Household Gods Read online

  Everything was suddenly horrifying. Even the bit of gossip she heard, one woman to another, cool and matter-of-fact as if it were nothing out of the ordinary: “Just got news my husband’s brother died down in Aquileia.”

  “Ahh,” her friend said, sounding just as calm about it. “That’s too bad. What was he doing down in Italy, anyway?”

  “Didn’t you know Junius? I thought you did. He was a muleteer.”

  “I never met him, though you’ve told me about him before. What happened to him? Did the Marcomanni get him?”

  “No, he didn’t have any trouble with the barbarians. Anyhow, they got driven out of Aquileia — was it year before last? I forget. No, it was this pestilence that’s going through Italy. It’s very bad, they say. The gods grant it doesn’t come here.” At that, for the first time, the woman sounded less than nonchalant. This wasn’t gossip. This was honest fear.

  Wonderful, Nicole thought. An epidemic. Of what, flu? She remembered only too vividly the sound of Kimberley losing her corn dog in the backseat of the Honda.

  She also, after a moment and with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air, remembered another kind of epidemic, one much deadlier, that people might speak of with the same fear she heard in the women’s voices. She’d known three people who’d died of AIDS. Two gay men, and a woman friend from law school, who hadn’t known till too late that the man she’d had a brief affair with was bisexual.

  Resolutely, she shut that out of her mind. It would happen on the other side of the world, eighteen hundred years or so from now. There was nothing she could do about it. Nor, frankly, could she do anything about this “pestilence” that had taken a life hundreds of miles from here. This wasn’t the twentieth century. People couldn’t travel that far that fast. What had they said about the Ebola virus? If it hadn’t been for air travel, it might never have left Africa.

  No air travel here. Of that she was absolutely sure.

  What she could do now, and what she was going to do, was buy fish. She bought some trout that didn’t look too flyblown: she’d already seen they were popular in Carnuntum. She bought some bream, too, partly in the spirit of experiment, partly because a couple of them were so fresh they still quivered a little. The fish were cheaper than the meat. In Los Angeles, it would have been the other way round.

  The fishmongers strung their catch on the leather thong that the butcher had given her to help carry the leg of mutton. Nicole felt like a comic-page fisherman who’d hooked a sheep along with the rest of his catch. She was glad by then of the wool that still wrapped the mutton: it let her sling the thing over her shoulder with the fish dangling, and carry it a little less awkwardly than if she let the whole lot hang. With the meat and fish balanced on her shoulder and the bundle of raisins and onions under her arm, she paused to run through her mental shopping list.

  A stall nearby reminded her of one item that she couldn’t get out of. “Wine,” she said reluctantly to herself. The dealer in the stall she’d seen first wasn’t the only one with wine to sell. They were all ready, no, eager, to sell it to her. Every one of them wanted her to taste his particular brand, too, “To be sure it’s the genuine article,” one said in a voice as fruity as his wine. She couldn’t get out of it, but neither could she tell one wine from the next, except that they were all darker and sweeter than the cheap stuff she’d drunk with breakfast.

  Of course she wasn’t about to admit that. She remembered how she’d seen people in restaurants and on TV, sniffing and making portentous faces and tasting tiny bits from crystal goblets. Here she was given a whacking big ladle — God knew where that had been or how many people had put lips to it before her — and invited to taste, taste!

  She tasted, for what that was worth, and settled to the inevitable haggle. Meat and fish might be cheap here compared to L.A., but wine cost the living earth.

  She didn’t have nearly the luck beating them down that she’d had with the scallion-sellers. “Mistress Umma, it’s real Falernian,” said one who recognized the body she was wearing. “That means it has to come all the way from the middle of Italy on muleback, so you can’t wonder that it’s not cheap. I can’t go any lower, or I lose money.” Something about his tone, the mixture of patience and exasperation, overcame her court-trained skepticism. He was telling the truth as he saw it.

  Nicole hadn’t had to worry about transportation costs, except at the office when she had to decide whether to throw something in the mail or FedEx it. No trucks here, she reminded herself. No trains, either. She wondered how long the wine had taken to get here, and what problems it had had along the way.

  Once she’d bought an amphora, she had a transportation problem of her own: how to get home with a big clay jug, some dead fish, a leg of mutton, a makeshift sack of raisins, and, for good measure, the green onions. She wished she’d brought Julia after all, even if that meant bringing the children, too, and closing the tavern while everybody was gone. For that matter, she wished she had one of the pack mules that had brought the Falernian wine from Italy.

  While she tried to figure out how not to have to make more than one trip — and kept coming up with the answer, No way, Jose — someone at her elbow spoke in a dry voice: “Want me to give you a hand with some of that?”

  She whirled. There stood Titus Calidius Severus, one eyebrow raised in an expression of sardonic amusement. All he carried were half a dozen dead thrushes, their scrawny yellow legs bound together with twine. How could he want to eat them? she thought in faint disgust. They’re too cute to eat.

  But that wasn’t what he’d asked her. “Thank you, Calidius,” she said with as much grace as she had to offer, and a good bit of relief. “I’d love a hand.”

  His mouth tightened. She’d said something wrong, and she didn’t even know what. Nor did he say anything that might give her a hint. He simply picked up the amphora and the raisins, leaving her with meat, fish, and scallions, and strode off through the market. Nicole followed, not least because she was sure he knew how to get back. She wasn’t at all sure she did.

  As they were leaving the market square, four men tramped past them. They weren’t Romans; they were speaking a guttural language Nicole didn’t understand. It reminded her somehow of the German she’d heard on her honeymoon. She didn’t think it was — didn’t think it could possibly be — the same language, but she couldn’t have proved it, not with only a dozen or so words of German to call her own.

  Even if the men had been speaking Latin, she would have tagged them for foreigners. They were taller, thicker through the chest, and ruddier than most of the locals. They let their beards and hair grow longer than the Romans did, and — Nicole’s nose wrinkled — used rancid butter for hair oil.

  They wore the first trousers she’d seen in Carnuntum — baggy woolen ones, tied tight at the ankles — and short tunics over them. Each of them wore a long sword on his left hip.

  They stared around the square as if they owned it, or perhaps as if they planned on robbing it. People stared at them, too, in fear and alarm, and muttered behind their hands. Nicole had seen exactly the same reaction in Topanga Plaza when a pack of gangbangers walked into the Wherehouse or Foot Locker.

  “Mithras curse the Quadi and Marcomanni both to the infernal depths,” Calidius Severus growled. He was eyeing the strangers as a cop might eye gangbangers at the mall. He’d made it plain he was a veteran. Had he fought these Quadi or Marcomanni? Maybe he had, from the bitterness in his tone. “Miserable barbarians have their nerve, coming into town to buy this and that when they invaded the Empire three years ago not far west of here.”

  “Invaded?” Nicole said, and then, hastily, “Yes, of course.” Odd bits of gossip began to fit together like pieces of evidence. The Marcomanni had conquered Aquileia in Italy, and been driven back from it. She didn’t know where in Italy Aquileia was, but nowhere in Italy was particularly close to the Danube. She shivered a little, though the day was fine and mild. “It must have been quite an
invasion.”

  “That it was.” To her relief, Calidius didn’t notice the odd phrasing; he was intent on his own thoughts. “Some officers I’ve talked with — educated fellows, you know — say it was the worst since the Cimbri and Teutones came down on us, and that was — what? — almost three hundred years ago”

  Longer than the United States has been a country, Nicole thought, and shivered again. On her honeymoon, she’d caught glimpses of the sense of history that filled Europe but was so conspicuously absent from America. She hadn’t expected to find that sense in second-century Carnuntum. After all, this was ancient history, wasn’t it? Not so ancient, evidently, that it didn’t have history of its own. She hadn’t gone back to the beginning of time, as she’d sometimes felt — never more urgently than when her belly griped her. She was stuck somewhere in the middle.

  She stayed close to Titus Calidius Severus. He hadn’t been afraid of the Marcomanni or Quadi or whoever they were. He’d been angry at them. From the way he stamped resolutely ahead, he was still angry. But that anger might not all have been aimed at the men he called barbarians: after a while, he said, “Umma, if you tell me what you think I’ve done wrong, I may decide to be sorry for it. If it’s something I ought to be sorry for.”

  Nicole couldn’t quite suppress the twitch of a smile at his careful phrasing. He could have been a lawyer, with that kind of mind. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong,” she said.

  She was glad he was in front of her, so he couldn’t see her wince. Something she hadn’t expected to deal with when she traveled in time: the past life of the body she wore. People made assumptions about her. They expected things of her, things she was supposed to do or think or say, because Umma had always done or thought or said them. Sometimes, as with Lucius and Aurelia, it came in handy. Sometimes…

  The fuller and dyer stopped and looked back at her then. Fortunately, she’d managed to pull her face straight. Calidius was nothing if not forthright: “Then why didn’t you want me to come over last night?”

  “Because I didn’t feel like it,” she answered, not angrily but without any hesitation, either. If he made a habit of coming on by whenever he felt like a roll in the hay, he was going to have to get himself some new habits.

  He grunted. “All right. Can’t expect a woman to know her own mind from one day to the next, I guess.” Before she had a chance to bridle at that, he redeemed himself, at least in part, by adding, “Women likely say the same about men. I’ve known enough who’d give you cause to, anyhow.”

  If he was in the habit of mocking everyone impartially, she could deal with that. All the cops she’d ever known, in Indiana and California alike, were the most cynical people on the face of the earth. Maybe soldiers were the same way. Because of that, and because she felt, for a moment, as if she could almost like him, she said, “Besides, it wouldn’t have mattered either way. I was sick last night.”

  “Belly, I’ll bet.” Calidius grunted again, apparently a noise that indicated his brains were working. “Julia told me you and the kids were drinking water all day yesterday. What got into you, Umma? One of your new ideas? Water’s handy if you haven’t got anything else, but if you do, forget it. Kids all right?”

  “Not too bad, “ Nicole answered. The amphora of Falernian he was carrying for her was glazed. God only knew what was in the glaze, but she could make a pretty fair guess that lead was part of it. But he wouldn’t believe lead was poisonous. Even if he did, so what? If lead killed you, it killed you a little bit at a time. Drinking the water, she’d discovered, was liable to be lethal in a hurry.

  “That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad they’re all right. They’re pretty fair kids, they are.”

  His stock jumped several points in Nicole’s book. She’d gone out only a couple of times after Frank broke up with her. She might have done it more often if so many men, on learning she had children, hadn’t reacted as if they were a dangerous and possibly contagious disease. I still don’t want to go to bed with him. she thought. She didn’t want to go to bed with anyone.

  She started down the street away from the market, back toward the tavern, but Titus Calidius Severus held up a hand. “Wait. You still haven’t told me what you’re angry at.”

  Nicole gritted her teeth. He was losing points again, and fast. “I did tell you, Calidius: I’m not angry at you. I will be, though, if you keep pushing at me like this.”

  “There — you did it again,” he said.

  And there it was again: the prickle of alarm. What have I done? What’s wrong?

  Thank God, finally — he went on in a growing heat, spelling it out in terms even a time-traveler from West Hills could understand: “How can I help thinking you’re mad at me when you haven’t called me by my praenomen since day before yesterday? If you can’t be that familiar with someone who knows you’ve got a little mole halfway down from your navel, what in Ahriman’s name is a praenomen good for? “

  Nicole bit her tongue. Good God! He knew her body — no, knew this body — better than she did. How had she managed to miss a mole in that spot?

  Because, she told herself with tight-drawn patience, she’d been too busy overdosing on her new reality — and freaking at the shaved parts south of the mole. But if she did start calling him Titus, would he take it as a signal and assume she was open for business again? She’d been formally polite, and he’d taken it for displeasure. If she didn’t go back to the intimate use, he’d be convinced she really was mad at him. Except she wasn’t. Except probably she was, because he was a man and she was a woman and it was all too clear that relations between the sexes were no easier to figure here than they’d been in Los Angeles.

  She couldn’t take all day making up her mind, not with him standing there studying her. Finally, with an exhalation that wasn’t quite a sigh, she said, “I’m sorry, Titus. I just haven’t been myself the last couple of days.” And you don’t know how true that is. But, instead of the truth, she opted for the simple, the rational, and the practical: “Too much to do, not enough time to do it.”

  “Well, that’s so twelve months a year, and an extra day on leap year,” Calidius answered. He too hesitated, as if looking for something else — he couldn’t remember what — that needed saying. Then, as if he’d found it, he grinned. “And I won’t chuck you under the chin anymore, either. I really didn’t know you didn’t like it.”

  He was trying. She could say that much for him. Of course, he had an ulterior motive. What male didn’t, in whatever century she found herself in? Nicole nodded, but said simply, “Let’s get on back.”

  Titus Calidius Severus started walking. She followed again, with one pause to set down the leg of lamb and scratch her head. No Head and Shoulders, she thought with more sadness than she’d ever expected to feel. No Selsun Blue. No Denorex. Still, there was a bright side. No idiotic commercials for them, either.

  They passed the two graffiti about Lydia, in reverse order this time. Pointing to the one and then, a bit farther along, to the other, Nicole said, “Put those two together and they’re pretty funny.”

  “I think so, too, but I’ll bet you Marcus doesn’t,” Calidius said wryly. He walked on a couple of paces, then stopped so abruptly, Nicole almost ran into him. “You read them.” He sounded almost accusing.

  Uh-oh. “Yes, I read them.” If Nicole stayed cool, kept it light, maybe he wouldn’t fuss about it.

  No such luck. “All these years I’ve known you, and I never knew you had your letters.” When he frowned, his face looked absolutely forbidding. “Mithras, I can think of plenty of times when you’ve had me read things for you.”

  “I’ve been studying lately,” Nicole said. It was weak, but it was the only explanation she could come up with on the spur of the moment. “Not knowing how always seemed such a lack.”

  Muscle by muscle, he relaxed; he’d gone as tense facing her as he might have before a battle. “Well, I’ve heard you say that before,” he allowed. Thank you. Umma. Nicole
thought. Calidius went on, “But why didn’t you tell me you wanted to learn? I’d have helped.”

  “For one thing, I wanted to surprise you,” she said: again, the path of least resistance.

  “You did it, all right,” he said, and chuckled. “And now that you can read a little, you’ll think you can read everything. Isn’t that just like a woman?”

  He’d been doing so well for himself. Now he’d pressed the wrong button — no, he hadn’t just pressed it. He’d stomped on it. “I can read anything,” she said in the frosty voice she used to reserve for asking Frank why the check was late. Titus Calidius Severus started to say something. She overrode him. “And I’ll show you.”

  And she did. She read every sign, every graffito, every inscription between marcus loves lydia and her restaurant and Calidius’ shop across the street from it. She didn’t stumble once. She made no mistakes. After she’d read the sign above his door, she added, sweetly, “And thank you very much for carrying the wine and the raisins all this way… Titus.”

  His sour expression proved she’d done that just right. He looked as if he wished he’d been born without a praenomen, let alone been so rash as to make a big deal of it. But under that, and rapidly swelling through it, he looked astonished. “How did you do that? I don’t think I ever heard anyone read that way, not even men who called themselves philosophers. You didn’t mumble the words at all to see what they were. You just… read them straight out. That’s amazing. How do you do it?”

  Nicole’s astonishment couldn’t have been much less than his, though she tried to keep it buried underneath her courtroom mask — the one with the faint, superior smile and the slightly lifted eyebrow. She’d gone to a public school in Indianapolis that was no better than it had to be, and then to a medium-good university. That had landed her a job at a medium-good law firm in Los Angeles, which had not even been a medium-good job by the time it was done with her.