Household Gods

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.”