Household Gods

Brigomarus pulled through, though so narrowly that he looked like a ghost of himself. Ila died – which Nicole had a great deal of difficulty pretending to be sorry for. Tabica and Pacatus never took sick at all.

Nicole heard that with almost resentful envy. She was glad they didn’t come to the tavern to flaunt the accident of their good health. Brigomarus came, more than once, never very cordially, but as he said, family was family. And maybe he wasn’t terribly fond of his sister and her stick of a husband, either. Umma, or Nicole in Umma’s body, might actually be preferable, day for day and scowl for scowl.

Some of her neighbors and customers came through the sickness better than Umma’s family had. The wet nurse had brought the pestilence into Sextus Longinius lulus’ house, but both he and his son escaped it. Sometimes he would bring the baby with him when he came over for a cup of wine or a bowl of whatever Nicole or Julia had on the menu. Longinius lulus the younger was a happy baby. He was always smiling or gurgling with laughter. He knew nothing of pestilence, or of death. For that, Nicole envied him.

Ofanius Valens, that cheerful little man, bounced back fast from his dose of the sickness. He came in nearly every day, bringing this dainty or that for Julia: figs candied in honey, cuts of ham that were more fat than meat. He was perfectly open as to his motive. “Got to put some flesh on you, sweetheart,” he said to Julia in Nicole’s hearing. “You’re nothing but skin and bones. I’m not too terribly fond of lying on a ladder.”

He was fattening her like a goose. Nicole wanted to get angry at him, and at Julia, too. She did manage a small flare of temper, but it died down as soon as it rose. It was the sickness, she told herself. It left behind a lassitude that was terribly slow to pass.

That was even true – to a degree. She had neither the energy nor the inclination for a truly towering outrage. And if she had – what could she do? Short of throwing Julia into her room and walling up the entrance, she didn’t see how she could keep the freedwoman from doing what she obviously wanted to do.

Lassitude or no, Nicole kept a weather eye on Lucius. If he so much as headed for the door, she pounced. “Have you got your heavy cloak on? Put the hood up, you’ll freeze. Go back and put on your socks!”

He put up with it better than she would ever have expected from a boy his age: for the first day or two he suffered without complaint, but on the third day, as she came swooping out of the upper reaches with an extra pair of socks in hand, he planted his feet and put on a ferocious scowl. “Mother! I’m not made of glass. I won’t break.”

“Maybe you won’t,” she fired back, “but you’re all I’ve got in this world. I’m going to look out for you, and that’s that.”

He rolled his eyes and shook his shoulders – less a shrug than a shedding of her suffocating concern – and ran off to play with the remnants of the old noisy gang of neighborhood boys. As children will, he was recovering much faster than an adult. He came in from playing earlier than he used to, and fell into bed without even token protest, but his appetite was voracious and he was gaining strength by the day.

“Mind you don’t get wet!” she called after him, “or I’ll give you something to remember it by.”

He didn’t even acknowledge the threat. Brat. He knew she wasn’t up to chasing after him and giving him the swat he deserved, either.

Nicole stood with the socks still in her hand, turning and twisting them in her fingers. The rough burn of knitted wool kept part of her mind in the world where it belonged, but the rest was wandering afield.

All I’ve got in this world. If Nicole was in fact descended from Umma, that was true in more ways than she could explain to Lucius. If something happened to him, if the chain broke, what would become of her? Would she disappear? Would it be as if she had never been? There was no way to tell, and no way she wanted to test it. She’d keep Lucius safe whether he wanted it or no, for her sake as well as his own.

The price of grain rose. It never got above a level she could afford, but it did rise enough that she had to charge more for bread. Customers grumbled. She lost a few, but they came back when they discovered that bread wasn’t any cheaper elsewhere. “It’s criminal,” one of them said, “but you still make the best loaf in Carnuntum.”

“You get what you pay for,” Nicole said – and was a little startled by the pause, the stare as he worked it out, and then the burst of laughter. Another twentieth-century cliche that people here had never heard before.