Household Gods

Nicole didn’t laugh, though she was sorely tempted. “Aren’t you?” she said. “Then maybe it’s time you learned. There’s this thing called politeness. Have you ever heard of it?”

Even after his earlier encounter with her, he obviously hadn’t expected quite that degree of independence. Brigomarus, who’d seen rather more of her, sighed and shrugged. “She’s like that these days,” he said. “Short of hauling her out and horsewhipping her, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it.” He paused, shook his head, went on in a slightly different tone. “Still. Mother asked to see her, and she’s not likely to get another chance.”

Flavius Probus nodded curtly, again without acknowledging Nicole, and bent again to his table leg. His work was meticulous, his hands deft and skilled, as if the pretentious idiot who lived in his head bore no relation to the craftsman in his hands.

They’d been dismissed. Nicole might have made an issue of it, but Brigomarus was headed toward the stairs. She almost didn’t follow. Even needling Flavius Probus was preferable to paying a last visit to someone else’s mother. But the sooner she got it over with, the sooner she was out of there and back in the tavern that, for better or worse, she’d come to think of as home.

The stairway was less rickety than the one she used every day. Marcus Flavius Probus kept it in good repair. The hallway at the top, however, was just like the one in her house, narrow and malodorous and nearly pitch-dark. Aside from its porch and its wretched columns, this building was no fancier than her own.

Brigomarus turned into the first door on the right-hand side of the hall, the one that corresponded with Nicole’s in the tavern. The master bedroom, then? Interesting, she thought, that the old woman had it. Though not at all surprising.

While she paused in the hallway, letting her eyes adjust to the brighter light within, she heard Brigomarus say, “Here she is, Mother. She came after all, as you asked.” His voice had the odd, uncomfortable gentleness that people often put on in front of the sick.

The sickroom reek was stronger here. Nicole nearly gagged on it as she stepped into the bedroom. Umma’s sister was perched on a stool by the bed on which her mother lay. Ila favored Nicole with a venomous look and a sarcastic, “So good of you to join us.”

It was going to be a united front, Nicole could see. Some part of her knew she should make some effort to smooth things over – but to do that, she’d have to undo Julia’s manumission. And that wasn’t possible.

She settled for a long, cold glare at Ila, and a silence that, she hoped, said more than words. Then she forgot Umma’s sister. The woman huddled in the bed, the woman who’d given birth to Umma, the woman who Nicole thought was an ancestor of her own, looked more nearly dead than alive. Atpomara’s skin clung like parchment to her bones; the fever had boiled most of the water from her flesh. Along her forehead and cheek, the rash that marked the pestilence was red as a burn.

But, whereas Julius Rufus had died almost at once when the fever exploded in him, Umma’s mother still clung to life, still had some part of her wits about her. She stretched a clawlike finger toward Nicole. Her eyes bored into – bored through – the woman who inhabited her daughter’s body. “You are the cuckoo’s egg.” Her voice was a dry rasp. “Cuckoo’s egg,” she repeated.

“Ungrateful daughter, ungrateful sister,” Ila hissed from beside her.

Nicole hardly heard. She stared at the woman who had given birth to the body she now inhabited. What did Atpomara mean? Just that Nicole was ungrateful, as Ila said? Or could she somehow sense that a stranger’s spirit now dwelt in Umma’s body? Were the fever and perhaps the approach of death letting her own spirit roam wider than it might have otherwise?

“Have a care, cuckoo’s egg,” Atpomara said. “If you and your own eggs fall, if the shells break before you hatch – “ She had to stop; a paroxysm of coughing wracked her.

“Her wits are wandering,” Brigomarus murmured to Ila, who nodded. Neither of them spoke to Nicole.

She didn’t mind. She didn’t want to speak to them, either. She didn’t want to be here at all. She hoped Brigomarus was right: she hoped Atpomara’s wits were wandering. If they weren’t, the dying woman’s words made sense – disturbing sense.

Almost since the day she’d come to Carnuntum, Nicole had believed Umma was a distant ancestor of hers. If Umma died of the pestilence, and if Lucius and Aurelia – one of them, at least, also an ancestor, difficult as it was to believe of so young a child – also died of the pestilence… where did that leave Nicole Gunther of Indianapolis, who would marry Frank Perrin and live to regret it?

Nowhere?