Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  “Serves ‘em right,” Lucius said. In his biased opinion, legionaries were splendid creatures. He wore the wooden sword on his belt all the time now, and marched everywhere. Nicole was hard put to keep him from talking like a legionary, too, complete with the appalling vocabulary. She’d never told him what one of them had done to her. What point? He wouldn’t understand.

  “It certainly does serve the Germans right,” Julia said. All the Roman soldiers in the tavern nodded. Most of them had their eyes on Julia. She could have said the sun rose in the afternoon, and the legionaries’ heads — among other things — would have bobbed up and down. Men, Nicole thought scornfully.

  Every so often, a soldier would pat Julia or Nicole on the bottom, or try to pull one of them down onto his lap. Sometimes Julia would let a legionary get away with it, sometimes she wouldn’t. Nicole never did. She developed a whole range of ways to get the message across.

  “Arr!” a legionary roared when she spilled a bowl full of stewed parsnips and salt fish into his lap. He sprang to his feet and did an impromptu war dance. “That’s hot! You did that on purpose, you miserable bitch.”

  “You’d better believe I did, you stinking bastard,” Nicole snapped. “If your hands don’t stay where they belong, your supper won’t go where it belongs.”

  He had a sword at his belt. If his hand dropped to the hilt, she didn’t know what she’d do. Scream and duck, probably — what other choice did she have? Instead, he cocked a big, hard-knuckled fist. “I ought to beat the crap out of you for that, lady,” he growled, glaring from her to his dripping tunic and back again.

  But one of the soldiers at another table said, “Oh, take it easy, Corvus. You grope a broad and she doesn’t like it, shit like that’s going to happen to you.”

  “Shit is right,” the legionary with the Roman hands said. “Look at the mess she made of me.” He swiped at his tunic, but only managed to smear it worse.

  He didn’t get much sympathy from any of his cohorts. They laughed and jeered: “A little lower and to the left, Corvus! My, what a fine, artistic outfit you’ve got on!”

  He spun on his heel and stamped out of the tavern. Nicole, freed of his attentions, made sure she didn’t keep too close a watch on the wine bill for the soldier who’d told Corvus off. If he got a free cup, or two, or three, then so be it.

  It’s worth it, she thought. Only afterwards did it occur to her that she’d fallen into a way of thinking she’d always deplored. She’d needed a man to protect her from another man. There wasn’t any getting away from it — but neither did she have to accept it.

  It was the way things were, here in Carnuntum.

  Still, nobody tried to take her or Julia by force, not now. There was a line, and the Roman legionaries did keep to the polite side of it. What they reckoned polite, however, would have turned Navy fliers at a Tailhook convention into outraged feminists. Nicole never was sure they would stay on the polite side, either. That one bastard had gone from friendly smile to criminal assault in a few dizzying seconds. Any of these other legionaries was capable of the same thing, with just as little warning.

  How would she ever be able to trust a man again? After what Frank had done to her, she hadn’t had much use for men. Now… In the long run, killing any hope for that trust might have been the cruelest thing the rape had inflicted on her.

  “They’re swine, a lot of them,” Julia agreed — Julia was always happy to agree about the shortcomings of men, of a good many of which she was likely to have more intimate knowledge than did Nicole. “They’re swine, sure as sure, but what can you do about it?”

  “There ought to be laws,” Nicole said. In her time, there would be. They wouldn’t be perfect. She’d had to come back here to discover that they would be pretty damned effective, all things considered.

  “Laws?” Julia tossed her head just as she did when she turned down a proposition from a horny soldier. “Fat lot of good laws would do. Laws are for the rich. Laws are for men. Who makes laws? Rich men, that’s who. You think they’ll ever make them to help anybody else? Not likely.”

  Nicole took a deep breath. She’d have liked, very much, to tell Julia of the change in attitude that would come when education spread widely among both men and women. But what was the use? How was education supposed to spread when every single book had to be laboriously copied out by hand? Just another machine, she would have thought if somebody at a party in Los Angeles had started going on and on about the printing press. In an age of desktop publishing and home copy machines and the Internet, it seemed antiquated, obsolete.

  But next to a reed pen, it was a stunning advance in technology. And with technology came advances in thinking. The more people had access to books, the fewer were ignorant, and the less superstition there could be. And women could start making laws, or finding ways to assure that laws were made.

  A better day was coming. In the time from which Nicole had chosen to flee, you could see its dawn on the horizon, bright enough to read a newspaper by. It was midnight here, darkest midnight. And there weren’t any newspapers to read, either. Nicole had never thought of USA Today as an instrument of liberation, but it was. In what it signified, in what it implied: a literate population that wanted, and expected, to be fed the news in bite-sized pieces.

  And she was eighteen hundred years away from it, and she couldn’t go home. She had no one to blame for it but herself. She’d wished herself into this. No one else could wish her out.

  The first tears caught her by surprise. Ever since she’d realized Carnuntum in the second century wasn’t what she thought it would be — wasn’t anything even close — she’d done her best to stay strong, to grit her teeth: even the one that had troubled her in this body, the one that had had to be pulled at such a cost in pain. She’d tried to roll with the punches, to keep from giving way to despair. Her best hadn’t been too bad, either. When she’d cried before, she’d always done it in the privacy of her bedchamber — her miserable, bare, stinking bedchamber.

  Now, as if at last a dam had broken, more and more tears followed those first two, and she couldn’t seem to stop them. What would Julia think, watching her employer, her former owner, go to pieces right in front of her?

  Julia, as far as Nicole could tell through tear-blurred vision, was astonished. “Mistress!” she said. “What on earth is the matter?”

  “Everything,” Nicole answered, which was true, comprehensive, and absolutely useless.

  Julia got up, came around the table, and laid a hand on Nicole’s shoulder. “Everybody feels that way now and again. You just have to get through the bad times and hope they’ll be better tomorrow.”

  Again, that was good, sensible advice. Nicole knew as much. But she was, for the moment, something less than sensible. “No, it won’t!” she cried. “It’ll be just the same as it is today.” She could conceive of no stronger condemnation of Carnuntum than that.

  “Well — “ Julia hesitated. “When things change, they usually get worse.”

  “How could they get worse?” Nicole demanded. “What could be worse than — this?” The sweep of her hand took it all in: stinking tavern, stinking city, stinking world.

  But Julia had a ready answer: “Things were just — the way they always had been, till last year. Then the pestilence came, and that was worse, and then the Marcomanni and Quadi, and that was worse yet, and then the legions drove them back across the river, and that was better for the city, yes, but it was worse for you, wasn’t it, on account of that one cursed soldier?”

  She had to stop there, to draw a breath. Nicole fired back before she could go on: “Yes, and how many other bastards like him are there in the army that we’ll never, ever hear about, either because the women they raped are too ashamed to come forward, or because the legionaries killed them after they were done screwing them?”

  “Bound to be some,” Julia agreed with chilling calm. “But that isn’t what you asked, is it, Mistress? You asked how things could be worse. I
told you.”

  Nicole shook her head so violently that the tears veered wide of their accustomed tracks. “That’s just how things have got worse already. Not how they could get worse than they already are.”

  Julia blinked, then stared, then started to laugh. For sure she was amused, and a little taken aback. Maybe she was trying to jolly Nicole out of her gloom. “No wonder Marcus Aurelius listened to you when you complained about that legionary. You can split hairs just like a lawyer.”

  But Nicole was not about to be jollied. “And a whole fat lot of good that does me, too,” she said.

  “It got you ten aurei,” Julia pointed out.

  “Getting raped got me ten aurei,” Nicole said with bitter, legalistic precision. “Believe me, I’d rather not have them. Besides,” she added even more bitterly, “who ever heard of a lady lawyer? Who ever heard of a lady anything in Carnuntum?”

  Julia sighed. “Well, Mistress, it doesn’t look as if anything I can say will cheer you up. Do you want a jar or two of wine? Would that help?”

  “No!” Nicole stamped her foot. If she’d been Kimberley, that sort of behavior would have earned her a time-out. If she’d been Lucius, it would have got her a whack on the fanny. Because she was an adult, she could do as she pleased — but nothing she could do here pleased her. There was nothing to do, except get drunk or get screwed. She wasn’t in the mood to invite a hangover. The other… her whole body tightened, and her stomach clenched. If she tried very hard, she could remember that last, tender night with Titus Calidius Severus. But no matter how hard she tried to cling to it, the Roman legionary’s hard hands and mocking voice ran over it and drowned it.

  Julia had given up on her. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Why don’t you do that, too? And hope — or pray to Liber and Libera, since you’ve become so fond of them — that you’ll feel better in the morning.” She turned away from Nicole and headed for the stairs. “Good night,” she said over her shoulder.

  That was as blunt, and as close to outright rude, as the freedwoman had ever dared be. It demonstrated rather forcibly how far Nicole had strayed from anything resembling decent manners.

  She didn’t care. She had perfectly good reason for being unreasonable. If Julia couldn’t see that, then too bad for Julia.

  As soon as Nicole had shaped the thought, she knew a stab — small but distinct — of guilt. Julia had been her best friend and ally in this whole ugly world. She didn’t deserve to be treated this way. “Then she should try harder to understand how I feel,” Nicole said to the air.

  Nicole knew she should go up after Julia, and if not apologize, then at least try to smooth things over. But Julia was long gone.

  Tomorrow would be soon enough. She’d wake again in Carnuntum as she always had. She’d do something to make it up to her freedwoman — something small but telling. She didn’t know what. She couldn’t, once she’d made herself think like a civilized adult, think much past the moment, or past the burden of this whole awful age.

  She sniffled loudly, and blew her nose on her fingers. No Kleenex, no handkerchief. She grimaced and wiped her fingers on the rammed-earth floor, which at least had the virtue of being newly swept. She rubbed her hand on her tunic. A smear of dirt stained the faded wool. She brushed ineffectually at it. It was a losing battle. Every bit of it was the same: futile and hopeless.

  She thrust herself to her feet, went over to the bar, opened the lid of one of the winejars and stared down into it. Plenty of wine in Carnuntum these days, with so many legionaries in town. The rich, fruity scent filled her nostrils. Even through the heaviness of tears, she grew a little dizzy with the fumes.

  When she first came to Carnuntum, the very smell of wine gave her the horrors. Now she saw in it only oblivion, and blessed numbness.

  And in the morning she’d wake up with a headache, and the world would still be too much with her, and what would she do after that? Drink another jar of wine? Her father had taken that road; she knew where it led. But now she understood why he’d done it. She even came close to forgiving — a thing she’d never imagined she’d do.

  She reached for the dipper. Instead of pouring the wine into a cup, she poured out a puddle in front of Liber and Libera. She let the last dribble of wine spill down the faces of the god and goddess — side by side, coequal, and maddeningly indifferent.

  If you don’t bet, you can’t win. Who had said that? She heard it in her father’s voice, a voice she’d spent most of her life trying to forget. Imagining things, she thought. And if she saw, or imagined she saw, a sparkle in Liber’s limestone eyes, and in Libera’s, surely it was but lamplight catching the wetness of the wine. There was no hope. There was no winning this game of gods and shifting time. The die, as the Romans liked to say, was cast. She couldn’t go back. What she did now in front of the votive plaque, she did by force of habit, nothing more.

  She dropped the dipper back in the winejar and covered it with the wooden lid. She blew out all the lamps but one, which she carried with her up the narrow rickety stairs.

  Julia was already snoring. She had a clear conscience, or else she had no conscience at all. Or maybe she was just dead-tired from having worked sunup to sundown.

  Nicole wasn’t much better off herself. She went on stumbling feet into the bedchamber, set the lamp on a stool by the bed, and closed the door behind her and barred it. It wouldn’t stop an intruder who really wanted in, but it would slow him down a little. That was as much as she could hope for in this world.

  She lay down on the hard, lumpy, uncomfortable bed and blew out the lamp. Her nightly prayer was worn thin with use, the same plea as always, word for ineffectual word. She should give up on it. But she was too stubborn.

  If you don’t bet. you can’t win. Was that her father’s voice? Or another? Or even… two others? Or was it nothing but her imagination? She’d prayed this prayer for so long, and been ignored so completely. The god and goddess couldn’t be turning toward her at last. Of course not. She was bound here forever, condemned to this primitive hell, for her great sin, the sin of hating the world she was born to.

  On the votive plaque, Libera’s limestone eyes turned to meet Liber’s. The goddess’ naked stone shoulders lifted in a shrug. The god’s hands rose in a gesture that meant much the same. If there had been anyone in the tavern, he would have heard a pair of small, exasperated sighs. Mortals, Libera’s shrug said. And Liber’s gesture agreed: Give them what they want, and watch them discover they never wanted it in the first place. They were really too busy in this age of the world, to trouble themselves with this refugee from that dull and sterile age still so far in the future. Why on earth was she so desperate to go back there? There, she’d merely existed. Here, she’d lived. She’d known love and pain, sickness and war, danger and excitement and all the other things that made life worth living. How could she abandon them for a world in which nothing ever really happened?

  Still, there was no doubt about it. She honestly wanted to go back. Now that Liber and Libera had turned their attention on this petitioner, every prayer she’d sent, every plea she’d raised, ran itself through their awareness. She’d been storming heaven, crying out to them to let her go.

  She hadn’t framed her prayers in the proper form. Some gods were particular about such things. But if Liber and Libera had been of that disposition, they would never have granted Nicole’s first petition. Neither were her offerings of precisely the right sort. Still, they were offerings, and sincerely meant. No divinity could fail to be aware of that.

  Once more the limestone gazes met. Liber’s expression was wry. Libera’s was exasperated. Well; if this foolish woman thinks she can change her mind yet again, she’ll just have to live with it.

  They nodded in complete agreement. For a moment, they basked in its glow, well and divinely content to have solved this niggling problem. A house spider, weaving its disorderly web on the ceiling above the plaque, froze for a moment at the brief flare of light. A moth started toward it
, but it faded too quickly. The moth fluttered off aimlessly, its tiny spark of awareness barely impinging on the god and goddess’ own. The tavern was dark again, and utterly still.

  When Nicole lay down, she had feared she’d never fall asleep. But once she was as comfortable in that bed as she could be, she spiraled irresistibly down into the deeps of sleep. Worry faded, hopelessness sank out of sight. Dreams rose up around her, strange and yet familiar. A stair going down, a stair going up, round and round and round and…

  21

  Nicole wound slowly back toward consciousness. She lay with her eyes closed. The mattress under her was hard and lumpy and uncomfortable. A sigh, her first willed breath of the morning, hissed out through her nostrils. Another day in Carnuntum. Another day to get through without too many disasters. Another day to pray with all her heart that she could somehow, someday, without dying first, get out of there.

  She rolled over. The mattress wasn’t any more comfortable on her side than on her back. It crinkled and rustled, shifting under her, jabbing into a rib. What the —?

  Her own mattress, such as it was, was stuffed with wool. It didn’t rustle when she rolled over on it. Was she sick again? Had Julia or someone moved her onto a straw pallet while she was delirious?

  She opened her eyes. She was looking out an open doorway into a hall.

  But she’d shut the bedroom door the night before, shut and barred it, as she always had, ever since she came to Carnuntum.

  The doorway was taller, wider. Its edges weren’t indifferently whitewashed wood. They were — painted metal? And that shimmer close to her eyes, so close she had to shorten focus, almost cross her eyes, to see it, was a railing, bright silver — aluminum.

  She was dreaming. She drew in another deep breath. And smelled — nothing. No city stink. No reek of shit and garbage and smoke and unwashed humanity. In their place was… not quite nothing, after all. A faint, tingling, half-unpleasant smell. Floor wax and — disinfectant? Yes.