Household Gods

had to go out and sell my body just to stay alive. Instead I got to do it when I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it now. I wanted to help.”

That hasn’t been as scary as I thought. Nicole had never heard freedom more faintly praised. And yet, the rest of it was just as honestly put, and it was, in its way, the most genuine expression of gratitude Nicole could ever have asked for. She couldn’t find anything more eloquent to say than, “All right, Julia. Thank you. Just — thank you.”

Julia shrugged and went back to scouring tables. Nicole groped for something more to say, but there wasn’t anything that would work. She went back to the cash box instead, and paused before she shut and locked it, staring down at the brassy gleam of the coins. Her mind was running of itself through everything those extra sesterces would buy, and all the ways she could make them stretch.

Pragmatism. It wasn’t a pretty word, or a laudable trait, but here, in this time and place, it meant survival.

As a lean and hungry spring swung into a parched summer, Nicole had time, once in a while, to wonder about the war between the Romans and the Germans — Marcomanni, Quadi, she never had learned how to tell the two apart. There was no easy way to get an answer. Even before the invasion, events at a town as close as Vindobona reached Carnuntum slowly and often in garbled fashion, if they arrived at all. When the war had been fought farther west, it was like noise in a distant room of the house — there, but difficult to understand.

Now the war had rolled right over Carnuntum — and it was still hard to interpret. Every so often, Germans would come through town with loot obviously gathered somewhere farther south in Pannonia. Other Germans passed through on the way south, heading toward the fighting — or maybe just toward chances to murder and rape and plunder.

Were they winning the war? If they were, did that mean they’d go down into Italy and sack Rome the way they’d sacked Carnuntum? Was this the fall of the Roman Empire? Was now the time when everything went to hell? For far from the first time, Nicole wished she knew more ancient history. Had Liber and Libera thought they were doing her a favor, dropping her right in the middle of the great collapse?

She spent a few anxious days worrying about that in the odd moments when she wasn’t worrying about being hungry. Then, to her own surprise, she found an answer. No news had come in, and she still knew next to nothing of the history of the Roman Empire — but there was one thing she did know.

The Heidentor wasn’t there. That was the key. When she’d done the budget tour of Petronell on her honeymoon, the guide had droned on and on, nearly putting her to sleep; but one part of his spiel she did remember. He’d said, quite distinctly, that the gate was Roman work. Therefore, the Roman Empire couldn’t be gone from Carnuntum for good. Sooner or later, Roman power would return here. The Heidentor would go up to mark it.

Was it sooner? Or was it later? Would the Romans take Carnuntum back from the Quadi and Marcomanni next month, next year, or ten years from now? That might not make any difference in the building of the Heidentor, but it would make a hell of a lot of difference in Nicole’s life. If the Germans were still in Carnuntum ten years from now, she was damned sure she wouldn’t be.

About the middle of August, she began to feel something that might have been hope. More Germans began coming back through Carnuntum, and fewer of them were carrying booty. Some were wounded: they were bandaged, or they limped, or they were missing a limb. They didn’t volunteer information, and nobody seemed inclined to ask.

For a little while, life in Carnuntum had been — acceptable was too strong a word. It had been somewhere within shouting distance of bearable. People had been hungry, but they hadn’t been — too — afraid to go through the city to see what they might find. The Marcomanni and Quadi remained arrogant, but, while they might steal, they seldom committed worse outrages.

Now, when things didn’t seem to be going so well for the Germans farther south, the situation in Carnuntum turned nasty again. People whispered of robbery and rape. They hinted of even worse.

And one morning, as Nicole made her way to market, she turned a corner and stumbled over a corpse. There wasn’t much doubt the man was dead. Drunks didn’t lie in that boneless stillness, in a clotted pool of blood. Nor would a drunk have worn a ragged tunic rent with crisp, new, two-inch slashes. Those weren’t knife wounds. Those had been made by a sword. Blood had darkened the tunic almost to black; its original color, as near as she could see, had been blue.

Until she came to Carnuntum, Nicole hadn’t realized how much blood a man’s body held: one more lesson she would sooner not have learned. Flies congregated in a buzzing cloud. One walked leisurely along a gash that laid open the corpse’s cheek, exposing the teeth in a ghastly grin.

Nicole shuddered convulsively and gulped hard. She would not — she would not — vomit all over the street. She wheeled blindly and ran, not caring what anyone thought, wanting only to be back in the safety of her own four walls.

When she’d shut herself inside them and barred the door, and never mind that it was broad daylight, Nicole dropped down to the nearest stool and hugged herself till she stopped shivering and trying to gag. She ignored Julia’s wide-eyed stare and Lucius’ startled, “Mother! What happened? What —?” She made herself think, and think clearly.

The man couldn’t have been dead for long. If she’d turned that corner a few minutes earlier, would someone else have gasped in horror at discovering her dead body there? Wrong place at the wrong time, she thought. That could have been the epitaph for most of the senseless slayings in Los Angeles.

It might be her own epitaph, for the matter of that. No one had ever been in a wronger place, or in a wronger time.

But wherever and whenever she was, and however right or wrong that was, she had to live. She had to leave the tavern in search of food, but that wasn’t all she had to go out for. If it had been, she would have stayed at home and sent Julia in her place. No; she had to go out to look for the plaque of Liber and Libera, the one and only plaque that had brought her to Carnuntum. That was no errand she could pass on to Julia. No matter what it cost her to set foot outside that door each day, for the plaque, she did it.

For all her hunting, she never found it. She still gave Liber and Libera their daily libation of wine, when she had any, on the principle that it couldn’t hurt and might help.

And one day, when she’d come home with a bag of mealy apples and a string of little bony fish, and no votive image, she found the plaque on the bar, broken in half and shedding bits on the scrubbed surface. Julia stood over it with exactly the same look of guilt and horror and welling tears as Kimberley might have had if she’d spilled her milk all over the living-room carpet.

This wasn’t just spilled milk. Nicole sucked in a breath. She had no idea what she was going to say. She wasn’t going to scream. She promised herself that.

Julia spoke before Nicole could begin, a rapid rush of words. “Mistress, I’m sorry, so sorry, I picked it up to dust it, and it slipped out of my hand, and it broke. I’ll pay you for it, get you a new one. Just take it out of my wages.”

While she babbled on, Nicole had calmed down considerably. She picked up the two largest pieces and weighed them in her hands. Liber stared blandly at her out of one, Libera out of the other. If they were dismayed to be so abruptly separated, they weren’t about to show it.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said to Julia, and she meant it. “It’s not as if it were any great relic. It wasn’t even working very well — the god and goddess weren’t doing much for us, were they?”

“I don’t know,” Julia said. She’d calmed down, too, with the quickness of a child or a slave, now she knew she wasn’t in trouble for breaking her mistress’ plaque. “Things could be better for us, but they could be a lot worse, too. Remember Antonina.”

“I’m not likely to forget Antonina,” Nicole said, a little coldly. She held onto the coldness. It kept her calm. “Things have been getting uglier lately. I think it’s time to splash ourselves again with Calidius Severus’ perfume.”

Julia made a face. “Oh, do we have to? I’ll never get any extra sesterces for the cash box if we do.”

“Would you rather the Germans took it without paying for it?”

“No!” Julia said, as if by reflex. Then, as thought caught up with instinct: “I don’t want to give the Germans