Household Gods

Toward midmorning, the rain came, hard and cold. The wind – a wind with teeth in it – drove it lashing sideways. No mild summer downpour, that. It had a taste of winter. In Indianapolis, the next storm would have brought ice with it. Nicole thought that might be the case here as well.

Even the fever wasn’t enough to keep her warm in that. She put on the thick wool cloak that had lain in the drawer since she’d come to Carnuntum. She put on socks, too. Even with them, she shivered. She would have been cold had she been healthy. Sick as she was, she felt as if she were walking naked through a meat locker in a supermarket.

No supermarkets. No meat lockers. No way to get warm, either.

From somewhere, Julia dug out a couple of square brass contraptions. They looked like hibachis. “Time to light the braziers,” she said. She filled them with charcoal and got them going. When Nicole stood right next to one, she almost started to thaw. When she moved more than two feet away, she froze solid again. She remembered Indianapolis, and getting the furnace going, and staying warm no matter how cold the winter got.

But she seemed to remember – hadn’t the Romans had central heating?

Not here. Not for the poor, at least. Braziers – the space heaters of this world – were all anyone had.

The next day was more of the same, only worse: maybe because the bad weather lingered, maybe because Nicole couldn’t escape the truth. She was sicker. Two funeral parties squelched through the noisome mud outside. If the pestilence didn’t get the mourners, pneumonia would finish them off just as conclusively.

That night, Nicole didn’t bother to bar her bedroom door. Some of the last bits of rationality left in her warned that, come morning, she might be in no shape to get up and unbar it.

Her sleep was uneasy, broken with fragments of dreams, stray bits of nightmare, memories so real that she sat up with a gasp. She’d been reaching for a coffee cup in the office, or nuking a hotdog for Justin, or throwing a load of laundry in the dryer. There was nothing romantic about these moments at all. They were relentlessly, blissfully mundane.

Then she’d wake and the manifold stink of Carnuntum would hit her like a blow to the face. No coffeemakers, no microwave ovens, no clothes dryers. No drugs, either, to fight this disease that was eating her from the inside out. Once she actually stared at her hand in the nightlamp’s flicker, looking for the lines of flame that must mark the muscles and the bones. But it was only Umma’s thin long-fingered hand, with its olive skin and its work-worn palms.

She drifted for a long time between sleep and waking, not sure at all that she wanted to wake, but unable to cling to sleep. At last, sleep shrank and vanished. The waking it left her with was a cold and pallid thing. She was shivering so hard she couldn’t even sit up. All she could do was lie there and scrabble feebly, pulling the blankets around her as tightly as she could. Her teeth chattered as if she’d been standing naked in an icy wind.

After what seemed like a very long time, someone tapped on the door.

Nicole tried to tell whoever it was to come in, but the sound that came out bore little resemblance to intelligible words.

It didn’t matter. The door opened somewhat tentatively. Julia’s round Germanic face and big blue eyes peered around it. The eyes went as round as the face. “Oh, no, Mistress,” she said.

Oh, yes, Julia, Nicole thought. She tried to say it, too, because it was surely the wittiest thing she’d come up with in – why, forever. All she got for her trouble, again, was an unintelligible croak.

Julia ventured fully into the room, chattering as she came, as if words could hold the horrors at bay. “When you didn’t come down to open up or to eat breakfast, I was afraid you were too sick to get out of bed. As soon as I get the fires built up, I’ll bring you some warmed wine and some soup.”

Nicole had owned this woman. No, dammit, Umma had owned her. Sick as she was, Nicole insisted on the distinction. Julia could have done nothing, or next to it, and let her former mistress die in bed. No one would have said a word. Not with the harvest the pestilence was reaping. But, in spite of having been another human being’s property, Julia was doing what she could to keep Nicole going. Maybe she was a genuinely nice person. Maybe Nicole didn’t understand exactly how slavery worked. Maybe both of those things were true at once.

Warm wine slid down Nicole’s throat with surprising ease. The soup tasted strongly of leeks, rather less so of salt pork. It was warm, which counted for more than its flavor.

“I’ll look in on you every so often, Mistress,” Julia promised.

Nicole nodded. The soup and wine made her feel a little more alive. But when Julia pressed a hand to her forehead, the freedwoman looked grave, as Nicole had herself when she’d felt the heat that radiated from Julius Rufus.