Household Gods (21 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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“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 everybody-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.
No matter how she scratched, no matter how she picked through the kids' hair, she couldn't keep up. Long before sunset, she understood why Umma hadn't been able to keep the kids' heads even halfway clean. She went on anyhow, with the kids getting more and more fractious every time, till she had to light a lamp to see the nits; then even the lamp wasn't enough. The kids went up to bed in visible relief—there, they probably figured, they'd be safe from her pinching, prodding fingers.
She followed them not long after, tired to the bone. She thought seriously of stripping the bed—but there was still the mattress under the sheets. And the floor wasn't clean either. Nothing short of a house fire was going to get rid of every louse in the place.
She undressed and washed up as best she could, missing toothpaste the most—her teeth felt as if they were coated in flannel. She rubbed them, and tried not to think of lice. The bed waited for her, deceptively tidy, as she'd made it in her innocence, just this morning. How many newly hatched baby lice would crawl onto her, once she lay down?
She couldn't sleep propped up against the wall. For that
matter, she couldn't live if she went on like this. She'd been walking the edge of hysteria since Lucius found the louse in his hair. She had to stop. She had to stop now—or go straight screaming out of her mind.
Nicole hated nothing so much as a silly, screaming woman. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, two-inch roaches in the kitchen—no, she didn't like them, but she could handle them. She'd never known anything but contempt for women who couldn't handle the crawly things in life. What was a louse but another damned crawly thing?
But it was on her. It was laying eggs on her. It was—
“Enough,” she said, so harshly it made her throat ache. She took three deep breaths, each held a few seconds longer than the last. She made herself calm down. It wasn't completely effective—she was still shaking, and her stomach was tied in a raw and painful knot—but it held her steady enough to lie on the bed. She couldn't quite bring herself to pull the covers up over herself. She'd work up to that gradually. For now, just lie there. Just let the muscles relax one by one. Forget the worst blow this world had struck her. With everything else, untreated sickness, raw sewage in the street, rampant animal and child abuse, slavery—a few million lice were awesomely trivial.
“It's the small things that get you,” she mumbled. Sleep had seemed light-years away, but, once she was horizontal, it crept inexorably up on her. It wasn't just her body that was tired. Her mind was exhausted, wrung out and hung up to dry. Sleep was wonderful. Sleep was beautiful. Sleep would let her forget everything—even the myriad small live things that hatched and crawled and bred and died—but not soon enough—right on her body.
 
Wine the next morning at breakfast seemed oddly welcome, not a poison to be drunk in slight preference to a different poison. Did it make her feel a little easier about the likelihood—no, the certainty—she was walking around with six-legged company? Maybe. Did it make her want to scratch a
little less? Maybe. If it did, was that bad or good? For the life of her, Nicole didn't know.
She had two cups with her bread.
I'm thirsty,
she told herself. When she finished the bread and that second cup of—after all—well-watered wine, she declared, “I'm going to the baths. Aurelia, you're coming with me.” She sounded very loud and sure, even to herself.
“Oh, good!” Aurelia squealed with glee. No fights here, not like getting Kimberley into the tub. But this wasn't just getting into the tub. This was an outing, which made it special.
Nicole wanted her to come for two very good and useful reasons. First and foremost was the chance to scrub Aurelia's hair as well as she could, to get rid of as many lice and nits as possible. While she did that, she'd get an answer to a question that had occurred to her as soon as she remembered baths, ladies' day, and the kids' vermin: how would she go about taking care of that with Lucius? Could she bring a boy eight years old to the baths with her on a ladies' day? Maybe, but it didn't seem likely. She'd have to see if she spotted any boys his size there today. If she couldn't, could she ask Brigomarus, the brother she hadn't met? Or would Titus Calidius Severus let Lucius go with him when he went to the baths? Did he go to the baths? The way he smelled, it was hard to tell.
Second, and not the least important of matters, either, Aurelia knew the ropes at the baths and Nicole didn't. Nicole had learned how to run the tavern by watching Julia. Now she would learn how to take a Roman bath by watching … her daughter? She still didn't think of Aurelia that way. How long did parents who adopted need to start thinking of their new children as if they were actual, blood relations? Aurelia, now—Aurelia was a blood relative, had come from this body, this blood and bone, these genes.
But Aurelia was not Nicole's child in the spirit, where it mattered; not fully, not yet. Kimberley and Justin, who were … they were farther away than children had ever been from their mother; as far away as if she had died and not
gone spiraling down through time. She hoped they were all right. She prayed they were all right, prayed to the deaf God in whom she'd almost given up believing and whom the Romans mocked, and prayed also to Liber and Libera.
Let my children be all right.
They'd listened to her once. Why not again?
She took a couple of asses out of the cash box, then scooped out a random handful of coins. Maybe she'd shop a little on the way home, or buy Aurelia a treat, or maybe there would be extras at the baths over and above the price of admission. Julia didn't act surprised: Umma must have found some way to make those
dupondii
and
sesterces
disappear.
Poor Julia. She'd had to depend on the kindness of a customer or on Nicole's generosity—on her owner's generosity, a notion that still gave Nicole the cold grues—for even the small change that let her into the baths. She'd got a couple of
dupondii
while Nicole was out, but that wasn't much, not set against the copper and brass and silver in the cash box.
My owner gets to take as much money as she wants, whenever she wants.
That thought, or one like it, had to be echoing in Julia's mind. How did everyone who owned a slave escape being murdered in her bed? It was evil, that was all. Just purely evil.
“Come on,” Nicole said to Aurelia. “Let's go get clean.” That was cowardice, but she didn't care. As long as she was in the baths, she wouldn't have to look at Julia. She wouldn't be reminded of the injustice she was still perpetrating.
Aurelia knew the way to the baths. Nicole thought she could have found them again by herself—not finding them would have been like mislaying an elephant—but letting the little girl scamper ahead and then catching up every fifty yards or so worked very well. Aurelia paid no attention whatever to the anatomically correct statues. Nicole shouldn't have been surprised, not with men casually pissing in a jar right across the street from the tavern. Nonetheless, she was. It was all too different. She had to take it in a piece at a
time, and pray she could put it together before she made a fatal mistake.
As men had the day before, women trooped up the steps and into the baths. The only men now in evidence around that enormous place were half a dozen burly types in ragged tunics, each of them bent under a load of wood that looked almost as enormous as the baths.
Off to one side of them marched a self-important little man who was obviously their boss. His tunic was not only fairly new but dyed the rust brown of the one Nicole was coming to think of as her best dress. More important than that, however, the only wood he carried was a single, straight, peeled stick.
“Keep moving, you lazy bastards, keep moving!” he shouted. “Got to keep the fires fed, so we do, so we do. Ladies' day today. Ladies want their water nice and hot, that they do. Ladies want lots of nice steam, too. Ladies want hot air going through the hypocausts, yes indeed. Can't let their pretty little feet get cold, oh no.” What the workmen no doubt wanted was for the overbearing little twerp to shut up and let them do their job.
Suddenly, not ten feet from the little door they were approaching—Nicole looked for but didn't see an AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign—one of the workmen tripped and fell. The leather lashings of his bundle parted. Twigs and branches and hacked chunks of treetrunk spilled over the paving stones.
“You oaf! You cocksucking idiot! You dingleberry hanging off the ass of the city of Carnuntum!” The straw boss literally hopped with rage. Nicole had never seen anybody do that before. He kept right on cursing while he did it, too. Aurelia giggled. Nicole's hands flew up to cover the child's ears, but the fellow was yelling too loudly for that to do any good.
Slowly, the workman shook himself free of lumber and climbed to his feet. Both knees. and one elbow dripped blood on the cobbles. “I'm sorry,” he said in gutturally accented Latin. “I pick it up and—”
“Sorry!” the nasty little straw boss screamed. “Sorry? You think you're sorry now? I'll have 'em sell you to the mines. That'll make you sorry, by Jupiter's great hairy balls!”
The workman quailed. Nicole didn't fully understand the threat, but he did, and it terrified him. She did understand that he wasn't just a workman. He was a slave. He would have to be, to get stuck with a job like the one he had. His abject manner said so as loudly as the threat to sell him.
And the boss' stick wasn't only for show. He swept it whistling up over his head, then down, again and again, beating the workman as cruelly—and, worse, as casually—as that man whom Nicole had seen whipping his poor overburdened donkey the morning she came to Carnuntum.
And the slave let him. He stood there and took it with the air of a man who knew he'd get worse later if he tried to do anything about it now.

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