Household Gods (18 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Across the street, somebody had drawn an elaborate sketch of a man with a donkey's head, hanging from a cross, with a normal man standing below, lifting up his hands. Scribbled under it she read, ALEXANDER WORSHIPPING HIS GOD.
“What's that supposed to mean?” Nicole murmured in absent-minded English. It hit hard when it hit, as the painfully obvious can do, taking her straight back to Sunday school. So when was this, the age of Christians and lions? Someone here obviously didn't think much of the Christians.
A scribble like that would have brought Sunday school down around everybody's ears. No one here seemed to take
the least notice of it. Maybe people agreed with it. Maybe it honestly didn't matter to them. No wonder Julia had thought Nicole was acting strangely when she'd asked about the Christian calendar.
Just down the street from the shop with Alexander's portrait on its wall stood an enormous building, by far the largest Nicole had seen in Carnuntum.
City hall?
she wondered.
State capitol?
Whatever it was, it was busy. People—all men, she noticed with a reflexive feminist sting—bustled in and out of several side entrances. Smoke poured from the slits of windows and out the doors as people came and went. In Los Angeles, she'd have been sure the place was on fire. In Carnuntum, where chimneys hadn't been invented, smoke seemed ubiquitous and, for all she could tell, harmless.
Nicole walked along beside the building for what had to be 150 yards before she came to a corner. Around that she found what she'd been hoping for: the main entrance. It was even more floridly ornate than she'd started to expect. An inscription ran above it in the spiky and portentous Roman capitals, proclaiming that Marcus Annius Libo, to celebrate assuming the consulship for the second time during the reign of the august Emperor Hadrian, had erected for the city of Carnuntum these … public baths.
Nicole laughed out loud. “That's right!” she said, remembering the ruins again. Any town whose grandest building was a bathhouse was her kind of place. She wondered if it was as fancy on the inside as its white-marble, columned elegance suggested. On impulse, she started up the low stairs. She hadn't bathed the day before, and couldn't remember the last time she'd missed before that.
But, at the top of the stairway, a bored-looking attendant held up a hand to stop her. “Gents today,” he said. “Ladies yesterday, ladies tomorrow, gents today.” He sounded like a broken record.
“Oh.” Nicole felt like an idiot. Hadn't Julia said yesterday was a ladies' day? So men and women alternated. How bloody inefficient. Couldn't they have had separate sections? Alternating half-days? Coed facilities? What if someone
needed a bath now and it was the wrong day? What was she supposed do then?
Damn it, her skin was crawling just thinking about two. days without a hot shower, let alone an all-over bath.
She opened her mouth to say something of that, but shut it again. She wasn't, at the moment, feeling quite up to fighting weight. As she turned on her heel, letting that be her whole expression of temper, she stopped short. Two women strolled out of the baths, laughing and chattering and jingling coins in little dyed-leather pouches. Nicole forgot the flutter in her belly and the ache in her head. She rounded on the doorman, porter, whatever he was, and jabbed an indignant finger in their direction. “What about them?”
The attendant sneered. She'd seen that look back in L.A., once or twice, when her clothes weren't fancy enough to suit a maître d'. “They didn't go in to
bathe,
lady,” he said.
Nicole snapped her mouth shut on a retort, and looked again at the women. Even for women in Carnuntum, they were heavily made up. Their faces looked like the masks she'd seen hanging over the stage in every theater she'd been in. And every inch of it, she had no doubt, the same deadly white lead that she'd thrown out the window this morning. Their tunics seemed made of gauze, wafting in whatever breeze happened to blow, and leaving exactly nothing to the imagination. Their pubes, she couldn't help but notice, were shaved as—she blushed inside herself, and snarled at herself for it—as her own was. Their nipples appeared to be rouged or painted. The scent that wafted from them was so strong she nearly gagged. Rosewater and musk and something oddly … culinary? Was that cinnamon? Even as strong as it was, its sweetness was welcome amid the smoke and stench of the city.
It was also, she realized, advertising.
“Oh!” she said again before she could catch herself. She wasn't supposed to feel what she was feeling, which was all the indignation of the Midwestern matron at being brought face to face with a pair of hookers. Umma was a respectable woman; no one had indicated otherwise. And yet these two
prostitutes sashayed past her in their waft of perfume and their flutter of inadequate draperies, acting as if they had just as much right to promote their business as she did hers.
So what was she supposed to feel? As a feminist, she should deplore the reduction of her fellow women to mere commercial sex toys—and be dismayed to realize that the so-called oldest profession probably was that ancient. As a liberal, she should approve the lack of hypocrisy of a culture that allowed the same freedom from persecution to hookers as to johns.
It was the good old liberal feminist's dilemma, as insoluble now as it had ever been. The two contrary notions jangled together uneasily in her mind as she hurried down the stairs.
 
Just past the baths lay a large open square with colonnades on all four sides. Rows of stalls filled it and spread out under the colonnades. It reminded Nicole of the Farmers' Market in Los Angeles, only more so. Nothing had a price tag. Buyers and sellers haggled with loud shouts and frantic gesticulations. Some of them grinned, enjoying the game. Others tackled it with grim determination, as if dickering were a matter of life or death.
Nicole could understand the grim ones a fair bit better than the grinning ones, just then. Her head was aching again, and not just with the aftermath of the trots. She'd been in supermarkets bigger than this. Hell, she'd been to the Mall of America.
In the Mall of America, she knew the rules. What to expect, what to look for, where the maps were if she couldn't find her way. Here there was nothing to guide her. No nice little map on a pillar with a pink dot labeled, “You Are Here.” Nothing but a churning mass of people and things. Far too many of those things were alive. No shrink-wrap or cold cases here. Dinner came on the hoof or just recently killed, with head and feet still on.
Nicole took a deep breath that didn't steady her quite so much as she'd have liked it to, and set out around the edge
of the cobblestoned square. She'd look things over, she told herself, before she tried to buy anything.
She'd got about halfway round when a man called out to her: “Hello, Mistress Umma! Look at the lovely raisins I've got for you today.”
As far as Nicole was concerned, raisins were raisins. These could have come straight out of a red SunMaid box. She looked down her nose at them, as if they were a legal brief she intended to tear to pieces. She'd learned to do that in Mexico, and found there that she liked it. A little of the thrill started to come back through cranky stomach and culture shock. She let it build up. She was going to need it, if she expected to get out of here with any cash left over.
Focus, then. Forget the bellyache, the headache, the overtaxed brain. Think of it as an exercise, like moot court in law school: up all night and running on caffeine, briefcase full of illegible notes and brain full of irrelevant data, but everything coming to one single, all-important point.
Raisins. Never act as if you really want what you intend to buy, she'd learned south of the border. That was easy enough now. She never had cared much for raisins. But Julia had said the restaurant needed them. Therefore, the restaurant was going to get them.
“Go on, taste a few,” the seller—dealer? huckster?—urged her. “You'll see how fine they are.”
She took one, examined it on all sides, ate it. She shrugged. “Yes, it's a raisin. How much?”
“Eight
sesterces
for a
modius
,” he answered, not quite promptly.
A
modius
was a lot; the image that sprang into her mind at the sound of the word was of a jar that had to hold a couple of gallons' worth. The idea of getting that many raisins for a few brass coins was mind-boggling. Still, the dealer had hesitated the least little bit before he replied. Maybe that didn't mean anything. Maybe it did. “And what did you charge me for them last time?” she asked in her best cross-examination voice.
It wasn't quite
Where were you on the night of the fourth?
but it did the job. The raisin-seller winced. “All right, six
sesterces
,” he said sullenly. “That's not any higher than Antonius is charging—you don't need to go trotting over to him the way you did the last couple of times.”
“Oh, you think I should?” she said as if that were a brilliant idea, and shifted as if to turn away from the stall.
“Don't you move!” the raisin-seller shrilled at her. “I just heard him sell a
modius
of rabbit droppings to Junia Marcella for seven and an as. What makes you think he'll give you any better deal?”
Nicole shrugged again. The shrug was the buyer's best weapon in these Third-World markets—except that this wasn't the Third World, was it? It was a completely different world altogether. “I suppose I believe you,” she said. “This time.”
He beamed. “Good!” he said. “Good!” Then he waited. She fumbled in her purse and counted out the six
sesterces,
but he wouldn't take them. “Not yet, not yet! Where's your basket? Didn't you bring anything to put them in?”
Of course I didn't!
Nicole started to say, but stopped herself in time. Everywhere she looked, people were carrying baskets and bags, bundles and parcels. No plastic bags—that, she didn't miss at all. But no paper, either. Nothing that resembled it.
No wonder Umma hadn't had any books on the chest of drawers or by her bed. How did the Romans run their empire without paper? Nicole wished she knew how to make it. It would be like getting in on the ground floor of Microsoft.
Unfortunately, she didn't. And, even if she had, she wouldn't have had time to do it while the raisin-seller waited. She had to stand watching and feeling foolish while he borrowed a
modius
-sized pot from the bean-dealer next door, filled it full of raisins, then poured the raisins into a big pile on a grimy linen sheet and tied it around them with what looked like a leather bootlace. He charged her an as for the packaging, too, and sounded as if he had every right in the world to do it. She gave him the little copper coin without a murmur.
She wandered on down the line of stalls, finding in them a bewildering variety of things in no discernible order: fruit next to sandals next to bolts of cloth next to the kind of beads and bangles she'd expect to see on the street in San Francisco.
When she came to a butcher's stall, she wondered if she'd ever eat meat again. No neat, clean packages wrapped in polyethylene film here. Some of the meat lay on platters. Some—she peered, doubting her eyes—was nailed to boards. All of it was crawling with flies. Once in a while, the butcher swiped halfheartedly at them, but they came back in buzzing swarms.
What was it some friend of Frank's had said after spending a semester in Africa? All about picturesque markets and the African equivalent of hotdog stands: kabob-sellers. “They're called fly kabobs,” Frank's friend had said. Nicole had thought he was exaggerating.
Not anymore, she didn't.
There was blood everywhere—literally. As Nicole moved closer, drawn as much by revulsion as by curiosity, she realized the butcher was hawking it. “Pig's blood for blood sausages! Three asses for a
sextarius!
” He held up a small pot, about the size of a one-cup measure in West Hills. “One more as buys you the gut to case it in.”
His eye caught Nicole's. Before she could back away, he put down the pot and scooped up a wriggling, pink-and-gray mass that had to be pig intestines, and thrust them in her face. They stank of pig, and of the pig's last meal. Garbage, from the smell of it, and other things even less savory.
She recoiled. Her stomach, which had forgotten its complaints, abruptly remembered them. She swallowed bile. It burned going down, and made her voice even tighter than it would have been to start with. “I don't want pig guts,” she said through clenched teeth. “I want a leg of mutton.”
He never even blinked. “I've got a nice one with the hide still on,” he said. “You can get it tanned with the wool, if you want, or do the shearing and spin yourself some nice thread.” He reached under his counter and rummaged, muttering
to himself. With a grunt that sounded excessively satisfied, he pulled something out from below and slammed it down in front of her. “Here you go,” he said.
She stared at it. It was a sheep's leg. No doubt about it. It had been hacked right off the body, hide and all. She gulped down a new rush of bile. The leg was bloody at the top, with the pink knob of bone showing through. The hoof was still on it. It wasn't a particularly clean hoof, either.

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