“It probably was, then.” Nicole spoke the words like a judge passing sentence. Maybe she was passing sentence – on Carnuntum. She shivered. She’d been shivering a lot lately, though it was summer, and warm enough by Carnuntum’s standards.
When he clasped her to him, she felt the cold in him, too, the chill that had nothing to do with the air’s temperature. He warmed quickly enough, all the way to burning. Over forty or no, he had it in him to go a second round.
“It’s the company I keep,” he said when they’d slipped apart again, each a little more winded than the last time.
“You’re just being sweet,” she said. She could have flattered herself into thinking her own allure made him so randy. So maybe that did have something to do with it. But she knew the sick man in the baths was as much in his mind as in hers.
He yawned. “Now look at me. I’ll want to sleep till noon, and Gaius will have to drag me out of bed to get the day’s work done.” Gaius would tease his father too, probably, about old men and young ambitions.
The lamp guttered abruptly and went out. Nicole cursed: she’d forgotten to fill it before she went to bed. Going to bed with company could do that, distract her from life’s smaller concerns.
Titus Calidius Severus cursed more pungently than she, as he groped for his sandals in the dark. Nicole found her own tunic conveniently near to hand and slipped it over her head, smoothing it down her body. Her hands paused of their own accord. She was all warm still from making love.
Her eyes had adapted to the tiny amount of light that slipped through the shuttered window. She had no trouble seeing her way to the door, or unbarring it and peering out. She listened, head cocked, then nodded. Julia was snoring, a deeper counterpoint to the children’s diatonic scale.
She padded barefoot down the stairs. Calidius Severus followed so close he almost trod on her heels. She plotted a path through the tables and stools between the stairs and the door, and cheered herself under her breath when they both reached the door unscathed. She saw his crooked grin in the light of a wan moon. He hugged her tight. “I’ll get through tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that,” he said. “I’ll just go on and on. Just the way we all do.”
She sighed, and nodded. She, too. There was no other way to get through life in Carnuntum and still keep herself within shouting distance of sanity. “You have good sense, she said.
“Do I?” He shrugged. “What am I doing here in the middle of the night, then?” He started to chuck her under the chin, but caught himself, and kissed her instead. “Kissing’s better,” he said, “after all.”
She could hardly argue with that. It was hard to let him go; hard, maybe, for him to let her go. But they were practical people. They parted briskly enough. He went to his own place and his son and his work. She went to hers. Day after tomorrow, when it was again a men’s day at the baths, he’d be back. She could count on that, as sure and as regular as the clockwork that Rome had never known.
The next morning, when Nicole opened her door for business, the amphorae were out in front of Calidius Severus’ shop. Maybe Gaius had put them there, she thought, until she saw movement inside, and recognized the bristle of Titus’ beard. She felt logey and slow. He must feel much the same. For the first time in a while, she’d have given a great deal for a pot of coffee and a pair of mugs, and a jump-start for both of them.
As she scooped salted olives from their amphora into a wooden bowl, Dexter the doctor trudged past. He had his leather satchel in his hand: not quite a little black bag, but close. On impulse she left the bar, went quickly to the door and called to him: “Dexter! How is the woman who took sick in the amphitheater?”
He paused in his stride. He didn’t seem as annoyed to be stopped as he might. He looked tired, she thought, and pale. Up all night, probably, practicing his trade.
“The woman in the amphitheater?” he asked. “They buried her yesterday.”
Nicole stood flatfooted. She’d expected it. She’d dreaded it. And yet…
He didn’t wait for her to get her wits back. “I’m off to another case now,” he said. “Aesculapius grant me better fortune.” As he turned to go, a storm of sneezing overtook him, and a rattle of coughing in its wake.
Oh Lord. He had it, too. Nicole caught herself wiping her hands frantically on her tunic, though she hadn’t touched him at all. How many people had that woman infected at the show? How many of them were sneezing and coughing, but hadn’t yet broken out with the rash that signaled full onset of the disease? How many people were going to catch the disease in the baths? Just about everyone in Carnuntum went to the baths; they were always crowded. A plague couldn’t ask for a better breeding ground.
Nicole’s last bastion of optimism crumbled. She shook her head and turned back to the tavern. There was a cold feeling in her stomach, and an ache that wasn’t hunger. She was familiar with it from this and that: an accident on the freeway, the California bar exam. It was fear.
Julia was up at last, a little late – and was that a sign she was getting sick? Nicole quashed that stab of worry. Julia was cleaner than she’d been when Nicole first arrived in Carnuntum, now she had money and a little time for the baths, but she still had a fondness for tight tunics and a disgusting tendency to wake up cheerful and stay that way till the rest of the world caught up with her. Or not; Julia didn’t care.
Her curiosity was as sharp as ever, too. “What were you talking to Dexter about?” she asked as she worked flour into the first batch of the day’s bread.
Nicole started chopping nuts and raisins for sweet cakes. She took her time in answering. “We were talking about the woman who got sick when Titus and I were at the mime show,” she said. She didn’t really have to, or particularly want to, but Julia was the closest thing she had to a female friend in this world. She had a pressing need, suddenly, to share the worry with someone else.
Julia didn’t appear to know or care that there was something to worry about. She smiled at Nicole’s use of Titus Calidius Severus’ praenomen. She’d made it clear long since that she thought the two of them were a good match. If she could see them married off, Nicole was sure, she’d be the happiest freedwoman in Carnuntum. “How is the woman?” she asked.
“Dead, ‘ Nicole answered baldly.
Julia didn’t go pale, or reel, or seem at all shocked. “Oh,” she said without much evident emotion. “That’s too bad.”
People in Carnuntum were on very much more intimate – and much more casual – terms with death than people were in the United States of the late twentieth century. Julia’s offhand observation was one more signpost on a well-marked road. She took for granted the possibility that a person could get sick and drop dead, just like that. From what Nicole had seen of the state of the medical art, that wasn’t the least bit surprising.
They worked in silence, in the well-worn groove of two people who’d been coworkers for so long, they no longer needed to think about how they shared this task or that. Just as the bread came out of the oven, the first of the morning’s regulars showed up at the door. He hawked and spat before he came in, and coughed.
Nicole had let down her guard a little. Her stomach had even begun to unclench. Now it went as tight as a fist. Julia, oblivious, served the man his regular cup of one-as wine and his half-loaf of bread with olive oil to dip it in.
As he thanked and paid her, a confusion of distant sound resolved itself into sense. A funeral procession made its sorrowful way toward and then past the tavern. Professional mourners wailed and keened. Musicians thumped and tootled their dirges. Friends and relatives of the deceased straggled behind the bier. They’d gone for an older extravagance than Fabia Ursa’s funeral party had: faces streaked with ashes, tunics ceremonially rent. Under the marks of formal grief, their expressions were set, stunned. Just outside the doorway, one of them said, “But he was so young!”