Household Gods (28 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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“Yes, that's right,” Nicole said, and then, with trained caution, “Remind me of the differences between formal and informal manumission.”
The clerk smiled. It was not at all a pleasant smile. It was, in fact, more of a leer. “Well,” he said. “Of course. One can't expect a woman to know how the law works, now, can one?” It took all of Nicole's years of legal training and dealing with good-ole-boy judges and sleazy lawyers to keep from braining him with his own bronze inkpot. He went on in blind complacency, reciting as if by rote, in just about the same tone she would have used for explaining torts to a four-year-old: “Formal manumission is more complicated, of course, and grants a slave higher status. It makes her free, and it makes her a Roman citizen. She'd still be your client, of course, and you, or rather your guardian, her patron. She won't be able to hold office”—he smiled that nasty smile again, as if to show how unlikely that was in any case—“but her freeborn children, if she should have any, will be.”
Julia nodded as if she'd known that all along. Her expression
was eager, but there was wariness underneath, like a dog that accepts a bone but looks for a kick to follow.
Nicole made herself ignore Julia and concentrate on what the clerk was saying. “And informal manumission?” she asked.
“As I said,” the clerk replied with a little sniff of scorn, “for that you needn't have come here. She'd be free then, but not a Roman citizen. Junian Latin rights, we call it.” And anyone but an idiot or a woman, his expression said, would know as much. “When she dies, whatever property she's acquired while she's free reverts back to you.”
That didn't seem like much of a choice to Nicole. “We'll do it the formal way,” she said.
“The other difference,” the clerk said, “is the twenty-
denarius
tax for formal manumission: five percent of her approximate value.”
Nicole winced. “That's a lot of money.”
“One gets what one pays for,” the clerk said: a bureaucrat indeed, and no mistake. “For your twenty
denarii
you receive full and proper documentation.” He paused. His eyebrows rose slightly. “I gather you haven't brought the proper fee?”
Nicole had an all but irresistible urge to ask if he took MasterCard or Visa. “No, I haven't,” she said a little testily. No credit cards here, either—not even a bank, that she'd seen or heard of. And what would people write checks on? The walls?
Meanwhile, there was the issue of the fee, and the fact that twenty
denarii
would lighten the cash box by a significant degree. So Julia was worth about four hundred
denarii
. That was a lot of money. No wonder Julia hadn't thought she could save it on her own—and no wonder Brigomarus had been so upset. Nicole was, in effect, giving away the family Mercedes.
The clerk was no kinder and certainly no pleasanter, but he seemed—for whatever reason—to have decided against the usual bureaucratic obstructionism. “Well then,” he said. “You can get the money, I suppose.”
Nicole nodded. She had practice in looking sincere—it
was a lawyer's stock in trade—but she wasn't lying, either.
The clerk seemed to know it, or else it was the one hour a day when he cut his victims an inch of slack. “Very well. I'll draw up the documents. You go, collect the money, and come back with your guardian.”
“My guardian?” Nicole said. That was the second time he'd used the term. So what was she, a minor child? Or did the word have another meaning?
“That would be your husband, of course,” the clerk said, unsurprised by what had to look to him like female imbecility, “but your husband is dead. Let me see.” The clerk frowned into space, mentally reviewing family connections he knew better than Nicole did. “He was his own man, not in anyone's
patria potestas,
which means that you no longer come under the legal authority of any male in his family. Which returns responsibility to your own, birth family. Father's dead. Brothers—you have a brother, yes? Britomartis—Brigomarus. We'll need his signature, or failing this his witnessed mark, before the documents are legal and binding.”
“Why?” Nicole demanded. “I can sign for myself.”
The clerk laughed, a strikingly rich and full sound to have come from so pinched and small a mouth. “Why, Madam Umma, of course you can! You can write your name wherever you like, if you can write it at all. But if this transaction is to be legal, it must have a man's name attached to it.”
“What?” Nicole veered between fury and horror. First, to have to ask Brigomarus to agree to Julia's manumission, after what he'd said and implied when Nicole informed him of it—fat chance. And second, and worse, her own approval wasn't enough—because she was a woman, she had no right or power to sign a legally binding contract. That—by God, that was positively medieval.
But this wasn't even the Middle Ages yet, she didn't think. It was a long and apparently unenlightened time before that.
And there was Julia, shocked out of her awe at the place and the proceedings, blurting out with a rather remarkable
lack of circumspection, “Didn't you know that, Mistress? Brigomarus knows it, I'm sure he does.”
“To the crows with Brigomarus,” Nicole snarled. “It's outrageous. It's unjust, it's immoral, it's unequal, it's unfair, it's absurd, it's impossible.” Her voice had risen with every word. In fact, she was shouting. People were staring. She didn't care. Was she any less a human being because she couldn't piss in one of Calidius Severus' amphorae?
The clerk was signally unimpressed by her vocabulary or her volume. “It's the law,” he said primly.
“To the crows with the law, too,” Nicole snapped. Now there was a hell of a thing for a lawyer to say. And she didn't care. She didn't care one little bit. She got a grip on Julia's arm, swiveled her about, and stalked off in high indignation.
 
 
M
istress!” JULIA CALLED FROM the street just outside the tavern, where she'd gone to peer at something or other outside.”Look at the sunset. Isn't it beautiful? The sky is turning all those clouds to fire. I'll bet you an
as
it will rain tomorrow.”
Nicole didn't gamble, but she didn't say so. Julia seemed unperturbed by the setback to her manumission. In fact, as they'd walked home, Nicole slamming her feet down furiously with every stride, Julia trotting along behind her, Julia had said, “Ah well. Isn't that just like fate?”
Julia the slave might be a fatalist, but Nicole was damned if she'd sit around blathering about kismet or whatever else you wanted to call it. The idea that a man's signature was required to make a document valid told her loud and clear where women stood in Carnuntum—and, no doubt, in the rest of the Roman Empire. In Los Angeles, at least the letter of the law had been on her side. There, hypocrisy had got
her so frothing mad she'd wished herself centuries back in time to get away from it. Well—she'd succeeded. No hypocrisy here, oh no. Just pure naked oppression.
“Rain would be nice,” Julia was saying. “I heard the farmers saying in the market yesterday that it's been too dry for too long—the crops are suffering. Much more drought and we'd be in trouble. You know what they say:
dry summer, winter famine
. Rain now would mean we eat well come winter.”
“I hope it's a cursed flood,” Nicole said sullenly.
Julia pulled out the neckline of her tunic and spat down onto her bosom. Nicole stared at her. “What on earth did you do that for?”
“To turn aside the evil omen, of course,” the slave—still a slave—answered. “Drought's bad, but floods are really and right-there bad.”
Spitting in your bosom was, Nicole supposed, like knocking on wood or crossing your fingers for luck. But in the twentieth century, most people who knocked on wood didn't really believe it would do any good..Julia sounded as serious about averting the omen as Nicole's grandmother had been when she made the sign of the cross.
Not a fair comparison
, Nicole thought.
Grandma was doing something religious. This is just superstition
.
So?
said the lawyerly part of her mind.
Would you be so kind as to define the difference?
Well: religion got higher ratings than superstition. But that, she admitted to both sides of herself, was a less than useful distinction.
She'd had two cups of wine with her supper. They combined with the undercurrent of burning outrage to make her discontented with the idea of trudging upstairs and falling asleep. She'd done that every night since she'd come to Carnuntum, and it looked to be what everybody did every night, without variation and without exception.
“Julia,” she said suddenly, “I want some fun tonight.”
“Why are you telling me, Mistress?” Julia asked. “Go
across the street.” She pointed toward the shop and house of Titus Calidius Severus.
Nicole's face grew hot. “That's not what I meant!” she said a little too quickly. “I meant someplace … oh, someplace to go: to a play, or to listen to music, or to go out dancing.” Yes indeed: no TV, no movies, no radio, no stereo—she was starting to go stir-crazy. It wasn't quite like living in a sensory-deprivation tank—some of her senses, especially smell, got a bigger workout here than they ever had back in the United States—but it wasn't far removed, either. If she didn't do something besides get up and get to work and get hit over the head with culture shock and collapse into sleep, she was going to scream.
“Mistress,” Julia said, “you know daytime is the time for things like that.” She shrugged. Nicole, even through her haze of fury, thought Julia might just have decided that her mistress was intermittently simpleminded and needed to be humored. “Of course,” Julia went on, “the daytime is when we're busy, too. But there'll be plays and beast shows in the amphitheater all summer long.”
“Beast shows,” Nicole said, distracted almost out of her mood. So what were those? A traveling zoo, maybe? That would make sense, with no planes or trains or automobiles, and not much chance to go much of anywhere. It stood to reason that enterprising types might think to bring the zoos to the people, rather than the other way around.
That didn't help her immediate predicament. “What do I do
now?
” She sounded like a bored four-year-old, she knew that, but she couldn't help it.
“I still don't know why you're mad at Calidius Severus”—Julia shrugged again, as if to say she wasn't and wouldn't be responsible for Nicole's vagaries—“but since you are, there isn't much else
to
do but get drunk.”
“No!” The answer was quick and sharp and automatic.
“Well,” Julia said, “it's one way not to notice the time crawling by. It's here”—she held up a hand—“and then it's there, and you don't care what happened in between.”
“No,” Nicole said again, remembering her father coming
home plastered night after night. For the first time, she thought to wonder
why
he'd got drunk. Was he trying to blot out the time he spent in the factory every day? It wasn't enough reason, but it was
a
reason. She'd never looked for a reason before; it had just been part of her life. She scratched her head, then wished she hadn't—what was crawling through her hair?
“You feel pretty good, too,” Julia went on, not really arguing with Nicole so much as reminding herself. “Oh, you may not feel so good the next morning, but who cares about the next morning? That's then. This is now.” She looked longingly toward the long stone bar, as if to say she wouldn't mind at all if she got drunk.
“No,” Nicole said once more, but she heard something in her voice she'd never expected to find there: hesitation. She'd smoked marijuana a few times, at Indiana and afterwards. She would have enjoyed it more, she thought, if it hadn't felt as if she were lighting smudge pots in her lungs. What could be so different about alcohol? She'd been drinking wine—watered wine, but wine—with meals, and she hadn't turned into a lush.
But your father did
, said the stern voice in her mind. For the first time it sounded less authoritative than merely prim. Miss Priss, Frank had called her sometimes. At first it was affectionate, but later it gained an edge. Then he started adding, “You know, Nicole, people who preach like that usually do it because they're afraid they'll be tempted—and they'll like it.” Not long after that, he was gone. Lady number two hadn't ever been prim in her life, or sensible either.
Nicole couldn't help it if she was congenitally sensible. Maybe that good sense was what she needed now, instead of blind abhorrence.
Dad drank boilermakers, for heaven's sake. A few cups of wine don't even come close
.
Do they?
“Can't do it all the time,” Julia said, “but everybody needs to get drunk once in a while.”
Moderation in everything, including moderation
. Nicole couldn't remember where she'd heard that. She'd always
thought it made good sense, but she'd never applied it to alcohol before. She'd been too busy running in the opposite direction—running away from the father figure, a therapist would say. So did it make sense now? God—gods—knew this wasn't Los Angeles. Life here in Carnuntum was profoundly, sometimes unbearably, different.
Gods, yes. Liber and Libera had, somehow, granted her wish, her whine, her prayer. They'd brought her to Carnuntum. They were, as she had discovered to her dismay, god and goddess of wine. What would they think, what would they do, if they realized how she felt about their very own and most protected substance? Or had they known all along, and set her up for just this dilemma?
Hadn't Christianity turned a lot of the old gods into devils? Right now, Nicole could see why. But she hadn't felt anything bad in Liber or Libera, not in their faces on the plaque and not in the way they'd granted her prayer. So maybe it was a creeping evil—or maybe it was simple godlike benevolence.
Be careful what you wish for
, she'd heard said:
you might get it
.
She was, she knew, talking herself into something she would have rejected in horror a few days—or, heavens, was it weeks?—before. She
had
rejected wine, and what had that got her? A case of the runs that almost turned her inside out, and derision from everybody who heard about her drinking water.
“Well, maybe,” she heard herself say. “Maybe it'll get the taste of that cursed clerk out of my mouth.” An excuse, an alibi—she knew as much. She also knew life was a bore, and an unpleasant bore at that.
Julia must have had a much more solid understanding of that than she did. The slave went over to the bar and filled two cups with wine, brought them back, and plunked one on the table in front of Nicole. Nicole stared at it. It was one of the cups she filled and washed and filled again all day long, brimful of the middle-grade wine. That was boldness on Julia's part, mixed with prudence: not the cheap stuff if they
were going to drink it neat, but not the expensive stuff either, since they were going to drink a lot.
Nicole reached out a hand that was gratifyingly steady and lifted the cup. With the same deep breath she'd have drawn just before she jumped into a lake of cold water, she touched it to her lips and sipped.
The wine wasn't watered; they wanted it full strength, to get drunk the faster. It was almost as thick as syrup, and almost as sweet, too. But under that sweetness lay the half-medicinal, half-terrifying taste of alcohol.
Julia sighed and set down her own, emptied cup. “That's so good,” she said. Her voice was low, throaty, sensuous. She might have been talking about something quite other than wine.
“Yes,” Nicole said, although she didn't think it was particularly grand. Warmth filled her belly and spread slowly outward.
Julia tilted back her cup to catch the last of the wine, then rose to refill it. Politely, she picked up Nicole's, too, only to set it down and give Nicole a look the dim lamplight only made more reproachful. “You haven't finished yet, Mistress?” Beneath the words lay others:
what are you waiting for?
What was Nicole waiting for? If she was going to do this, she wasn't going to do it halfway. She gulped down the wine—dizzied, half staggered, nearly ready to gag on the fumes and the sweetness, but by damn she did it. She thrust the cup at Julia. Julia nodded approval, filled it up again, brought it back.
That one Nicole drained as fast as she could. “You haven't finished yet, Julia?” she said, and laughed. It sounded too loud, as if she'd turned up the volume by mistake.
Julia laughed, too. Was she laughing because she thought it was funny, or because her owner had made a joke?
Damn
, Nicole thought. Her thoughts were turned up high, too.
I don't care. Tomorrow I'll care. Not tonight. No. Not tonight.
A swallow or two later, or maybe it was three, Nicole touched the tip of her nose. It seemed to have gone numb.
That was funny—not big-laugh funny, not giggle funny.
Funny
funny.
I am getting drunk
, she thought. It was wonderful. Marvelous. Fascinating.
And it was her turn to fill the cups. Getting up wasn't bad, though the floor tilted underfoot. Walking straight was harder.
Yes, Officer
, she thought,
I'm walking under the influence
. She giggled.
So did Julia. If she found anything out of the ordinary in sitting down with her mistress and getting plastered, she didn't let on. Nicole wondered how often she'd done it with Umma. As Nicole carried the wine back to the table, walking with great care so as not to spill it, she almost came right out and asked. She caught herself in the nick of time.
Alcohol,
she thought clearly and—all right, primly—
makes you want to talk before you think
. Such a clear thought, and so wise. She was proud of it.
If she hadn't learned about talking jags from experience—if she hadn't already had a good notion of them from memories of her father and from what she'd seen in the tavern—Julia would have taught her. The slave's mouth ran and ran and ran.
Nicole had learned a long time ago that nodding every once in a while was enough to keep a drunk—in this case, Julia—going. Some of what the slave said was interesting in a lurid sort of way; Nicole found out more than she wanted to know about the intimate preferences of several of her regular customers. The one who liked his boys sweet and young, for example—the younger the better; and the one who'd buried or divorced three wives, not one of whom had ever given him an heir, because he couldn't bring himself to enter them through the proper orifice; and …
And then Julia said, “Mistress, if Titus is even half as good as Gaius, you won't find much finer anywhere you look. He's probably better, too—I bet he wouldn't be in such a hurry all the time.” She sighed gustily. “And besides, Mistress, he's crazy about you. And you're angry at him. What did he do to get you in such an uproar? I never have been able to figure it out.”

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