Household Gods (70 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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“They
might
have left us alone,” Nicole said. “What we did worked. That's good enough.” She patted her belly, which felt wonderfully full. “And a big mess of snails is good enough—or better than good enough—too, no matter what a cursed barbarian thinks.”
Julia nodded. So did Lucius. It took Nicole a moment to realize what she'd just said.
Cursed barbarian?
If that wasn't the precise local equivalent of
damn nigger
or
stinking wetback,
what was it? She looked up at the soot-smeared ceiling. She was horrified, but she was also a little amused—that wasn't like the old Nicole at all, at all. Of all the things the
second century had done to her, slinging casual ethnic slurs was one of the last she'd expected.
Neither of the others saw anything at all unusual or reprehensible in it. Lucius packed away the last snail from the bowl, sat back, and belched luxuriously. Nicole frowned, but she held her tongue—still more evidence of the new, far from improved version. “I'll catch more snails tomorrow, Mother,” Lucius said.
“Good.” Nicole ruffled his hair. He ducked his head, but not too much, and put up with it better than she might have expected. She patted her belly again. It came down to a simple choice, she thought. She could worry about whether her belly was full, or she could worry that she was improperly denigrating the magnificent achievements of the Quadi and Marcomanni and, as far as she could tell, the Lombards.
It took leisure to be politically correct, and to see all sides of the question. Leisure—and a well-stocked larder. And no good and sufficient and very immediate reason to blame the ethnic group of choice for the gnawing in her middle.
 
Snails grew scarce, as she'd known they would. Pigeons proved tasty, though she cooked the meat right off the bones to make sure it was safe to eat. After a while, they got harder to catch: the survivors turned streetwise. The sight of a human within a stone's throw sent them skyward in a whirring racket of wings.
There was always fish in the market, no matter how hard the times were. The Germans didn't mind if the locals went out in their little boats with nets or hooks and lines. But, when it was almost the only food available, fish became expensive. Nicole regretted every frivolous
as
she'd spent since she entered Umma's body—to say nothing of the coins Umma had spent before Nicole came to Carnuntum.
That
aureus
Swemblas gave her had seemed a huge sum of money, like a thousand-dollar bill. And, like a thousand-dollar bill when no other cash was coming in, it melted away, an as here, a
dupondius
there, a couple of
sesterces
somewhere else.
Nicole found herself in a cruel dilemma: if she sold the food she managed to find, she earned money with which to buy more food, but she couldn't eat what she sold. If, on the other hand, she ate the little food she managed to lay hold of, she stopped being hungry for a while, but money flowed out of the cash box as inexorably as sand running through an hourglass.
The uneasy compromise that she settled on left the three of them both hungrier and closer to broke than she wanted them to be. Her drawers fit more loosely than they had when she first woke in Umma's body, even more loosely than they had when she was recovering from the pestilence. Her belly growled at her all the time.
She'd known hunger before. In Indiana and California, she'd spent enough time on diets that hadn't done much but fray her temper, nibbling carrot sticks when her stomach was yelling for a banana split. But all the hunger she'd endured had been voluntary. Whenever she'd wanted to, or whenever she couldn't stand it anymore, relief had been no farther away than the nearest bacon double cheeseburger or package of Twinkies or Milky Way bar—anything guaranteed to leap six weeks of Lean Cuisine at a single bound.
Not here. Not now. That mournful litany played yet again in her mind, as it had—how many times?—since she'd come to Carnuntum. This hunger was not consensual. It was forced on her, as much as the Germans had forced themselves on poor Antonina. She'd never thought there could be a connection between hunger and rape, but there it was.
That wasn't the only unpleasant connection she found. One day, after she came back to the tavern with a couple of trout and a little cheese for which she'd paid more than she could really afford, she put the money she hadn't spent back in the cash box. By then, she knew to the
as
how much was supposed to be in there; as hard as times were, she paid much closer attention than she had when they were easier.
She frowned. The box held a few
sesterces
more than it should have. Till she came back, there hadn't been any food to eat, let alone to sell to anybody else. Her eye fell on Julia.
Julia was scrubbing tables, mostly for something to do; business was too bad to keep her occupied with much else, and there was no flour for bread. She looked the same as she always did, thinner of course, but she was still what yahoos in Indiana would have called a nice piece of ass. Nicole sucked in a breath, and let it out in a spate of words: “Julia! I've told you not to—”
Julia wasn't to be cowed this time, even by Nicole at the start of a rampage. “No, Mistress. We need the money. If we can't find some way to pay for food, pretty soon I'll be too skinny for anyone to want me at all. And,” she added after a brief pause, “one of them even knew what he was doing. It wasn't too bad. He's the one who paid me double—because, he said, I was worth it.”
She didn't blush while she said it, or apologize for having a mind of her own. Julia had changed, too. She wasn't the childlike creature Nicole had first met, who had ducked her head and lowered her eyes and done as she was told.
Nicole found that her fists were clenched. They ached. Carefully, with some effort, she unclenched them. She made herself think, and see what Julia had already seen before her. The big brass coins would help—a great deal. There was no way Nicole could deny it. If it came to a choice between selling oneself and starving … there was another set of choices she'd never imagined herself having to make.
“We should be glad,” Julia said, “that some people still have money to spend on something besides food.”
Disposable income,
Nicole thought. She bit down hard on laughter she might not have been able to quell, and said the thing she had to say: “Thanks for sharing what you made instead of keeping it for yourself.”
Julia did look down then, and shrugged as if in embarrassment. “You weren't bad to me when you owned me. You never kept me hungry, the way some people do with their slaves. Then you went and set me free. That hasn't been as scary as I thought, especially since you've let me stay on here, and earn my keep honestly. I could have had to go out and sell my body just to stay alive. Instead I got to do it
when
I
wanted to do it. I wanted to do it now. I wanted to help.”
That hasn't been as scary as I thought.
Nicole had never heard freedom more faintly praised. And yet, the rest of it was just as honestly put, and it was, in its way, the most genuine expression of gratitude Nicole could ever have asked for. She couldn't find anything more eloquent to say than, “All right, Julia. Thank you. Just—thank you.”
Julia shrugged and went back to scouring tables. Nicole groped for something more to say, but there wasn't anything that would work. She went back to the cash box instead, and paused before she shut and locked it, staring down at the brassy gleam of the coins. Her mind was running of itself through everything those extra
sesterces
would buy, and all the ways she could make them stretch.
Pragmatism. It wasn't a pretty word, or a laudable trait, but here, in this time and place, it meant survival.
 
As a lean and hungry spring swung into a parched summer, Nicole had time, once in a while, to wonder about the war between the Romans and the Germans—Marcomanni, Quadi, she never had learned how to tell the two apart. There was no easy way to get an answer. Even before the invasion, events at a town as close as Vindobona reached Carnuntum slowly and often in garbled fashion, if they arrived at all. When the war had been fought farther west, it was like noise in a distant room of the house—there, but difficult to understand.
Now the war had rolled right over Carnuntum—and it was still hard to interpret. Every so often, Germans would come through town with loot obviously gathered somewhere farther south in Pannonia. Other Germans passed through on the way south, heading toward the fighting—or maybe just toward chances to murder and rape and plunder.
Were they winning the war? If they were, did that mean they'd go down into Italy and sack Rome the way they'd sacked Carnuntum? Was
this
the fall of the Roman Empire? Was
now
the time when everything went to hell? For far
from the first time, Nicole wished she knew more ancient history. Had Liber and Libera thought they were doing her a favor, dropping her right in the middle of the great collapse?
She spent a few anxious days worrying about that in the odd moments when she wasn't worrying about being hungry. Then, to her own surprise, she found an answer. No news had come in, and she still knew next to nothing of the history of the Roman Empire—but there was one thing she did know.
The
Heidentor
wasn't there. That was the key. When she'd done the budget tour of Petronell on her honeymoon, the guide had droned on and on, nearly putting her to sleep; but one part of his spiel she did remember. He'd said, quite distinctly, that the gate was Roman work. Therefore, the Roman Empire couldn't be gone from Carnuntum for good. Sooner or later, Roman power would return here. The
Heidentor
would go up to mark it.
Was it sooner? Or was it later? Would the Romans take Carnuntum back from the Quadi and Marcomanni next month, next year, or ten years from now? That might not make any difference in the building of the
Heidentor,
but it would make a hell of a lot of difference in Nicole's life. If the Germans were still in Carnuntum ten years from now, she was damned sure she wouldn't be.
About the middle of August, she began to feel something that might have been hope. More Germans began coming back through Carnuntum, and fewer of them were carrying booty. Some were wounded: they were bandaged, or they limped, or they were missing a limb. They didn't volunteer information, and nobody seemed inclined to ask.
For a little while, life in Carnuntum had been—
acceptable
was too strong a word. It had been somewhere within shouting distance of bearable. People had been hungry, but they hadn't been—too—afraid to go through the city to see what they might find. The Marcomanni and Quadi remained arrogant, but, while they might steal, they seldom committed worse outrages.
Now, when things didn't seem to be going so well for the Germans farther south, the situation in Carnuntum turned nasty again. People whispered of robbery and rape. They hinted of even worse.
And one morning, as Nicole made her way to market, she turned a corner and stumbled over a corpse. There wasn't much doubt the man was dead. Drunks didn't lie in that boneless stillness, in a clotted pool of blood. Nor would a drunk have worn a ragged tunic rent with crisp, new, two-inch slashes. Those weren't knife wounds. Those had been made by a sword. Blood had darkened the tunic almost to black; its original color, as near as she could see, had been blue.
Until she came to Carnuntum, Nicole hadn't realized how much blood a man's body held: one more lesson she would sooner not have learned. Flies congregated in a buzzing cloud. One walked leisurely along a gash that laid open the corpse's cheek, exposing the teeth in a ghastly grin.
Nicole shuddered convulsively and gulped hard. She would not—she would not—vomit all over the street. She wheeled blindly and ran, not caring what anyone thought, wanting only to be back in the safety of her own four walls.
When she'd shut herself inside them and barred the door, and never mind that it was broad daylight, Nicole dropped down to the nearest stool and hugged herself till she stopped shivering and trying to gag. She ignored Julia's wide-eyed stare and Lucius' startled, “Mother! What happened? What—?” She made herself think, and think clearly.
The man couldn't have been dead for long. If she'd turned that corner a few minutes earlier, would someone else have gasped in horror at discovering her dead body there?
Wrong place at the wrong time,
she thought. That could have been the epitaph for most of the senseless slayings in Los Angeles.
It might be her own epitaph, for the matter of that. No one had ever been in a wronger place, or in a wronger time.
But wherever and whenever she was, and however right or wrong that was, she had to live. She had to leave the tavern in search of food, but that wasn't all she had to go
out for. If it had been, she would have stayed at home and sent Julia in her place. No; she had to go out to look for the plaque of Liber and Libera, the one and only plaque that had brought her to Carnuntum. That was no errand she could pass on to Julia. No matter what it cost her to set foot outside that door each day, for the plaque, she did it.

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