Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  19

  Getting up with her belly empty and her scalp itching and her skin dark with soot was harder than it had ever been before. She stared around the bare little bedroom, and dismay changed rapidly into unabashed loathing. For the first time in a very long while, she wondered if she’d lost her mind.

  She’d been persisting in the conviction that Carnuntum was the hallucination. But — what if it wasn’t? What if it was real, and West Hills a dream? Had she really known frozen food and printed books and automobiles and air conditioning and computers and airplanes and the United States Constitution? Or had she been Umma all along, gone round the bend for a while, and now at last begun to recover?

  “I am Nicole Gunther-Perrin,” she said in quiet but impassioned English, “and I will go back to California.” She clenched her work-battered hand into a fist and slammed it down onto the thin mattress. “I will. But not today, God damn it.”

  She believed that. She had to believe it. If she didn’t… she’d have to come to terms with staying in Carnuntum for the rest of her life. With the Marcomanni and Quadi holding the city and the Roman legions likely to be knocking on the door any minute now, the rest of her life probably wouldn’t be measured in decades. Days, more likely. Or hours.

  “God be thanked for small mercies,” she muttered.

  She trudged downstairs to a meager breakfast of barley bread that sat like a brick in her stomach — but a small brick, oh, a very small brick. Julia was already up and gone, as far as she could tell. Lucius was nowhere to be seen. Out playing with the neighborhood kids, she had to hope. She raided the cash box and went out to see what she could find to keep herself and Lucius and Julia eating for another day or two, or maybe just for another meal.

  Few Germans roamed the street so early. They didn’t have to worry about making a living; they lived off everyone else’s labor. They could sleep late — or later, anyhow, since no one here moved too far out of rhythm with the sun. For that reason, the early morning was a good time to hit the market square, if anyone happened to have anything out for sale.

  Nicole felt like clapping her hands when she saw not one but two fishermen setting out a gleaming array of trout and carp. She wasn’t the only one buying, but there weren’t so many people there that they started frenziedly bidding against one another, as she’d seen happen once or twice. She paid an arm, but managed to keep the leg in reserve for a jar of wine a farmer had brought into Carnuntum. It was the last one he had left. “Glad to be rid of it,” he said. “Now I’m going to get out of town while the getting’s good.”

  That struck Nicole as eminently sensible; what hadn’t made a lot of sense was his coming into town in the first place. She got out of the market while the getting was good, too, and the gods were kind. The streets were still all but deserted. She made it back to the tavern unmolested, without even the usual quota of whistles and catcalls from passing Germans.

  Julia had been to the baths: she was clean and relatively fresh. Nicole made a mental note to go later, if the quiet continued. Julia regarded Nicole’s purchases dubiously. “That’s a lot of fish, Mistress,” she said. Then she shrugged. “Well, we’ll stuff ourselves like force-fed geese, because it won’t keep long. And then we’ll moan and groan about how full we are — and then we’ll be empty again.”

  “So we will,” Nicole agreed. “But being full for even a little while feels good.”

  “It certainly does,” Julia said, in a tone and with an expression that made it plain she was not talking about food. Nicole snorted. Julia looked altogether unabashed. Nothing Nicole had ever done could make her feel that her way of dealing with men — and striking deals with them — was wrong.

  It worked for her. In times like these, that meant something. More power to her, Nicole thought, with a little wrench of the gut. Paradigm shift. That was never either easy or painless.

  Baked fish and a quarter of a small loaf of barley bread did not make for a balanced diet, but Nicole went to bed without the feeling that, if she had a tapeworm, it was about to sue for lack of proper maintenance. She’d had that feeling too often lately. Now that she was without it for a little while, she wasted very little time worrying about proper nutrition. Any nutrition at all was enough to carry on with.

  When the sun rose the next morning, the Marcomanni and Quadi rose with it. So did the rest of Carnuntum; Nicole would not have been surprised to learn that the braying of the Germans’ horns had roused the recently dead from the graveyard outside the walls. It sounded like an elephant being flayed with a dull pocketknife.

  The street outside the tavern was hardly quieter. Germans ran in packs down the street, swords in hand, baggy trousers flapping against their legs, shouting back and forth in their guttural dialects. Nicole had picked up a few words — enough to be quite clear on what they were yelling about: “The Romans are coming! The Romans are coming!”

  One if by land, two if by the Danube, she thought dizzily. She leaned on the window frame for a moment, letting the wan sun warm her face. It would cloud up later, she suspected. It almost always did.

  She dressed with a little more than her usual care, and went downstairs to a breakfast of cold fish. Julia and Lucius were not far behind her. She was interested to note that Julia was also a bit cleaner than usual, though Lucius was his disheveled small-boy self.

  They didn’t open the tavern, or even unbar the door. “With any luck at all, this will be over soon,” Nicole said. She glanced at the image — the image — of Liber and Libera. If you won’t send me home, will you at least let me live as good a life here as I can?

  A prayer wasn’t supposed to be reproachful, but she didn’t care. They’d brought her here. They could live with the consequences.

  In the beginning, the second battle for Carnuntum sounded very much like the first. The shouts from the walls were in German now and not in Latin, but the tones of anger, desperation, rage, even wild glee, were much the same.

  But after a while, as the morning went on and the sun began to play hide-and-seek with the gathering clouds, a new sound brought Nicole bolt upright. It sounded like the beating of an enormous heart, deep and ponderously slow.

  Lucius looked up excitedly from the board game he was playing with

  Julia. “Battering ram! That’ll do it for the gate. Then — in come the legions. March! March! March!”

  He marched himself all the way upstairs to fetch his sword, and all the way back down and around the room, leaping and spinning and stabbing with it, till Nicole ducked in and caught him and held him fast. He was hot and sweaty and breathing in gulps. And he’d forgotten completely how little use his wooden blade had been against the Germans.

  Nicole’s grip slackened. He wriggled free, still panting, but he’d calmed down enough to sit on a bench conveniently near the door.

  He didn’t go back to his game, which he’d been losing anyway. Quietly Julia stowed the pieces inside the board and put it away, and sat with folded hands, waiting with a slave’s patience for whatever was going to come.

  The Romans kept knocking on the door to Carnuntum. A second ram joined the first, striking a counterpoint from another gate. With each crashing thud, Nicole thought surely it would break through.

  But the gates had been built strong, nor did they care who tried to break them. They held for the whole of that day, until the pounding became as monotonous as a migraine, as relentless as the pulse of Nicole’s own heart in her ears.

  Lucius alternated between playing legionary and waiting for the real legionaries to come marching down the street. At length, Nicole prevailed on him to go upstairs with Julia and, if not sleep, then at least get off her nerves.

  She sat where she’d been for most of the day. If she’d had a stack of magazines to read, she’d have been too twitchy to bother with them. She contemplated a big job, a job that would keep her too busy to think, but even if she’d had tools to sand down and refinish the tables, she’d never get it done before dark. She’d have to
ask Brigo next time he came by, whether she could borrow any — for that matter, whether he’d like to help. He’d might surprise her by agreeing to it.

  Daylight faded, and the pounding went on. Nicole circled the room, coming to a halt in front of the votive plaque. Liber and Libera regarded her with serene complacency. “All right,” Nicole said to them, rather defiantly, in English. “Maybe you wanted me to see the Romans take back Carnuntum. Maybe I was supposed to see that, sometimes, the good guys win.” She glowered at them. “With all due respect, I’d sooner have taken that on faith, and gone home.”

  The god and goddess didn’t move, or say a word. A little wear and tear aside, they looked just as they had when their plaque had stood on her nightstand in clean, quiet, safe West Hills. Nicole looked around at this filthy tavern in a barbarian-held town taken from an empire that reckoned itself civilized only because everything around it was so absolutely barbaric. She sighed deeply, turned her back on the heedless divinities, and trudged upstairs to bed.

  She slept rather better than she’d expected, a deep, sodden sleep, though she’d drunk no wine the night before. She woke as she’d fallen asleep, to the sound of the rams battering away at the gates.

  The last of the fish weren’t fit for human consumption. Nicole tossed them out the window. Julia, who was just coming down the stairs, exclaimed in dismay and ran to the window beside Nicole, but Nicole had done the job a little too well: they’d landed in a steaming pile of ox manure.

  “Mistress!” Julia said. “They might still have been all right to eat. Now when are we going to get any more?”

  “If you want them so much, you can go out there and bring them back,” Nicole said. Julia shot her a look — as close to defiance as she’d ever come — and startled Nicole by doing exactly as she was told.

  Nicole watched her as she paused at the door, looking rapidly up and down the deserted street, and scuttled toward the fish. When she was within a few feet of them, her face screwed up in disgust. Nicole wasn’t surprised. The reek of them still clung to the bowl they’d lain in.

  Julia came back without the fish, and with a crestfallen expression. She’d gone out to make a point; but Nicole, for once, had won it instead. They scraped together a breakfast of stale barley bread and boiled water, punishment fare, and settled for another day of siege.

  Toward midday, one of the gates went crashing down. Screams and shouting and something else — a deep, rhythmic, profoundly arrogant sound — proclaimed the legions’ arrival in Carnuntum. They were singing, Nicole realized, in a strong, marching beat, to the braying of horns and the beating of drums.

  Nicole looked at Julia and Lucius. Julia and Lucius looked back. Was her grin as wide and crazy as theirs were? They leaped up all at once and whooped. Julia grabbed Nicole’s hand and Lucius’. His free hand grabbed Nicole’s. They danced madly around the room, kicking into stools and tables, and not caring in the slightest.

  When they’d danced themselves breathless, Nicole and Lucius flung themselves down to rest, but Julia had something else in mind. She dipped a rag in the dishwater barrel and scrubbed at her arms. “Now I don’t smell like a chamberpot anymore,” she said triumphantly.

  Then, as if she’d gone completely out of her mind, she unbarred the door and ran out into the street, headed toward Gaius Calidius Severus’. She was damned lucky: the street was full of Germans running away from the wall. None of them stopped to grab a last taste of Roman flesh.

  Nicole stared after her. Then, incredulously, she started to laugh. Julia always had been consistent about what constituted a celebration.

  It wasn’t all bad, either. Nicole was sick of smelling like eau de pissoir herself. She scrubbed her arms and neck, even added a little bit of vinegar from the stores. Better to smell like a salad than like a hot day in an outhouse.

  When she looked up from what were still sadly inadequate ablutions — God, what she wouldn’t have given for a bar of soap — Lucius had disappeared, and his toy sword with him. She cursed, first in Latin, then, more satisfyingly, in English. He’d gone to watch the fighting, the little lunatic. He’d never in his life imagine that he could get caught in it. She could — and it scared the hell out of her.

  She ran to the door and shouted his name. Nothing. She called again, louder. No sign of him. Why should there be? He had what the twentieth century had learned to call plausible deniability. “Oh, no, Mother, “ he would say, eyes wide and sincere. “I didn’t hear you. Everybody was yelling so loud.”

  “I’ll warm his backside,” Nicole muttered. The idea didn’t give her the collywobbles, as it would have when she first came to Carnuntum. He’d proved himself immune to any lesser suggestion. He did not need to know just how vitally important his life was to her. He was, literally, her lifeline, the one assurance she had of her continued existence.

  Without further pause for thought, Nicole ran out of the tavern. She barely remembered to shut the door behind her.

  The street was even fuller of Germans than before. Some were headed at a gallop for the wall, swords drawn, faces set in masks of ferocity. Some were falling back, retreating deeper into the city. Their swords were notched or bloodied or broken, and their masks had cracked. Beneath lay fear — the first fear she’d seen in anyone but a Roman since this war began.

  Serves you right, she thought viciously. Some of the Marcomanni and Quadi coming away from the wall were bleeding. That served them right, too. It was time they had a taste of their own medicine.

  The barbarians yelled back and forth, comers to goers, incomprehensibly. None took the slightest notice of Nicole, any more than they had of Julia. Who was probably, right at that moment, screwing her brains out. Nicole didn’t know whether to be jealous or annoyed. Annoyed, she decided: if Julia had waited a little longer before running over and hopping into bed with Gaius Calidius Severus, maybe Lucius wouldn’t have had the chance to sneak out the door.

  “Lucius!” Nicole called again, but her voice was lost in the chaos. Maybe he really couldn’t hear her. And maybe, too, if she stayed out here on the sidewalk any longer, one of those Germans running past was going to take a swipe at her with his sword, just for the hell of it.

  She ducked into the alley between her house and the house where Sextus Longinius lulus lived and Fabia Ursa had died. As soon as she did it, she wished she hadn’t; the stink of dumped chamberpots was appalling. Flies rose in buzzing clouds, furious to be disturbed in their feasting. She flailed her arms. Maybe one or two failed to land on her.

  Just as she turned to try another route, a German loomed in the mouth of the alleyway. Nicole stopped cold.

  The German looked at her in — surprise? With a sound like an ox lowing, he collapsed. Blood poured into the filthy dirt from a wound on the inside of his thigh. So much blood — how had he run all the way from the wall?

  The flies didn’t care what he’d done or how. They swarmed toward the spreading pool, milling around its edges, sampling it to see if they liked it as well as yesterday’s slops. It would do, their manner said. It would definitely do.

  Nicole couldn’t bring herself to step over the dying German. She turned and went farther up the alley, picking her way past the piles of filth. At the back of her house, the alleyway jogged to the left instead of cutting straight through to the next street. The houses and shops facing that one weren’t directly in back of hers and its neighbors, as they would have been in a Los Angeles subdivision. Nobody here had bothered to think that might be desirable.

  Nicole couldn’t see what was going on in the next street, but she could hear it loud and clear. People were screaming in several languages, and clashing iron against iron. Lucius would reckon it a great show, the bloody-minded little rascal. God, if he got embroiled in that…

  Footsteps pounded toward her from the other street, heavy steps, much too heavy for a child’s. Armor clanked. A shout rang out in Latin: “The Emperor!”

  She sagged against the indifferently whitewashed stone of
the wall — her own wall, the back wall of her house. Not a German bent on rapine and plunder. A Roman legionary, a soldier of civilization — such as it was — one of Carnunturn’s rescuers from its barbarous conquerors.

  “The Emperor!” he shouted again, just as he rounded the corner. He and Nicole saw each other at the same instant. Had he been carrying a gun, she might have died. By the gasp that escaped him when he spied her, his first thought when he saw anyone not a legionary was enemy. But instead of the twentieth-century soldier’s rifle, he had a sword in his right hand and a great, clumsy-looking shield on his left arm. He was still two or three strides away from her when he realized she wasn’t dangerous.

  He skidded to a stop, heavy sandals scuffing up dust. His sword lowered. Nicole dared, at last, to breathe. She let it out as a word: “The Emperor!” And, as he stood still, staring at her, “Thank God you’re finally here!”

  A moment too late, she realized that it should have been, Thank the gods you’re here! But the Roman soldier did not seem inclined toward literary criticism. He grinned. Between his black beard, the iron cheekpieces of his helmet, and the low rim that projected almost like a cap’s visor, she couldn’t see much of his face: that grin, a nose that looked like a nose, and dark eyes that stayed alert, wary, even while he grinned at her.

  Then she did what she’d promised herself she would do with the first legionary she saw inside Carnuntum: she marched up to him and gave him a kiss. She’d had in mind a kiss on the cheek, but the soldier’s beard and the cheekpieces made that impractical. She kissed him on the end of the nose instead.

  He laughed out loud. “Hello to you, too, sweetheart,” he said. “You can do better than that, I’ll wager.” He let the shield slip to the ground, wrapped his arms around her — sword still clenched in his right fist — and bent his mouth down to hers.

  That kiss, crushed against scale mail and with a sword bumping her backside, was odds-on the most uncomfortable she’d ever had. She didn’t care. It was — damn, it was fun. Just like the basketball game years ago before she ever met Frank, when Indiana clawed from behind to beat Notre Dame with a shot at the buzzer. She’d let out a squeal and kissed not only her date but the guy who sat on the other side of her. They’d all laughed. It had been that kind of moment: dizzy, crazy, and oh so sweet with victory.