Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  “Yes, I’d like that,” she said. Then the apprehension struck. She’d thought she’d like the beast show, too. Who knew what surprises might lurk in a seemingly innocent mime? “They’re not going to kill anybody, are they?”

  Calidius Severus arched a brow, but he answered seriously enough. “I wouldn’t think so. Too expensive for a troupe outside of Rome or maybe Alexandria to butcher a slave when the show calls for somebody to die. The gore’ll just be pig’s blood in bladders, same as usual. But it’ll look real.”

  She stood flatfooted. She was always taken aback when a cultural difference flew up and hit her in the face, but this time was worse, somehow. This man was her lover, and she was glad of it, too. He was genuinely thoughtful and considerate, out of bed and in it. Her kids — Umma’s kids, but one way and another she’d come to think of them as her own — thought the sun rose and set on him; there stood Lucius now, hanging on his every word. And the only thing he saw wrong with killing slaves in a show was that it was too expensive to be practical.

  His attitude was standard here. Witness the beast show. Witness the execution that was its climax. Witness the gladiatorial shows — which she hadn’t, and for which she thanked God. In Carnuntum, life was cheap.

  It shouldn’t have been surprising. She could still feel Fabia Ursa’s absence like the healed socket of a tooth; and Fabia Ursa had lost two babies before she died delivering a third. Maybe, since life was so easy to lose, it was that much easier to take. People lived surrounded by death, till death was commonplace.

  Resolutely, she pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. She couldn’t afford to linger over every incidence of culture shock. She had to live in this world, regardless of what she thought of certain parts of it. And that meant recording the datum as Calidius had given it, a thing she needed to know to survive. She would deal with that. Later, if she had time — if she ever had time — she’d worry about other things.

  All of which added up to the simple answer she gave him. “I’ll come to the mime,” she said.

  He’d taken time to sip from his winecup while she woolgathered. Once he had her answer, he set down the cup. “Well, good,” he said. “I don’t quite know when they’re getting into town, but they should be worth an afternoon’s diversion when they do. Anything to make one day different from another.”

  “Oh, yes,” Nicole said, this time without hesitation. Most people in Carnuntum didn’t come close to agreeing with her on the importance of life, but when it came to making life interesting, she agreed wholeheartedly with the rest of the population. Life might be precious, but it was also, without TV, the VCR, or even electric lights, rather massively tedious.

  The players arrived none too soon, in Nicole’s estimation. Schedules weren’t set months in advance as they would have been in L.A. Entertainers came and went as weather and the roads allowed. In this case, a spell of good weather gave way to several days of pouring rain. When the clouds cleared away and the sun came boldly out, the players appeared in Carnuntum. Graffiti on the walls proclaimed their arrival, and one morning, as Nicole headed to market, she saw an outlandishly dressed person standing in front of a market stall, haggling with the vendor over the price of white lead. Nicole bit her tongue before she pointed out that the stuff was poisonous. She was learning, though it was taking her a while.

  She did her marketing and went home with suitable dignity, but once she was there, she couldn’t resist telling Julia about the actor she’d seen. Julia clapped her hands and did a little dance. One of the regulars half-choked on his bit of sausage. Julia in her almost-new but still somewhat too tight tunic, dancing with glee, was a sight for hungry eyes.

  Nicole suppressed the frown that thought engendered. “You like the mime shows? ‘ she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Julia said, and transparently remembered not to add the habitual Mistress.

  “Well,” said Nicole. “Then we’ll have to see that you get a day off, won’t we?”

  She’d made Julia a happy woman — but not so happy she forgot to be diligent in her duties. Quite the opposite. Julia with a break in sight was determined to be the best freed servant anyone ever had. She was a little too eager, if truth be told; but she didn’t ask Nicole to let her go to the show first. That wouldn’t have been proper. She conceded Nicole the right to opening day, and stayed behind uncomplaining. It would be her turn tomorrow. She’d made sure everybody in the tavern knew it, and cared about it, too.

  The mime show was in the same place as the beast show had been, the amphitheater outside the city’s southern wall. There wasn’t really anywhere else in Carnuntum that could hold a crowd in comfort.

  Nicole wasn’t exactly comfortable. The memory of the beast show was still too fresh. But she was determined to enjoy the day, and particularly the person she was sharing the day with.

  “Nice of you to give Julia time off tomorrow to come see a show,” Titus Calidius Severus remarked to Nicole.

  “It’s only fair,” she answered. “Besides, we’ll get along better this way.”

  Calidius Severus misunderstood her deliberately, and with a spark in his eye, too. “I like the way we get along just fine.” He’d been over the night before, fresh from the baths and smelling as sweet as anyone ever smelled here. Nicole, remembering one or two things they’d done together between dusk and dawn, stretched almost as Julia liked to, like a huge and sensuous cat. She liked it fine, too — and she was glad of it. Finally, she’d found something in Carnuntum that wasn’t painful, barbaric, or shocking.

  Even if nobody got killed or maimed, she hadn’t expected to like the mime show. And yet she liked it very much indeed. It was called The Judgment of Paris, which at first meant nothing to her but seemed perfectly familiar to the crowd. Paris, who came from Troy, not France, was trapped into judging a beauty contest among goddesses: Juno, Athena, and Venus.

  If it had been on TV, she would have called it a comedy-drama. The audience laughed at the machinations of their deities, a level of irreverence that brought her up short. It was as if one of the networks had made a sitcom out of the Bible.

  After a little while, however, she stopped fretting. Obviously no one expected to be struck by lightning, or found this levity anything but tight and proper. She settled back with a gusty sigh, and determined to enjoy the show.

  The plot was thin, like the plot of a TV sitcom. As with a sitcom, she let it wash over her instead of analyzing it like a legal brief. The music — flutes and drums and horns — was loud and insistent. The costumes were gaudy: yellows and reds and greens of an intensity that no one ever saw in everyday clothes. If Rome had known day-glo colors, these actors would have used them. They had a distinct, almost fluorescent glow as they strutted and danced in the arena where, not so long ago, so many beasts and a single man had died. The women who played the goddesses and Helen of Troy took every opportunity to wear as little as possible. Whenever those opportunities arose, as they frequently did, the men in the audience roared their approval.

  Sex sells, Nicole thought. It was as true for ancient Rome as for modern Hollywood.

  Titus Calidius Severus didn’t shout, but he was most attentive to the actresses jiggling and strutting across the ground where lions and wolves and bears had prowled not so long before.

  Watching him watch the pretty women, Nicole decided she didn’t mind the way he did it. She could hardly have asked him not to pay attention to them; that was what they were there for, and he was a healthy male with all his hormones in working order… as she had good reason to know. What mattered was that he didn’t give the impression that he would sooner have been with one of them than with his real companion, as so many men would have done. Frank had stared up at an awful lot of movie screens as if he’d forgotten she was there beside him, and not just toward the end, either. And what had he gone for when he was ready to dump Nicole? Ms. Blond Hollywood Bimbo, what else?

  She surprised herself, not with the virulence of the thought, but with the c
oolness of it. Frank Perrin was centuries unborn and half the world away. The edge was off her bitterness. She was too busy surviving in this world to waste energy on a marriage that had been dead long before Frank walked out the door.

  Calidius Severus for sure was better-looking than Frank, though Frank smelled a whole lot better. He was also just as attentive to the swordfights as to the women in their skimpy draperies. He leaned forward on the bench, muttering under his breath at this bobble or that wobble. “If I’d used a sword like that,” he told Nicole in a pause between acts, “I’d be twenty-five years dead. “

  The swordplay was as obviously choreographed as a bar fight in a Western. Like a Western, it wasn’t meant to be realistic. But she could hardly explain that to Calidius Severus. She settled for the glaringly obvious instead. “It’s only make-believe,” she said.

  He muttered and scowled and shifted on the bench, but little by little he subsided. He was almost too reasonable a man to be real. Nicole tried to imagine him in a Stetson and carrying a six-shooter, sauntering into a saloon in time-honored movie-cowboy fashion. It was amazingly easy, though his looks tended more toward the Mexican sidekick than the tall lanky cowhand.

  Not very many movie Westerns were as extravagantly gory as this Roman equivalent. Still, despite the copious blood, the killings were obviously faked. She’d believed Calidius Severus when he said there wouldn’t be any excessive realism in the mime, but she couldn’t help the small sigh of relief that, after all, the actors would get up to strut the stage another day.

  When Paris and Helen leaped gleefully between the sheets — in this case, a blanket as gaudy as their costumes — that looked choreographed, too. But, as enthusiastic as it was, Nicole wondered if, after all, it was faked. The audience didn’t seem to think it was, or else was delighted to buy into that particular illusion. Men and women both cheered on the performers. The imagination could do a lot with a pair of heads, a strategically arranged blanket, and a set of highly suggestive gyrations.

  There was a collective groan when the gyrations ended, and with it the scene. In the next, with neither sex nor swordplay to engross them, the audience indulged in a spate of restlessness. Paris struggled nobly against it, crying overwritten defiance at the Greeks who threatened to come and take Helen back from Troy. But even his trained voice couldn’t overwhelm the shout from a few rows behind Nicole that pretty obviously wasn’t in the script: “Is there a physician in the amphitheater?”

  Along with most of the other people right around her, she turned to stare. A man with a seriously worried expression held up a woman who seemed to have fainted. Her eyes were closed and her body limp; her head lolled on the man’s shoulder. Even if she’d been awake, she would have looked sick: her face was flushed, and a distinctive, spotty rash mottled one cheek. It looked to Nicole like measles. She was just old enough to have had them herself before her parents got around to getting her vaccinated — she still felt the sting of the unfairness, and the magnitude of her luck that she’d had no worse than a face and body covered with blotches, and a week in bed being fed whatever she asked for. She’d only learned later how many dangerous side effects measles could have.

  She didn’t ever remember being so sick she passed out; mostly she’d been covered with spots and distressingly itchy. This woman had it a lot worse.

  Someone was edging and sidling his way down from higher up. “Move aside, if you please. I’m a physician. Excuse me, sir. Madam. If you don’t mind.” She recognized the voice as much as the face and the walk, with its brisk politeness and its underlying air of impatience with the bulk of the human race. Dexter the physician had taken a day off; but, like doctors in every place and time, he wasn’t going to get that much of a break.

  The man on the other side of the woman moved over to give Dexter room to sit beside her. It didn’t look like altruism. It looked like getting out of range of contagion.

  Dexter ignored the man’s cowardice. He took the woman’s pulse, felt her forehead, and bent close to examine the rash. Nicole turned back to the show, which had indulged itself in another swordfight, but she kept being drawn to the sick woman and the physician. Each time she looked, Dexter looked unhappier.

  He murmured something to the sick woman’s companion, too low for Nicole to hear. She didn’t have long to be frustrated. As soon as Dexter had bent over the woman again, the man cried, “The pestilence! What kind of quack are you, anyway? Can’t you even tell when someone’s had too much sun?”

  Any doctor Nicole had known in Indiana or California would have blown sky-high if he’d been screamed at like that — either blown sky-high or called in a slander lawyer. Dexter only bowed his head in humility — which Nicole found incredible — or else in the kind of arrogance that didn’t care what the world thought. “May you be right,” he said. “May I be wrong. Take her home. Make her comfortable. Her fate now is in the hands of the gods.”

  The woman’s companion glowered at the doctor, but didn’t fling any further abuse. He hefted her up with a grunt, staggering under the dead weight, and maneuvered between the benches to the aisle. People scrambled back out of the way. Nicole was just about to think of offering something, a hand, Calidius Severus’ hand, whatever could help, when a man a row or two down did it for her.

  Maybe he was a relative. The woman’s companion seemed to know him, at least. Between them, they supported her in a kind of fireman’s carry and carried her down and apparently out of the amphitheater. She went like a gust of wind through dry California scrub, fanning a spark into wildfire. “Pestilence,” people whispered. Then louder: “Pestilence!”

  The show ended not long after the woman’s departure. Applause was sparse, abstracted. The actors tried to drum it up, strutting and gesticulating on the stage. One, who’d played a comic villain, favored the amphitheater with an obscene gesture and a flash of his bony behind.

  Nobody but Nicole seemed to take any notice. Some of the audience kept glancing toward the place where the woman had been sitting, uneasily, as if something dark might be lurking there still. Others craned their necks, peering at anyone who might be inclined to keel over.

  Titus Calidius Severus’ sigh had a wintry sound to it, though it was still only August. “So,” he said. “It’s come here after all. I was hoping it wouldn’t. From everything I’ve heard, it’s been bad — very bad — in Italy and Greece.”

  “It looked like the — “ Nicole broke off. The Latin she’d been gifted with when Liber and Libera sent her to Carnuntum had no word for measles. No word, she’d learned, meant no thing. But measles, even before there was a shot for it, had been a common childhood disease. You were sick, and maybe there were side effects, but you didn’t usually die of them. That had been true, her mother had said, for as long as anyone remembered. How could there be no word for the disease in Rome?

  No. That was the wrong question. If the Romans didn’t have a word for it, what did that mean? That it wasn’t a common childhood disease here and now? If that was the case… For the first time, Nicole felt a stab of fear. Sometime not too long before she left TV behind for good, she’d watched a show — on the Discovery Channel? A E? PBS? — about the European expansion. It might have been much less easy for the sun never to set on the British Empire if the Native Americans and the Polynesians had had any resistance to smallpox or measles. The British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, brought their diseases as well as their trade goods and their guns. As often as not, the bacteria and viruses did the conquering, and the Europeans took over what was left. Native populations had, the documentary said, died like flies.

  And here she was in a world that had no name for measles, and Calidius Severus was staring at her, obviously waiting for her to go on. “It looked like the what?” he asked. “I didn’t think anybody’d ever seen anything like this before. Do you know something I don’t?”

  Sudden tears stung her eyes. The world blurred about her. I know so many things you don’t, Titus, she thought in a kind
of grief. And what good did knowing them do? Knowing that there could be such a thing as a measles vaccine was a hell of a long way from knowing how to make one. She wasn’t like the hero in a time-travel movie. She didn’t come equipped with every scientific advance and the means to manufacture it. All she had was day-today, more or less random cultural knowledge, which could flip a light switch but couldn’t begin to explain what made it work.

  What had Dexter told the sick woman’s companion? Take her home and make her comfortable? Nicole couldn’t have given better advice, not here. That was all anybody in second-century Carnuntum could do. It was all the physician had been able to do for Fabia Ursa. And Fabia Ursa was dead.

  Calidius Severus was waiting, again, for her to answer. He always did that. She still wasn’t used to it — to having a man listen to her. God knew Frank never had. She hadn’t always listened to Frank, either, but then Frank was a bore.

  She gave Calidius Severus an answer, though maybe not the answer he was looking for. “No, I don’t know anything special,” she said. All at once, to her own amazement, she hugged him fiercely. “I just want us to come through all right.”

  “So do I,” he said. He didn’t sound overly convinced. “That’s as the gods will — one way or the other. Nothing much we can do. Maybe Dexter was wrong. Physicians don’t know everything, even if they like to pretend they do. Or maybe he was right, but there’ll be only the one case. It won’t be an epidemic.”

  “Maybe,” Nicole said. She grasped at the straw as eagerly as he had, and with as little conviction. Maybe saying it would make it true.

  Or maybe not.

  They left the amphitheater in silence that extended well beyond the two of them, and walked back toward the city. On the way in, everyone had been lively, cheerful, chatting and calling back and forth. Now only a few people spoke, and that in low voices. The rest slid sidewise glances at them, peering to see if they looked sick.