Household Gods

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she whispered, more to herself than to Titus Calidius Severus.

He nodded, a little too vigorously. “Maybe it won’t,” he said. He reached to take her hand just as she reached to take his. They clung to each other as they made their way through the clamor and stinks, the flies and smoke of Carnuntum.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she said again, in the street in front of the tavern. But she knew what crouched there in the dark, however loud she whistled. She gave it a name: “I’m scared.”

“So am I, “ Titus Calidius Severus said.

13

For a day or two, nothing much happened. Nobody fell over dead in front of the tavern. None of Nicole’s customers brought in rumors that people were dropping dead anywhere else in Carnuntum. She began to hope Dexter was wrong after all. As Titus Calidius Severus had said, doctors didn’t know everything. That was true in the twentieth century, and a hell of a lot truer here in the second.

When she went to the market, it seemed she heard an awful lot of people coughing and sneezing. More people than usual? She wasn’t sure. Her nerves were on edge. She was hypersensitive, jumping on every hack and sniffle.

The next day, when she took Aurelia to the baths, she told herself the same thing. Nobody was looking any more or less healthy than he ever had. Sometimes she even believed it, and held onto the belief for an hour or two – until someone else started sneezing and started a chain reaction, or a walk down the street sounded like a percussion section.

The night after that – the night after a men’s day at the baths – Titus Calidius Severus came across the street at sunset and stayed on after the children and Julia had gone off to their beds. Julia sauntered upstairs with elaborate casualness. Nicole had to work hard not to notice it.

She and Calidius Severus didn’t linger long over the last of the wine. There was so much to say, they ended up not saying much of anything. In a little while they went upstairs, she leading, he following – for the view, she supposed, such as it was. Next time she’d insist on following him. He had a nice ass, as she had good reason to know.

At the top of the stairs, she paused for an instant. The children were snoring in two high, unmusical tones. No sound came from Julia’s room.

Nicole shrugged. Silence would do. “Come on,” she said, as she had on every night after a men’s day at the baths since the mime show. Her bedroom was waiting, and Calidius Severus was in it. She slipped in behind him, and barred the door.

She was easy enough with Calidius now to leave the lamp burning on the chest of drawers while they made love. Her body wasn’t a whole lot in this culture, but in her own it was enough to be proud of. She put some of that pride in the way she held herself. If she could have been really clean, if she’d had access to shampoo, makeup, moisturizers, even plain old soap, she’d have been really something, but as it was, she wasn’t bad. She liked the tautness of her stomach, and thighs that had never heard of cellulite. Her breasts were small and pointed but rather nice, and not too soft in spite of two children – not nursing one’s own did make a difference.

He was enjoying the view, as he must have done on the stairs. She took time to return the favor. He had a good body, better than her own by current standards, and not bad at all for an old man, as he liked to say. The dyes he worked in had stained his hands and arms indelibly, and there were spatters on his feet. They made him interesting. She liked to follow the patterns with her finger, to stroke upward to the clean olive flesh of his upper arm, and across his shoulders where a soft furze of black hair grew, then down his back and around to the rampant thing in front, that Romans liked to call the “little man.” He was ticklish down the line of his spine, would wriggle and fuss if she ran a nail along it, but he loved to be massaged deep and painful-hard in the broad muscles of his shoulders.

There were scars. Sometimes he’d tell her where he’d got them: the arrow in the arm, the sword-thrust that grazed his ribs, the deep pitted hollow in his thigh where the spear had struck. Each one recalled pain that people in her world seldom knew, not just the pain of the wound but the pain of treatment, and no drugs but wine and, once in a while, poppy juice – crude opium, nowhere near as effective as the modern arsenal of painkillers. Wine was the only antiseptic, too, and no antibiotics to back it up. It was a miracle he’d survived, and not only that, that he walked without a limp. “Except in the dead of winter,” he’d told her a time or two back. “Then everything stiffens up. Price of old age, and being an old soldier.”

He wasn’t so old in bed, as she liked to reassure him. “Boys are always in a hurry,” she said. “Men take their time.”

“That’s good,” he’d say then, “because it takes me a little more time to warm up and a little more to cool down, these days.”