Household Gods
Page 33
There were people sitting in the first row above the wall, men and women better dressed than most, some with parasols to protect them from the sun. One such, a creature so epicene Nicole took it for a woman till it turned slightly and she saw the curled beard, stamped down hard on the straining fingers. The crowd cheered. The dandy turned grandly about, bowing and throwing kisses.
Padusius dropped wailing to the sand. The lionesses sprang.
He was unarmed, his toy weapons flung aside and far out of reach, not much more useless there than they would have been in his hands. His fists beat against one great cat’s side. He kicked at the other. The lionesses took no more notice of his struggles than of the death-throes of a gazelle. He was nothing more to them than meat.
Nicole watched Padusius’ writhing ebb. She couldn’t shut her eyes, or turn her face away. She was caught in a sick, and sickened, fascination.
She’d never watched a man die before. Not for real, not right in front of her. People in California, in that world so far away in space and time, had spoken in favor of televising executions. Let the public see what capital punishment was really like, they had said. They’d abolish it then, in a fit of righteous horror.
Nicole had been rather inclined toward that view herself. Now she was sitting in a place where public executions were, from the looks of it, a common thing. The faces around her were avid, the eyes greedy, drinking in the sight of a human being dying hideously under the teeth and claws of lions. They’d made it a sport, like the slaughter of animals. It was a spectacle for their amusement.
Padusius’ struggles had all but stopped. The lionesses paused to lick red and dripping jaws, then bent their heads and began to feed. They wouldn’t wait for him to finish dying, any more than the male of their species had waited for the bear, or the wolves for the aurochs.
Calidius Severus spoke beside Nicole, startling her half out of her skin. The crowd’s roar had sunk to background noise. His voice was surprisingly distinct, and rather loud. “Well, that’s that. Pretty cursed quick, too — quicker than the son of a whore deserved.” He paused as if to ponder that, then sighed and shrugged. “Still and all, he won’t be breaking in the heads of honest people again, or doing worse, for that matter. I hear he outraged Domitius Zmaragdus’ wife after he’d murdered her husband in front of her.”
“Did he?” Nicole said faintly. It seemed her overloaded stomach would stay where it belonged. A few minutes before, she wouldn’t have bet on it. Calidius Severus had just given her the most powerful argument of all in favor of capital punishment: Now we know he won’t do it again.
Did hearing that Padusius was a rapist as well as a murderer make her feel easier about watching him die? Almost with his dying breath, he’d sworn he hadn’t committed the crime for which he’d been condemned. Was he telling the truth?
There was no way, now, to know. All the witnesses were dead. The suspect was dying, was maybe already gone. His foot jerked beneath a lioness’ paw, startling Nicole. The lioness snapped at it and began to gnaw, as a dog will gnaw on a favorite bone.
Whatever the truth was, whether the man was guilty or innocent, it didn’t matter now. One way or the other, he was just as dead.
They — the authorities, Faustinianus, whoever was in charge — let the lionesses eat their fill of Padusius’ body. People started getting up, stretching and belching, jostling one another as they headed for the exits.
Calidius Severus touched Nicole’s arm, a light brush of the fingers, quickly taken away. Nicole shivered. She wasn’t repulsed, not at all, but neither was she in a mood to be touched.
“Shall we go?” he asked. “No gladiators this afternoon; it’s too early on in the games. The last couple of days, I expect they’ll put on a healthy show.”
“Gladiators?” Nicole knew what the word meant: she could hardly help it. She hadn’t thought she would need the knowledge. Carnuntum kept surprising her, as usual in ways dismaying rather than delightful.
If you looked at them the right — no, the wrong — way, gladiatorial shows made a horrid kind of sense. Beasts killed beasts for the Romans’ amusement. Beasts killed men for the Romans’ amusement, too; the lionesses were still gnawing meat from the bones of the man who had insisted he wasn’t a murderer. If you took those two for granted, why not have men kill men for the Romans’ amusement?
Nicole thrust herself to her feet and turned her back on the bloody spectacle below. “I have no interest in watching gladiators,” she said firmly.
“All right,” Calidius Severus said equably. “If I have time to go, I’ll go with Gaius. He’s always been more interested in the finer points of the fighting than you have, anyway. “
He didn’t sound annoyed at all, or even particularly disappointed. It was like a father taking his grown son to a football game and leaving his girlfriend at home.
And what did they show of football on the news? Half the time, it seemed to Nicole, they showed players getting spectacularly, if not usually bloodily, hurt. Maybe the gap between Carnuntum and West Hills was narrower than she’d supposed.
No. She shook her head. Football injuries were incidental to the game. They weren’t the point of the exercise. Boxing? That was legalized mugging, pure and simple. But people didn’t usually die in a boxing match.
But that wasn’t all Calidius Severus had meant. He was a veteran, an ex-legionary. He’d really used sword and spear and shield. (And… killed people with them? Nicole didn’t want to think about that. Not just this moment.) Fine points in his line of work weren’t just about winning a game. They were about staying alive.
When in Rome… Nicole shook her head again, and shivered slightly as she always did when she caught herself understanding how the Romans saw the world. Things made sense if you looked at them in that particular way. It didn’t make them any more right.
The crowd by now had thinned quite a bit. Calidius Severus led her back down the rows of benches, sidestepping the debris of a long day’s entertainment. Instead of paper cups and cigarette butts and hotdog wrappers, Nicole made her way past empty sausage casings and half-eaten buns and spilled wine. It seemed an unconscionably long time before they reached the exit, and longer still before the bottleneck of people let go and disgorged them into the sunlit field. The green of its grass was cool and restful after the hard glare of sand in the arena.
Nicole let out a long sigh of relief. Her eyes slid back to the place where the Heidentor didn’t stand. In much the same way, her tongue ran over the broken teeth in her mouth more often than it sought out the whole ones. What was missing and should have been there was more interesting than what was where it belonged.
“I hope you had a good time.” Titus Calidius Severus sounded more like a nervous teenager coming home from his first date with a girl than a middle-aged man out with a longtime lover. He’d been eyeing her the same way she’d eyed the Heidentor: wondering where the familiar had gone.
She didn’t let him see her smile. He’s not taking me for granted, she thought. Good. Aloud, she said, “I enjoyed the time with you, but I’ve lost my taste for beast shows. “
He started to speak. She would have bet a fistful of denarii it was something about womanish weakness. If that was so, he visibly and prudently decided against it, and cleared his throat instead. He walked on for a bit, toward the city gate. Then he said, with some care, “I always enjoy the time I spend with you, Umma.”
Nicole regarded him with widened eyes. “Why, Titus! That’s sweet.” Did he blush? Hard to tell. She found she was smiling. He might smell like ancient piss, but he had more style than most of the California yuppies she’d known.
The moment she stepped through the gate of Carnuntum, Titus Calidius Severus’ familiar stench blew right out of her head. She’d been away from the city stink for a few hours; it was gone from her nose. Now it struck her full force, every bit as strong as the day she found herself in Umma’s body. It was like being slammed in the face with a long-dead salmon.
“A good thing you do, too.” Nicole tried her damnedest not to breathe. Yes, dammit, she’d lost the immunity she’d taken so long to acquire.
At least it cooled her down, and let her look at her companion through something other than a hormonal haze.
She let him lead her back through Carnuntum. She was reasonably sure she could have found her way back to the tavern without him; she’d come to understand that the main streets of the city were laid out in a grid, a sequence of large squares. But in between these wider avenues, lesser streets and alleys twisted in a bewildering maze.
Those were, at the moment, dry. For that, Nicole was deeply grateful. None was paved, and few had sidewalks.
Calidius Severus walked her back to the tavern. Outside the door, he hesitated. Nicole hadn’t seen a man hesitate like that since her dates worried more about acne than about five o’clock shadow. Working up the nerve to kiss me, she thought with a glimmer of amusement. If he hadn’t hesitated, if he’d tried to take a kiss as if he were entitled to it, she would have sent him on his way, with a clout in the ear to remember her by.
Because he was so diffident about it, so obviously unsure she’d allow it, she let the kiss happen. He tasted of wine. For all his shyness going in, he knew how to kiss. He was eager, but he didn’t try to swallow her alive.
Something quivered, deep down inside. It wasn’t desire, not quite, but a shadow of it: an awareness that if she wanted to, if she let it happen as she’d let the kiss happen, she could feel desire.
She didn’t know which of them broke the kiss first. If it was Calidius Severus, he was in no hurry to let her go. As close as he held her, she couldn’t be in any doubt as to how he felt about it.
Before things could get awkward, she slipped out of his arms.
He stood flatfooted, still reaching for her, though she’d moved just out of reach. “Umma — “ he began.
She tilted her head. “Yes?” she asked. She didn’t mean to be unfriendly, but neither did she want him to think she wanted to hop into bed with him then and there.
One thing she’d seen before this, and for which she gave him credit, was that he did actually listen to her. He paid attention not only to what she said but also to how she said it.
His frown, right now, said he understood perfectly well that that yes didn’t mean, Yes, let’s do it. “You’ve been funny lately,” he said.
Nicole laughed. Once she’d started, she found she couldn’t stop. Part of it was the wine. Part was the sheer magnitude of Calidius’ understatement, and how little he knew, or could know, how great it was.
He waited with commendable patience for her laughter to run down. When at last it did, he said, “I didn’t think I was that funny.” His tone might have been wry, or it might have been bewildered. With a shrug that matched it, he turned away from her and headed across the street toward his own shop.
She watched him go. She didn’t know what she was feeling. Regret. Relief. A little guilt — and that made her angry, because she’d wished herself into this place to get away from just this kind of emotional bullying. She hadn’t wanted him. Why should she feel as if she’d done something wrong?
She turned abruptly, pivoting on her heel, and stalked into the tavern.
It was empty except for Julia, but, from the looks of the cups and bowls that the freedwoman was scrubbing, business had been brisk just a little earlier. Bread was baking, fresh and fragrant. The aroma of garlic and herbs wafted from the pot over the hearth. Julia had made one of her pot-dishes for the evening trade.
Julia didn’t seem to notice anything odd in Nicole’s face or gait. She was grinning, in fact, and clapping her hands. Nicole wondered dourly what Julia had been up to while she was away.
“Well?” the freedwoman pressed when Nicole didn’t say anything. “Did you have a good time at the beast show?”
Watching animals fighting and killing one another, watching the lionesses pull down and feed on the condemned criminal — no, Nicole had not enjoyed the show. But that wasn’t quite what Julia had asked.
In Indiana and later in California, Nicole had gone to plenty of lousy movies and still come home happy. She didn’t know that happy was the word she’d have used of herself at the moment, and yet… “Do you know,” she said, surprised and not altogether displeased, “after all, I think I did.”
11
Sextus Longinius lulus came into the tavern one day not long after the beast show. He waited politely while Nicole took her latest batch of bread out of the oven. She nodded to him, not particularly surprised. He wasn’t what she would call a regular, but he came in now and then, bought a cup of the middle-grade wine, and drank it slowly as if he actually savored the stuff. Sometimes she thought he came as much for the excuse to get out of the house as for the wine.
Today, however, he seemed oddly tense. He set a shiny brass sestertius in front of her and said, “Let me have a cup of Falernian, Umma. I’m going to be here for a while. Might as well start off with the best. I’ll go back to the cheap stuff later, when I’ve stopped caring what it tastes like.”
Nicole lifted her brows as she drew him a cup of Falernian. She’d never heard him sound so determined about anything.
It dawned on her slowly. Too slowly, if she wanted to be honest about it. She thrust a finger at him. “Don’t tell me. Fabia Ursa’s in labor.”
“She is that,” Longinius lulus said. “Chased me out of the house, too. ‘No place for a man,’ she said — you know how women do. ‘None of your business. Go get the midwife, go get my sister, go get my friends, and go away.’ I knew I’d end up here, and you’re right next door anyway, so I saved you for last.”
Frank had been at the hospital with Nicole when Kimberley and Justin were born. She’d been glad to have him there, holding her hand and coaching her through labor and birth. She hadn’t known he’d fall for a blond bimbo before his son took his first step.
Carnuntum had no hospitals, as far as she could tell. Babies were born at home. And fathers were not welcome in what was obviously women’s work. Female friends and relatives of the mother joined her instead to celebrate the new life. Nicole rather liked that, even if it left the father out of his own child’s first hours. Being there at his children’s births hadn’t kept Frank from running off with the first big-busted babe who came along.
Another sestertius clanked down on the bar, startling Nicole back into the here-and-now. “More of the same,” Longinius lulus said. “Then you’d better go on over. Julia can get me the rest of the way drunk.”
Nicole nodded. “All right. But why —?” she stopped. Why wasn’t that hard, not when she let her brain run for once ahead of her mouth. Fabia Ursa had had two babies already, and lost them both. Her husband wouldn’t have been worth much if he weren’t worried.
Nicole thrust the coin back toward him. “This one’s on me, “ she said firmly. “Everything will be all right. You’ll have yourself a fine daughter or son to be proud of.”
Longinius left the coin where it was, and gulped down the wine without seeming to taste it. He’d been keeping up a good front, but his face was paler than it might have been, and his hand shook as he set down the cup. “Fabia’s been praying to Mother Isis. Pray the rest of the gods it helps.”
“It can’t hurt,” Nicole said, which was true enough, if a little on the lame side.
Sextus Longinius lulus nodded solemnly; the Falernian was hitting him hard. “Egyptians are the oldest people in the world. If their great goddess can’t keep a mother safe, no god can. She’s had practice, she has.”
“I hope it all goes well,” Nicole replied. That was also true. Whether Isis existed at all, let
alone had any power to help Fabia Ursa… well, who knew? Liber and Libera had brought Nicole here, hadn’t they? Maybe Isis would answer the woman’s prayer.
She left Longinius deep in his third cup of wine — the cheaper stuff this time — with Julia to keep an eye on him and the children to help her, and went out across the alley to Fabia Ursa’s house. Just as she reached the door, someone else came up beside her: a lean, determined-looking woman loaded down with a heavy leather sack and what looked more like an adult-sized potty chair without the pot than anything else Nicole could think of. After a moment, Nicole realized it had to be a birthing chair. She’d heard of such a thing somewhere, but she’d never seen one. Compared to the way she’d had to deliver her two, flat on her back with her feet in metal stirrups, the chair looked a hell of a lot more comfortable.
The woman noticed her glance, but misinterpreted it. “Good day to you, Umma,” she said, her voice civil but brisk. “Yes, this is the same chair you had for yours. It was made to last.”
“It certainly looks that way,” Nicole said. The midwife nodded with the barest hint of a smile. She wouldn’t let Nicole take the bag or the chair, but did submit to having the door held open for her. Nicole had resigned herself to picking up the woman’s name from context. She’d done that so often by now, it no longer threatened to pitch her into a panic attack.
In all the time Nicole had been in Carnuntum, she hadn’t ever gone into the living quarters of the tinker’s house. Fabia Ursa had always come to the tavern with her store of gossip, or Nicole had stopped by the shop without going the rest of the way.
Today was no different. Nicole could see why it might make sense for Fabia Ursa to have her baby down below, in the much larger, lighter, and probably cleaner room. The shop had been cleared of much of its debris, the heaped pots pushed against the walls and the tools put away, probably in the box in the corner. In the cleared space, Fabia Ursa was walking with grim determination that Nicole well remembered from her own labor. It was supposed to help move things along. Whether it did or it didn’t, it gave the pregnant woman something to do. When the contractions grew too strong, she’d settle into the birthing chair and get to work in earnest.