Household Gods (69 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Nicole started to snap at him, but checked herself. What was his comment but the second-century version of her reflection on teenagers and supermodels? In the end, she simply said, “When you think how they treated so many women here, seeing this hurts.”
“Ah.” Brigomarus nodded. “Yes, I can see how it might. The world must look different out of a woman's eyes.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He looked astonished. It wasn't that family didn't kiss here; they did. But she had been on anything but kissing terms with Umma's family. Here, for once, Brigomarus had found exactly the right thing to say.
She felt like kissing him again when she was able to buy two jars of wine from the fellow in the market square. The farmer demanded Falernian prices for it, though it was the local rotgut in the local yellow-brown earthenware. Nicole took her best shot at getting him to come down: “Suppose I walk away and let the barbarians steal it from you? How much will you get then?”
He didn't blink. “The chance I take of that is part of the reason I have to charge so cursed much for what I do sell.”
When he wouldn't budge, Nicole paid up. As she and Brigomarus were carrying the wine back toward the tavern, he said, “You'll have to charge Falernian prices, too, or you'll lose money.”
“Then I will,” she said robustly. “Not many places will have any wine at all. People will pay.” She was sure of that. Half the people who came into the tavern complained about having to drink water; a good many complained about coming down sick afterwards. Whenever she suggested boiling the water before drinking it, people looked at her as if she were nuts.
She and Brigomarus were almost home safe, and unmolested, when two big red-faced Germans planted themselves in their paths. One rested a meaty hand on the hilt of his sword. The other proved to speak some Latin. “What have you in those jars?” he demanded. “Is wine, yes?”
Nicole's mind raced. “Is wine, no,” she answered. “Is piss for my dyeworks. Want to drink some?” She thrust her jar at the German.
The outhouse reek that still came off her lent force to her words. The barbarian recoiled, spitting out dismayed gutturals.
His friend asked a question. The answer he got left him revolted, too. They both took off in a hurry.
Brigomarus looked ready to burst with suppressed laughter. He kissed her instead, quick but firm, as a brother should. “Even if you do smell bad,” he said.
“That's all right,” she said. “That's better than all right.”
They were still laughing when they walked into the tavern. Julia looked up at them in surprise. “I haven't heard the two of you laugh like that in a long time,” she said.
“Since the pestilence,” Nicole said. Her laughter had died.
“Longer than that,” Julia said. “It's probably been since—hmm.” She paused. “Since last spring, I guess.”
Since Umma moved out and Nicole moved in.
I ruined the neighborhood—and the neighborhood has been doing its best to ruin me.
She actually enjoyed telling Julia why she and Brigo had been laughing. God, she had changed.
Not for the worse, she hoped. Julia laughed at the joke. So did Lucius, when he came running in from outside. He laughed harder than anyone else. At his age, gross-out humor was the best kind.
Nicole set her jar of wine behind the bar. Brigo followed suit. She grinned at him suddenly. “Let's have some wine,” she said. And if she'd known a year ago that she'd say such a thing, let alone say it with such relish, she'd have been flatly appalled. Carnuntum had changed her in ways she never could have imagined. It had also, and forcibly, changed her attitude toward life in Los Angeles. She longed for that life, even while she laughed and bantered and poured out cups of horrible wine. But she was trapped here, in this life she'd thought she wanted. She might never escape; never be free of it, unless or until she died.
 
 
L
ITTLE BY LITTLE, THE folk of Carnuntum learned to live with the occupation of their city. They drank water, though sometimes it made them sick, or beer or bad local wine in place of the better vintages that could not come up from the south. When the olive oil ran out—which took a while, because, in contrast to the wine, the Germans had no interest in helping to consume it—they made do with butter. They complained about it, too, loud, long, and rarely with any inventiveness. Nicole liked butter quite a bit, as long as it was fresh. But without refrigeration, it went rancid much faster than oil.
Gaius Calidius Severus despised the stuff. “The smell stays in my mustache,” he complained, “and I have to live with it all day long.”
Compared to rancid piss, rancid butter didn't seem that bad to Nicole, but she didn't tax him with it. She was too fond of him. He'd done a great deal for her, and he was a hell of a good kid. Very soon now, he was going to be a very nice young man.
Little by little, she and Julia left off splashing themselves with
eau de pissoir.
The Marcomanni and Quadi still sometimes casually walked off with things without bothering to pay for them, but the excesses of the sack didn't go on for long. It gradually dawned on the Germans that, having overrun Carnuntum, they would get the most out of it if it ran as near normally as possible.
One day, a man who happened to be selling apples in the market square said to Nicole, “Umma, have you heard? My cousin Avitianus, the one with the farm out past the amphitheater—you know, the one who's got the six girls and just the one boy and that one's addled in the head? Well, the
Germans took two of his sheep and wouldn't pay him, which is nothing at all new, you know, but you know what he did?”
Nicole hadn't the faintest. She opened her eyes wide and looked expectant.
“He complained to the chiefs, that's what!” the man said. “Imagine that.”
Nicole could imagine. She didn't like the picture she was getting. “That was brave, but it can't have been very smart.”
“Well, that's Avitianus, you know?” The apple-seller sighed. “They gave him a kick in the arse and sent him on his way. That Avitianus, he's got bigger balls than a he-goat, but he's got to use his thumbs to count them.”
“And so much for justice, too,” Nicole said.
“Only justice a poor man ever knows is what he gets hit over the head with,” the man replied. “The Germans'll hit you over the head with a sword. Before they came, the rich bastards would hit you over the head with a lawyer. The sword hurts more, but the lawyers took more.”
She stared at him. Even in ancient Rome, people made snide jokes about attorneys? “If it weren't for lawyers, we'd all be after each other with swords all the time,” she said with a touch of asperity.
“Well, maybe,” the apple-seller said. “But maybe we'd leave each other alone more, too, if we had swords instead of lawyers.”
“Tell it to the Germans,” Nicole said, bending his own words back against him. He grunted, shrugged, and finally, grudgingly, nodded.
 
“Those are nice ones,” Julia said when Nicole brought the apples back. “You must have bought them before they were picked over.”
“I suppose I did,” Nicole answered. The apples didn't look that nice to her. They were on the smallish side compared with what she'd been able to buy in the supermarket. Produce here was wildly inconsistent; some apples would have a firm texture and a delicious, complex sweetness as good as anything she could have hoped for back in L.A., while others
from the same orchard wouldn't be worth eating.
While she stared at them, inspiration struck. She rummaged through the spices in back of the bar till she found a quill of cinnamon. Spices, she'd discovered, traveled more than most things: they were valuable, didn't take up much room, and didn't spoil. She ground up part of the quill in a mortar and pestle. The sweet pungent fragrance made her nostrils twitch. It smelled of autumn in Indiana, and a bakery on a rainy day, and apple pie on the table at Thanksgiving. It was wonderful, and it made her throat go tight and her eyes sting. Julia saved her from bawling into the mortar. “What are you going to do with that, Mistress?” she asked.
“I'm going to make some baked apples,” Nicole answered.
Julia's eyes went wide. “I've never heard of anyone eating apples any way but raw.”
“Well, you'll learn something, then,” Nicole said.
They weren't perfect. Had they been, they would have been sweetened with sugar instead of honey, and they would have been swimming in cream. But Julia and Lucius didn't have to know there was anything missing. They devoured theirs in what seemed like two bites apiece, and loudly demanded more. Nicole savored hers, the taste on her tongue and the aroma in her nose. It filled the whole tavern, and for a little while drove away the stink of Carnuntum. “You could make a fortune with those,” Julia said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.
“No,” Nicole said. “Too easy to figure out what I did. Besides, where can I get more cinnamon once this is gone?”
Julia made a face. “You're right about that—it won't be easy. There's probably not any left in the city, and no merchants in their right minds are going to come this way, not with the Germans running wild through Pannonia. By the gods, no merchants who are out of their minds would come this way, either.”
Nicole and Lucius laughed, Nicole with a little incredulity; serious, literal-minded Julia almost never said anything witty. Still, Nicole sobered quickly: the joke cut too close to the truth. She said, “Nobody much will come this way, except
for the farmers close to town. The market square is half empty.”
“We didn't have a famine in spite of the pestilence,” Julia said. “If we don't have a famine in spite of the pestilence and the Germans, the gods will truly be looking out for us.”
Lucius said, “If the gods are truly looking out for us, why did they let the pestilence happen? Why did they let the Marcomanni and Quadi conquer Carnuntum in the first place?”
“Why? Why, because … because …” Julia floundered. She scratched her head. In scratching, she found something, which she squashed between two fingernails. That still gave Nicole the horrors. She kept on fighting the battle against lice, though now she knew it was a losing battle. Julia turned to her. “Mistress, why do you suppose the gods did let those terrible things happen, if they are looking out for us?”
Nicole swallowed a sigh. Such was the lot of mothers everywhere: to be expected to answer the unanswerable. “I don't know why the gods do anything,” she said. “I don't think anyone does. You can
believe,
but how can you
know?
No one has ever questioned a god, that I know of.” Maybe no one ever had, but Nicole certainly wanted to. She'd have given a lot to ask some good, hard questions of Liber and Libera—and better yet, to actually get answers.
Why on earth did you send me back here? Why on earth won't you send me home to California?
She'd done everything she knew how to do to get the attention of the god and goddess. She'd prayed, and nobody could doubt her prayer was sincere. She'd given enough wine to swim in if they'd been so inclined. But they weren't listening to her.
She hadn't given up her search for the actual plaque, the one that had brought her back here. Once it was safe to go out again, and while she had errands to run—trips to market, women's day at the baths—she took time to hunt. She hadn't seen anything closer to it than the one she'd bought from the stonecutter near the market, but she hadn't given up. Nor did she intend to, not till she'd scoured every street and poked into every shop.
Looking for something in Carnuntum, she'd discovered, was nothing like shopping in L.A. or Indianapolis, not if you wanted to be thorough, as she emphatically did. She couldn't let her fingers do the walking; she had to do it with her feet. It wasn't just that there were no phones here. There were no phone books, nowhere she could check under STONECUTTERS to see if she'd found them all. There wasn't a Chamber of Commerce from which she might have got a list of such artisans, either. If she wanted to hunt them down, she had to do it herself.
“In all my spare time,” she muttered, which would have been funny if only it were funny. She'd thought she was busy in Los Angeles. Work here in Carnuntum never seemed to get done. If she couldn't find the plaque, if she couldn't escape the second century … Had she seen her own gravestone when she came to Petronell on her honeymoon? She didn't remember seeing any inscribed to a woman named Umma, but that proved nothing. She could as easily say it proved Umma had never existed, and all this was a dream.
In which case, Nicole had taken to dreaming historical epics.
 
A week or two after Nicole invented baked apples, the tavern ran low on grain. When Nicole went to the market square in search of more, she found none for sale: no wheat, no barley. She'd never seen rye or oats. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked a man who was selling plums at a preposterous price.
“Tighten your belt,” he answered.
She hissed at his total lack of sympathy, and went searching elsewhere. As she'd recalled, a miller or two had shops between the market and her tavern. One of them sold her a little barley flour at five times what it should have cost. The other shook his head and said, “Sorry, but I haven't a kernel to spare. I'm hanging on to every grain in every jar to keep myself and my kin alive. Hard word to give you, I know, but that's how it is.” Nor would he give way, even when Nicole pleaded for something, anything, a handful would do.
“My wife's having a baby,” he said. “I've got to keep her strength up.”
Nicole left the miller's shop in a state of considerable aggravation. Before she could make it out into the street, a gang of Germans swaggered down the sidewalk, arm in arm and giving way to no one. She had to flatten herself against the wall to keep them from walking right through her. They laughed to see her cringe. They were big and ruddy-cheeked and healthy. They hadn't missed any meals lately, and didn't look likely to, either. Whatever grain there was or had been in Carnuntum, it was in their hands now. And the Romans? They plainly didn't give a damn about the Romans.
She waited till they were well past before going on her own way. As she walked, she found her eyes following a flock of pigeons in the street. Their brainless strut wasn't a whole lot different from that of the mighty conquerors. If this lot learned to carry swords, the rest of the birds would be in trouble. And how, she wondered, would they taste roasted, or stewed, maybe, with the few herbs she had left, and some of that awful local wine? They hadn't changed a bit, to be sure. Their habits were just as disgusting as they'd ever been. Even as she watched, one of them pecked at an ox turd in the street. Her stomach turned over. But as it did that, it growled. Pigeons were meat. Her stomach knew it, regardless of what her brain might have to say.
Julia exclaimed in dismay when she brought home so little in the way of grain. “Mistress, what will we do?”
“Tighten our belts,” Nicole replied, as the man with the plums had done with her. It was no answer, and yet the only one possible.
No, not quite the only one possible. “I think we'll close down for a while,” she said, “just worry about feeding ourselves, till more food comes into the city. And … I think I'll send Lucius out tomorrow, to bring us back as many snails as he can catch.”
How many calories in a snail? How many other people, children and adults alike, had gone out hunting snails? How long before Carnuntum had not a snail left in it, and people
still hungry? Those were all good, relevant questions. She had answers for none of them—yet. What she did have was the bad feeling she would not only get answers, they wouldn't be anything either easy or comfortable to deal with.
For a while, at least, they'd manage. The next day, Lucius went out hunting and returned with a good-sized basket full of snails. The tavern smelled of garlic and fried molluscs the rest of the day. Nicole, Lucius, and Julia all ate till they were full, and there were still live snails left in the basket for tomorrow.
A German came in while they were eating. He grimaced at what was to Nicole the wonderful odor of garlic, and turned the color of a bream's belly when he found out what she and the others were eating. He literally fled the tavern, a hand clapped to his mouth.
Nicole laughed for a long while after he was gone. The others followed suit, but they were a little puzzled. She had to stop, wipe away the tears of mirth, and try to explain. “Isn't it strange? Murdering people for fun doesn't bother these bastards. Violating women doesn't faze them. Robbing people doesn't trouble them in the slightest. But snails with garlic? That makes them turn up their toes.”
“If we'd known it, we could have splashed ourselves with garlic juice instead of sour piss,” Julia said seriously—she still wasn't quite inclined to laugh at a German. “We would have liked it better, and the Germans still would have left us alone.”

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