Household Gods

Not in my backyard, people in Los Angeles shouted when they didn’t want a jail or a housing project or a nuclear-power plant or anything else necessary but unpleasant built anywhere near them. Mean-spirited, Nicole had thought them. Selfish. Deficient in humane impulses.

To hell with humane impulses. Carnuntum was just barely making its way through a pestilence. Death was walking through the streets. Famine stared it in the face. There was only one horseman of the Apocalypse missing, and she’d be damned if she’d wish a war on the city as well. As trivial as they suddenly seemed, she shaped the words in her mind regardless. Not in my backyard. Please, God, not in my backyard.

“Maybe the barbarians are as bad off as we are,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. “Let’s hope they are. Let’s pray for it.” He levered himself to his feet, moving like a much older man. He had to be as worn out as she was. “Here, I’d better do some work. You take care of yourself, Mistress Umma, and don’t push yourself too hard. If you need help, call. I’ll come.” He pulled his hood up over his head, hunched his shoulders, and ducked out into the rain.

She watched him go. He detoured a bit, down the sidewalk to the stepping stones, to cross as dry as he could. He paused when he reached the narrow walk on the other side, as if to gather his forces, then strode on up it and into the shop. He and his father had lived above it in all apparent amity; no squabbles that Nicole had ever seen or heard. And now he was alone.

No wonder he’d paused. It was hard enough for her to go up those back stairs, knowing there’d be one fewer sleeper above, and praying that neither Julia nor – please God – Lucius had taken a sudden turn for the worse and died while she was fuddling about below. What it must be like to walk into those rooms, to know there was no one else there – she didn’t want to imagine it, and yet she couldn’t help herself.

She wanted to leap up, run, make sure Lucius and Julia were alive and recovering. The best she could do was a slow crawl, creeping like an old woman, taking each step with trembling care, and resting every few steps. She couldn’t even spare the energy for frustration. Patience, she willed herself. Patience. That should be her watchword for this whole, primitive, maddeningly slow-moving world.

All through the fall and winter, the pestilence lashed Carnuntum. Both Lucius and Julia recovered – ever so slowly, as Nicole did herself. Losing one in four in her household left her statistically average, as best she could tell. She would have given anything to escape that tyranny of numbers. Aurelia’s absence was an ache behind her breastbone.

She’d taken little enough direct notice of the child while she was alive; life had been too busy, her head too strained with the effort of living in a world so totally foreign. But Aurelia had been a part of the world in ways that Nicole hadn’t even noticed until she was gone. Waking up in the morning, beginning the day, marking its completion by the kids’ tramping down the stairs and demanding their breakfast – without coffee, it had become a waking ritual of its own. She’d become accustomed to Aurelia’s presence. She’d grown fond of the little dark-haired girl with the gap where one front tooth had been, who loved to go with Nicole to women’s day at the baths. Who’d got into Nicole’s makeup box once, and painted herself to look a perfect horror, and been so proud of her achievement that Nicole didn’t dare laugh at her. Who had fought with Lucius as only siblings could, and not always been the one to make up – she’d been the tougher-minded of the two, Nicole had often thought.

And now she was gone, and Nicole ached with the loss. Would she have ached any more for Kimberley or Justin? Had she, ever, since she came to Carnuntum?

Ah, but they were alive, somewhere in time – alive and, if there were gods, and if those gods had any mercy, well. She missed them still, in unexpected moments, or in the dark before dawn. But neither of them was dead. She missed them. She didn’t grieve for them, for the lives they’d never have, or the death that had taken them so ungodly soon.

Their safety on the other side of time was her anchor, the thing that made it possible for her to live in this world without them. She hadn’t known till too late that Lucius and Aurelia had been the counterweight. While she had those two in her care, she could tell herself she had a clear purpose here. With one of them gone… how could she hold? She had to; Lucius needed her, and Julia needed her, and even Gaius Calidius Severus seemed to rely on her presence across the street. And yet she could feel herself slipping. She had to hold on, but it grew harder rather than easier, the longer it went on.