Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  Nicole set a sestertius on the bar as change. The man pushed it back. “No. Give us more bread and meat and raisins. Tell us when we need to give you more money for it.”

  Nicole nodded again, more warmth in the gesture now — the professional warmth any businessperson offered to big spenders. “Would you like some olive oil to go with your bread?”

  They all made faces at her, the same sort of faces Lucius and poor Aurelia had made when she suggested they drink milk. “Olive oil is not good,” said the one who’d declared that wine was. “Have you butter?”

  If only, Nicole thought, with a fleeting memory of cold, sweet butter on fresh crusty bread from the bakery near the law offices. She overrode it with the reality she was condemned to. “No, I have no butter. People here like olive oil better.”

  She resisted the temptation to tell them to rub the bread in their hair if it was butter they wanted — they were downright rancid with it; she had to hold her breath when she came close. It might offend them. Even worse, they might do it.

  The three Germans sighed in unison. “We will eat the bread bare, then,” said the spokesman, whose Latin seemed to be best.

  Before long, they laid down another denarius for still more wine and bread and meat. All three coins, unquestionably, were Roman. Nicole held up the third one. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you get so much of my country’s money?”

  They smiled. They looked, just then, like the beasts in the amphitheater when they had spotted prey. The one who did most of the talking said, “We have been in the Roman Empire before.” He turned and spoke to his friends in their own language. Nicole caught the word Roman again. He had to be translating the remark. They all laughed.

  She didn’t like that laughter. Like the smiles, it seemed… carnivorous. Had these Germans been part of the war farther west? Had they come into the Roman Empire as invaders, robbers, looters? Was that how they’d got their hands on Roman coins?

  They were behaving themselves now. Whatever might be happening farther west, things were peaceful in Carnuntum. Nicole couldn’t turn on the evening news and watch the latest videotape of Romans and Germans fighting… wherever they were fighting. Wolf Blitzer was eighteen hundred years away. Without daily reminders, the war felt unreal.

  Best change the subject. “Has the pestilence been very bad on your side of the river?”

  They talked among themselves for a while, low and somehow urgent, though they were smiling and acting casual. Then the spokesman said, “No, the sickness has not among us been too bad. We have had some among us take ill and die, but not many.”

  “I wonder why that is,” Nicole said. At first, it was just another polite phrase. Once it was out of her mouth, however, she really did wonder. She asked, “You don’t live in cities on the other side of the river, do you?”

  The two who hadn’t said much — at least one of whom, she suspected, had little or no Latin — conferred with the spokesman again, and shook their heads. He did the talking, as before: “Oh, no. So many people all in one place? Who could imagine that on our side of the river?”

  Nicole had all she could do not to laugh in his face. Carnuntum was a real city, no doubt of that. It might have held fifty thousand people, maybe even seventy-five, before the pestilence cut the population by at least a third. What would this solemn German have made of Los Angeles, with three and a half million people in the city, nine million in the county, fourteen or fifteen million in the metropolitan area? For that matter, what would a Roman have made of Los Angeles?

  Los Angeles had been horrifying enough for somebody from Indianapolis, which was no small city itself. You could drop Carnuntum into Eagle Creek Park and still have room to run your dog.

  “So many people all in one place is not good,” the German said. His friends nodded. So did Nicole, though perhaps not for the same reason. With people more thinly scattered on the northern bank of the Danube, the pestilence wouldn’t have had such a large reservoir in which to flourish. But then the German said, “So many good things all in one place is very fine and wonderful.”

  His friends nodded again, in a way Nicole didn’t like. It wasn’t so much admiring as covetous.

  At long last, they seemed to have filled up on wine and bread and meat — she’d begun to wonder if each of them had a black hole where his stomach should be. They got up from their stools, belched in an ascending chorus, and swaggered out as they’d swaggered in.

  Nicole breathed a sigh of relief. She’d made a good day’s living from them, but she’d been braced for them to start breaking up the place if they had much more to drink. They’d had a look she knew too well: elevated, but not actually drunk. Her father had come home from the bar that way sometimes. If he stayed away from the kitchen cabinet, he wasn’t too bad; he’d go into the den and sit in front of the TV till he fell asleep. But if he went to pull a bottle out of the cabinet, that meant trouble.

  The Germans hadn’t been gone five minutes when Julia trotted downstairs and applied herself to making a new batch of bread. “Nice of you to join me,” Nicole said with a sardonic edge.

  Julia bent over the bread-bowl, her hair falling forward, hiding her face. Her voice was subdued, as it had been when she was still a slave, and very seldom since. “I’m sorry, Mistress. I couldn’t be in the same room with those — those barbarians. They’re nothing but trouble. If you remember — that pack of Quadi, last year…”

  She didn’t go on. Nicole wondered if she was being challenged, if Julia was testing her memory.

  Of course not. That was trauma, that set to Julia’s shoulders, and that tension in her fingers. Nicole could easily imagine what kind. “It’s all right,” she said. “I remember.” Which of course was a lie, but not if she’d been Umma.

  Julia lifted her head. Her face was as tight as her shoulders, but it eased a little as she looked at Nicole. “I’m glad they didn’t bother you,” she said.

  “So am I,” Nicole said. “I could have grabbed a knife, I suppose, and fought them off, or tried to. They might have been too surprised to go for their swords. Or I could have yelled, and all the neighbors would have come running.”

  “Like last time?” Julia shook herself hard, and went back to working flour and water and yeast together. “Maybe they’d even have got to you before — “ She stopped. She bent over the dough, attacking it as if it had been a broad and greasy German face. In a very little while, she’d pounded it to a pulp.

  Nicole stood where Julia’s words had left her. Rape was too familiar a thing in Los Angeles, too; but no neighbors would have come running to the rescue. People didn’t get involved. The most they did, if they did anything at all, was call 911. Or grab a camcorder and go for the media gold. Nevertheless, that was a world she understood. She wanted it back. That night before she went to bed, she prayed to Liber and Libera as she had done for the past however many nights, till the prayer was worn to habit, and the words were turned to ritual. Please, god and goddess. Take me home.

  Slowly and reluctantly, winter gave way to spring. After the last snow fell, a hard and driving rain moved in like insult on top of injury. Snow over mud was bearable; the mud froze, and you could cross the street without choking on dust or sinking in muck. To be sure, if it rained, or if there was a thaw and then a freeze, the snow froze into ice, and you slipped and slid and cursed and tried not to fall down and break an elbow or your tailbone. But then snow had a way of falling and making the ice passable again.

  Spring rain melted the snow and with it the mud beneath. Every unpaved road in Carnuntum turned into black bean soup. Cold, glutinous, congealed black bean soup, ankle-deep and as apt to suck your boot off as to turn suddenly treacherous and send you skidding into a knot of passersby.

  The tag end of winter was a lean time. The storerooms were nearly empty of grain. There were no fresh vegetables to be had, and not much meat on the market that wasn’t salted, smoked, or cured. Nicole didn’t even want to think how much sodium was in each p
ortion that she served out to customers or to her family. There was fish, at least, fresh as well as salt. Fresh fish kept better in this weather, and she bought more of it. Her basic fish fry — olive oil, with crumbs from yesterday’s bread — was rather a popular item. She only wished she’d had some tartar sauce to put on it, or some chips to go with it. Nobody here had ever heard of the potato, though an experiment with onion rings didn’t turn out too badly.

  Every time she went to the market, she saw more Germans: big fair men with, now and then, a big fair woman striding robustly alongside. They seemed on their best behavior, but everyone watched them warily. Some of the veterans of the legion that had its encampment a few miles downstream took to wearing swords, which they hadn’t done before.

  One men’s day at the baths, Nicole was amazed to see several Marcomanni or Quadi — she still couldn’t tell one tribe from another — coming down the stairs. They looked mightily contented. She wondered how they bathed on their side of the Danube. To her way of thinking, the baths left something to be desired, but her basis of comparison was a hot shower and soap. Compared to a plunge into an icy stream or a half-frozen lake, the Roman baths had to seem like heaven.

  A detachment of Roman soldiers in their fancy armor came over from the legionary camp and began patrolling the walls and streets of Carnuntum. Every so often, one or two of them would drop into the tavern.

  One day when spring was well advanced, a pair of legionaries came rattling and jangling in just as Nicole finished pouring a round of wine for a tableful of Germans. The air was always vaguely tense when the Germans were in the tavern, but Nicole had learned to ignore the tension.

  She couldn’t ignore this. The legionaries didn’t say a word except to order the one-as wine. The Germans, drinking Falernian and paying for it in silver as they always did, went on with their low growl of conversation. Neither side acknowledged the other.

  Nobody else spoke, or moved much either. Julia, who hadn’t been able to make herself scarce this time, took refuge in scouring plates and cups and bowls. Lucius helped her, or tried; he kept dropping things. The two or three ordinary customers, trapped in the back and unable to escape without running the gauntlet between the soldiers and the barbarians, nursed whatever they were eating and drinking, and did their best to seem inconspicuous.

  The Germans finished their wine, belched — a little louder than usual, maybe — and left. A few minutes later, the legionaries did the same.

  As soon as the soldiers were out the door, a long sigh ran through the room. Nicole hadn’t known she was holding her breath till she let it out.

  “Phew!” Ofanius Valens said for them all. “Another cup of the two-as for me, Umma. That could have been ugly.”

  “It was ugly,” Nicole said.

  “It could have been uglier,” he said. He took the cup Nicole had filled for him, thanked her, and drank deep.

  Nicole was tempted to keep him company. She’d had precious few brawls in the tavern, and nothing worse than a pair of young idiots going at each other with fists and getting pitched into the street. The Calidii Severi, father and son, had played bouncers that day, she remembered. It still hurt to think of Titus, how he was dead and would never walk through that door again.

  She remembered, too, how surprised she’d been, not by the fight, but by the fact that it was the first that had escalated that far. She’d come to Carnuntum convinced that drinking equaled drunkenness and that was that. And drunkenness, she’d been just as sure, had meant a fight — her father sending her mother to the ER yet again, where she’d lie as always, claiming she’d run into a door or fallen down the stairs.

  In fact, neither of those assumptions had turned out to be universally or even generally true. Most of her customers drank without getting drunk. Of the ones who did go over the edge, more got friendly or talky or sleepy than got belligerent. She’d made a point of sending the nasty drunks on their way, and making it clear that they weren’t to come back. They’d mostly stayed away, too. “Plenty of other places to get a load of wine,” as one of them had informed her before she booted him out.

  She’d been running a tavern in small-town Indiana. And the L.A. gang scene had come to town. “If those barbarians had gone at it with those legionaries,” she said, “it wouldn’t have been a tavern brawl. It would have been a war.”

  Ofanius Valens finished off his cup of wine and held it up for another. When Nicole had brought it, and scooped up the dupondius he set on the table, he said, “Yes, it would have been a war. It might have started a fire here to match the one that’s been burning farther west.”

  Nicole needed a moment to realize that, whereas she’d been using a figure of speech, Ofanius Valens had meant his words literally. “You don’t really think so, do you?” she said. “We’ve stayed at peace all this time. Why should it all blow up in our faces now?”

  “We’ve been at peace, and the gods know I’m glad of it, too,” Ofanius Valens said. “But the gods also know I’ve never seen so many Quadi and Marcomanni in town as I have the past month or so. We’d always get a few: they’d cross the river to buy things in the market or drink in the taverns or just to stare at our fancy buildings. The barbarians couldn’t build a bathhouse like ours in a thousand years.”

  “Now, though,” Julia said, “now they look like dogs in front of a butcher’s stall.”

  A lean and hungry look, Nicole thought. She’d thought it before, about the Romans in this city, with their thin dark faces — and hadn’t Shakespeare written it about a Roman, now that she stopped to think? But it fit these Germans just as well, in a different way.

  She’d thought — she’d been sure — she was getting away from war when she fell back through time. She’d thought — she’d been sure of — all sorts of things when she came to Carnuntum. Very few of them had turned out to be true, or anything close to it. She’d hated the late twentieth century while she was living in it. From the perspective of the second century, it looked like the earthly paradise.

  Perspective, she thought, is a wonderful thing.

  “We have the wall,” she said. And had she ever stopped to think why Carnuntum had a wall? Very basic principle of legal theory: laws existed to prevent people from doing things to harm other people. A wall wasn’t just there to look pretty and provide a nice high place for lovers to walk on fine summer evenings. It was there for a reason: to keep out nasty neighbors.

  Everybody here knew that. They knew something else, too — even the children. “We have the wall,” Lucius agreed, “and the legion.” He slapped the hilt of his toy sword. It was thrust in his belt at the precise angle at which the Roman soldiers wore their real ones.

  “That’s not a whole legion,” Ofanius Valens said gloomily, “and what there is of it won’t be enough. They’ll defend their camp first and worry about us afterwards. I’d do the same in their sandals.”

  “What I want to know,” Julia said with unaccustomed sharpness, “is why the barbarians won’t leave us alone. We haven’t done them any harm.”

  My God, Nicole thought, even here and now, the small and the weak came out with the same cry of protest as they had all through the blood-spattered twentieth century. And yet this was the Roman Empire. It was by no means small, and she’d never heard it was weak. “Don’t the Germans know they’re like a dog fighting an elephant?” she demanded.

  Ofanius Valens laughed, but the sound was bitter. “They know they’ve had a fine time plundering Roman provinces and then scurrying back across the river into their forest. Now we’re weak from the pestilence — easy pickings, they’ll be thinking.”

  “We drove them out of Aquileia.” Nicole remembered that from her very first, panicky trip to the market square. She still didn’t know exactly where Aquileia was, but what did that matter?

  Ofanius nodded. “So we did. And I’d be happier if they’d never got down that far.”

  “Maybe everything will come out all right here,” Julia said, reaching for Nicole�
��s optimism — which Nicole was almost ready to call naivete. “Maybe it will, if the gods stay kind.”

  “Here’s hoping it does. “ Ofanius Valens lifted his cup, peered into it, and seemed astonished to find it empty. “Have to do something about that,” he said, and fumbled a couple of asses out of the pouch he wore on his belt. Nicole took the cup and filled it yet again.

  “Thank you, Umma,” he said when she set it on the table in front of him. He lifted it once more, wobbling a tiny bit — he’d had three cups, after all. “Here’s to peace, prosperity, and the Germans staying on their side of the river.”

  Back in California, Nicole had had an earthquake emergency kit, with blankets and food that would keep, and bottled water and a frying pan and matches and charcoal for the barbecue and a first-aid kit all stored in a plastic trash can and waiting for a disaster she hoped would never come. She wondered if she ought to start a war emergency kit here. And if she did, what would she put in it? So many things she’d taken for granted in California didn’t exist here. She could get together wine and salt fish and olive oil. That would be better than nothing — and if the war held off, she could always sell what was in the kit.

  She shook her head. She was as twitchy as a cat on a freeway. The Germans and the legionaries had set everyone’s nerves on edge. Still — there were soldiers in the city where there hadn’t been any before. Someone else, someone who might have reason to know, was twitchy too. Maybe she’d get together that emergency kit after all.

  The Marcomanni and the Quadi broke into Carnuntum on a misty spring morning. They used the mist to their advantage, for it kept anyone on the southern bank of the Danube from spying their boats till they were almost ashore.

  Nicole was just putting the first loaves of the morning into the oven when the sound of horns throughout the city brought her bolt upright. The fierce brass bray put her in mind of the civil-defense sirens that had wailed on the last Friday of each month when she was a girl in Indiana. If this was a drill, it was awfully realistic. A commotion outside brought her running to the door. People were running up and down the street, shouting and screaming. She picked words out of the tumult: “Marcomanni! Quadi! Germans!” Then even those were lost in the general roar of alarm and dismay and fear.