Household Gods (44 page)

Read Household Gods Online

Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
5.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
And still—how many people here in Carnuntum, here in the Roman Empire, here all over the world, died young, died in anguish, of injuries and illnesses from which they would easily have recovered in Los Angeles? How many babies died of childhood diseases against which they couldn't be immunized, because no one knew how?
She didn't know the exact answer, but she knew the general one:
lots
. She shivered. If you were in your thirties in Carnuntum, you couldn't count on another thirty or forty or fifty years of healthy, active, productive life, as you could in
L.A. or Indianapolis. You could wake up dead, for any reason at all. Then, the day after tomorrow, some wine-sodden lout of a gravedigger would be shoveling dirt over your corpse.
Maybe Julia had the right idea after all. In a world in which you didn't know if you'd be alive next week, let alone next year, you really would want to grab hold of whatever pleasure came your way.
Eat, drink, be merry. Tomorrow you may die
. It had been a greeting-card joke in Indianapolis. Here, it was real. It was the truth.
Everybody else was gone from the cemetery. Even the priestess had disappeared, Nicole had no idea where. For all she knew, the woman had sunk back into the ground, to emerge again when a devotee of Isis came to be buried. The gravediggers had made substantial inroads on the pile of dirt. One of them belched; the other farted. They grinned at each other as if it had been a grand joke.
Nicole had some vague idea that there was a funeral feast—or a collation of some sort, if not quite on the scale of a banquet—at Longinius Iulus' house. Hadn't Fabia Honorata said as much? Nicole should probably make an effort to go, put in an appearance, as she'd done at Frank's faculty parties. She wasn't any happier about this than about those uncomfortable and ultimately unprofitable gatherings.
In the end, she didn't take the extra steps across the alley from the tavern. She went home instead, and took refuge in the smell of wine and beer and bread, the sight of people eating and drinking and being—yes—merry, and the sound of Julia's voice calling out a greeting that actually sounded glad. Nicole didn't flatter herself that it was joy to see her; now Julia would be wanting a break from running the place by herself. Not that she wasn't competent to do it. She was, and highly so. But it was a lot of work for one pair of hands.
She was laughing as Nicole came in, exchanging banter with one of the regulars. At sight of her former mistress, however, she put on a somber expression, and even managed the gleam of a tear. “How sad,” she said. “Poor Fabia Ursa. Remember how she cried after her babies died? First one and
then the other—that must have been so hard for her to bear.”
Nicole nodded without speaking. Hard wasn't the word for it. How could any woman lose two babies in a row and stay sane, and still want to try again? And yet how could anyone lose two babies in a row and
not
want to keep trying? Fabia Ursa must have been torn in two, not wanting to lose another, but wanting desperately to have one, just one, that lived.
“And now she finally had one that seems healthy, pray the gods it stays so,” Julia said, unconsciously echoing Nicole's thoughts, “and she dies herself. Where's the sense in that?”
“I don't know,” Nicole answered wearily. “I just don't know. Maybe things happen for no reason at all. I don't know that, either.”
“Then what's the point of believing in gods?” Julia demanded. Nicole shrugged. Julia's eyes had gone wide as they always did when she was thinking hard and not particularly conventionally, as if she needed to let more light into her brain.
Her eyes narrowed again, shutting off the ray of reason. She shook her head. “You have to believe in the gods. If you don't, what's the point to
anything?”
Nicole shrugged again, heavily. At the moment, she wasn't convinced anything
had
a point. “Pour me a cup of one-
as
wine, would you, please?” she said. Maybe it would take the edge off her gloom.
Only after Julia had filled the cup and handed it over, and Nicole had drunk it half down, did it strike her. She was using the wine as a drug again, as she had at the beast show. She was drinking to dull her senses. To forget her grief and the anger that went with it. In short, to take the edge off reality.
She had been on the way toward feeling better. Now she felt worse. She set the cup down with an effort that dismayed her. She steeled herself to do something, anything. Wait on one of the customers who'd begun to drum on the tables. Take the bread out of the oven. Check the seasoning in the stewpot.
She'd do all those things. But first, she picked up the cup again, and drained it.
 
“A good evening to you, Mistress Umma.” The last of the day's customers ate a salted olive, spat the pit on the floor, and took the last swig from his cup of beer. He set a
sestertius
on the table and got to his feet. “I'd better head on home, before my wife sets the dog on me when I come through the door. She's bound and determined that anybody who comes in after sundown must be a thief in the night.”
“Not quite so dark as that,” Nicole said. The sun was setting, and twilight lingered, though for a shorter time than it had at the height of summer. The man had an
as
coming in change, but he didn't wait for it. He hurried out the door. Maybe he hadn't been joking about his wife and the dog.
“I'll light some lamps,” Julia said behind her.
“Why bother?” Nicole said. She was still tired, and her mood was still black in spite of liberal applications of wine. She'd have closed the tavern after the funeral that morning if she hadn't needed the money. To Julia, she said, “We might as well shut down. We're not going to bring in many more people at this hour of the day.”
“More like the first hour of the night,” Julia said. The Romans gave every day twelve hours and every night twelve, too. Daylight hours were long in summer, short in winter, nighttime the reverse. It wasn't the system Nicole was used to, but it worked well enough, especially in the absence of clocks. The only problem came in the in-between hours, when nobody quite agreed on what time of day or night it was.
As Nicole was turning toward the stairs, someone called from the doorway: “Am I too late for a cup of wine?”
Had it been someone Nicole had never seen before, she would have said yes and sent him on his way. But it was Titus Calidius Severus. She almost frightened herself with how glad she was to see him. “Of course not,” she answered him. “Come in, come in. Julia, light a lamp after all.”
Julia nodded just a shade too eagerly. She lit a lamp and
set it on the table at which Calidius Severus had chosen to sit. Then she yawned—theatrically? Nicole couldn't tell. Julia said, “You're right, I think. We're not going to get many more tonight. By your leave, I'll go on up to bed.”
That was more transparent than any of the glass Nicole had seen in Carnuntum. But ordering her freedwoman to stay down here with her would have been pretty transparent, too, to say nothing of insulting to Calidius Severus. Nicole had seen often enough that he wasn't the sort who couldn't hear
no
. She nodded to Julia without visible hesitation.
Calidius set a couple of
sesterces
on the table. “Let me have a cup of Falernian,” he said, “and get one for yourself, too. Fellow came in this afternoon, paid me a debt he's owed me most of a year. I've got a little money.” His chuckle was wry. “Who says the gods don't work miracles every now and again?”
Nicole didn't feel like having any more wine, but she didn't see how she could turn down her friend, either—for friend he was, just as surely as Fabia Ursa had been no more than a cordial acquaintance. As she plied the dipper, the baby next door started to cry. She jerked her head toward the noise. “Sometimes the gods choose not to work miracles.”
“That's so.” In the lamplight, the fuller and dyer's frown was full of shadows. The baby kept on crying. Calidius Severus sighed. “Poor Longinius. He's going to have a tough time now. He thought the sun rose and set on Fabia Ursa.”
“They were happy together.” Nicole carried the two cups of wine to the table, hooked a stool with her ankle, and sat opposite Calidius. She was peripherally aware of tables that still needed wiping, floor that could use a sweeping, and the last of the day's stew baking onto the bottom of a pot. None of them mattered much right at the moment.
Calidius Severus took the cup she pushed toward him and sipped. Cheap wine you chugged down as fast as you could, to get past the taste. Falernian you sipped if you could, savoring the rich sweetness. “Ah,” he said. “That's the stuff.” He frowned. “You're not drinking.”
She made herself raise the cup to her lips. The wine was
sweet. If she didn't think about lead, if she didn't think about alcohol, she might even have said it was good. “It was hard losing Fabia Ursa,” she said at last. “That should never have happened.”
“Dexter's a pretty fair doctor,” Titus Calidius Severus said. “He did everything he knew how to do.” “But he didn't know enough!” Nicole blazed at him as she hadn't quite had the temerity to blaze at Isis' priestess.
Still, she thought unwillingly, it wasn't Dexter's fault, not really. In an odd way, it was Nicole's, for knowing what would be possible eighteen hundred years from now, and blaming the doctor because he didn't. The fuller and dyer was right; Dexter had done everything he knew how to do.
“Talk to any honest doctor and he'll tell you he doesn't know as much as he'd like to.” Calidius Severus reached across the table and set his hand on Nicole's. In a different tone of voice, he went on, “Who does?”
The lamp sputtered and flared, bringing out the dark stains that would never leave the fuller and dyer's skin. Nicole smelled the hot olive oil inside the lamp. After a moment, she realized that was all she smelled. Calidius Severus had lost his usual summer-privy reek. “You've been to the baths!” she said.
“What if I have?” He shrugged with elaborate casualness. “If I pay a call on a lady, I don't want her to think less of me because my work makes me smell like a pissoir.”
“Oh,” Nicole said. It was more of a gasp than a word. She didn't know if she dared laugh. It wasn't funny, not at all. And yet she hadn't thought, not really, that he understood how bad he smelled. His nose must have accustomed itself to the reek, just as hers had got used to the stink of Carnuntum.
He was watching, waiting for her to speak. “That was very … thoughtful of you,” she said a little desperately—and with dawning awareness. She knew what he had in mind. She wasn't surprised. What else, after all, did a man usually have on his mind?
What was surprising, and not exactly thrilling either, was
the realization that she had it on her mind, too. She glowered down at the wine cup, as if the Falernian in there had betrayed her. But alcohol had very little to do with it. She was sober as a judge—more sober than a couple of judges she'd known. Some of it was fear of extinction hammered home by Fabia Ursa's untimely death. More, she admitted, had to do with Calidius Severus' patient pursuit of her. He hadn't taken no for an answer, but he hadn't made a nuisance of himself, either. But most of it was the loneliness and isolation she felt here. This, she'd thought, would be her ideal world, her best escape from the twentieth century: simple, idyllic, egalitarian, worth even abandoning her kids; after all, didn't men do it all the time? It was none of those things—not even close. And now, to her deep dismay, she needed an escape from the escape.
If she could go back—
No. Not even for Kimberley and Justin. She loved them, a fierce, visceral love that had nothing to do with anything she'd done or not done. It hadn't kept her from leaving them, and it wouldn't bring her back. Not as long as she found life in that world unlivable. Even Dawn-the-bimbo was better for them than Nicole in the state she'd been in when she made her prayer to Liber and Libera. Nicole now, worn thin with the simple effort of survival in a world she'd never been prepared for and certainly never fit into, was even less able to be the kind of mother they needed. She couldn't even make this world a better place, and she was living in it. All her grand plans, her ambitions to “invent” everything from the chimney to the cotton swab, had lost themselves somewhere, so completely she couldn't even regret that they were gone. Every scrap of energy she had was devoted to staying alive, fed, and more or less sane.
All of that came together into a decision of sorts. “Let's wait a little longer,” she said, “to make sure Julia's gone to sleep.”
“Well, well,” Titus said in unguarded surprise. Then he laughed quietly. “Well, well.” He laughed again, more freely, with a brightness of joy in it that she found contagious.
“However you like. I've been saying that all along.”
She sipped at the wine without answering. She'd made a choice, and it wasn't easily revocable. She should have relaxed into it; been glad for the release, at long last, of tension. Instead, she was twitchier than ever. She was, in a manner of speaking, about to lose her virginity again—her first time in this body. First times were always strange. How much stranger this was, when her lover didn't even know it was the first time. As far as he knew, this was the same woman he'd made love to—how many times before? Many, if Nicole was any judge.

Other books

The Private Club 3 by Cooper, J. S., Cooper, Helen
The Vision by Jen Nadol
To Tempt A Viking by Michelle Willingham
Brown, Dale - Independent 02 by Hammerheads (v1.1)
Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike
Lost Dreams by Jude Ouvrard
French Lessons by Peter Mayle
Learning to Ride by Erin Knightley