Household Gods (29 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Her calling the two Calidii Severi by their praenomens left Nicole confused for a moment, but not for any longer than that. One thing was interesting: If Julia wondered what Titus Calidius Severus was like in bed, he'd never put down a couple of
sesterces
and gone upstairs with her when Umma was out shopping and the kids had gone off to play somewhere. A point of sorts for the fuller and dyer. Though a point for what, in what game, Nicole wasn't inclined to say.
Julia still waited expectantly for her answer. She chose her words with care. With all the wine she had in her, she, unlike Julia, couldn't have spoken quickly if she'd wanted to. “It's not any one thing,” she said. “It's not any big thing, even. We just haven't been getting along as well as we did before, that's all.”
“It's too bad,” Julia said. In the dim lamplight, Nicole was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “The children really like him, too.”
“Children or no children, if you think I'll have anything to do with a man who smells like sour piss all the time, you can think again,” Nicole snapped—or rather, the wine did it, before she could stop herself.
That wasn't the whole story. It wasn't even most of the story. But the wine could have done much worse. It was a part of the story that would make sense to Julia, and apparently did. She nodded thoughtfully. “You've been fussy about things like that lately, haven't you, Mistress? I've seen you throw out a couple of pieces of meat we could have served without having anybody complain, or not much, anyhow.”
“If it smells bad to me, it'll smell bad to the cush—
cus
tomers,” Nicole said. How wonderful: she'd got Julia to stop talking about Titus Calidius Severus. She laughed with the wonder of it.
When she looked at the lamp, she saw two side by side unless she screwed up her eyes and tilted her head just so. Getting up required a distinct effort of will. “I'm going to bed,” she announced with a grand flourish that nearly sent her over onto her backside—and did send her into a fit of
the giggles. Two blurry Julias nodded vigorously and gulped down all the wine in their cups before they trotted along after her like obedient puppies.
 
Nicole had danced to the music of the wine—had she ever. And come morning, she paid the piper.
She'd felt worse her first night in Carnuntum, when her day of water-drinking caught up with her, but not by much. That had been concentrated misery, too: bowels in an uproar, but the rest of her not so bad. Now she hurt all over.
She sat up with excruciating slowness. If she moved one bit faster, her head would fall off. Just as she achieved a wobbly vertical, an oxcart with an ungreased axle squeaked and groaned down the street in front of the tavern. She held her head on her shoulders with both hands, and suppressed a groan that would have made it ache even worse. No wonder her father used to complain that her mother was scrambling the breakfast eggs too loudly. If she'd known then what she knew now, she'd never have laughed.
Her mouth tasted as if she'd been drinking from the chamber pot instead of a wine cup. What she wouldn't have given for a bottle of Scope or a tube of Crest with toothbrush to match—and a dentist on call while she was at it. Her bad tooth ached worse than it ever had before.
So that's what a hangover is
, she thought. Every nerve ending turned up high. Every sensation more intense than usual. A lot more intense. A hell of a lot more intense.
Sunlight streamed in through the open window. She would have been willing to swear it was the same watery sunshine she'd always seen in Carnuntum, but her eyes blinked and watered and ached as if it had been the fierce glare of the Sahara. She yearned for sunglasses—one more lifesaving idea no one in Carnuntum had ever had.
When she first came to Carnuntum, she'd told herself—and believed—that the loss of material things didn't matter. She'd traded them for genuine equality: a good enough bargain, all things considered. Since then, she'd learned just how far off the mark she'd been. She'd lost all the little
things that made life easier, and got in return less equality than she'd ever imagined possible, and almost as much sheer aggravation as she'd seen in the twentieth century.
That's not a bargain
, she thought nastily.
That's a consumer complaint
.
So where did she go to file? Was there a consumer protection bureau for victims of unscrupulous gods?
Her guts rumbled. They were happier than they'd been that first night, but they weren't dancing in the daisies, either. She was glad, once she'd used the chamber pot, to fling its reeking contents out the window.
An irate shout rose from the alley. A laugh shook itself out of her—and half killed her head, too.
Damn
, she thought, half in horrified embarrassment; but only half. Now there was a hazard of urban life no one in Los Angeles had to worry about.
On mornings when he was feeling the worse for wear, her father had dosed himself with aspirin and black coffee. No coffee here; she'd found that out the hard way. Would that willow-bark decoction make the rock drummer in her head stop his demented solo? What did the Romans do about hangovers—besides suffer, that is?
She got up: slowly, because her whole body ached, as if from a low-grade flu. When she looked in the polished bronze mirror in her makeup kit, she winced.
Eyes like two pissholes in the snow
, her mother had said of her father on mornings after he'd come reeling back late from another foray against the bottle. She'd been too young then to understand what that meant. Now here they were, staring back at her: two reddish-yellow holes in a flat white face.
She couldn't just sit here wishing she were dead. There was money to earn: bread to bake, food to cook and serve, wine to ladle out into waiting cups. It didn't, at the moment, seem any more appealing than sucking up to fat assholes of law partners. A couple of weeks in the tavern business had shown her all too clearly that, while a woman could make a living at it, she wasn't going to retire to the Riviera any time soon.
The loss of a day's proceeds would hurt.
Inspiration struck. She winced. Julia! Julia could run the tavern. She usually did anyway, more than Nicole hoped she knew.
No. Nicole winced again. That wouldn't do, not for more than a few hours. Some things—the cash box, for example—had to stay under Nicole's supervision. And it really took two to run the tavern properly; actually they could have used a third pair of hands, even with the kids' intermittent help.
No real help for it. Running a tavern in any era was no easy nine-to-five. Sunup to sundown, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, no paid vacations—and no sick leave. She had to get herself out there and get to work. If she looked like grim death … she did, that was all. She'd had plenty of customers who looked the same way, and for the same reasons, too.
Julia was already downstairs, getting things ready for a new day. To Nicole's guilty relief, Julia, who was normally resilient to the point of perkiness, looked as if she'd been ridden hard and put away wet, too.
“Hello, Mistress.” Julia managed a smile, but it was wan. “Now we remember why getting drunk all the time isn't such a good idea.”
“What, you needed reminding?” Nicole said—not too loud; her own voice hurt her ears. Julia, she noticed, hadn't opened the shutters. Nicole didn't blame her one bit. The light creeping between the wooden slats already seemed bright enough to blind a person.
Another cart banged and rattled along the street outside. Nicole and Julia winced in unison.
Aspirin,
Nicole wished with all her heart.
Coffee
. Of course they didn't materialize. She'd run fresh out of wishes when she wished herself back in time to Carnuntum. “What do we do about this?” she moaned … quietly.
“I ate some raw cabbage,” Julia said, “and I drank a little wine—not too much, by the gods!” Her sigh was mournful. “Hasn't done much good yet.”
“Raw cabbage?” Nicole sighed just as Julia had, gustily.
“I'll try some, too—and a
tiny
bit of wine.” She held thumb and forefinger close together.
She wasn't fond of raw cabbage to begin with. She was even less fond of it after she'd choked down a handful of leaves. Her stomach asked, loudly and pointedly, what the hell she thought she was doing to it. Maybe the idea behind this particular hangover cure was to make you feel miserable somewhere else, so you wouldn't worry about your head falling off. If that was the case—she'd rather carry her head around under her arm than deal with a stomach in open revolt.
She also discovered that, if there was any one thing in the world wine didn't go with, raw cabbage was it.
“Time to bite the bullet,” she muttered. There was no toilet to run to, and no sink either, just the open front door. She couldn't even say the words in Latin; she had to resort to English. Latin knew nothing about bullets.
Bite the ballista bolt
didn't cut it, somehow.
Life in the second century was nothing like what she'd expected. One by one, every idea she'd had, had turned out to be wrong. Still, she thought with a kind of desperate optimism, this was a world without bullets, without guns. It had to be safer, didn't it? It had to be more secure than the world she'd left behind.
A few minutes after Nicole opened the door, the sun went behind a cloud—a nice, thick, rainy-looking cloud. Clouds like that had been a cause for universal groans in Indiana, but in California they were wonderfully welcome.
Here, too, after so long a drought—and after a hangover. She beamed at Julia. Julia beamed back.
That relief—and whatever she got from the cabbage and wine, which wasn't much—didn't last long. Lucius and Aurelia came downstairs and started raising hell. Probably they weren't any noisier than usual, but no way was Nicole up for kid-noise on that scale.
Nicole told them several times to be quiet, which did as much good as she'd figured it would: zilch, zero, zip. Her head hurt. Her tooth throbbed in sledgehammer rhythm.
Aurelia stampeded past with Lucius in roaring pursuit. Nicole snagged first one and then the other, and laid a solid smack on each backside. “Shut up!” she yelled at them both. “Just—shut—
up!”
She stopped cold.
Oh, God
. Her father had done the same thing—the exact same thing—on his mornings after. She looked at her hand, appalled. “I'm sorry,” she started to say. “Oh, God, I'm sorry.”
She never said it, because even while the words took shape on her tongue, she noticed something. It was quiet in the tavern. The kids had slunk off to do something useful: Lucius chopping nuts, Aurelia helping Julia grind flour for the next batch of bread. They weren't sniveling or acting abused. They were simply … quiet. And they stayed quiet for a good while. Not forever, but long enough.
Nicole never did voice her apology. She didn't like herself much for it, either.
Were peace and quiet worth an occasional whack? The people of Carnuntum certainly thought so. Nicole never had. She'd sworn when she was a little girl, after her father had left another set of bruises on her mother's face—and her mother told people she'd walked into a door—that she'd never raise her hand in anger to anyone, adult or child. And here she'd broken that vow.
When in Rome …
She was breaking down, belief by belief, conviction by conviction. If the parents of Carnuntum had been transported as suddenly to Los Angeles as Nicole had to Carnuntum, every last one of them would have faced losing custody of their children. Most would have done jail time for child abuse. But here no one looked twice, even when a father was caught beating his son till the boy screamed for mercy.
From everything she'd read, that should have made the adults of Carnuntum—the grown-up survivors of abuse—a hateful pack of social misfits. And yet they weren't. They were just people. Maybe they were cruder than people in Los Angeles, but there was no denying the resemblance. Human nature, whatever that was, hadn't changed. People fell in and
out of love, they quarreled and made up, they did business, they gossiped, they got drunk—as Nicole's aching head too well knew—all as they might have done eighteen hundred years later on the other side of the Atlantic.
So what did that say about all the books she'd read and the television talk shows she'd watched, and all the theory she'd taken as gospel? The Romans had a theory that it was perfectly acceptable for one human being to buy and sell another. That theory, as far as she was concerned, was dead wrong, no matter how elaborately they justified it.
The next thought, the corollary, was amazingly hard to face. What if her own theories—her own assumptions—weren't exactly right, either? What if they were all skewed somehow? So where did right end and wrong begin? Who could know, and how?
She clutched her head in her hands. It was pounding worse than ever, but not with the hangover, not any longer. Tough questions of law and ethics had done that to her, too, when she was in law school. She'd been glad to get out of those courses with a passing grade.

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