Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  Two afternoons later, Brigomarus breezed into the tavern. Luck was looking after Nicole again. She didn’t need to wonder who this casual type was who blew in as if he owned the place. Lucius, who’d been cracking walnuts, shouted “Uncle Brigo!” and tried to tackle him.

  He swept the boy up, tipped him upside down, and bonked his head on a tabletop. Lucius squealed in delight. Brigomarus tipped him back upright and set him bouncing on his feet, and pulled a handful of candied figs from his belt pouch. Lucius snatched them as eagerly as if he hadn’t been eating as many walnuts as he dropped into the bowl, and danced around the room while Aurelia, who’d heard the uproar and come downstairs to see what was happening, fell on her uncle and held him hostage till he surrendered a second handful of figs.

  “Greedy kids,” he said affectionately, planting himself on a stool and thumping the table with a fist. “Let me have some wine, would you, sister? I’d have been back sooner, but they’ve had us making shields from dawn to dusk. The war with the tribes across the river isn’t anywhere near over yet, you mark my words. “

  Nicole dipped a cup of Falernian for him, figuring family deserved the best. Maybe Umma hadn’t been that generous: Brigomarus’ eyebrows rose and he smacked his lips. He downed the cup with as much pleasure as thirst.

  She studied him while he drank. He looked like one of Umma’s relatives, sure enough. He was, she suspected, a younger brother, though not by much. He was a little fairer than Umma, his eyes hazel rather than brown, but they shared long faces and prominent noses and sharp cheekbones. His beard obscured the shape of his chin, but she supposed it was narrow and rather pointed, like her — Umma’s — own. He was rather good-looking, in a lean and hungry way. If she’d been her California self, she might not have wanted to know him; he looked hard and a little dangerous, though his ready smile and easy manner tended to conceal it.

  Lucius pestered him, tugging at his arm, voice escalating into a whine: “Wrestle me, Uncle Brigo! Come on, let’s wrestle, come on, Uncle Brigo!”

  “No,” Brigomarus said. Lucius kept at him, tugging harder, ignoring Brigomarus’ frown and reiterated, “No!” Brigomarus casually hauled off and smacked him upside the head, harder than Nicole had ever hit a child in her life. “Cut it out, kid,” he said. “I want to talk to your mother.”

  Lucius rocked with the blow, but he didn’t start crying or screaming. “Oh, all right, Uncle Brigo,” he said, disappointed but evidently undamaged.

  If he had started to cry, Nicole would have been on Brigomarus like a tiger. As it was, she wanted to yell at him anyhow. It was hard to hold herself back, to be sensible, to keep from giving herself away. Julia was inclined to take Nicole’s odd moments in stride. Somehow, Nicole didn’t think Brigomarus would be so accommodating.

  “What’s on your mind?” she asked him, and hoped she sounded enough like his sister to pass muster.

  Evidently she did. He answered a question with a question: “What’s this I hear about you wanting to set Julia free?”

  Nicole’s heart jumped, but she held steady. “It’s true,“ she said. “I do.” She’d had time enough over the past couple of days to frame a response that, from what Julia had said, a person from here and now could legitimately have made: “I decided that I didn’t want her to have to sleep with customers to get a little spending money.” She kept wanting to say pocket change, but nobody in Carnuntum knew about pockets.

  Brigomarus raised his eyebrows. “What? That never bothered you before.” He sucked on a front tooth, as if it helped him get his thoughts in order. “I hate to lose the money she cost, too — and if one of those customers knocked her up, the brat would bring a nice piece of change.” By his tone, he might have been trying to talk his sister out of a real-estate deal he thought foolish. Like Julia and everyone else Nicole had seen in this place, he had not the slightest sense that anything was wrong with or about slavery itself.

  It drove Nicole crazy. The casual way in which Brigomarus spoke of selling a child for profit made her belly go tight and cold. “Setting Julia free is what I want to do,” she said with unshaken determination, “and I’m going to do it.”

  Brigomarus scowled. “Listen, you know it’s not that simple.” He paused as if to control his temper, or maybe to come up with an argument a silly woman would understand. “Look, Umma, if you’re bound and determined, I don’t want to fight over it. Life is too short as it is. Let’s do it like this, if you’ve got your mind set on it.” He waited for Nicole’s emphatic nod, then went on, “Let her earn more money and keep more money, so she can pay back what she cost.”

  Julia’s face fell. Nicole could make a pretty good guess what that meant: with what Julia could make, she’d never be able to pay for herself — unless she sold her body, and sold it and sold it… That was partly why Nicole shook her head even more violently than she’d nodded, but only partly. She could not stomach owning a slave for one more instant. And there was no way in hell she was going to compromise with the system by taking money from Julia in return for Julia’s freedom. “No,” Nicole said. “I’m going to emancipate her, and that’s that. “

  “I say you’re not going to do anything of the sort.” Brigomarus sounded as revoltingly sure of himself as any senior partner at her old law firm.

  “You may be my brother” — and then again, you may not — “but you’re not my master, so don’t treat me as if you think you are,” Nicole snapped. Brigomarus stared at her as if she, or rather Umma, had never spoken to him like that before. If Umma hadn’t, she’d probably wasted a lot of good chances. “She’s not your slave, she’s mine, and I’m going to do with her as I think best.”

  “As you think best?” Brigomarus1 eyebrows had climbed to his hairline in an expression of comic incredulity — but there was nothing comic about his tone. “And what does that have to do with it? You have a family, Umma, and you seem to have forgotten about it.”

  “I haven’t forgotten!” Nicole said hotly — and honestly enough. She never forgot Kimberley or Justin, either, even in the deep throes of life in Carnuntum.

  She knew what he meant, nevertheless, and couldn’t help a stab of guilt at the actual, if not technical, falsehood.

  “Oh, you haven’t?” Brigomarus drawled. “Not that I’d blame you for wanting to forget dear Mother and our snotty sisters, after they’ve married up and you’ve stayed where we came from, and I know they never waste a chance to remind you of it, either. But even so, Umma, and even if you don’t care what this does to the rest of the family, I never imagined you, of all people, throwing away good money for no good reason.”

  Nicole stiffened her back and lifted her chin. “I’m going to do what’s best for me and what’s best for Julia, and that’s all I’m worried about,” she said.

  She’d shocked Brigomarus: she saw it in his eyes. And she’d shocked Julia, which shocked her in turn.

  Well, she thought, if the second century isn’t ready for a little twentieth-century assertiveness — and only a little, because she’d soft-pedaled it as best she could — too damn bad.

  Stiffly, Brigomarus said, “We’ll speak of this further when you’ve come to your senses. The gods grant it be soon.” He looked into his cup, saw he had a swallow of wine left, and gulped it down. Then he stalked out of the tavern, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. He hadn’t, Nicole noticed, said good-bye, even to the kids.

  “Mistress — “ Julia looked and sounded deeply worried. “Mistress, are you really sure you want to quarrel with your family over me? A family’s the most important thing in the world. If you don’t have a family you’re on good terms with, who’s going to nurse you when you’re sick? Who’s going to take care of your children if you die? Who’s going to help you if you go into debt? If I had a family, I’d never get them angry at me.”

  Nicole looked at Julia as if seeing her for the first time. She was all alone in the world. As a slave, she was more thoroughly isolated from everyone around her than anyone
in the twentieth century could be. That, thought Nicole, no doubt made her look at family with a wistful longing only distantly connected to anything real. You needed to be in a family to know how horrible it could actually be.

  Umma apparently knew. “Dear” Mother and a couple of upwardly mobile sisters, was it? Then they probably didn’t just drop in to visit, the way Brigomarus felt free to do; and that was a relief. It was enough of a tightrope walk to keep Umma’s image going in this tavern and in the neighborhood, without trying to fool Umma’s own mother into believing that Nicole was Umma.

  So where was Umma? Back in West Hills trying desperately to cope? Floating somewhere in limbo? Or — with a jolt that made her gasp — dead? Dead and… gone?

  For now, Nicole focused on a simpler problem. “Don’t you worry about it,” she said to Julia. “Everything’s going to be fine, and Brigomarus will figure out he’d be smart to keep his nose out of things that are none of his business.”

  “How can you say they’re none of his business?” Nicole hadn’t pegged Julia as a worrier, but neither had she presented Julia with a problem that pertained directly to her. “You’re part of his family. They’ll all be up in arms when they hear what you want to do, mark my words.”

  In the United States of the late twentieth century, family was a pallid thing — so pallid that Frank, damn him, could abandon his with hardly a backward glance, and abandon it without disapproval from anyone but Nicole. If anything, his colleagues were jealous he’d latched on to a new, young, sexy girlfriend. And Nicole herself, while she liked her sisters well enough, lived two thousand miles away from them and didn’t call as often as she should, let alone write. She’d hardly thought of them at all in the week before she came to Carnuntum, except to wish she could palm the kids off on them for a couple of days after she found out Josefina was heading for Ciudad Obregon.

  On the whole, Nicole had liked things that way. She hadn’t cared for it when Frank bugged out, not even a little bit, but she’d enjoyed being free herself, ever since she’d got big enough to tell her mother no and make it stick. If she didn’t have to kill herself over money and her job, she liked responsibility, liked being, from day to day, the only one who really took care of the house, the kids, her life in general.

  Julia sounded as if family disapproval in Carnuntum was like being shunned in an Amish community — Nicole had seen something on television about that, and been caught by the intensity of reaction to something that amounted to the silent treatment. Silence was lovely, she’d thought. So was being left alone. She could have used a lot of that when she was growing up, stuck sharing a bedroom with a sister she could barely stand the sight of, who’d grown up into a reasonably decent person but with whom Nicole had next to nothing in common.

  It seemed Umma had about the same relationship with her sisters as Nicole had — but The Family meant far, far more.

  Well. So it did. She d weathered infidelity, shed weathered divorce. She could weather family disapproval, too. She was her own person, first, last, and always.

  She said so, loudly and emphatically. She had no real hope of raising Julia’s consciousness, but maybe, over time and with repetition, some of it would stick.

  Right at the moment, Julia didn’t look enlightened. She looked horrified. Nicole was used to working hostile audiences; it was what a lawyer did for a living. But Julia had a look that warned her to go slow or she’d lose the case. She tried one more time, regardless: “I am my own person. You can be your own person. Family doesn’t have to dictate every breath you take. It isn’t even your family! I’m not worried about it. Why should you be?”

  Julia’s chin was set, her face closed. She wrapped herself in a cloud of flour, slapping together another batch of bread for the evening crowd, immersing herself in work to keep from listening — or perhaps to keep from screaming at her mistress to shut up.

  She visibly relaxed when Nicole dropped the subject. Nicole sighed. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” she murmured in English, and started, painfully, to laugh. Julia’s startled expression only made her laugh the harder.

  Family you could escape, but even in West Hills it was sometimes hard to escape the neighbors. Not that, there, they dropped by and wanted to borrow a cup of oil and stay on for a chat; it was more like hard rock at three A.M. and dog poop in the front yard.

  In Carnuntum, there wasn’t anything at three A.M. but maybe an early rooster crowing, but during the day plenty went on. The day after Brigomarus came to pull his sister into line, Nicole looked up from chopping scallions to find herself face to face with a vaguely familiar figure. It was the voice that jogged her memory, high and rather thin, with a touch of what people in Indiana used to call adenoids.

  The owner of the voice, Nicole realized, was rather obviously pregnant. She didn’t seem to be blooming, but rather the Rosemary’s Baby type: wan and hollow-cheeked, but in this case irrepressibly cheerful. She held up a cup and said brightly, “Good morning, Umma! It’s been absolute days since I saw you. Here, look, I have an excuse. I’m out of oil and my dear woollyhead of a husband has gone off all day drumming up clients, and it’s such a long walk to the market.”

  Nicole was no recent expert in cup-of-sugar diplomacy, but she’d seen plenty of it when she was growing up. If it wasn’t sugar, it was coffee, or maybe, in extremity, a cigarette: a transparent excuse to come by, camp in the kitchen, and chatter the morning away. Housewives did it to lighten the monotony, or to get out of washing the ceilings, or to drum up sympathy for this or that husbandly stunt.

  In Carnuntum, apparently, the medium of exchange was olive oil. Nicole spared a half-instant to wonder if Umma actually gave away what she sold to regular customers, then shrugged and dipped the cupful. Her neighbor, as she’d expected, didn’t just thank her and leave, but perched on a stool near the counter where Nicole was working. It was a slow time of day, as she must have known and calculated. She looked as if she was a regular occupant of that same stool, easy and comfortable — surprisingly so for someone whose pregnancy didn’t seem to be treating her well.

  “So,” she said. “How is everything, then? Do you believe what Valentia got up to with that traveling eye-doctor? Why, I hear her husband whipped her black and blue — then she made him feel so guilty he gave her a new necklace! Imagine that!”

  Nicole hadn’t known she was tense till she felt the muscles of her back and shoulders relax. This was the easy kind of neighbor, then, the one who never let you get a word in edgewise. She didn’t appear to notice anything odd about Nicole, nor did she expect any answer to her rapid-fire questions — just rattled right on through them. There was something strangely soothing in the endless flow of her voice, names and events that were as alien to Nicole as the far side of the moon, but so many of them were familiar, too: this couple married, that one divorced (“And he tried to pretend her dowry was his own family money, can you believe that? Got slapped good and proper for that one, you can be sure!”), a third blessed with a son, “and about time, too, after six daughters — they had to expose the last four, they just couldn’t feed them.”

  The woman sighed. Her face, for a moment, was almost somber. “Some people have children and don’t want them. Me, I want them and neither of my first two saw even one birthday.” Nicole heard her with grim astonishment. Things like that didn’t happen in California. No — they did, but rarely enough that they put you on the talk-show circuit with your anguish. Well, Nicole’s neighbor was on the talk-show circuit, too. She sighed and patted her belly. “This time, by Mother Isis, everything will be fine. It will.”

  On and on it went. Somewhere in the middle, Julia came down from cleaning upstairs, greeting the visitor with a smile of honest pleasure and a delighted, “Fabia Ursa! How good to see you. You’re looking well.” Which gave Nicole a name and a respite, while they chattered at each other for a while — till Julia seemed to remember her status and excused herself to take the heap of soiled bedding and filthy clothes across the stre
et to Titus Calidius Severus, who would trample them in a tub full of water and fuller’s earth. No washing machines or laundromats here. No Tide, either, worse luck.

  Nicole realized as the morning went on that she liked Fabia Ursa. She also realized she couldn’t say that of anyone else she’d met in Carnuntum, even Lucius and Aurelia. It was odd, because back in the twentieth century she’d cordially despised the kaffeeklatsch queens, as she’d liked to call them. Fabia Ursa was a cheerful soul, happily married to a somewhat feckless but much beloved husband, whose foibles she was not shy about sharing. She had two slaves who did everything, as she professed, and had not much to do, it seemed, but trot about and discover who was doing what to whom. She did it with such relish, and with such a clear sense of vocation, that it was impossible to dislike, still less despise her.

  Yes, Nicole liked Fabia Ursa. She was not so sure at all that she liked Titus Calidius Severus. Sometimes she did. Then he’d say something, or do something, to set her off again.

  He waved to Nicole whenever they saw each other outside their front doors. She always answered politely, and she remembered to use his praenomen. Past calling him Titus, however, she gave him nothing he could take for encouragement.

  Although Julia clucked like an unhappy mother hen, Nicole wasn’t altogether unhappy when the fuller and dyer stayed out of the restaurant for a few days after her trip to the market. She hoped that meant she’d made him stop and think. No one, she told herself fiercely — not Umma’s brother, not Umma’s lover, no one — was going to take her for granted here.

  Despite that determination, her nerves twanged like a Nashville guitar string when, two or three days after she and Brigomarus had got nowhere, Calidius Severus walked in with a man about half his age who otherwise looked just like him — and, unfortunately, smelled just like him, too. They sat down together like an identical-twin act, exact same stoop, exact same turn of the head, even the same shift and hitch on their respective stools. Nicole, watching them, felt a small, distinct shock, a Why didn’t he tell me? shock, much the same as if she’d found a wedding ring on Calidius Severus’ finger. But he couldn’t be married, could he? No. Julia had said he was a widower.