No supermarkets. No meat lockers. No way to get warm, either.
From somewhere, Julia dug out a couple of square brass contraptions. They looked like hibachis. “Time to light the braziers,” she said. She filled them with charcoal and got them going. When Nicole stood right next to one, she almost started to thaw. When she moved more than two feet away, she froze solid again. She remembered Indianapolis, and getting the furnace going, and staying warm no matter how cold the winter got.
But she seemed to remember – hadn’t the Romans had central heating?
Not here. Not for the poor, at least. Braziers – the space heaters of this world – were all anyone had.
The next day was more of the same, only worse: maybe because the bad weather lingered, maybe because Nicole couldn’t escape the truth. She was sicker. Two funeral parties squelched through the noisome mud outside. If the pestilence didn’t get the mourners, pneumonia would finish them off just as conclusively.
That night, Nicole didn’t bother to bar her bedroom door. Some of the last bits of rationality left in her warned that, come morning, she might be in no shape to get up and unbar it.
Her sleep was uneasy, broken with fragments of dreams, stray bits of nightmare, memories so real that she sat up with a gasp. She’d been reaching for a coffee cup in the office, or nuking a hotdog for Justin, or throwing a load of laundry in the dryer. There was nothing romantic about these moments at all. They were relentlessly, blissfully mundane.
Then she’d wake and the manifold stink of Carnuntum would hit her like a blow to the face. No coffeemakers, no microwave ovens, no clothes dryers. No drugs, either, to fight this disease that was eating her from the inside out. Once she actually stared at her hand in the nightlamp’s flicker, looking for the lines of flame that must mark the muscles and the bones. But it was only Umma’s thin long-fingered hand, with its olive skin and its work-worn palms.
She drifted for a long time between sleep and waking, not sure at all that she wanted to wake, but unable to cling to sleep. At last, sleep shrank and vanished. The waking it left her with was a cold and pallid thing. She was shivering so hard she couldn’t even sit up. All she could do was lie there and scrabble feebly, pulling the blankets around her as tightly as she could. Her teeth chattered as if she’d been standing naked in an icy wind.
After what seemed like a very long time, someone tapped on the door.
Nicole tried to tell whoever it was to come in, but the sound that came out bore little resemblance to intelligible words.
It didn’t matter. The door opened somewhat tentatively. Julia’s round Germanic face and big blue eyes peered around it. The eyes went as round as the face. “Oh, no, Mistress,” she said.
Oh, yes, Julia, Nicole thought. She tried to say it, too, because it was surely the wittiest thing she’d come up with in – why, forever. All she got for her trouble, again, was an unintelligible croak.
Julia ventured fully into the room, chattering as she came, as if words could hold the horrors at bay. “When you didn’t come down to open up or to eat breakfast, I was afraid you were too sick to get out of bed. As soon as I get the fires built up, I’ll bring you some warmed wine and some soup.”
Nicole had owned this woman. No, dammit, Umma had owned her. Sick as she was, Nicole insisted on the distinction. Julia could have done nothing, or next to it, and let her former mistress die in bed. No one would have said a word. Not with the harvest the pestilence was reaping. But, in spite of having been another human being’s property, Julia was doing what she could to keep Nicole going. Maybe she was a genuinely nice person. Maybe Nicole didn’t understand exactly how slavery worked. Maybe both of those things were true at once.
Warm wine slid down Nicole’s throat with surprising ease. The soup tasted strongly of leeks, rather less so of salt pork. It was warm, which counted for more than its flavor.
“I’ll look in on you every so often, Mistress,” Julia promised.
Nicole nodded. The soup and wine made her feel a little more alive. But when Julia pressed a hand to her forehead, the freedwoman looked grave, as Nicole had herself when she’d felt the heat that radiated from Julius Rufus.
The touch didn’t hurt, but it felt strange, as if there should be pain somewhere: an odd, twitchy, uncomfortable feeling. When Julia left the room, through the fog that blurred Nicole’s sight these days, she saw the slow headshake, and the slight slump of the wide meaty shoulders.
On the way downstairs, Julia sneezed and then coughed, twice in a row.
Julia, too. Nicole didn’t know why she should be surprised. Part of her tried to grieve, or at least to be scared, but she was too weak for either. She’d begun to shiver again under the blankets and the heavy cloaks. Her wits drifted away. This time, she lacked the strength of will or the strength of body to call them back. They were going. She wasn’t. Her eyes slid closed.
Sometime later – she had no idea how long – she found herself floating weightlessly above the body she’d been inhabiting. Its face was reddened and roughened with the telltale rash of the pestilence. Its chest still rose and fell, rose and fell, shallow but steady. She could feel the heat coming off the body, and yet, every now and again, it shivered.
From her vantage above it all, she wondered how Titus Calidius Severus was doing. As quickly, as easily as that, she was no longer hovering above her body, but above his. He writhed and tossed in a bed not too different from her own – and why, she asked herself, hadn’t she ever seen it before? Now and then, a hoarse cry escaped him. Anger, it might have been, or alarm, or remembered battle. His face and neck bore the same scarlet marks as Umma’s cheeks and chin and forehead.
Sextus Longinius lulus’ baby, she thought. She didn’t know why it mattered, but she wanted to see him, to see how he was. No sooner had the thought crossed her mind, than she was in the tinker’s house. And there was the baby, nursing at the fat pale breast of a woman who looked more nearly Irish than Roman. Baby and nurse both seemed healthy: no coughing or sneezing, and no rash on face or breast.
That sight comforted Nicole more than she’d thought possible. Even knowing the sickness could strike those two within the day, even within the hour, she still was glad to see them safe. The next thing, the thing she should have done, to look in on her own – Umma’s own – children, she couldn’t bring herself to do. If they were well, then that was well. If they weren’t, she didn’t want to know. She couldn’t do anything to help them. And she’d drive herself wild, like a bird against a window, beating and beating herself for no purpose at all.
She was drifting while she maundered, floating as if in water. One way and another, she found herself once more above Umma’s body. As unattractive as the prospect was, she knew she should find her way back into it. Spirit belonged in body. Spirit alone was air and nothingness. Was – dead.
But when she tried to slip back as she’d slipped out, it was like pressing one pole of a magnet into the same pole of another. Some force thrust her softly but irresistibly back, as if to tell her, This place is not safe for you.
Had Umma’s mother journeyed like this? Was that how she’d known a stranger looked out at her from her daughter’s eyes? If Atpomara had done that, she had managed to rejoin her body. And then, almost at once, she had died.
Nicole’s mind in its disembodied state was more distractable even than it had been through the haze of fever. It fled the thought of Atpomara, and Atpomara’s death, toward the much wider world. If Carnuntum was in such straits, all the way out by the Danube, what was it like in Rome itself?