Household Gods

the head, as he might have done with a toddler who amused him.

She didn’t bite the hand that patted her, as she would have dearly loved to do. Overbearing, sexist oaf. But, in his overbearing, sexist way, he’d admired her for her boldness. He wouldn’t go on admiring her if she backed down. Whereas, if she kept it up, he might just admire her enough to let her alone. She thrust out her own hand. “Pay up, then,” she said.

Silence stretched. If he decided the joke had gone too far, the next few minutes would be among the most urgently unpleasant she’d ever known, and very likely the last she ever knew. His right hand slid down to his belt. She held her breath. His hand bypassed his sword, and paused at the pouch behind it. He pulled out a coin and slapped it into the palm of Nicole’s hand. “Here. This pays for all, yes?”

It was a little coin, smaller than an as, about the size of a nickel. It was surprisingly heavy, and gleamed brighter than even the shiny brass sesterces that looked like gold… till you had the real thing with which to compare them.

Julia spoke in an awed whisper: “That’s an aureus.”

Nicole had never seen a goldpiece, not in all the time she’d been in Carnuntum. Even silver wasn’t in common circulation, not at the low rung of the economy where the tavern dwelt. She thought — she wasn’t sure, she’d never needed to be sure — an aureus was worth twenty-five denarii. A hundred sesterces. Four hundred asses. A hell of a lot of money.

“Yes,” she said dizzily. “This pays for everything.” Her wits started working again: “Everything to eat and drink, that is.”

The German’s nod was impatient. “Yes, yes,” he said, and then, to put her in her place once more after he’d deigned to yield, “You flatter yourself if you think we want you or your servant here. You stink.”

She hung her head, as if chastened. Down where the German couldn’t see her do it, she grinned. She made herself wipe the expression from her face. But oh, how fine it had felt while she wore it!

The Marcomanni and Quadi — and perhaps even Lombards — drank all the wine she had, and ate most of the food. A few of them left. A few newcomers joined the crowd. Nobody touched Nicole or Julia or Lucius, or offered harm. They’d won a kind of immunity, between Calidius Severus’ stale piss and Nicole’s food and drink.

She knew how lucky she was. She’d seen horror. She’d heard it. She kept hearing it, too. Every so often, close by or far away, a woman would start screaming. She knew what that meant. The first time or two or three, she told herself she should rush out, find a weapon, do something about it. But no matter how brave she might be, she’d end up killed or thrown down beside the other woman and served up as the second course. It made her sick, but there was no getting away from it. Not one person in Carnuntum, male, female, it didn’t matter, could do a thing. They were conquered. And this was what conquest was. She’d built a tiny raft of what might be safety. In the fallen city, that was — that would have to be — miracle enough.

The gathering was becoming rather rowdy. The frat-party ambience had thickened, till Nicole could almost see these murdering bastards as a gang of Sig-Eps and Tri-Delts celebrating a hard day’s beer-bashing with a nightlong carouse.

One of them sprang up, egged on by his friends, and put on such a long, jut-jawed face that there was no mistaking what he was trying to be: a Roman citizen in the full draped weight of the toga, thirty pounds of chalk- whitened wool, throwing up his hands and squealing like a woman as a big bluff German cleaned out his cash box.

It was terrible, reprehensible, and ultimately very sad, and yet it was screamingly funny. The Germans were rolling on the floor, howling with laughter. And it was funny. Eddie Murphy could have used it without changing a thing — thirty pounds of toga, forty pounds of gold chains, what difference did it make? Nicole couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing.

The sound of it brought her up short. These men had just murdered one of her neighbors and gang-raped another in the middle of the street, and she was laughing with them? God, for a vial of poison to drop in their wine. And a dose for herself, for succumbing to the oldest disease in the world: falling into sympathy with the oppressor.

As had been happening once in a while as the afternoon wore on, somebody new swaggered through the door. He was a horrible sight, his tunic and trousers splashed with blood. None of it was his. He took a place at a table in the middle of the room, roared for wine — Nicole spitefully gave him the last of the one- as rotgut; he swilled it down without seeming to notice. Everybody wanted to know, by gestures and grunted words, how he’d come to be covered with gore. His answer was graphic, with much thrusting and slashing of the air. They laughed and pounded the tables. He stabbed a finger at his crotch and mimed the thrust and grind of a good fast rape.

They clapped and cheered. They gathered round him and pounded him on the back. Amid the gluey vowels and guttural consonants of their incomprehensible speech, Nicole understood clearly what they thought of him. He’d scored in their reckoning, and scored big.

And would anything change, really, in eighteen hundred years? Never mind the small scale of fraternity hazings and barroom gang rapes. The twentieth century had institutionalized slaughter, and turned rape into a science. Serbs massacred Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and drove women into rape camps. She’d be willing to bet they boasted of the horrors they’d committed, and sat around in bars and cheered one another on.

But, in one respect, things had changed. Once the Serbs had had their fun, they’d done their best to hide it from the world. They buried in mass graves the people they’d slaughtered, and denied that the rape camps had ever existed.

These Germans didn’t think like that. Not in the least. They saw nothing shameful in what they did; felt no need to hide it from the world. They had every right, they seemed to believe, to rob and rape, murder and pillage.

They were terrible people. And they were proud of it. They were completely, unreachably alien.

All too soon and all too completely, the wine ran out. Nicole poured the last dregs into a cup, served it to a German who wouldn’t have cared if she’d given him vinegar, and stood empty-handed and beginning, all over again, to be afraid.

But the German with the topknot, the one who’d given her the aureus, patted her on the head again as if she’d been a favorite dog, and said, “No one hurts you here today. I say this — I, Swemblas.” He struck a pose, with a lift of his head that told her the topknot and the Roman armor meant something. He was a man of substance, a chieftain maybe, or someone who had ambitions to be.

“I’m glad,” she said to him. Then, after a pause and a moment’s thought: “I’d be even gladder if you granted the same immunity to everyone in Carnuntum.”

Swemblas laughed. “Ho! Ho, little woman, you make good jokes! Carnuntum is ours now. We will enjoy it. You Romans are too weak to stop us. If you were not, we would not be here.”

He was honest, she granted him that. You have what we want, and we’re strong enough to take it away from you. So we damn well will.

The twentieth century had spilled more blood than this small-time butcher ever dreamt of, working toward proving that greed and violence were not to be tolerated in an enlightened world. Here in the second century, greed and violence were the virtues of the hour. And who was she to tell them otherwise?

One of the Germans sat where he could see at an angle out the door. He pointed, laughed, and said something in his own language that made his friends echo his laughter.

“What’s funny?” Nicole asked Swemblas, emboldened by the knowledge of his name and by the promise he’d made her.

He actually condescended to explain. “We are many drunken Germans, and here is also a drunken Roman.”

And there he came, staggering along the street. Nicole saw the stagger first, before anything else. Her lip curled in anger and contempt. Carnuntum had fallen, and this idiot could think of nothing better to do about it than soak himself in wine.

Then he lifted his head, and she gasped in recognition. It was Gaius Calidius Severus. He’d never get drunk at such a time. He’d gone off to fight; there was no way he’d come back sloshed, even to drown his sorrow at defeat.

“He’s not drunk,” she said suddenly. “He’s hurt.” She ran out past the staring Germans, caring only that none