Household Gods Read online

  Nicole caught herself wondering if Julia was a little slow in the head — or if it was a game slaves played, to ask questions that sounded wide-eyed innocent but were calculated to catch a person in the raw.

  If that was a game, Nicole could play one of her own. “Can I get face powder that doesn’t have lead in it?” she asked. And held her breath, hoping she hadn’t come too close to sounding like the foreigner she was.

  Julia didn’t seem to find the question that far out of the ordinary. Maybe she was slow; or maybe slaves learned to expect any kind of oddity from their masters. She frowned, as if in thought. “Some people use white flour, but I don’t like it myself — you don’t either, much, do you? No matter how tight you close it up, sooner or later it gets bugs in it. That never happens with white lead.”

  “I should hope not!” Nicole said. “Lead’s poisonous.”

  “Oh, it can’t be, Mistress.” Julia sounded absolutely sure of herself. “If it were, they wouldn’t use it for water pipes.”

  Nicole started to say They do? but stopped before the question was out of her mouth. They did, and she didn’t need Julia’s word for it. The Latin for lead was plumbum. She and Julia had said it close to a dozen times between them. What was a plumber but somebody who messed around with plumbum? It was a lead-pipe cinch that was how plumbers had got their name.

  What she did say was, “They shouldn’t.”

  “Mistress,” Julia said in a tone that reminded Nicole rather too strongly of her mother trying to be very, very patient with her father when he came home — because he’d said or done something right out of line, but if she called him on it too soon or too strongly, he’d take a swing at her, “Mistress, really, haven’t you been complaining an awful lot, the past day or two?” And about things like wine and water that made you nice and sick, too, Nicole could almost hear her thinking, and look where that got you. “What are they supposed to use for pipes, Mistress? Clay breaks too easy, and wood rots.”

  “Copper — “ Nicole began.

  “And how expensive would that be?” Julia asked. Impossibly so, her tone said. “Besides, copper’s no good for you. Cook vegetables in copper and you’ll see the verdigris right away, and taste it, too.” She made a face. “And it’ll sicken your stomach faster than drinking water will. That’s why they put lead on the inside of copper kettles, for goodness’ sake.”

  “It is?” Nicole said faintly. “They do?”

  Yesterday morning, she’d looked around the restaurant with delight. Now she looked again, with growing horror. Some of her cooking pots were lead-lined? Her eye fell on a jar of olive oil, which was made of glazed pottery. What was in the glaze? Every so often, the TV news would report that batches of stoneware from China or someplace were being banned from the USA because their glazes had too much lead. The amphorae of wine under the counter were glazed, too, all but the one that held the cheapest local stuff. You couldn’t even put lead foil over the corks on wine bottles anymore, not in California you couldn’t.

  God knew, this wasn’t California. This wasn’t anyplace fit or healthy for human occupation, from the looks of it.

  What about the terra sigillata pitcher and bowl in her room? How was she going to know? How could she find out?

  God. God, God, God. What was that book she’d seen in a used bookstore once, with the day-glo pink cover? Future Shock, that was it. So what was this? Past shock? Culture shock? Pure unadulterated shock? Nothing here was safe. Everything could poison you. Every little taken-for-granted thing.

  Julia was happily oblivious to Nicole’s confusion. She seemed to think they were still playing some kind of game, a game of wits maybe, a test of her cultural literacy. Or was it literacy, if it had nothing to do with reading?

  Julia spoke again as the voice of sweet reason, as if that were the role she’d decided she was cast in. “Besides, Mistress, if lead were poisonous, we’d all be dead, wouldn’t we?” She laughed at the absurdity of the notion, the same way people in the twentieth century had laughed at the notion that DDT might hurt the environment.

  Lead poisoning was insidious, Nicole knew that. It took a long time to build up. But she couldn’t explain that here, even if there were words to express it. Julia wouldn’t listen, any more than people had listened about DDT, or fluorocarbons, or the hole in the ozone layer.

  Julia seemed to have decided the game was over; that it was time to go back to work. Her tone had changed, and even the way she held herself. She was the slave again, carefully submissive; no more arguments, no thinly veiled rebukes. “What would you like for breakfast, Mistress?” she asked.

  Nicole wasn’t pleased to note how glad she was that Julia had gone back to being servile again. “Bread and watered wine, same as the children,” she said — and that was a capitulation, too, but she couldn’t see any way out of it. Except possibly one. “The one-as wine,” she added, “nothing fancy.” That was the one that came in the unglazed amphora. If it was bad wine, so much the better. Then maybe she could keep from growing too fond of it.

  Even if it didn’t have lead — she hoped it didn’t have lead — it still had alcohol in it. The odor rising from the (unglazed, thank God) cup made her shiver. She could all but hear her father downstairs yelling at her mother, while she lay in bed with the covers pulled up over her head and tried not to listen. She had to will herself to sip.

  Diluted, the wine tasted like watery, half-spoiled grape juice. It had a tang to it, a sharpness and a kind of dizziness in back of it, that had to be the alcohol. She’d never tried any before, to know. She’d refused.

  Her heart was thumping again, as it had when she discovered her face was armored in lead. She’d thought, somehow, that the first taste would do it: would hit her hard enough to make her stagger. Apparently, that wasn’t how it worked. She sipped again, deeper, and again, till the cup was empty.

  Did she feel anything? Was there anything to feel? Maybe she was a tiny bit more detached from the world than she had been before. Maybe she wasn’t. She’d been in varying degrees of fog since she woke up in Carnuntum — and for certain sure she was detached; she was a complete stranger to this whole world and time.

  Julia was watching her, nodding sagely, as if she could see an effect Nicole couldn’t feel. “That will do you good, Mistress,” she said.

  “I doubt it,” Nicole said. Her belly was rumbling again, knots and snarls that were more nerves than sickness. The wine hadn’t made it worse, at least. She was grateful for that.

  Medicine. She could think of it as medicine. Even her mother had had a stash of medicinal brandy, that her father had never managed to find.

  Julia’s voice broke in on her thoughts, as so often before: as if it were a kind of lifeline, an anchor to this world. “Are you feeling well enough to go out and buy things today, Mistress, or will you send me? “

  Nicole focused abruptly and too sharply, though the edges of things still wavered just a little. Julia was watching her alertly, with a look she’d seen on a dog hoping for a portion of the humans’ dinner. So was this a new game, then? A gambit to get hold of some money, to do God knew what with it?

  Nonsense, Nicole thought. Julia could get at the till either way, whether she stayed to mind the tavern or went out shopping. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the house.

  If that was it, too bad. Nicole hadn’t gone out since she got here, either. Her insides still felt very uncertain; and even though Imodium looked like a Latin word, it surely wasn’t, or she’d have found a bottle of it by now. Maybe if she could get out, breathe relatively fresh air, see more of Carnuntum than she could from window or doorway, she’d forget her indisposition for long enough to make it go away.

  “I’ll go,” she said. Julia’s face fell, but she didn’t argue. After all, her expression said, she wasn’t the boss. Nicole did her best to sound brisk. “Let’s see — what do we need?”

  Julia visibly swallowed her disappointment to focus on the duties at hand. “That amphora of F
alernian in there” — she pointed to the bar — “will last the day out, I think, but not tomorrow. And we’re out of scallions and raisins, and we could use some more mutton.”

  “I’ll get some fish, too, if I see any worth buying,” Nicole said. She had to say something, if she expected people to think she was staying on top of things.

  “All right, Mistress.” Julia sounded vaguely dubious, but then she nodded. She’d dropped her facade of submission again, Nicole noticed. It seemed to go up when Nicole was giving orders, but to go down when they were working together — as if a slave could think for herself, sometimes, if her mistress gave the signal. Had Nicole been giving the right signals after all?

  Maybe it was all those years of dealing with secretaries — pardon, administrative assistants — and paralegals. They hadn’t been much more than slave labor either, not at the pay they got and with the workload they carried.

  Julia had gone right on talking, in a tone that reminded Nicole almost poignantly of a paralegal invited to voice an opinion on a case: “Fish spoils fast, so there’s always that risk, but we can eat it ourselves tonight if no one else does. And people will probably order it. You were doing some interesting things with it yesterday when they brought it in for you to cook. Word will get around.”

  “I suppose so,” Nicole said, though she wondered how. No TV, no radio, no telephones, no e-mail. How did people find out what was going on in the world, or even in Carnuntum?

  She wasn’t going to find out by staying cooped up here. Under Julia’s eye, she unlocked the cash box and chose a selection of coins, picking them out with care, as if she knew to the as how much she was leaving behind. Julia’s glance didn’t flicker; her brow didn’t wrinkle. Nicole drew in a breath of relief, and escaped out the door.

  She turned left more or less at random. She’d gone several steps before she realized: she didn’t know where to buy any of the things on her mental list. Nothing in sight looked like a supermarket, or even like the corner grocery stores the supermarkets had forced out of business. A vague memory of her honeymoon brought to mind tiny shops, boucheries and boulangeries and something with a horse’s head out front that she’d found very pretty till she learned it was a horsemeat butcher. She didn’t see anything like that, either.

  A voice called out behind her. She stopped and turned, expecting it to be Julia, calling out that she’d gone the wrong way. But it was someone from the next house down, a little bony bird of a woman with an extraordinary crown of curled and frizzed hair, waving and calling, “Umma! Oh, Umma! Good morning!”

  Nicole almost didn’t respond. But the woman was looking straight at her, looking so delighted that Nicole wondered if Umma and she were long-lost sisters. She raised her hand and waved back, trying to put a little enthusiasm in it, so as not to seem suspicious.

  “Off to market then?” the woman asked. “And isn’t it a lovely morning? Do come over later, will you please, dear? It’s been ages since we had a good gossip!”

  Nicole hoped her expression didn’t betray what she felt, which was a kind of horror. Neighbors in West Hills didn’t lean out of upstairs windows — if they had any — and yodel at passersby. This neighbor obviously thought she was a friend, too. Or else she really was a relative.

  “Later,” Nicole managed to say. “Yes, I’ll come over later.” In about ten years. She put on a bright company smile, and wished she had a watch to glance at significantly. “Well. I’m off, then. Good morning.”

  “Good morning!” the stranger caroled, and mercifully ducked back inside.

  She hadn’t said Nicole was going in the wrong direction, either. Nicole decided to take that as an omen. She strode on out, feeling better already, though she had to be careful where she stepped; and she kept a wary eye on the windows above. Some of her original sense of adventure was coming back. She felt like a brave explorer — Montezuma’s Revenge and all.

  Pigeons strutted in the streets of Carnuntum, arrogant and brainless and half tame, just as they did in Los Angeles. Life here was riskier for them, however. A fellow tossed a fine-meshed net over a couple, scooped them up before they could let out more than one startled coo, and ran back inside his house, shouting, “I’ve got supper for today, Claudia!”

  Nicole wouldn’t have wanted to eat them. Living in Los Angeles, she’d come to despise the automobile for the pollution it caused, even while she worshipped at its shrine. No cars in Carnuntum. But that didn’t mean no pollution, as she’d thought it would. The streets were packed deep with ox droppings, horse droppings, donkey droppings. The pigeons mined them for any number of treasures: seeds, insects, the unmistakable and nauseating pale wriggle of a worm.

  One good look at what they were pulling out of the heaps of ordure, and Nicole knew she wouldn’t touch one of those birds if a waiter from Le Bistro brought it.

  She’d hated the air she’d had to breathe in the San Fernando Valley, back in the twentieth century: thick, stinking, and the color of filthy old chinos. It had stung her eyes and caught at her lungs with every breath she took. The air in Carnuntum stank worse than the air in the Valley ever had. It was clogged with smoke. It stung her eyes and caught at her lungs with every breath she took.

  It was also full of flies. Every time someone walked past, they rose in buzzing clouds from the dung that beasts of burden had left behind, and from the occasional dog turds in the street. At least, Nicole hoped that was what those were. Some of them seemed on the large side for that.

  The flies didn’t all go back to their suppers, either. Some decided to take the long way home, pausing to snack on passing animals or, better yet, people. Slapping while walking looked to be as automatic as breathing.

  It wasn’t so easy or mindless for Nicole, or apparently so effective, either. In the first few minutes after she’d left the restaurant, she took at least three powerfully annoying bites. These weren’t little itching mosquitoes, either, like the ones that had made the summer evenings miserable in Indiana. These were horseflies — B-52s, people had called them when she was little. Their bites stabbed like a red-hot needle.

  Slapping, cursing, wishing in vain for a vat of Woodsman’s Fly Repellent, she turned off her own street onto a larger one. A block or two down, that one ran into a bigger one yet, one big enough to boast a cobblestoned paving. At the intersection sat a fountain from which water splashed lethargically into a stone tank. Women stood around chatting and filling jugs from the tank.

  They can’t use all that for cooking or washing, Nicole thought. They must drink some of it. She shuddered, wondering how often it made them sick. And that was just the water itself, without help from lead pipes and lead-glazed jars. She shuddered again. If the galloping trots didn’t get you, lead poisoning would.

  A block farther down the cobblestoned street stood a marble statue, half again life size, of a nude, bearded man. The Getty Museum, twenty minutes from West Hills, had a marvelous collection of ancient statuary; the couple of times Frank dragged her there on one of his cultural-literacy jags, Nicole had admired the cool white elegance of the stone.

  This statue was neither cool nor white nor elegant. It had been painted to look as lifelike as possible, down to eyeballs, nipples, and pubic hair. It was, in Nicole’s opinion, one of the tackiest things she’d ever seen. Hadn’t they run a Saudi sheik out of Beverly Hills for painting the statues on the grounds of his mansion like this?

  Seeing her astonished stare, a woman in a grimy linen tunic mistook its meaning. She pointed to the marble penis — also half again life size — and said, “I wish my husband got that hard. How about you, dearie?” The woman didn’t wait or seem to expect an answer. She bustled on down the street, chortling at her own bawdy wit.

  The statue had to be just as bad a joke as the one the woman had made. Nicole wondered if some civic-minded person would come along and sandblast the paint off the marble to make it decently pure again.

  Then, as she rounded a corner, she came on the next one. This was of a wo
man, mostly and graphically nude. It had been painted with the same loving attention to detail and the same total lack of taste as the male statue.

  If that physique represented Carnuntum’s ideal of beauty, Umma’s body was on the skinny side by local standards. At least half of the old wheeze, You can’t be too thin or too rich, didn’t apply here. Somehow, Nicole suspected the other half was still in force.

  Distracted by the statue, she almost jumped out of her skin as a nightmare of teeth and glaring eyeballs lunged out of a shop almost into her face. Just as her scattered wits identified the thing as a dog, a stout iron chain brought it up short. Nicole’s yelp of alarm was lost in its yelp of surprise.

  A roar from the shop reduced them both to silence: “Hercules! Blast you to Hades, you fornicating thing!”

  The owner of the voice burst into the street, armed with a stout stick and a glare as red-eyed and wild as the dog’s had been. The glare reduced the dog to a whimpering puddle, but the owner never seemed to notice. The stick slashed the dog across the nose; a foot armed with a hobnailed sandal booted it in the ribs. The dog whined piteously and slunk back into the shop, chain rattling behind it.

  The shopkeeper tucked the stick in his belt and shook his head. “Damn, Mistress Umma, I’m sorry for that. You know why I got the miserable beast — three break-ins in six months, and the last time the bastards got as far as the cash box before I drove them off. But even with the sign, the blasted dog’s scared off half my customers.” He tilted his head toward the wall, where a neatly painted inscription read, cave canem: Beware the dog.

  Nicole was still shaking with reaction and a surprising, unexpected surge of anger. “I don’t care if you do have a sign,” she said. “If that dog had bitten me, I’d have sued.” The sentence came as naturally in Latin as it would have in English.

  It had the same effect it would have had in English, too. The shopkeeper turned a chalky white, stuttered something she couldn’t make out, and scuttled back inside the shop. Thumps and anguished barks told her he was beating the dog again. Mean or not, no animal deserved that. But what could she do about it? There was no SPCA in this world. For the first time, Nicole really understood what the phrase “dog-eat-dog” meant.