Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  The Emperor. Nicole had hardly given a thought to him since she came to Carnuntum. His words didn’t dominate TV, radio, the papers, and the newsmagazines, as an American President’s did. There were no media for the Roman Emperor to dominate. If it hadn’t been for his coins, she wouldn’t even have known what he looked like, or what his name was. Marcus, Marcus Aurelius. According to the coins, he was a middle-aged man with a beaky nose, a receding chin a beard couldn’t quite hide, and curly hair that looked as if it needed brushing.

  All of which told her exactly nothing. People didn’t talk about him at all, or seem to think about him much, either. Brigo certainly didn’t sound awed at the prospect of an imperial visit. “Is he coming himself,” she asked, “or is it just some general leading the army in his name?”

  “From what I’ve heard, he’s leading his own army,” Brigomarus said. “He took the field himself farther west, I know that. Whether he’ll beat the cursed Marcomanni and Quadi and come this far — there’s no way anyone can know that.”

  “I hope he does,” Nicole said fervently.

  Brigomarus rolled his eyes. “Oh, by the gods, don’t we all,” he said. “I can’t think of anybody in Carnuntum who’s done well under the Germans. Except…”

  When he didn’t go on, Nicole thumped him on the arm. “Come on — who?”

  “The undertakers,” he answered promptly — and hastily threw up a hand.

  “Don’t throw that cup at me! They got more work than they deserved during the pestilence. The Germans gave them even more. They’re getting cursed rich.”

  “Maybe they are,” Nicole said, “but I don’t expect they’ll cry too hard when the Germans go.”

  She wouldn’t be sorry to see them go, either — preferably out on their ears. She wouldn’t be sorry, if she was perfectly honest with herself, to see the lot of them killed. She’d been pretty young when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. When she thought about it, she realized how much the Vietnam War had colored her attitude toward war in general. She’d thought the Gulf War a waste of money and men, fought mostly over oil — never mind the rhetoric about democracy and freedom. But now, from the middle of a war, she didn’t just remember how rapturously the people of Kuwait had welcomed the soldiers who drove out the Iraqis. She understood right down to the bone why the Kuwaitis had been so overjoyed. She was ready — more than ready — to plant a big fat kiss on the first Roman legionary who came tramping up the street. And if there was blood on his sword, all the better.

  Brigomarus slapped the bar in front of her, startling her back into herself. “You seem to have things here pretty much in hand. How are you fixed for food?”

  “Not too bad,” she said, which was only a slight exaggeration. “We’re hungry, but we aren’t — quite — starving. And you, Brigo? If you need help, we can spare a little. “ She couldn’t, not really, but neither was she — quite — on the edge.

  Umma’s brother shook his head. “No, thank you, we don’t need anything. I’m hungrier than I ever wanted to be, but I’m not dying of it.”

  She drew a breath and nodded. She was relieved, there was no point in denying it. Every scrap she didn’t share was that much more for Lucius and Julia and herself. “We’ll just keep our heads down and hang on, and wait till the Emperor comes.”

  Till the Emperor comes. It sounded like a fairy tale she might have read to Kimberley, not one of the real, old, grim ones, but one of the sugar-coated, saccharine-overloaded, sweetness-and-light fables that were deemed safe for impressionable young children. But there was nothing either sweet or harmless about Carnuntum. The little blue birds would have gone into somebody’s pot, and the pretty butterflies been trampled underfoot by a horde of marching Germans. It would take more than a pastel prince to rescue Carnuntum. It would take an emperor.

  Nicole hoped, a little crazily, that he didn’t try to buy himself any new clothes. “I hope he comes soon,” she said.

  “So do I,” Brigomarus answered. “So does everybody — except the Quadi and the Marcomanni. And they’re the ones with the most to say about when he gets here, or if he gets here at all.”

  More and more Germans in filthy bandages prowled the streets of Carnuntum. Fewer and fewer peasants brought in produce from the villages and farms around the city. Carnuntum might have been the only place where they could get money for it, but Carnuntum was also the place where they were most likely to be robbed and killed. They didn’t need any sort of cost/benefit analysis to draw the appropriate conclusion. They stayed away. And Carnuntum went hungry.

  One who did dare the market square brought news of a battle outside Scarabantia. “Who won?” Nicole demanded in the middle of trying to haggle down the price of his prunes.

  He wasn’t inclined to haggle. Intellectually, Nicole understood that: if she didn’t feel like paying his price, some other hungry citizen would. It infuriated her even so. He had a lot of damn nerve, lining the pockets he didn’t wear with profits made from hunger. He also wasn’t inclined to answer her question in a hurry. He reminded her of a farmer from downstate Indiana, sparing of words and suspicious of everybody he hadn’t known since he was four years old.

  “Who won?” she repeated, wishing she could appeal to a judge to get an answer out of the reluctant witness.

  “Cursed lot of dead on both sides,” he answered at last, which made her want to feed him all his prunes at once — if she couldn’t loosen up one end, she’d damned well loosen up the other. Then, grudgingly, he let drop a kernel of information: “Romans are still coming north.”

  Nicole let out a long sigh of relief. “Why don’t you sound happier about it?” she asked. “There aren’t any Germans around to hear you.” Even as she spoke, she looked about to make sure she was right: the age-old glance of the occupied, checking to see that the occupiers were busy elsewhere.

  The farmer shrugged. “I’m making good money these days. And the Marcomanni and Quadi haven’t got the faintest notion what taxes are: haven’t had to pay ‘em an as on my land or my crop. You can bet it won’t be like that when the usual pack of clerks is back in the saddle.”

  That he was surely right didn’t make his attitude any more appealing. Nicole had to remind herself she wasn’t likely to improve his outlook by tearing him limb from limb, strictly rhetorically of course. Nor was she inclined to call a German to do it for her. And she needed those prunes. Reluctantly, she shelled out ten times what she reckoned they were worth, raked them into her sack, and left him to his prosperity.

  Hunger had long since taken Lucius past the point where he turned up his nose at anything even vaguely resembling food. He would have gobbled all the prunes if Nicole had given him even half a chance. She snatched the bag out of his greedy fingers and stowed it safe behind her. “Oh, no, you don’t! Julia and I get to have some, too. Do you want to spend the whole night squatting over a pot because you made a pig of yourself?”

  Lucius scowled and stamped his foot. “I don’t care. I want to eat. I’m all empty inside!”

  “We all are,” Nicole said. Not that he cared: he was a child. To children, nothing mattered but the moment. She tried to console him, at least a little. “Maybe we won’t be hungry much longer. The man who sold me the prunes said the Romans won a battle outside of Scarabantia.”

  “Outside Scarabantia?” Julia echoed. “That isn’t very far away at all. The Emperor could be here in just a few days.” Her face had been bright with hope, but all at once it fell. “I hope the Germans don’t try to stand siege here. They might hold off the legions for weeks, maybe even months.”

  “Siege?” That hadn’t occurred to Nicole. She wished it hadn’t occurred to Julia, either: now they both had something to gnaw their empty bellies over. “God, I hope not, too.” She tried to look on the bright side, if there was such a thing: “We didn’t keep out the Marcomanni and Quadi for very long. Maybe they won’t be able to hold off the legions, either.”

  “I hope you’re right.” But Julia didn’
t sound convinced. “We didn’t have much of a garrison here, and the Germans took us half by surprise. The legions won’t be so lucky. The Germans will be expecting them — and there are an awful lot of Germans in Carnuntum.”

  That made a depressing amount of sense. Nicole stared blankly at Lucius’ outstretched hand, blinked, doled out a handful of prunes. He might be greedy about the whole bag, but he’d learned how to eat his prize once he won it: piece by piece, savoring it, making it last. When he’d got the last scrap of flavor out of the first one, he spat the pit on the floor and said, “If it is a siege, the barbarians will keep all the food for themselves. We’ll starve.”

  “You aren’t supposed to understand that much this young,” Nicole said. He shrugged, already halfway through his second prune. She provided the answer he wasn’t about to. In this world, yes, he had to understand that much. Otherwise he wouldn’t survive. She was the one who was lacking here. Her capacity for estimating man’s inhumanity to man had proved time and again that it wasn’t up to, or down to, dealing with the second century. Of course the Germans would lay hold of all the food they could — hadn’t they done it already? Of course they would treat the people of Carnuntum, the people who actually belonged in the city, as expendable. Yes, it made perfect sense. The Serbs in Bosnia wouldn’t have needed it spelled out for them.

  Nicole glanced at the spot behind the bar where, once, the plaque of Liber and Libera had stood. Don’t you see? she said in her mind. I’m too… civilized to live in this time. Even if the plaque had still been there, she wouldn’t have got any response. She was bitterly certain of that. She’d made her bed. It was hard and lumpy and uncomfortable, with scratchy blankets and vermin uncounted. She had to lie in it. The god and goddess weren’t listening.

  She took a prune out of the bag and popped it into her mouth. It was sweet and good. She had to make the best of things here. She chewed the flesh off the pit, and very carefully, too; and not only because she wanted to savor the taste. The last thing she wanted was to bite down too hard and break another tooth. That would mean, sooner or later, another visit to Terentianus. One of those was enough to last her two lifetimes, and then some.

  Food was scarce, but at least, as people were inclined to remark, there was plenty of water. That wasn’t always the case in a siege, Nicole had gathered.

  She was just on her way out the door, amphora in hand, headed for the fountain two blocks over, when she nearly collided with Brigomarus. He was in a fair hurry, and he had something tucked under his arm. “What’s that?” Nicole wanted to know, once they’d stopped laughing at the comedy of errors: each leaping back with a little shriek, then doing the “Which way do I go next?” dance till they both stopped and stared at each other.

  “What’s this?” Brigomarus brought the cloth-wrapped oblong out from under his arm, grunting a bit: it was heavy for its size. “It’s a present for you.”

  “Really? For me?” Nicole couldn’t clap her hands: they were full of amphora. “Show me!”

  He obligingly let slip the wrapping and held it for her to see.

  She felt the handles of the amphora slipping through her fingers. She felt them, but she couldn’t do a thing about it. The amphora struck the rammed-earth floor and went instantly from pot to potsherds. She didn’t care. She didn’t care at all.

  “By the gods, it’s not such a big thing as that,” Brigomarus said, more than a little taken aback. “I happened to notice you’d lost the other one you had up here, and so I thought I’d — “

  Nicole hardly heard him. ‘‘Where did you get that?’’ she whispered.

  “This?” Brigomarus shrugged. “Stonecutter named… what was his name? Celer, that was it. Pestilence got him, poor fellow. I bought it… oh, must have been toward the end of spring last year, I guess. So when I saw you didn’t have yours up anymore, then Julia told me what happened to it, I thought I’d bring you this one to take its — “

  He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Nicole threw her arms around him, being very, very careful of the plaque, and kissed him soundly. There was nothing sisterly about it. When she let him go, he was red from the neck of his tunic all the way up to his hairline. She didn’t care about that, either. With great delicacy, she took the plaque of Liber and Libera from him.

  It was the plaque. She recognized it instantly. The carving was sharper and crisper than it had been when the limestone slab sat on her night-stand. Of course it would be. The plaque was much younger than it had been then.

  When had Brigomarus bought it? Toward the end of spring last year, he’d said. She didn’t know — she didn’t have any way to discover — exactly when he’d bought it, exactly when Celer had finished it, but she would have bet it was right about the time when she’d taken up residence in Umma’s body. No wonder she hadn’t been able to find it till now. Brigo had had it all along. Had the gods intended that? Had they cared enough to hide it, effectively, in plain sight?

  “It’s — perfect!” she said. “Absolutely perfect.”

  “I’m glad you think so.” Brigomarus still sounded bewildered. Nicole didn’t blame him. But there was no way she was going to enlighten him. She was only half crazy.

  “I don’t just think so. I know so.” Nicole hoped she did. To be wrong now, to be disappointed again… She didn’t want to think about that. If this plaque, the very same, the self-same one that had brought her here, couldn’t get her back to West Hills, nothing could. If nothing could… No. She wasn’t thinking about that.

  Brigomarus coughed a time or two. Nicole’s stomach clenched — legacy of the pestilence. But no, it was just a catch in his throat, or maybe a touch of a cold. “There’s another reason I came, too,” he said, “and look, I almost forgot. I heard it from a German who came in screaming for a shield. The Emperor and the army are on their way. They’ll be here any day. The barbarians are yelling at the top of their lungs for something, anything to help them drive the Romans back.”

  “Are they?” Nicole was listening with only half an ear. Her eyes kept coming back to the stone faces of the god and goddess. Those carven lips had kissed her palm in promise. Those bland and heedless faces had turned on her, and smiled, and granted her prayer.

  It was as if she couldn’t keep two purposes in mind at once. Either she was surviving in this world, devoting every scrap of her attention to it, or she was concentrating totally on getting out of it. Now that she had the key — please, god and goddess, let it be the key — there was no room in her for anything else.

  Those lips had kissed her palm well over a year ago, as Umma’s body reckoned time. What had happened to her body? How long had it been there? Had Umma been struggling to survive there as Nicole struggled to survive here? Ye gods, a Roman woman who couldn’t even read, trying to cope with all the complexities of life in Los Angeles — two minutes of that and they’d lock her away. Nicole had survived because life was simpler here, if orders of magnitude harder. The things she needed to cope with, she’d at least dimly heard of. What could Umma have made of the automobile, the telephone, the microwave oven?

  Or — and maybe worse — what if Umma hadn’t been there at all? What if there was nobody home? Would Nicole leap forward in time, only to find that there was nothing there, no body to move into? What if she was — if she was -

  She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t. She caressed the votive plaque with fingers that shook a little. She had to try. No matter what waited for her, it had to be better than what faced her here.

  Brigomarus left, still baffled that his sister should be so delighted with his present and hardly seem interested at all in the news he’d brought. There was no way he could understand that the votive plaque was the best, the greatest news she’d ever wanted.

  Nicole set it where the other one had been. She found a little wine — dregs, to be honest — in the bottom of one of the jars set into the bar, and offered it to the god and goddess. Then and only then did she get around to picking up the pieces of the broken amph
ora, finding another one, and going out and lugging back water.

  Julia had been across the street in the fuller and dyer’s shop when Brigomarus came by. She was back by the time Nicole brought in the jar of water. Nicole didn’t ask what, if anything, Julia had been doing with Gaius Calidius Severus. It was none of her business.

  The freedwoman was leaning on the bar, chin in hands, contemplating the plaque. When Nicole came in she rolled an eye at her and asked, “Where’d you get that, Mistress?”

  “Brigo brought it,” Nicole answered. “Didn’t he tell you? He said you told him how the other one got broken.”

  “Oh,” Julia said with a hunch of the shoulders. “Well. I forgot about that.” Had she? Nicole wondered. And wondered something else, too: something that was really rather reprehensible. Oh, surely not. Julia sold herself to strangers, but when it came to people she knew, she tended to either keep a roster of regulars or, as with young Calidius Severus, give it away for free. No, she was just remembering that she’d broken the first plaque, and indulging in a bit of guilt.

  She came out of it soon enough. “That was nice of him,” she said. She tilted her head and squinted. “If you don’t mind me saying so, I think it’s a nicer carving job than the one we had before.”

  “I think so, too,” Nicole said. And if she didn’t mean quite the same by that as Julia did, then Julia didn’t need to know it.

  That night before she went to sleep, she begged Liber and Libera to send her back to California, back to the twentieth century. She was reaching them — she was. The way seemed open, as it hadn’t before. She drifted off with a smile on her face.

  She woke… in Carnuntum.