Nicole had some vague idea that there was a funeral feast – or a collation of some sort, if not quite on the scale of a banquet – at Longinius lulus’ house. Hadn’t Fabia Honorata said as much? Nicole should probably make an effort to go, put in an appearance, as she’d done at Frank’s faculty parties. She wasn’t any happier about this than about those uncomfortable and ultimately unprofitable gatherings.
In the end, she didn’t take the extra steps across the alley from the tavern. She went home instead, and took refuge in the smell of wine and beer and bread, the sight of people eating and drinking and being – yes – merry, and the sound of Julia’s voice calling out a greeting that actually sounded glad. Nicole didn’t flatter herself that it was joy to see her; now Julia would be wanting a break from running the place by herself. Not that she wasn’t competent to do it. She was, and highly so. But it was a lot of work for one pair of hands.
She was laughing as Nicole came in, exchanging banter with one of the regulars. At sight of her former mistress, however, she put on a somber expression, and even managed the gleam of a tear. “How sad,” she said. “Poor Fabia Ursa. Remember how she cried after her babies died? First one and then the other – that must have been so hard for her to bear.”
Nicole nodded without speaking. Hard wasn’t the word for it. How could any woman lose two babies in a row and stay sane, and still want to try again? And yet how could anyone lose two babies in a row and not want to keep trying? Fabia Ursa must have been torn in two, not wanting to lose another, but wanting desperately to have one, just one, that lived.
“And now she finally had one that seems healthy, pray the gods it stays so,” Julia said, unconsciously echoing Nicole’s thoughts, “and she dies herself. Where’s the sense in that?”
“I don’t know,” Nicole answered wearily. “I just don’t know. Maybe things happen for no reason at all. I don’t know that, either.”
“Then what’s the point of believing in gods?” Julia demanded. Nicole shrugged. Julia’s eyes had gone wide as they always did when she was thinking hard and not particularly conventionally, as if she needed to let more light into her brain.
Her eyes narrowed again, shutting off the ray of reason. She shook her head. “You have to believe in the gods. If you don’t, what’s the point to anything?”
Nicole shrugged again, heavily. At the moment, she wasn’t convinced anything had a point. “Pour me a cup of one-as wine, would you, please?” she said. Maybe it would take the edge off her gloom.
Only after Julia had filled the cup and handed it over, and Nicole had drunk it half down, did it strike her. She was using the wine as a drug again, as she had at the beast show. She was drinking to dull her senses. To forget her grief and the anger that went with it. In short, to take the edge off reality.
She had been on the way toward feeling better. Now she felt worse. She set the cup down with an effort that dismayed her. She steeled herself to do something, anything. Wait on one of the customers who’d begun to drum on the tables. Take the bread out of the oven. Check the seasoning in the stewpot.
She’d do all those things. But first, she picked up the cup again, and drained it.
“A good evening to you, Mistress Umma.” The last of the day’s customers ate a salted olive, spat the pit on the floor, and took the last swig from his cup of beer. He set a sestertius on the table and got to his feet. “I’d better head on home, before my wife sets the dog on me when I come through the door. She’s bound and determined that anybody who comes in after sundown must be a thief in the night.”
“Not quite so dark as that,” Nicole said. The sun was setting, and twilight lingered, though for a shorter time than it had at the height of summer. The man had an as coming in change, but he didn’t wait for it. He hurried out the door. Maybe he hadn’t been joking about his wife and the dog.
“I’ll light some lamps,” Julia said behind her.
“Why bother?” Nicole said. She was still tired, and her mood was still black in spite of liberal applications of wine. She’d have closed the tavern after the funeral that morning if she hadn’t needed the money. To Julia, she said, “We might as well shut down. We’re not going to bring in many more people at this hour of the day.”
“More like the first hour of the night,” Julia said. The Romans gave every day twelve hours and every night twelve, too. Daylight hours were long in summer, short in winter, nighttime the reverse. It wasn’t the system Nicole was used to, but it worked well enough, especially in the absence of clocks. The only problem came in the in-between hours, when nobody quite agreed on what time of day or night it was.
As Nicole was turning toward the stairs, someone called from the doorway: “Am I too late for a cup of wine?”
Had it been someone Nicole had never seen before, she would have said yes and sent him on his way. But it was Titus Calidius Severus. She almost frightened herself with how glad she was to see him. “Of course not,” she answered him. “Come in, come in. Julia, light a lamp after all.”
Julia nodded just a shade too eagerly. She lit a lamp and set it on the table at which Calidius Severus had chosen to sit. Then she yawned – theatrically? Nicole couldn’t tell. Julia said, “You’re right, I think. We’re not going to get many more tonight. By your leave, I’ll go on up to bed.”
That was more transparent than any of the glass Nicole had seen in Carnuntum. But ordering her freedwoman to stay down here with her would have been pretty transparent, too, to say nothing of insulting to Calidius Severus. Nicole had seen often enough that he wasn’t the sort who couldn’t hear no. She nodded to Julia without visible hesitation.
Calidius set a couple of sesterces on the table. “Let me have a cup of Falernian,’ he said, “and get one for yourself, too. Fellow came in this afternoon, paid me a debt he’s owed me most of a year. I’ve got a little money.” His chuckle was wry. “Who says the gods don’t work miracles every now and again?”
Nicole didn’t feel like having any more wine, but she didn’t see how she could turn down her friend, either – for friend he was, just as surely as Fabia Ursa had been no more than a cordial acquaintance. As she plied the dipper, the baby next door started to cry. She jerked her head toward the noise. “Sometimes the gods choose not to work miracles.”
“That’s so.” In the lamplight, the fuller and dyer’s frown was full of shadows. The baby kept on crying. Calidius Severus sighed. “Poor Longinius. He’s going to have a tough time now. He thought the sun rose and set on Fabia Ursa.”
“They were happy together.” Nicole carried the two cups of wine to the table, hooked a stool with her ankle, and sat opposite Calidius. She was peripherally aware of tables that still needed wiping, floor that could use a sweeping, and the last of the day’s stew baking onto the bottom of a pot. None of them mattered much, right at the moment.
Calidius Severus took the cup she pushed toward him and sipped. Cheap wine you chugged down as fast as you could, to get past the taste. Falernian you sipped if you could, savoring the rich sweetness. “Ah,” he said. “That’s the stuff.” He frowned. “You’re not drinking.”
She made herself raise the cup to her lips. The wine was sweet. If she didn’t think about lead, if she didn’t think about alcohol, she might even have said it was good. “It was hard losing Fabia Ursa,” she said at last. “That should never have happened.”
“Dexter’s a pretty fair doctor,” Titus Calidius Severus said. “He did everything he knew how to do.”
“But he didn’t know enough!” Nicole blazed at him as she hadn’t quite had the temerity to blaze at Isis’ priestess.
Still, she thought unwillingly, it wasn’t Dexter’s fault, not really. In an odd way, it was Nicole’s, for knowing what would be possible eighteen hundred years from now, and blaming the doctor because he didn’t. The fuller and dyer was right; Dexter had done everything he knew how to do.