Household Gods (46 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Calidius Severus noticed, too. His smile broadened. He blew her a kiss. Julia made that interested noise again. Absurdly, Nicole felt herself blushing as if she'd been caught
in flagrante delicto
—a fine Latin phrase—rather than simply receiving a friendly greeting from the neighbor across the street.
She fought down the heat of memory, and blew the kiss back toward him. He grinned and bowed and went inside.
Nicole rounded on Julia. Julia had the sense to get very busy very fast.
Lucius and Aurelia put a merciful end to what was becoming an uncomfortable stretch of silence. Their noise and clatter drove the shadows out of the tavern. Their voices rang in it, demanding breakfast
this instant
. Julia was quick to shut them up. She ate with them, and Nicole after a short pause. She was hungrier than she'd expected. She realized, in the middle somewhere, that she'd used her bread to sop up all the olive oil in the little bowl Julia gave her. She didn't remember having started to do that, but it seemed a habit these days. It wasn't making her fat. Some days, in fact, that oil was the only fat she got in her diet. Maybe her body had quietly told her she needed it.
Ofanius Valens was her first customer. He wasn't a regular anymore, but he had started coming back now and then since Julia's manumission party. Nicole brought him his bread and scallions and walnuts and a cup of the two-
as
wine.
His usual
, she thought, and remembered how terrified she'd been the first time she saw him. Now she knew what two or three dozen people liked to order, maybe more. It felt as easy, as natural, as keeping track of the files in her computer.
Titus Calidius Severus came in at midmorning for a loaf of bread and a cup of wine.
And thou
, she thought facetiously, till she caught a whiff of him. His ammoniacal reek was back in force. Nicole let out a small, silent sigh. If he ever tried to get her to take him to bed when he smelled like that …
Surely he had better sense. If he didn't, she'd teach him some, and fast. Not that she really thought he needed any education. He'd never even tried to kiss her when he smelled bad.
She realized she was standing over him, staring blindly at him. As she moved to busy herself somewhere else, he said between bites of Julia's fresh and still-warm bread, “Fellow who came into the shop to pick up some wool I'd dyed for him told me there's a troupe of actors coming in from Vindobona in a few days. Do you want to take in one of the
mimes they put on? He said they were supposed to be pretty good—and if they're not, we can always throw cabbages at them.”
Vindobona, Nicole had learned, was the name by which Vienna went these days. Although Vienna would go on to put Petronell in the shade, here-and-now Carnuntum was at least as important a city.
“Yes, I'd like that,” she said. Then the apprehension struck. She'd thought she'd like the beast show, too. Who knew what surprises might lurk in a seemingly innocent mime? “They're not going to kill anybody, are they?”
Calidius Severus arched a brow, but he answered seriously enough. “I wouldn't think so. Too expensive for a troupe outside of Rome or maybe Alexandria to butcher a slave when the show calls for somebody to die. The gore'll just be pig's blood in bladders, same as usual. But it'll look real.”
She stood flat-footed. She was always taken aback when a cultural difference flew up and hit her in the face, but this time was worse, somehow. This man was her lover, and she was glad of it, too. He was genuinely thoughtful and considerate, out of bed and in it. Her kids—Umma's kids, but one way and another she'd come to think of them as her own—thought the sun rose and set on him; there stood Lucius now, hanging on his every word. And the only thing he saw wrong with killing slaves in a show was that it was too expensive to be practical.
His attitude was standard here. Witness the beast show. Witness the execution that was its climax. Witness the gladiatorial shows—which she hadn't, and for which she thanked God. In Carnuntum, life was cheap.
It shouldn't have been surprising. She could still feel Fabia Ursa's absence like the healed socket of a tooth; and Fabia Ursa had lost two babies before she died delivering a third. Maybe, since life was so easy to lose, it was that much easier to take. People lived surrounded by death, till death was commonplace.
Resolutely, she pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. She couldn't afford to linger over every incidence of
culture shock. She had to live in this world, regardless of what she thought of certain parts of it. And that meant recording the datum as Calidius had given it, a thing she needed to know to survive. She would deal with that. Later, if she had time—if she ever had time—she'd worry about other things.
All of which added up to the simple answer she gave him. “I'll come to the mime,” she said.
He'd taken time to sip from his winecup while she wool-gathered. Once he had her answer, he set down the cup. “Well, good,” he said. “I don't quite know when they're getting into town, but they should be worth an afternoon's diversion when they do. Anything to make one day different from another.”
“Oh, yes,” Nicole said, this time without hesitation. Most people in Carnuntum didn't come close to agreeing with her on the importance of life, but when it came to making life interesting, she agreed wholeheartedly with the rest of the population. Life might be precious, but it was also, without TV, the VCR, or even electric lights, rather massively tedious.
 
The players arrived none too soon, in Nicole's estimation. Schedules weren't set months in advance as they would have been in L.A. Entertainers came and went as weather and the roads allowed. In this case, a spell of good weather gave way to several days of pouring rain. When the clouds cleared away and the sun came boldly out, the players appeared in Carnuntum. Graffiti on the walls proclaimed their arrival, and one morning, as Nicole headed to market, she saw an outlandishly dressed person standing in front of a market stall, haggling with the vendor over the price of white lead. Nicole bit her tongue before she pointed out that the stuff was poisonous. She was learning, though it was taking her a while.
She did her marketing and went home with suitable dignity, but once she was there, she couldn't resist telling Julia about the actor she'd seen. Julia clapped her hands and did a little dance. One of the regulars half-choked on his bit of
sausage. Julia in her almost-new but still somewhat too tight tunic, dancing with glee, was a sight for hungry eyes.
Nicole suppressed the frown that thought engendered. “You like the mime shows?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Julia said, and transparently remembered not to add the habitual
Mistress
.
“Well,” said Nicole. “Then we'll have to see that you get a day off, won't we?”
She'd made Julia a happy woman—but not so happy she forgot to be diligent in her duties. Quite the opposite. Julia with a break in sight was determined to be the best freed servant anyone ever had. She was a little too eager, if truth be told; but she didn't ask Nicole to let her go to the show first. That wouldn't have been proper. She conceded Nicole the right to opening day, and stayed behind uncomplaining. It would be her turn tomorrow. She'd made sure everybody in the tavern knew it, and cared about it, too.
The mime show was in the same place as the beast show had been, the amphitheater outside the city's southern wall. There wasn't really anywhere else in Carnuntum that could hold a crowd in comfort.
Nicole wasn't exactly comfortable. The memory of the beast show was still too fresh. But she was determined to enjoy the day, and particularly the person she was sharing the day with.
“Nice of you to give Julia time off tomorrow to come see a show,” Titus Calidius Severus remarked to Nicole.
“It's only fair,” she answered. “Besides, we'll get along better this way.”
Calidius Severus misunderstood her deliberately, and with a spark in his eye, too. “I like the way we get along just fine.” He'd been over the night before, fresh from the baths and smelling as sweet as anyone ever smelled here. Nicole, remembering one or two things they'd done together between dusk and dawn, stretched almost as Julia liked to, like a huge and sensuous cat. She liked it fine, too—and she was glad of it. Finally, she'd found something in Carnuntum that wasn't painful, barbaric, or shocking.
Even if nobody got killed or maimed, she hadn't expected to like the mime show. And yet she liked it very much indeed. It was called
The Judgment of Paris
, which at first meant nothing to her but seemed perfectly familiar to the crowd. Paris, who came from Troy, not France, was trapped into judging a beauty contest among goddesses: Juno, Minerva, and Venus.
If it had been on TV, she would have called it a comedy-drama. The audience laughed at the machinations of their deities, a level of irreverence that brought her up short. It was as if one of the networks had made a sitcom out of the Bible.
After a little while, however, she stopped fretting. Obviously no one expected to be struck by lightning, or found this levity anything but right and proper. She settled back with a gusty sigh, and determined to enjoy the show.
The plot was thin, like the plot of a TV sitcom. As with a sitcom, she let it wash over her instead of analyzing it like a legal brief. The music—flutes and drums and horns—was loud and insistent. The costumes were gaudy: yellows and reds and greens of an intensity that no one ever saw in everyday clothes. If Rome had known day-glo colors, these actors would have used them. They had a distinct, almost fluorescent glow as they strutted and danced in the arena where, not so long ago, so many beasts and a single man had died. The women who played the goddesses and Helen of Troy took every opportunity to wear as little as possible. Whenever those opportunities arose, as they frequently did, the men in the audience roared their approval. Sex sells, Nicole thought. It was as true for ancient Rome as for modern Hollywood.
Titus Calidius Severus didn't shout, but he was most attentive to the actresses jiggling and strutting across the ground where lions and wolves and bears had prowled not so long before.
Watching him watch the pretty women, Nicole decided she didn't mind the way he did it. She could hardly have asked him not to pay attention to them; that was what they were
there for, and he was a healthy male with all his hormones in working order … as she had good reason to know. What mattered was that he didn't give the impression that he would sooner have been with one of them than with his real companion, as so many men would have done. Frank had stared up at an awful lot of movie screens as if he'd forgotten she was there beside him, and not just toward the end, either. And what had he gone for when he was ready to dump Nicole? Ms. Blond Hollywood Bimbo, what else?
She surprised herself, not with the virulence of the thought, but with the coolness of it. Frank Perrin was centuries unborn and half the world away. The edge was off her bitterness. She was too busy surviving in this world to waste energy on a marriage that had been dead long before Frank walked out the door.
Calidius Severus for sure was better-looking than Frank, though Frank smelled a whole lot better. He was also just as attentive to the swordfights as to the women in their skimpy draperies. He leaned forward on the bench, muttering under his breath at this bobble or that wobble. “If I'd used a sword like that,” he told Nicole in a pause between acts, “I'd be twenty-five years dead.”
The swordplay was as obviously choreographed as a bar fight in a Western. Like a Western, it wasn't meant to be realistic. But she could hardly explain that to Calidius Severus. She settled for the glaringly obvious instead. “It's only make-believe,” she said.
He muttered and scowled and shifted on the bench, but little by little he subsided. He was almost too reasonable a man to be real. Nicole tried to imagine him in a Stetson and carrying a six-shooter, sauntering into a saloon in time-honored movie-cowboy fashion. It was amazingly easy, though his looks tended more toward the Mexican sidekick than the tall lanky cowhand.
Not very many movie Westerns were as extravagantly gory as this Roman equivalent. Still, despite the copious blood, the killings were obviously faked. She'd believed Calidius Severus when he said there wouldn't be any excessive
realism in the mime, but she couldn't help the small sigh of relief that, after all, the actors would get up to strut the stage another day.
When Paris and Helen leaped gleefully between the sheets—in this case, a blanket as gaudy as their costumes—that looked choreographed, too. But, as enthusiastic as it was, Nicole wondered if, after all, it was faked. The audience didn't seem to think it was, or else was delighted to buy into that particular illusion. Men and women both cheered on the performers. The imagination could do a lot with a pair of heads, a strategically arranged blanket, and a set of highly suggestive gyrations.
There was a collective groan when the gyrations ended, and with it the scene. In the next, with neither sex nor swordplay to engross them, the audience indulged in a spate of restlessness. Paris struggled nobly against it, crying overwritten defiance at the Greeks who threatened to come and take Helen back from Troy. But even his trained voice couldn't overwhelm the shout from a few rows behind Nicole that pretty obviously wasn't in the script: “Is there a physician in the amphitheater?”

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