Household Gods

The touch didn’t hurt, but it felt strange, as if there should be pain somewhere: an odd, twitchy, uncomfortable feeling. When Julia left the room, through the fog that blurred Nicole’s sight these days, she saw the slow headshake, and the slight slump of the wide meaty shoulders.

On the way downstairs, Julia sneezed and then coughed, twice in a row.

Julia, too. Nicole didn’t know why she should be surprised. Part of her tried to grieve, or at least to be scared, but she was too weak for either. She’d begun to shiver again under the blankets and the heavy cloaks. Her wits drifted away. This time, she lacked the strength of will or the strength of body to call them back. They were going. She wasn’t. Her eyes slid closed.

Sometime later – she had no idea how long – she found herself floating weightlessly above the body she’d been inhabiting. Its face was reddened and roughened with the telltale rash of the pestilence. Its chest still rose and fell, rose and fell, shallow but steady. She could feel the heat coming off the body, and yet, every now and again, it shivered.

From her vantage above it all, she wondered how Titus Calidius Severus was doing. As quickly, as easily as that, she was no longer hovering above her body, but above his. He writhed and tossed in a bed not too different from her own – and why, she asked herself, hadn’t she ever seen it before? Now and then, a hoarse cry escaped him. Anger, it might have been, or alarm, or remembered battle. His face and neck bore the same scarlet marks as Umma’s cheeks and chin and forehead.

Sextus Longinius lulus’ baby, she thought. She didn’t know why it mattered, but she wanted to see him, to see how he was. No sooner had the thought crossed her mind, than she was in the tinker’s house. And there was the baby, nursing at the fat pale breast of a woman who looked more nearly Irish than Roman. Baby and nurse both seemed healthy: no coughing or sneezing, and no rash on face or breast.

That sight comforted Nicole more than she’d thought possible. Even knowing the sickness could strike those two within the day, even within the hour, she still was glad to see them safe. The next thing, the thing she should have done, to look in on her own – Umma’s own – children, she couldn’t bring herself to do. If they were well, then that was well. If they weren’t, she didn’t want to know. She couldn’t do anything to help them. And she’d drive herself wild, like a bird against a window, beating and beating herself for no purpose at all.

She was drifting while she maundered, floating as if in water. One way and another, she found herself once more above Umma’s body. As unattractive as the prospect was, she knew she should find her way back into it. Spirit belonged in body. Spirit alone was air and nothingness. Was – dead.

But when she tried to slip back as she’d slipped out, it was like pressing one pole of a magnet into the same pole of another. Some force thrust her softly but irresistibly back, as if to tell her, This place is not safe for you.

Had Umma’s mother journeyed like this? Was that how she’d known a stranger looked out at her from her daughter’s eyes? If Atpomara had done that, she had managed to rejoin her body. And then, almost at once, she had died.

Nicole’s mind in its disembodied state was more distractable even than it had been through the haze of fever. It fled the thought of Atpomara, and Atpomara’s death, toward the much wider world. If Carnuntum was in such straits, all the way out by the Danube, what was it like in Rome itself?

Somewhat to her dismay, she didn’t shift to the imperial capital. She’d left the tavern behind, but escaped only as far as the amphitheater, to the seat from which she’d watched the mime show with Titus Calidius Severus. From there she looked south, across the fields to the darkness of a forest that, some part of her knew, went on for miles. That was as close as she’d come to Rome. It was as far in that direction as her spirit could go.

And where else could she go? Her mind stretched across alternatives, and seized on the wildest one, the one she’d have thought craziest of all if she’d heard this story from the comfort of West Hills. God – gods, how she wished Liber and Libera had never brought her to Carnuntum.

And there they were, floating before her in a vast expanse of nothingness. They looked just as they had on the memorial plaque beside her soft, clean, blessedly vermin-free California bed: rather plump, naked, and pleased with themselves. Their eyes were fixed on some rosy distance, far away from Nicole and her inescapably mortal self.