Household Gods

Even with people coming back for the best bread in Carnuntum, business was not what it had been in the summer. Part of that was the fault of the pestilence, but part, she realized, was the season. When she’d come into this world, spring was gliding into summer; the sun rose very early and set very late. Now that was reversing itself. Without the aid of watch or clock, she couldn’t be sure of the days’ length as winter drew near, but they seemed far shorter than in Los Angeles, and in Indianapolis, too. Eight hours of daylight? Nine at the most? Damned little, in a world lit only by fire.

But even that was deceptive, because it assumed the sun shed much light when it did deign to scurry above the horizon. What with rain and sleet and occasional snow and endless masses of dirty-gray clouds and fogs off the Danube that sometimes didn’t break up till nearly noon and sometimes didn’t break up at all, Carnuntum was shrouded in gloom.

The outer weather mirrored Nicole’s inner climate. With the coming of winter, she felt, as she hadn’t since the first days after she arrived, how very much she missed artificial light. No torch or oil-burning lamp could compare to a plain old forty-watt bulb. They barely lifted the skirts of the dark. They couldn’t ever drive it away.

She wanted it driven away. She needed it driven away. It pressed on her, weighing her down. She was always gloomy, always depressed. She couldn’t get herself moving in the morning; she went to bed as soon as the light was out of the sky. She snapped at people for no reason. Her mood was filthy, and filthier as the winter went on.

Sometime in December, a phrase came back to her from the part of herself that she’d shut away in the dark, her lightbulb-lit, daylight-bright twentieth-century self: seasonal affective disorder. If she didn’t have it, she sure as hell had its first cousin. Had Umma been the same way – was it her physiology responding to the lack of light? Or was it Nicole herself reacting more strongly because she wasn’t used to it?

Either way, she amazed herself with how much she could sleep. She might almost have been a hibernating animal. When slate-gray gloom turned black, she would wrap herself in her blankets, and not know another thing till black lightened again toward gloom. After a while even a bursting bladder couldn’t wake her; she slept straight through, woke and half-fell on the pot, and staggered downstairs to scrape out another day’s living.

As December advanced, Julia and Lucius started to get excited about something called the Saturnalia. With all that they said about it, Nicole understood how and why the English word came to be associated with revelry. It was a whole week’s festival, centered on the winter solstice; it celebrated the sun’s turn back toward the north. Sunreturn – inch by inch, day by day, creeping once again toward the long brilliant days and brief starlit nights of summer.

No wonder they made a festival out of it. Even the dim vague dream of honest daylight was enough to perk Nicole up, though the dirty-gray reality of the days dragged her down soon enough.

Then Lucius started dropping hints. “Did you see the game board old Furius Picatus has in his shop around the corner? It’s hollow, and it’s got a set of dice in the middle. Jupiter! The games I could play, if I had that.”

Why, Nicole thought, Saturnalia was like Christmas. People gave presents – and kids dropped hints. A game board and dice were preferable to the latest media tie-in, hands down, no questions asked. So – had Christmas presents begun in the tradition of the Saturnalia? Did they really go that far back?

She’d always loved Christmas, even when it was trendy to emulate Ebenezer Scrooge. Choosing and buying presents, hiding them, waiting to see the faces when they were unwrapped at last – she was like a little kid. “About the only time you ever were,” Frank had said to her after the divorce. At this distance, she could grant that maybe he was right. But better to be a kid once a year than never to be a kid at all.

Yes, even in a year that had brought so much shock, and so much death. This was a time for warmth, and for such light as there could be. She wouldn’t forget grief, or put the dead out of her mind completely, but she could give herself, at least for this season, entirely to the living.