Household Gods (53 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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The kids shut up, which was exactly what she'd wanted, and Brigomarus said, “Oh. Well then. I guess there's nothing to worry about, though he looks a little crazy to me. Staring at you like that—you'd think he had designs on you.”
Damn him, just when she'd thought he'd leave well enough alone, he had to turn into the overprotective brother. He was supposed to be at odds with her; not butting into her life as if he had every right to do it.
She couldn't even speak in the young Christian's defense. It was too dangerous—for him and for her. And, she had to
admit, he did look a little crazy. “He hasn't given me any trouble,” she said rather lamely.
“Good.” Brigomarus started to turn away, then hesitated. “Stay well. If you don't, send your slave—”
“My freedwoman,” Nicole said sharply.
He made a sour face. “Your freedwoman. Send your
freedwoman
to me or to Ila or Tabica. We'll do what we can for you, in spite of everything.”
They would, too, though they'd make her pay in guilt for every minute. Still—after all, and however reluctantly, he meant well. She thanked him, which he took as no less than his due, and gathered up Lucius and Aurelia. “Come on, chicks. We've got a tavern to run.”
Julia had things well in hand. She also had a mark on the side of her neck, which Nicole knew hadn't been there when she took the children to the funeral. Nicole couldn't decide whether to ream the woman out or to burst into laughter. In the end, she didn't quite do either. She was disappointed to discover that she couldn't find a precise Latin equivalent for hickey.
Business—hers, if not Julia's—was slow. People were staying away from taverns for fear of catching the pestilence, or else were too sick to leave their beds. Whichever it was, the place wasn't bringing in much in the way of cash.
“We're not using so much, either,” Julia said when Nicole commented on it—complained, really, if she wanted to be honest. “A lot of what we sell won't go stale. It will keep till things pick up again.”
Nicole nodded. That was true—if things ever did decide to improve again.
She spent much of the afternoon grinding flour, until her shoulder started grinding, too. She was stockpiling, figuring to get ahead of the game; then she could have a few relatively easy days later on. The prospect of a break of any kind, relatively easy days, made her work all the harder. She hadn't had much time off since she came to Carnuntum.
Deafened by the gritty rumble of the quern, she didn't notice the man who came into the tavern until he rapped the
table at which he was sitting. She put on her company face, the one she reserved for customers, with a smile still bright after the long slow day—until she recognized the eyes that lifted to meet hers. Her smile evaporated. “Oh,” she said. “It's you.”
“Yes, Mistress Umma.” The young Christian smiled. “It is I.” The smile was a little wider than it might have been; his eyes glittered even in the gloom of the tavern. Nicole had seen smiles like that on Hare Krishnas at airports, on Jehovah's Witnesses who came to the door. The people behind the smiles were usually harmless, but …
She did her best to hide her unease. “What can I get you?” she asked him.
“Bread and wine,” he answered. He was watching her closely—too closely. He noticed how she hesitated on hearing those words. His smile widened. There was triumph in it. “You know the meaning of bread and wine?”
“What if I do?” she said roughly.
“Then you are one of us,” he answered. “You are one of those who know the name of Jesus Christ. You are one of those who know about his Passion, through which we too are resurrected. You are one of those who know judgment is coming for everyone, for even the heavenly hosts, the cherubim and seraphim, if they have no faith in the blood of Christ.”
“What if I do?” Nicole repeated. The young man wasn't saying anything she hadn't heard in church and in Sunday school. And yet, there, the world to come had been mentioned, but it hadn't been at the heart of all her lessons. This world, and living one's life in clean and godly fashion, had counted for more.
Living in the material world had been easy in the United States. Nicole hadn't thought so at the time, but now she had a basis of comparison. Titus Calidius Severus had had a point, after all. When times were good, this world was easier to live in, and the next seemed distant, irrelevant.
Times weren't good now, and they were getting worse. And if the young Christian eating bread and drinking wine
in her tavern wasn't a wild-eyed fanatic, Nicole didn't know what he could possibly be. “Do not cleave to those who believe not, Umma, even if they be of your own flesh and blood,” he said with quivering urgency. “Do not, I beg you in the name of the risen God. They go to torment eternal. This pestilence is the sword of God. When you are close to the sword, you are close to God. When you are surrounded by lions, you are close to God. Soon you will meet him face to face.”
“How about when you're writing things on the wall?” Nicole inquired acidly. “Did you want to be surrounded by lions then? You should have stayed and let someone catch you.”
His head drooped. When it came up again, to her astonishment there were tears on his cheeks. “My body was weak,” he whispered. “My spirit was weak. Here and now, as I speak in life, I should yearn for death with a lover's passion. I want to eat the bread of God, the flesh of Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, which is love undying. I pray to be found worthy of martyrdom. And so,” he said, leaning toward her, trembling again with the zeal of the proselyte, “should you.”
His voice, his manner, were compelling. He believed with his whole heart and soul that every word was the absolute truth.
Gospel truth
, she thought in a kind of dim alarm. And he was determined that Nicole should believe as he did, should take as little notice of this life as she could, the sooner and the better to get on with the next one.
He scared the hell out of her. If somebody gave him the keys to a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil, maybe he wouldn't push the button when the time came—he had, after all, run from her. But maybe he
would,
too, if he nerved himself first. Even the possibility was terrifying.
Carefully, she said, “You owe me three
asses.”
He looked so astonished, she almost laughed in his face. It took him several tries, and a fair bit of spluttering, before he could say, “You would put the coin of Caesar ahead of the salvation of your soul?”
“Don't you fret about my soul,” she said. “That's no one's business but my own.”
The Christian's astonishment changed in tone and intensity. Twentieth-century individualism hit people here hard …
the way wine hits people who aren't used to drinking,
Nicole thought with experience she hadn't had, or wanted, before she came to Carnuntum. She took a deep breath and drove the point home. “And, since my soul is still in my body, I need those three asses.”
Maybe the look in his eyes was pity and love. It seemed a lot more like outrage. He got up, dug in the leather pouch he wore on his belt, found three copper coins, and slammed them down on the tabletop. The tavern's earthen floor didn't help him much when it came to stamping noisily out, but he gave it his best shot. His back was as straight—and as stiff—as a redwood.
Julia came in from the market just after he'd flung himself out the door, carrying a jarful of raisins and a bunch of green onions. “What was bothering
him?”
she wanted to know.
Nicole shrugged as casually as she could manage. “Oh,” she said, “just another dissatisfied customer.”
Julia raised an eyebrow, but mercifully didn't ask questions. Sometimes, Nicole reflected with a twinge of residual guilt, it wasn't too inconvenient that Julia had been a slave. Slaves learned, better and faster than most, when it didn't pay to be curious.
 
Lazy in the afterglow, Nicole sprawled next to and on Titus Calidius Severus. Her head lay on his chest, one arm stretched across his belly, one thigh draped over him so the rest of her leg lay between his. She was, emphatically, a satisfied customer.
“It's good with you,” she said, and raised her hand to stroke his cheek. In the light of the one lamp on the chest of drawers, the arm's shadow leaped and swooped.
His own free arm slid slowly along her flank, tracing the smooth, economical curves of Umma's body. One corner of Nicole's mouth twisted. In Los Angeles, this body would
have been sleek. Here, it was skinny. Just one more example of
you can't win no matter how hard you try
syndrome.
“You make me a happy man,” he said, and, as if to prove it, tilted her face up and kissed her. He wasn't after a second round. He was just … enjoying himself. So, for that matter, was she. He was good in bed, and she didn't think she was too bad there either; but more than that, they liked one another. They took pleasure in each other's company.
Idly, she wondered why she'd been lucky enough to find a good lover when so little in the rest of Carnuntum had turned out to be any good at all. Polluted water, lead everywhere, slavery, brutality, sexism, appalling notions of medicine—and, in the middle of all that, as good a lover as any she'd ever known in the United States. She pondered Calidius' shadowed face the way a D.A. pondered a piece of evidence that didn't fit a pattern.
And then, after a moment, it did, or she thought it did. In their waterworks, in their pottery glazes, in their political and legal institutions, in what their doctors knew—in all those things and more, the Romans lacked eighteen hundred years of collective experience she'd taken for granted. She'd had no idea how much she'd taken it for granted, either, till she'd had her face rubbed in it.
But sex wasn't something that tended to improve through collective experience. It was something everybody learned for herself or himself over the course of a lifetime. It might get more athletic, it might get more esoteric—she remembered some rather interesting nights when she was in law school, when she and a certain young man had worked their way through the greatest hits of the
Kama Sutra
—but when it came down to it, it could be just as good in plain vanilla as in the fanciest flavor you could imagine. Maybe that meant Alley Oop the caveman had been able to keep Mrs. Oop happy, too. For Mrs. Oop's sake, Nicole hoped so.
She laughed a little. The exhalation stirred the hair on Calidius Severus' chest. He raised an eyebrow. “What's funny?”
“I think I've figured out why you're so good,” she answered.
“And that's funny?” He snorted. “You didn't need to go and do any figuring for that. I could have told you: it's the company I keep.”
Nobody had ever said anything remotely like that to her. Frank certainly hadn't. Most of the men she'd dated since Frank had been too busy thinking about either themselves or their chances of getting laid to imagine saying such a thing. For a stretching instant, she wanted to cry. Then she wanted something else. She was amazed to discover how much she wanted it.
Well,
she thought,
aphrodisiacs are where you find them.
Getting what else she wanted took considerable effort, but, in the end, it turned out to be effort well spent. She was, she thought, pretty well spent herself. So was Titus Calidius Severus. He peered up at her while she still sat astride him. “You can be my jockey any day,” he said.
She reached down to stroke his cheek again. Her hand lingered, savoring the crispness of his beard and the smoothness of the cheek above it, then paused. Almost of itself, it went to his forehead. “You're warm,” she said in sudden sharp suspicion. No afterglow this time; alarm killed it even though he still nestled, shrinking, inside her.
He laughed and made light of it: “After what we've been doing? You'd best believe I'm warm.” Without warning, he pinched her. She jerked and squeaked. He flopped out of her.
She let him jolly and cajole her as he got into his tunic and sandals. But she knew the sweaty feel of skin after love; that was how her own skin felt now. He hadn't felt like that. He'd been warm and dry, the way Kimberley and Justin sometimes were before they came down with something. If you came down with something in Carnuntum now …
“I'm fine,” he said downstairs in the doorway, as they embraced. They'd taken to doing that, safe enough in the shadow of the entrance, but this night or very early morning, it lasted a little longer, and held a little tighter. He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her. “Fine.
See? Fit as can be, and ready to whip my weight in lions.”
He still felt warm, or Nicole thought he did. She wasn't quite sure. Maybe she was a little warm herself. Or maybe she was letting her imagination and her fear run away with her. She hoped so.
Titus Calidius Severus coughed sharply, several times, as he crossed the street. When he got back to his own door, he looked over his shoulder. Nicole stared at the dim white smudge of his face in the dawn. His eyes were almost preternaturally dark. He shook his head and went inside. His step had a jaunty bounce to it, as if to prove to her that there was nothing wrong with him. No, nothing at all.

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