Household Gods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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