He nodded, a little too vigorously. “Maybe it won’t,” he said. He reached to take her hand just as she reached to take his. They clung to each other as they made their way through the clamor and stinks, the flies and smoke of Carnuntum.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she said again, in the street in front of the tavern. But she knew what crouched there in the dark, however loud she whistled. She gave it a name: “I’m scared.”
“So am I, “ Titus Calidius Severus said.
13
For a day or two, nothing much happened. Nobody fell over dead in front of the tavern. None of Nicole’s customers brought in rumors that people were dropping dead anywhere else in Carnuntum. She began to hope Dexter was wrong after all. As Titus Calidius Severus had said, doctors didn’t know everything. That was true in the twentieth century, and a hell of a lot truer here in the second.
When she went to the market, it seemed she heard an awful lot of people coughing and sneezing. More people than usual? She wasn’t sure. Her nerves were on edge. She was hypersensitive, jumping on every hack and sniffle.
The next day, when she took Aurelia to the baths, she told herself the same thing. Nobody was looking any more or less healthy than he ever had. Sometimes she even believed it, and held onto the belief for an hour or two – until someone else started sneezing and started a chain reaction, or a walk down the street sounded like a percussion section.
The night after that – the night after a men’s day at the baths – Titus Calidius Severus came across the street at sunset and stayed on after the children and Julia had gone off to their beds. Julia sauntered upstairs with elaborate casualness. Nicole had to work hard not to notice it.
She and Calidius Severus didn’t linger long over the last of the wine. There was so much to say, they ended up not saying much of anything. In a little while they went upstairs, she leading, he following – for the view, she supposed, such as it was. Next time she’d insist on following him. He had a nice ass, as she had good reason to know.
At the top of the stairs, she paused for an instant. The children were snoring in two high, unmusical tones. No sound came from Julia’s room.
Nicole shrugged. Silence would do. “Come on,” she said, as she had on every night after a men’s day at the baths since the mime show. Her bedroom was waiting, and Calidius Severus was in it. She slipped in behind him, and barred the door.
She was easy enough with Calidius now to leave the lamp burning on the chest of drawers while they made love. Her body wasn’t a whole lot in this culture, but in her own it was enough to be proud of. She put some of that pride in the way she held herself. If she could have been really clean, if she’d had access to shampoo, makeup, moisturizers, even plain old soap, she’d have been really something, but as it was, she wasn’t bad. She liked the tautness of her stomach, and thighs that had never heard of cellulite. Her breasts were small and pointed but rather nice, and not too soft in spite of two children – not nursing one’s own did make a difference.
He was enjoying the view, as he must have done on the stairs. She took time to return the favor. He had a good body, better than her own by current standards, and not bad at all for an old man, as he liked to say. The dyes he worked in had stained his hands and arms indelibly, and there were spatters on his feet. They made him interesting. She liked to follow the patterns with her finger, to stroke upward to the clean olive flesh of his upper arm, and across his shoulders where a soft furze of black hair grew, then down his back and around to the rampant thing in front, that Romans liked to call the “little man.” He was ticklish down the line of his spine, would wriggle and fuss if she ran a nail along it, but he loved to be massaged deep and painful-hard in the broad muscles of his shoulders.
There were scars. Sometimes he’d tell her where he’d got them: the arrow in the arm, the sword-thrust that grazed his ribs, the deep pitted hollow in his thigh where the spear had struck. Each one recalled pain that people in her world seldom knew, not just the pain of the wound but the pain of treatment, and no drugs but wine and, once in a while, poppy juice – crude opium, nowhere near as effective as the modern arsenal of painkillers. Wine was the only antiseptic, too, and no antibiotics to back it up. It was a miracle he’d survived, and not only that, that he walked without a limp. “Except in the dead of winter,” he’d told her a time or two back. “Then everything stiffens up. Price of old age, and being an old soldier.”
He wasn’t so old in bed, as she liked to reassure him. “Boys are always in a hurry,” she said. “Men take their time.”
“That’s good,” he’d say then, “because it takes me a little more time to warm up and a little more to cool down, these days.”
When Nicole made love, the world went away. The yammering of thoughts went quiet, and she was spared, for a little while, the constant strain of living somebody else’s life.
Tonight they joined with an urgency that had as much to do with holding fear at bay as with any kind of bodily passion. They clasped each other tight, he driving hard and deep, she urging him on, legs locked about his middle, holding him even after she’d come to climax and felt the hot rush of him inside her.
Only then did it strike her. The twist of wool and the box of resin lay on the chest, untouched, forgotten.
At the moment she couldn’t find it in her to care. Next to the fear she’d lived with since the day in the amphitheater, this was nothing. If she had caught something, so to speak, she didn’t doubt that Julia would know how to take care of it. Unlike the pestilence. The pestilence – it put her in mind of the plague, the great plague of long ago (or a long time coming, from this end of time) – no one could stop.
She was holding him so tight, he gasped for breath. Reluctantly, she let him go. They lay nested in the narrow bed, and he managed a shallow gust of laughter. He groped for her hand and pressed it to his chest. His heart was still drumming hard. “You see, woman? You wear me out.”
Bless him for knowing just what to say, and how to say it, to shake her out of her megrims. She seized on the mood, and let it take her over. It was amazingly easy. She snorted. “Oh, nonsense. If the baths took women every morning and men every afternoon, you’d be over here bothering me every night.”
He poked her in the ribs. She squeaked, then clapped a hand to her mouth. Damn – she’d have bet an amphora of Falernian that Julia was lying in her bed across the hall, laughing her head off.
“Can’t think of a better reason to want to go to the baths,” Calidius Severus said. Nicole snorted again. He went on, “Likely just as well they do things this way. Any man past forty who says every other day’s not easier is lying through his teeth.”
She liked him very much, just then. Loved him? Maybe. But love was easy; it was mostly hormones. Liking was harder to come by. As far as she’d ever known, the handful of men who weren’t convinced they were permanently nineteen would sooner have faced cross-examination by Johnnie Cochran than said as much out loud, especially to a woman. Honesty was novel, and highly refreshing.
Without warning, and without a word, she kissed him. He widened his eyes at her. “What was that for?” he asked.
“Just because,” she said.
He laughed. “Good enough reason for me.”
His laughter didn’t last. Little by little, it leached from his face. She’d been holding onto her bright mood by sheer force of will, but he’d run out of stamina. Slowly, he said, “The attendants had to carry somebody out of the cold plunge today. He had a rash on his face and neck, and on his chest, too. He looked like the woman at the show.”
Nicole went still. If her heart could have stopped, it would have. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“No, I’m not sure,” he answered, but he didn’t sound any more reassured than she felt. “I didn’t see either one of them for very long, and I didn’t get a very good look at them. But the rash is hard to miss – and they both had it.”