Household Gods

Nicole wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. She groped for the bird-frail wrist, searching for a pulse. She found what she’d found with Julius Rufus: nothing.

She wanted, very much, to cry. Crying would loosen the knot in the middle of her, the hard, cold, hurting thing that had swelled in her when she saw Aurelia’s stillness. But the tears wouldn’t come. Her body was too ravaged. There was no water in it to spare.

If she was truly descended from Umma, then it must be through Lucius. If Lucius died of this pestilence… what then? Atpomara had warned her.

No ancestor, no descendant. Not just death but nonexistence. Nothingness. Complete oblivion.

She would have been afraid for Lucius’ life even if he’d been nothing to her, but for the dozens, maybe hundreds of lives that would come after him, her fear mounted to terror. She bent over him, breathing hard, and struggling for composure. His drawers were wet and stinking. She changed them and cleaned him, as Gaius Calidius Severus had done for her. He tried to fight her off, but his body wasn’t paying much attention to what his brain told it.

At least, she thought, he had enough strength in him to fight.

Julia didn’t, when Nicole did the same for her. But she was still breathing, and her body was still fever-warm. As long as she had breath and heat in her, there was hope. Genuine unselfish hope, unconnected with Nicole’s very existence. It felt almost virtuous.

One slow step at a time, Nicole made her way downstairs. The tavern was dark and quiet. There were half a dozen loaves of bread by the oven. All were stale, at least three days old, maybe more. Nicole didn’t care. She tore a chunk off a loaf and ate it with a cup of wine, soaking bits of the hard, dry stuff in the sweet heavenly liquid. The bread sat in her stomach like a stone. The wine, though, the wine was rain in a desert. Her body absorbed the moisture with joyous gratitude, and began to bloom.

She dipped up a second cup. When she’d got about halfway through it, the front door swung open. Gaius Calidius Severus strode in in a gust of wind and a scent of rain. The hood of his tunic was up, darkened with wet. Mud caked his booted feet.

He was well into the tavern before he saw Nicole standing by the bar, holding onto it to keep from tilting over. “Mistress Umma!” he cried in glad surprise. “Mithras be praised – you’re on the mend. And the others?”

“Lucius and Julia are very sick, but they’re still alive. Aurelia is… Aurelia is…” Nicole couldn’t make herself say it. Wouldn’t make herself say it. Instead, she asked, “How is your father? How’s Titus?”

“He died yesterday,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. Just like that, baldly, without any effort to soften the blow. Once Nicole would have thought he didn’t care, but she knew better now. He was numb; running on autopilot. Saying what he had to say, and getting it over with. “In the end, it was a mercy. I was going to find an undertaker after I came here. It’ll take some looking, from what I hear. A lot of them are dead.”

Black humor, Nicole thought. It was even slightly funny, and yet she wanted to laugh. A lot of them are dead. A lot of everybody was dead. Butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers. Except they didn’t have candles here. They had lamps. Lamp-oil vendors. Tavernkeepers. Fullers and dyers. Fine and gentle men. Lovers.

She called herself to order. She couldn’t crack up. She didn’t have time. “If you find an undertaker,” she said, “let me know his name. I’ll need him, too. Because – because – “

With the wine inside her, at last, she could cry. For Aurelia, who had become her daughter. For Titus Calidius Severus, whom she had – loved? Yes, loved. For the world in which she was trapped, the world from which she couldn’t escape, the world that was falling to pieces all around her.

Gaius Calidius Severus wept with her. He’d been carrying the same leaden burden, the same crushing weight of grief. Tears didn’t wash any of it away, but they lightened it a little. A very little.

When they’d both run out of tears, they stood in the gloom of the shuttered tavern, in the drumming of the rain, and stared bleakly at one another. “It can’t get worse than this,” she said. “It can’t.”

15

The next day, Titus Calidius Severus was laid in the cemetery outside the city’s walls. Nicole was still too weak to leave the tavern, let alone walk so far. Just crossing the street that morning to sit with Gaius Calidius Severus left her exhausted. But that much she could do, and that much she did. She was glad she had: the young dyer was all alone in the shop, sitting in the reek of ancient piss and the muddle of colors on the floor and walls and on the sides of the vats. He wasn’t doing anything, hadn’t tried to ease his sorrows with work. He was simply sitting there, on a bench by the wall, as she’d seen people wait in bus stations, with a kind of blank and bovine patience.