Household Gods

If she wasn’t out of her body any longer, she was still just a little bit out of her head. What had Gaius Calidius Severus said? Everyone here was too sick to take care of her? Julia? Lucius? Aurelia? All sick? All – dying? Flying? Traveling around Carnuntum, seeing the astral sights?

She slapped herself back into something resembling coherence. They were sick. They couldn’t take care of her. She had to take care of them. She had to get – up -

With every ounce of strength she had, she rolled halfway over. The effort overwhelmed her. Unconsciousness hit her like a blow to the head.

When she woke, it was dark. Night, she realized after a terribly long while. That same night, or the one after, or the one after that? She had no way of knowing. Her hand moved leadenly, but it moved. She touched her drawers. They were dry. Gaius might have come in again and changed her without her waking.

She felt terrible: thirsty, hungry, feverish. Steamrollered. It was the best she’d felt since she woke up and realized that there was no way she was getting up to face the world. “I think I’m going to live,” she whispered, mostly because she could. Her lips and mouth were desert-dry, her tongue a sand-coated bolt of flannel. Even so, she heard the wonder in the ruins of her voice.

Her eyes closed again, and she slept – really slept this time, as opposed to passing out. She woke sometime in the morning: light was leaking through the shutters. She sat up. The room spun around her, but she didn’t keel over. After a while, it steadied. Could she stand? The first time she tried, she sat down again in a hurry. But she tried again. Darkness came and went; spots swam in front of her eyes. She stayed on her feet. When the world stayed more or less steady, she ventured a step. Once she’d done that, she had to finish, or fall. She fetched up against the chest of drawers, and leaned against it, panting as if she’d finished a marathon.

She had to look in on the others. She couldn’t stay here. For one thing, there was water in the terra sigillata pitcher by the bed, but no wine to kill the germs in it, and no food. She had to eat. She had to make sure the others were – weren’t -

She couldn’t go any farther for a while, not till she gathered what rags of strength she had. While she did that, she could see how she was. She fumbled in the drawer for the makeup kit, and pawed it open. The mirror nearly slipped from her shaking fingers, but she caught it somehow and propped it on the chest.

Her eyes widened in horror. The eyes of the concentration-camp survivor in the bronze mirror widened, too.

She’d been fashionably slim for a West Hills matron. Now she was skeletal. Skin stretched drumhead-tight over cheekbones and jaw. The rash lingered on her neck and in the hollows of her cheeks. Some of it was peeling, as if she’d had a dreadful sunburn. Someone – Ofanius Valens? – had told her that could happen. She was almost proud that she remembered.

Her hair was like sweat-matted straw. When she raised her free hand to brush it back from her forehead, clumps of it came away between her fingers. He’d told her about that, too. “My God,” she muttered in English. That so much of her hair was dead told her more clearly than anything else, how close she’d come to dying.

The water in the terra sigillata pitcher tempted her – Christ, she was thirsty! – but not enough to make her drink. Another bout of the runs would kill her.

She lurched to the doorway. She had to rest there, leaning against the wall. When she could breathe again, more or less, she opened the door. It was as heavy as the city gate, and about as tractable. Another lurch propelled her across the hall to Julia’s room. No sound came through the curtain. She set her weight to it and pulled it aside.

Julia sprawled across the bed. Light poured across her from a shutter that she hadn’t fastened, or that had come unfastened while she was too ill to tend to it. In her fever, she’d kicked off the covers. Her tunic was hiked up almost to her hips, but a man would have had to be a necrophiliac to want her then.

Still – she was alive; her breast rose and fell in the rapid, shallow breathing that Nicole remembered all too well. She didn’t look ready to stop at just that moment. Nicole went on, fighting to keep her breathing quiet, to concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other.

Lucius and Aurelia lay in their beds. Lucius moaned and thrashed in delirium. Aurelia lay very still. At first, Nicole was relieved. Sleeping, then, and maybe on the way to recovery.

But Umma’s daughter lay too still. Julia, even unconscious, had looked alive somehow, and her breathing had been visible from the doorway. Aurelia lay like a doll that some enormous child had discarded.

Step by step, Nicole made her way to the bed. Her hand shook uncontrollably as she reached to set it on Aurelia’s forehead.

Aurelia did not have a fever, not any longer. Her flesh was cool, almost cold. It would never be warm again.