Household Gods (33 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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“You haven't been yourself,” Calidius Severus agreed. It wasn't the first time Nicole had heard that in Carnuntum. The people who said it didn't know how right they were—and Lord, was she glad of that. The fuller and dyer shrugged and got to his feet. “Well, I won't trouble you anymore about it now. I thought there might be something you wanted to say that you didn't want to say in front of people, if you know what I mean.”
“It's nothing like that,” she said in dull embarrassment. “I told you it was nothing like that when we were walking back from the market square.”
In three quick steps, and before she quite realized it, he was standing beside her. She suppressed the flinch, she hoped, before he could have seen it. She hadn't known he could move so fast, or with such unexpected strength.
But he didn't touch her. He didn't do that. “What is it, then?” he demanded. His voice was as firmly under control as his body was, and as rigid with tension.
He must have realized that he wasn't going to get an answer. He shrugged again—he had a whole repertoire of shrugs, a shrug for every occasion—and leaned forward. Before she could pull away, before she was even sure of what he was going to do, he kissed her. It was gentle, no force;
just the brush of his lips, with a faint tickle of beard and mustache. “Take care of yourself, Umma,” he said. “I do love you, you know.” Before she could find words to reply, he was gone.
 
 
N
ICOLE STARED AT THE place where Titus Calidius Severus had been. “Now why did he have to go and say something like that?” she muttered in English. His kiss hadn't been revolting—on the contrary. That worried her more than if she'd wanted to gag at it. He'd been in the tavern, he and his son, long enough that she'd stopped noticing the reek of stale piss that followed them wherever they went. The rest …
She hadn't been the least bit interested in sex, with Titus Calidius Severus or anyone else, since she came to Carnuntum. She'd felt anything but sexy herself. She was grubby all the time. She was lousy. She had a yeast infection that didn't want to go away, which left her generally unenthusiastic about her private parts. She never got anywhere near enough sleep. It was hard enough to live in this body every hour of every day, without trying to warm up right good and proper, too.
And yet … It wasn't that she wanted Calidius Severus. It was that she might have wanted him. Her mind and self might not remember him, but her body too clearly did. It had memories, it seemed, small yearnings, tinglings that woke when he looked at her or touched her or, as he had just now, kissed her.
With thoughts as disturbing as these, and leading in even more disturbing directions, she was almost pathetically glad to greet the dripping customer who blew in out of the rain
and loudly demanded bread and honey and wine—so loudly, in fact, that he woke Julia.
She started bolt upright, eyes enormous with terror, a deer-in-the-headlights look if Nicole had ever seen one. Nicole could read her face as if it had been yesterday's newspaper. Oh, gods—sleeping on the job. What would her mistress do to her? How would she talk her way out of it?
Then, as Nicole tried to watch and serve the customer at the same time, the truth dawned on her. Nicole—Umma—wasn't her mistress anymore. Her relief was as strong as her fear had been, swept over it and drowned it, and let her stand reasonably straight and make her way over to the bar, where she dipped a cup of the two-
as
wine and brought it to the still dripping, faintly steaming customer.
After the man had paid and left, Nicole said, “Julia, if you doze off on me tomorrow, you
will
be in trouble.”
Julia grinned at her. “Oh, yes, I know that,” she said. She carefully did not include the title that she'd always put in before. No
Mistress
, not any longer. “Today was special, though. With the wine and the loving and all.” She stretched with a sinuous, sinful wriggle. Then she hiccuped, which made her laugh. She was full of herself, bubbling over with freedom—and, Nicole caught herself thinking, license. Nicole had known women like that. Girls, too, in high school. There, they were called sluts—even called themselves that, like a badge of pride.
Julia's straightforward sluttiness—all right, earthiness—had always irked Nicole. Now it made her jealous. And that made her angry at herself, because she was jealous.
She covered both jealousy and anger with work. Of that there was always plenty and then some. She washed cups and washed cups and washed cups; she'd almost run out of clean ones. Julia ground flour to bake bread. She and Nicole took turns at the oven, keeping the fire even and gauging when the baking would be done. Time was when Nicole had thought the labor-saving devices in her kitchen in West Hills didn't really save labor—that it was just hype. She knew much better now.
And today was a slow day. Because of the rain, it looked as if the tavern would get by with one baking, two at the outside, instead of the usual four. It didn't help the cash box much, but it made life easier for the staff—all two of them.
Maybe that was why, when Nicole went upstairs as gray day turned into black night, she was only tired, not exhausted. She lay down, but did not fall asleep as fast as she usually did—as fast as if someone had whacked her over the head with a club. The wine had worn off long ago. If she'd had a hangover, it had dissipated somewhere in between customers. So that was how to do it: get drunk in broad daylight and work it off. She'd have to remember that.
Except for the chirping of crickets, the buzzing of mosquitoes, and, somewhere far off, a dog that would not stop barking, it was eerily quiet behind her barred door. No distant racket of TVs and radios, no hiss of cars going past as was commonplace in L.A. even at three in the morning. Nothing. People were snug in their warm buggy beds, and would be till sunrise.
She was snug, too, snug but restive. She tossed and turned. Side to belly to back. Back to belly to side. Of itself—or so she thought till it got there—her hand slid between her legs and crept under her loincloth. It was the first time since she came to Carnuntum, the first interest she'd had in anything but falling flat on her face in bed and waking up however many hours later in some new state of misery or other: itching, griping, cursing dirt and vermin and discomfort.
It had been a long while. It was still strange to find herself smooth down there, except for the small itching scab where she'd cut herself shaving at the baths a day or two before. The difference aroused her. On the fantasy screen behind her eyes, where Mel Gibson and Adrian Paul had used to play out their little dramas, a completely new and different face took shape. It wasn't, God forbid, Titus Calidius Severus, but it wasn't
not
, either. He had a beard; bearded men had never fed her fantasies. He had warm dark eyes and a smile that had never known orthodontia. His shoulders were broad, the skin of his chest warm and shaved smooth: she could
feel the faint catch of the stubble. He shaved below, too, around the noble loft of his organ—not huge, not as a man might imagine a woman would want, but a good size, a comfortable size, like the ones she'd seen on the gaudy statues in the market. She felt the shape and hardness of it, the heat that mounted as he smiled at her, smiled and smiled, and—wise man—said nothing at all.
Her hand quickened. Her breathing matched pace with it. Caught; paused. A little moan escaped her.
She relaxed all at once, let her body go limp. Oh, that was good; that was what she'd needed. And yet she shrugged as she often did afterwards, alone in the dark. It was good, but she knew better. The real thing could be as lonely as this, if he did what he wanted to do and then rolled off her, snoring before he hit the pillow. But when it was good, there was nothing like it. No, nothing in the world.
This would do. It had eased the worst of the tightness out of her, which was what she had wanted. She could sleep now.
As she drifted off, she felt one last, small stab of jealousy. Lucky Julia, who didn't bother her head—or her body—with such frettings.
 
Nicole woke to total strangeness. For a terrible instant, she knew she'd been yanked out of time again, to who knew where. Then she recognized the familiar bed underneath her, the familiar itch and skitter of her personal vermin, and the familiar septic stink of Carnuntum. The strangeness was in the light. It was just sunup—and there was a sun to light the sky. The clouds that had lain so heavy on the town for so long had tattered and torn. When she got up and stumbled to the window to look out, she saw patches of pale blue amid the scudding gray. The air that washed her cheeks was damp still, and cool, but no rain fell. The rain had gone away.
She yawned and stretched, arching her back like a cat. A good hot shower and a thorough delousing would have done her a great deal of good, but even without them she felt as good as she'd felt since she came to Carnuntum.
She was smiling as she went downstairs, a smile Julia returned—up before Nicole as usual, baking the morning bread. Freedom didn't seem to have done much damage—yet—to her work ethic. She might even work harder, now she worked for wages: now she had a stake in working well.
They did their morning chores as they'd come to do, moving through and around each other like partners in a dance. There was a kind of pleasure in it, the pleasure of a pattern well executed. The first customers—a handful of morning regulars—came in with their usual greetings: a smile and a cheery wave, a rheumy scowl, a hungover wince, depending on the individual. They settled in their usual places with their usual breakfasts, wine and fresh bread for the most part. Some liked to banter with Nicole or Julia.
Nicole had just finished a long and lively exchange with a muleteer whose name she could never remember but whose face she couldn't forget—he had a quite imposing wen at the corner of his left eye—when a half-dozen new customers came trooping in. All but one were strangers. That one, coming in behind but clearly a part of the group, as if he were herding it onward, was Umma's brother Brigomarus. His expression mirrored the rest. The best word Nicole could find for it was
thunderous.
Her bright mood darkened, and not slowly either. From the way Brigomarus acted toward the others, and the resemblance the women bore to him and to each other—and, for that matter, to Umma—she couldn't exactly miss who they were. The two younger women had to be Umma's sisters, and the older one, she of the steel-gray bun and steely stare, their mother. The men, in turn, had to be the sisters' husbands. One was a great deal older than the woman whose elbow he supported. The other was thirty-five or so, and probably a few years older than his apparent wife.
Nicole had learned in her time in Carnuntum that clothes very definitely made the man here—or the woman. The rich never affected the local equivalent of torn jeans and ratty T-shirts, and the poor never tried to dress up like the rich, even if they could have afforded it. There were no designer knockoffs
in discount outlets here. One could, quite easily, determine a person's status by the type and quality of clothes he or she wore, and by the kind and quantity of jewelry, as well as by the intricacy of a woman's hairstyle.
These women, these sisters of Umma the tavernkeeper, were a good cut above her with her combed-out-anyhow hair and her two good tunics. They wore soft wool dyed in amazingly off-key colors, and linen that might have made a decent summer power suit in Los Angeles; and they were hung everywhere, it seemed, with necklaces and armlets, rings and earrings. Not all or even most of it was gold, but enough of it was, particularly on the sister with the older man, that Nicole was left in no doubt as to their economic status. These were the local equivalent of prosperous businessmen and their wives. The older man was even tricked out in a toga—about as formal as a dinner jacket, and overwhelmingly so in the humble surroundings of a tavern.
Even the mother's simplicity of hair and dress—a couple of layers of black tunic and a black cloak—was deceptive. Her one ornament was a ring on her finger where Nicole's twentieth-century eye looked for a wedding ring, and it was gold.
Nicole was more than glad she'd drunk well-watered wine with breakfast, and eaten a good half-loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese. If she'd been as full of Falernian as she was at Julia's manumission party, she'd have said exactly what she thought: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Slumming, I suppose?”
They did have the look, and no mistake. The younger man, a tall reedy fellow with the scars of old acne on his sparsely bearded cheeks, dusted off a bench with an air of great fastidiousness, and helped his mother-in-law to a seat thereon. She allowed him to assist her, but not without paying for it: “Not so solicitous, Pacatus, if you please. It makes you look like a legacy-hunter. Not, I suspect, that you aren't eager to see me die and leave you my holdings, but it's more polite to act as if it doesn't matter.”
She had a voice like poisoned honey, which was probably
what had brought her this far up in the world—widow of a well-to-do man, Nicole guessed, but that man hadn't been Umma's father, not by a long leap up the social ladder.
The old lady got herself settled with much clucking and fussing from all concerned; all but Nicole, who stayed right where she was, safe behind the bar. In the process she picked up names to attach to faces: Pacatus the younger son-in-law, Tabica his wife, Ila the older—and probably oldest—sister; she looked older than Umma. And, most overweeningly pompous of that whole pompous crew, Ila's togaed husband, Marcus Flavius Probus. No one, not even his wife, called him by his praenomen. Nicole doubted Ila ever did, even in bed. He bore the full triune burden of his name, wherever and whenever he was.
While the in-laws catered to the old lady, whom Marcus Flavius Probus addressed as
my dearest Atpomara,
but everyone else called simply
Mother,
Brigomarus stood a little apart with arms folded, quietly but conspicuously removed from the fray. Nicole didn't know that she liked him any better for it. He was the light of his mother's eye, she could see that without half trying. Atpomara sneered at her sons-in-law and tyrannized over her daughters, but when she looked at her son her terrible old eyes almost went soft.
Queen bee,
Nicole thought, and disliked the woman on sight.
One way and another, the tavern managed to empty of customers while Atpomara got herself settled. Either they knew something was up and were too polite to hang around and witness it, or people knew this family too well to want to be anywhere near it once it assembled in force. Even Julia, who wasn't usually any kind of coward, muttered something about seeing if the kids were up to something upstairs, and left Nicole to face the music alone.

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