Household Gods (31 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus pushed past her, not exactly rudely, and settled themselves at the table with the others, calling for wine. “The Falernian,” Calidius Severus senior said. “Why not? This is an occasion.” When Julia brought it, they lifted their cups in salute.
Her eyes went wide. Odds were, nobody had ever done that for her before—who would, for a slave? Her fair skin showed a blush as bright as a sunset, rising from the neckline of the tunic all the way to her hairline.
Gaius Calidius Severus watched as Nicole did, most attentively. If he'd been any more attentive, he would have thrown her down on the floor then and there.
Nicole coughed, rather more sharply than she'd intended, and said, “I think we all know why I asked you to come here. I wanted to set Julia free the formal way, but my brother has made it plain he won't sign the document, and my signature by itself isn't good enough.”
And to one damned warm climate with that clerk in the town hall, too
, she thought. “So I'll set her free the informal way, among friends.” She held out her hand. “Come here, Julia.”
Julia came, walking slowly, as if in a formal procession—or as if she didn't quite believe it all was real. Nicole set a hand on her shoulder. It was stiff, held still by a clear effort of will. “Friends,” Nicole said, “it is my wish that this woman should no longer be a slave, but should now and forever after be a freedwoman. You are witnesses to the fact that I am manumitting her in this way, and that I no longer claim her as a slave.”
“I've heard lawyers in togas who didn't talk that fancy,” Titus Calidius Severus said admiringly. Nicole looked at him in surprise and sudden, completely unaffected delight. He
could have searched for a long time before he found a compliment that suited her better.
She was, she discovered, smiling widely and more warmly than she could remember doing, ever, in Carnuntum. She had to reel herself in, to remember the rest of what she'd planned. She went around behind the bar and rummaged in the box she'd found there. “I've written the manumission right here on papyrus: one copy for Julia and one for myself. If you please, you two Calidii and you, Longinius Iulus, should sign them as witnesses.”
Julia's eyes and mouth were wide open. “Mistress! I didn't know you'd done that.”
“Well, I did,” Nicole said robustly, “and you don't have to call me Mistress anymore, either. You're free now, just as I said you would be.”
She'd printed out the manumissions in block capitals, that being the universal style in Carnuntum. The reed pen she'd bought with the papyrus sheets worked about as well as a fountain pen, except she had to re-ink it every line or two. She'd spelled the Latin by ear and by guess, but she'd seen from signs and graffiti that she wasn't alone in her uncertainty.
Titus Calidius Severus mumbled to himself as he read one copy. “Not bad. Not bad at all. Nice and clear, nothing too pretty, no flowers of rhetoric, but it gets the job done. I've seen lots worse.” He seemed to be surprised, too—probably because no one expected a woman to show even basic literacy, let alone a decent writing style.
Gaius Calidius Severus agreed with Nicole's impatience. “Come on, Father, leave off. This is no time for literary criticism.”
Titus Calidius Severus shot his son a narrow glance, but he didn't seem inclined to pull rank. “No, it's not, is it? Umma, where's the pen and ink?” Nicole brought them to him. He signed his name on each sheet of papyrus, and his son followed suit. Both of them wrote with great labor and effort, tongues stuck out, as if they were a pair of second-graders. Nicole couldn't have proved they weren't, either, not
by their handwriting. Which of them had the more painful scrawl was hard to judge, but neither would be entering a calligraphy contest any time soon.
Sextus Longinius Iulus couldn't write at all. He made his mark instead, a sprawling Roman numeral six—VI—for Sextus. The Calidii Severi witnessed it. There didn't appear to be any stigma attached to his illiteracy, no patronizing looks or one-syllable explanations. Some people wrote. Most didn't. That was the way the world was.
Once the documents were signed, witnessed, and duly executed, Nicole handed one copy of the manumission to Julia. “Here you are,” she said. “I don't think we can get much more official than this, not without Brigomarus. Head up, now, and eyes front. You're a free woman.”
Everybody clapped and cheered as if at a play. Julia clutched her sheet of papyrus in stiff fingers. She looked glad—oh yes, very glad indeed. But apprehensive, too, if not outright terrified.
Maybe she had a point, at that. She'd been dubious about the idea from the beginning; had done her best to impress on Nicole that freedom wasn't a purely abstract thing. It meant changes, profound ones, in her status, in her position, in her mode of living. Suddenly, she wasn't property anymore. She was her own person, with rights and privileges, but with responsibilities too. Slaves had none of those things, nor anything else but what their masters gave them.
Nicole might have been tempted to drop the whole thing, to let Julia go on as before, bound but safe. But she couldn't bear the thought of owning another human being. She knew—she'd known for a while now—she was going through the manumission at least as much for herself as for Julia.
“Now we celebrate!” Gaius Calidius Severus declared. “Wine all around, on me!”
Everyone cheered again. Through the last of the noise, Titus Calidius Severus said with a degree of indulgence, “Look at the kid spending my money. I'll have to buy the next round, I suppose.”
“No,” Nicole said firmly, squelching them both. “The first round is on me.” She filled six cups from the amphora of Falernian—yes, even for herself. She might drink the cheap stuff for meals and the middle grade the one time she set out to get seriously drunk, but this called for the heavy artillery.
To hell with the unleaded,
she thought.
One cup of premium in the tank won't hurt.
It was definitely sweeter and stronger than the wine she was used to. Everybody sipped slowly, with suitably appreciative noises, just like a wine tasting at Spago.
Because she'd served the good stuff on the house, Gaius Calidius Severus bought a round of Falernian, too. Left to himself, Nicole suspected, he would have been more likely to order the two-
as
wine.
Just as Julia fetched the cups for Gaius Calidius Severus' round, Ofanius Valens squelched in from the rainy outdoors. He hadn't shown his face in the tavern since Nicole had pried Julia off his lap.
Well, Nicole thought, if he did have to show up, now was a good time for it. Teach him a lesson, and a good one, too.
Sure enough, he looked at the gathering by the bar, with a particularly keen glance at Julia, and asked, “What's going on?”
“We're celebrating,” said Julia. “I'm free.” She sounded more cheerful about the idea, now she had a cup of Falernian in her.
Ofanius Valens smiled with apparently unfeigned pleasure. “Now that's worth celebrating,” he said. Nicole smiled back at him, a little smugly, until he added, “You cost me the same old two
sesterces
the last time.”
Nicole waited for Julia to throw something at him or pick up a stool and brain him with it, supposing he had any brains north of his crotch. But Julia's laugh was loud and obviously genuine. The men in the tavern laughed, too, but they were men. What else could you expect from them? Only when Nicole heard Fabia Ursa giggling did she realize the joke wasn't out of line here.
Local community standards.
No matter what the local community thought, she didn't like it.
“Next round is mine,” Ofanius Valens said, fitting himself into the party as if he had every right to do it.
“You're going to be a couple of cups short, Ofanius,” Titus Calidius Severus said. They straightened out who owed how much wine to whom, with resigned amusement that showed they'd done such things many times before. Drunks, Nicole supposed, had plenty of practice in getting drunk.
She wasn't as scornful as she had been, not with that drunken night with Julia under her own belt. In its own way, it had been fun—while it lasted. The next morning … The less she thought about the next morning, the better.
Sextus Longinius was not to be left out of the party. He bought the next round. Nicole wished he hadn't, not with a baby on the way and him as far from rich as she was. But there wasn't any way to tell him so without bruising his pride. A person had to be able to hold his head up in front of his friends and neighbors—as much here as in Los Angeles, or Indianapolis for that matter.
All the rounds included Nicole—they wouldn't have been rounds if they hadn't. She had to empty her cup each time, too, or people would wonder what was the matter with her. Their conversation, which hadn't been particularly genteel to begin with, turned loud and silly.
She
turned loud and silly.
She wasn't drunk. She was sure she wasn't. She'd been drunk before. Drunk was when she couldn't stand up without wanting to fall over. Now, although her feet didn't quite want to do as she told them, she walked well enough. She said clever things, witty things: people laughed, didn't they? She couldn't remember the last time she'd been the life of the party. Had she ever been? Her memory was fogged a bit—time travel did that to a person, even without a few cups of Falernian—but as far as she could recall, mostly at parties she'd either circulated rapidly and got out as fast as possible, or found a corner to hide in while too many other guests got sloshed or stoned.
None of them had been as witty as she was being. She
didn't remember laughing this hard or feeling so much like someone who belonged, either. Now there was irony: she had to go back eighteen hundred years and halfway around the world to find people who accepted her as one of them.
Hardly anybody came in to distract from the celebration. She understood perfectly. She was amazed at how well she understood. Who would want to go wandering around on a wet, sloppy day? You couldn't stay dry in a car, not here, not now. You couldn't stay dry anywhere, unless you stayed indoors.
“You look happy, Umma,” Titus Calidius Severus said to her in the warm haze of the wine, “happier than you have in a while. I'm glad.”
Of course you are—you want to go to bed with me
. But the thought lacked the sour edge it had had before. If she looked at him through the lens of better acquaintance—and several cups of wine—the fuller and dyer didn't seem so bad. No—he wouldn't have seemed so bad at all if he hadn't smelled like a public toilet, and not a well-maintained one, either.
Gaius Calidius Severus pulled his hood up over his head and headed for the door. The rain hissed down outside. He ducked a runnel of water off the roof, sloshed to the edge of the sidewalk, and lifted his tunic. Through the sound of the rain, the sound of piss hitting flooded street was tiny but distinct.
When he came back in, he was grinning. “Running water, as good as the baths,” he said. Everybody laughed.
Or was it everybody? Nicole had missed a couple of voices. “Where's Julia?” she asked. She couldn't have mislaid her, now, could she?
Fabia Ursa giggled in between sips of wine.
Fetal alcohol syndrome,
Nicole thought fuzzily. The thought, for a mercy, blurred and faded before it touched her tongue. “Didn't you see her go upstairs with Ofanius?” Fabia Ursa asked. She seemed to think it wonderfully funny. “I wonder if that really is for free. The first time, maybe, but not many after that, I'll bet. Julia will be minding her
asses
now.”
A pun lurked in there somewhere, but it needed to be in English to work. Nicole's warm, happy mood went suddenly cold. Lucius and Aurelia were upstairs playing—and shame on Nicole for not thinking about them till just now. Were Julia and Ofanius Valens going at it right next door to them?
Someone pushed a cup into her hand. It was full and all but slopping over. She gripped it like a lifeline, raised it to her lips and drank seep. The wine flowed through her in the now familiar sensation, warm as an open fire.
Central heating,
she thought with a return of her antic mood. That was the wine, oh yes: making her forget cold things and sad things, grim things and bad things. So the kids were having a primal experience up there. It couldn't be anything they hadn't heard before—not the way Umma had been pimping Julia. They must have grown up to the sounds of flesh on flesh, thumps and moans and whatever other sound effects were in vogue in this age of the world.
She had to have another talk with Julia, yes. It might be normal behavior here, but it wasn't
nice
behavior. Julia was a free woman now. She had to learn about nice.
But not right now. Tomorrow. If Nicole remembered.
A little while later, Julia came trotting lightly down the stairs with Ofanius Valens right behind her. They weren't blushing in the least, or hiding anything either. He looked as if he should have been puffing smugly on a cigarette—if the Romans had had tobacco, Nicole was sure, they'd all have smoked like the chimneys they also didn't have. Julia's face had a loose, sated look. Her eyes were smoky; her tunic was awry. She straightened it absently, with fingers that paused to stroke the curve of a breast, then wandered on down past the rounded belly. Nicole held her breath, wondering in shocked fascination if she would start stroking her crotch right then and there, but her hand slipped sidewise over a hip and away. She smiled at them all with impartial benevolence.

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