Household Gods

“Why bother?” Nicole said. She was still tired, and her mood was still black in spite of liberal applications of wine. She’d have closed the tavern after the funeral that morning if she hadn’t needed the money. To Julia, she said, “We might as well shut down. We’re not going to bring in many more people at this hour of the day.”

“More like the first hour of the night,” Julia said. The Romans gave every day twelve hours and every night twelve, too. Daylight hours were long in summer, short in winter, nighttime the reverse. It wasn’t the system Nicole was used to, but it worked well enough, especially in the absence of clocks. The only problem came in the in-between hours, when nobody quite agreed on what time of day or night it was.

As Nicole was turning toward the stairs, someone called from the doorway: “Am I too late for a cup of wine?”

Had it been someone Nicole had never seen before, she would have said yes and sent him on his way. But it was Titus Calidius Severus. She almost frightened herself with how glad she was to see him. “Of course not,” she answered him. “Come in, come in. Julia, light a lamp after all.”

Julia nodded just a shade too eagerly. She lit a lamp and set it on the table at which Calidius Severus had chosen to sit. Then she yawned – theatrically? Nicole couldn’t tell. Julia said, “You’re right, I think. We’re not going to get many more tonight. By your leave, I’ll go on up to bed.”

That was more transparent than any of the glass Nicole had seen in Carnuntum. But ordering her freedwoman to stay down here with her would have been pretty transparent, too, to say nothing of insulting to Calidius Severus. Nicole had seen often enough that he wasn’t the sort who couldn’t hear no. She nodded to Julia without visible hesitation.

Calidius set a couple of sesterces on the table. “Let me have a cup of Falernian,’ he said, “and get one for yourself, too. Fellow came in this afternoon, paid me a debt he’s owed me most of a year. I’ve got a little money.” His chuckle was wry. “Who says the gods don’t work miracles every now and again?”

Nicole didn’t feel like having any more wine, but she didn’t see how she could turn down her friend, either – for friend he was, just as surely as Fabia Ursa had been no more than a cordial acquaintance. As she plied the dipper, the baby next door started to cry. She jerked her head toward the noise. “Sometimes the gods choose not to work miracles.”

“That’s so.” In the lamplight, the fuller and dyer’s frown was full of shadows. The baby kept on crying. Calidius Severus sighed. “Poor Longinius. He’s going to have a tough time now. He thought the sun rose and set on Fabia Ursa.”

“They were happy together.” Nicole carried the two cups of wine to the table, hooked a stool with her ankle, and sat opposite Calidius. She was peripherally aware of tables that still needed wiping, floor that could use a sweeping, and the last of the day’s stew baking onto the bottom of a pot. None of them mattered much, right at the moment.

Calidius Severus took the cup she pushed toward him and sipped. Cheap wine you chugged down as fast as you could, to get past the taste. Falernian you sipped if you could, savoring the rich sweetness. “Ah,” he said. “That’s the stuff.” He frowned. “You’re not drinking.”

She made herself raise the cup to her lips. The wine was sweet. If she didn’t think about lead, if she didn’t think about alcohol, she might even have said it was good. “It was hard losing Fabia Ursa,” she said at last. “That should never have happened.”

“Dexter’s a pretty fair doctor,” Titus Calidius Severus said. “He did everything he knew how to do.”

“But he didn’t know enough!” Nicole blazed at him as she hadn’t quite had the temerity to blaze at Isis’ priestess.

Still, she thought unwillingly, it wasn’t Dexter’s fault, not really. In an odd way, it was Nicole’s, for knowing what would be possible eighteen hundred years from now, and blaming the doctor because he didn’t. The fuller and dyer was right; Dexter had done everything he knew how to do.

“Talk to any honest doctor and he’ll tell you he doesn’t know as much as he’d like to.” Calidius Severus reached across the table and set his hand on Nicole’s. In a different tone of voice, he went on, “Who does?”

The lamp sputtered and flared, bringing out the dark stains that would never leave the fuller and dyer’s skin. Nicole smelled the hot olive oil inside the lamp. After a moment, she realized that was all she smelled. Calidius Severus had lost his usual summer-privy reek. “You’ve been to the baths!” she said.

“What if I have?” He shrugged with elaborate casualness. “If I pay a call on a lady, I don’t want her to think less of me because my work makes me smell like a pissoir.”