Household Gods

Titus Calidius Severus coughed sharply, several times, as he crossed the street. When he got back to his own door, he looked over his shoulder. Nicole stared at the dim white smudge of his face in the dawn. His eyes were almost preternaturally dark. He shook his head and went inside. His step had a jaunty bounce to it, as if to prove to her that there was nothing wrong with him. No, nothing at all.

Nicole fled upstairs. Behind the barred door of her bedroom, she gave way to the brief luxury of tears. They were more tears of rage, rage that the pestilence might come between her and most of the good she’d found in Carnuntum, than tears of fear.

She sneezed. A moment later, she sneezed again. And again. It didn’t feel like a cold coming on. It felt like the flu. It felt like a killer flu.

She wished she hadn’t thought of it that way. The tears that came next were tears of fear.

She slept for a little while, maybe, a heavy sleep, full of formless dreams. When she got up, she still felt fluish, fluish and a little hung over, too; though she hadn’t drunk that much the night before, the light hurt her eyes as it had when she’d deliberately got plastered with Julia. The tavern seemed too bright, though it must have been almost totally dark. When she opened the front door, she had to blink several times against the glare.

While she was blinking, Titus Calidius Severus emerged from his shop with his amphorae. They waved to each other. “How are you? ‘ they said, each an echo of the other. It was not a simple morning pleasantry. They both really wanted – needed – to know.

“Fine,” they answered, both at the same time. Nicole knew she was lying. And so was Titus Calidius Severus. If he didn’t know that, she would have been astonished.

She went back inside, welcoming the dimness after the blaze of the morning. Julia was just coming downstairs, heavy-eyed and yawning. She swallowed her yawn, nearly choked on it, in embarrassment at finding Nicole there ahead of her. “I’m sorry, Mistress,” she said, sounding genuinely apologetic but not terrified, the way she had before Nicole manumitted her: one small step at a time, she was learning to be free. “How are you this morning?”

“Fine,” Nicole answered, as she had for Titus Calidius Severus. If she said it often enough, if she made other people believe it, maybe it would turn out to be true.

She failed before she’d begun. Julia stiffened at the sound of her voice, and peered at her. “Fine? Are you, Mistress Umma?” She strode to a window and set hand to the shutters. “Come over here, “ she said sharply, “and let me take a look at you.” She might have been talking to Lucius or Aurelia.

That was irritating, but Nicole lacked the energy to rise to it. Julia flung the shutters wide. Daylight streamed in, dazzling her. Tears of pain ran down her cheeks. She started to flinch away from it, but forced herself to hold still. Even so, she raised a hand to shield against the worst of the glare.

Julia clicked her tongue. “Oh, Mistress,” she said. She laid her hand on Nicole’s forehead. When she lowered it, her face was tight with worry. “Oh, Mistress,” she said again. “I’m afraid you’ve got – “ She didn’t say it. Instead, she tugged at the neckline of her tunic and spat onto her bosom.

“I’m afraid I’ve got it, too,” Nicole said. She didn’t say the word, the one whose ill omen Julia had tried to cast aside: pestilence. She let out a sigh that, she realized too late, had probably sent a few million viruses into Julia’s face. She sighed again, this time averting her face. “Whether I do or I don’t, I’ve got to keep going as long as I can.”

It wasn’t bravery, not really. It was denial. Julius Rufus had said it while he stood in front of her with a fever hot enough to bake bread. Bare minutes later, he’d collapsed in the street. Within the hour, he was dead, slipped away quietly while he lay just inside the doorway of the tavern.

That was a nice, cheerful note on which to start the morning.

Nicole was sicker than a dog, but she wasn’t close to collapse. Yet. She didn’t think. When Lucius and Aurelia came down for breakfast, Nicole examined them like a hawk – from a distance, to minimize the chance of breathing disease onto them. They both seemed fine: hungry and rowdy. She didn’t know how much that proved. She’d been rowdy herself the night before. She coughed. Wet snot tickled her nose and made her sneeze. The love she’d enjoyed – and how she had enjoyed it! – with Titus Calidius Severus seemed a million miles away.

Customers came in: not too many. That helped Nicole, who was moving slower than she should have, to deal with them. Some of them were moving slower than they should have, too, as if they’d been recorded at 45 rpm and were playing back at 33 1/3.