Still, she was glad to leave that wall behind, and gladder yet to find that the alley opened onto a street, which opened onto one of the long, straight main avenues. That one, she recognized. She was deeply relieved to see no sign of the young Christian with the extraordinary turn of speed.
Titus Calidius Severus was in the tavern, eating walnuts, and now and then tossing bits of shell at Lucius, who thought it was great sport. He had a cup of wine in front of him, from which he’d clearly been sipping. “How’s your mother?” he and Julia asked in the same breath.
She’s not my mother! Nicole knew better than to say. She mustered a sigh, and an expression that, if not devastated, was at least grave. “She’s got it, no question. Maybe she’ll get better. Maybe — “ She shrugged.
Calidius Severus nodded in evident sympathy. “Don’t say it. That way you won’t have words of evil omen on your conscience if — “ He didn’t say it, either.
“Get me a cup of the one-as, would you, Julia?” Nicole sat at the table with the fuller and dyer. He set a hand on her shoulder, reassuringly, just for a moment, then let it drop. She was more comforted than she might have expected, and surprised, because she hadn’t expected to need comfort. When Julia brought the wine, she emptied half the cup in a long, dizzying swallow.
Her trouble wasn’t what they had to be thinking. She felt nothing for the loss of a mother she’d never known, who’d never been hers. Atpomara was a horrible old woman, rude and high-handed, with not a jot of compassion in her. Nicole hated her guts.
The wine didn’t dim the thing that bothered her. She couldn’t forget what Atpomara had said. She couldn’t make herself believe the woman had been out of her head from fever, either, however much she wanted to believe just that.
And there wasn’t a single person she could talk to, whom she trusted enough to share even part of her secret. Titus Calidius Severus would reckon her mad. Or, worse — he might believe her. He’d think her possessed by a demon. Who knew what he might do then? He was a reasonable man, as men went here. But in a situation that went beyond reason, he’d turn on her. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t.
In part to break the silence, in part to turn her mind aside from fretting to no useful purpose, she mentioned the Christian she’d surprised. It was stupid, maybe, but it did turn the conversation onto a new track.
“I’ve seen those scrawls,” Julia said. “I didn’t know what the words say, but I’ve seen the fish and the cross. There’ve been more of them lately than there used to be.”
“There have, haven’t there?” Titus Calidius Severus said. “I can read the words. Bunch of cursed nonsense, if you ask me. The Jews go on and on about only having one god, so how can that god have a son, especially a son who’s a crucified rebel? If you ask me, too many people don’t think these things through. Even the Jews can’t buy this one.”
Nicole had never considered herself religious; if anything, she’d been an agnostic. But this was not just the faith but the culture she’d been raised in, and here was this urine-reeking man with his hands dyed blue to the elbows, dissecting it as if it were just another crazy cult. The nerve he’d struck was almost as painful as the one in her sore tooth.
“If it’s all nonsense,” she asked him tightly, “why are there more Christian slogans on the walls these days? Doesn’t that sound as if more and more people are believing what the Christians say?” She knew it; she had eighteen hundred years of hindsight. Not one of which she could safely claim — but that, for the moment, was beside the point.
“Maybe more people are believing in it,” the fuller and dyer answered, “but maybe they aren’t. Times are hard, with the pestilence and with the war against the Germans off to the west of here. The world’s not a very nice place right now. When things go bad in this world, it’s only natural for people to worry more about the next one. And if that Christian nonsense were true, it’d be easier to have a happy afterlife as a Christian than any other way I can think of. No wonder light-minded folks drift that way.”
So there, Nicole thought. The annoying thing was that, as he had a way of doing, Calidius Severus made a lot of sense. His own Mithraism, for instance, seemed to be for men only, and especially for soldiers. From what the men at Fabia Ursa’s funeral had said, Isis-worship was a women’s cult. Would Christianity triumph for no better reason than that it was the religion of the lowest common denominator, the network television of its day?
Whatever the reason, she knew Christianity had triumphed — would triumph. Did Calidius’ argument mean it had triumphed in part because more hard times were ahead for the Roman Empire? If they were, how soon? Not for the first time, she caught herself wishing she’d paid a lot more attention to history. If she had, she might know more about the world and times in which she was living.
She hadn’t answered Calidius Severus, and she didn’t have an easy answer handy. Julia grinned at her. “He’s got you, Mistress Umma.”
“And glad of it, too,” Calidius Severus said with a grin just as wide and rather more wicked.
Nicole bit her lip and tried not to look as if she were fretting. If she had any more good to say of Christianity, both of them would start to wonder why.
She chose a safer way out. “Titus told me once I sounded like a philosopher. Now I get to tell him the same thing.”
“What? Me? An old soldier up to his elbows in piss? I get to tell you that’s nonsense. ‘ He sounded gruff, almost angry. Underneath that, he sounded very pleased. He threw another piece of walnut shell at Lucius. Lucius, greatly daring, threw it back. Titus Calidius Severus laughed. Nobody talked anymore about religion, Christian or otherwise.
Two days later, Brigomarus came into the tavern again. The look in his eyes, blank and shellshocked, told her what he was going to say before he said it. She didn’t like him, let alone love him, but he was a creature in pain. “Here.” She dipped a cup of wine. “Drink this.”
“You’re sure you can spare such largess for your family?” The sarcasm didn’t keep him from taking the wine or from draining it in a gulp. It seemed to steady him. He let out a long, shuddering sigh, then gave her the news she expected: “She’s gone. It was peaceful, at the end. She breathed, then she stopped for a bit, and then, when I thought it was over, she breathed one more time, and that was the last.”
Nicole didn’t imagine that he told her this for her own sake. It was something he needed to remember, and to repeat to himself. “I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” she said truthfully. Then, remembering what Calidius Severus had said, she added, “I hope she’s happy in the next world.”
“The gods grant it be so,” Brigomarus said, and fell silent, staring down into his empty cup. Nicole didn’t choose to take the hint, if hint it was. Maybe he was simply preoccupied.
At length he said the other thing that weighed on his mind. “I’m afraid Flavius Probus is coming down with it.”
“I’m sorry,” Nicole said. She had very little use for Ila’s husband, but this wasn’t a disease she’d wish on anyone. “I hope he gets better. Some people do.”
“Yes, some people do.” Brigomarus looked at Nicole as if he was trying hard not to hate her. And what did he think she’d done now? With the air of a man who has run out of patience, he flung words at her. “This is our mother, Umma.”
So. She wasn’t acting mournful enough to suit him. And acting was what it would have to be. She hadn’t known Atpomara well, and certainly hadn’t liked her. But that didn’t remove the essential fact. As long as she wore Umma’s body, she had to act as Umma would be expected to act. She tried to imagine how she’d feel if her own mother died. The parallel wasn’t too far off: even in West Hills, she’d been distant in space and time and interests, and, since the divorce, the distance had grown worse. Sometimes she thought her mother regarded divorce as a fundamental moral failure — her own as much as Nicole’s.