Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  She made her way back to the bar to fill more cups. She had to use the dipper slowly and carefully, to keep from dribbling wine on the stone countertop. As long as she didn’t move too fast, she was just fine.

  When she carried the cups back to the table, she had a couple of extras. She squinted at them, counted them, counted them again to be sure. Seven — that was the right number, wasn’t it? She looked up from the cups to count noses. Fabia Ursa, Sextus Longinius lulus, Ofanius Valens, Titus Calidius Severus — lord, these names were a mouthful. Didn’t anybody do names like Joe and Bob and Sue here?

  Probably just as well they didn’t. She was letting her mind wander again, too. Four people. Five, counting herself. (Umma. Now that was a nice short name. Everybody should have a name like Umma.) Who was missing?

  Julia, of course. And Gaius Calidius Severus.

  Where they were, and what they were doing up there, required only one guess, especially since Ofanius Valens was staring at the stairway with a discontented expression. What was he thinking? Was he jealous? Or was he wondering if he’d left Julia dissatisfied?

  Maybe he had, at that. Maybe, on the other hand, Julia was just setting out to get as much as she could today.

  Fabia Ursa spoke Nicole’s thought aloud, as if she’d caught it floating in the rain- and wine-soaked air. “She’ll sleep sound tonight, I’m sure,” she said with a small giggle that ended in a hiccup. Under the tight-stretched fabric of her tunic, the baby kicked as if in protest. She laughed with a catch in it, as if the baby had caught a rib, and rubbed her belly. “It will be a while before I can sleep that way again — what with the baby between us now, and, if Mother Isis is kind, it will wake me up in the night, and keep me running from sunup to sunup.”

  Nicole had heard Fabia Ursa mention Isis before; but she’d known the name even before that. She’d read a book once with the goddess’ name in the title. Isis, the book had said, was a goddess in Egypt. Carnuntum and Egypt were a long way apart. The Romans might have had only those hideous, squeaking carts to haul goods and people, but ideas seemed to travel on wings.

  Fabia Ursa and Sextus Longinius lulus had retreated into a private and connubial world. She was simpering, he was smiling sappily. They gazed fondly into each other’s eyes. He had taken her hand; she rested the other on the swell of her belly. He didn’t seem too dismayed to be denied his wife’s embraces. Probably getting it from one of their slaves, Nicole thought sourly.

  While the tinker and his wife shared their little moment and the other two men engrossed themselves in the latest round of Falernian, Julia and Gaius Calidius Severus came bounding down the stairs. They looked indecently pleased with themselves.

  Yes, that was the word. Indecent. Nicole fixed Julia with a jaundiced stare. No matter how much wine she’d taken on board, she could not bring herself to approve of Julia’s conduct. Julia wasn’t a slave any longer. She wasn’t property — and she wasn’t a sex object. Women weren’t supposed to think of themselves as nothing but receptacles for men to fill. They certainly weren’t supposed to have as good a time doing it as Julia was. It was not dignified.

  Julia aimed in a straight line for her cup of wine, drained it in one long gulp, dropped to a stool and laid her head on the table and fell sound asleep.

  They all regarded her in varying degrees of amusement — Nicole’s the least, the men’s the most, and Fabia Ursa’s somewhere in the middle. “I take it back,” said the tinker’s wife. “She’ll sleep sound right now.”

  Everyone laughed but Nicole. Julia never even stirred.

  Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Ursa took their leave not long after. Nicole couldn’t tell which was holding which up. If she’d had to guess, she’d have said the tinker’s wife was propping up her husband.

  As if their departure had been a signal, Ofanius Valens wandered off as well. Nicole caught the glance he shot at Julia as he passed her: a strange expression, almost but not quite unreadable, composed of lust and affection, amusement and resentment. She could imagine what he was thinking. I wasn’t enough for you, was I? Well, next time we’ll see what you think!

  Not, thought Nicole with sodden determination, that he was going to get a next time. She’d have that talk with Julia. Tomorrow. After the hangover that was coming. Yes.

  Gaius Calidius Severus had been sipping his wine slowly, as if waiting for Ofanius Valens to leave first. It was a kind of possessiveness, Nicole supposed. This is my territory, it said. If he’d been a dog, he’d probably have lifted his leg at a spot between Ofanius Valens and Julia.

  Once his rival was gone, he seemed to decide that Julia didn’t need further staking out. He finished off his wine, pulled his cloak up over his head, and headed for the door. Just as he passed it, his father called out, “Don’t fall into a vat of piss till I get back! I won’t be but a minute.” Gaius laughed and ducked out into the rain.

  Which left Julia, sound asleep, and Nicole, too wide awake, and Titus Calidius Severus. As if to punctuate the moment, Julia let out a snore that was almost a bleat. Nicole wished she would wake up. Upstairs she heard the voices, not too loud, of Lucius and Aurelia playing. The children were being very good, extraordinarily good. Nicole wished they would have a fight and come down to tattle on each other. She didn’t want to be alone, or as close to alone as made no difference, with Titus Calidius Severus.

  He wanted to be alone with her. He’d made sure he would be, staying behind after everyone else had left. It was just as much a statement as the timing of his son’s departure.

  Nicole looked around for a blunt instrument in case he got out of hand. She didn’t have to look far. The Romans didn’t have soft plastics. Everything they made was pottery or metal or wood. She had only to choose her weapon.

  But the fuller and dyer didn’t look as if he planned to do anything too reprehensible. He sat on the stool, peering from his empty cup to Nicole and back again. “I miss you, Umma,” he said. “I still haven’t figured out what I did to get you upset with me, but I miss you. I want you to know that.”

  “I do know,” she said. She wasn’t just saying it to fill the silence. His approach, if it was an approach, was honestly civilized — more civilized than anything she’d got in Los Angeles after Frank dumped her. Frank hadn’t exactly been the soul of gentility, either, come to that. She hadn’t known a man could be.

  This man was civilized enough to make her feel downright guilty. Till Nicole muscled herself, thanks to Liber and Libera, into Umma’s body, Calidius Severus and Umma had had what they probably thought was a good solid relationship. So what did that make her? A homewrecker?

  She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help being Nicole and not Umma; being a twentieth-century lawyer and not a second-century tavernkeeper.

  He was waiting for her to go on. That was civilized, too: a kind of instinctive politeness, a courtesy so well trained as to be automatic. She sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “The past few weeks… everything’s been so confused. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

  “You haven’t been yourself,” Calidius Severus agreed. It wasn’t the first time Nicole had heard that in Carnuntum. The people who said it didn’t know how right they were — and Lord, was she glad of that. The fuller and dyer shrugged and got to his feet. “Well, I won’t trouble you anymore about it now. I thought there might be something you wanted to say that you didn’t want to say in front of people, if you know what I mean.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” she said in dull embarrassment. “I told you it was nothing like that when we were walking back from the market square.”

  In three quick steps, and before she quite realized it, he was standing beside her. She suppressed the flinch, she hoped, before he could have seen it. She hadn’t known he could move so fast, or with such unexpected strength.

  But he didn’t touch her. He didn’t do that. “What is it, then?” he demanded. His voice was as firmly under control as his body was, a
nd as rigid with tension.

  He must have realized that he wasn’t going to get an answer. He shrugged again — he had a whole repertoire of shrugs, a shrug for every occasion — and leaned forward. Before she could pull away, before she was even sure of what he was going to do, he kissed her. It was gentle, no force; just the brush of his lips, with a faint tickle of beard and mustache. “Take care of yourself, Umma,” he said. “I do love you, you know.” Before she could find words to reply, he was gone.

  9

  Nicole stared at the place where Titus Calidius Severus had been. “Now why did he have to go and say something like that?” she muttered in English. His kiss hadn’t been revolting — on the contrary. That worried her more than if she’d wanted to gag at it. He’d been in the tavern, he and his son, long enough that she’d stopped noticing the reek of stale piss that followed them wherever they went. The rest…

  She hadn’t been the least bit interested in sex, with Titus Calidius Severus or anyone else, since she came to Carnuntum. She’d felt anything but sexy herself. She was grubby all the time. She was lousy. She had a yeast infection that didn’t want to go away, which left her generally unenthusiastic about her private parts. She never got anywhere near enough sleep. It was hard enough to live in this body every hour of every day, without trying to warm up right good and proper, too.

  And yet… It wasn’t that she wanted Calidius Severus. It was that she might have wanted him. Her mind and self might not remember him, but her body too clearly did. It had memories, it seemed, small yearnings, tinglings that woke when he looked at her or touched her or, as he had just now, kissed her.

  With thoughts as disturbing as these, and leading in even more disturbing directions, she was almost pathetically glad to greet the dripping customer who blew in out of the rain and loudly demanded bread and honey and wine — so loudly, in fact, that he woke Julia.

  She started bolt upright, eyes enormous with terror, a deer-in-the-headlights look if Nicole had ever seen one. Nicole could read her face as if it had been yesterday’s newspaper. Oh, gods — sleeping on the job. What would her mistress do to her? How would she talk her way out of it?

  Then, as Nicole tried to watch and serve the customer at the same time, the truth dawned on her. Nicole — Umma — wasn’t her mistress anymore. Her relief was as strong as her fear had been, swept over it and drowned it, and let her stand reasonably straight and make her way over to the bar, where she dipped a cup of the two-as wine and brought it to the still dripping, faintly steaming customer.

  After the man had paid and left, Nicole said, “Julia, if you doze off on me tomorrow, you will be in trouble.”

  Julia grinned at her. “Oh, yes, I know that,” she said. She carefully did not include the title that she’d always put in before. No Mistress, not any longer. “Today was special, though. With the wine and the loving and all.” She stretched with a sinuous, sinful wriggle. Then she hiccuped, which made her laugh. She was full of herself, bubbling over with freedom — and, Nicole caught herself thinking, license. Nicole had known women like that. Girls, too, in high school. There, they were called sluts — even called themselves that, like a badge of pride.

  Julia’s straightforward sluttiness — all right, earthiness — had always irked Nicole. Now it made her jealous. And that made her angry at herself, because she was jealous.

  She covered both jealousy and anger with work. Of that there was always plenty and then some. She washed cups and washed cups and washed cups; she’d almost run out of clean ones. Julia ground flour to bake bread. She and Nicole took turns at the oven, keeping the fire even and gauging when the baking would be done. Time was when Nicole had thought the labor-saving devices in her kitchen in West Hills didn’t really save labor — that was just hype. She knew much better now.

  And today was a slow day. Because of the rain, it looked as if the tavern would get by with one baking, two at the outside, instead of the usual four. It didn’t help the cash box much, but it made life easier for the staff — all two of them.

  Maybe that was why, when Nicole went upstairs as gray day turned into black night, she was only tired, not exhausted. She lay down, but did not fall asleep as fast as she usually did — as fast as if someone had whacked her over the head with a club. The wine had worn off long ago. If she’d had a hangover, it had dissipated somewhere in between customers. So that was how to do it: get drunk in broad daylight and work it off. She’d have to remember that.

  Except for the chirping of crickets, the buzzing of mosquitoes, and, somewhere far off, a dog that would not stop barking, it was eerily quiet behind her barred door. No distant racket of TVs and radios, no hiss of cars going past as was commonplace in L.A. even at three in the morning. Nothing. People were snug in their warm buggy beds, and would be till sunrise.

  She was snug, too, snug but restive. She tossed and turned. Side to belly to back. Back to belly to side. Of itself — or so she thought till it got there — her hand slid between her legs and crept under her loincloth. It was the first time since she came to Carnuntum, the first interest she’d had in anything but falling flat on her face in bed and waking up however many hours later in some new state of misery or other: itching, griping, cursing dirt and vermin and discomfort.

  It had been a long while. It was still strange to find herself smooth down there, except for the small itching scab where she’d cut herself shaving at the baths a day or two before. The difference aroused her. On the fantasy screen behind her eyes, where Mel Gibson and Adrian Paul had used to play out their little dramas, a completely new and different face took shape. It wasn’t, God forbid, Titus Calidius Severus, but it wasn’t not, either. He had a beard; bearded men had never fed her fantasies. He had warm dark eyes and a smile that had never known orthodontia. His shoulders were broad, the skin of his chest warm and shaved smooth: she could feel the faint catch of the stubble. He shaved below, too, around the noble loft of his organ — not huge, not as a man might imagine a woman would want, but a good size, a comfortable size, like the ones she’d seen on the gaudy statues in the market. She felt the shape and hardness of it, the heat that mounted as he smiled at her, smiled and smiled, and — wise man — said nothing at all.

  Her hand quickened. Her breathing matched pace with it. Caught; paused. A little moan escaped her.

  She relaxed all at once, let her body go limp. Oh, that was good; that was what she’d needed. And yet she shrugged as she often did afterwards, alone in the dark. It was good, but she knew better. The real thing could be as lonely as this, if he did what he wanted to do and then rolled off her, snoring before he hit the pillow. But when it was good, there was nothing like it. No, nothing in the world.

  This would do. It had eased the worst of the tightness out of her, which was what she had wanted. She could sleep now.

  As she drifted off, she felt one last, small stab of jealousy. Lucky Julia, who didn’t bother her head — or her body — with such frettings.

  Nicole woke to total strangeness. For a terrible instant, she knew she’d been yanked out of time again, to who knew where. Then she recognized the familiar bed underneath her, the familiar itch and skitter of her personal vermin, and the familiar septic stink of Carnuntum. The strangeness was in the light. It was just sunup — and there was a sun to light the sky. The clouds that had lain so heavy on the town for so long had tattered and torn. When she got up and stumbled to the window to look out, she saw patches of pale blue amid the scudding gray. The air that washed her cheeks was damp still, and cool, but no rain fell. The rain had gone away.

  She yawned and stretched, arching her back like a cat. A good hot shower and a Thorough delousing would have done her a great deal of good, but even without them she felt as good as she’d felt since she came to Carnuntum.

  She was smiling as she went downstairs, a smile Julia returned — up before Nicole as usual, baking the morning bread. Freedom didn’t seem to have done much damage — yet — to her work ethic. She might even work hard
er, now she worked for wages: now she had a stake in working well.

  They did their morning chores as they’d come to do, moving through and around each other like partners in a dance. There was a kind of pleasure in it, the pleasure of a pattern well executed. The first customers — a handful of morning regulars — came in with their usual greetings: a smile and a cheery wave, a rheumy scowl, a hungover wince, depending on the individual. They settled in their usual places with their usual breakfasts, wine and fresh bread for the most part. Some liked to banter with Nicole or Julia.

  Nicole had just finished a long and lively exchange with a muleteer whose name she could never remember but whose face she couldn’t forget — he had a quite imposing wen at the corner of his left eye — when a half-dozen new customers came trooping in. All but one were strangers. That one, coming in behind but clearly a part of the group, as if he were herding it onward, was Umma’s brother Brigomarus. His expression mirrored the rest. The best word Nicole could find for it was thunderous.

  Her bright mood darkened, and not slowly either. From the way Brigomarus acted toward the others, and the resemblance the women bore to him and to each other — and, for that matter, to Umma — she couldn’t exactly miss who they were. The two younger women had to be Umma’s sisters, and the older one, she of the steel-gray bun and steely stare, their mother. The men, in turn, had to be the sisters’ husbands. One was a great deal older than the woman whose elbow he supported. The other was thirty-five or so, and probably a few years older than his apparent wife.

  Nicole had learned in her time in Carnuntum that clothes very definitely made the man here — or the woman. The rich never affected the local equivalent of torn jeans and ratty T-shirts, and the poor never tried to dress up like the rich, even if they could have afforded it. There were no designer knockoffs in discount outlets here. One could, quite easily, determine a person’s status by the type and quality of clothes he or she wore, and by the kind and quantity of jewelry, as well as by the intricacy of a woman’s hairstyle.