Household Gods (15 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Julia was gaping. So were all three of the remaining customers. Nicole sighed. So Umma and Calidius had been an item, had they? Why on earth the woman whose body Nicole was wearing would want a man who smelled like an outhouse was beyond her.
Whatever the reason for it, Julia obviously thought Umma and Titus Calidius Severus had had a good thing going. Well, to hell with what Julia thought. Nicole had come back here
for herself, not to play bedwarmer to the piss merchant across the street.
She would have told Julia so, in no uncertain terms, but two more men and a woman came into the place just then, and set her to running about again. She stayed busy till sundown, which came late this time of year.
As soon as it began to get dark, business didn't just fall off: it died. Nicole didn't fully understand that till she lighted a lamp. Matches she didn't have; she had to use a twist of straw from a basket by one of the cookfires, and light it from the fire. The oil-soaked wick sputtered and guttered before it came alive. The flame did next to nothing to push back the gathering gloom. Not for the first time, and very probably not for the last, she missed the daily magic of electric power.
The
taberna
was empty. So was the street. The children had come in not long before, devoured a supper of bread and cheese and a little of the smoked pork, and gone upstairs with Julia. They hadn't insisted that she kiss them, though they'd stood in a line, slave and children alike, and said a polite good night. Nicole hadn't tried to keep them downstairs, or tried to persuade them to eat a few vegetables with their bread and protein. She was too tired to fight that battle tonight. Tomorrow, she'd promised herself, on the children's behalf. Even as she thought it she'd been struck with a memory of older guilt: Justin and his chicken nuggets and french fries, eating a meal that couldn't possibly be good for him, because his mother was too tired to fix a proper dinner.
She missed him suddenly, so fiercely that for a moment she couldn't breathe. She missed Kimberley. She missed the house in West Hills. She even—
No. She didn't miss Frank. Not for one split second.
She took the lamp with her to the front door and stood in it, peering out. Good Lord, she thought: she hadn't set foot outside all day. She looked across the street, then up and down. A few torches and lamps flickered, but only a few. Above the flat black line of roofs, a piercingly bright star—
Venus?—hung in the western sky, at the edge of the skirts of twilight.
After work back in West Hills, she would have watched TV or read a magazine or put a CD on the stereo. No TV here, no magazines, no stereo or CDs.
Even if she'd had the energy for them, she'd have been too exhausted to bother. She pulled the solid weight of the door shut and barred it, then shuttered the windows. Picking up the feeble lamp again from where she'd set it on the table by the door, she retrieved the cash box and carried it upstairs. The stairs seemed steeper than ever in that bare hint of light, narrow and precipitous and ripe for a fall. But she managed them without even tripping, let alone breaking her neck.
The curtains were drawn in the other rooms. She ventured to look in. Two were empty, though one had a bed in it. The third was full of the sound of quiet breathing. Something large lay across the door. The rasp of a snore sent Nicole starting back, even as she realized what it was. Julia, sleeping on the floor, being a living obstacle to anything that tried to come in and get at the children. It was touching, in its way, though Nicole made a mental note to give Julia permission to sleep in one of the unused rooms. Whatever those were for. Guests? Storage? In the morning, or whenever she could, she'd have to look and see.
But not tonight. She was swaying on her feet. If Julia hadn't been in the way, she might have gone in and tucked the children in as she would have done with Justin or Kimberley, but she wasn't at all sure she could do it without waking the slave. Best to let them be.
In the room that she'd begun to think of as hers, she set the lamp on the chest and the cash box beside it. She had no energy at all for wrestling the heavy chest and hiding the box. What could happen to it, after all? The door was locked below, and she'd barred the door up here. She used the chamber pot—a luxury she'd had too little of in that long full day—and let herself sink down on the bed. Before she could even rise to blow out the lamp, she was deeply and soundly asleep.
 
 
N
ICOLE WOKE EARLIER THAN she'd intended. The lamp had gone out. It was pitch-black outside, though the moon had climbed over the roof of the house, the shop, whatever it was, next door and sent a thin strip of wan gray light through the bedroom window. She hadn't bothered to shutter it: this was the second floor; what could get in?
She noticed the light only peripherally, in that it helped her find the chamber pot. The one advantage of having the damned thing right there under the bed was that she didn't need to race down the hall to the bathroom. That was as well, for she didn't think she would have made it. The next couple of minutes were among the most urgently unpleasant she'd known for as long as she could remember.
“Stomach flu!” she groaned when the worst of it was over. What awful luck!
It was even more awful than she'd thought at first. There wasn't any toilet paper. She used one of the rags from the drawer in the chest, and threw it into the chamber pot afterwards. And regretted instantly and powerfully that it wasn't a toilet after all. A toilet you could flush. A pot just sat there, stinking. She lay back down with another groan. Even without the stink, she didn't think she'd have gone back to sleep again in a hurry. She could tell she wasn't done yet. A herd of buffalo with iron hooves was stampeding through her guts.
Just as she finished the second bout—almost as bad as the first, and no promise more wasn't coming—somebody knocked on her door. “What is it?” she said weakly, amazed she'd remembered to use Latin. If it wasn't the end of the world, she had no intention of getting up for it.
It was worse than the end of the world. “Mistress,” Julia said through the door, “Aurelia is puking something fierce,
and Lucius has the trots.” She sounded as if she was afraid she'd be killed for bringing the bad news.
Who knew? Maybe in Carnuntum, a slave would be. “I'm coming,” Nicole groaned. She got out of bed and stood swaying. These were, in effect, her kids. If her guess was right, they really were her relatives. They were her responsibility, that was certain.
Single mother then,
she thought in weary disgust.
Single mother now.
She hadn't figured on that when she came back to Carnuntum.
She unbarred the door. Julia was standing in the hallway holding a wan and flickering lamp. She looked like a ghost with her sleep-disheveled hair and her pale face.
Her voice was real enough, shakily stern—almost smug. It reeked of
I told you so.
“Mistress, it really wasn't very wise of you to give them water to drink all day. You know perfectly well—” She paused to inhale, which must have given her a good whiff of the chamber pot. “Oh, dear, Mistress—you' ve got it, too!”
“Yes, I've got it, too,” Nicole said. “Happy day.” A piece of limerick ran through her head:
Her rumblings abdominal were simply phenomenal.
And wasn't that the sad and sorry truth? Any minute now, dogs would start barking at the noises her insides were making.
But that had nothing to do with anything. She was on mommy duty now. “Come on,” she said as brusquely as her queasy innards would allow. “Take me to the kids.”
As they walked down the hall, Julia picked up where she'd left off. “Drinking water all the time isn't healthy,” she insisted. “I did try to tell you, but you didn't want to hear, Mistress, even though everybody knows it.”
A lot of what everybody knows was nonsense. That had been so in Los Angeles, and was bound to be so in Carnuntum. Still, Nicole thought, what if the water really was bad, the way it was in Mexico? She hadn't had any trouble drinking it in Petronell or Vienna on her honeymoon.
Her mouth twisted. That was the twentieth century, not the second. Evidently chlorine had something going for it after all.
But wine? Her frown deepened. People here drank like fish. If they weren't alcoholics, it wasn't from lack of trying.
There was no way she was taking that route herself. She'd watched her father crawl into a bottle and pull the stopper in after him. She'd never touched a drop of alcohol, and she was damned if she was going to start now.
Her belly tied itself in a knot and yanked hard. She gasped and doubled up. God! She hadn't felt this bad since she went into labor with Justin. Whatever this was, it was nasty.
This time, it let her go. She straightened and made it the rest of the way down the hall, where Julia was waiting beside one of the curtained doorways. Her nose told her it was the right place. It smelled even worse in there than in her bedroom: between the two of them, Lucius and Aurelia had been sick from both ends.
Nicole took the lamp from Julia. Its flame was low. “Go fetch another one,” she said. “This one's almost out of oil.”
Julia didn't seem to mind the errand. The air would be fresher where she'd been sent, that was certain. “Yes, Mistress,” she said with suspicious good cheer.
As Nicole listened to her thump her way downstairs, it struck her that she hadn't even bothered to say please. She'd treated Julia like a … like a slave again.
No time to waste in feeling guilty. Both children were groaning, a sound she knew too well. At the same time, the lamp guttered and went out. There was no moonlight on this side of the house, no way to see anything. She tracked the kids by their moans and their heavy breathing, and a little catch that must have been a sob. She barked a shin against the hard side of a bed, swallowed a curse—damn, that hurt!—and bent to feel for a forehead. She found one, and another next to it. Hot. Hers was probably hot, too, not that she had time to care. Kids first.
The lamp Julia brought was marginally brighter than the one Nicole had left by the door after it burned out. It still shed about as much light as a nightlight back in West Hills.
Julia set it down on a stool and stepped back against the wall and waited.
That was what guards did in Frank's pet old movies. The gesture must mean the same here as there. It was Nicole's show. She looked around a little desperately. So now what?
In West Hills, she had known what to do. Here—Here, her own toothache, which hadn't gone away, which as far as she could tell would never go away, had already taught her Latin didn't have a word for Tylenol. It didn't have a word for aspirin, either. By unpleasant but perfect logic, no word meant no thing.
Back in West Hills, she wouldn't have thought of giving aspirin to kids with fever anyhow, because of the small but real risk of Reye's syndrome. Back in West Hills, she'd had other, better choices. Her mother, who hadn't, and who hadn't known about Reye's syndrome, either, had given Nicole aspirin plenty of times. Nothing bad had happened. Nicole would have given it to Lucius and Aurelia—and taken some herself—without a qualm, if only she'd had any.
Julia stirred, probably deciding Nicole wasn't thinking straight because she was sick. “Shall I get the willow-bark decoction, Mistress?” she asked.
Oh, joy,
Nicole thought.
A folk remedy.
In West Hills, she'd have laughed it off. In Carnuntum, without any other useful choice, she grasped at it almost eagerly. It might not do any good, but it might not hurt, either. Folk remedies weren't supposed to kill, were they?
Julia was waiting for her to say something. “Yes,” she said more impatiently than she'd meant. “Yes, go on, go get it—please,” she added a bit belatedly.
Julia seemed almost relieved to be snapped at, though the politeness of the last word made her eyes roll briefly before she darted back down the stairs.
The children might be sick, but they weren't too sick to make a whole range of revolted noises. “Willow bark!” said Lucius, who seemed the livelier of the two. “Ick! Ick ick ick!”
“Be quiet,” Nicole said to him. No, snapped at him. She was too blasted sick herself to be nice about it. Somewhat
to her surprise, he shut up, though he kept making horrible faces.
Julia came back none too soon with a bottle and a tiny cup. The stuff she poured out looked horrid and smelled worse, but Nicole held her nose and gulped it down regardless. Its taste was even worse than its smell—gaggingly, throat-wrenchingly bitter.
The kids were staring at her as if she'd done something ridiculously brave. Taking medicine, it seemed, was no more popular in Carnuntum than it had been in California. That might have been funny, had she felt less like dying.
She'd expected the stuff to be nasty. It was. It was also familiar, which she hadn't expected. When she'd had a sore throat, her mother had made her gargle with a couple of aspirins dissolved in warm water. God, she'd hated that! This taste wasn't far from it.
Nicole made the kids take the decoction anyway. If it tasted like aspirin, maybe it had something like aspirin in it. Hadn't she heard or read somewhere that aspirin came from some folk remedy or other? Maybe it came from this one.
“Julia, you're feeling all right,” Nicole said tiredly, “and I'm not.” Even in the dim lamplight, she saw how smug Julia looked. She lacked the energy to call her on it. “Would you take care of the chamber pots in here and in my room, please?”
“Yes, Mistress,” Julia said. Her method of taking care of a pot was to pick it up, carry it to the window, and dump it out on the ground below. She went back to Nicole's bedroom and did the same thing with the one in there, or so the second wet splat declared.
The words were shocked right out of Nicole's head. If there'd been any to be found, they would have come out in a shriek. No toilets was one thing. No sewers—but Rome had sewers! She'd seen a documentary. Where were Carnuntum's sewers? Didn't these people know anything about sanitation?
No wonder flies buzzed in through her window. And no
wonder at all that Carnuntum smelled the way it did—and the water wasn't fit to drink.
The willow-bark decoction made her feel better—not a lot better, but some. And the kids' foreheads were cooler. They'd stopped groaning and subsided into a fretful doze. She hugged them and, after a little hesitation, kissed them. They didn't object. She felt strange: half like a babysitter, taking care of children not her own; half like a mother. If these had really been her own—
She didn't know any Latin lullabies. On sudden inspiration, and because she couldn't think of anything else, she hummed “Rockabye Baby.” Even without the English words, maybe the tune would do the trick. Apparently it did. First Aurelia's breathing, then Lucius', slowed and deepened into the cadence of sleep.
“That's a nice song, Mistress,” Julia whispered as they tiptoed out of the children's room. “Has it got words?”
“If it does, I don't know them,” Nicole answered, with a small stab of guilt at the lie—or maybe it was her gut clenching again. “I'm going to go back to sleep now myself, or try. If I do, you'll be on your own for a while in the morning. I hope you can—”
“I understand,” Julia said. “I've managed before. Rest if you can, Mistress.”
Lumpy mattress. Scratchy blanket. Leftover stink from the dregs in the pot. Nicole didn't care. Her belly wasn't churning so hard. Next to that, nothing else counted. She yawned, stretched, wiggled … slept.
 
When Nicole woke up, daylight was streaming in through the window. She still didn't feel good, not even close, but, after she used the chamber pot a little less explosively than she had in the nighttime, the buffaloes decided to end their stampede through her insides and head off somewhere to graze.
There was nowhere to dump the chamber pot except out the window. “Sewers,” she muttered. “This town needs sewers.”
She gritted her teeth and dumped the pot as Julia had the night before.
She dressed quickly in a fresh loincloth and tunic, and looked at herself in the mirror in the makeup kit. She looked like a chimney sweep. Most of the smoke that hadn't gone through the hole in the roof the day before had clung to her.
She washed her face with water from the
terra sigillata
pitcher, careful now not to get any water in her mouth, the way she would have been in a shower south of the border.
The water was bad, no arguing with that—or with the reek that lingered around the emptied chamber pot. So what was she supposed to drink? Wine? She could water it, she supposed—wouldn't the alcohol kill germs as easily as it slaughtered brain cells? She'd get a lower dose then, too. Maybe she could work out a formula as to how little wine she could get away with before the water went toxic.
She still didn't like it. She liked even less that the kids had to drink the stuff in any proportion. Maybe she could talk them into drinking milk after all, and never mind the Marcomanni and the Quadi, whoever they were.
She studied her newly washed face in the mirror. Not a chimney sweep, not anymore. Now she just looked like hell. “That,” she said to nobody in particular, “is why God made makeup.”

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