Authors: Judith Tarr
Household Gods (19 page)
The butcher grinned at her. “It'll go about twelve pounds, I'd say. How does twenty-five
sesterces
sound? Buy it for that, and I'll throw in the head for another, mm, seven. Brain, tongue, eyeballsâall sorts of good things in a sheep's head.” He pointed. There it was, nailed to a board, staring at Nicole with idiot fixity.
sesterces
sound? Buy it for that, and I'll throw in the head for another, mm, seven. Brain, tongue, eyeballsâall sorts of good things in a sheep's head.” He pointed. There it was, nailed to a board, staring at Nicole with idiot fixity.
The mouth hung open. A big fly walked across the sheep's tongue. It paused to nibble on some dainty or other, washed its face fastidiously, walked on. Nicole watched in sick fascination. Another fly buzzed down beside the first one. Calmly and without any fuss, the second climbed on top of the first. They began to mate.
“No, not the head.” Her voice came from far away; she was trying not to lose her breakfast. Good God, how did any Romans ever live to grow up? “I'll give you fifteen
sesterces
for the leg.”
sesterces
for the leg.”
They ended up splitting the difference. By the butcher's smirk, she knew he'd ripped her off, but she didn't care. She only wanted to get away. Magnanimously, the butcher tied a strip of rawhide around the leg of mutton above the hoof and looped it into a carrying handle. Even more magnanimously, he didn't charge her for it.
By the time she found two men and a woman selling scallions within twenty feet of one another; she'd recovered ⦠somewhat. She wasn't quite
compos mentis
enough to do any haggling of her own, but an inspiration saved her the effort: she let them do it for her. She went to the first, got his price, went on to the next for a better offer, challenged the third to top it. By the time she was done, she'd got the green onions for next to nothing. She left the three vegetable dealers shouting
and shaking their fists at one another. The woman's curses were most inventive. The smaller, thinner man had, surprisingly, the most impressive voice.
compos mentis
enough to do any haggling of her own, but an inspiration saved her the effort: she let them do it for her. She went to the first, got his price, went on to the next for a better offer, challenged the third to top it. By the time she was done, she'd got the green onions for next to nothing. She left the three vegetable dealers shouting
and shaking their fists at one another. The woman's curses were most inventive. The smaller, thinner man had, surprisingly, the most impressive voice.
She decided to get out of there before they started a riot. She tucked the bunch of onions into the top of her bundle of raisins, got a grip on the leg of mutton, and beat a prudent retreat.
There were lots of fishmongers in the market, what with Carnuntum lying on the bank of the Danube. Nicole went from stall to stall in search of the one that smelled least bad. It wasn't easy. The fish peered up at her with dead, unblinking eyes: bream and pike and trout and carp that looked amazingly like ornamental koi except for their dull gray scales.
She couldn't move fast, not weighted down as she was. While she strolled, she let the gossip from other strolling shoppers wash over her. She'd done that every so often at Topanga Plaza, too; people-listening could be as interesting as people-watching. A lot of the stories could have come from her time as readily as this one: So-and-so had found her husband in bed with her friend (Nicole's lips tightened), one partner was supposed to have cheated the other in a real-estate deal, Such-and-such had got his brother-in-law drunk and buggered him.
But there were differences. When a boy of six or seven started crying and wouldn't stop, his mother whacked him on the bottom, hard. He kept crying. His mother whacked him again and bellowed, “Shut up!”
He shut up. In Topanga Plaza, that would have been a minor scandal, with people rushing to the child's defense. Nicole might have done it here, if she'd been a little closer and a lot less loaded down.
Nobody else even offered to try. Nobody seemed to want to. Quite the opposite, in fact. Three different people congratulated the mother. “That'll teach him discipline,” growled a grizzled fellow who carried himself like a Marine. Heads bobbed in agreement.
Nicole gaped. So it wasn't just Umma abusing Lucius and
Aurelia. Everybody abused children, and expected everybody else to abuse them, too. That was ⦠appalling, that was it. That was the word she wanted.
Aurelia. Everybody abused children, and expected everybody else to abuse them, too. That was ⦠appalling, that was it. That was the word she wanted.
The little Roman boy's filthy face and snot-dripping nose struck Nicole with a powerful memory of Kimberley and Justin as she'd seen them last, clean and sweet-smelling and tucked up in bed. Nobody had ever laid a hand on them in anger; not Nicole, and no, not Frank, either. Frank had never been abusive. Absent, yes; abusive, no. Dawn? Who could say? Stepmothers were wicked by definition. There wasn't a fairy tale that didn't say soâand some of those were pretty horrifying.
Everything was suddenly horrifying. Even the bit of gossip she heard, one woman to another, cool and matter-of-fact as if it were nothing out of the ordinary: “Just got news my husband's brother died down in Aquileia.”
“Ahh,” her friend said, sounding just as calm about it. “That's too bad. What was he doing down in Italy, anyway?”
“Didn't you know Junius? I thought you did. He was a muleteer.”
“I never met him, though you've told me about him before. What happened to him? Did the Marcomanni get him?”
“No, he didn't have any trouble with the barbarians. Anyhow, they got driven out of Aquileiaâwas it year before last? I forget. No, it was this pestilence that's going through Italy. It's very bad, they say. The gods grant it doesn't come here.” At that, for the first time, the woman sounded less than nonchalant. This wasn't gossip. This was honest fear.
Wonderful, Nicole thought. An epidemic. Of what, flu? She remembered only too vividly the sound of Kimberley losing her corn dog in the backseat of the Honda.
She also, after a moment and with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air, remembered another kind of epidemic, one much deadlier, that people might speak of with the same fear she heard in the women's voices. She'd known three people who'd died of AIDS. Two gay men, and a woman friend from law school, who hadn't known till too late that the man she'd had a brief affair with was bisexual.
Resolutely, she shut that out of her mind. It would happen on the other side of the world, eighteen hundred years or so from now. There was nothing she could do about it. Nor, frankly, could she do anything about this “pestilence” that had taken a life hundreds of miles from here. This wasn't the twentieth century. People couldn't travel that far that fast. What had they said about the Ebola virus? If it hadn't been for air travel, it might never have left Africa.
No air travel here. Of that she was absolutely sure.
What she could do now, and what she was going to do, was buy fish. She bought some trout that didn't look too flyblown: she'd already seen they were popular in Carnuntum. She bought some bream, too, partly in the spirit of experiment, partly because a couple of them were so fresh they still quivered a little. The fish were cheaper than the meat. In Los Angeles, it would have been the other way round.
The fishmongers strung their catch on the leather thong that the butcher had given her to help carry the leg of mutton. Nicole felt like a comic-page fisherman who'd hooked a sheep along with the rest of his catch. She was glad by then of the wool that still wrapped the mutton: it let her sling the thing over her shoulder with the fish dangling, and carry it a little less awkwardly than if she let the whole lot hang. With the meat and fish balanced on her shoulder and the bundle of raisins and onions under her arm, she paused to run through her mental shopping list.
A stall nearby reminded her of one item that she couldn't get out of. “Wine,” she said reluctantly to herself. The dealer in the stall she'd seen first wasn't the only one with wine to sell. They were all ready, no, eager, to sell it to her. Every one of them wanted her to taste his particular brand, too, “To be sure it's the genuine article,” one said in a voice as fruity as his wine. She couldn't get out of it, but neither could she tell one wine from the next, except that they were all darker and sweeter than the cheap stuff she'd drunk with breakfast.
Of course she wasn't about to admit that. She remembered how she'd seen people in restaurants and on TV, sniffing and
making portentous faces and tasting tiny bits from crystal goblets. Here she was given a whacking big ladleâGod knew where that had been or how many people had put lips to it before herâand invited to taste, taste!
making portentous faces and tasting tiny bits from crystal goblets. Here she was given a whacking big ladleâGod knew where that had been or how many people had put lips to it before herâand invited to taste, taste!
She tasted, for what that was worth, and settled to the inevitable haggle. Meat and fish might be cheap here compared to L.A., but wine cost the living earth.
She didn't have nearly the luck beating them down that she'd had with the scallion-sellers. “Mistress Umma, it's real Falernian,” said one who recognized the body she was wearing. “That means it has to come all the way from the middle of Italy on muleback, so you can't wonder that it's not cheap. I can't go any lower, or I lose money.” Something about his tone, the mixture of patience and exasperation, overcame her court-trained skepticism. He was telling the truth as he saw it.
Nicole hadn't had to worry about transportation costs, except at the office when she had to decide whether to throw something in the mail or FedEx it. No trucks here, she reminded herself. No trains, either. She wondered how long the wine had taken to get here, and what problems it had had along the way.
Once she'd bought an amphora, she had a transportation problem of her own: how to get home with a big clay jug, some dead fish, a leg of mutton, a makeshift sack of raisins, and, for good measure, the green onions. She wished she'd brought Julia after all, even if that meant bringing the children, too, and closing the tavern while everybody was gone. For that matter, she wished she had one of the pack mules that had brought the Falernian wine from Italy.
While she tried to figure out how not to have to make more than one tripâand kept coming up with the answer,
No way, José
âsomeone at her elbow spoke in a dry voice: “Want me to give you a hand with some of that?”
No way, José
âsomeone at her elbow spoke in a dry voice: “Want me to give you a hand with some of that?”
She whirled. There stood Titus Calidius Severus, one eyebrow raised in an expression of sardonic amusement. All he carried were half a dozen dead thrushes, their scrawny yellow legs bound together with twine.
How could he want to eat
them?
she thought in faint disgust.
They're too cute to eat.
How could he want to eat
them?
she thought in faint disgust.
They're too cute to eat.
But that wasn't what he'd asked her. “Thank you, Calidius,” she said with as much grace as she had to offer, and a good bit of relief. “I'd love a hand.”
His mouth tightened. She'd said something wrong, and she didn't even know what. Nor did he say anything that might give her a hint. He simply picked up the amphora and the raisins, leaving her with meat, fish, and scallions, and strode off through the market. Nicole followed, not least because she was sure he knew how to get back. She wasn't at all sure she did.
Â
As they were leaving the market square, four men tramped past them. They weren't Romans; they were speaking a guttural language Nicole didn't understand. It reminded her somehow of the German she'd heard on her honeymoon. She didn't think it wasâdidn't think it could possibly beâthe same language, but she couldn't have proved it, not with only a dozen or so words of German to call her own.
Even if the men had been speaking Latin, she would have tagged them for foreigners. They were taller, thicker through the chest, and ruddier than most of the locals. They let their beards and hair grow longer than the Romans did, andâNicole's nose wrinkledâused rancid butter for hair oil. They wore the first trousers she'd seen in Carnuntumâbaggy woolen ones, tied tight at the anklesâand short tunics over them. Each of them wore a long sword on his left hip.
They stared around the square as if they owned it, or perhaps as if they planned on robbing it. People stared at them, too, in fear and alarm, and muttered behind their hands. Nicole had seen exactly the same reaction in Topanga Plaza when a pack of gangbangers walked into the Wherehouse or Foot Locker.
“Mithras curse the Quadi and Marcomanni both to the infernal depths,” Calidius Severus growled. He was eyeing the strangers as a cop might eye gangbangers at the mall. He'd made it plain he was a veteran. Had he fought these Quadi or Marcomanni? Maybe he had, from the bitterness in his
tone. “Miserable barbarians have their nerve, coming into town to buy this and that when they invaded the Empire three years ago not far west of here.”
tone. “Miserable barbarians have their nerve, coming into town to buy this and that when they invaded the Empire three years ago not far west of here.”
“Invaded?” Nicole said, and then, hastily, “Yes, of course.” Odd bits of gossip began to fit together like pieces of evidence. The Marcomanni had conquered Aquileia in Italy, and been driven back from it. She didn't know where in Italy Aquileia was, but nowhere in Italy was particularly close to the Danube. She shivered a little, though the day was fine and mild. “It must have been quite an invasion.”
“That it was.” To her relief, Calidius didn't notice the odd phrasing; he was intent on his own thoughts. “Some officers I've talked withâeducated fellows, you knowâsay it was the worst since the Cimbri and Teutones came down on us, and that wasâwhat?âalmost three hundred years ago.”
Longer than the United States has been a country
, Nicole thought, and shivered again. On her honeymoon, she'd caught glimpses of the sense of history that filled Europe but was so conspicuously absent from America. She hadn't expected to find that sense in second-century Carnuntum. After all, this was ancient history, wasn't it? Not so ancient, evidently, that it didn't have history of its own. She hadn't gone back to the beginning of time, as she'd sometimes feltânever more urgently than when her belly griped her. She was stuck somewhere in the middle.
, Nicole thought, and shivered again. On her honeymoon, she'd caught glimpses of the sense of history that filled Europe but was so conspicuously absent from America. She hadn't expected to find that sense in second-century Carnuntum. After all, this was ancient history, wasn't it? Not so ancient, evidently, that it didn't have history of its own. She hadn't gone back to the beginning of time, as she'd sometimes feltânever more urgently than when her belly griped her. She was stuck somewhere in the middle.
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