Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  Here… Here, if what Calidius was saying was right, simply being able to read without moving her lips set her above the local equivalent of a Ph.D. He had to be exaggerating. He knew more about it than she did, didn’t he? Anybody who’d grown up here knew more about it than she did.

  And if it was true, if literacy was as rudimentary as that, it didn’t promise much for the rest of civilization, either. This wasn’t what she’d expected when she’d wished herself to Carnuntum.

  She needed to think. There was never time to think. That was just as true here, since she’d wakened in Umma’s bed, as it had been when she went to sleep in West Hills.

  Calidius was still waiting for an answer. Simplest, again, seemed best: “I don’t know how I learned to read like this. It’s how I taught myself, that’s all.”

  “Amazing,” he repeated, and stabbed the amphora’s pointed tip down into the dirt of the street, as he’d done with the empties he used for urinals outside his shop. He set down the raisins beside the jar and, still shaking his head, carried the songbirds back toward his door. On his way he stopped at one of the jars and pissed in it, as unself-conscious as any of the other men who paused there. Seeing that Nicole’s gaze had followed him, he grinned and let his tunic fall. “My own private stock, from my own privates.”

  She didn’t know why she smiled. It was a godawful joke. Face it, she told herself. Face the way things are. The way things were was plain. He took it utterly for granted that a man would piss in a pot in a public place. There was nothing either shameful or prurient about male nudity here — that was obvious. Female nudity…

  Best not get into that. So: nothing shameful. Even noticing that he wasn’t circumcised, or calling to mind that no one else she’d seen pissing in front of his shop was, either. Like the doors that swung on pegs rather than hinges, it wasn’t any better or worse than what she’d known before. It was just different.

  Titus Calidius Severus went inside his shop, leaving Nicole to look after herself. He hadn’t even said good-bye. She didn’t know why that should matter, but it did.

  6

  She gritted her teeth, picked up the leg of mutton with its pendant fish, and lugged them into the odorous dimness of the tavern. The scent of wine and sweat, must and hot oil, garlic and herbs and unsubtle perfume, struck her like a wall. She clove her way through it.

  Julia materialized out of it, imperturbably cheerful as ever, and fetched in the wine and the raisins and the scallions. As she came back in, Nicole asked her, “How are the children?”

  “They haven’t been too bad, Mistress,” Julia answered, as willingly as always. If she’d been a babysitter in West Hills, Nicole thought, she’d have been booked from one end of the week to the other. “They’re using the pot more than they should, but I think they’re getting better. Are you all right?”

  Nicole’s stomach rumbled alarmingly. She set her teeth and ignored it. “I’m not too bad, either.”

  “You were lucky,” Julia said. “A lot of times, when people’s bellies gripe them like that, they keep on shitting and shitting till they die. That’s what happened to Calidius’ wife a few years ago, remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” Nicole said. Of course she didn’t, but from now on she would. Titus Calidius Severus hadn’t been two-timing anybody when he came visiting her, then — no, when he came visiting Umma. A point in his favor. Did it balance off that rude remark he’d made about women? Not even close, Nicole thought. That was exactly the attitude that she’d fled in the twentieth century. She’d prayed for a place that was free of it. Liber, Libera — what were you thinking? Couldn’t you understand what I meant?

  They didn’t blast her where she stood, but neither did they answer. She was left where she’d been before, face to face with a monumental wall of male chauvinist piggery.

  And he’d seemed so decent, too. A pleasant man. A nice man, as her mother in Indiana might have said.

  “There ain’t no such thing,” Nicole snarled to nobody in particular. Nobody answered, or even seemed to notice that she’d spoken.

  Snarl though she might, fact was fact. And men, it seemed, were men. Nicole dug fingers into a sudden fierce itch in her scalp. Damn, it was getting worse. She needed a shower, shampoo — even a bath would do. All over. In hot water.

  Tomorrow was ladies’ day in the baths. She’d live till then. Maybe.

  Julia’s voice startled her out of her funk. “Business was good while you were gone, Mistress,” Julia said brightly, “and I got a couple of dupondii for myself. May I keep them?”

  Had she slipped her hand in the till? Had she snaked out a good deal more than a couple of dupondii and claimed the smaller amount, hoping Nicole wouldn’t notice? Listening to her, looking at her, Nicole didn’t think so. Her tone was eloquent. She’d asked because she might get in real trouble if she kept the dupondii without asking, but she didn’t think Nicole could possibly say no.

  Nicole couldn’t see any good reason to refuse. “Yes, go ahead. That’s more than you got from Ofanius Valens yesterday morning. How did you do it?”

  “Usual way,” Julia said with a smile and a shrug. The smile had an odd edge to it, but nothing Nicole could lay a finger on. “Customers thought I was nice.”

  “All right,” Nicole said. “Here, will you take the hide off this leg of mutton while I tend to the rest of the things I bought?”

  “Of course, Mistress,” the slave replied.

  I have to set her free as soon as I can, Nicole thought again. The Romans don’t have paper, right? So how bad can the paperwork be?

  As Julia went to get a knife for the mutton, she said over her shoulder, “Oh — Mistress, I almost forgot. Your brother stopped by while you were gone to market. He said he’d come back another time.”

  “Did he?” The words were entirely automatic — they didn’t have anything to do with any rational thought processes on Nicole’s part. Up till this moment, she hadn’t known she, or rather Umma, had a brother. Up till this moment, she’d never had a brother. Two sisters, yes; a brother, no. She supposed she had to make the best of it. “If that’s what he said,” she said, she hoped not too lamely, “that’s what he’ll probably do.”

  Julia nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. Brigomarus is always very reliable.” Now Nicole not only had a brother, she knew what his name was. That helped. If only she’d be able to recognize him when he walked through the door…

  Julia skinned the leg of mutton with nonchalant competence. Nicole was sure she couldn’t have done it half so neatly. She’d never had to try anything like that before — but she was going to have to learn. Another survival skill in this world without supermarkets, like pissing in a chamberpot and haggling in the market. Next time, she decided, I do it myself.

  While Julia worked, Nicole checked the cash box, doing her best not to be too obvious about it. Julia saw her doing it even so. The slave went right on with her task. Even as an ordinary employee, she wouldn’t really have had any grounds for complaint. As a slave, she doubtless could land in very hot water if she got out of line.

  Nicole didn’t like the small stab of relief — almost of approval — that accompanied the thought. It was the same less than laudable gut reaction and the same tardy pang of guilt that she’d felt when she saw a police car patrolling a Latino neighborhood while she was driving through it. She didn’t want to be glad the cops came down harder on poor minorities than on affluent whites — but just at that moment, she couldn’t help it. She was glad.

  Lucius came running down the stairs, pulling a toy cart on the end of a leather thong. It squeaked almost as much as a real one. By the way he squealed laughter, he wasn’t at death’s door or anywhere close. All the same, Nicole asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine, Mother, thanks,” the boy answered, as carelessly as if he hadn’t had the galloping trots in the middle of the night. Kids, Nicole thought, half in amazement, half in envy. Lucius was kind enough to add, “Aurelia’s fine, too.
”

  “That’s good,” Nicole said. Even so, she snagged him as he loped on by, and felt his forehead. Normal. He was grubby, too, but there wasn’t much she could do about that on short notice. “If you are feeling fine,” she said, “I have a job for you. Would you help me put the groceries away? Here, I got some raisins, and some scallions. Put them where they belong, will you please?”

  As clever stratagems went — Nicole had no idea where either item belonged — it was about as successful as she might have expected. “Oh, Mother,” Lucius said with the indignation of a child in any country, in any time, faced with the adult insistence on doing something useful instead of running around making a nuisance of himself. Nicole armed herself for battle, but he amazed her: once he’d registered his complaint, he did as he was told. Maybe he was afraid he’d get whacked if he didn’t. Maybe he was just a good kid.

  By what Nicole had seen here, anybody in Carnuntum would have loudly maintained that those last two notions had something in common. She didn’t care what anybody in Carnuntum would maintain. She didn’t believe it, not for a minute.

  Lucius scratched his head. The gesture was as contagious as a yawn. Nicole gave in to the irresistible urge to scratch. Her scalp — no, Umma’s scalp: it wasn’t her fault — never stopped itching, any more than her tooth stopped aching or her heart stopped beating.

  Lucius stopped suddenly and let out a very grown-up grunt of satisfaction. He reached up and squished something between the fingernail of one hand and the thumbnail of the other. Nicole’s stomach did a slow lurch that had nothing to do with the water she’d drunk the day before. “Lucius!” she said sharply. “What was that?”

  He grinned. “Louse,” he said, wiping his hands on his tunic. He sounded insufferably pleased with himself. “I’ve been trying to catch the miserable thing all day. And look, I finally did.”

  “Oh…” Nicole bit her tongue before she burst out in a flood of English swearwords. Latin still felt strange to her, like a made-up language; something she’d learned in school and recited by rote. She couldn’t cut loose in it. If she started screaming in English, people would think she’d gone round the bend. Did they burn witches here? No English, then. Latin wasn’t enough. She clamped down hard on the most satisfying option of all: a plain old wordless shriek.

  Once, about a year before, Kimberley and Justin had come home from Josefina’s with head lice. That had been a nightmare: washing the kids’ hair with Nix, using the Step 2 rinse to help loosen the nits — the eggs — from the hair shafts, and washing everyone’s bedding and spraying the mattresses and the furniture with Rid to kill any nits the children might have shed.

  She’d used enough chemicals to exterminate a couple of endangered species. That had been bad enough, but it hadn’t been the worst part: not even close. The worst part was going through Justin’s hair, and especially Kimberley’s, which was both longer and thicker, one strand at a time, looking for the nits the fine-toothed comb that came with the Nix hadn’t been able to free.

  The only difference between her and a mother chimpanzee was that chimps had to worry about hair all over the bodies of their offspring, and she didn’t. From then on, she’d understood how and why searching for tiny details got to be known as nitpicking.

  “Come over to the window here,” she told Lucius. He rolled his eyes but obeyed. She shifted him around till his head was in the light, and started going through his hair. He didn’t ask what she was doing, which meant he knew. “Oh…” Nicole muttered again, in lieu of anything stronger. Umma might have done this for him before, but she hadn’t done much of a job. His hair was full of telltale white specks. They were so small, they disappeared if you looked at them from the wrong side of the hair shafts, but they were there, all right. They were all too evidently there.

  He yelped more than once as she yanked and tugged, pinching nits one by one, sliding her fingers along each laden hair till she could crush them. She wasn’t gentle. Her revulsion was too strong. Each time she crushed a nit, she wanted frantically to wash her hands.

  She didn’t do that. What good would it do? She had no soap. Nothing but water.

  Every time she thought she’d found the last of them, a dozen more turned up. And there — oh, God, there was a live one, pale and slow and small, like a piece of dandruff with legs. It scuttled away from her questing fingers. Lucius wiggled as she pursued it. “Hold still!” she snapped. Her tone froze him in place. She barely noticed, except that he’d stopped moving. “Got it!” she said, and squashed the thing with a horrid mixture of delight and revulsion. It expired with a faint, crisp pop.

  Just as she was about to go on playing mommy ape, a pair of customers wandered in. Her grip on Lucius slackened as she turned to take care of the man and woman. He escaped before she could tighten her hold again, scampering gleefully past the customers into the freedom of the street.

  She could hardly go after him, not with both customers settling noisily at a table and calling out their orders. She fed them wine from the middle-range jar, and bread that Julia must have made while she was out, and honey and nuts. They scratched at themselves as they ate and drank, casually and without shame, as if it were something everybody did all the time. Had people been doing that to excess the day before? Had they been doing it in the market square? There’d been so many things to see, so much to absorb, that she hadn’t noticed.

  She’d notice now. Oh, Lord, wouldn’t she just?

  Her fingers clawed at her own scalp. Something… squished under one of them. She wanted to scream again. She wanted to throw up. She had to stand there while the customers finished and paid her and left, her head throbbing with Excedrin Headache Number Six Hundred and Sixty-six, and one thought beating over and over. Lousy. Lousy. Lousy…

  No Nix here. No Step 2. No Rid. She couldn’t have cared less now about what was in them. She just wished she had them. Oh, God, she wished she had them.

  Back before Nix and the rest, people had killed lice and nits with kerosene. Some people still did, because it was cheap or because it was what they’d used before they came to the United States. Once a year or so, there’d be a news story about an immigrant child whose head caught fire while her mother was delousing her.

  Kerosene seemed like ancient history to Nicole. Unfortunately for her here and now, it wasn’t ancient enough. The Latin vocabulary she’d acquired from wherever she’d acquired it didn’t even have a word for the stuff.

  “Julia,” she said, “what do I do about these horrible lice?”

  Even in her misery, she’d framed the question with a lawyer’s precision. As she’d hoped, Julia took her to be complaining about the ones she’d just found on Lucius and on herself — oh, Christ, and on herself — rather than about lice in general.

  “They are annoying, aren’t they, Mistress?” the slave said with a sigh. Annoying was not the word — was not a tenth the word — Nicole would have used. Julia went on, “I don’t know what you can do except what you did: pick nits, comb hair, and wash it, too, I suppose, though nothing seems to do much good. Just about everybody has ‘em.”

  Nothing seems to do much good. Just about everybody has ‘em. Nicole hated bugs of any sort. She could deal with them, but she hated them. The idea that she had bugs living on her would make her scalp crawl if it hadn’t been crawling already. She’d felt dirty before. Now she felt unclean. She’d never known what that meant before, or how much worse it was than merely being filthy.

  “Lice carry disease,” she said. She knew she shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t get her anywhere. But she couldn’t stop herself.

  Sure enough, Julia looked at her as if she’d gone around the bend again, and said what she’d expected, as predictable as a sitcom script: “I never heard that before. Bad air or evil spirits or getting your humors out of line some way, yes, but lice? Beg pardon for saying so, but you sure have been coming up with some funny ideas lately, Mistress.”

  “Ha, “ Nicole said in a hollow voice. “Ha,
ha.” Convincing Julia she was right wasn’t the most important thing in the world — and that was lucky, too, because she could tell at a glance she wasn’t going to convince Julia, any more than she’d convinced her lead was poisonous. Julia had that every-body-knows look on her face again, the one impenetrable to everything this side of a baseball bat.

  And there it was again, the script according to Julia: “How could lice carry disease? Like I said, almost everybody has ‘em. If they carried disease, people would be sick all the time, wouldn’t they? And they aren’t. So lice can’t carry disease.” The slave hugged herself with glee. “Listen to me, Mistress! I’m reasoning like a philosopher.”

  Nicole sighed and went back to grinding flour. Julia’s logic was as good as she thought it was — if all lice carried disease all the time. If some lice carried it some of the time, no. But how could Nicole show that? She couldn’t, not by mere assertion, which was all she had going for her here.

  It didn’t matter anyhow. Lice weren’t bad only because they carried disease. They were bad because they were disgusting. They were bad because they were lice. And she had them in her hair. In her hair. Every time she itched, she scratched frantically. Sometimes she drew blood. Every once in a while, she squashed something. She wiped her hands on her tunic, again and again.

  When she found half a moment, she yelled for Aurelia. The little girl fidgeted more under her hands than Lucius had. She was just as lousy as her brother. As she had with Lucius, Nicole plucked nit after nit from her hair, and killed a couple of live ones for good measure.

  But she didn’t have time to do anything even close to a proper job, not with baking and cooking and dealing with customers. It wouldn’t have mattered even if she had had time, because the children’s bedding was sure to be full of nits — and probably full of lice, too. Julia’s, too. And her own. Dear God in heaven, her own too.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. Squish — a chitinous yielding under her fingernail. Got one. Five minutes later… Scratch, scratch, scratch.