“Maybe more people are believing in it,” the fuller and dyer answered, “but maybe they aren’t. Times are hard, with the pestilence and with the war against the Germans off to the west of here. The world’s not a very nice place right now. When things go bad in this world, it’s only natural for people to worry more about the next one. And if that Christian nonsense were true, it’d be easier to have a happy afterlife as a Christian than any other way I can think of. No wonder light-minded folks drift that way.”
So there, Nicole thought. The annoying thing was that, as he had a way of doing, Calidius Severus made a lot of sense. His own Mithraism, for instance, seemed to be for men only, and especially for soldiers. From what the men at Fabia Ursa’s funeral had said, Isis-worship was a women’s cult. Would Christianity triumph for no better reason than that it was the religion of the lowest common denominator, the network television of its day?
Whatever the reason, she knew Christianity had triumphed – would triumph. Did Calidius’ argument mean it had triumphed in part because more hard times were ahead for the Roman Empire? If they were, how soon? Not for the first time, she caught herself wishing she’d paid a lot more attention to history. If she had, she might know more about the world and times in which she was living.
She hadn’t answered Calidius Severus, and she didn’t have an easy answer handy. Julia grinned at her. “He’s got you, Mistress Umma.”
“And glad of it, too,” Calidius Severus said with a grin just as wide and rather more wicked.
Nicole bit her lip and tried not to look as if she were fretting. If she had any more good to say of Christianity, both of them would start to wonder why.
She chose a safer way out. “Titus told me once I sounded like a philosopher. Now I get to tell him the same thing.”
“What? Me? An old soldier up to his elbows in piss? I get to tell you that’s nonsense. ‘ He sounded gruff, almost angry. Underneath that, he sounded very pleased. He threw another piece of walnut shell at Lucius. Lucius, greatly daring, threw it back. Titus Calidius Severus laughed. Nobody talked anymore about religion, Christian or otherwise.
Two days later, Brigomarus came into the tavern again. The look in his eyes, blank and shellshocked, told her what he was going to say before he said it. She didn’t like him, let alone love him, but he was a creature in pain. “Here.” She dipped a cup of wine. “Drink this.”
“You’re sure you can spare such largess for your family?” The sarcasm didn’t keep him from taking the wine or from draining it in a gulp. It seemed to steady him. He let out a long, shuddering sigh, then gave her the news she expected: “She’s gone. It was peaceful, at the end. She breathed, then she stopped for a bit, and then, when I thought it was over, she breathed one more time, and that was the last.”
Nicole didn’t imagine that he told her this for her own sake. It was something he needed to remember, and to repeat to himself. “I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” she said truthfully. Then, remembering what Calidius Severus had said, she added, “I hope she’s happy in the next world.”
“The gods grant it be so,” Brigomarus said, and fell silent, staring down into his empty cup. Nicole didn’t choose to take the hint, if hint it was. Maybe he was simply preoccupied.
At length he said the other thing that weighed on his mind. “I’m afraid Flavius Probus is coming down with it.”
“I’m sorry,” Nicole said. She had very little use for Ila’s husband, but this wasn’t a disease she’d wish on anyone. “I hope he gets better. Some people do.”
“Yes, some people do.” Brigomarus looked at Nicole as if he was trying hard not to hate her. And what did he think she’d done now? With the air of a man who has run out of patience, he flung words at her. “This is our mother, Umma.”
So. She wasn’t acting mournful enough to suit him. And acting was what it would have to be. She hadn’t known Atpomara well, and certainly hadn’t liked her. But that didn’t remove the essential fact. As long as she wore Umma’s body, she had to act as Umma would be expected to act. She tried to imagine how she’d feel if her own mother died. The parallel wasn’t too far off: even in West Hills, she’d been distant in space and time and interests, and, since the divorce, the distance had grown worse. Sometimes she thought her mother regarded divorce as a fundamental moral failure – her own as much as Nicole’s.
Still, if her mother had died, she’d grieve. It was as Brigo had said: that was her mother.
Out of all that, she drew a sigh that shook a little, and rubbed her eyes that ached with tiredness and stress. “I’m sorry, “ she said. “It’s just… it doesn’t feel real. So many people are dying, so much death, till everybody’s numb. And to have her gone, of all people – didn’t we used to think she’d outlive us all?”
That was a gamble, a stab in the dark, but it found a target. Brigomarus nodded. Even so, he studied her. So many people in Carnuntum had measured her with that steady stare, she was about ready to rise up in revolt. At last he said, “We haven’t been happy with you, so I don’t suppose you’ve been happy with us, either. “ There he went, making her explanations for her, just as everyone else did who’d weighed her and found her wanting. “We’ll have to pull together, that’s all, however many of us are left alive after this pestilence goes back wherever it came from. “
“Yes,” Nicole said. That was safe enough, but she couldn’t bring herself to add to it.
However many of us are left alive. There was a phrase that did not belong to the twentieth century. People must have said it in the Black Death, and that was later than this, though she couldn’t remember offhand just how much later it was. This wasn’t the bubonic plague, either. California and the other southwestern states got occasional cases, much publicized on the TV news, so she had an idea of the symptoms, and these weren’t it. But this other plague, whatever it was, was hitting the whole Roman Empire just as the Black Death had hit medieval Europe.
Brigomarus was clouding up again. For a wonder, she managed to figure out why before the clouds turned to thunder and lightning. “When will the funeral be?” she asked.
“Tomorrow noon,” he answered, easing – yes, that had been the right question. “We’ll start the procession at the shop of Fuficius Cornutus the undertaker – down the street from the town-council building.”
“We’ll be there, “ she said. Lucius and Aurelia, too. From old Indiana memories, she knew the children would be expected to say good-bye to their grandmother. She wouldn’t have asked it of Kimberley and Justin, but these were older children, and tougher, and much more familiar with death. They’d lost their father, after all, and who knew whom else?
Brigomarus nodded, and startled her somewhat by thanking her for the wine. “Stay healthy,” he said as he went on his way. Just after he’d reached the door, he sneezed. Nicole hoped devoutly that he was only coming down with a cold.
Five funerals went on at the same time, here and there across the graveyard outside Carnuntum. Nicole wondered how many more there had been earlier in the day, and how many would follow in the afternoon. Too many – no doubt of that. The gravediggers lay limply on the grass, looking like men in the last stages of exhaustion. They must have taken the job as a sinecure: lie around, drink wine, dig a grave now and then. Now they were earning their keep a hundred times over. Did they get hazard pay? Or did the Romans have any such concept?
The priest who waited at the gravesite was male and not, it was clear, a devotee of Isis. Somehow it wasn’t surprising that Atpomara hadn’t entrusted herself to the women’s goddess. The prayer he gabbled out, in fact, was to Dis Pater and Herecura, deities whom Nicole had never heard of. From the wording of the prayer, she gathered they were consorts, rulers of the underworld. Parts of the prayer to Herecura weren’t even in Latin; the words came to her as mere noise. Did that mean Herecura was a local goddess? Then how had she acquired a Roman husband? Nicole couldn’t even ask: she’d have been expected to know the answer.