Household Gods (72 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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“I hope you're right.” But Julia didn't sound convinced. “We didn't have much of a garrison here, and the Germans took us half by surprise. The legions won't be so lucky. The Germans will be expecting them—and there are an awful lot of Germans in Carnuntum.”
That made a depressing amount of sense. Nicole stared blankly at Lucius' outstretched hand, blinked, doled out a handful of prunes. He might be greedy about the whole bag, but he'd learned how to eat his prize once he won it: piece by piece, savoring it, making it last. When he'd got the last scrap of flavor out of the first one, he spat the pit on the floor and said, “If it is a siege, the barbarians will keep all the food for themselves. We'll starve.”
“You aren't supposed to understand that much this young,” Nicole said. He shrugged, already halfway through
his second prune. She provided the answer he wasn't about to. In this world, yes, he had to understand that much. Otherwise he wouldn't survive. She was the one who was lacking here. Her capacity for estimating man's inhumanity to man had proved time and again that it wasn't up to, or down to, dealing with the second century. Of course the Germans would lay hold of all the food they could—hadn't they done it already? Of course they would treat the people of Carnuntum, the people who actually belonged in the city, as expendable. Yes, it made perfect sense. The Serbs in Bosnia wouldn't have needed it spelled out for them.
Nicole glanced at the spot behind the bar where, once, the plaque of Liber and Libera had stood. Don't
you see?
she said in her mind.
I'm too … civilized to live in this time.
Even if the plaque had still been there, she wouldn't have got any response. She was bitterly certain of that. She'd made her bed. It was hard and lumpy and uncomfortable, with scratchy blankets and vermin uncounted. She had to lie in it. The god and goddess weren't listening.
She took a prune out of the bag and popped it into her mouth. It was sweet and good. She had to make the best of things here. She chewed the flesh off the pit, and very carefully, too; and not only because she wanted to savor the taste. The last thing she wanted was to bite down too hard and break another tooth. That would mean, sooner or later, another visit to Terentianus. One of those was enough to last her two lifetimes, and then some.
 
Food was scarce, but at least, as people were inclined to remark, there was plenty of water. That wasn't always the case in a siege, Nicole had gathered.
She was just on her way out the door, amphora in hand, headed for the fountain two blocks over, when she nearly collided with Brigomarus. He was in a fair hurry, and he had something tucked under his arm. “What's that?” Nicole wanted to know, once they'd stopped laughing at the comedy of errors: each leaping back with a little shriek, then doing
the “Which way do I go next?” dance till they both stopped and stared at each other.
“What's this?” Brigomarus brought the cloth-wrapped oblong out from under his arm, grunting a bit: it was heavy for its size. “It's a present for you.”
“Really? For me?” Nicole couldn't clap her hands: they were full of amphora. “Show me!”
He obligingly let slip the wrapping and held it for her to see.
She felt the handles of the amphora slipping through her fingers. She felt them, but she couldn't do a thing about it. The amphora struck the rammed-earth floor and went instantly from pot to potsherds. She didn't care. She didn't care at all.
“By the gods, it's not such a big thing as that,” Brigomarus said, more than a little taken aback. “I happened to notice you'd lost the other one you had up here, and so I thought I'd—”
Nicole hardly heard him.
“Where did you get that?”
she whispered.
“This?” Brigomarus shrugged. “Stonecutter named … what was his name? Celer, that was it. Pestilence got him, poor fellow. I bought it … oh, must have been toward the end of spring last year, I guess. So when I saw you didn't have yours up anymore, then Julia told me what happened to it, I thought I'd bring you this one to take its—”
He didn't get to finish the sentence. Nicole threw her arms around him, being very, very careful of the plaque, and kissed him soundly. There was nothing sisterly about it. When she let him go, he was red from the neck of his tunic all the way up to his hairline. She didn't care about that, either. With great delicacy, she took the plaque of Liber and Libera from him.
It was
the
plaque. She recognized it instantly. The carving was sharper and crisper than it had been when the limestone slab sat on her nightstand. Of course it would be. The plaque was much younger than it had been then.
When had Brigomarus bought it? Toward the end of
spring last year, he'd said. She didn't know—she didn't have any way to discover—exactly when he'd bought it, exactly when Celer had finished it, but she would have bet it was right about the time when she'd taken up residence in Umma's body. No wonder she hadn't been able to find it till now. Brigo had had it all along. Had the gods intended that? Had they cared enough to hide it, effectively, in plain sight?
“It's—perfect!” she said. “Absolutely perfect.”
“I'm glad you think so.” Brigomarus still sounded bewildered. Nicole didn't blame him. But there was no way she was going to enlighten him. She was only half crazy.
“I don't just think so. I know so.” Nicole hoped she did. To be wrong now, to be disappointed again … She didn't want to think about that. If this plaque, the very same, the self-same one that had brought her here, couldn't get her back to West Hills, nothing could. If nothing could … No. She
wasn't
thinking about that.
Brigomarus coughed a time or two. Nicole's stomach clenched—legacy of the pestilence. But no, it was just a catch in his throat, or maybe a touch of a cold. “There's another reason I came, too,” he said, “and look, I almost forgot. I heard it from a German who came in screaming for a shield. The Emperor and the army are on their way. They'll be here any day. The barbarians are yelling at the top of their lungs for something, anything to help them drive the Romans back.”
“Are they?” Nicole was listening with only half an ear. Her eyes kept coming back to the stone faces of the god and goddess. Those carven lips had kissed her palm in promise. Those bland and heedless faces had turned on her, and smiled, and granted her prayer.
It was as if she couldn't keep two purposes in mind at once. Either she was surviving in this world, devoting every scrap of her attention to it, or she was concentrating totally on getting out of it. Now that she had the key—please, god and goddess, let it be the key—there was no room in her for anything else.
Those lips had kissed her palm well over a year ago, as
Umma's body reckoned time. What had happened to
her
body? How long had it been there? Had Umma been struggling to survive there as Nicole struggled to survive here? Ye gods, a Roman woman who couldn't even read, trying to cope with all the complexities of life in Los Angeles—two minutes of that and they'd lock her away. Nicole had survived because life
was
simpler here, if orders of magnitude harder. The things she needed to cope with, she'd at least dimly heard of. What could Umma have made of the automobile, the telephone, the microwave oven?
Or—and maybe worse—what if Umma hadn't been there at all? What if there was nobody home? Would Nicole leap forward in time, only to find that there was nothing there, no body to move into? What if she was—if she was—
She wasn't dead. She
wasn't.
She caressed the votive plaque with fingers that shook a little. She had to try. No matter what waited for her, it had to be better than what faced her here.
Brigomarus left, still baffled that his sister should be so delighted with his present and hardly seem interested at all in the news he'd brought. There was no way he could understand that the votive plaque was the best, the greatest news she'd ever wanted.
Nicole set it where the other one had been. She found a little wine—dregs, to be honest—in the bottom of one of the jars set into the bar, and offered it to the god and goddess. Then and only then did she get around to picking up the pieces of the broken amphora, finding another one, and going out and lugging back water.
Julia had been across the street in the fuller and dyer's shop when Brigomarus came by. She was back by the time Nicole brought in the jar of water. Nicole didn't ask what, if anything, Julia had been doing with Gaius Calidius Severus. It was none of her business.
The freedwoman was leaning on the bar, chin in hands, contemplating the plaque. When Nicole came in she rolled an eye at her and asked, “Where'd you get that, Mistress?”
“Brigo brought it,” Nicole answered. “Didn't he tell you?
He said you told him how the other one got broken.”
“Oh,” Julia said with a hunch of the shoulders. “Well. I forgot about that.” Had she? Nicole wondered. And wondered something else, too: something that was really rather reprehensible. Oh, surely not. Julia sold herself to strangers, but when it came to people she knew, she tended to either keep a roster of regulars or, as with young Calidius Severus, give it away for free. No, she was just remembering that she'd broken the first plaque, and indulging in a bit of guilt.
She came out of it soon enough. “That was nice of him,” she said. She tilted her head and squinted. “If you don't mind me saying so, I think it's a nicer carving job than the one we had before.”
“I think so, too,” Nicole said. And if she didn't mean quite the same by that as Julia did, then Julia didn't need to know it.
That night before she went to sleep, she begged Liber and Libera to send her back to California, back to the twentieth century. She was reaching them—she was. The way seemed open, as it hadn't before. She drifted off with a smile on her face.
She woke … in Carnuntum.
 
 
G
ETTING UP WITH HER belly empty and her scalp itching and her skin dark with soot was harder than it had ever been before. She stared around the bare little bedroom, and dismay changed rapidly into unabashed loathing. For the first time in a very long while, she wondered if she'd lost her mind.
She'd been persisting in the conviction that Carnuntum was the hallucination. But—what if it wasn't? What if it was real, and West Hills a dream? Had she really known frozen
food and printed books and automobiles and air conditioning and computers and airplanes and the United States Constitution? Or had she been Umma all along, gone round the bend for a while, and now at last begun to recover?
“I am Nicole Gunther-Perrin,” she said in quiet but impassioned English, “and I
will
go back to California.” She clenched her work-battered hand into a fist and slammed it down onto the thin mattress. “I
will.
But not today, God damn it.”
She believed that. She had to believe it. If she didn't … she'd have to come to terms with staying in Carnuntum for Marcomanni and Quadi holding the city and the Roman legions likely to be knocking on the door any minute now, the rest of her life probably wouldn't be measured in decades. Days, more likely. Or hours.
“God be thanked for small mercies,” she muttered.
She trudged downstairs to a meager breakfast of barley bread that sat like a brick in her stomach—but a small brick, oh, a very small brick. Julia was already up and gone, as far as she could tell. Lucius was nowhere to be seen. Out playing with the neighborhood kids, she had to hope. She raided the cash box and went out to see what she could find to keep herself and Lucius and Julia eating for another day or two, or maybe just for another meal.
Few Germans roamed the street so early. They didn't have to worry about making a living; they lived off everyone else's labor. They could sleep late—or later, anyhow, since no one here moved too far out of rhythm with the sun. For that reason, the early morning was a good time to hit the market square, if anyone happened to have anything out for sale.
Nicole felt like clapping her hands when she saw not one but two fishermen setting out a gleaming array of trout and carp. She wasn't the only one buying, but there weren't so many people there that they started frenziedly bidding against one another, as she'd seen happen once or twice. She paid an arm, but managed to keep the leg in reserve for a jar of wine a farmer had brought into Carnuntum. It was the last
one he had left. “Glad to be rid of it,” he said. “Now I'm going to get out of town while the getting's good.”
That struck Nicole as eminently sensible; what hadn't made a lot of sense was his coming into town in the first place. She got out of the market while the getting was good, too, and the gods were kind. The streets were still all but deserted. She made it back to the tavern unmolested, without even the usual quota of whistles and catcalls from passing Germans.
Julia had been to the baths: she was clean and relatively fresh. Nicole made a mental note to go later, if the quiet continued. Julia regarded Nicole's purchases dubiously. “That's a lot of fish, Mistress,” she said. Then she shrugged. “Well, we'll stuff ourselves like force-fed geese, because it won't keep long. And then we'll moan and groan about how full we are—and then we'll be empty again.”
“So we will,” Nicole agreed. “But being full for even a little while feels good.”
“It certainly does,” Julia said, in a tone and with an expression that made it plain she was not talking about food. Nicole snorted. Julia looked altogether unabashed. Nothing Nicole had ever done could make her feel that her way of dealing with men—and striking deals with them—was wrong.
It worked for her. In times like these, that meant something.
More power to her,
Nicole thought, with a little wrench of the gut. Paradigm shift. That was never either easy or painless.
Baked fish and a quarter of a small loaf of barley bread did not make for a balanced diet, but Nicole went to bed without the feeling that, if she had a tapeworm, it was about to sue for lack of proper maintenance. She'd had that feeling too often lately. Now that she was without it for a little while, she wasted very little time worrying about proper nutrition. Any nutrition at all was enough to carry on with.
When the sun rose the next morning, the Marcomanni and Quadi rose with it. So did the rest of Carnuntum; Nicole would not have been surprised to learn that the braying of
the Germans' horns had roused the recently dead from the graveyard outside the walls. It sounded like an elephant being flayed with a dull pocketknife.
The street outside the tavern was hardly quieter. Germans ran in packs down the street, swords in hand, baggy trousers flapping against their legs, shouting back and forth in their guttural dialects. Nicole had picked up a few words—enough to be quite clear on what they were yelling about: “The Romans are coming! The Romans are coming!”
One if by land, two if by the Danube,
she thought dizzily. She leaned on the window frame for a moment, letting the wan sun warm her face. It would cloud up later, she suspected. It almost always did.
She dressed with a little more than her usual care, and went downstairs to a breakfast of cold fish. Julia and Lucius were not far behind her. She was interested to note that Julia was also a bit cleaner than usual, though Lucius was his disheveled small-boy self.
They didn't open the tavern, or even unbar the door. “With any luck at all, this will be over soon,” Nicole said. She glanced at the image—
the
image—of Liber and Libera.
If you won't send me home, will you at least let me live as good a life here as I can?
A prayer wasn't supposed to be reproachful, but she didn't care. They'd brought her here. They could live with the consequences.
In the beginning, the second battle for Carnuntum sounded very much like the first. The shouts from the walls were in German now and not in Latin, but the tones of anger, desperation, rage, even wild glee, were much the same.
But after a while, as the morning went on and the sun began to play hide-and-seek with the gathering clouds, a new sound brought Nicole bolt upright. It sounded like the beating of an enormous heart, deep and ponderously slow.
Lucius looked up excitedly from the board game he was playing with Julia. “Battering ram! That'll do it for the gate. Then—in come the legions. March! March! March!”
He marched himself all the way upstairs to fetch his
sword, and all the way back down and around the room, leaping and spinning and stabbing with it, till Nicole ducked in and caught him and held him fast. He was hot and sweaty and breathing in gulps. And he'd forgotten completely how little use his wooden blade had been against the Germans.
Nicole's grip slackened. He wriggled free, still panting, but he'd calmed down enough to sit on a bench conveniently near the door.
He didn't go back to his game, which he'd been losing anyway. Quietly Julia stowed the pieces inside the board and put it away, and sat with folded hands, waiting with a slave's patience for whatever was going to come.
The Romans kept knocking on the door to Carnuntum. A second ram joined the first, striking a counterpoint from another gate. With each crashing thud, Nicole thought surely it would break through.
But the gates had been built strong, nor did they care who tried to break them. They held for the whole of that day, until the pounding became as monotonous as a migraine, as relentless as the pulse of Nicole's own heart in her ears.
Lucius alternated between playing legionary and waiting for the real legionaries to come marching down the street. At length, Nicole prevailed on him to go upstairs with Julia and, if not sleep, then at least get off her nerves.
She sat where she'd been for most of the day. If she'd had a stack of magazines to read, she'd have been too twitchy to bother with them. She contemplated a big job, a job that would keep her too busy to think, but even if she'd had tools to sand down and refinish the tables, she'd never get it done before dark. She'd have to ask Brigo next time he came by, whether she could borrow any—for that matter, whether he'd like to help. He'd might surprise her by agreeing to it.
Daylight faded, and the pounding went on. Nicole circled the room, coming to a halt in front of the votive plaque. Liber and Libera regarded her with serene complacency. “All right,” Nicole said to them, rather defiantly, in English. “Maybe you wanted me to see the Romans take back Carnuntum. Maybe I was supposed to see that, sometimes, the
good guys win.” She glowered at them. “With all due respect, I'd sooner have taken that on faith, and gone home.”
The god and goddess didn't move, or say a word. A little wear and tear aside, they looked just as they had when their plaque had stood on her nightstand in clean, quiet, safe West Hills. Nicole looked around at this filthy tavern in a barbarian-held town taken from an empire that reckoned itself civilized only because everything around it was so absolutely barbaric. She sighed deeply, turned her back on the heedless divinities, and trudged upstairs to bed.
She slept rather better than she'd expected, a deep, sodden sleep, though she'd drunk no wine the night before. She woke as she'd fallen asleep, to the sound of the rams battering away at the gates.
The last of the fish weren't fit for human consumption. Nicole tossed them out the window. Julia, who was just coming down the stairs, exclaimed in dismay and ran to the window beside Nicole, but Nicole had done the job a little too well: they'd landed in a steaming pile of ox manure.
“Mistress!” Julia said. “They might still have been all right to eat. Now when are we going to get any more?”
“If you want them so much, you can go out there and bring them back,” Nicole said. Julia shot her a look—as close to defiance as she'd ever come—and startled Nicole by doing exactly as she was told.
Nicole watched her as she paused at the door, looking rapidly up and down the deserted street, and scuttled toward the fish. When she was within a few feet of them, her face screwed up in disgust. Nicole wasn't surprised. The reek of them still clung to the bowl they'd lain in.
Julia came back without the fish, and with a crestfallen expression. She'd gone out to make a point; but Nicole, for once, had won it instead. They scraped together a breakfast of stale barley bread and boiled water, punishment fare, and settled for another day of siege.
Toward midday, one of the gates went crashing down. Screams and shouting and something else—a deep, rhythmic, profoundly arrogant sound—proclaimed the legions' arrival
in Carnuntum. They were singing, Nicole realized, in a strong, marching beat, to the braying of horns and the beating of drums.
Nicole looked at Julia and Lucius. Julia and Lucius looked back. Was her grin as wide and crazy as theirs were? They leaped up all at once and whooped. Julia grabbed Nicole's hand and Lucius'. His free hand grabbed Nicole's. They danced madly around the room, kicking into stools and tables, and not caring in the slightest.
When they'd danced themselves breathless, Nicole and Lucius flung themselves down to rest, but Julia had something else in mind. She dipped a rag in the dishwater barrel and scrubbed at her arms. “Now I don't smell like a chamber pot anymore,” she said triumphantly.
Then, as if she'd gone completely out of her mind, she unbarred the door and ran out into the street, headed toward Gaius Calidius Severus'. She was damned lucky: the street was full of Germans running away from the wall. None of them stopped to grab a last taste of Roman flesh.
Nicole stared after her. Then, incredulously, she started to laugh. Julia always had been consistent about what constituted a celebration.
It wasn't all bad, either. Nicole was sick of smelling like
eau de pissoir
herself. She scrubbed her arms and neck, even added a little bit of vinegar from the stores. Better to smell like a salad than like a hot day in an outhouse.
When she looked up from what were still sadly inadequate ablutions—God, what she wouldn't have given for a bar of soap—Lucius had disappeared, and his toy sword with him. She cursed, first in Latin, then, more satisfyingly, in English. He'd gone to watch the fighting, the little lunatic. He'd never in his life imagine that he could get caught in it. She could—and it scared the hell out of her.
She ran to the door and shouted his name. Nothing. She called again, louder. No sign of him. Why should there be? He had what the twentieth century had learned to call plausible deniability. “Oh, no, Mother,” he would say, eyes wide
and sincere. “I didn't hear you. Everybody was yelling so loud.”
“I'll warm his backside,” Nicole muttered. The idea didn't give her the collywobbles, as it would have when she first came to Carnuntum. He'd proved himself immune to any lesser suggestion. He did not need to know just how vitally important his life was to her. He was, literally, her lifeline, the one assurance she had of her continued existence.

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