Household Gods

“No, Mistress Umma,” he said meekly. He ate obediently, and drank, with the little widening of the eyes everyone got at the first wonderful taste of Falernian.

Julia sauntered past his table, putting everything she had into it, which was quite a lot. He didn’t look up from the wine. Well, Nicole thought, he isn’t quite back to normal yet. A little while longer, and a little way to go. But he was well on track, and that was good enough.

New Year’s was celebrated not with horns and paper hats but with clay lamps stamped with the two-faced image of Janus. On the morning of the festival, Julia pulled a couple of them from the back of a shelf, dusted them, filled them with oil, and lit them.

“This year,” Nicole said, studying one of the images in the flicker of its flame, “I want to look ahead, not behind. Things will be better. They won’t get worse.”

“May it be so,” Julia said fervently. And after a moment: “The gods know, it would be hard for things to get much worse.”

Half an hour couldn’t have gone by before a funeral procession made its slow way down the muddy street toward Carnuntum’s southwestern gate, the gate that led to the graveyard. Nicole watched it for a moment, then deliberately turned her head. She’d already seen more death in half a year in Carnuntum than in her whole life in the United States. She didn’t want or need to be reminded of it again. Not today. Not when there was a future to look forward to, and a life to live.

Since the day he got up from his bed to savor snails and Falernian, Gaius Calidius Severus had come over every day at about the same time. He was back to paying for his own food and drink, which dropped him down to bread and oil and onions and two-as wine, but he professed himself happy with it.

Today Nicole served him with a flourish, and gave him a smile to go with it. Death doesn’t win every time, she thought.

Better and better: he took longer to eat than he might have, because his eye kept turning toward Julia. Nicole felt the smile stretch – not the least bit lessened by the small shock of realization. She was glad to see his tongue hanging out over her freedwoman again. It was another sign of his recovery – another sign of life, as it were.

That evening, she was presented with a different sign of life, and not a pleasant one, either. The tooth that had been hurting in a low-grade, steady way ever since she found herself in Umma’s body decided it had had enough. Between one heartbeat and the next, a demon picked up a hammer and started trying to drive a tenpenny nail into her lower jaw. It didn’t succeed on the first blow, or yet on the tenth. It was going to keep hammering away, it was clear, for as long as it took.

She’d been eating supper with Lucius and Julia. Julia was still in a daze, smiling dreamily – no doubt remembering her hour upstairs with Gaius Calidius Severus. Lucius, however, was alert, a little too much so. He left off babbling about his latest triumph with the game board, fixed her with a penetrating stare, and asked, “What’s the matter, Mother? You look awful.”

“Toothache,” Nicole said thickly. “Bad toothache.” She twisted her tongue back toward the throbbing tooth and prodded it as hard as she dared. The flesh there was hotter than it should have been, and felt puffy and loose. She nearly gagged at the taste. Without even thinking, she thrust fingers into her mouth and tried to twist the tooth a little, to make it more comfortable. That was a mistake. The demon gave up on hammering nails and resorted to railroad spikes. The tavern went dark for a moment – a darkness that had nothing to do with bad weather, three-o’clock sunset, or miserable excuses for lamps.

She sank down onto a stool. If one hadn’t been close by, she would have settled for the floor. She would have sunk down through that, if it made the pain go away. But of course the pain had no intention of doing any such thing. It had moved in, lock, stock, and railroad spike.

Her fingers had snapped back as soon as the pain hit the red zone. She stared down at them. The tip of her index finger was smeared with something thick, semiliquid, and grayish yellow. After a moment of pure blankness, she recognized it. “Pus,” she said, which could have been either Latin or English. Whichever language it was in, it was not good news. She had to struggle to go on in Latin: “I’ve got an abscess back there.”

Julia shuddered. “Oh, Mistress! That’s not good. No, not good at all. I’m afraid you’ll have to have it pulled. If you don’t, it will keep on festering, and as it festers it will spread. You’ll lose a whole lot of teeth. You could even die.”

“Right!” said Lucius with altogether too much relish. “All your teeth fall out, and it festers and festers, and you fall over dead.”

Nicole narrowly resisted the urge to smack him. “Thank you so much, both of you,” she said frostily – but not through clenched teeth. That would have hurt like hell.