Household Gods

witness.

“Cursed lot of dead on both sides,” he answered at last, which made her want to feed him all his prunes at once — if she couldn’t loosen up one end, she’d damned well loosen up the other. Then, grudgingly, he let drop a kernel of information: “Romans are still coming north.”

Nicole let out a long sigh of relief. “Why don’t you sound happier about it?” she asked. “There aren’t any Germans around to hear you.” Even as she spoke, she looked about to make sure she was right: the age-old glance of the occupied, checking to see that the occupiers were busy elsewhere.

The farmer shrugged. “I’m making good money these days. And the Marcomanni and Quadi haven’t got the faintest notion what taxes are: haven’t had to pay ‘em an as on my land or my crop. You can bet it won’t be like that when the usual pack of clerks is back in the saddle.”

That he was surely right didn’t make his attitude any more appealing. Nicole had to remind herself she wasn’t likely to improve his outlook by tearing him limb from limb, strictly rhetorically of course. Nor was she inclined to call a German to do it for her. And she needed those prunes. Reluctantly, she shelled out ten times what she reckoned they were worth, raked them into her sack, and left him to his prosperity.

Hunger had long since taken Lucius past the point where he turned up his nose at anything even vaguely resembling food. He would have gobbled all the prunes if Nicole had given him even half a chance. She snatched the bag out of his greedy fingers and stowed it safe behind her. “Oh, no, you don’t! Julia and I get to have some, too. Do you want to spend the whole night squatting over a pot because you made a pig of yourself?”

Lucius scowled and stamped his foot. “I don’t care. I want to eat. I’m all empty inside!”

“We all are,” Nicole said. Not that he cared: he was a child. To children, nothing mattered but the moment. She tried to console him, at least a little. “Maybe we won’t be hungry much longer. The man who sold me the prunes said the Romans won a battle outside of Scarabantia.”

“Outside Scarabantia?” Julia echoed. “That isn’t very far away at all. The Emperor could be here in just a few days.” Her face had been bright with hope, but all at once it fell. “I hope the Germans don’t try to stand siege here. They might hold off the legions for weeks, maybe even months.”

“Siege?” That hadn’t occurred to Nicole. She wished it hadn’t occurred to Julia, either: now they both had something to gnaw their empty bellies over. “God, I hope not, too.” She tried to look on the bright side, if there was such a thing: “We didn’t keep out the Marcomanni and Quadi for very long. Maybe they won’t be able to hold off the legions, either.”

“I hope you’re right.” But Julia didn’t sound convinced. “We didn’t have much of a garrison here, and the Germans took us half by surprise. The legions won’t be so lucky. The Germans will be expecting them — and there are an awful lot of Germans in Carnuntum.”

That made a depressing amount of sense. Nicole stared blankly at Lucius’ outstretched hand, blinked, doled out a handful of prunes. He might be greedy about the whole bag, but he’d learned how to eat his prize once he won it: piece by piece, savoring it, making it last. When he’d got the last scrap of flavor out of the first one, he spat the pit on the floor and said, “If it is a siege, the barbarians will keep all the food for themselves. We’ll starve.”

“You aren’t supposed to understand that much this young,” Nicole said. He shrugged, already halfway through his second prune. She provided the answer he wasn’t about to. In this world, yes, he had to understand that much. Otherwise he wouldn’t survive. She was the one who was lacking here. Her capacity for estimating man’s inhumanity to man had proved time and again that it wasn’t up to, or down to, dealing with the second century. Of course the Germans would lay hold of all the food they could — hadn’t they done it already? Of course they would treat the people of Carnuntum, the people who actually belonged in the city, as expendable. Yes, it made perfect sense. The Serbs in Bosnia wouldn’t have needed it spelled out for them.

Nicole glanced at the spot behind the bar where, once, the plaque of Liber and Libera had stood. Don’t you see? she said in her mind. I’m too… civilized to live in this time. Even if the plaque had still been there, she wouldn’t have got any response. She was bitterly certain of that. She’d made her bed. It was hard and lumpy and uncomfortable, with scratchy blankets and vermin uncounted. She had to lie in it. The god and goddess weren’t listening.

She took a prune out of the bag and popped it into her mouth. It was sweet and good. She had to make the best of things here. She chewed the flesh off the pit, and very carefully, too; and not only because she wanted to savor the taste. The last thing she wanted was to bite down too hard and break another tooth. That would mean, sooner or later, another visit to Terentianus. One of those was enough to last her two lifetimes, and then some.

Food was scarce, but at least, as people were inclined to remark, there was plenty of water. That wasn’t always the case in a siege, Nicole had gathered.

She was just on her way out the door, amphora in hand, headed for the fountain two blocks over, when she nearly collided with Brigomarus. He was in a fair hurry, and he had something tucked under his arm. “What’s that?” Nicole wanted to know, once they’d stopped laughing at the comedy of errors: each leaping back with a little shriek, then doing the “Which way do I go next?” dance till they both stopped and stared at each other.

“What’s this?” Brigomarus brought the cloth-wrapped oblong out from under his arm, grunting a bit: it was heavy for its size. “It’s a present for you.”

“Really? For me?” Nicole couldn’t clap her hands: they were full of amphora. “Show me!”

He obligingly let slip the wrapping and held it for her to see.

She felt the handles of the amphora slipping through her fingers. She felt them, but she couldn’t do a thing about it. The amphora struck the rammed-earth floor and went instantly from pot to potsherds. She didn’t care. She didn’t care at all.

“By the gods, it’s not such a big thing as that,” Brigomarus said, more than a little taken aback. “I happened to notice you’d lost the other one you had up here, and so I thought I’d — “

Nicole hardly heard him. ‘‘Where did you get that?’’ she whispered.

“This?” Brigomarus shrugged. “Stonecutter named… what was his name? Celer, that was it. Pestilence got him, poor fellow. I bought it… oh, must have been toward the end of spring last year, I guess. So when I saw you didn’t have yours up anymore, then Julia told me what happened to it, I thought I’d bring you this one to take its — “

He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Nicole threw her arms around him, being very, very careful of the plaque, and kissed him soundly. There was nothing sisterly about it. When she let him go, he was red from the neck of his tunic all the way up to his hairline. She didn’t care about that, either. With great delicacy, she took the plaque of Liber and Libera from him.

It was the plaque. She recognized it instantly. The carving was sharper and crisper than it had been when the limestone slab sat on her night-stand. Of course it would be. The plaque was much younger than it had been then.

When had Brigomarus bought it? Toward the end of spring last year, he’d said. She didn’t know — she didn’t have any way to discover — exactly when he’d bought it, exactly when Celer had finished it, but she would have bet it was right about the time when she’d taken up residence in Umma’s body. No wonder she hadn’t been able to find it till now. Brigo had had it all along. Had the gods intended that? Had they cared enough to hide it, effectively, in plain sight?

“It’s — perfect!” she said. “Absolutely perfect.”

“I’m glad you think so.” Brigomarus still sounded bewildered. Nicole didn’t blame him. But there was no way she was going to enlighten him. She was only half crazy.

“I don’t just think so. I know so.” Nicole hoped she did. To be wrong now, to be disappointed again… She didn’t want to think about that. If this plaque, the very same, the self-same one that had brought her here, couldn’t get her back to West Hills, nothing could. If nothing could… No. She wasn’t thinking about that.

Brigomarus coughed a time or two. Nicole’s stomach clenched — legacy of the pestilence. But no, it was just a catch in his throat, or maybe a touch of a cold. “There’s another reason I came, too,” he said, “and look, I almost forgot. I heard it from a German who came in screaming for a shield. The Emperor and the army are on their way. They’ll be here any day. The barbarians are yelling at the top of their lungs for something, anything to help them drive the Romans back.”

“Are they?” Nicole was listening with only half an ear. Her eyes kept coming back to the stone faces of the god and goddess. Those carven lips had kissed her palm in promise. Those bland and heedless faces had turned on