Nicole heard that with almost resentful envy. She was glad they didn’t come to the tavern to flaunt the accident of their good health. Brigomarus came, more than once, never very cordially, but as he said, family was family. And maybe he wasn’t terribly fond of his sister and her stick of a husband, either. Umma, or Nicole in Umma’s body, might actually be preferable, day for day and scowl for scowl.
Some of her neighbors and customers came through the sickness better than Umma’s family had. The wet nurse had brought the pestilence into Sextus Longinius lulus’ house, but both he and his son escaped it. Sometimes he would bring the baby with him when he came over for a cup of wine or a bowl of whatever Nicole or Julia had on the menu. Longinius lulus the younger was a happy baby. He was always smiling or gurgling with laughter. He knew nothing of pestilence, or of death. For that, Nicole envied him.
Ofanius Valens, that cheerful little man, bounced back fast from his dose of the sickness. He came in nearly every day, bringing this dainty or that for Julia: figs candied in honey, cuts of ham that were more fat than meat. He was perfectly open as to his motive. “Got to put some flesh on you, sweetheart,” he said to Julia in Nicole’s hearing. “You’re nothing but skin and bones. I’m not too terribly fond of lying on a ladder.”
He was fattening her like a goose. Nicole wanted to get angry at him, and at Julia, too. She did manage a small flare of temper, but it died down as soon as it rose. It was the sickness, she told herself. It left behind a lassitude that was terribly slow to pass.
That was even true – to a degree. She had neither the energy nor the inclination for a truly towering outrage. And if she had – what could she do? Short of throwing Julia into her room and walling up the entrance, she didn’t see how she could keep the freedwoman from doing what she obviously wanted to do.
Lassitude or no, Nicole kept a weather eye on Lucius. If he so much as headed for the door, she pounced. “Have you got your heavy cloak on? Put the hood up, you’ll freeze. Go back and put on your socks!”
He put up with it better than she would ever have expected from a boy his age: for the first day or two he suffered without complaint, but on the third day, as she came swooping out of the upper reaches with an extra pair of socks in hand, he planted his feet and put on a ferocious scowl. “Mother! I’m not made of glass. I won’t break.”
“Maybe you won’t,” she fired back, “but you’re all I’ve got in this world. I’m going to look out for you, and that’s that.”
He rolled his eyes and shook his shoulders – less a shrug than a shedding of her suffocating concern – and ran off to play with the remnants of the old noisy gang of neighborhood boys. As children will, he was recovering much faster than an adult. He came in from playing earlier than he used to, and fell into bed without even token protest, but his appetite was voracious and he was gaining strength by the day.
“Mind you don’t get wet!” she called after him, “or I’ll give you something to remember it by.”
He didn’t even acknowledge the threat. Brat. He knew she wasn’t up to chasing after him and giving him the swat he deserved, either.
Nicole stood with the socks still in her hand, turning and twisting them in her fingers. The rough burn of knitted wool kept part of her mind in the world where it belonged, but the rest was wandering afield.
All I’ve got in this world. If Nicole was in fact descended from Umma, that was true in more ways than she could explain to Lucius. If something happened to him, if the chain broke, what would become of her? Would she disappear? Would it be as if she had never been? There was no way to tell, and no way she wanted to test it. She’d keep Lucius safe whether he wanted it or no, for her sake as well as his own.
The price of grain rose. It never got above a level she could afford, but it did rise enough that she had to charge more for bread. Customers grumbled. She lost a few, but they came back when they discovered that bread wasn’t any cheaper elsewhere. “It’s criminal,” one of them said, “but you still make the best loaf in Carnuntum.”
“You get what you pay for,” Nicole said – and was a little startled by the pause, the stare as he worked it out, and then the burst of laughter. Another twentieth-century cliche that people here had never heard before.
Even with people coming back for the best bread in Carnuntum, business was not what it had been in the summer. Part of that was the fault of the pestilence, but part, she realized, was the season. When she’d come into this world, spring was gliding into summer; the sun rose very early and set very late. Now that was reversing itself. Without the aid of watch or clock, she couldn’t be sure of the days’ length as winter drew near, but they seemed far shorter than in Los Angeles, and in Indianapolis, too. Eight hours of daylight? Nine at the most? Damned little, in a world lit only by fire.
But even that was deceptive, because it assumed the sun shed much light when it did deign to scurry above the horizon. What with rain and sleet and occasional snow and endless masses of dirty-gray clouds and fogs off the Danube that sometimes didn’t break up till nearly noon and sometimes didn’t break up at all, Carnuntum was shrouded in gloom.
The outer weather mirrored Nicole’s inner climate. With the coming of winter, she felt, as she hadn’t since the first days after she arrived, how very much she missed artificial light. No torch or oil-burning lamp could compare to a plain old forty-watt bulb. They barely lifted the skirts of the dark. They couldn’t ever drive it away.
She wanted it driven away. She needed it driven away. It pressed on her, weighing her down. She was always gloomy, always depressed. She couldn’t get herself moving in the morning; she went to bed as soon as the light was out of the sky. She snapped at people for no reason. Her mood was filthy, and filthier as the winter went on.
Sometime in December, a phrase came back to her from the part of herself that she’d shut away in the dark, her lightbulb-lit, daylight-bright twentieth-century self: seasonal affective disorder. If she didn’t have it, she sure as hell had its first cousin. Had Umma been the same way – was it her physiology responding to the lack of light? Or was it Nicole herself reacting more strongly because she wasn’t used to it?
Either way, she amazed herself with how much she could sleep. She might almost have been a hibernating animal. When slate-gray gloom turned black, she would wrap herself in her blankets, and not know another thing till black lightened again toward gloom. After a while even a bursting bladder couldn’t wake her; she slept straight through, woke and half-fell on the pot, and staggered downstairs to scrape out another day’s living.
As December advanced, Julia and Lucius started to get excited about something called the Saturnalia. With all that they said about it, Nicole understood how and why the English word came to be associated with revelry. It was a whole week’s festival, centered on the winter solstice; it celebrated the sun’s turn back toward the north. Sunreturn – inch by inch, day by day, creeping once again toward the long brilliant days and brief starlit nights of summer.
No wonder they made a festival out of it. Even the dim vague dream of honest daylight was enough to perk Nicole up, though the dirty-gray reality of the days dragged her down soon enough.
Then Lucius started dropping hints. “Did you see the game board old Furius Picatus has in his shop around the corner? It’s hollow, and it’s got a set of dice in the middle. Jupiter! The games I could play, if I had that.”
Why, Nicole thought, Saturnalia was like Christmas. People gave presents – and kids dropped hints. A game board and dice were preferable to the latest media tie-in, hands down, no questions asked. So – had Christmas presents begun in the tradition of the Saturnalia? Did they really go that far back?