Ididn’t go looking for a prostitute, she thought starchily. But there’d been that fast-talking son of a bitch who’d made all that noise about being the youngest man in his firm to make senior partner, except of course he hadn’t made it yet, but everybody knew it was just a matter of time. She couldn’t even remember his name. She’d let him talk her into bed just to prove that she could still get a man; that a man could still want her, even if Frank had traded her in on a younger model. Compared to that, a straightforward transaction with a whore didn’t look quite so bad.
At long last Longinius lulus finished his wine. “Thanks, Umma,” he said, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic. “I’ll head over to the market square, I guess. Either I’ll find a wet nurse there who can take on another baby, or else I’ll find somebody who knows one.”
“Ask at Sextus Viridius’ stall,” Julia said. “I heard one of his daughters might be setting up as a wet nurse, since her husband walked out on her and left her with a newborn baby.”
Longinius lulus looked ready to kiss her, but either he was too shy or he had more self-control than Nicole might have credited him with. “I’ll try that,” he said. “Thank you, Julia.”
She smiled. He waved impartially at them both, but mostly at Julia, and left in rather better spirits than Nicole might have expected.
She let out a long sigh. Part of it was sympathy for the tinker’s plight. The rest was a desire to rid her lungs of as much of the air he’d breathed at her as she could.
Julia echoed her sigh. “He’s having a hard time,” she said. “First his wife, now his baby’s nurse – you’d think he’d done some god a bad turn. And yet he’s such a nice man. If I had any luck to spare, I’d give it to him.”
“Would you?” Nicole said slowly.
Julia nodded. Her eyes were wide and earnest. What was she thinking of, taking Longinius lulus upstairs as a personal act of charity?
Nicole actually caught herself thinking, Maybe, the next time he comes and the place isn’t busy, I’ll find myself an errand to run. Just once. As a gift to him. She wasn’t even particularly shocked to catch herself at it. Julia wasn’t being coerced. She honestly wanted to do something for him, and that something was all the gift she had to give. He’d be happy. She’d be happy. Nicole could live with it, if she had to.
On the day when Julius Rufus was due for his regular beer delivery, he showed up as he always did, leading a small and tottery donkey with four large barrels of sour beer strapped to its back. Nicole caught sight of them outside the tavern, in between one customer going out and another coming in, and reached the door in time to see him unfasten one of the barrels from its cat’s cradle of leather lashings and ease it to the ground. He tipped it on its side and rolled it into the tavern. She had to jump aside or it would have rolled over her toe.
“Good day, Mistress Umma,” he said as he always did. “Good thing my next stop is close by, or poor old Midas here would get all lopsided.” He laughed, but he wasn’t his usual hearty self. He looked as worn as his joke, and his cheeks were flushed. He heaved the barrel up on its end beside the bar, and leaned there for a moment to get his breath back. “Let me have a cup of your two-as wine, would you? Gods, it’s hot today.”
Nicole hadn’t particularly noticed. After Indianapolis and especially after L.A., none of the summer weather she’d seen in Carnuntum struck her as anything more than warm. A lot of it, today included, didn’t even measure up to that.
She slipped past him behind the bar and dipped up his cup of wine. When she turned to bring it to him, he’d sunk down onto a stool. He was scratching the side of his neck between the edge of his beard and the neck opening for his tunic, and frowning. “Has something bitten me there?” he asked her. “It itches.”
Nicole peered at the reddened skin. It wasn’t just the scratching that had turned it that angry shade. “It doesn’t look like a bite,” she said. “It looks more like some kind of a… rash.” She swallowed. She felt as if she’d just done a one-and-a-half gainer into a dry pool. Yes, it looked like a rash. The kind of rash that went with the measles. She’d seen it at several rows’ distance in the amphitheater, and marked the resemblance. Now, from close up, there was no mistaking it.
Her thoughts must have shown in her face. Or maybe Julius Rufus had been coughing and sneezing for the past three or four days, and all the while done his best to tell himself he was fine, he was just coming down with a cold. As his eyes met hers, they went wide. He knew what a rash could mean. His voice lowered to a whisper. “Is it the pestilence?”
“I don’t know,” she lied – a white lie, she told herself. She debated the next thing, but really, if she was going to get it, she would; she couldn’t be any more exposed than she had been by now. And wasn’t measles one of the diseases that was contagious before the symptoms showed? Whether it was or it wasn’t, the damage by now was done. As if he were a sick child, she said, “Here. Let me feel your forehead.”
Obediently, he raised his head and tilted it back. Nicole laid her palm on his forehead. Even before she touched him, she felt the heat radiating from his skin. She had to will herself not to jerk away in alarm. God, he was hot. 104 degrees? 105? 106? She couldn’t tell, not exactly. She hadn’t felt that kind of fever often enough to gauge the temperature. She didn’t ever want to again, either. He was burning up.
“Have I got a fever?” he asked.
She felt the hysterical laughter rising, but she had a little control left. She didn’t let it out. Why on earth hadn’t he passed out right there in front of her, as the woman in the amphitheater had done?
She answered him, because she had to say something, and he was waiting. “Yes,” she said. “You are pretty warm.” And the Danube is damp, and the sun is bright, and… As surreptitiously as she could, she wiped her hand on the coarse wool of her tunic. Too late, of course. Much too late. But she couldn’t stop herself. “Maybe you shouldn’t deliver the rest of your beer this morning,” she said as tactfully as she could. “Maybe you should go home and lie down.”
He shook his head, and wobbled when he did it, so that he almost fell off the stool. “Oh, no, Mistress Umma. Even if it is the pestilence, I can’t do that. Too much work to do. Besides, I hear it kills you if you’re lying down, same as if you’re standing up. Got to keep going.” He shook his head again, this time vaguely, as if he didn’t know where he was going even if he was going there.
Nicole wanted to shake him, but if she did, she’d knock him clean over. There wasn’t anybody around to pick him up, either. One way and another, anybody who’d been in the tavern had managed to make himself scarce. Julia was nowhere in evidence, nor the kids either. She was alone with a very, and perhaps deathly, ill man.
She did what she could, which was damned little. “If you rest, you’ll be more able to fight off the disease,” she said.
“I can’t help it,” he said with the kind of mulishness she’d seen before in people too ill to think straight. “I’ve got to go on.” It took him two tries before he could stand up. “Thank you for the wine.” He’d had only the one cup, but he staggered like a man far gone. Which he was – but not in wine.
Nicole stayed where she was as he made his listing, swaying his way to the door. She couldn’t make herself move, still less lend him a hand. A kind of horror held her rooted, a sick fascination. This is what death looks like, a small voice said in the corner of her mind.