Household Gods (36 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Titus Calidius Severus and Lucius headed off for the baths. The boy walked easily beside the man, chattering at a great rate, more than he ever did with Nicole or Julia. They looked, she thought, like son and father.
That thought brought her up short for a moment, stopping her on a stepping stone before she recovered herself and went on across the street.
Were
they father and son? Calidius and Umma had not exactly had a platonic friendship before Nicole arrived to disrupt it.
She shook her head. No. In all the gossip she'd overheard or been regaled with, she'd never heard the slightest suggestion that Umma had been getting it on the side with her neighbor while her husband was still alive. And he hadn't died that long ago, from things that Fabia Ursa had said: three or four years at most. Both Lucius and Aurelia were older than that.
Damn, what had the man's name been? The clerk in the town hall had told her, but it had slipped right out of her head. So far she hadn't needed it, but the way her luck ran, eventually she was going to. She just had to pray that the rest of her luck held, and someone said his name before she had to come up with it.
She glowered at the graffito on the tavern's wall. If she took a brush to it, she'd probably get rid of the whitewash, too. She'd have to buy more whitewash, then, and paint over it. She glowered more darkly. Another couple of
sesterces
thrown away. Maybe she'd leave it up, at least until the beast shows were done. It might, she told herself, even draw a couple of customers into the tavern.
Aurelia erupted through the front door, spotted Nicole, and said, “Eep!” She ducked back in even faster than she'd come out. Nicole laughed. She knew what
that
meant. Aurelia had been all set to play in the mud, like her brother before her.
Foiled
, Nicole thought wickedly.
She went inside with more decorum. The warm rich smell
of baking bread fought and almost overwhelmed the city stink. Julia was over at the counter, grinding flour for the next batch.
As Nicole went to spell her at the mill, a man's voice spoke behind her. “Mistress Umma?”
Nicole turned, trying not to seem too startled. The newcomer was a dapper little man, and a total stranger. He knew her, however, or thought he did. Little by little, she was getting used to that. It didn't drive her to panic much anymore, not the way it had at first.
Then again, maybe Umma
hadn't
known him. He blinked and peered at her as if he might be a bit nearsighted. “My name is Julius Rufus,” he said. He was carrying a small wooden keg, which he set on one of the tables. “I hear you've been in the mood to try new things lately.”
Her heart leaped from a standstill into a pounding gallop. “What? What about it?” Damn—were people all over Carnuntum gossiping about the new and highly eccentric Umma?
Old Umma used to be sharp, you bet, but lately she's gone soft in the head
. God—that could get dangerous. Somebody might even—
But Julius Rufus said, “I'll tell you what about it,” and her heartbeat slowed to a fast canter. Safe, she was safe. This was a salesman, or she wasn't a Hoosier of Hoosier born. As if to reassure her even further, he went on in a fast patter that had to be as old as the hills, “I know this tavern has always served nothing but wine—good wine, too, everybody agrees on that. Still and all, if you've taken it into your head to try things you haven't tried before, how about this delicious barley brew here? It's my very own, brewed up of the finest ingredients, according to an ancient recipe that's come down through my family since the first Pyramid was a pup.”
Julia looked up from the quern. “The Marcomanni and Quadi drink beer because they don't know any better,” she said flatly. “When they get smart, they buy wine from us Romans.”
Julius Rufus showed teeth as irregular as Calidius Severus' in an insouciant grin. “Beer has been good enough for the
Egyptians since time out of mind, and
my
beer has been good enough for a nice lot of people in Carnuntum for a good ten years now. There's some very fine taverns go through a whole barrel of it before they've emptied their amphorae of wine.”
“Barrels,” Nicole murmured. Beer had alcohol in it, of course. But, if it came in barrels, it wouldn't be full of lead. She fetched a clean cup and a dipper, and bore down on Julius Rufus and his sample cask. “Let me try some.”
Julia looked astonished. Julius Rufus looked delighted. He lifted the lid of his keg with a flourish. “Help yourself, Mistress Umma—and see for yourself that you'll have no reason whatsoever to look down your nose at this fine product.”
When Nicole and Frank toured Austria on their honeymoon, Frank had drunk Austrian beer with conspicuous pleasure. Nicole, despite his urging, had stuck to mineral water. What she wouldn't give to do that now …
She shook herself and focused on the task at hand. No help for it, and no escape, either. She dipped up a cupful, raised the cup to her lips, and sipped.
She had to work hard to hold her face straight. Wine, at least, was sweet. Frank had always said beer was an acquired taste. Nicole wondered why on earth anyone would want to acquire it. The stuff was bitter. It was sour. She could taste the alcohol in it. The only thing she could say for it was that it might make drunkenness more trouble than it was worth. If everyone reacted to beer the way she did, she might actually make some inroads against alcoholism in Carnuntum.
She made herself take another sip. It tasted no better than the first. “It'll never take the place of wine,” she said.
“Told you so,” Julia said from behind the counter.
But Julius Rufus was undeterred. “I don't intend it to take the place of wine,” he said. “I drink wine myself—in fact, if you'll serve me a cup of your two-
as
there, I'll be grateful.” He set a
dupondius
on the table by the keg. Nicole nodded to Julia, who poured out the wine for him. He tossed it down, smacked his lips with stagey relish, and said, “Sure, wine's good, and plenty of it. But the more choices you give
your customers, the more customers you're likely to get. Don't you think so, Mistress Umma?”
He was good. If he'd lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, he would have sold a hell of a lot of encyclopedias or aluminum siding or whatever he was peddling, because sure as hell he would have been peddling something.
Even so, if Nicole had intended to say no, he would have been out the door before he got well warmed up to his pitch. Her mother had been death on door-to-door salesmen, and Nicole had continued the family tradition with telemarketers.
But she wasn't going to turn this salesman down. If she could get in more choices that didn't involve ingesting lead in toxic quantities—not to mention a choice that might not involve ingesting quite so much alcohol—then she might not be totally happy, but she'd be happier than she was now. She looked him in the eye and said, “How much do you want for each barrel, and how many cups can I get per barrel?”
Julius Rufus beamed at her. “You think of your profit margin, I see. Good for you! If your arithmetic is weak, I'll be happy to help you with your figuring, so that you—”
“My arithmetic is fine, thank you,” Nicole snapped. Her arithmetic, from what she'd seen, was a damn sight better than that of any local without a counting board in front of him. The Romans, naturally enough, used and thought in terms of Roman numerals, and Roman numerals were to arithmetic what cruel and unusual punishment was to jurisprudence.
The dicker that followed left Julius Rufus sweating. “Mistress Umma, do you want my children to starve?” he wailed at the midpoint.
“They won't starve,” she retorted. “They can drink the beer you don't sell me. This isn't something I have to have. It's something I might want to have—if the price is right. This tavern's done fine without beer for a long time. We can go right on doing fine without it, as long as it's going to cost six times as much as it's worth.”
“What a terrifying woman you are,” Julius Rufus muttered.
Nicole smiled a smile that Frank had likened to a shark's. “You say the sweetest things,” she said. He flinched as if she'd slapped him.
She ended up buying the beer at something less than half the price he'd quoted. She still had a scrap left of the papyrus on which she'd written out Julia's letters of manumission; she got out the pen and ink and set down on the scrap the terms to which she and Julius Rufus had agreed. When it was written up as it should be, she shoved the papyrus across the bar at him. “Just sign this, if you would.”
“Sweet Isis the merciful!” he cried. He mumbled his slow way through the three-line contract, then scrawled something that might have said
Julius Rufus
below it. “There! Are you happy now?”
“I'm fine, thank you,” Nicole said, and seized the papyrus and stowed it away in the box before he could think of grabbing it for himself. She turned to Julia. “Pour this nice man a cup of Falernian, if you please.” She was the soul of politeness now, even if she'd been a barracuda only moments before. Why not? Nothing wrong with being friendly
after
she'd got her way.
 
 
W
E'LL HAVE GOOD WEATHER for the beast show,” Titus Calidius Severus said, as smug as if he'd ordered it especially for the occasion.”This sort of thing is a lot less fun in the rain and mud.”
“Yes,” Nicole said, barely remembering to answer him at all. She was excited out of all proportion to the occasion, almost quivering with eagerness at the chance to do something out of the ordinary. She'd even fixed herself up with a sitter: she'd promised Julia a couple of extra
sesterces
above her usual wages, to ride herd on things. Julia had
agreed so readily, Nicole suspected she was plotting to earn a few more
sesterces
on the side—or on her back.
Nicole almost didn't care. Or, no: she cared. But there wasn't anything she could do about Julia once Julia was out of her sight. And she wanted—God, how she wanted—to get away for the day.
“This will be—” she began, but stopped abruptly, before she said something she might regret.
Titus Calidius Severus wasn't about to let her off that particular hook. “Be what?” he asked in all apparent innocence.
“Fun,” Nicole said after a pause. It wasn't what she'd intended to say. But, while this would be the first time she'd gone outside the walls of Carnuntum, it certainly wouldn't be the first time Umma had done so. Nicole wasn't about to blow her cover now. Not after all this time.
A clamoring throng of people streamed toward the southwestern gate of the city, all heading, as she was, for the amphitheater. They chattered as they went, sounding at least as excited as she felt. “Lions, I heard,” one said. “
I
heard tigers,” somebody else declared. People scoffed at that, to disgust: he folded his arms and set his jaw and retreated into injured silence. “Bears,” a woman said behind him. “There are always bears.”
“Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!” Nicole was wearing sandals, not ruby slippers, and the road was neither yellow nor brick, but she kicked up her heels regardless.
Calidius Severus didn't seem to find anything too strange about her behavior, though his glance was more than a little amused. “I'm with everybody else except that one idiot,” he said: “I won't believe they've got tigers till I see 'em with my own eyes.”
Nicole blinked at the absolute literality of his comment. For an instant—a very brief instant—she felt a little of the old, sinking sensation, the awareness that went all the way to the bone, that no, indeed, she wasn't in Kansas anymore; nor in West Hills, either. She felt more as if she'd fallen into a sword-and-sandal epic from late-night TV.
They jostled through the gate. In the sudden coolness beneath
it, as people crowded together to pass the bottleneck, Nicole found herself pressed against Calidius Severus. She had to clutch at his shoulder or trip and fall. He caught her easily, as if he'd done it often before, and held her in a calm familiar grip.
She stiffened. He let go. Neither exchanged a glance. Nicole was still breathing hard as she emerged into the sunlight. It was painfully bright after the dimness of the gate. That was why she blinked so hard, she told herself; and she'd been pushed to go a fair bit faster than she wanted to, to keep up with the crowd. That was why her breath came so quick. Of course it was. She wasn't feeling anything toward the man who walked decorously beside her.
The amphitheater stood not far outside the city's walls, a couple of hundred yards, she reckoned, surrounded by a meadow of knee-high grass.
At the sight of it, Nicole stopped cold. She'd come this way before, and seen almost exactly the same view, on her honeymoon. Frank had stood beside her then, a good deal cleaner and a good deal sweeter-smelling than the man who was with her now.
The impact, the sense of
déjà vu,
was much stronger than it had been inside the baths. She'd seen only the floor plan, so to speak, in a twentieth-century landscape of ruins and modern town. Here and now …
Even in the late twentieth century, the amphitheater had been clearly recognizable for what it was, with banks of earth leading down toward a central stage dug out well below ground level. Eighteen-hundred-odd years had changed remarkably little. In this much older time, retaining walls supported the banked earth, but they had a look of surprising age: well-seasoned timbers and stone much worn and overgrown with moss. Nicole on her honeymoon had been bored, jetlagged, and only vaguely interested in old dead things. In this old dead world that felt all too distinctly here-and-now, she knew a moment's vertigo, a confusion of places and times. That was then—nearly two thousand years
in the future. This was now, eighteen hundred years in her own past.
She must have looked alarming. “You all right, Umma?” Titus Calidius Severus asked in evident concern.
“Yes,” she said quickly, and as firmly as she could. She pulled herself together and made herself walk on. “Maybe a touch of the sun.”
He eyed her sidelong, but he didn't call her on the lie. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “You won't end up all brown like a farm woman.”
In the twentieth century, leaving skin cancer out of the equation, tan was in—it showed you weren't confined to a factory or an office all day long. Here, it was just the opposite: a pale face was a face that hadn't been out sweating in the sun all day. But both meant the same thing: leisure to do whatever you liked, whenever you wanted to do it.
Nicole's head had begun to ache, as it usually did when she'd had enough of
here-and-there, now-and-then.
She distracted herself as she had before, with the details of her surroundings. The countryside, like the amphitheater, hadn't changed much—wouldn't change much—in eighteen centuries. It was still meadows and grainfields and patches of woods, with an apple orchard or two for variety. One of the meadows, off to the east, was planted thickly with—stones?
Gravestones. It wasn't a meadow; it was a cemetery.
She shivered slightly. To the Nicole who had stood here—would stand here—eighteen centuries from now, all this country, and all these people, were dead. Long dead and gone to dust.
Her gaze swept south, toward what on her honeymoon had been Carnuntum's largest and most imposing Roman monument. The locals called it the
Heidentor
, the Heathen Gate, a huge stone archway more than fifty feet tall. It had been partly ruined when she saw it. She wondered, as her eye searched for it, what it would look like intact.
It wasn't there.
She stopped once more, gaping. The first emotion she felt was an absurd sense of outrage, as if she'd been cheated.
Where in hell had the stupid thing gone? You couldn't just pick up that much stone and drop it in your purse.
The answer came belatedly and with somewhat of a shock. The
Heidentor
hadn't been built yet. When, in the United States, she'd thought about the Roman Empire at all—which hadn't been any too bloody often—she'd envisioned its history as a single, compact entity.
The Roman Empire
. It was there, and then it was gone. There wasn't any depth to it, or any development. It just was.
But that wasn't actually the way things worked. There were lifetimes upon lifetimes' worth of Roman Empire—and the lifetime in which the
Heidentor
went up hadn't happened yet. She wondered how far in the future it lay. Would she live to see it built, or even begun? How long
did
something like that take to build?
“Come on,” Titus Calidius Severus said, loud in her ear, still determinedly amiable. “You keep stopping. Shall I dangle a parsnip in front of your face, the way the farmers do when their donkeys won't go?”
Yet again, Nicole shook herself back into what passed for reality. “It's a lot better than laying into me with a stick,” she said. “I've seen too much of that lately. I think it's cruel.”
The fuller and dyer shrugged. “One way or another, you've got to get the work out of them. If they won't go by themselves, you make 'em. They're just animals. It's not like they feel things the way people do.”
Nicole was as certain animals did feel things the way people did as Calidius Severus evidently was that they didn't. She opened her mouth to argue the point, but something else more urgent pushed itself to the front of her mind. “People beat slaves, too, and they haven't got any excuse at all for that.”
While they talked—she wouldn't quite call it argued—they'd reached the entrance to the amphitheater. Titus Calidius Severus handed a
sestertius
to an attendant—a slave? He got no change back; admission was a
dupondius
apiece.
Only when that was done and they'd been waved through the gate did he respond to Nicole. As he had before, he said,
“One way or another, you've got to get the work out of them.”
Nicole swallowed a sigh. She should have known what he'd say. How could she expect anything different? “I'd rather use the parsnip of freedom than the stick,” she said.
“The parsnip of freedom?” Calidius Severus grinned his crooked grin. “Now
there's
a phrase to send men marching into battle!” His grin faded. “Some masters do that. For some slaves, it works. But one man's not the same as another, same as one donkey's not the same as another. Some are too stubborn to go forward unless you make 'em do it.”
That held a hard core of common sense—if you believed there was nothing wrong with slavery. “If a free man won't work, you can fire him and replace him with someone else who will,” Nicole said.
“Or more likely with someone else who won't, either.” The fuller and dyer held up a hand before she could counter that. “Like I said before, it's a nice day. We're here at the beast show. Is this worth arguing about right now?”
That also was hard common sense, but Nicole didn't like it any better for that. Her years in law school had left her convinced that anything was worth arguing about, any time she was in the mood to argue. But she
was
at the beast show, and she was curious about it; and she was also on a date. It was, in an odd way, both a first date and not. For her, yes; for Calidius Severus, no. “I guess it'll keep,” she said, a little grudgingly.
“Good,” he answered with apparent relief. “For a while there, I figured they'd put us down on the floor, and the crowd could watch us go at it instead of the beasts.” He took a deep breath, shook his head, and held out his hand, offering it as if it had been a gift. His voice was brisk. “Come on.”
Nicole was getting just a small bit tired of take-charge masculinity; but not enough, yet, to kick at it. She let him take her hand—if nothing else, it made sure they weren't separated in the jostle of the crowd—and lead her into the amphitheater.
It was larger than she remembered, or maybe it only
seemed so because there were so many people in it. When there'd been no more than a handful of tired tourists and a guide droning on in three different languages, it hadn't looked big enough to hold more than a few hundred. In fact, it held several thousand—maybe five, maybe ten; Nicole had never been much good at that kind of estimate. The seats on which they crowded together were backless wooden benches. Vendors ran up and down the aisles, singing out their wares: sweet rolls and sausages and wine. It wasn't all that different, in looks and atmosphere, from a college football game.
Titus Calidius Severus pointed up along a row of benches. “Hurry up, Umma! There's a couple of good ones, right on the aisle. Quick now, before someone else gets in ahead of us.” He suited action to words, flinging his backside down just ahead of another man who'd spotted the same seats at the same time. Nicole sat beside him with, she hoped, a little more decorum but no less dispatch. The man who'd been aiming for the seats, and his wife or lady friend, glowered at them but didn't offer to fight over it.
Nicole took a deep breath of air that was, for a change, not particularly redolent, and made herself as comfortable as she could. She'd have been glad of a cushion like the one she'd carried to football games.
Some people nearby actually had cushions, or had thought ahead and brought a cloak or extra tunic to soften the seat.
Next time
, she thought. “How long before the show starts?” she asked.
“Shouldn't be too much longer.” The fuller and dyer looked over his shoulder. She did the same, to see what he saw: rows of benches still open, and people shuffling into them, picking spots, calling to escorts and friends as they found good ones. “They'll let it get fuller than this before they turn the first critters loose. Slowpokes always grumble when they miss the opening rounds.”
While Calidius Severus spoke, a vendor had been working his way toward them. Calidius Severus raised a brow at Nicole. “Want some wine?”
Nicole nodded with barely an instant's hesitation. She was
hesitating less and less over it now, and worrying less about it, too—which worried her in itself.

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