Household Gods (71 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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For all her hunting, she never found it. She still gave Liber and Libera their daily libation of wine, when she had any, on the principle that it couldn't hurt and might help.
And one day, when she'd come home with a bag of mealy apples and a string of little bony fish, and no votive image, she found the plaque on the bar, broken in half and shedding bits on the scrubbed surface. Julia stood over it with exactly the same look of guilt and horror and welling tears as Kimberley might have had if she'd spilled her milk all over the living-room carpet.
This wasn't just spilled milk. Nicole sucked in a breath. She had no idea what she was going to say. She wasn't going to scream. She promised herself that.
Julia spoke before Nicole could begin, a rapid rush of words. “Mistress, I'm sorry, so sorry, I picked it up to dust it, and it slipped out of my hand, and it broke. I'll pay you for it, get you a new one. Just take it out of my wages.”
While she babbled on, Nicole had calmed down considerably. She picked up the two largest pieces and weighed them in her hands. Liber stared blandly at her out of one, Libera out of the other. If they were dismayed to be so abruptly separated, they weren't about to show it.
“Don't worry about it,” she said to Julia, and she meant it. “It's not as if it were any great relic. It wasn't even working very well—the god and goddess weren't doing much for us, were they?”
“I don't know,” Julia said. She'd calmed down, too, with the quickness of a child or a slave, now she knew she wasn't in trouble for breaking her mistress' plaque. “Things could be better for us, but they could be a lot worse, too. Remember Antonina.”
“I'm not likely to forget Antonina,” Nicole said, a little
coldly. She held onto the coldness. It kept her calm. “Things have been getting uglier lately. I think it's time to splash ourselves again with Calidius Severus' perfume.”
Julia made a face. “Oh, do we have to? I'll never get any extra sesterces for the cash box if we do.”
“Would you rather the Germans took it without paying for it?”
“No!” Julia said, as if by reflex. Then, as thought caught up with instinct: “I don't want to give the Germans anything.”
“Of course you don't,” Nicole said. “If you don't want to give it to them, they have no business taking it.”
Julia thought about that, long and visibly hard. Then she nodded.
“Nobody
has any business taking it, if I say no.”
Nicole's smile was so wide and so rusty, it actually hurt. Maybe after all, in spite of everything, she was managing to do a little consciousness-raising.
 
Brigomarus came to visit a day or two later, as he made a habit of doing. He stopped inside the door, sniffed and grimaced. “You're visiting the dyer's shop again,” he said. Nicole wondered if he meant to sound quite so accusatory.
“The time seemed ripe,” she answered calmly.
Umma's brother spat in disgust. “Ripe's the word, and no mistake.”
“That's bad,” Nicole said. “Very bad.”
He grinned at her. “You started it.”
“I did, didn't I?”
They smiled at one another. Somehow, over the weeks and months, they'd become, maybe not friends, but definitely not adversaries. They got along. They could laugh together. It wasn't bad, as sibling relationships went.
Nicole's smile died first. “So,” Brigomarus said, “tell me what got you going this time.”
She told him bluntly about the murdered man in the street. Brigomarus nodded, all laughter gone. “From what I'm hearing, he wasn't the only one. In fact, I came here to warn you
to stay inside as much as you can for a while. But you seem to be a step ahead of me.”
“Maybe not,” Nicole said. “What have you heard?”
“Not a whole lot,” he answered somberly, “but none of it's good. The Germans are screaming at me—they're screaming at everybody. More shields, more arrowheads, more blades, more spearpoints, more everything.”
“And I bet they want it all by yesterday, too,” Nicole said.
“By yest—” Brigomarus had to pause and work that one out. However tired a joke it was in English, it must have been new in Latin. He regarded her in dawning admiration. “That's just when they want it, by the gods. You've had a way of coming out with things lately, haven't you?”
“I don't know,” Nicole said with a shrug that wasn't nearly as innocent as it looked. “Have I?” Before Umma's brother could dig her in any deeper, she hurried them both back to the subject at hand: “What else do you know? How badly is the war going for them? Do they talk about it?”
“Not in any language a civilized man can understand. They grunt and bark like a herd of hungry pigs. But even when they're babbling among themselves, the names of towns don't change that much. The past few days, they've been talking about Savaria and Scarabantia—and those aren't that far down the road from Carnuntum. If the Emperor is coming this way, he'll be here before too long.”
The Emperor.
Nicole had hardly given a thought to him since she came to Carnuntum. His words didn't dominate TV, radio, the papers, and the newsmagazines, as an American President's did. There were no media for the Roman Emperor to dominate. If it hadn't been for his coins, she wouldn't even have known what he looked like, or what his name was. Marcus, Marcus Aurelius. According to the coins, he was a middle-aged man with a beaky nose, a receding chin a beard couldn't quite hide, and curly hair that looked as if it needed brushing.
All of which told her exactly nothing. People didn't talk about him at all, or seem to think about him much, either. Brigo certainly didn't sound awed at the prospect of an imperial
visit. “Is he coming himself,” she asked, “or is it just some general leading the army in his name?”
“From what I've heard, he's leading his own army,” Brigomarus said. “He took the field himself farther west, I know that. Whether he'll beat the cursed Marcomanni and Quadi and come this far—there's no way anyone can know that.”
“I hope he does,” Nicole said fervently.
Brigomarus rolled his eyes. “Oh, by the gods, don't we all,” he said. “I can't think of anybody in Carnuntum who's done well under the Germans. Except …”
When he didn't go on, Nicole thumped him on the arm. “Come on—who?”
“The undertakers,” he answered promptly—and hastily threw up a hand. “Don't throw that cup at me! They got more work than they deserved during the pestilence. The Germans gave them even more. They're getting cursed rich.”
“Maybe they are,” Nicole said, “but I don't expect they'll cry too hard when the Germans go.”
She wouldn't be sorry to see them go, either—preferably out on their ears. She wouldn't be sorry, if she was perfectly honest with herself, to see the lot of them killed. She'd been pretty young when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. When she thought about it, she realized how much the Vietnam War had colored her attitude toward war in general. She'd thought the Gulf War a waste of money and men, fought mostly over oil—never mind the rhetoric about democracy and freedom. But now, from the middle of a war, she didn't just remember how rapturously the people of Kuwait had welcomed the soldiers who drove out the Iraqis. She understood right down to the bone why the Kuwaitis had been so overjoyed. She was ready—more than ready—to plant a big fat kiss on the first Roman legionary who came tramping up the street. And if there was blood on his sword, all the better.
Brigomarus slapped the bar in front of her, startling her back into herself. “You seem to have things here pretty much in hand. How are you fixed for food?”
“Not too bad,” she said, which was only a slight exaggeration.
“We're hungry, but we aren't—quite—starving. And you, Brigo? If you need help, we can spare a little.” She couldn't, not really, but neither was she—quite—on the edge.
Umma's brother shook his head. “No, thank you, we don't need anything. I'm hungrier than I ever wanted to be, but I'm not dying of it.”
She drew a breath and nodded. She was relieved, there was no point in denying it. Every scrap she didn't share was that much more for Lucius and Julia and herself. “We'll just keep our heads down and hang on, and wait till the Emperor comes.”
Till the Emperor comes.
It sounded like a fairy tale she might have read to Kimberley, not one of the real, old, grim ones, but one of the sugar-coated, saccharine-overloaded, sweetness-and-light fables that were deemed safe for impressionable young children. But there was nothing either sweet or harmless about Carnuntum. The little blue birds would have gone into somebody's pot, and the pretty butterflies been trampled underfoot by a horde of marching Germans. It would take more than a pastel prince to rescue Carnuntum. It would take an emperor.
Nicole hoped, a little crazily, that he didn't try to buy himself any new clothes. “I hope he comes soon,” she said.
“So do I,” Brigomarus answered. “So does everybody—except the Quadi and the Marcomanni. And they're the ones with the most to say about when he gets here, or if he gets here at all.”
 
More and more Germans in filthy bandages prowled the streets of Carnuntum. Fewer and fewer peasants brought in produce from the villages and farms around the city. Carnuntum might have been the only place where they could get money for it, but Carnuntum was also the place where they were most likely to be robbed and killed. They didn't need any sort of cost/benefit analysis to draw the appropriate conclusion. They stayed away. And Carnuntum went hungry.
One who did dare the market square brought news of a
battle outside Scarabantia. “Who won?” Nicole demanded in the middle of trying to haggle down the price of his prunes.
He wasn't inclined to haggle. Intellectually, Nicole understood that: if she didn't feel like paying his price, some other hungry citizen would. It infuriated her even so. He had a lot of damn nerve, lining the pockets he didn't wear with profits made from hunger. He also wasn't inclined to answer her question in a hurry. He reminded her of a farmer from downstate Indiana, sparing of words and suspicious of everybody he hadn't known since he was four years old.
“Who won?” she repeated, wishing she could appeal to a judge to get an answer out of the reluctant witness.
“Cursed lot of dead on both sides,” he answered at last, which made her want to feed him all his prunes at once—if she couldn't loosen up one end, she'd damned well loosen up the other. Then, grudgingly, he let drop a kernel of information: “Romans are still coming north.”
Nicole let out a long sigh of relief. “Why don't you sound happier about it?” she asked. “There aren't any Germans around to hear you.” Even as she spoke, she looked about to make sure she was right: the age-old glance of the occupied, checking to see that the occupiers were busy elsewhere.
The farmer shrugged. “I'm making good money these days. And the Marcomanni and Quadi haven't got the faintest notion what taxes are: haven't had to pay 'em an
as
on my land or my crop. You can bet it won't be like that when the usual pack of clerks is back in the saddle.”
That he was surely right didn't make his attitude any more appealing. Nicole had to remind herself she wasn't likely to improve his outlook by tearing him limb from limb, strictly rhetorically of course. Nor was she inclined to call a German to do it for her. And she needed those prunes. Reluctantly, she shelled out ten times what she reckoned they were worth, raked them into her sack, and left him to his prosperity.
Hunger had long since taken Lucius past the point where he turned up his nose at anything even vaguely resembling food. He would have gobbled all the prunes if Nicole had given him even half a chance. She snatched the bag out of
his greedy fingers and stowed it safe behind her. “Oh, no, you don't! Julia and I get to have some, too. Do you want to spend the whole night squatting over a pot because you made a pig of yourself?”
Lucius scowled and stamped his foot. “I don't care. I want to eat. I'm all empty inside!”
“We all are,” Nicole said. Not that he cared: he was a child. To children, nothing mattered but the moment. She tried to console him, at least a little. “Maybe we won't be hungry much longer. The man who sold me the prunes said the Romans won a battle outside of Scarabantia.”
“Outside Scarabantia?” Julia echoed. “That isn't very far away at all. The Emperor could be here in just a few days.” Her face had been bright with hope, but all at once it fell. “I hope the Germans don't try to stand siege here. They might hold off the legions for weeks, maybe even months.”
“Siege?” That hadn't occurred to Nicole. She wished it hadn't occurred to Julia, either: now they both had something to gnaw their empty bellies over. “God, I hope not, too.” She tried to look on the bright side, if there was such a thing: “We didn't keep out the Marcomanni and Quadi for very long. Maybe they won't be able to hold off the legions, either.”

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