”

He still felt warm, or Nicole thought he did. She wasn’t quite sure. Maybe she was a little warm herself. Or maybe she was letting her imagination and her fear run away with her. She hoped so.

Titus Calidius Severus coughed sharply, several times, as he crossed the street. When he got back to his own door, he looked over his shoulder. Nicole stared at the dim white smudge of his face in the dawn. His eyes were almost preternaturally dark. He shook his head and went inside. His step had a jaunty bounce to it, as if to prove to her that there was nothing wrong with him. No, nothing at all.

Nicole fled upstairs. Behind the barred door of her bedroom, she gave way to the brief luxury of tears. They were more tears of rage, rage that the pestilence might come between her and most of the good she’d found in Carnuntum, than tears of fear.

She sneezed. A moment later, she sneezed again. And again. It didn’t feel like a cold coming on. It felt like the flu. It felt like a killer flu.

She wished she hadn’t thought of it that way. The tears that came next were tears of fear.

She slept for a little while, maybe, a heavy sleep, full of formless dreams. When she got up, she still felt fluish, fluish and a little hung over, too; though she hadn’t drunk that much the night before, the light hurt her eyes as it had when she’d deliberately got plastered with Julia. The tavern seemed too bright, though it must have been almost totally dark. When she opened the front door, she had to blink several times against the glare.

While she was blinking, Titus Calidius Severus emerged from his shop with his amphorae. They waved to each other. “How are you? ‘ they said, each an echo of the other. It was not a simple morning pleasantry. They both really wanted — needed — to know.

“Fine,” they answered, both at the same time. Nicole knew she was lying. And so was Titus Calidius Severus. If he didn’t know that, she would have been astonished.

She went back inside, welcoming the dimness after the blaze of the morning. Julia was just coming downstairs, heavy-eyed and yawning. She swallowed her yawn, nearly choked on it, in embarrassment at finding Nicole there ahead of her. “I’m sorry, Mistress,” she said, sounding genuinely apologetic but not terrified, the way she had before Nicole manumitted her: one small step at a time, she was learning to be free. “How are you this morning?”

“Fine,” Nicole answered, as she had for Titus Calidius Severus. If she said it often enough, if she made other people believe it, maybe it would turn out to be true.

She failed before she’d begun. Julia stiffened at the sound of her voice, and peered at her. “Fine? Are you, Mistress Umma?” She strode to a window and set hand to the shutters. “Come over here, “ she said sharply, “and let me take a look at you.” She might have been talking to Lucius or Aurelia.

That was irritating, but Nicole lacked the energy to rise to it. Julia flung the shutters wide. Daylight streamed in, dazzling her. Tears of pain ran down her cheeks. She started to flinch away from it, but forced herself to hold still. Even so, she raised a hand to shield against the worst of the glare.

Julia clicked her tongue. “Oh, Mistress,” she said. She laid her hand on Nicole’s forehead. When she lowered it, her face was tight with worry. “Oh, Mistress,” she said again. “I’m afraid you’ve got — “ She didn’t say it. Instead, she tugged at the neckline of her tunic and spat onto her bosom.

“I’m afraid I’ve got it, too,” Nicole said. She didn’t say the word, the one whose ill omen Julia had tried to cast aside: pestilence. She let out a sigh that, she realized too late, had probably sent a few million viruses into Julia’s face. She sighed again, this time averting her face. “Whether I do or I don’t, I’ve got to keep going as long as I can.”

It wasn’t bravery, not really. It was denial. Julius Rufus had said it while he stood in front of her with a fever hot enough to bake bread. Bare minutes later, he’d collapsed in the street. Within the hour, he was dead, slipped away quietly while he lay just inside the doorway of the tavern.

That was a nice, cheerful note on which to start the morning.

Nicole was sicker than a dog, but she wasn’t close to collapse. Yet. She didn’t think. When Lucius and Aurelia came down for breakfast, Nicole examined them like a hawk — from a distance, to minimize the chance of breathing disease onto them. They both seemed fine: hungry and rowdy. She didn’t know how much that proved. She’d been rowdy herself the night before. She coughed. Wet snot tickled her nose and made her sneeze. The love she’d enjoyed — and how she had enjoyed it! — with Titus Calidius Severus seemed a million miles away.

Customers came in: not too many. That helped Nicole, who was moving slower than she should have, to deal with them. Some of them were moving slower than they should have, too, as if they’d been recorded at 45 rpm and were playing back at 33 1/3.

That phrase wouldn’t mean anything to Kimberley and Justin. All they’d know would be CDs and tapes. Records would be primitive, outmoded. She laughed. She’d learned more about primitive and outmoded than she’d ever dreamt possible. Was a record primitive in an oxcart?

She was aware enough to realize her wits were starting to wander. When she thought about it, she could force them back into — or close to — their proper path. When she didn’t think about it, they started drifting again.

Brigomarus came in that afternoon. He was still healthy, but he looked grim. “Flavius Probus just died, ‘ he said. He didn’t sound astonished, as an American would have been to announce the death of someone in the prime of life. He sounded weary; this was but one more death piled on many. “He — Umma, are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” Nicole answered. It wasn’t easy to make herself pay attention, but she managed. “Too bad about him.”

“Too bad? Is that all you can say?” Brigomarus started to cloud up, but checked himself. He took a long look at her. “Oh, by the gods, you’ve got it, too.”

“I think so,” Nicole said vaguely. Again, she forced herself to focus. “You’d better go home, Brigo. It’s catching from person to person, you know. I don’t suppose I want to make you sick.” She wouldn’t have put it that way if she’d been well, but she wouldn’t have had to warn him then, either.

He didn’t take offense. Maybe he didn’t notice the way she phrased it; maybe he made allowances for the pestilence. He said, “As long as I’m well, I’ll come back and see how you’re doing. I’ll do what I can for you — you are my sister, no matter how — “ He broke off. “You are my sister.”

“That’s true. I am your sister.” It was nice to know they could agree on something.

Brigomarus didn’t linger after that. Nicole was interested to see how he got up and drifted out the door, moving as if he were underwater. After a while — Nicole wasn’t sure how long — Julia said, “Mistress, you ought to go upstairs and go to bed.”

“No, that’s what you do,” Nicole said: the first thing that popped into her head. She laughed. She thought it was funny. But she didn’t have a sense of humor. Nothing was funny to her. Frank had said it often enough. “Dawn makes me laugh,” he’d said after he split. Damned blasted cliche.

Damn: she was sicker than she’d thought.

Julia didn’t seem to think the joke was very funny, and Julia did have a sense of humor. “I don’t mean go to bed with anyone,” she said. Maybe she, like Brigomarus, was making allowances. Maybe she was just feeling literal. “I mean by yourself, to rest.”

“But I can’t rest.” Even through the haze of illness, Nicole knew that. “If I rest, the work won’t get done.” Yes, she sounded like Julius Rufus. She pressed her hand to her own forehead. She was hot. She didn’t think she was as hot as the brewer had been, but her palm was hot, too, so she couldn’t be sure. “I’ve got to go on.”

“What if you fall over?” Julia asked reasonably.

“If I fall over, I probably would have fallen over in bed, too,” Nicole replied. “You can drag me upstairs then.” Maybe I’ll die on the way up. Maybe I’ll take two aspirins and feel better in the morning. No. No aspirins. She remembered — no aspirins. But something… something. “The willow-bark decoction!” she exclaimed, inordinately proud that she’d remembered.

But Julia said, “We haven’t got any more. Poor Fabia Ursa used what we had — and how much good did it do her?”

Nicole hadn’t remembered that. “Go out and buy a new jar.” It had done a little good when she’d been down with the galloping trots. Maybe it would do a little good now. Would that be enough? What could Nicole do but hope?

Julia seemed eager to snatch whatever hope she could find. She scooped coins out of the cash box and left at a lope. After she was gone — quite a while after — Nicole realized she had no idea how much money Julia had scooped up. Well, if her freedwoman had ripped her off, she damn well had, and that was that.

Julia came back fairly quickly with a little jar clutched in her hand. She dumped a handful of money back in the cash box. Either she’d been honest or she was covering her tracks. Nicole rebuked herself as soon as she’d thought that, poured the potion into a cup of wine and honey, and drank it down. It still tasted hideously bitter — yes, like aspirin in the back of her throat. She chopped onions, trying not to chop off any fingers while she was doing it, and waited to see if the medicine would help.

It did — a little. Instead of feeling very hot and disconnected from the world around her, after an hour or so she felt hot and distantly connected to the world around her. She still didn’t feel good, or anything close to it. She snapped and railed at Julia and the children. Every little thing set her off; it was all she could do not to take it out on the customers. Of course she knew why she was so irritable, but she couldn’t help it. The words came out all by themselves, with nothing conscious in them at all.

Toward evening of what had seemed an endless day, Titus Calidius Severus crossed the street and swayed into the tavern. Maybe it was her fever, but he seemed to weave where he stood, like waterweeds in a current. He ordered bread and wine, but before Nicole could reach for the loaf, he grimaced and shook his head. “No, just wine,” he said, setting a dupondius on the bar. “The two-as. I haven’t had any appetite today. “

Nicole realized she’d hardly eaten anything, either. The thought of food, even food as bland as bread, made her stomach cringe. “How are you?” she asked as she brought the fuller and dyer his wine.

He studied her. It took a while; he seemed to have to pause and remember why he was doing it. Finally, he said, “About the same as you are, I expect.” He sighed and shook his head. “Not much point to pretending anymore, is there? We’ve got it, sure as sure.”

“Yes, I think we do,” Nicole said with a kind of relief. She hadn’t known how much effort it took to deny the truth. It was like a load off her back — even with the fear that replaced it, the bone-deep dread of death.

Calidius Severus frowned and stuck a finger in his ear, as if he didn’t think he’d heard right. “What was that?”

“Yes, I think we do,” Nicole repeated. Listening to the words, she realized they were in English. She said them again, this time in Latin.

“Ah.” Calidius face cleared. “I wondered if you couldn’t talk right, or if the fever was doing funny things to my ears. What were those noises you were making? Sounded almost like the grunts the Quadi use for a language.”

“I don’t know — I suppose it must be the fever.” Nicole had never made that kind of slip before. She hoped she never made it again. This time, at least, she had an excuse for it. Next time…

There couldn’t be a next time. There mustn’t be.

“The fever,” Titus Calidius Severus agreed. “And the eyes — I’m like an owl in the daylight.” Nicole nodded. He went on, “Then the rash comes — and then we find out if we live or die.” He tossed back the rest of his wine. “One way or the other, it won’t be too long.”

“No.” Back in Los Angeles, Nicole hadn’t worried about dying young, except for a few brief, dreadful moments on the freeway. She thought she should have been more upset. If she’d felt better, if she’d been more fully a part of the world, she would have been terrified. On the other hand, she wouldn’t have had so much to worry about if she’d felt better.

“Everyone else here well?” the fuller and dyer asked.

“So far,” Nicole said. “And your son?”

“Gaius is fine — so far, as you say,” Calidius Severus answered.

Wearily, blearily, Nicole shook her head. “My brother-in-law died today — Brigomarus brought me the news. By the time it’s over, half the people in town will be dead.”

“It’s not quite that bad,” Calidius Severus said, but before Nicole could feel even a little bit hopeful, he went on, “By what I’ve heard, down in Italy and Greece it’s killing one in four, maybe one in three. “

A fourth to a third of the people in Italy and Greece — dead? From a disease? A pestilence? Nicole thought again of the Black Plague, and of that TV documentary about the horrible things disease had done to the Native Americans. Again, the sickness already in her kept her from knowing the full weight of horror. Even through the fog, it was bad enough.

Titus Calidius Severus finished his wine, got up, and kissed Nicole on the cheek. His lips were warm, but not in a way she liked. “See you tomorrow, “ he said. When he spoke again, she thought he was talking more to himself than to her: “I hope I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The night was bad. Nicole alternately burned with fever and shook with chills. Coughing fits racked her. It was like the worst flu she’d ever had. But no antibiotics here, no painkillers, nothing but willow bark and tincture of time.

Morning came none too soon, and somewhat to her surprise. She was alive. She didn’t feel any worse when she staggered out of bed than she had when she fell into it, which was maybe good, and maybe just delusion.

Titus Calidius Severus was standing in his doorway when she opened up. He seemed as proud as she was, to be on his feet and moving.

The day was gray and nasty and chilly. She was almost glad of the fever that burned inside her. When the chills hit, they’d be all the worse, but meanwhile she didn’t need more than the tunic she’d put on when she got up.

Toward midmorning, the rain came, hard and cold. The wind — a wind with teeth in it — drove it lashing sideways. No mild summer downpour, that. It had a taste of winter. In Indianapolis, the next storm would have brought ice with it. Nicole thought that might be the case here as well.

Even the fever wasn’t enough to keep her warm in that. She put on the thick wool cloak that had lain in the drawer since she’d come to Carnuntum. She put on socks, too. Even with them, she shivered. She would have been cold had she been healthy. Sick as she was, she felt as if she were walking naked through a meat locker in a supermarket.

No supermarkets. No meat lockers. No way to get warm, either.

From somewhere, Julia dug out a couple of square brass contraptions. They looked like hibachis. “Time to light the braziers,” she said. She filled them with charcoal and got them going. When Nicole stood right next to one, she almost started to thaw. When she moved more than two feet away, she froze solid again. She remembered Indianapolis, and getting the furnace going, and staying warm no matter how cold the winter got.

But she seemed to remember — hadn’t the Romans had central heating?

Not here. Not for the poor, at least. Braziers — the space heaters of this world — were all anyone had.

The next day was more of the same, only worse: maybe because the bad weather lingered, maybe because Nicole couldn’t escape the truth. She was sicker. Two funeral parties squelched through the noisome mud outside. If the pestilence didn’t get the mourners, pneumonia would finish them off just as conclusively.

That night, Nicole didn’t bother to bar her bedroom door. Some of the last bits of rationality left in her warned that, come morning, she might be in no shape to get up and unbar it.

Her sleep was uneasy, broken with fragments of dreams, stray bits of nightmare, memories so real that she sat up with a gasp. She’d been reaching for a coffee cup in the office, or nuking a hotdog for Justin, or throwing a load of laundry in the dryer. There was nothing romantic about these moments at all. They were relentlessly, blissfully mundane.

Then she’d wake and the manifold stink of Carnuntum would hit her like a blow to the face. No coffeemakers, no microwave ovens, no clothes dryers. No drugs, either, to fight this disease that was eating her from the inside out. Once she actually stared at her hand in the nightlamp’s flicker, looking for the lines of flame that must mark the muscles and the bones. But it was only Umma’s thin long-fingered hand, with its olive skin and its work-worn palms.

She drifted for a long time between sleep and waking, not sure at all that she wanted to wake, but unable to cling to sleep. At last, sleep shrank and vanished. The waking it left her with was a cold and pallid thing. She was shivering so hard she couldn’t even sit up. All she could do was lie there and scrabble feebly, pulling the blankets around her as tightly as she could. Her teeth chattered as if she’d been standing naked in an icy wind.

After what seemed like a very long time, someone tapped on the door.

Nicole tried to tell whoever it was to come in, but the sound that came out bore little resemblance to intelligible words.

It didn’t matter. The door opened somewhat tentatively. Julia’s round Germanic face and big blue eyes peered around it. The eyes went as round as the face. “Oh, no, Mistress,” she said.

Oh, yes, Julia, Nicole thought. She tried to say it, too, because it was surely the wittiest thing she’d come up with in — why, forever. All she got for her trouble, again, was an unintelligible croak.

Julia ventured fully into the room, chattering as she came, as if words could hold the horrors at bay. “When you didn’t come down to open up or to eat breakfast, I was afraid you were too sick to get out of bed. As soon as I get the fires built up, I’ll bring you some warmed wine and some soup.”

Nicole had owned this woman. No, dammit, Umma had owned her. Sick as she was, Nicole insisted on the distinction. Julia could have done nothing, or next to it, and let her former mistress die in bed. No one would have said a word. Not with the harvest the pestilence was reaping. But, in spite of having been another human being’s property, Julia was doing what she could to keep Nicole going. Maybe she was a genuinely nice person. Maybe Nicole didn’t understand exactly how slavery worked. Maybe both of those things were true at once.

Warm wine slid down Nicole’s throat with surprising ease. The soup tasted strongly of leeks, rather less so of salt pork. It was warm, which counted for more than its flavor.

“I’ll look in on you every so often, Mistress,” Julia promised.

Nicole nodded. The soup and wine made her feel a little more alive. But when Julia pressed a hand to her forehead, the freedwoman looked grave, as Nicole had herself when she’d felt the heat that radiated from Julius Rufus.

The touch didn’t hurt, but it felt strange, as if there should be pain somewhere: an odd, twitchy, uncomfortable feeling. When Julia left the room, through the fog that blurred Nicole’s sight these days, she saw the slow headshake, and the slight slump of the wide meaty shoulders.

On the way downstairs, Julia sneezed and then coughed, twice in a row.

Julia, too. Nicole didn’t know why she should be surprised. Part of her tried to grieve, or at least to be scared, but she was too weak for either. She’d begun to shiver again under the blankets and the heavy cloaks. Her wits drifted away. This time, she lacked the strength of will or the strength of body to call them back. They were going. She wasn’t. Her eyes slid closed.

Sometime later — she had no idea how long — she found herself floating weightlessly above the body she’d been inhabiting. Its face was reddened and roughened with the telltale rash of the pestilence. Its chest still rose and fell, rose and fell, shallow but steady. She could feel the heat coming off the body, and yet, every now and again, it shivered.

From her vantage above it all, she wondered how Titus Calidius Severus was doing. As quickly, as easily as that, she was no longer hovering above her body, but above his. He writhed and tossed in a bed not too different from her own — and why, she asked herself, hadn’t she ever seen it before? Now and then, a hoarse cry escaped him. Anger, it might have been, or alarm, or remembered battle. His face and neck bore the same scarlet marks as Umma’s cheeks and chin and forehead.

Sextus Longinius lulus’ baby, she thought. She didn’t know why it mattered, but she wanted to see him, to see how he was. No sooner had the thought crossed her mind, than she was in the tinker’s house. And there was the baby, nursing at the fat pale breast of a woman who looked more nearly Irish than Roman. Baby and nurse both seemed healthy: no coughing or sneezing, and no rash on face or breast.

That sight comforted Nicole more than she’d thought possible. Even knowing the sickness could strike those two within the day, even within the hour, she still was glad to see them safe. The next thing, the thing she should have done, to look in on her own — Umma’s own — children, she couldn’t bring herself to do. If they were well, then that was well. If they weren’t, she didn’t want to know. She couldn’t do anything to help them. And she’d drive herself wild, like a bird against a window, beating and beating herself for no purpose at all.

She was drifting while she maundered, floating as if in water. One way and another, she found herself once more above Umma’s body. As unattractive as the prospect was, she knew she should find her way back into it. Spirit belonged in body. Spirit alone was air and nothingness. Was — dead.

But when she tried to slip back as she’d slipped out, it was like pressing one pole of a magnet into the same pole of another. Some force thrust her softly but irresistibly back, as if to tell her, This place is not safe for you.

Had Umma’s mother journeyed like this? Was that how she’d known a stranger looked out at her from her daughter’s eyes? If Atpomara had done that, she had managed to rejoin her body. And then, almost at once, she had died.

Nicole’s mind in its disembodied state was more distractable even than it had been through the haze of fever. It fled the thought of Atpomara, and Atpomara’s death, toward the much wider world. If Carnuntum was in such straits, all the way out by the Danube, what was it like in Rome itself?

Somewhat to her dismay, she didn’t shift to the imperial capital. She’d left the tavern behind, but escaped only as far as the amphitheater, to the seat from which she’d watched the mime show with Titus Calidius Severus. From there she looked south, across the fields to the darkness of a forest that, some part of her knew, went on for miles. That was as close as she’d come to Rome. It was as far in that direction as her spirit could go.

And where else could she go? Her mind stretched across alternatives, and seized on the wildest one, the one she’d have thought craziest of all if she’d heard this story from the comfort of West Hills. God — gods, how she wished Liber and Libera had never brought her to Carnuntum.

And there they were, floating before her in a vast expanse of nothingness. They looked just as they had on the memorial plaque beside her soft, clean, blessedly vermin-free California bed: rather plump, naked, and pleased with themselves. Their eyes were fixed on some rosy distance, far away from Nicole and her inescapably mortal self.

She didn’t even think before the words poured out of her. Let me go home. Let me go back. I don’t belong here. I belong there. This — and God, it hurt to say so, to admit she’d failed at anything — this was a mistake. I should never have come here. I want to go home!

When she’d shaped a wish into a prayer back in West Hills, not even knowing she’d done it, Liber and Libera had responded in an instant. Why not? They’d had nothing better to do — probably hadn’t for centuries. Who believed in them enough to pray to them? Nicole hadn’t, either, but she’d wanted out so badly, and been so absolutely desperate, that it hadn’t mattered who or what answered her prayer.

Now she was in their world, a world full of believers, and therefore of prayers. Nicole could dimly sense others winging their way to the god and goddess, as she sometimes heard the ghosts of other conversations on the phone when she waited for a long-distance connection to go through. She might as well have been calling Ticketmaster, trying to land seats for a hot show. Sometimes your call went through right away. But if everyone decided to jam the lines at once, you’d get a busy signal… again and again and again.

Just as she rang — dialed — prayed again, driving the force of her need at the unheeding gods, her spirit made its own, completely unwanted connection. As suddenly as it had left, it was in Umma’s body again, trapped in the reddish dark behind her eyelids. Someone had taken the covers off her. She was freezing cold. Hands groped under her tunic, tugging at her drawers.

Her eyes flew open. Gaius Calidius Severus loomed over her, the face so like his father’s, the pitting of adolescent acne on the cheeks, the beard that was still coming in in patches. She gasped, coughed, choked. Gaius violating her? Was he out of his mind? Was she? No way in the world she could fight him off. But — Gaius -

He raised his eyes from what he was doing with her drawers, and caught her stare. “Oh, good,” he murmured in profound relief. And then, louder: “Can you understand me, Mistress Umma?”

It took several tries — her head was as heavy as one of the gaudy statues in the baths — but at last she managed a nod. His expression lightened immeasurably. “My father made me promise to look after you,” he said. “Everyone else is too sick to help. You’ve — fouled yourself.” He blushed while he said that, like the boy he was, but he went on gamely: “I’m going to clean you off and get you a fresh pair of drawers. I’m doing the same thing for him. By the gods, that’s all I’m going to do. Do you understand? Is that all right?”

She sighed faintly, relaxing a tension she hadn’t known she had, and nodded, a little more easily this time. He pulled the soiled drawers off her, strode to the window, undid the shutters, and pitched the drawers out. They landed with a wet splat. He turned back into the room, leaving the shutters open to let in a pale gray light, and rummaged through the chest. He emerged with a rag, which he wet in the washbasin, and wiped Nicole clean. She got the strong impression he would have averted his eyes if he hadn’t needed to see what he was doing. The water on the rag felt icy cold on her burning skin.

He found another pair of drawers, and awkwardly, with much shifting and fumbling, got them onto her. She was as weak as a baby; she couldn’t even lift her hips to help him. When he was done, she was as glad as he must have been. “There you go,” he said. “Wine?” She nodded; words were still a long way beyond her.

He held the cup to her lips. She drank, a few swallows’ worth. Even that little exhausted her.

He didn’t try to force more wine into her, but let her lie back. He slipped his arm free of her, laid the blanket and the cloak over her, and stood for a while, as if he couldn’t think what to do next. Then it came to him. He turned without a word and all but fled.

She lay where he’d left her, clean, drowsy, and almost warm. He’d been real, then. Her spirit was secure in Umma’s body again, or as secure as it could be with the disease eating away at it. She tried to slip free once more, but the anchor was sunk, the chains secured. She sighed. No more out-of-body experiences — or more likely, no more being out of her head from fever. She’d tried to telephone Liber and Libera, hadn’t she? She could remember something. Lines busy. All our representatives are currently assisting customers. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. A representative will take your call as soon as…

If she wasn’t out of her body any longer, she was still just a little bit out of her head. What had Gaius Calidius Severus said? Everyone here was too sick to take care of her? Julia? Lucius? Aurelia? All sick? All — dying? Flying? Traveling around Carnuntum, seeing the astral sights?

She slapped herself back into something resembling coherence. They were sick. They couldn’t take care of her. She had to take care of them. She had to get — up -

With every ounce of strength she had, she rolled halfway over. The effort overwhelmed her. Unconsciousness hit her like a blow to the head.

When she woke, it was dark. Night, she realized after a terribly long while. That same night, or the one after, or the one after that? She had no way of knowing. Her hand moved leadenly, but it moved. She touched her drawers. They were dry. Gaius might have come in again and changed her without her waking.

She felt terrible: thirsty, hungry, feverish. Steamrollered. It was the best she’d felt since she woke up and realized that there was no way she was getting up to face the world. “I think I’m going to live,” she whispered, mostly because she could. Her lips and mouth were desert-dry, her tongue a sand-coated bolt of flannel. Even so, she heard the wonder in the ruins of her voice.

Her eyes closed again, and she slept — really slept this time, as opposed to passing out. She woke sometime in the morning: light was leaking through the shutters. She sat up. The room spun around her, but she didn’t keel over. After a while, it steadied. Could she stand? The first time she tried, she sat down again in a hurry. But she tried again. Darkness came and went; spots swam in front of her eyes. She stayed on her feet. When the world stayed more or less steady, she ventured a step. Once she’d done that, she had to finish, or fall. She fetched up against the chest of drawers, and leaned against it, panting as if she’d finished a marathon.

She had to look in on the others. She couldn’t stay here. For one thing, there was water in the terra sigillata pitcher by the bed, but no wine to kill the germs in it, and no food. She had to eat. She had to make sure the others were — weren’t -

She couldn’t go any farther for a while, not till she gathered what rags of strength she had. While she did that, she could see how she was. She fumbled in the drawer for the makeup kit, and pawed it open. The mirror nearly slipped from her shaking fingers, but she caught it somehow and propped it on the chest.

Her eyes widened in horror. The eyes of the concentration-camp survivor in the bronze mirror widened, too.

She’d been fashionably slim for a West Hills matron. Now she was skeletal. Skin stretched drumhead-tight over cheekbones and jaw. The rash lingered on her neck and in the hollows of her cheeks. Some of it was peeling, as if she’d had a dreadful sunburn. Someone — Ofanius Valens? — had told her that could happen. She was almost proud that she remembered.

Her hair was like sweat-matted straw. When she raised her free hand to brush it back from her forehead, clumps of it came away between her fingers. He’d told her about that, too. “My God,” she muttered in English. That so much of her hair was dead told her more clearly than anything else, how close she’d come to dying.

The water in the terra sigillata pitcher tempted her — Christ, she was thirsty! — but not enough to make her drink. Another bout of the runs would kill her.

She lurched to the doorway. She had to rest there, leaning against the wall. When she could breathe again, more or less, she opened the door. It was as heavy as the city gate, and about as tractable. Another lurch propelled her across the hall to Julia’s room. No sound came through the curtain. She set her weight to it and pulled it aside.

Julia sprawled across the bed. Light poured across her from a shutter that she hadn’t fastened, or that had come unfastened while she was too ill to tend to it. In her fever, she’d kicked off the covers. Her tunic was hiked up almost to her hips, but a man would have had to be a necrophiliac to want her then.

Still — she was alive; her breast rose and fell in the rapid, shallow breathing that Nicole remembered all too well. She didn’t look ready to stop at just that moment. Nicole went on, fighting to keep her breathing quiet, to concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other.

Lucius and Aurelia lay in their beds. Lucius moaned and thrashed in delirium. Aurelia lay very still. At first, Nicole was relieved. Sleeping, then, and maybe on the way to recovery.

But Umma’s daughter lay too still. Julia, even unconscious, had looked alive somehow, and her breathing had been visible from the doorway. Aurelia lay like a doll that some enormous child had discarded.

Step by step, Nicole made her way to the bed. Her hand shook uncontrollably as she reached to set it on Aurelia’s forehead.

Aurelia did not have a fever, not any longer. Her flesh was cool, almost cold. It would never be warm again.

Nicole wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. She groped for the bird-frail wrist, searching for a pulse. She found what she’d found with Julius Rufus: nothing.

She wanted, very much, to cry. Crying would loosen the knot in the middle of her, the hard, cold, hurting thing that had swelled in her when she saw Aurelia’s stillness. But the tears wouldn’t come. Her body was too ravaged. There was no water in it to spare.

If she was truly descended from Umma, then it must be through Lucius. If Lucius died of this pestilence… what then? Atpomara had warned her.

No ancestor, no descendant. Not just death but nonexistence. Nothingness. Complete oblivion.

She would have been afraid for Lucius’ life even if he’d been nothing to her, but for the dozens, maybe hundreds of lives that would come after him, her fear mounted to terror. She bent over him, breathing hard, and struggling for composure. His drawers were wet and stinking. She changed them and cleaned him, as Gaius Calidius Severus had done for her. He tried to fight her off, but his body wasn’t paying much attention to what his brain told it.

At least, she thought, he had enough strength in him to fight.

Julia didn’t, when Nicole did the same for her. But she was still breathing, and her body was still fever-warm. As long as she had breath and heat in her, there was hope. Genuine unselfish hope, unconnected with Nicole’s very existence. It felt almost virtuous.

One slow step at a time, Nicole made her way downstairs. The tavern was dark and quiet. There were half a dozen loaves of bread by the oven. All were stale, at least three days old, maybe more. Nicole didn’t care. She tore a chunk off a loaf and ate it with a cup of wine, soaking bits of the hard, dry stuff in the sweet heavenly liquid. The bread sat in her stomach like a stone. The wine, though, the wine was rain in a desert. Her body absorbed the moisture with joyous gratitude, and began to bloom.

She dipped up a second cup. When she’d got about halfway through it, the front door swung open. Gaius Calidius Severus strode in in a gust of wind and a scent of rain. The hood of his tunic was up, darkened with wet. Mud caked his booted feet.

He was well into the tavern before he saw Nicole standing by the bar, holding onto it to keep from tilting over. “Mistress Umma!” he cried in glad surprise. “Mithras be praised — you’re on the mend. And the others?”

“Lucius and Julia are very sick, but they’re still alive. Aurelia is… Aurelia is…” Nicole couldn’t make herself say it. Wouldn’t make herself say it. Instead, she asked, “How is your father? How’s Titus?”

“He died yesterday,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. Just like that, baldly, without any effort to soften the blow. Once Nicole would have thought he didn’t care, but she knew better now. He was numb; running on autopilot. Saying what he had to say, and getting it over with. “In the end, it was a mercy. I was going to find an undertaker after I came here. It’ll take some looking, from what I hear. A lot of them are dead.”

Black humor, Nicole thought. It was even slightly funny, and yet she wanted to laugh. A lot of them are dead. A lot of everybody was dead. Butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers. Except they didn’t have candles here. They had lamps. Lamp-oil vendors. Tavernkeepers. Fullers and dyers. Fine and gentle men. Lovers.

She called herself to order. She couldn’t crack up. She didn’t have time. “If you find an undertaker,” she said, “let me know his name. I’ll need him, too. Because — because — “

With the wine inside her, at last, she could cry. For Aurelia, who had become her daughter. For Titus Calidius Severus, whom she had — loved? Yes, loved. For the world in which she was trapped, the world from which she couldn’t escape, the world that was falling to pieces all around her.

Gaius Calidius Severus wept with her. He’d been carrying the same leaden burden, the same crushing weight of grief. Tears didn’t wash any of it away, but they lightened it a little. A very little.

When they’d both run out of tears, they stood in the gloom of the shuttered tavern, in the drumming of the rain, and stared bleakly at one another. “It can’t get worse than this,” she said. “It can’t.”