Household Gods (43 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Julia wanted to know all about the birthing. “Not that I know anything about birthing babies,” she said. “But maybe someday.”
Nicole widened her eyes. “What do you mean, you don't know anything about birthing babies?” Then, because she'd had a great deal of wine next door, she came out and said
it. “Gods know you've had plenty of opportunity to make one.”
Julia wasn't visibly offended. “Not if I can help it,” she said. “I don't need a fatherless brat dragging at my hem. I smear a twist of wool with pine resin and stuff it up there before I start.” The angle of her eyebrows said that Nicole should know about this rough-and-ready form of birth control, but if Nicole wanted to play at ignorance again, Julia wasn't of a mind to stop her.
Nicole wondered what the FDA would say about pine resin as a spermicide.
Better than nothing
, was her guess. She didn't think a twist of wool would be as effective as a proper diaphragm, either, but it was also likely to be better than nothing. Put them together and they probably made a halfway decent—or perhaps a halfway indecent—contraceptive.
Several times that night, the baby's crying across the alley woke her from a sound sleep. The first time or two, she lay with all her nerves jangling, ready to leap up and look after her baby. But slowly it sank in even on her sleep-drugged senses that this wasn't her baby. She didn't have to do anything about it except listen to it. Fabia Ursa, on the other hand …
Aemilia had left her to it just before dark. Nicole had served the midwife a cup of the two-
as
wine for the road, as it were, and seen her on her way to a well-deserved rest. “And that's if nobody takes it into her head to pop tonight,” Aemilia had said as she headed for the door.
Nicole recalled only too vividly how frazzled she'd been after Kimberley and Justin were born. She hoped Longinius Iulus and Fabia Honorata and the wet nurse were giving the poor woman some help. Nicole would look in on her, she thought fuzzily. In the morning.
She woke with the memory clear in her head, and no sound coming from next door. As soon as she'd got the tavern going and set Julia in charge of it again, she went next door to see how Fabia Ursa was doing. She found Fabia Honorata there already, and Longinius Iulus fixing the dented
pot against which the image of Isis had leaned. With each stroke of the hammer, he winced. He must have the headache from hell, and well earned, too.
The baby lay asleep in his cradle, swaddled like a mummy. Fabia Ursa sat on a stool nearby. Nicole was shocked at the sight of her. She knew what a woman was supposed to look like just after she'd given birth: as if a truck had run over her. Fabia Ursa looked worse than that. Her eyes had a hectic glow that raised Nicole's hackles. “Are you all right?” she asked sharply.
Fabia Ursa didn't respond. It was her sister who said, “You see it, too, don't you, Umma? I'm afraid she's got the fever.”
Nicole couldn't see that either Fabia Ursa or her husband had heard a word that either of them said. She crossed the room and laid her hand on Fabia Ursa's forehead. If the woman wasn't running a temp close to 102, Nicole would have been astonished. Aloud and in some frustration she said, “She's awfully warm.”
“She's burning up,” Fabia Honorata said. Worry made her tactless, or else she didn't think her sister could hear.
Nicole recalled how often Aemilia had slid her hands inside Fabia Ursa, how much pushing and prodding the midwife had done, and how few pains she'd taken to keep her hands clean. If Fabia Ursa had an infection, what could anybody in Carnuntum do about it? There were no antibiotics here. Aspirin? The willow-bark decoction was the closest thing to it, but it wouldn't do anything about the actual cause of the fever.
Bed rest and hope for the best
, Nicole thought. The thought made her uneasy. She hadn't ever known anybody who'd died in childbirth, but she'd heard enough about the mortality rate before the advent of antisepsis. Puerperal fever was nothing to take lightly.
“Is there something we can—” Nicole began, without much hope, but she had to ask.
Fabia Ursa interrupted her. “I'll be all right,” she said.
She didn't sound all right. She didn't merely sound exhausted, either. She sounded sick, with the same whining,
dragging quality to her voice that Nicole's kids had when they were coming down with something. It reminded her so vividly of Kimberley that last day in West Hills, her heart contracted. If she could be back there, right now—if she could be right there, with all the troubles she'd had, and the stink of vomit, and every other delight of that awful day—oh, God, what she wouldn't give to have it all back again.
She'd never wanted it so much. At first she'd been too elated. Later she'd been too busy surviving. Now …
Now she couldn't indulge herself. “I have some willow bark,” she said with a tinge of desperation. “Wait here; I'll go get it.” As if they could do anything but wait. They didn't say so. Both Sextus Longinius Iulus and Fabia Honorata nodded gratefully. Fabia Ursa sat mute, sunk again in that frightening lethargy.
Julia frowned when Nicole asked for the decoction. “Fabia Ursa?” she asked. Nicole nodded. “That's not good,” Julia said. “Fever after you have a baby—that can kill you.”
“I know,” Nicole said irritably. She didn't, not down in her bones where real belief was, but she'd seen Fabia Ursa. That was a very sick woman. Sick, she thought, as a dog.
Julia fetched the willow-bark decoction from its storage place, moving quickly, but not nearly quickly enough for Nicole's peace of mind. She snatched the jar with scant thanks and hurried back to the tinker's shop.
Fabia Ursa had gone upstairs—a good sign, maybe, if she could travel that far: now wasn't it? Sextus Longinius Iulus took the painfully inadequate jar with gratitude that made Nicole want to burst into tears. “Thank you, Umma,” he said. “You're a good neighbor.”
Nicole started to brush him off, but caught herself. He needed to be grateful more than she needed to be comfortable about it. “I'll bring you a loaf of bread every day,” she said, “and food your wife might like. All you'll have to worry about is getting her well.”
She'd done it now: he looked ready to fall at her feet. “You are the best of neighbors,” he said. “The gods blessed me and my family when they set us next to you.”
Nicole mumbled something and fled. It was cowardly, and she really should have gone upstairs with him to make sure Fabia Ursa took the medicine, but she'd had all she could stand.
It wasn't cowardice, she told herself, not really, that kept her away all the rest of that day and all the next. There was the marketing, there was the laundry, there was a flood of customers that ran her flat out from dawn to dusk. It was two days before she could scrape out enough time to get away. She had managed to send food over, once by Lucius and a time or two by Julia. She'd kept her promise in that much.
She found the tinker's shop deserted. The same pot he'd been mending before, or another just like it, lay forgotten on the workbench. As she stood hesitating in the doorway, a man's voice floated down the stairs: “—warm fomentations on the belly, an enema of warm olive oil, and gruel for nourishment. If she should show improvement, thin, sour wine would be best.”
A
doctor
, Nicole realized. A few moments later he trod briskly down the stairs. He looked like his voice: thin, intense, and profoundly preoccupied. He was younger than she would have guessed. His brows were drawn together. He did not look either pleased or hopeful. With a curt nod in her general direction, he left in a quite unmistakable hurry.
To his next patient?
Nicole wondered.
None of what he'd told Longinius Iulus sounded unreasonable, though Nicole wouldn't have wanted an enema if she felt like hell. But they were all things she would have done for the flu in L.A. They weren't much good for anything more serious.
He was trying to make Fabia Ursa as comfortable as he could, because he couldn't make her well. Nobody could do that, except Fabia Ursa herself. And that included Nicole.
She wavered, debating the good sense of going up to see if there was anything after all that she could do. But in the end she didn't go. She left the loaf of Julia's fresh-made
bread and a bowl of stewed pears on the counter, and retreated to the tavern.
The rest of the day passed in a blur. The night again was broken by the baby's crying, quickly suppressed: the wet nurse was doing her job, Nicole had to suppose.
Fabia Honorata was downstairs in the shop when Nicole went over the next morning, sitting on the tinker's bench, looking as if she hadn't sat down or rested in days. She looked up as Nicole came in, and managed a greeting, but not a smile.
Nicole asked the question she had to ask. “Fabia Ursa?”
“Not good,” Fabia Honorata said, too exhausted for anything resembling dramatics. “She doesn't recognize any of us. She thrashes in the bed. The fever burns her like fire. Pray to whoever you think will hear you. I'd even pray to the Christians' blustering fool of a god if I thought it would do any good.”
Nicole felt as if she'd been hit in the stomach. It didn't matter that she'd been expecting such news. She'd hoped—against hope, she'd known from the start—that she'd find Fabia Ursa sleeping, the fever broken, and everything as well as it could be.
She should have known that this world didn't have much to do with hope. Again she left the food she'd brought, again she fled to the sanctuary of the tavern. There in the comforting smells of bread and wine and humanity, she prayed as Fabia Honorata had asked her to. She did it halfheartedly, self-consciously. Somewhere on the road out of childhood, she'd lost the knack. But she tried. She hoped that would count for something.
That evening, as she was closing the tavern, she discovered what it had counted for. A storm of weeping and wailing broke from the shop next door. Fabia Honorata ran out in its wake, hair awry, tunic torn. “She's dead!” she cried. “My sister's dead!”
 
 
T
HE NEXT DAY DAWNED bright and warm, by no means as common a thing in that part of the world as it was in California. Nicole had come to welcome sun through the newly opened shutters of a morning, instead of taking it for granted. But today, as she squinted in the bright light after the stuffy dimness of her bedroom, the smile died as soon as it was born. There was an empty place in the world, a vacancy where Fabia Ursa had been. She'd been a constant, almost daily presence in Nicole's life, not drinking much, but eating like a teenager, packing it away somewhere in that bird-boned frame. Her voice had washed over Nicole while she went about the business of the tavern, a half-annoying, half-comforting rattle of gossip, opinions, hearsay, and cheerful nonsense. She'd always had something to say to the kids, and had looked after them when Nicole needed an extra hand, without complaint and without asking to be paid. Nicole had found ways: a bowl of stew or a chunk of bread with olive oil on the house, or a cup of wine for her husband if he happened by.
Now she was gone. The funeral was this morning, just late enough to let her open the tavern and yet again leave Julia to look after it while she went elsewhere. Julia didn't object. She liked the sensation of being the owner of the place, Nicole thought; and if she was turning tricks for spending money, she could do it a whole lot more easily when Nicole was away.
Nicole didn't want to think about that today. She didn't want to think about death, either, but death wasn't so easily evaded.
Most of the neighbors had turned out for the funeral procession. They seemed like a decent crowd as they gathered
in the alley, waiting for the body to be carried out of the house, but there couldn't have been more than a couple of dozen in all. Two women whom Nicole couldn't immediately place by name or face took their places at the head of what would be a small, sad procession. They were hired mourners, she realized, in garments artistically rent and with hair almost too dramatically disarrayed. As two strapping undertaker's assistants carried the body out of the house, wrapped in a linen shroud and laid on a wooden bier, the mourners began to keen. A pair of flute-players, one with a large instrument, one with a small, joined in just out of synch. The combined racket put Nicole in mind of scalded cats.
The procession wound its slow way out of the alley and into the broader street beyond. Nicole happened to be close to the front, not far in back of Sextus Longinius Iulus, who walked behind the bier. He carried his son in his arms, the son for whose life his wife had given her own. He looked eerily calm.
Shock,
Nicole thought. It wasn't real to him yet. Later, when it hit, he'd fall hard, but for now he was well in control of himself.
She debated disturbing him now or waiting till later. Later might not come; now was here. She said it, then, and hoped for the best: “Is there anything I can do?”
He shook his head. “Oh, no. The funeral club is paying for everything. I've put in my
sesterces
for years; now it's my turn to get the use of them.”
“Oh,” Nicole said, feeling oddly foolish. “How—forethoughtful.” The funeral club sounded like the closest thing to life insurance she'd heard of since coming to Carnuntum. Not that she could imagine genuine life insurance in a world like this one. The premiums would have been murderous. If somebody as young and healthy as Fabia Ursa could die from a simple infection … If Fabia Ursa could die like that, nobody was safe. Nicole shivered, though the day was warm as days went in Carnuntum.
“We have the babies buried under the stairs,” Longinius Iulus said in conversational tones. “If it weren't for the pollution,
I'd have put Fabia beside 'em, but adults have to go outside the city wall.”
For a moment Nicole wondered how, except by its size, an adult's body would produce pollution but a baby's wouldn't. Decay was decay, regardless of the scale.
It dawned on her belatedly that he had to mean religious, not environmental, pollution. As far as she could tell, all the Romans wanted to do with the environment was exploit it.
The funeral procession made its way through the city to the gate that led to the amphitheater. Once outside, however, it swung southeast toward the graveyard Nicole had seen on the day she went to the beast show. A woman stood waiting there, in a tunic that shone blinding white in the sun. A priestess, Nicole thought. Sexists or no, the Romans had female priests. The Catholic Church rather emphatically didn't, nor did most of the other conservative Christian denominations.
And what does
that
say?
she thought.
“Isis,” a man said off to the side, dismissively. “Isis is a women's god.”
“Well, and what do you expect?” said the man beside him. “It's a woman we're burying. If it had been a man, now, we'd be saying our prayers to a proper god.”
“Mithras,” the first man said. “Yes, there's a god for men.” The way he said it, men were so far above women in the food chain that there just was no comparison.
“And no women allowed, either,” his friend said. “That's a proper god for a soldier, that is.”
They sounded so smug, and so perfectly certain of their god's superiority, that Nicole would have loved to tell both of them where to go, with detailed instructions on how to get there. But this was a funeral procession. All she could do was shoot a glare at the men, who took no notice whatsoever, and steam in silence.
Rather belatedly, she recalled that Titus Calidius Severus followed Mithras. And what did that say about him? He was in the procession: not too far behind her, in fact, though he hadn't intruded on what must have looked like a fiercely private grief. That was a degree of sensitivity she wouldn't
have granted most sensitive Nineties guys in L.A., let alone a Roman of the second century.
As her eye caught his, his own lit up, but he didn't go so far as to smile. She couldn't tell if he'd heard the two men talking. He must have. If so, he wasn't passing judgment, or at least, not that she could see.
Maybe he didn't want to. He was a veteran, she knew that. Should she give him the benefit of the doubt? She shrugged. Maybe.
The procession made its way into the cemetery. It had spread out along the road; now, as it passed among the stones, it formed into a straggling line.
The priestess waited for them. She hadn't moved at all except for the wind tugging at her robes. Nicole wondered how, in a world bereft of bleach or detergent, she managed to keep them so blindingly white.
Nicole needed a little while before she could see past that white and shining shape to the darkness beside it. The priestess stood near the edge of a newly dug grave. The men who must have dug the grave sprawled on the grass not far away, passing a jar back and forth.
Slaves or free?
Nicole wondered.
No folding chairs here, and nowhere to sit but on a gravestone—which no one went so far as to try. The mourners stood around the grave, each seeming somehow to stand a little apart from the others. They'd seemed pathetically few in the city and on the road. Here they closed in and made a sizable crowd. Nicole had to slip between two taller neighbors to keep her eyes on the priestess.
The mourners had fallen silent. Nicole hadn't realized how intensely irritating their shrieking and keening was until it stopped, and she luxuriated in silence. The undertaker's assistants brought the bier down from their shoulders with a little too much evident relief. One's bones cracked as he bent to lower body and bier into the grave. The body rocked slightly, shifting sideways. Nicole caught her breath. But the bier steadied; it sank down into the dark earth.
It hadn't been real before, not really. Somehow that one
bobble, that almost-fall, brought it home to Nicole. Fabia Ursa was dead.
The priestess hadn't moved at all, or spoken a word, or seemed aware that any of them was there. Just as the body sank below the level of the ground, she raised her hands to the heavens. The voice that came out of her was strong, a little harsh, with a flatness in it that was vaguely familiar. So too were the words she spoke. “Queen Isis is she that is the mother of the nature of things, the mistress of all the elements, the initial progeny of the ages, highest of the divine powers, queen of departed spirits, first of the gods in heaven, the single manifestation of all the gods and goddesses.”
It was no prayer Nicole had ever heard before, but it had that odd, familiar feel. “The luminous summits of the sky, the wholesome breezes of the sea, and the lamented silences of the dead below, Isis controls at her will. Her sole divine power is adored throughout the world in many guises, with differing rites, and with differing names, but the Egyptians, preeminent in ancient lore and worshipping her with their special rites, give Mother Isis her truest name.”
Fabia Ursa's baby began to cry. Sextus Longinius Iulus passed him to the woman next to him, a nondescript woman of indeterminate age. She slid her arm out of one sleeve of her tunic and exposed a breast, thereby informing Nicole, and anyone else with eyes to see, who she was and what she was doing here. The baby's cries subsided into gurgles.
Nicole, distracted by the baby and his nurse, had missed a few words of the priestess' prayer, declamation, whatever she wanted to call it: “—take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and cherish it. May Isis take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and comfort it. May Isis take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and give it peace and rest and tranquility forever.”
“So may it be,” several of the people gathered around the grave said in unison. The hired mourners took up their racket again, wailing and beating their breasts. The musicians kept them company with a racket that certainly made Nicole sad—sad that she had to listen to such a ghastly imitation of music.
Fabia Honorata had carried a covered jar to the graveside. Now that Longinius Iulus' arms were free of the baby, she handed the jar to him. He took it as if he didn't know quite what to do with it; then with a start he seemed to remember where he was. He was still in shock. He bent stiffly, and set the jar in the grave beside his wife's shrouded body. “My dear wife,” he said with the same flatness Nicole had heard in the priestess, the flatness of rote, “I offer you food and drink to take with you on your journey from this world to the next.”
His voice was steady. But as he knelt beside the grave, looking down at the shape that lay within it, something in him crumpled. For a moment Nicole thought he would faint, or fling himself into the grave with Fabia Ursa's body.
Of course he did no such thing. He straightened painfully, as if he were a very old man. As he turned his face again to the sun, Nicole saw tears streaming down his cheeks.
That, it seemed, was all there was to the funeral. As Longinius Iulus stepped away from the grave, the two gravediggers woke from what had looked like a fairly complete stupor, picked up their spades, and ambled toward the grave. They didn't pay attention to the rapidly dispersing group of people, nor did they show any notable concern for the solemnity of the occasion. Without a word, they dug spades into the pile of earth beside the grave and began to fill it in. Dirt thudded down onto the shrouded body of the woman who had been Umma's friend, and whom Nicole had liked well enough.
Nicole suppressed a stab of guilt.
Well enough
was a cold thing when she stopped to think about it, but the fact was, Fabia Ursa had been a neighbor and an acquaintance. She had not, in Nicole's mind, been a friend.
Whatever she had been, one thing was certain. “It's not fair,” Nicole said to no one in particular. The others had turned away from the grave and headed toward the gate. They weren't a procession anymore; they were a scattering of individuals and couples, who happened to be in the same place at the same time. Some even seemed to have forgotten
what they'd come for: they were laughing and talking. Nicole wanted to grab the lot of them and shake them. “It's
not
fair! She had too much to live for, to die like that.”
Somewhat to her surprise and rather to her dismay, the priestess of Isis heard her. “The gods do as they please,” she said with the hint of a frown. “Who are we to question their will?”
Shut up, don't ask questions, and do as you're told
. That was what that meant, in the second century as in the twentieth. Nicole couldn't buy it, not here. With any real concern for cleanliness, Fabia Ursa never would have contracted that infection in the first place. With a doctor who knew his ass from his elbow, she wouldn't have died of it. This funeral wasn't the will of the gods; it was no more and no less than ignorance.
She said so, injudiciously, but she was past caring for that. The priestess' expression of shock was almost gratifying—it proved just how ignorant and downright criminally negligent people were in this world and time. “Aemilia is one of the best midwives in the city,” she said, “and as for Dexter, he studied medicine in Athens. Anything mortal men could have done to save your friend, they did. It was no human creature's fault that she died.”
Nicole shut her mouth with a snap.
If I'd had a shot of penicillin to give her, you'd be singing a different tune
, she thought fiercely; but some remnant of common sense kept her from saying it aloud. She'd done enough damage as it was.

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