Household Gods (23 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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That gave Nicole the name of the tool she was awkwardly wielding. Amazing, how much dirt it took off with the oil. It wasn't as good as soap would have been, but it wasn't
bad. And she only had to tell Aurelia to stop wiggling about half a dozen times.
After she'd finished with Umma's daughter—her daughter now—she swallowed a twinge of revulsion and rubbed oil into her own skin, all over. It had a slimy, slippery feel, like cold cream gone bad, or rancid baby oil. Aurelia begged to help. Nicole handed her the strigil. “Here, you do my legs.” Aurelia was happy to oblige. She did as good a job as one might expect, but grew bored with it and wandered off, humming to herself. Nicole finished the rest, twisting awkwardly to do her back and buttocks. It was truly astonishing how well the oil lifted dirt. Her skin was a couple of shades lighter, and it hadn't even seen water yet.
A man's voice sent her into a purely reflexive jump-and-curl, one arm over her breasts, the other over her privates. The owner of the voice sauntered in beside and a little behind one of the women who'd been exercising in the courtyard, the one who looked astonishingly like Elizabeth Taylor and seemed to have about the same fondness for gold and outsized stones. No diamonds, Nicole was rather disappointed to note. The jewels were huge, but looked rough and barely polished; they ran heavily to garnets and amber.
The woman skinned her tunic over her rigidly curled and plaited head and strolled, unconcernedly naked, to a vacant bench. She lay on her belly and rested her head on her folded arms, sighing and wriggling her ample buttocks as if to get comfortable on the well-worn wood.
Her escort was a type Nicole would have recognized in L.A. He'd have been showing off his buff pecs on the beach and trying out for roles on
Baywatch,
back where Nicole came from. Here he seemed to have settled into the life of a kept studmuffin. He bent over his—mistress? that could be taken several different ways—and began to rub her back. She purred with pleasure. Nobody could miss the sound: it echoed through the room.
Was he a slave? Was he her slave? Did the baths provide a masseur if you paid extra? Nicole didn't know the answers to any of those questions. Another one occurred to the lawyerly
side of her, one that made her laugh to herself: how many masseurs figured in divorce actions in Carnuntum?
Aurelia was hopping up and down with impatience. “Mother! Are you asleep? I asked you. Shall we go in the hot plunge now, or the cool one?”
Nicole shook herself back into line. “The hot one,” she answered promptly. The man's muscles hadn't aroused her a bit, but her insides went all soft and quivery at the thought of hot water.
She'd chosen right for Aurelia, too: the child clapped her hands and danced. She skipped ahead through one of two doorways at the far side of the stripping-off room. More women had been going through that doorway than through the other. So it wasn't just Nicole's twentieth-century sensibility. In a world in which hot water wasn't simply to be had at the turning of a tap, people valued it all the more.
The hot plunge was a small swimming pool, although Nicole had never before gone into a pool with a mosaic of voluptuously naked women on the bottom. Their hair was green—sea nymphs? She sighed as she lowered herself into the water: the temperature was just what she would have wanted in her own tub.
Some of her pleasure died abruptly. This water hadn't come from a nice safe heater in a corner of the laundry room. Slaves had hauled wood to feed the fires that heated the pool. There was human sweat in it, and human blood, too.
She couldn't wallow in liberal guilt every time she made a new move. This whole world looked to be a liberal's nightmare. Too much of it would have been her nightmare if she'd known what it was really like.
Well, she hadn't. And she was here, and she was staying here, and that was that. She shut off the corner of her mind that niggled her with guilt, and went back to reveling in the feel of hot water on her skin.
Aurelia had slid into the plunge a little way down. Now she came paddling up to Nicole, sleek as a fish. “Come here,” Nicole said. “We're going to do your hair.”
Aurelia didn't like getting duncked, not even slightly. She
spluttered and squawked and wiggled, none of which did her any good. Nicole was all for empowering children, but not when they had heads full of lice and nits. She did the best job she could with hot water and no shampoo, and had to hope it would be enough.
When she'd finished tormenting Aurelia, she worked at her own hair and scalp with fingers and nails till she could feel the sting of water in scrapes and scratches. Maybe she'd managed to unload the current cargo of vermin. But even if she had, how long would that last? She'd have to boil all the bedding and all the clothes in her house to have a prayer of banishing them for good—and she had next to no chance that they'd stay banished, not with customers bringing in a whole new shipment five minutes after she'd killed off the last one.
She could get used to stuffing her underwear with rags several days a month, because the other women in Carnuntum had to do the same. She supposed she could get used to chamber pots, because everybody in Carnuntum used chamber pots. Could she get used to being lousy, because everybody in Carnuntum was lousy? Not—bloody—likely. She scrubbed at her scalp again.
A woman a few feet away from her stopped trying to rub dirt off an arm that was hardly more than skin wrapped around bones and started coughing: long, wet, racking coughs that made her ladder-thin body shudder and her face turn dusky purple. When at last she seemed able to pause for breath, Nicole saw flecks of reddish froth in her nostrils and the corners of her lips, as if she'd literally coughed up bits of lung.
Tuberculosis,
Nicole thought with a frisson of horror. The horror that followed was too big for a frisson: the woman spat the bloody foam into the water, as casual as if there were no harm in it at all, and went back to trying to get clean.
Nicole stared transfixed at the swirling, turbid water. The foam had melted right into it. In her mind's eye, she saw the bacilli floating there, spreading through the plunge, multiplying
in that wonderful warm, wet medium. But the germs were too small for her physical eyes to see—for anyone to see. And there were no microscopes here. She remembered that from some class or other, history of science or some such: what a world-shaking discovery that had been. It was still centuries in the future.
And, because germs were too small for human eyes to see, no one in Carnuntum would believe they were there. Everything she'd seen in the city made her sure of that.
But that didn't mean they weren't there, or that she didn't know they were there. She grabbed Aurelia, who was doing her best to imitate an otter. “Time to get out,” Nicole said firmly.
“Oh, Mother! Do you want to go to the sweating room already?” Aurelia sounded like every kid ever born, in any corner of the world.
It did her no good whatever. “Yes, that's where we're going,” Nicole said, though she hadn't known it was till Aurelia mentioned it. All she'd known was that they were getting out of this pool, and they were doing it this instant.
Reluctantly, Aurelia did as she was told. Reluctantly, she led the way down a dim stone passageway to the sweating room, though Nicole wasn't about to let her know she was doing that.
Outside the room, an attendant stood holding a tray. She held it out as Nicole came up. Half a dozen leaf-shaped iron blades lay on the tray. “Razor?” she asked.
Nicole took a razor. She held it cautiously; in California, she'd used an electric shaver, not least because she kept slicing herself with blades. This wasn't just a slicing tool; if you weren't careful, you could kill somebody with it. Yourself, for instance.
Nevertheless, and in spite of her misgivings, she took it. She'd already seen that nobody in Carnuntum went around
au naturel.
If she wanted to blend in, she had to do what everybody else did.
And, having seen how bad the lice problem was, she thought she knew why women here shaved everything but
their heads. It was a wonder they didn't shave their heads, too. Maybe she should do that, and start a fashion?
She wasn't feeling quite so radical just then. She had chances enough for mayhem as she shaved tender places she'd never tried shaving before with any razor at all, let alone one as potentially lethal as this. The razor was dull, too, and scraped and pulled, and altogether it was not a pleasant process.
Women might shave everywhere, and for good sanitary reasons, too, but Nicole had already seen that men didn't even shave their faces. So what was fair about that?
Not one thing
, she thought with a familiar smolder of anger.
Hot air hissed and wheezed through pipes in the walls and floor of the sweating room. Nicole wasn't the only woman shaving there; the sweat that poured from her helped soften the hair and made it easier for the razor not only to cut the hair but to slide across the skin. Nicole still cut herself three or four times, but she wasn't the only one doing that, either. Small bloody nicks and muttered curses marked other victims of fashion and hygiene.
Aurelia, being small, was thoroughly baked before Nicole had started to brown. Just as Nicole scraped the last wiry black fuzz from her shin, Aurelia tugged at her free hand. “Let's jump in the cold plunge now, Mother. I'm melting!” Sweating room … Cold plunge …
Sauna,
Nicole thought happily. She slid down into the cold pool with a sigh of bliss. Aurelia jumped in, splashing water everywhere. None of the women in the pool complained. Maybe they were willing to let kids be kids. Maybe, like Nicole, they felt too good to complain.
When the water started feeling chilly instead of wonderful, Nicole climbed out. Aurelia's lips were blue, and her teeth chattered. Nicole looked around for a towel, but there didn't seem to be one. The air of the baths at least was warmer than the water they'd been in. They dried as they walked down the hall back to the stripping-off room, and warmed up, too. Aurelia paused halfway down the hall. “I have to go
to the latrine,” she said, and ducked through a doorway.
Nicole, and Umma, too, thank God—or gods—wasn't one of those women who had to go every ten minutes, or she'd have been in bad shape by now; but her bladder was a little full, and she was curious as to what, if anything, Romans had besides chamber pots. She was envisioning a row of stalls, and in each a malodorous earthen pot, as she stepped from the dim passage into a slightly brighter and much wider space. It was larger than she'd expected, as big as the biggest public restroom she could remember from the twentieth century. It was public, too, no doubt about that. No stalls or partitions separated one hole from another on the long stone bench. You sat down and did what you did in front of everybody, and everybody did her business in front of you.
Nicole's bladder clamped up tight and wouldn't let go. Bashful bladder syndrome sounded like a joke, but it wasn't. It was as real as this giant privy and the dozen or so women squatting and chattering and doing their business with no more trouble than the men had had pissing in Titus Calidius Severus' urn.
Closing her eyes helped. So did the gurgle of flowing water beneath her: houses might not boast running water, but the baths and fountains did. The latrine even had the equivalent of toilet paper: a sponge on a stick in a jar of water. The water was murky. Nicole picked up the sponge with some misgivings, wondering who'd used it last. Nobody else seemed to wonder about that, or care.
The latrine wasn't all it might have been, but it was bliss compared to squatting over an earthenware jar. In spite of the sweating room and the cold plunge, the baths weren't all they might have been either; but again, compared to being filthy they were heaven.
Aurelia obviously agreed. “That was nice, Mother,” she said as they got back into their clothes, “even if you did scrub my hair too hard.”
Nicole nodded. “It was nice,” she said. She probably hadn't got all of Aurelia's nits, or her own, but she didn't
want to think about that. She didn't want to think about going back to work, either, not after this lovely lazy morning. She sighed and squared her shoulders. “It was nice,” she repeated, “but we've got to go home.”
 
 
N
ICOLE WAS SURPRISINGLY GLAD to see the street she'd come to think of as her own, and the tavern that technically was her own, even after the pleasure of a bath and a romp through the market and the rich indulgence of sticky buns. She'd even got the baker to throw in a basket with a broken handle, no good for displaying his wares but more than good enough for bringing a sampling home. She'd eaten one, too, and Aurelia had had two and was sulking slightly at being denied a third.
Aurelia scampered through the door ahead of her. She paused, licking sticky fingers and letting her eyes adjust. “Hello!” she sang out to the dark within. “I'm—”
She stopped. Her eyes made out shapes that came clearer the longer she stared.
“Oh, hello, Umma,” Ofanius Valens said. He was sitting on a stool. Julia was sitting on his lap. His right arm circled her waist. His left arm had hiked her tunic up to her knees so his hand could slide between her legs. Her tongue was doing something monstrously lewd to his ear.
Lucius rampaged up and down behind them, joyfully oblivious, or else so used to the sight that he didn't even think it was worth noticing. He swept his toy sword hither and yon, leaping and stabbing the defenseless air. “Take that, you miserable barbarian! Ha!” He whooped and brandished the sword. “By Jupiter! Right in the guts!” What Julia was doing with Ofanius Valens didn't bother Lucius.
It bothered Nicole. It bothered her a lot. “What's going on here?” she demanded.
Aurelia ran right past the two of them, sparing a giggle that told Nicole she knew exactly what was going on, she thought it was mildly amusing, but it wasn't half as interesting as the game her brother was playing. She sprang into that with a whoop and a cry, not even needing a toy sword to become a fearless warrior maiden. Still whooping, they rollicked and scrambled up the stairs.
Julia didn't move from Ofanius Valens' lap. His hand went right on rubbing and fondling. Nicole watched it move rhythmically up and down, up and down, raising and lowering her filthy tunic. “Now, now, don't worry,” he said easily. “I wasn't going to cheat you.” He tilted his head toward the table. “See, there's your two
sesterces,
and Julia'll get her
dupondius
once we've gone upstairs, if she's as lively as she usually is.”
“I'll do my best,” Julia purred. The purr and the smile that followed were polished to a hard, clear—professional—gloss. Ofanius Valens' hand pumped harder. She rocked with it, still smiling, with little, audible catches of breath that Nicole would have bet were as calculated as the rest.
They both took the whole thing completely for granted. Nicole didn't. Julia had been pleased with herself yesterday: she'd made a couple of
dupondii
for herself. How had she made them?
The usual way,
she'd said. Was this the usual way? Prostituting herself? Umma must have—no, not looked the other way. Where Julia might get a
dupondius
for herself if the customer—if the john, mincing no words—liked her, Umma raked in two
sesterces
every time her slave walked up those stairs. That was good money: more than she took in for some meals. Of course, it also made her a small-time madam. Umma obviously hadn't cared about that. Nicole did.
Every time she began to have the shaky beginnings of a feel for the way Carnuntum worked, something like this slapped her in the face. Julia was at Ofanius Valens' ear again, flicking her tongue down the curve of it. “Stop that!”
Nicole burst out, her voice thick with revulsion. Ofanius blinked at her through a visible haze of horniness. Julia blinked in the exact same way, through the exact same haze. They honestly, incontestably did not understand what Nicole's problem was. “Stop that,” she repeated a little more quietly. “Julia, get off him.”
Julia did as she was told, automatically, like a child or a well-trained animal. The haze retreated, though enough of it lingered that she kept a hand on Ofanius Valens' shoulder, kneading it absently as she frowned at Nicole. “What's the matter, Mistress?” she asked in the tone that had become too familiar, that didn't quite dare ask,
What's wrong with you? You're acting weird again!
“You see he's already paid. Like he says, we weren't going to steal from you. Or are you worried about yesterday? I put the two
sesterces
in the box each time, just like always. Didn't you find them when you reckoned up the accounts?”
Nicole hadn't known how to reckon up the accounts, or how much to look for, either. She couldn't say so. She concentrated on the other thing, the more important thing. “Julia, look at me.” Julia was already doing that. Her expression made it clear that she knew it and was refraining from commenting on it. Nicole took a steadying breath and went on with the speech she'd prepared: “You don't have to go to bed with him, Julia. You don't ever have to go to bed with anybody for money again. That's all done now.” She glared at Ofanius Valens. “Food is one thing. Wine is another.” It wasn't anything she wanted, but it also didn't seem to be anything in which she had a choice. Here … “This is something else altogether. It's over, done, finished. Not in this place, ever again. Do you understand me?”
Ofanius Valens scratched his head. Nicole flinched inside for reasons that had nothing to do with the business at hand. He couldn't possibly know about those reasons, or the flinch, either.
He seemed to decide, after a moment's puzzlement, that argument would get him nowhere.
Smart man,
Nicole thought. Smarter than most twentieth-century males. He was
still a male, however, and he wasn't any happier than any other male who'd ever been born about being told no, he couldn't have what he wanted. “I don't know what you're getting yourself in an uproar about, Umma. Whatever it is, I guess I'll just take myself someplace else from now on.” He scooped up his two
sesterces
from the tabletop, dumped them in his belt pouch, and stalked past Nicole and out the door.
“And good riddance.” Nicole turned to Julia, a smile at the ready, to receive the slave's thanks for freeing her from that sordid transaction.
Julia gave her no such thing. Julia, in fact, looked furious. Her nostrils flared. Her blue eyes glittered. She hissed, a sharp, furious sound.
Her words were an anticlimax, her tone studiedly mild, but her expression gave away how angry she was. “That wasn't very nice, Mistress. Now he won't come back.”
She doesn't know anything about freedom. How can she? She's never had it.
Nicole chose her words with care, to soothe Julia's temper and get her thinking rationally. “Don't worry about him,” she said. “We don't need his business, or business like his.” As she spoke, she advanced into the room, till she was close enough to lay a hand on Julia's shoulder. It was stiff, set against her. “I told you: you're never going to bed with another man for money. Never again—I promise.”
Julia's eyes widened. It still wasn't gratitude—it was somewhere between dismay and horror. Worse yet was the gleam of tears. “Mistress, why can't I go to bed with men anymore? What did I do? Why are you so angry with me? Just tell me and I'll fix it. You can beat me all you like, if that will make you feel better.”
Nicole's head shook. Good Lord. Titus Calidius Severus had thought she was angry with him, too. That had been a misunderstanding. What was there to misunderstand here? “I'm not angry,” Nicole said, just as she had to Calidius Severus. “I don't want you to have to suffer like that, that's all.”
“Suffer, Mistress?” Julia tossed her head in amazement. “What is there to suffer? Ofanius Valens knows how to make a woman hot.” Her hips twitched a little; Nicole didn't think she knew she was doing it. “And even the ones who aren't very good usually give me something for myself afterwards, because I make them hot. Now that you've taken another of your strange new notions, how am I supposed to get any money of my own? That was all I had, Mistress: taking men upstairs. I
liked
taking men upstairs.”
Nicole stared. Julia stared back, for once not lowering her eyes in submission. She was shocked enough, and indignant enough, to show for once what must have been her real self. She wasn't slow at all, or simple either. That was a mask she wore, like the hooker's mask she'd put on for Ofanius Valens.
“Ofanius Valens gave you an
as
at breakfast the other day,” Nicole said. “You didn't do anything for him then but wait on him and be pleasant to him.”
“Oh, yes, a whole
as,
” Julia said scornfully. “And that wasn't just on account of breakfast, either. He was being nice to me so I'd be nice to him later.”
An as for a piece of ass,
Nicole thought, but she didn't say it—it only worked in English. What she did say was, “Sleeping with men for money is degrading.”
Julia shrugged, still sullen and not about to let Nicole forget it. “I've heard people say that,” she said. “Usually women who don't have what it takes. They're jealous, that's all. Can't get any fun, so don't want anybody else to get any either.”
“Fun?” Nicole said incredulously. “You call it fun?”
Julia did a creditable bump-and-grind, with a wild, mirthless grin in it for Nicole. “Sure it is. What else is there in the world that's anywhere near as much fun?”
She wasn't just saying it to be obnoxious, Nicole realized. She meant it. In Los Angeles, there had been any number of things to do besides hop between the sheets. Anything from aerobics to pottery classes to nightclubs to fancy restaurants to biker bars to mall-crawling to … She stopped the mental
recitation before it threw her into a funk. None of those things existed in Carnuntum. Nicole had been here only three days, scrambling every minute to keep afloat in a sea of totally new and strange details. She hadn't had time to be bored. Julia had lived her whole life here, without television, without radio, without movies, without recorded music, without newspapers, books, magazines … without much of anything when it came to entertainment. Nicole remembered when she was a kid in Indiana, when a tornado would roar through, or a blizzard, and the power would go out, in rural areas sometimes for days or weeks; and nine months later the maternity wards in the hospitals would be doing a boomtown business. When there was nothing else to do, people just naturally turned to sex.
“I mean,” Julia said, sounding like a Latinate Valley girl, “I could get drunk all the time, but you wouldn't like that, either, because then I wouldn't be able to work.”
“No,” Nicole said, “I wouldn't like that.” Considering how she felt about alcohol, there were few things she would have liked less. But this was one of them. She might have descended from lawyer to tavernkeeper, but by God, she hadn't descended from lawyer to procurer. “You're not going to prostitute yourself just to get a little spending money.”
“Mistress,” Julia said with an air of desperate patience. “It's not just for the money. You don't sleep by yourself every night. Or at least,” she added after a pause, “you didn't till you quarreled with Calidius Severus the other day.” When Nicole didn't erupt at that—Nicole was momentarily unable to think of anything to say—Julia went on, “Oh, Mistress! I know I'm a slave and you can do whatever you want and I can't say a thing about it, but you've never been as bad as you've been in the past few days. If you've got it into your head that I'm suffering—how about the pain I feel when I don't have any money to call my own?”
Her expression was piteous, but Nicole didn't budge. Mothers of teenagers heard the same arguments in pretty much the same tone. It didn't mean a thing, and she was not about to let it sway her. “You will not make money by selling
yourself,” she said. Julia dropped her wounded-kitten pose and glared. Nicole glared right back.
The moment stretched. Nicole drew in a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh. “I've been thinking about this for a long time”—ever since her spirit came to Carnuntum, even if that was only two days—“and now I'm sure the time is right. I'm going to set you free.”
This time, she was sure Julia would fall on her neck in gratitude. She waited for it, expected it. But, as before, Julia seemed anything but glad to get such a gift. If anything, she looked upset. “But,” she said, “Mistress, what would I do if I was free?”
Nicole reminded herself again that this was a slave, and probably born a slave. The concept of freedom was alien to her. Therefore Nicole kept her voice light, encouraging. “What will you do? Why, anything you want to. You'll be free.”
Julia eyed her warily. “Could I go on working here?”
“For wages, do you mean?” Nicole asked.
Julia nodded. She was still wary, with a hint of apprehension, but Nicole had noticed that if Julia got a thought in her head, she couldn't help but pursue it to its logical conclusion. “Yes, Mistress. Or at least, some wages. Room and board and a little money for myself.”

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