cabinet, he wasn’t too bad; he’d go into the den and sit in front of the TV till he fell asleep. But if he went to pull a bottle out of the cabinet, that meant trouble.
The Germans hadn’t been gone five minutes when Julia trotted downstairs and applied herself to making a new batch of bread. “Nice of you to join me,” Nicole said with a sardonic edge.
Julia bent over the bread-bowl, her hair falling forward, hiding her face. Her voice was subdued, as it had been when she was still a slave, and very seldom since. “I’m sorry, Mistress. I couldn’t be in the same room with those — those barbarians. They’re nothing but trouble. If you remember — that pack of Quadi, last year…”
She didn’t go on. Nicole wondered if she was being challenged, if Julia was testing her memory.
Of course not. That was trauma, that set to Julia’s shoulders, and that tension in her fingers. Nicole could easily imagine what kind. “It’s all right,” she said. “I remember.” Which of course was a lie, but not if she’d been Umma.
Julia lifted her head. Her face was as tight as her shoulders, but it eased a little as she looked at Nicole. “I’m glad they didn’t bother you,” she said.
“So am I,” Nicole said. “I could have grabbed a knife, I suppose, and fought them off, or tried to. They might have been too surprised to go for their swords. Or I could have yelled, and all the neighbors would have come running.”
“Like last time?” Julia shook herself hard, and went back to working flour and water and yeast together. “Maybe they’d even have got to you before — “ She stopped. She bent over the dough, attacking it as if it had been a broad and greasy German face. In a very little while, she’d pounded it to a pulp.
Nicole stood where Julia’s words had left her. Rape was too familiar a thing in Los Angeles, too; but no neighbors would have come running to the rescue. People didn’t get involved. The most they did, if they did anything at all, was call 911. Or grab a camcorder and go for the media gold. Nevertheless, that was a world she understood. She wanted it back. That night before she went to bed, she prayed to Liber and Libera as she had done for the past however many nights, till the prayer was worn to habit, and the words were turned to ritual.
Slowly and reluctantly, winter gave way to spring. After the last snow fell, a hard and driving rain moved in like insult on top of injury. Snow over mud was bearable; the mud froze, and you could cross the street without choking on dust or sinking in muck. To be sure, if it rained, or if there was a thaw and then a freeze, the snow froze into ice, and you slipped and slid and cursed and tried not to fall down and break an elbow or your tailbone. But then snow had a way of falling and making the ice passable again.
Spring rain melted the snow and with it the mud beneath. Every unpaved road in Carnuntum turned into black bean soup. Cold, glutinous, congealed black bean soup, ankle-deep and as apt to suck your boot off as to turn suddenly treacherous and send you skidding into a knot of passersby.
The tag end of winter was a lean time. The storerooms were nearly empty of grain. There were no fresh vegetables to be had, and not much meat on the market that wasn’t salted, smoked, or cured. Nicole didn’t even want to think how much sodium was in each portion that she served out to customers or to her family. There was fish, at least, fresh as well as salt. Fresh fish kept better in this weather, and she bought more of it. Her basic fish fry — olive oil, with crumbs from yesterday’s bread — was rather a popular item. She only wished she’d had some tartar sauce to put on it, or some chips to go with it. Nobody here had ever heard of the potato, though an experiment with onion rings didn’t turn out too badly.
Every time she went to the market, she saw more Germans: big fair men with, now and then, a big fair woman striding robustly alongside. They seemed on their best behavior, but everyone watched them warily. Some of the veterans of the legion that had its encampment a few miles downstream took to wearing swords, which they hadn’t done before.
One men’s day at the baths, Nicole was amazed to see several Marcomanni or Quadi — she still couldn’t tell one tribe from another — coming down the stairs. They looked mightily contented. She wondered how they bathed on their side of the Danube. To her way of thinking, the baths left something to be desired, but her basis of comparison was a hot shower and soap. Compared to a plunge into an icy stream or a half-frozen lake, the Roman baths had to seem like heaven.
A detachment of Roman soldiers in their fancy armor came over from the legionary camp and began patrolling the walls and streets of Carnuntum. Every so often, one or two of them would drop into the tavern.
One day when spring was well advanced, a pair of legionaries came rattling and jangling in just as Nicole finished pouring a round of wine for a tableful of Germans. The air was always vaguely tense when the Germans were in the tavern, but Nicole had learned to ignore the tension.
She couldn’t ignore this. The legionaries didn’t say a word except to order the one
Nobody else spoke, or moved much either. Julia, who hadn’t been able to make herself scarce this time, took refuge in scouring plates and cups and bowls. Lucius helped her, or tried; he kept dropping things. The two or three ordinary customers, trapped in the back and unable to escape without running the gauntlet between the soldiers and the barbarians, nursed whatever they were eating and drinking, and did their best to seem inconspicuous.
The Germans finished their wine, belched — a little louder than usual, maybe — and left. A few minutes later, the legionaries did the same.
As soon as the soldiers were out the door, a long sigh ran through the room. Nicole hadn’t known she was holding her breath till she let it out.
“It
“It could have been uglier,” he said. He took the cup Nicole had filled for him, thanked her, and drank deep.
Nicole was tempted to keep him company. She’d had precious few brawls in the tavern, and nothing worse than a pair of young idiots going at each other with fists and getting pitched into the street. The Calidii Severi, father and son, had played bouncers that day, she remembered. It still hurt to think of Titus, how he was dead and would never walk through that door again.
She remembered, too, how surprised she’d been, not by the fight, but by the fact that it was the first that had escalated that far. She’d come to Carnuntum convinced that drinking equaled drunkenness and that was that. And drunkenness, she’d been just as sure, had meant a fight — her father sending her mother to the ER yet again, where she’d lie as always, claiming she’d run into a door or fallen down the stairs.
In fact, neither of those assumptions had turned out to be universally or even generally true. Most of her customers drank without getting drunk. Of the ones who did go over the edge, more got friendly or talky or sleepy than got belligerent. She’d made a point of sending the nasty drunks on their way, and making it clear that they weren’t to come back. They’d mostly stayed away, too. “Plenty of other places to get a load of wine,” as one of them had informed her before she booted him out.
She’d been running a tavern in small-town Indiana. And the L.A. gang scene had come to town. “If those barbarians had gone at it with those legionaries,” she said, “it wouldn’t have been a tavern brawl. It would have been a war.”
Ofanius Valens finished off his cup of wine and held it up for another. When Nicole had brought it, and scooped up the
Nicole needed a moment to realize that, whereas she’d been using a figure of speech, Ofanius Valens had meant his words literally. “You don’t really think so, do you?” she said. “We’ve stayed at peace all this time. Why should it all blow up in our faces now?”
“We’ve been at peace, and the gods know I’m glad of it, too,” Ofanius Valens said. “But the gods also know I’ve never seen so many Quadi and Marcomanni in town as I have the past month or so. We’d always get a few: they’d cross the river to buy things in the market or drink in the taverns or just to stare at our fancy buildings. The barbarians couldn’t build a bathhouse like ours in a thousand years.”
“Now, though,” Julia said, “now they look like dogs in front of a butcher’s stall.”
