Household Gods

“I understand why,” Nicole said; and she did. “He was very nice.” She hesitated. Then she said, “And I want to thank you, too, for taking care of me and for taking care of all of us. For everything.”

She didn’t feel like going into any more detail than that. He understood what she meant; like his father, he wasn’t stupid. He coughed a time or two, maybe in embarrassment, maybe in something worse. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “It was easier when you didn’t wake up, but when you did – I guess that meant you were starting to get over it.”

“I think so,” Nicole said. “I wasn’t out of my head anymore after that.” She still felt as if the least puff of breeze would blow her away; she wouldn’t be all the way better for a long time yet. The tears that filled her eyes were partly tears of weakness, but only partly. “I wish your father had made it, too. I wish Aurelia had. I wish -“

“Everybody,” Gaius Calidius Severus said somberly. Nicole nodded. When he spoke again, he almost seemed surprised at himself, as if such large concerns were new to him: “I wonder what Carnuntum will be like after this. “

“Your father told me it was killing one in four, sometimes one in three, down in Italy,” Nicole said. “It’s not over yet, not here.”

“I know it’s not,” young Calidius Severus answered with a touch of impatience, and a touch – just a touch – of fear. “He told me the same thing.”

One in four, sometimes one in three. That wasn’t simply a disease. It was more like a nuclear war. Nicole tried to imagine a disaster on the same scale in the United States. Seventy-five or eighty million people dead in a few months – the country would fall apart. No doubt about it. The different parts of the Roman Empire weren’t so tightly connected as those of the U.S.A., but even so, this had to be a staggering blow.

As if to underline the thought, a funeral procession went by outside, not much bigger than Aurelia’s and even more miserable: the rain was coming down in sheets.

“Harvest wasn’t very good this year,” Gaius Calidius Severus mused, “even before the farmers started getting sick. That’s going to make things even harder.”

“I’ve heard people talking about that,” Nicole said. It hadn’t seemed particularly real at the time, but for some reason, now she understood. No farmers meant no one to bring in the harvest. No one to bring in the harvest meant no food in the market. And no food in the market meant…

Young Calidius Severus laughed. It sounded like a man whistling in the dark. “I hope there’s enough in the granaries to keep us fed till spring.”

“If there’s not,” Nicole said with a renewal of hope, “they’ll bring it in from somewhere else.” But as soon as she’d said it, she saw the hole in it. “If farmers elsewhere aren’t too badly hit by the pestilence, and they have any grain left over.”

Young Calidius Severus nodded. As if it were some kind of game, he found yet another hole, one that Nicole hadn’t thought of: “And if they can get the grain to us. “

No trucks, she reminded herself. No trains. Transportation by land was hideously expensive and even more hideously slow when everything went by muleback or oxcart; she saw that every time she bought a new amphora of Falernian. Mules and oxcarts couldn’t carry that much, either, not when you were talking about feeding thousands of people.

But Carnuntum lay by the Danube, and dumped raw sewage into the river every day – downstream, she admitted; she was always amazed when the Romans paid even the most basic attention to sanitary matters. Barges and boats plied it. If the pestilence hadn’t touched anybody farther west…

Before she made a fool of herself by speaking of it, her clouded memory brought her up short. The west wasn’t safe, either. Even if the pestilence hadn’t reached it, war had. What were the names of the people the Romans were fighting? “The Quadi and the Marcomanni,” she said, half to herself.

Gaius Calidius Severus looked as grim as his father had when he watched the German tribesmen swagger through the market square. “And the Lombards, too,” he said. He peered north past his own shop, toward the Danube, and looked grimmer yet. “I only hope they don’t come over the river here, too, once they’ve had word of all our losses. They’re like vultures, those barbarians. They love to flock around a carcass.”

Nicole shuddered at the image, and tugged at the neck of her tunic. Before she quite realized what she was doing, she’d spat onto her bosom.

He followed suit, turning aside the ill omen. “The pestilence has to be going through the legions in the camp east of here and at Vindobona, the same way it’s going through this city. The barbarians will know it, too. Curse them.”

“Maybe it’s going through them, too.” It was neither compassionate nor politically correct to wish an epidemic on people she didn’t know. But if it came to a choice between pestilence and war…