Household Gods (49 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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“Would you?” Nicole said slowly.
Julia nodded. Her eyes were wide and earnest. What was she thinking of, taking Longinius lulus upstairs as a personal act of charity?
Nicole actually caught herself thinking,
Maybe, the next time he comes and the place isn't busy, I'll find myself an errand to run. Just once. As a gift to him.
She wasn't even
particularly shocked to catch herself at it. Julia wasn't being coerced. She honestly wanted to do something for him, and that something was all the gift she had to give. He'd be happy. She'd be happy. Nicole could live with it, if she had to.
 
On the day when Julius Rufus was due for his regular beer delivery, he showed up as he always did, leading a small and tottery donkey with four large barrels of sour beer strapped to its back. Nicole caught sight of them outside the tavern, in between one customer going out and another coming in, and reached the door in time to see him unfasten one of the barrels from its cat's cradle of leather lashings and ease it to the ground. He tipped it on its side and rolled it into the tavern. She had to jump aside or it would have rolled over her toe.
“Good day, Mistress Umma,” he said as he always did. “Good thing my next stop is close by, or poor old Midas here would get all lopsided.” He laughed, but he wasn't his usual hearty self. He looked as worn as his joke, and his cheeks were flushed. He heaved the barrel up on its end beside the bar, and leaned there for a moment to get his breath back. “Let me have a cup of your two-as wine, would you? Gods, it's hot today.”
Nicole hadn't particularly noticed. After Indianapolis and especially after L.A., none of the summer weather she'd seen in Carnuntum struck her as anything more than warm. A lot of it, today included, didn't even measure up to that.
She slipped past him behind the bar and dipped up his cup of wine. When she turned to bring it to him, he'd sunk down onto a stool. He was scratching the side of his neck between the edge of his beard and the neck opening for his tunic, and frowning. “Has something bitten me there?” he asked her. “It itches.”
Nicole peered at the reddened skin. It wasn't just the scratching that had turned it that angry shade. “It doesn't look like a bite,” she said. “It looks more like some kind of a … rash.” She swallowed. She felt as if she'd just done a
one-and-a-half gainer into a dry pool. Yes, it looked like a rash. The kind of rash that went with the measles. She'd seen it at several rows' distance in the amphitheater, and marked the resemblance. Now, from close up, there was no mistaking it.
Her thoughts must have shown in her face. Or maybe Julius Rufus had been coughing and sneezing for the past three or four days, and all the while done his best to tell himself he was fine, he was just coming down with a cold. As his eyes met hers, they went wide. He knew what a rash could mean. His voice lowered to a whisper. “Is it the pestilence?”
“I don't know,” she lied—a white lie, she told herself. She debated the next thing, but really, if she was going to get it, she would; she couldn't be any more exposed than she had been by now. And wasn't measles one of the diseases that was contagious before the symptoms showed? Whether it was or it wasn't, the damage was done by now. As if he were a sick child, she said, “Here. Let me feel your forehead.”
Obediently, he raised his head and tilted it back. Nicole laid her palm on his forehead. Even before she touched him, she felt the heat radiating from his skin. She had to will herself not to jerk away in alarm. God, he was hot. 104 degrees? 105? 106? She couldn't tell, not exactly. She hadn't felt that kind of fever often enough to gauge the temperature. She didn't ever want to again, either. He was burning up.
“Have I got a fever?” he asked.
She felt the hysterical laughter rising, but she had a little control left. She didn't let it out. Why on earth hadn't he passed out right there in front of her, as the woman in the amphitheater had done?
She answered him, because she had to say something, and he was waiting. “Yes,” she said. “You are pretty warm.”
And the Danube is damp, and the sun is bright, and
… As surreptitiously as she could, she wiped her hand on the coarse wool of her tunic. Too late, of course. Much too late. But she couldn't stop herself. “Maybe you shouldn't deliver the rest of your beer this morning,” she said as tactfully as she
could. “Maybe you should go home and lie down.”
He shook his head, and wobbled when he did it, so that he almost fell off the stool. “Oh, no, Mistress Umma. Even if it is the pestilence, I can't do that. Too much work to do. Besides, I hear it kills you if you're lying down, same as if you're standing up. Got to keep going.” He shook his head again, this time vaguely, as if he didn't know where he was going even if he was going there.
Nicole wanted to shake him, but if she did, she'd knock him clean over. There wasn't anybody around to pick him up, either. One way and another, anybody who'd been in the tavern had managed to make himself scarce. Julia was nowhere in evidence, nor the kids either. She was alone with a very, and perhaps deathly, ill man.
She did what she could, which was damned little. “If you rest, you'll be more able to fight off the disease,” she said.
“I can't help it,” he said with the kind of mulishness she'd seen before in people too ill to think straight. “I've got to go on.” It took him two tries before he could stand up. “Thank you for the wine.” He'd had only the one cup, but he staggered like a man far gone. Which he was—but not in wine.
Nicole stayed where she was as he made his listing, swaying way to the door. She couldn't make herself move, still less lend him a hand. A kind of horror held her rooted, a sick fascination.
This is what death looks like
, a small voice said in the corner of her mind.
The donkey waited patiently under its somewhat lightened burden. Julius Rufus took its leadrope with something that, at a distance and in bad light, might have been taken for his usual briskness. The donkey, well habituated to its rounds, took a step forward. Julius Rufus crumpled to the ground, right there in the middle of the street. The donkey stopped and stood, head low, ears drooping. Very well, its stance said. If one step was all it needed to take, then one step it would be.
Nicole couldn't seem to take her eyes off the fallen man till a shadow fell across his body. Gaius Calidius Severus
stood there, staring down. He must have been watching from inside the dyer's shop.
Something about him, maybe just his presence, freed Nicole. She could move, could make her way out of the tavern and stand on the doorstep while an oxcart rattled and creaked its way down the street. The man in it caught her eye as he came closer. His expression was blankly hostile, the expression of a driver on a California freeway, going where he was going and God help anyone who got in his way. But oxcarts being what they were, wide open and dead slow, he had time to bellow at her as he came on: “Get that cursed drunk out of the road, lady, or I'll roll right over him.”
“He's not drunk, he's sick, and you'll be a lot sicker if you try running over him,” Nicole snapped—with no little satisfaction. On the freeway, you never got to answer back, or if you tried, you got shot.
She was threatening the drover in fine L.A. fashion: Don't Tread On Me, and I'll clobber you if you try. But he didn't get the nuances. His ox had brought him within peering distance of the fallen man. “Gods and goddesses,” he said, “he's got the pestilence!” He plied his stick on the ox with ferocious vigor. The ox bent its head and pressed on at half a mile an hour instead of a quarter, steering as wide around the crumpled body as it could. Nicole didn't see it slacken, but the drover redoubled his efforts once he'd passed the obstacle. The ox lowed in protest. The cart's axle squeaked and groaned. The man in it looked over his shoulder till the street bent and took him out of sight, as if the death in the street could follow him, and be beaten off if it came too close.
Gaius Calidius Severus stood watching him go, just as Nicole had done. When he was gone, the young dyer turned back to Nicole.
“Has
he got the pestilence, Umma?” he asked.
“Yes,” Nicole answered. She didn't try to soften it for him. Maybe she should have. He was her lover's son, after all. But right at the moment, she had no softness in her. She rolled Julius Rufus onto his back, got a grip on his armpits,
and set about dragging him back toward the tavern.
“Here,” Gaius Calidius Severus said, “you don't need to do that all by yourself.” He got hold of Julius Rufus' ankles and lifted while she dragged. Between the two of them, they carried the sick man into the tavern.
Nicole was more than glad of the help, but she wished Gaius Calidius Severus hadn't exposed himself to the disease. She also wished she hadn't exposed herself, but it had been too late to worry about that since Julius Rufus rolled her barrel of beer into the tavern.
She eased the unconscious brewer down next to the wall by the door, where no one would step on him, and thanked her helper with honest gratitude. He blushed a bit and shuffled his feet. “Any time,” he said. “There was too much of him for you to haul by yourself, I could see that. Mithras teaches that a man shouldn't just think what's right: he should
do
what's right”
Nicole liked that. Yet Mithraism, from all she'd heard, had no place for women.
She shrugged. This was hardly the time to worry about the finer points of religious doctrine.
Julia was back in the tavern from wherever she'd been: women's day at the baths, from the look and smell of her. The place was empty of customers, a stroke of good luck for which Nicole was deeply grateful.
Julia's eyes were a little too wide, her stare a little too fixed. But she had wits enough not to burst out in hysteria. Nicole brought her to order with a sharp word. “Julia—do you know where Julius Rufus has his brewery?”
“I—think so,” Julia answered hesitantly.
“I do,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. “I know just where it is. Do you want me to take the donkey back and let his family know he's—indisposed?”
“Would you?” Nicole said. And had to add: “Will your father mind if you take so much time off from work?”
“Not if I'm doing a favor for you,” he answered. That flustered her more than she might have expected. Of course
he knew what was going on. There couldn't be much of anybody who didn't.
Her nod was sharper than his comment deserved. He bobbed his own head by way of reply, with no irony that she could discern, and went to take charge of the donkey.
“He's very nice,” Julia said. “A little too young, but very nice.”
She hadn't thought he was too young when she went upstairs with him on the day of her manumission. Nicole found she'd come to forgive him that, or most of it. You really couldn't expect a man that young not to think with his crotch. It was like expecting a cock not to crow at sunrise: you could hope for it, even pray for it, but it wasn't bloody likely.
Lucius and Aurelia came tearing in from some game out back, and stopped short to stare at Julius Rufus. They didn't know or care enough to be scared, as Julia was. “What's wrong with him?” Aurelia wanted to know. But, tavernkeeper's daughter that she was, she found a logical answer to her own question: “Is he too drunk to go home?”
“No,” Nicole said flatly. “I'm afraid he's got the pestilence.”
The rash was coming out on his cheeks and forehead, developing almost like Polaroid film. Aurelia and Lucius had seen plenty of drunks at the tavern, but a man with the pestilence was new and therefore interesting. They edged closer for a better look.
Nicole caught them both with a braced arm. Lucius stopped, but Aurelia pushed against her, scowling. Aurelia never liked to be thwarted.
Nicole didn't, right now, give a damn what Aurelia liked or didn't like. “You stay back,” she said to the two of them, sternly enough that she hoped they'd listen. “This is a bad sickness. You can get it if he just breathes on you. Stay away from him.”
“But you brought him inside,” Lucius pointed out. “You and Calidius carried him. Does that mean you'll get the pestilence, too?”
“I hope not,” Nicole answered, three of the most sincere words she'd ever spoken.
While she was distracted with the kids, a customer came briskly in. He glanced at Julius Rufus, there on the floor, and raised his eyebrows. “He's got it, has he?” He passed the sick man without evident qualm and sat at a table near the middle of the tavern. “A cup of your two-as wine,” he said, “and some bread and oil.”
Julia served him with a kind of numbed efficiency. While she did that, the kids slipped free of Nicole's tiring grasp, but didn't try to get any closer to the sick man. They did hover, big-eyed, clearly waiting for him to do something—bleed, maybe, or vomit spectacularly, or die.
The customer ate, drank. He paid for his order in exact change, and walked out. Either he was as phlegmatic a man as Nicole had met, or he was just plain callous. Or maybe he was both at once.

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