Household Gods (11 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Not caring for an instant what the other woman might think, she hurried over to it and lifted the wooden lids she'd ignored before. Under each of them rested an amphora with a bronze dipper. The strong alcoholic smell of wine floated up to her nose.
Umma wasn't running a restaurant. She was running a tavern. Nicole startled herself with the intensity of her revulsion and anger. How many men of Carnuntum would stagger home drunk to abuse their spouses and children because of this place? Any one of them could have been her
father: face red with drink and rage, mouth open wide as he bellowed at his wife, hand swinging up to hit whatever, or whomever, got in its way.
“I will not,” she said tightly, “sell—this—”
The employee didn't understand. “Mistress, most of it's not Falernian, but it's all the best we can get for the price. Why, you said—”
Nicole cut her off. She had to understand. It was very, very important that she understand. “I will not sell wine.”
Her expression must have been alarming. The young woman started to babble again. “Mistress, are you ill? Have you lost your senses? You know we have to sell wine. If you don't, nobody will come here. We'll all go hungry.”
“I could serve—” Nicole started to say
coffee,
only to discover that the Latin she'd acquired had no word for it. She used the English instead.
“Coffee?” The young woman's accent did strange things to the vowels. “I don't know what that is, Mistress. Where would you get it? How would you serve it?”
Nicole started to answer, but stopped. Blue Mountain coffee came from Jamaica, Kalossi Celebes from Indonesia, Kona from Hawaii, good old unexciting Yuban from Colombia. She didn't know much about Roman history, but she was pretty sure those weren't places the Romans had ever heard of.
Her employee seemed absolutely convinced she couldn't make a go of a restaurant that didn't serve wine. Nicole had no way of knowing whether she was right, not on her first morning in Carnuntum.
This was the only guide she had, the only hope of getting through without being labeled insane or worse. She'd seen it in movies, how the alien landed on earth with a head full of data but missing a few of the most important. He was always found out, and then he had to suffer. Did the Romans have police? Government agencies? Whatever they'd call the CIA?
She had to fit in, at least at first. She had to act normal, or people would ask too many questions, questions she
couldn't answer. “Very well,” she said grudgingly. “We'll keep on serving wine. For now. But,” she went on, and that was firm, “I will drink water.”
The servant sighed deeply, the kind of sigh that said,
You may be crazy, but you're still the boss.
“Yes, Mistress,” she said, meekly enough, and poured her a cup from a pitcher on the bar.
Because the cup was earthenware and not glass, Nicole couldn't admire its crystal clarity as she would have liked. But when she sipped, she let out a sigh of pleasure. Now this was water, water as it ought to taste. What came out of the tap in Los Angeles was as full of chlorine as a swimming pool, and full of God only knew what all other chemicals. None of those pollutants here—just good, pure H
2
O.
“See?” Nicole set down the empty cup. “This is what's good for you.”
“Yes, Mistress.” The young woman sounded even more resigned, and even more dubious, than she had before.
A clatter from upstairs distracted them both from what might have been an uncomfortable pause. The servant smiled. “Here come the children, Mistress. They were sleepy today, weren't they?”
“Weren't they?” Nicole echoed. Her employee, fortunately, didn't seem to notice how hollow her voice sounded. How in the world was she going to convince—how many?—children she'd never seen before that she was their mother? She had no idea what to do or say—no time to think, either, before they were on her.
 
 
I
T WENT, THANK GOD, better than she'd dared hope. It still wasn't easy, not for her, but the kids, like the servant, seemed prepared to take her on faith. Why not? She looked
like their mother. She sounded like their mother. Who else could she be?
By now she took in data as automatically, and almost as effortlessly, as she had when she was studying for the bar exam. As she had then, she shut out emotions that wouldn't immediately serve her purposes, simply recorded them and filed them away to deal with later.
She had—Umma had—two children: a son named Lucius, who looked about eight years old, and a daughter called Aurelia, a couple of years younger. Aurelia reminded Nicole of Kimberley. It wasn't just that they were near enough the same age, and it certainly wasn't that they looked alike—Aurelia, naturally enough, looked like a smaller version of Umma. But the way she carried herself, the turn of her head when she looked at her mother, the prim little purse of her mouth, were all strikingly like Kimberley.
It struck Nicole rather strongly, if belatedly, that Umma might be one of her ancestors. The dream she'd had, the double spiral ladder of DNA, could have been the way she'd traveled here. Almost all of her great-grandparents had come to the United States from Austria. Carnuntum was—had been—would be—in Austria. Suppose their several-dozen-times-great-grandparents had come from here, from this town?
What a chain of coincidences if it was true: that she should have honeymooned in Carnuntum, that she'd found the votive plaque, that it had become the constant occupant of her nightstand, even long after it stopped being a symbol of her marriage to Frank Perrin. And after that marriage had gone sour beyond all repair, when her job imploded on her and her whole life was falling apart, a prayer expressed as a wish had done the impossible, had brought her down through the long chain of genes into this one of all her myriad ancestors.
Another thought trod on the heels of the first. If Umma was her ancestor, then so was either Lucius or Aurelia—or, for that matter, so were both of them. She swallowed a sudden, nearly hysterical giggle. They were children, half her size. Hard to imagine that they'd grow up, have children of
their own, and those would have children, and …
Right now, at this moment in the long skein of time, they were children, as real and unmistakable as Justin or Kimberley. They tore into breakfast as if, if they ate it fast enough, they'd grow into adulthood between the first bite and the last. She kept her mouth shut when they soaked their bread in olive oil and ate it greasy and dripping. They were growing children. They could get away with it.
At least, she thought, they aren't swilling down cholesterol with the fat. Did people in the Roman Empire even know what cholesterol was?
The children's table manners could have been better, but she kept quiet about those, too. For now. Lucius wolfed down every crumb of his bread, licked lips glistening with oil, and snapped to the young woman, “Julia! More bread.”
“Yes, young sir,” Julia said, and dropped her own breakfast to rise and do as he ordered. She smiled a trifle sadly at Nicole. “Doesn't he sound just like his father, Mistress? He tries so hard to be a little man—so good of him, and so well done, with your poor husband gone among the shades so young. We've need of a man about the house.”
Nicole reined in her first response, which was to demand to know what was so good about a man underfoot. So she was a widow, was she? Well, good for the late Mr. Umma, whatever his name had been. At least he'd had the courtesy to die instead of running off with the cute young thing next door.
Lucius snatched the bread that Julia brought him and sopped it in oil, without so much as a word or a glance. Nicole frowned. Table manners were one thing. Courtesy was another altogether. “Lucius,” she said sternly, “that was impolite. I didn't hear you say ‘please' to Julia. And what should you have said when she brought you your bread?”
Lucius looked at her as if she'd gone off her head. “What should I have said, Mother?”
He didn't sound as if he was sassing her, though the words could hardly mean anything else. Nicole took a deep breath
and counted to five before she answered. “What about thank you'?”
Lucius' straight black brows went up. “‘Thank you'? To a slave?”
Nicole's mouth was open. She shut it. She looked at Julia in a dawning horror. She couldn't be a slave. Slaves were something out of—
Something out of old dead history. This was old dead history. This, right now, this world she was living in.
Julia didn't even blink at what Lucius had called her, or at his tone. She sat back down in her place—a little apart from the others, Nicole saw as if for the first time, and on a lower stool, so that her head was a little below theirs. She kept it bowed even lower as she tucked into her own bread and oil and, with a sort of cautious defiance in the glance she shot at Nicole, her wine.
When Nicole thought of slavery, she thought of African-Americans and cotton fields and the Civil War. She vaguely recalled a movie or two about Rome, and something about slaves. Slave revolts? Chariot races? Charlton Heston? Frank would have known, damn him. Frank had a thing for Fifties movie epics. She'd ignored them when he had them on, except to notice that there was a lot of noise and bare skin, and costumes that made her think of a slow night in a Vegas casino. She'd forgotten all that when she prayed to come back to Roman days. She'd never imagined that she'd come back as a slaveowner. No late-twentieth-century minds thought like that.
Neither did they think of traveling back in time at all, not seriously. Not unless they were heavily into fantasy and gaming and all the rest of that unreal nonsense.
This was real enough. So was Julia, sitting there drinking the last of her wine with a little too clearly evident enjoyment.
While Nicole sat speechless, Aurelia held out her cup to Julia and said, “Get me some more wine.” Her eyes flicked to Nicole. She added, “Please.” Her smug little smile was the image of Kimberley's.
Look how good I'm being,
it proclaimed
to the world,
and look what a nasty brat my brother is.
Nicole had always detested that smugness in Kimberley. It didn't look any better in Aurelia, or do her any more good, either. Nicole snatched the cup from her hand before Julia could take it. She raised it to her nose and sniffed. The odor was unmistakable. “You are giving the children wine?” Her voice was quiet, dangerously so.
Julia understood her. “Yes, Mistress,” she said, as quietly, but without the deadly edge. There was a suggestion of great patience and of indulging a preposterous fancy, but it was too faint to do more than bristle at. “Of course I am, Mistress. I watered the wine half and half, just as I always do. I'd never give it to them neat. You know that, Mistress.”
Nicole didn't care what excuses she made, nor listen to her beyond that first, damning yes. “You gave them wine,” she said again, incredulous. “What are you trying to do, turn them into—” She groped in her new Latin vocabulary, hunting for the word that was so clear in English: alcoholics. There wasn't any such word. The best she could wasn't quite good enough: “Are you trying to turn them into drunkards?”
“I said,” Julia said with an air of shaky determination, “I watered it exactly as I should, as I was supposed to—as you, Mistress, always told me to—till now.”
She thought she'd done right, Nicole realized. She was so sure of it that she'd even held her ground against her—her owner. Nicole shuddered. Julia, oblivious, went on, “Mistress, by all the gods I don't know why you've taken so against wine today. Are you feeling well? Are you ill? Should I fetch you some poppy juice?”
Poppy juice? Opium?
One can of worms at a time,
Nicole thought. “I am not ill,” she said with taut-strung patience. “And you are not to give my children wine for breakfast.”
“Then,” said Julia, still defiant, “what am I supposed to give them?”
“Milk, of course,” Nicole answered sharply. Didn't she know that? Didn't anybody?
Apparently not. “Milk?” the children and Julia said in chorus,
all three; and in the same shocked tone, too. Lucius and Aurelia hacked and gagged and made disgusted faces. You'd have thought she'd just tried to feed them a plate of lima beans.
“Milk?” Aurelia repeated. “It's slimy!”
“It tastes horrible,” Lucius said. They looked at each other and nodded in perfect, and horrified, agreement. Nicole didn't think they agreed like that very often.
“It's expensive,” Julia said, making it sound like a clincher. “And besides, Mistress, you can't keep it fresh. It's even worse than fish. You waste what you don't use, because it's sure to be sour the next day, especially this time of year. Please pardon me for telling you, but really, Mistress, what in the world makes you want to feed them milk?”
“Because it's full of—” Nicole found she couldn't say
calcium
in Latin, either, even though it sounded like a Latin word to her. This time, her circumlocution was clumsy: “It helps make bones strong.”
“Barbarians drink milk,” Lucius said, as if that settled everything. “The Marcomanni and the Quadi drink milk.” He stuck out his tongue. Not to be outdone, Aurelia stuck out hers, too.
Some arguments you just couldn't win. This looked like one of them. Religion, politics, divorce—on some things, people's minds locked themselves shut and lost the key. If she tried to force it, she'd get into a fight; and that wouldn't gain her anything.
Sidestep, then. “If you won't drink milk, will you drink water?” she asked. The children didn't look happy, but they didn't screw up their faces and make puking noises, either. Neither did Julia, though her expression was eloquent. Nicole threw an argument at the kids to bolster her case: “I drank water this morning, and it hasn't hurt me.”
“You did?” Lucius sounded as if she'd just told him—well, as if she'd told him that she'd traveled in time from the twentieth century and she wasn't his mother at all.
What joy,
she thought.
A whole family of alcoholics in training, from the baby on up
—
and their mother is in business
selling wine.
She'd fix that, maybe not all in a day considering how Julia and the children had reacted to her suggestion that wine maybe wasn't the best thing for a human to drink, but by Liber and Libera she would show them how a healthy person ought to live. “I certainly did drink water this morning,” she said to Lucius. “Ask Julia if you don't believe me. She watched me do it. She even fetched the pitcher and poured me a cup.”
Lucius laughed. It was a distinctly and viscerally unpleasant sound, a Beavis-and-Butthead snigger. “Huh! That's funny, Mother. You can't believe a slave about anything. Only way they can testify is if you torture them.” He made a horrible face at Julia, a twisted devil-snarl, and jabbed his finger at her, with indescribable boy-type sound effects: hissing and bubbling and an abrupt, blood-curdling shriek.
He was making it up. He had to be. But Julia's white face and the sudden change in her silence, the way her shoulders went tight and hunched under her sad bag of a tunic, ate away at Nicole's disbelief.
She'd never taken legal history. It hadn't been required, and she hadn't been interested, and she hadn't had time even if she had been interested. Now, with piercing intensity, she wished that she had.
Legal history she might have missed, but she'd been a parent long enough to know how to shut down a thread of discussion that was going in a dangerous direction. Briskly, she said, “We're not talking about court right now, young man. Are you saying Julia and I would both lie to you about what I drank?”
Lucius shrank suddenly, startling her: flinched into himself, as if he'd expected a slap. “No, Mother,” he said. “I'll drink water after this, Mother. I promise I will.”
God, what had he expected? That she'd clobber him, just because he'd been obnoxious? What kind of mother had this Umma been? Not just alcoholism—abuse. Her stomach, even as full of breakfast as it was, felt small and tight and cold.
It knotted even tighter when Aurelia hastened to agree
with her brother. “I'll drink water, too,” she said. “I'll drink it right now. Julia, get me some water!”
Julia glanced at Nicole. Nicole nodded sharply. Julia sighed just audibly, poured Aurelia's wine into her own cup, and filled Aurelia's again with water.
Nicole's triumph, such as it was, was evaporating fast. Julia had just manipulated herself into a double ration of wine. Umma's children were flat-out terrified, and their fear had given Nicole the victory. What kind of mother raised her children to be afraid of her?
Not any kind of mother I am,
Nicole resolved grimly. And Julia—tricky bits aside, Julia obeyed her mistress, oh, sure. But she did it with slow sullenness, neither too slow nor too sullen to be caught and punished, but just enough to make her feelings clear.

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