Household Gods (67 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Nicole knew that now. She also knew, or feared, that like most such wisdom, it came too late to do her any good.
Antonina's storm of weeping had passed, and she seemed much the better for it. She wouldn't be a danger to herself now, Nicole thought. Later, if she had a relapse, she might try something, but somehow Nicole suspected that Antonina was too tough for that.
“Listen,” Nicole said. “I have to go back—poor Julia's all alone with a tavern full of drunken Germans. You come by if you need me, or call. One of us will come.”
“I'll be all right,” Antonina said. “You go. Slit a German throat or two for me, will you?”
“I wish,” Nicole sighed.
Antonina didn't laugh, or even smile, but her expression as she saw Nicole off was brighter than it had been since before Carnuntum fell. Nicole knew a moment's apprehension: what if Antonina found a kitchen knife and came hunting Germans?
Not likely. People here might be unsanitary and they might be inclined toward sexism, but they weren't casual killers. Not like the people who had conquered them. Which was probably why the Germans had won and the Romans had lost, but that was not a thought Nicole wanted to dwell on. Not if she had to face a tavern packed with drunken, snoring Germans.
Julia had drawn a stool up behind the bar and perched on it, elbows on the bar, chin in hands. She acknowledged Nicole with a lift of the brows: for Julia, a strikingly undemonstrative greeting. Her words revealed the cause of her preoccupation: “If we had anywhere to hide the bodies, I'd cut all their throats.”
“You and Antonina both,” Nicole said.
“Really? She's alive?” Julia's lack of enthusiasm wasn't laudable, but Nicole could more or less understand it. Antonina wasn't the most popular person in the neighborhood.
“Alive and well enough,” Nicole answered.
“That's good,” said Julia, deliberately, as if she'd thought over all sides of it, and made a considered decision.
That was more than Nicole could do, but somehow she had to try. She surveyed the human wreckage, and noted the chorus of snores, which was a bit more melodious than what the Romans called music. “Let's leave them here and go up to bed. With that
aureus,
we're ahead of the game no matter how much more they eat.” Then, as a new thought occurred
to her: “If you want to bring your blanket and sleep behind a door that locks, I don't mind at all.”
“That's kind of you, Mistress, but I'll be fine where I am,” Julia replied. “If they're in that kind of mood, a barred door won't stop them. Breaking it down might even get them more excited.”
Nicole hadn't thought of that. “You're probably right,” she said.
Julia didn't dwell on it. She yawned hugely and stretched. “I'll look in on Gaius Calidius Severus before I go to bed,” she said.
“Good,” Nicole said. “I was going to ask if you'd do that. Make sure his pupils are the same size. If they are, it's probably all right to let him sleep.”
“I do hope they are,” said Julia. “He's not happy about having to stay awake and listen to the city fall.” She paused. “If he needs to be kept awake … I'll stay with him.”
Nicole opened her mouth, thought better of it, nodded. “Go on,” she said. “I won't be closing up, with this many men on the floor. You can come in when you're ready, and not worry about disturbing me.”
Julia didn't linger. When she was gone, Nicole sighed faintly and looked around her. The wine was all gone, but there were dregs enough in the cups that Julia had collected and set aside for cleaning. Nicole found the one with the most in it, and poured the contents in front of the image of Liber and Libera. She didn't say her prayer just then. But the wish was stronger than it had ever been.
When she'd barred the door of her room and lain down in bed, then she prayed. She prayed as she'd never prayed before. Not just to be free of a world and time that weren't and had never been her own. To be safe. To be where war like this never came, and cities weren't sacked, or women raped in the street in broad daylight, except in backward parts of the world where she need never go.
For all the potency of her wishing, and for all the strength of her prayer, when she woke, she woke to Carnuntum. Down below, men were groaning and swearing in guttural
German, cursing the wine they'd drunk and the hangover it had given them.
She shook her head. They'd be wanting breakfast, and she'd better see what she could find. No matter who was in charge here, she had to stay alive until she could find a way to escape. There was a way. There had to be one. Didn't there?
 
The sack of Carnuntum went on for five days. As long as chaos was the order of the day, Nicole and Julia made daily trips across the street to keep themselves stinking and unattractive to would-be rapists. Gaius Calidius Severus had needed to be watched for much of that first night, according to Julia, but by morning he was groggy, headachy, but on the mend. He didn't need much looking after, once he was back on his feet, except what Julia was minded to give him.
One morning, just as Nicole was coming out of the shop with Julia, pungent with a new application of what Nicole was thinking of as rape repellent, they met Antonina on her way in. She wrinkled her nose, nodded, and went on by. Nicole swallowed a smile. So: Antonina had decided to join the anti-rape league. Good for Antonina.
Young Calidius Severus endured several days of dreadful, pounding headaches before the pain gradually began to recede. He never did recall how he'd got that lump on the side of his head. “It must have been a rock,” he said, over at the tavern, in an hour when it was blessedly empty of Germans. “It must have been. If a German had caught me with the flat of his blade, he wouldn't have stopped there. He'd have slit my throat or cut off my head.”
Nicole nodded. “I think you're right. It had to be something like that, something that made you drop your sword.”
“I suppose so,” he said, “but I don't know. I expect I never will.”
He dipped his bread in olive oil and ate. Nicole still had plenty of grain and, if anything, an oversupply of oil for the tiny amount of business she was doing. She was out of wine: the Germans had made sure of that.
Being out of wine meant drinking water. She didn't dare go over to the market square to find out if more wine was to be had, not yet. She didn't think any would be, anyhow, not judging by all the drunken barbarians she'd seen. At her insistence, Julia boiled water in the biggest pots they had. “This is a silly business, Mistress,” the freedwoman insisted.
“Do it anyhow,” Nicole said. Being the boss gave her the privilege of being arbitrary. She'd long since seen that arguments and explanations based on what the twentieth century knew and the second century didn't were worse than useless. “It can't hurt anything, can it?”
“I suppose not.” Julia was still dubious, but did as she was told. When, after a day or two, nobody came down with the runs, she allowed as how it might not have been such a bad idea. That was the biggest concession Nicole had ever wrung from her.
More and more Germans came into Carnuntum. Some were celebrating the destruction of the legionary camp down the river. Some came to plunder and steal, though the pickings by now were thin. A lot simply passed through, on their way south toward other Roman towns and more Roman loot.
“All the Roman Empire will be ours,” Swemblas boasted one day. “Every bit of it.”
Nicole didn't argue with him. She thought there'd been Roman Emperors after Marcus Aurelius, but she wasn't sure enough of it to say so. Not to mention that disagreeing with one of the new German masters of Carnuntum was likely to prove hazardous to her health.
He didn't stay long, in any case. A tavern without wine had far less appeal to him than one with it. “If you have no wine, what good are you?” he demanded.
“You and your friends drank all I had,” Nicole answered, not too sharply, she hoped. “How am I supposed to get more?”
“In the market, of course,” Swemblas said in a tone she knew all too well. Male arrogance and superiority, patronizing the silly little woman, and letting her know just what an idiot she was.
His astonishment was all the stronger for that, when Nicole laughed in his face. “Suppose I can go to the market without having a dozen of your friends pull me down and rape me, the way they did to my neighbor,” she said. Swemblas' expression went from astonished to shocked, likely because she dared talk so directly about what he did for fun. “Suppose I can do that,” she said. “I'm not sure I can, but suppose. You people have drunk or stolen all the wine the merchants had on hand. Where are they going to get more?”
“It is not my problem,” Swemblas said. “It is for the merchants to do.”
“Good luck,” Nicole said serenely. “Now the war is here, and south of here, not off somewhere farther west.” Being vague let her conceal how ignorant she was of local geography. But then, a lot of people who'd been born and raised in Carnuntum knew little of Vindobona, twenty miles up the Danube, and less about any place farther away. “If you were a Roman wine merchant, would you want to come up to Carnuntum from Italy, knowing there were Germans in the way?”
“I am not a merchant. I am not a Roman. I do not want to be either,” Swemblas said with dignity. And without a further word, he strode out.
He'd entirely missed the point. Nicole sighed. She shouldn' have expected anything different. Had the Germans been able to see anything from anyone else's point of view, they wouldn't have reckoned robbery and rape and murder to be fine sport, or applauded one another for them.
The next day, whether she wanted to or not, Nicole had to go to market. She was out of everything but grain and oil, and those were starting to run low.
Julia tried to talk her out of it. “Mistress,” she said, “the less you show yourself, the safer you'll be.”
“Yes, but if I get to the market square now, I have a better chance of finding things before it's picked clean,” Nicole answered. She wasn't as bold as she sounded, but Julia didn't call her on it. Julia was still shaking her head as Nicole went out the door.
There were Germans in the streets, swaggering about with a lordly air. In front of the shop where Nicole had bought her image of Liber and Libera, one of the conquerors picked up a votive plaque with an image of the naked Venus. He ran a hand over the limestone curves as if fondling a real woman.
“Gut!”
he grunted, or close enough. The shopkeeper stood motionless. The German laughed, tucked the plaque under his arm, and sauntered off. The stonecarver stared after him, but knew better than to demand payment.
Something about the incident stopped Nicole cold. It wasn't the theft—that was common enough these days. It wasn't the shopkeeper's powerlessness, not really. And yet …
I don't have the right plaque,
Nicole thought. The thought was very clear. She'd had it before, and more than once, but never so distinctly.
The god and goddess aren't listening, because the plaque I have—it's not the one I bought in Petronell. It's not just the image, or the intent. It's the connection to me, to my past and future. I need that one, and no other.
She couldn't prove it. Nor was there any way to do so, unless she found the actual plaque, the one that had brought her here. Did it even exist yet? Would she have to wait another twenty or thirty years before it was made?
No, she thought with a shiver. She had to believe, for her own sanity, that the plaque had brought her back to the time when it was carved. Otherwise, what would be the point of it at all?
She put the thought away for now; because she had an errand, and it was urgent. It wasn't too terribly hard to distract herself: the city had changed since she last went out to market. Shops that had once been open were closed and shuttered, Germans came and went from houses that had belonged to solid Roman citizens, the few women who were out and about went warily as Nicole herself did, and probably with some kind of weapon concealed in their clothing. Nicole, whose chief weapon was her stink of ancient piss, was just as glad not to be armed. Her self-defense instructor had
been blunt about it. “A knife or a gun may make you feel better when you carry it, but you're just giving a mugger another weapon to use against you. Unless you can shoot or stab to kill or disable, and do it instantly, he'll get hold of it and he'll use it. And you'll be worse off than you were before.”
Armed with a stink that kept even the locals from crowding in too close, Nicole passed the baths and came in sight of the open space of the market square. She stopped, and gasped.
The space was larger, much larger, than it had ever been before. It opened to the north and west, openness in shades of black, the charred ruins of the fire that she'd heard but not seen on the first day of the sack. Houses and shops and a handful of four- and five-story apartment buildings were flattened, burned to the ground.

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