Household Gods Read online

  It was worse than the end of the world. “Mistress,” Julia said through the door, “Aurelia is puking something fierce, and Lucius has the trots.” She sounded as if she was afraid she’d be killed for bringing the bad news.

  Who knew? Maybe in Carnuntum, a slave would be. “I’m coming,” Nicole groaned. She got out of bed and stood swaying. These were, in effect, her kids. If her guess was right, they really were her relatives. They were her responsibility, that was certain. Single mother then, she thought in weary disgust. Single mother now. She hadn’t figured on that when she came back to Carnuntum.

  She unbarred the door. Julia was standing in the hallway holding a wan and flickering lamp. She looked like a ghost with her sleep-disheveled hair and her pale face.

  Her voice was real enough, shakily stern — almost smug. It reeked of I told you so. “Mistress, it really wasn’t very wise of you to give them water to drink all day. You know perfectly well — “ She paused to inhale, which must have given her a good whiff of the chamberpot. “Oh, dear, Mistress — you’ve got it, too!”

  “Yes, I’ve got it, too,” Nicole said. “Happy day.” A piece of limerick ran through her head: Her rumblings abdominal were simply phenomenal. And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth? Any minute now, dogs would start barking at the noises her insides were making.

  But that had nothing to do with anything. She was on mommy duty now. “Come on,” she said as brusquely as her queasy innards would allow. “Take me to the kids.”

  As they walked down the hall, Julia picked up where she’d left off. “Drinking water all the time isn’t healthy,” she insisted. “I did try to tell you, but you didn’t want to hear, Mistress, even though everybody knows it.”

  A lot of what everybody knows was nonsense. That had been so in Los Angeles, and was bound to be so in Carnuntum. Still, Nicole thought, what if the water really was bad, the way it was in Mexico? She hadn’t had any trouble drinking it in Petronell or Vienna on her honeymoon.

  Her mouth twisted. That was the twentieth century, not the second. Evidently chlorine had something going for it after all.

  But wine? Her frown deepened. People here drank like fish. If they weren’t alcoholics, it wasn’t from lack of trying.

  There was no way she was taking that route herself. She’d watched her father crawl into a bottle and pull the stopper in after him. She’d never touched a drop of alcohol, and she was damned if she was going to start now.

  Her belly tied itself in a knot and yanked hard. She gasped and doubled up. God! She hadn’t felt this bad since she went into labor with Justin. Whatever this was, it was nasty.

  This time, it let her go. She straightened and made it the rest of the way down the hall, where Julia was waiting beside one of the curtained doorways. Her nose told her it was the right place. It smelled even worse in there than in her bedroom: between the two of them, Lucius and Aurelia had been sick from both ends.

  Nicole took the lamp from Julia. Its flame was low. “Go fetch another one,” she said. “This one’s almost out of oil.”

  Julia didn’t seem to mind the errand. The air would be fresher where she’d been sent, that was certain. “Yes, Mistress,” she said with suspicious good cheer.

  As Nicole listened to her thump her way downstairs, it struck her that she hadn’t even bothered to say please. She’d treated Julia like a… like a slave again.

  No time to waste in feeling guilty. Both children were groaning, a sound she knew too well. At the same time, the lamp guttered and went out. There was no moonlight on this side of the house, no way to see anything. She tracked the kids by their moans and their heavy breathing, and a little catch that must have been a sob. She barked a shin against the hard side of a bed, swallowed a curse — damn, that hurt! — and bent to feel for a forehead. She found one, and another next to it. Hot. Hers was probably hot, too, not that she had time to care. Kids first.

  The lamp Julia brought was marginally brighter than the one Nicole had left by the door after it burned out. It still shed about as much light as a nightlight back in West Hills.

  Julia set it down on a stool and stepped back against the wall and waited.

  That was what guards did in Frank’s pet old movies. The gesture must mean the same here as there. It was Nicole’s show. She looked around a little desperately. So now what?

  In West Hills, she had known what to do. Here — Here, her own toothache, which hadn’t gone away, which as far as she could tell would never go away, had already taught her Latin didn’t have a word for Tylenol. It didn’t have a word for aspirin, either. By unpleasant but perfect logic, no word meant nothing.

  Back in West Hills, she wouldn’t have thought of giving aspirin to kids with fever anyhow, because of the small but real risk of Reye’s syndrome. Back in West Hills, she’d had other, better choices. Her mother, who hadn’t, and who hadn’t known about Reye’s syndrome, either, had given Nicole aspirin plenty of times. Nothing bad had happened. Nicole would have given it to Lucius and Aurelia — and taken some herself — without a qualm, if only she’d had any.

  Julia stirred, probably deciding Nicole wasn’t thinking straight because she was sick. “Shall I get the willow-bark decoction, Mistress?” she asked.

  Oh, joy, Nicole thought. A folk remedy. In West Hills, she’d have laughed it off. In Carnuntum, without any other useful choice, she grasped at it almost eagerly. It might not do any good, but it might not hurt, either. Folk remedies weren’t supposed to kill, were they?

  Julia was waiting for her to say something. “Yes,” she said more impatiently than she’d meant. “Yes, go on, go get it — please,” she added a bit belatedly.

  Julia seemed almost relieved to be snapped at, though the politeness of the last word made her eyes roll briefly before she darted back down the stairs.

  The children might be sick, but they weren’t too sick to make a whole range of revolted noises. “Willow bark!” said Lucius, who seemed the livelier of the two. “Ick! Ick ick ick!”

  “Be quiet,” Nicole said to him. No, snapped at him. She was too blasted sick herself to be nice about it. Somewhat to her surprise, he shut up, though he kept making horrible faces.

  Julia came back none too soon with a bottle and a tiny cup. The stuff she poured out looked horrid and smelled worse, but Nicole held her nose and gulped it down regardless. Its taste was even worse than its smell — gaggingly, throat-wrenchingly bitter.

  The kids were staring at her as if she’d done something ridiculously brave. Taking medicine, it seemed, was no more popular in Carnuntum than it had been in California. That might have been funny, had she felt less like dying.

  She’d expected the stuff to be nasty. It was. It was also familiar, which she hadn’t expected. When she’d had a sore throat, her mother had made her gargle with a couple of aspirins dissolved in warm water. God, she’d hated that! This taste wasn’t far from it.

  Nicole made the kids take the decoction anyway. If it tasted like aspirin, maybe it had something like aspirin in it. Hadn’t she heard or read somewhere that aspirin came from some folk remedy or other? Maybe it came from this one.

  “Julia, you’re feeling all right,” Nicole said tiredly, “and I’m not.” Even in the dim lamplight, she saw how smug Julia looked. She lacked the energy to call her on it. “Would you take care of the chamberpots in here and in my room, please?”

  “Yes, Mistress,” Julia said. Her method of taking care of a pot was to pick it up, carry it to the window, and dump it out on the ground below. She went back to Nicole’s bedroom and did the same thing with the one in there, or so the second wet splat declared.

  The words were shocked right out of Nicole’s head. If there’d been any to be found, they would have come out in a shriek. No toilets was one thing. No sewers — but Rome had sewers! She’d seen a documentary. Where were Carnuntum’s sewers? Didn’t these people know anything about sanitation?

  No wonder flies buzzed in through her window. And no wonder at all th
at Carnuntum smelled the way it did — and the water wasn’t fit to drink.

  The willow-bark decoction made her feel better — not a lot better, but some. And the kids’ foreheads were cooler. They’d stopped groaning and subsided into a fretful doze. She hugged them and, after a little hesitation, kissed them. They didn’t object. She felt strange: half like a babysitter, taking care of children not her own; half like a mother. If these had really been her own -

  She didn’t know any Latin lullabies. On sudden inspiration, and because she couldn’t think of anything else, she hummed “Rockabye Baby.” Even without the English words, maybe the tune would do the trick. Apparently it did. First Aurelia’s breathing, then Lucius’, slowed and deepened into the cadence of sleep.

  “That’s a nice song, Mistress,” Julia whispered as they tiptoed out of the children’s room. “Has it got words?”

  “If it does, I don’t know them,” Nicole answered, with a small stab of guilt at the lie — or maybe it was her gut clenching again. “I’m going to go back to sleep now myself, or try. If I do, you’ll be on your own for a while in the morning. I hope you can — “

  “I understand,” Julia said. “I’ve managed before. Rest if you can, Mistress.”

  Lumpy mattress. Scratchy blanket. Leftover stink from the dregs in the pot. Nicole didn’t care. Her belly wasn’t churning so hard. Next to that, nothing else counted. She yawned, stretched, wiggled… slept.

  When Nicole woke up, daylight was streaming in through the window. She still didn’t feel good, not even close, but, after she used the chamberpot a little less explosively than she had in the nighttime, the buffaloes decided to end their stampede through her insides and head off somewhere to graze.

  There was nowhere to dump the chamberpot except out the window. “Sewers,” she muttered. “This town needs sewers.” She gritted her teeth and dumped the pot as Julia had the night before.

  She dressed quickly in a fresh loincloth and tunic, and looked at herself in the mirror in the makeup kit. She looked like a chimney sweep. Most of the smoke that hadn’t gone through the hole in the roof the day before had clung to her.

  She washed her face with water from the terra sigillata pitcher, careful now not to get any water in her mouth, the way she would have been in a shower south of the border.

  The water was bad, no arguing with that — or with the reek that lingered around the emptied chamberpot. So what was she supposed to drink? Wine? She could water it, she supposed — wouldn’t the alcohol kill germs as easily as it slaughtered brain cells? She’d get a lower dose then, too. Maybe she could work out a formula as to how little wine she could get away with before the water went toxic.

  She still didn’t like it. She liked even less that the kids had to drink the stuff in any proportion. Maybe she could talk them into drinking milk after all, and never mind the Marcomanni and the Quadi, whoever they were.

  She studied her newly washed face in the mirror. Not a chimney sweep, not anymore. Now she just looked like hell. “That,” she said to nobody in particular, “is why God made makeup.”

  Women here, she’d observed, powdered and painted themselves as heavily as a geisha in full regalia — and into much the same dead-white mask. The makeup Umma had used was less finely ground than the pricey Clinique that Nicole had held onto even when money got tight, as her one by-God extravagance. Its texture and color made her think, rather disjointedly, of quite another white powder, one that had been distressingly common in L.A. Rome might lack flush toilets and bathroom tissue — but it was also blessedly free of cocaine.

  It was free of powderpuff and makeup brushes, too. She smoothed the powder on as best she could with a bit of rag — no cotton balls, either. Who’d have thought there’d be a world without cotton balls? Or swabs? Or -

  Or eyebrow pencils, or lipsticks. Her finger had to do for both, and the rag growing grubbier with each step in the ritual. No cold cream, either, to remove mistakes or clean her fingers. If she could figure out how all those things were made, she’d be willing to bet there’d be a market for them.

  It was enough, for the time being, that she’d armored her face against the world. She’d understated the effect — probably people would think she was trying for a little too much of the natural look — but she still looked, to her own eyes, clownish and overdone. “Tammy Faye Does Carnuntum,” she said to her reflection. A smile, she noticed, cracked the paint just a little. No wonder geishas never seemed to wear an expression, just the blank white mask.

  It did what it was supposed to do, at least. It kept the world from guessing how lousy she felt.

  “Cash box,” she reminded herself, and scooped up that and the key before she headed out the door. She didn’t go straight downstairs, but paused at the curtain to the children’s room. No sound came from inside. She peered in. Enough of the early light seeped through their shuttered window to show them both still sleeping. Their faces were quiet, neither flushed nor pale. Aurelia had taken all the covers, but Lucius didn’t seem to mind. He slept on his stomach with his black hair all in a tousle. He looked nothing at all like either of Nicole’s in the way he slept, but the soft baby-cheeks, the nub of nose, caught at her throat.

  That was why children looked the way they did, wasn’t it? So their mothers wouldn’t throw them out before they could walk. Not just their mothers, either. Whoever found herself in charge of them.

  Aurelia stirred and kicked off the covers. Nicole froze, but neither child woke. Aurelia was clutching a cloth doll the way Kimberley would have hung onto Scratchy the bobcat. Other toys lay on the floor: another doll or two, a toy cart, a wooden sword.

  Nicole frowned at the sword. No children of hers were going to play with war toys — even if they weren’t, strictly speaking, her children.

  Her frown changed, darkened. Lucius’ father had been a soldier, from what she’d heard. Titus Calidius Severus was a veteran, too; he’d made that plain. Several of her other customers, from snatches of overheard conversation, also must have served in the legions. A legion had been based around here — she remembered that from her honeymoon day trip to Petronell. Hadn’t Rome had a Vietnam, then? Didn’t they understand what a horror war was?

  She shook herself, shrugged. War was far enough away from this here and this now, that there was no point in worrying about it. She slipped backward as quietly as she could, let the door-curtain fall back into place, and trudged down to her work. She was her own boss, after all. Nobody else was going to do it for her. No secretarial pool, no janitorial staff. Just herself — and Julia.

  Julia had the tavern open already, the fires going, everything in order and ready to start the day. She greeted Nicole almost too brightly, though her words were solicitous enough: “Good morning, Mistress! How are you doing now? Are you well?”

  Nicole caught herself wondering just how smug Julia felt. She quashed the thought and answered as civilly as she could manage, which wasn’t very, without coffee and with none in sight for the next however many hundred years. “I’m all right. I may even live.”

  Julia smiled one of her wide halfwit smiles. “Oh, Mistress! The last couple of days, you’ve had such a funny way of putting things.”

  Nicole’s heart thudded. God — what if Julia had guessed — what in the world was she going to -

  But Julia’s smile had turned conspiratorial. “And here you put your paint on, and you didn’t even bother with it yesterday.”

  “Right,” Nicole said a little too quickly. “Yes, that’s right. I didn’t need it yesterday. Today — “

  Julia nodded, woman to woman now instead of slave to mistress. “I know just what you mean. There’s nothing like a nice coating of white lead to keep people from guessing you aren’t right underneath it.” She stopped. Her voice rose in surprise. “Mistress! Where are you going?”

  Nicole was already halfway up the stairs. “To wash it off! “ she flung back. My God, she thought, over and over. My God! Had she swallowed any? Had any gone up
her nose?

  My God. Even the makeup was poisonous. And hadn’t she thought it looked a little like cocaine? It was worse than cocaine — a more certain, a more deadly killer than cocaine had ever been. Had she got any in her eyes? Could the blood vessels in her eyes absorb it? God, what was she supposed to do? She didn’t know a thing about lead poisoning, except that it was bad — and she was a prime candidate for it.

  At the top of the stairs, she almost bowled over Lucius, who obviously had felt well enough to get out of bed. “Mother!” he called as she rushed past him. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  She didn’t answer. She dived into her bedroom, slammed and barred the door, and leaped on the washbasin. No facecloth, no towel, but rags — rags! She yanked a fistful out of the drawer and dunked them, and scrubbed at her face, over and over, till the skin stung and burned. Every time she splashed herself with water, she made herself blow out through her mouth and nose, to keep from getting any more of the lead into her system. Once she had it all off, or hoped to heaven she did, she took the little pot of makeup over to the window and dumped it out, as she had with the chamberpot not long before. This time, she watched the cloud of white powder drift down to the ground. No one was passing below, to be startled by the small deadly snow. Nothing moved but the flies, seething in the noisome mess that, she could see, lined every house-wall. There’d be a few million fewer, she thought, thanks to her latest contribution.

  She was calm again — or calm enough, at least, to face the world. She took a deep breath and braved the stairs again.

  Lucius and Aurelia were both down below and both eating breakfast: a little bit of bread without oil, and something in a cup that was probably watered wine. Nicole couldn’t find the energy to make an issue of it.

  Julia, of course, wasn’t about to leave well enough alone. “Why did you get rid of your makeup, Mistress?” she asked. “You looked nice with it on.”