She lay where he’d left her, clean, drowsy, and almost warm. He’d been real, then. Her spirit was secure in Umma’s body again, or as secure as it could be with the disease eating away at it. She tried to slip free once more, but the anchor was sunk, the chains secured. She sighed. No more out-of-body experiences — or more likely, no more being out of her head from fever. She’d tried to telephone Liber and Libera, hadn’t she? She could remember something. Lines busy. All our representatives are currently assisting customers. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. A representative will take your call as soon as…
If she wasn’t out of her body any longer, she was still just a little bit out of her head. What had Gaius Calidius Severus said? Everyone here was too sick to take care of her? Julia? Lucius? Aurelia? All sick? All — dying? Flying? Traveling around Carnuntum, seeing the astral sights?
She slapped herself back into something resembling coherence. They were sick. They couldn’t take care of her. She had to take care of them. She had to get — up -
With every ounce of strength she had, she rolled halfway over. The effort overwhelmed her. Unconsciousness hit her like a blow to the head.
When she woke, it was dark. Night, she realized after a terribly long while. That same night, or the one after, or the one after that? She had no way of knowing. Her hand moved leadenly, but it moved. She touched her drawers. They were dry. Gaius might have come in again and changed her without her waking.
She felt terrible: thirsty, hungry, feverish. Steamrollered. It was the best she’d felt since she woke up and realized that there was no way she was getting up to face the world. “I think I’m going to live,” she whispered, mostly because she could. Her lips and mouth were desert-dry, her tongue a sand-coated bolt of flannel. Even so, she heard the wonder in the ruins of her voice.
Her eyes closed again, and she slept — really slept this time, as opposed to passing out. She woke sometime in the morning: light was leaking through the shutters. She sat up. The room spun around her, but she didn’t keel over. After a while, it steadied. Could she stand? The first time she tried, she sat down again in a hurry. But she tried again. Darkness came and went; spots swam in front of her eyes. She stayed on her feet. When the world stayed more or less steady, she ventured a step. Once she’d done that, she had to finish, or fall. She fetched up against the chest of drawers, and leaned against it, panting as if she’d finished a marathon.
She had to look in on the others. She couldn’t stay here. For one thing, there was water in the terra sigillata pitcher by the bed, but no wine to kill the germs in it, and no food. She had to eat. She had to make sure the others were — weren’t -
She couldn’t go any farther for a while, not till she gathered what rags of strength she had. While she did that, she could see how she was. She fumbled in the drawer for the makeup kit, and pawed it open. The mirror nearly slipped from her shaking fingers, but she caught it somehow and propped it on the chest.
Her eyes widened in horror. The eyes of the concentration-camp survivor in the bronze mirror widened, too.
She’d been fashionably slim for a West Hills matron. Now she was skeletal. Skin stretched drumhead-tight over cheekbones and jaw. The rash lingered on her neck and in the hollows of her cheeks. Some of it was peeling, as if she’d had a dreadful sunburn. Someone — Ofanius Valens? — had told her that could happen. She was almost proud that she remembered.
Her hair was like sweat-matted straw. When she raised her free hand to brush it back from her forehead, clumps of it came away between her fingers. He’d told her about that, too. “My God,” she muttered in English. That so much of her hair was dead told her more clearly than anything else, how close she’d come to dying.
The water in the terra sigillata pitcher tempted her — Christ, she was thirsty! — but not enough to make her drink. Another bout of the runs would kill her.
She lurched to the doorway. She had to rest there, leaning against the wall. When she could breathe again, more or less, she opened the door. It was as heavy as the city gate, and about as tractable. Another lurch propelled her across the hall to Julia’s room. No sound came through the curtain. She set her weight to it and pulled it aside.
Julia sprawled across the bed. Light poured across her from a shutter that she hadn’t fastened, or that had come unfastened while she was too ill to tend to it. In her fever, she’d kicked off the covers. Her tunic was hiked up almost to her hips, but a man would have had to be a necrophiliac to want her then.
Still — she was alive; her breast rose and fell in the rapid, shallow breathing that Nicole remembered all too well. She didn’t look ready to stop at just that moment. Nicole went on, fighting to keep her breathing quiet, to concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other.
Lucius and Aurelia lay in their beds. Lucius moaned and thrashed in delirium. Aurelia lay very still. At first, Nicole was relieved. Sleeping, then, and maybe on the way to recovery.
But Umma’s daughter lay too still. Julia, even unconscious, had looked alive somehow, and her breathing had been visible from the doorway. Aurelia lay like a doll that some enormous child had discarded.
Step by step, Nicole made her way to the bed. Her hand shook uncontrollably as she reached to set it on Aurelia’s forehead.
Aurelia did not have a fever, not any longer. Her flesh was cool, almost cold. It would never be warm again.
Nicole wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. She groped for the bird-frail wrist, searching for a pulse. She found what she’d found with Julius Rufus: nothing.
She wanted, very much, to cry. Crying would loosen the knot in the middle of her, the hard, cold, hurting thing that had swelled in her when she saw Aurelia’s stillness. But the tears wouldn’t come. Her body was too ravaged. There was no water in it to spare.
If she was truly descended from Umma, then it must be through Lucius. If Lucius died of this pestilence… what then? Atpomara had warned her.
No ancestor, no descendant. Not just death but nonexistence. Nothingness. Complete oblivion.
She would have been afraid for Lucius’ life even if he’d been nothing to her, but for the dozens, maybe hundreds of lives that would come after him, her fear mounted to terror. She bent over him, breathing hard, and struggling for composure. His drawers were wet and stinking. She changed them and cleaned him, as Gaius Calidius Severus had done for her. He tried to fight her off, but his body wasn’t paying much attention to what his brain told it.
At least, she thought, he had enough strength in him to fight.
Julia didn’t, when Nicole did the same for her. But she was still breathing, and her body was still fever-warm. As long as she had breath and heat in her, there was hope. Genuine unselfish hope, unconnected with Nicole’s very existence. It felt almost virtuous.
One slow step at a time, Nicole made her way downstairs. The tavern was dark and quiet. There were half a dozen loaves of bread by the oven. All were stale, at least three days old, maybe more. Nicole didn’t care. She tore a chunk off a loaf and ate it with a cup of wine, soaking bits of the hard, dry stuff in the sweet heavenly liquid. The bread sat in her stomach like a stone. The wine, though, the wine was rain in a desert. Her body absorbed the moisture with joyous gratitude, and began to bloom.
She dipped up a second cup. When she’d got about halfway through it, the front door swung open. Gaius Calidius Severus strode in in a gust of wind and a scent of rain. The hood of his tunic was up, darkened with wet. Mud caked his booted feet.