Household Gods

anything.”

“Of course you don’t,“ Nicole said. “If you don’t want to give it to them, they have no business taking it.”

Julia thought about that, long and visibly hard. Then she nodded. “Nobody has any business taking it, if I say no.”

Nicole’s smile was so wide and so rusty, it actually hurt. Maybe after all, in spite of everything, she was managing to do a little consciousness-raising.

Brigomarus came to visit a day or two later, as he made a habit of doing. He stopped inside the door, sniffed and grimaced. “You’re visiting the dyer’s shop again,” he said. Nicole wondered if he meant to sound quite so accusatory.

“The time seemed ripe,” she answered calmly.

Umma’s brother spat in disgust. “Ripe’s the word, and no mistake.”

“That’s bad,” Nicole said. “Very bad.”

He grinned at her. “You started it.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

They smiled at one another. Somehow, over the weeks and months, they’d become, maybe not friends, but definitely not adversaries. They got along. They could laugh together. It wasn’t bad, as sibling relationships went.

Nicole’s smile died first. “So,” Brigomarus said, “tell me what got you going this time.”

She told him bluntly about the murdered man in the street. Brigomarus nodded, all laughter gone. “From what I’m hearing, he wasn’t the only one. In fact, I came here to warn you to stay inside as much as you can for a while. But you seem to be a step ahead of me.”

“Maybe not,” Nicole said. “What have you heard?”

“Not a whole lot,” he answered somberly, “but none of it’s good. The Germans are screaming at me — they’re screaming at everybody. More shields, more arrowheads, more blades, more spearpoints, more everything.”

“And I bet they want it all by yesterday, too,” Nicole said.

“By yest — “ Brigomarus had to pause and work that one out. However tired a joke it was in English, it must have been new in Latin. He regarded her in dawning admiration. “That’s just when they want it, by the gods. You’ve had a way of coming out with things lately, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Nicole said with a shrug that wasn’t nearly as innocent as it looked. “Have I?” Before Umma’s brother could dig her in any deeper, she hurried them both back to the subject at hand: “What else do you know? How badly is the war going for them? Do they talk about it?”

“Not in any language a civilized man can understand. They grunt and bark like a herd of hungry pigs. But even when they’re babbling among themselves, the names of towns don’t change that much. The past few days, they’ve been talking about Savaria and Scarabantia — and those aren’t that far down the road from Carnuntum. If the Emperor is coming this way, he’ll be here before too long.”

The Emperor. Nicole had hardly given a thought to him since she came to Carnuntum. His words didn’t dominate TV, radio, the papers, and the newsmagazines, as an American President’s did. There were no media for the Roman Emperor to dominate. If it hadn’t been for his coins, she wouldn’t even have known what he looked like, or what his name was. Marcus, Marcus Aurelius. According to the coins, he was a middle-aged man with a beaky nose, a receding chin a beard couldn’t quite hide, and curly hair that looked as if it needed brushing.

All of which told her exactly nothing. People didn’t talk about him at all, or seem to think about him much, either. Brigo certainly didn’t sound awed at the prospect of an imperial visit. “Is he coming himself,” she asked, “or is it just some general leading the army in his name?”

“From what I’ve heard, he’s leading his own army,” Brigomarus said. “He took the field himself farther west, I know that. Whether he’ll beat the cursed Marcomanni and Quadi and come this far — there’s no way anyone can know that.”

“I hope he does,” Nicole said fervently.

Brigomarus rolled his eyes. “Oh, by the gods, don’t we all,” he said. “I can’t think of anybody in Carnuntum who’s done well under the Germans. Except…”

When he didn’t go on, Nicole thumped him on the arm. “Come on — who?”

“The undertakers,” he answered promptly — and hastily threw up a hand.

“Don’t throw that cup at me! They got more work than they deserved during the pestilence. The Germans gave them even more. They’re getting cursed rich.”

“Maybe they are,” Nicole said, “but I don’t expect they’ll cry too hard when the Germans go.”

She wouldn’t be sorry to see them go, either — preferably out on their ears. She wouldn’t be sorry, if she was perfectly honest with herself, to see the lot of them killed. She’d been pretty young when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. When she thought about it, she realized how much the Vietnam War had colored her attitude toward war in general. She’d thought the Gulf War a waste of money and men, fought mostly over oil — never mind the rhetoric about democracy and freedom. But now, from the middle of a war, she didn’t just remember how rapturously the people of Kuwait had welcomed the soldiers who drove out the Iraqis. She understood right down to the bone why the Kuwaitis had been so overjoyed. She was ready — more than ready — to plant a big fat kiss on the first Roman legionary who came tramping up the street. And if there was blood on his sword, all the better.

Brigomarus slapped the bar in front of her, startling her back into herself. “You seem to have things here pretty much in hand. How are you fixed for food?”

“Not too bad,” she said, which was only a slight exaggeration. “We’re hungry, but we aren’t — quite — starving. And you, Brigo? If you need help, we can spare a little. “ She couldn’t, not really, but neither was she — quite — on the edge.

Umma’s brother shook his head. “No, thank you, we don’t need anything. I’m hungrier than I ever wanted to be, but I’m not dying of it.”

She drew a breath and nodded. She was relieved, there was no point in denying it. Every scrap she didn’t share was that much more for Lucius and Julia and herself. “We’ll just keep our heads down and hang on, and wait till the Emperor comes.”

Till the Emperor comes. It sounded like a fairy tale she might have read to Kimberley, not one of the real, old, grim ones, but one of the sugar-coated, saccharine-overloaded, sweetness-and- light fables that were deemed safe for impressionable young children. But there was nothing either sweet or harmless about Carnuntum. The little blue birds would have gone into somebody’s pot, and the pretty butterflies been trampled underfoot by a horde of marching Germans. It would take more than a pastel prince to rescue Carnuntum. It would take an emperor.

Nicole hoped, a little crazily, that he didn’t try to buy himself any new clothes. “I hope he comes soon,” she said.

“So do I,” Brigomarus answered. “So does everybody — except the Quadi and the Marcomanni. And they’re the ones with the most to say about when he gets here, or if he gets here at all.”

More and more Germans in filthy bandages prowled the streets of Carnuntum. Fewer and fewer peasants brought in produce from the villages and farms around the city. Carnuntum might have been the only place where they could get money for it, but Carnuntum was also the place where they were most likely to be robbed and killed. They didn’t need any sort of cost/benefit analysis to draw the appropriate conclusion. They stayed away. And Carnuntum went hungry.

One who did dare the market square brought news of a battle outside Scarabantia. “Who won?” Nicole demanded in the middle of trying to haggle down the price of his prunes.

He wasn’t inclined to haggle. Intellectually, Nicole understood that: if she didn’t feel like paying his price, some other hungry citizen would. It infuriated her even so. He had a lot of damn nerve, lining the pockets he didn’t wear with profits made from hunger. He also wasn’t inclined to answer her question in a hurry. He reminded her of a farmer from downstate Indiana, sparing of words and suspicious of everybody he hadn’t known since he was four years old.

“Who won?” she repeated, wishing she could appeal to a judge to get an answer out of the reluctant