Household Gods (77 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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He sighed. If he was a born soldier, Nicole was a born Indy-car driver. But he was doing what he thought he had to do to make the world a better place, and doing it as best he knew how. Nicole couldn't help but admire him, even when he was ruling against her.
Would he succeed in his goal? She didn't know. All she
knew was that, sooner or later, the Roman Empire would fall. She didn't know when, or exactly how. She hoped, just then, that it didn't fall on this man's watch. If there was any fairness in the world, he deserved to win his war and hold back the darkness a while longer.
He said—and he said it with some regret, too, “I am going to deny your petition for damages from my government for the attack upon you.”
Nicole drew breath to ask if she could appeal that, but stopped, feeling foolish. If the Emperor refused her, who could overrule him? There was no Supreme Court here, no check or balance to the Emperor's power. To her amazement, she wasn't angry at this man, this good and—yes—wise ruler. She didn't feel cheated. He was playing the game by the rules he understood, and playing it as fairly as he knew how.
“I still think you're wrong,” she said, “but what can I do? I can't make you agree with me, any more than I could make your soldier”—she was too stubborn to stop calling him that—“stop doing what he did.”
Marcus Aurelius held up a hand. “I have ruled that the Roman Empire owes you no compensation for what you suffered at this unknown legionary's wicked hands. That ruling shall stand. Whether you deserve compensation for the wrong you have suffered may perhaps be another question. Alexander!” For the first time that evening, the Emperor raised his voice. It made Nicole start a little. He was soft-spoken by nature and inclination, but she knew, just then, that he had taught himself to be heard across a battlefield.
The man who hurried into the room was none other than the secretary who had been so surprised at Nicole's petition that he'd actually accepted it. He ignored Nicole completely. Marcus Aurelius beckoned him close and murmured something to him, all but whispering in his ear. Nicole tried her best to eavesdrop, but they were both too skilled at keeping private conversations private.
Alexander glanced at Nicole. His mouth was thin with distaste. “Sir, are you sure?”
That, Nicole heard perfectly clearly. She obviously was meant to. Interesting, she thought: Marcus Aurelius' subordinates respected him, that was evident, but they also felt free to talk back to him.
“Yes, yes,” said the Emperor of the Romans with the slightest well-bred hint of impatience. “I am most certainly sure.” In Sheldon Rosenthal's fondest dreams, he was perhaps a quarter as suave as Marcus Aurelius.
With a sigh, Alexander left the chamber. While he was gone, Nicole didn't know what to say, so she settled for saying nothing. The Emperor seemed lost in thought—meditating on the cares of empire, she supposed.
In a little while, Alexander came back with a small leather sack, which he handed without ceremony to Marcus Aurelius. He left shaking his head. The Emperor, his every movement said, was doing something Alexander could not possibly approve of.
Marcus Aurelius knew it, too; his eyes glinted as he set the sack in front of Nicole. “The Empire cannot compensate you,” he said. “I, however, as a citizen of the Empire, can offer you, privately and personally, some small recompense for your misfortune.”
And you can do it without setting a precedent that you and your successors are bound to follow,
Nicole thought. No, no flies on the Roman Emperor, not a one. But, having ruled against her, he could have sent her home with nothing. She'd fully expected that; been braced for it, even tried to formulate some kind of argument that wouldn't make her look either greedy or presumptuous.
She thanked him automatically, with her eyes on the sack. It was very small. Give her a few
denarii,
pack her off, rest content that she had no further recourse—how easy for him to do. Easy, and cheap.
It wasn't exactly fine etiquette, but she untied the string that closed the mouth of the sack. If Marcus Aurelius imagined he could shut her up with a handful of silver …
She shook the sack out on the table. It had hardly any heft
to it at all. If it was empty—if this was some kind of bitter joke—
It was a damned good thing she'd kept her mouth shut before she saw what the aide had brought her. These weren't a few token
denarii.
They were
aurei—
all gold, brilliant in the lamplight. Ten of them. She counted, very carefully; picked them up and tipped them into her palm. They gleamed there, more wealth than Umma had ever held in her hand at one time.
Marcus Aurelius didn't frown at her rudeness. Maybe he even understood it. “I understand that no money can punish your violator, or undo what he did to you. But what money can do, I hope this money will do. The gods grant it be so.”
It was a great deal of money. Two hundred fifty
denarii—
more than half the price of a slave. A thousand
sesterces.
Four thousand asses. It was like an incantation, an invocation of prosperity. More than a month's business—not profit, business—at the tavern. The rough equivalent, in second-century purchasing power, of the price of a Lexus.
Nicole had expected less, and would have settled for it. But the lawyer in her frowned at the ten
aurei
and reflected that, in terms of pain and suffering, she should have got more. He probably had it, too. If the deep-pockets rule applied, whose pockets—or moneybags—were deeper than those of the Emperor of the Romans? The rest of her knew that wasn't realistic. Money went a whole lot further here than in West Hills. Nor, by the law of the Empire, had Marcus Aurelius been obligated to give her any compensation at all. It was the action of a good man, a man who gave not because he had to, but because he felt that it was right.
Carefully, she said, “What money can do, I think this money will do. Thank you, sir. You are very generous.” She'd said things like that more times than she could count. Far more often than not, she was conscious of the hypocrisy even as the words passed her lips. This time, she meant it from the bottom of her heart. How strange, in a world not just conspicuously but dreadfully worse than the one she'd been born to, to find at the head of the Roman Empire a man
head and shoulders and torso above any of the rulers or statesmen of the late twentieth century. Mediocrities in expensive suits, every last one of them.
“I shall give you torchbearers to escort you back to your house,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Any town, even one so much smaller than Rome as this, may prove dangerous to an honest woman walking alone in darkness. Having suffered one calamity, you ought not to fear another.”
“Thank you again for your thoughtfulness,” Nicole said.
To her astonishment, she saw she'd embarrassed him. “Some take pride in claiming credit for service,” he said. “Some will not claim it aloud, but still secretly regard those whom they help as being in their debt. I try, as I believe all should try, to do one right thing after another, as naturally as a vine passes from yielding one summer's grapes to those of the next.”
If another man had said such a thing, he would have sounded like a pompous ass. Marcus Aurelius brought it out as if it were, or should be, simple truth.
Nicole smiled. Now, finally, she understood what he was. It was more than a word. It was a whole manner of being. “The Romans are lucky,” she said, “to have a philosopher for an emperor.”
He surprised her again, this time by shaking his head. “A general at the helm, a Trajan or a Vespasian, would serve us better now,” he replied. “But I am what we have, and I can but do my best.” He rose from the table, and called for servants. They came quickly, torches at the ready, crackling and trailing a stream of fire. He handed her into their care, with a grace and a courtesy that were in keeping with all the rest of him. The last she saw of him, he was standing by the table in the light of those many lamps, his shoulders bowed a little, borne down by the weight of his office. It was late by second-century standards, but he looked as if he had a long night ahead of him still.
Outside in the darkness, the torches seemed dismayingly feeble, casting only a dim, flickering light at the feet of their bearers. The moon, which hung in the southeast on this clear
late-August night, gave more and better light, but anything at all might have lurked in the moonshadows. A bright red star—Mars?—glowed a little above the moon. Even brighter was Jupiter, splendid and yellow-white below the moon, not far above the eastern horizon. Was that Saturn between them? Nicole would have known once, when it was a family pastime to spot the planets and call out names of the constellations. She hadn't done it since—Indianapolis? A long time. Night skies in Los Angeles were drowned in light, and she was too busy, most of the time, to notice.
This was the first time that she'd had to navigate Carnuntum by night. It was a dangerous pastime if you were too poor to afford guards and torchbearers. In the dark, in the absence of either streetlights or signs, she almost lost herself in the twisting ways of the city. Nothing looked the same as it did in daylight. Her steps grew slower and slower. The torchbearers began to mutter behind their hands, rude remarks in Latin and in another, unfamiliar language. Greek? It was much too mellifluous to be German.
At last, to her relief, she found the fountain near the tavern. From there, she had no trouble finding her way home. At the door, though she was suddenly, desperately tired, she paused to thank the Emperor's servants. They were polite to her because Marcus Aurelius had been, but they plainly couldn't wait to get the hell out of there.
Dim lamplight flickered through the slats of the shutters on the front windows. How nice of Julia, Nicole thought, to leave a lamp burning, so that Nicole wouldn't have to fumble her way in the dark.
She opened the door and slipped through it into the familiar, slightly funky interior of the tavern. Julia was sitting on a stool beside the lamp. She looked ready to fall over.
“For heaven's sake,” Nicole said, “what did you wait up for me for? Go to bed before you fall asleep where you sit.”
Julia shook her head stubbornly, though a yawn caught her and held her hostage in the middle. “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” she said. “I know Marcus Aurelius is supposed to be a good man, but he is the Emperor. He
can do whatever he wants. I was afraid of what he might do when you had the nerve to ask him to pay you back for what that legionary did, as if it were
his
fault.”
“He wouldn't admit to that,” Nicole said. “We had quite an argument about it, as a matter of fact. He wouldn't admit it was his fault or his government's fault.” Even though she thought she understood why Marcus Aurelius reasoned as he did, anything less than complete success irked her.
It impressed the hell out of Julia. “You … argued with the Roman Emperor, Mistress?” she said incredulously.
“I sure did,” Nicole answered, “and even though he wouldn't admit that he and his government were at fault, he gave me this.” She tossed the little leather sack down in front of the freedwoman. Julia stared at it dubiously, as Nicole must have done when the Emperor gave it to her. “Go ahead, open it.”
Julia did as told. Her gasp was altogether satisfactory. She spilled the
aurei
out on the tabletop. Nicole watched her closely as she put them back into the sack one by one, and made sure all ten were in there when she returned it. That was a lot of money—temptation even for the most honest employee.
“By the gods,” Julia said, softly and reverently, though Nicole thought she revered the cash more than the gods. “He wouldn't have given you this much if he'd gone to bed with you himself.”
“I didn't go see him to go to bed with him,” Nicole said with rather more sharpness than was strictly necessary.
“But if he'd wanted to—” Everything was very straightforward in Julia's mind. Nicole had seen that time and again. She'd also seen that trying to change Julia's mind was like pounding your head against a rock: your head would break long before the rock did. This time, she didn't even try. “Let's get some sleep,” she said. “Everything turned out as well as it could.”
“I'll say!” Julia exclaimed. “Almost makes me wish—”
Nicole's expression brought her up short. As clearly as if it were happening again, Nicole could feel the Roman soldier
forcing himself onto her, ramming deep, driving home a lot more than simple physical pain. What it did to her spirit … “You don't know what you're talking about,” Nicole said harshly. “Be glad of that.”
 
Somebody in the Bible—Jacob?—had seen God face to face, and his life was preserved. After that, he'd become a great man among the Hebrews. Nicole didn't remember all the details; she hadn't been to Sunday school in a long, long time. But she'd seen Marcus Aurelius face to face, and not only was her life preserved, she'd come away with ten
aurei.
That was enough to make her a celebrity in the neighborhood, if not in all of Carnuntum.

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