Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  “Time to bite the bullet,” she muttered. There was no toilet to run to, and no sink either, just the open front door. She couldn’t even say the words in Latin; she had to resort to English. Latin knew nothing about bullets. Bite the ballista bolt didn’t cut it, somehow.

  Life in the second century was nothing like what she’d expected. One by one, every idea she’d had, had turned out to be wrong. Still, she thought with a kind of desperate optimism, this was a world without bullets, without guns. It had to be safer, didn’t it? It had to be more secure than the world she’d left behind.

  A few minutes after Nicole opened the door, the sun went behind a cloud — a nice, thick, rainy-looking cloud. Clouds like that had been a cause for universal groans in Indiana, but in California they were wonderfully welcome.

  Here, too, after so long a drought — and after a hangover. She beamed at Julia. Julia beamed back.

  That relief — and whatever she got from the cabbage and wine, which wasn’t much — didn’t last long. Lucius and Aurelia came downstairs and started raising hell. Probably they weren’t any noisier than usual, but no way was Nicole up for kid-noise on that scale.

  Nicole told them several times to be quiet, which did as much good as she’d figured it would: zilch, zero, zip. Her head hurt. Her tooth throbbed in sledgehammer rhythm.

  Aurelia stampeded past with Lucius in roaring pursuit. Nicole snagged first one and then the other, and laid a solid smack on each backside. “Shut up!” she yelled at them both. “Just — shut — up!”

  She stopped cold. Oh. God. Her father had done the same thing — the exact same thing — on his mornings after. She looked at her hand, appalled. “I’m sorry,” she started to say. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  She never said it, because even while the words took shape on her tongue, she noticed something. It was quiet in the tavern. The kids had slunk off to do something useful: Lucius chopping nuts, Aurelia helping Julia grind flour for the next batch of bread. They weren’t sniveling or acting abused. They were simply… quiet. And they stayed quiet for a good while. Not forever, but long enough.

  Nicole never did voice her apology. She didn’t like herself much for it, either.

  Were peace and quiet worth an occasional whack? The people of Carnuntum certainly thought so. Nicole never had. She’d sworn when she was a little girl, after her father had left another set of bruises on her mother’s face — and her mother told people she’d walked into a door — that she’d never raise her hand in anger to anyone, adult or child. And here she’d broken that vow.

  When in Rome…

  She was breaking down, belief by belief, conviction by conviction. If the parents of Carnuntum had been transported as suddenly to Los Angeles as Nicole had to Carnuntum, every last one of them would have faced losing custody of their children. Most would have done jail time for child abuse. But here no one looked twice, even when a father was caught beating his son till the boy screamed for mercy.

  From everything she’d read, that should have made the adults of Carnuntum — the grown-up survivors of abuse — a hateful pack of social misfits. And yet they weren’t. They were just people. Maybe they were cruder than people in Los Angeles, but there was no denying the resemblance. Human nature, whatever that was, hadn’t changed. People fell in and out of love, they quarreled and made up, they did business, they gossiped, they got drunk — as Nicole’s aching head too well knew — all as they might have done eighteen hundred years later on the other side of the Atlantic.

  So what did that say about all the books she’d read and the television talk shows she’d watched, and all the theory she’d taken as gospel? The Romans had a theory that it was perfectly acceptable for one human being to buy and sell another. That theory, as far as she was concerned, was dead wrong, no matter how elaborately they justified it.

  The next thought, the corollary, was amazingly hard to face. What if her own theories — her own assumptions — weren’t exactly right, either? What if they were all skewed somehow? So where did right end and wrong begin? Who could know, and how?

  She clutched her head in her hands. It was pounding worse than ever, but not with the hangover, not any longer. Tough questions of law and ethics had done that to her, too, when she was in law school. She’d been glad to get out of those courses with a passing grade.

  There wasn’t anybody standing over her now, demanding that she think about things that she plain didn’t want to think about. It didn’t make any difference. The thoughts were there. She could make them go away, but they kept coming back, mutating and changing, till they changed her, and made her into something different from what she’d been. Something, maybe, she didn’t want to be.

  “Hurry up with my order there,” a customer said. He hadn’t given it much more than a minute or two before. Julia was scrambling as fast as she could to fill it.

  And Nicole had had it up to here. If she wasn’t going to take any guff from Lucius and Aurelia, she sure as hell wasn’t about to let an obstreperous customer push her around, either. “Keep your drawers on,” she snapped. “You’ll get it when it’s ready.”

  She held her breath. If he got up and stomped off the way Ofanius Valens had when she wouldn’t let him play doctor with Julia, then let him.

  Instead, and to her amazement, he wilted. “I’m sorry, Umma,” he mumbled into his greasy beard. “As soon as you can, please.”

  “That’s better,” Nicole said briskly. She couldn’t help a last stab of guilt. Without the hangover, she probably wouldn’t have barked so loud. But, she told herself, let’s face it: in Carnuntum as in Los Angeles, a healthy dose of assertiveness was not at all a bad thing.

  Rain pattered down on the roof of the tavern. Every so often, raindrops slipped in through the smokeholes in the roof and hissed angrily as they dove into the cookfires. Some of them missed the fires and hit the floor. That would have been a raving nuisance on carpet or linoleum. On rammed earth, it was a little too interesting for words. Rammed earth was fine when it was dry. When it was wet, it was mud.

  Nicole had never understood mud before, not really. She picked her way past the muddy spots and the damp and odorous customers to peer outside. It had been raining for three or four days now, a mild, steady summer rain of a sort Indianapolis knew well. She’d lost the habit of it in Los Angeles, had forgotten the look and smell and feel of it, the long gray damp days, the dripping nights, the mildew that grew everywhere. In Los Angeles, there were only two kinds of rain: not enough and too much.

  As far as Nicole was concerned, a mild, steady summer rain was too much in Carnuntum. Raindrops plashed down on puddles in the street. Or so they had done that first lovely wet day. By now, day three or four — God, she’d lost count — the whole street was a vast, muddy puddle. Something that had been alive once upon a time, but not too recently, bobbed in the water. She had no desire to find out what it was.

  An oxcart came trundling along, a little quieter than the usual run of them: the axle, though bare of oil, had plenty of water for lubricant. The cart wasn’t going very fast. Every time the weary-looking ox lifted a foot, it lifted a clinging ball of mud. A mucky wake trailed the cart’s thick wooden wheels. Mud clung to them as to the ox’s hooves, clogging them till they seemed likely to stick solid.

  Mud, in fact, clung to everything. Keeping it out of the tavern was shoveling against the tide. Whenever a customer walked in and set a dripping cloak on the edge of a table, a muddy puddle formed beneath it. Julia pulled dry rushes from a sack behind the bar to sop up a little bit of the worst puddles.

  Concrete house pads weren’t likely to happen for another eighteen hundred years, but carpets might have been of at least some help. It seemed the Romans had never thought of them. They were easy enough to describe, and easy enough to make, too.

  Maybe Nicole should invent them — or would discover be the right word? Though not right away. For the time being, she was only thinking about it. Rammed earth was not the ideal surface on which
to lay carpets. She might have to invent the hardwood floor first, or do something with tiles. Saltillo wasn’t all that different from Roman brick, come to think of it.

  As Nicole stood in her doorway with the rain misting on her cheeks, Fabia Ursa’s husband, Sextus Longinius lulus, poked his head out next door, evidently to get a look at the rain, too. The tinker was a cheerful little man, as garrulous as his wife, but where she was thin and frail and delicately built, he had the quick-moving round body, full cheeks, and buck teeth of a chipmunk. He smiled at her. She reflexively smiled back. It was hard not to. Chip or Dale? she caught herself wondering.

  His voice, at least, was a normal voice, not the high gabble of an animated chipmunk. “Lovely day,” he said, “if you’re a goose.”

  “I’m sick of rain,” she said. Heavens, she sounded like a Californian — and after all these years of being hopelessly Midwestern, too.

  He shook his head, but his smile didn’t fade. She was glad. She didn’t want him to think she was annoyed at him. He was a good-natured sort, and, from everything she’d seen and heard, was devoted to his wife. “We do need the rain,” he said, “but it could go away now and even the farmers wouldn’t complain.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t,” Nicole said with deep feeling. She paused. Well: so say it. Soonest started, soonest over, “Can you and Fabia come over for a little while?”

  He seemed delighted at the invitation, though he couldn’t possibly know what it was for. “Why, of course! We’ll be right there.”

  Nicole nodded with a faint and she hoped inaudible sigh of relief. “Good. Good, then. I’m going to fetch the Calidii, too.”

  “Are you?” Longinius lulus laid a finger on the side of his nose. Probably he imagined that he looked sly. “Ah! I know what’s going on. Fabia doesn’t count for that, you know. She’s only a woman.”

  Nicole wanted to wither him with a glare, but restrained herself. He might only be reminding her of how the law worked. She liked him; she’d give him the benefit of the doubt. This time.

  “Fabia will come anyhow,” he said. “Liven up the day, and all that. She’s been a bit crabby lately, with the baby.”

  Nicole could imagine. Late pregnancy, as she knew too well, was hell. She nodded and waved to Sextus Longinius, who popped back into his house to fetch his wife. Nicole walked down the narrow, muddy stone sidewalk, thankful, and not for the first time, that the street boasted a sidewalk at all; some didn’t. Like a mountain goat jumping from crag to crag, she crossed the street on the stepping stones. The sidewalk on the other side was even narrower. A patch of mud had oozed onto it from the overloaded street. She slipped and slid and almost fell into the morass; flailed wildly and caught herself up against the damp wall. She clung there for a moment, breathing hard, more with stress than with exertion. An involuntary swim in the odorous, ordurous mud of Carnuntum was not her idea of a good time.

  Titus Calidius Severus hadn’t set the amphorae in front of his shop today. Maybe he thought the product he’d get would be too diluted to do him any good; probably he feared the jars would float away. A nice little river ran just about where he liked to thrust the pointy ends of the jars.

  Nicole opened the door a little too quickly for her stomach’s peace of mind. A monumental stink assaulted her and almost knocked her off her feet.

  Through streaming eyes and gagging coughs, she managed to discern Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus near the end of a row of wooden tubs, doing the double-double routine with something thick, dark, and cottony-looking. It was, she realized, some kind of wool, and the substance they were sloshing it around in was stale piss. When they straightened up to greet her, the stuff ran down their hands and arms and dripped from their fingertips onto the floor. They didn’t bother with rushes; they let the piss make its own noxious mud.

  “Good morning, Umma,” Titus Calidius Severus said. If the stench bothered him — if he even noticed it — he didn’t show it. “Haven’t seen you in here for a couple of weeks. What can I do for you today?”

  Did he sound hopeful? Maybe he did. Nicole ignored his tone just as he ignored the smell. Business, she thought. Stick to business. “Can you and your son come over to the tavern for a little while?” she asked.

  Titus looked at Gaius. They knew what was going on, too. This wasn’t like Los Angeles, where people could live next door to each other for years without bothering to learn each other’s names. Here, everyone knew what everyone else was thinking.

  “Who else have you got?” the fuller and dyer asked.

  “Sextus Longinius lulus and his wife,” Nicole answered.

  “Fabia Ursa doesn’t count,” Calidius Severus said, just as Sextus Longinius had. But maybe Calidius Severus had learned something from the past week or two of dealing with the stranger in Umma’s body. He held up his hand before she could snap at him, and said hastily, “Don’t blame me, Umma! It’s how the law works. You’ll still have three men as witnesses, which ought to do you well enough. Of course it would be even better if Brigomarus were acting for you, but — “

  “No,” Nicole said sharply. “This is my business, and he’s too stubborn to see it. I’ll take care of it. She’s my slave, not his.”

  “Now who’s the stubborn one? “ Titus Calidius Severus chuckled. So did his son. Nicole didn’t see the joke, herself. She waited till they finished their male bonding or whatever it was. It happened soon enough, and the fuller and dyer sobered. He said slowly, “I’m not sure this is the wisest thing, and I’m not easy about it in my mind, either, if you want the honest truth. But you’re clearly set on it, and you’re the one I’ve got to live with day to day. You’ll settle it with your family, or you won’t — that’s between you and them. Personally, I hope you do. Meanwhile,” he said with an air of decision, “we’ll do what you ask. Gaius, run upstairs and get our cloaks, would you? It’s still coming down out there.”

  Gaius wasted no time in obeying. He had to be as hungry for entertainment as Sextus Longinius was.

  He and his father threw the cloaks on over their tunics and pulled up the hoods. Nicole hadn’t seen any umbrellas in Carnuntum. A parasol, yes, shielding the face of an obviously wealthy woman from the sun in the market square one day, but no umbrellas. Maybe I could discover those, too, she thought. She was developing a whole list of potentially profitable “inventions,” any one of which would make life a fair bit easier.

  Picture it now, she thought: a nice little operation, eight or ten or a dozen employees — all free men and women, of course — chatting happily as they made umbrellas. It was a bit too much like a Worker’s Paradise ad, but then again, why not? They’d make a good living, collect benefits — another thing to invent, right there — and she… she’d get rich. Or well-to-do, at least. Latin might even come up with a new word, a word for yuppie, luppa?

  What were Roman patent laws like? Were there any? Could somebody who owned slaves set them to making umbrellas eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, undercut her, and drive her out of business? What were Roman bankruptcy laws like?

  She shook her head and suppressed a wry smile. From rich to down and out in five seconds flat. The Calidii Severi hadn’t even noticed. She turned on her heel with a touch more dispatch than strictly necessary. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Gaius slipped on the same stretch of muddy sidewalk that had almost sent her into the much muddier street. His father caught him, whirled him around and wrestled him up against the wall, so convincing that Nicole was briefly alarmed. But they were both laughing, pushing each other like rowdy boys, all the way down the wall and over the stepping stones. Why neither of them splashed into the muck, Nicole couldn’t imagine.

  Pointedly, Nicole said, “If the law needs grown men and not little boys, maybe you two should go back home. I’ll look for someone else.”

  “By Jupiter!” Titus Calidius Severus cried in mock dudgeon. “Methinks I’ve been offended.” He lunged at Nicole, as if to knock her off the stone block on which she st
ood. She leaped by pure instinct to the next one, and from there to the safety of the sidewalk. The fuller and dyer followed, grinning like a blasted idiot.

  Nicole planted fists on hips and glared. “That wasn’t funny!”

  “Oh yes it was,” said Calidius Severus. Not even Nicole’s deadliest scowl could wipe the grin off his face.

  The tavern was a welcome refuge, stuffy air, odor of mildew, and all. Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Ursa were there already, drinking wine and eating bread and salted onions. Nicole flinched to see a pregnant woman swilling down wine — just as she flinched at so many other things in Carnuntum. As with all the rest of them, there wasn’t a thing she could reasonably expect to do about it.

  Unreasonably, of course, she could tell Fabia Ursa she ought to be drinking milk instead. And Fabia Ursa would stick out her tongue and look revolted, just as Lucius and Aurelia and Julia had done on the first morning after Nicole found herself in Carnuntum. Life was too short.

  For that matter, who could guess what diseases lurked in the milk here? Pasteurization was as unheard of as aspirin or carpets.

  Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus pushed past her, not exactly rudely, and settled themselves at the table with the others, calling for wine. “The Falernian,” Calidius Severus senior said. “Why not? This is an occasion.” When Julia brought it, they lifted their cups in salute.

  Her eyes went wide. Odds were, nobody had ever done that for her before — who would, for a slave? Her fair skin showed a blush as bright as a sunset, rising from the neckline of the tunic all the way to her hairline.

  Gaius Calidius Severus watched as Nicole did, most attentively. If he’d been any more attentive, he would have thrown her down on the floor then and there.

  Nicole coughed, rather more sharply than she’d intended, and said, “I think we all know why I asked you to come here. I wanted to set Julia free the formal way, but my brother has made it plain he won’t sign the document, and my signature by itself isn’t good enough. “ And to one damned warm climate with that clerk in the town hall, too, she thought. “So I’ll set her free the informal way, among friends.” She held out her hand. “Come here, Julia.”