Household Gods

“So may it be,” several of the people gathered around the grave said in unison. The hired mourners took up their racket again, wailing and beating their breasts. The musicians kept them company with a racket that certainly made Nicole sad – sad that she had to listen to such a ghastly imitation of music.

Fabia Honorata had carried a covered jar to the graveside. Now that Longinius lulus’ arms were free of the baby, she handed the jar to him. He took it as if he didn’t know quite what to do with it; then with a start he seemed to remember where he was. He was still in shock. He bent stiffly, and set the jar in the grave beside his wife’s shrouded body. “My dear wife,” he said with the same flatness Nicole had heard in the priestess, the flatness of rote, “I offer you food and drink to take with you on your journey from this world to the next.”

His voice was steady. But as he knelt beside the grave, looking down at the shape that lay within it, something in him crumpled. For a moment Nicole thought he would faint, or fling himself into the grave with Fabia Ursa’s body.

Of course he did no such thing. He straightened painfully, as if he were a very old man. As he turned his face again to the sun, Nicole saw tears streaming down his cheeks.

That, it seemed, was all there was to the funeral. As Longinius lulus stepped away from the grave, the two gravediggers woke from what had looked like a fairly complete stupor, picked up their spades, and ambled toward the grave. They didn’t pay attention to the rapidly dispersing group of people, nor did they show any notable concern for the solemnity of the occasion. Without a word, they dug spades into the pile of earth beside the grave and began to fill it in. Dirt thudded down onto the shrouded body of the woman who had been Umma’s friend, and whom Nicole had liked well enough.

Nicole suppressed a stab of guilt. Well enough was a cold thing when she stopped to think about it, but the fact was, Fabia Ursa had been a neighbor and an acquaintance. She had not, in Nicole’s mind, been a friend.

Whatever she had been, one thing was certain. “It’s not fair,” Nicole said to no one in particular. The others had turned away from the grave and headed toward the gate. They weren’t a procession anymore; they were a scattering of individuals and couples, who happened to be in the same place at the same time. Some even seemed to have forgotten what they’d come for: they were laughing and talking. Nicole wanted to grab the lot of them and shake them. “It’s not fair! She had too much to live for, to die like that.”

Somewhat to her surprise and rather to her dismay, the priestess of Isis heard her. “The gods do as they please,” she said with the hint of a frown. “Who are we to question their will?”

Shut up, don’t ask questions, and do as you’re told. That was what that meant, in the second century as in the twentieth. Nicole couldn’t buy it, not here. With any real concern for cleanliness, Fabia Ursa never would have contracted that infection in the first place. With a doctor who knew his ass from his elbow, she wouldn’t have died of it. This funeral wasn’t the will of the gods; it was no more and no less than ignorance.

She said so, injudiciously, but she was past caring for that. The priestess’ expression of shock was almost gratifying – it proved just how ignorant and downright criminally negligent people were in this world and time. “Aemilia is one of the best midwives in the city,” she said, “and as for Dexter, he studied medicine in Athens. Anything mortal men could have done to save your friend, they did. It was no human creature’s fault that she died.”

Nicole shut her mouth with a snap. If I’d had a shot of penicillin to give her, you’d be singing a different tune, she thought fiercely; but some remnant of common sense kept her from saying it aloud. She’d done enough damage as it was.

And still – how many people here in Carnuntum, here in the Roman Empire, here all over the world, died young, died in anguish, of injuries and illnesses from which they would easily have recovered in Los Angeles? How many babies died of childhood diseases against which they couldn’t be immunized, because no one knew how?

She didn’t know the exact answer, but she knew the general one: lots. She shivered. If you were in your thirties in Carnuntum, you couldn’t count on another thirty or forty or fifty years of healthy, active, productive life, as you could in L.A. or Indianapolis. You could wake up dead, for any reason at all. Then, the day after tomorrow, some wine-sodden lout of a gravedigger would be shoveling dirt over your corpse.