Household Gods

“Very much, thank you,” Nicole answered, “even if it is only dead flesh.”

He started slightly, and stared. She wondered if she’d get into trouble for having the nerve to put a sardonic twist on what he said. To hell with it, she thought, and instructed herself to stop worrying. She never would have got an audience with the Emperor if she hadn’t had a fat dose of chutzpah.

“Anything would taste good now,” she added. “As I said, we haven’t had much to eat since the Germans came.”

To her astonishment, Marcus Aurelius lowered his eyes as if in shame. “You may justly reproach me for that,” he said. “Had I been able to best the barbarians before they broke into Carnuntum, I would gladly have done so. But I had neither the strength nor the ability to prevent them.”

That he felt he deserved blame for his failure was perfectly, even painfully, obvious. That he was also very, very able was just as obvious. In the late twentieth century, such a politician would have been a prodigy of nature — and very likely would have found it impossible to get elected to office.

But nobody had elected Marcus Aurelius to anything. He was Emperor of the Romans. He held that office for life. Rulers of that sort were out of fashion in her time, and with good reason. Without the need to keep the people happy enough to keep on voting for them, rulers could do whatever they pleased. Even if they bought votes and forced their election, in the end they fell, and often bloodily.

And yet, without the need to pander to the electorate, rulers might also be as good as they chose. They didn’t have to slip and slither and slide around every issue, to make sure the voters kept on voting them back into office. Nor did they have to back off from unpopular positions, if those positions were right, for fear of being voted out. They could do whatever needed doing, and do it to the best of their ability.

As Nicole listened to the man across the table, she understood something altogether new about accountability. Not all freedom was license, and not all power was corrupt. This Emperor of the Romans, whose rank and office were as undemocratic as they could possibly be, made even the best American politician seem an unprincipled hack.

While they sat silent, each lost in reflection, the slave brought in bread and honey. Nicole took the first, fabulously sweet bite, and had all she could do to keep from wolfing down the rest. “This is wonderful honey!” she said.

Marcus Aurelius smiled. “I’m glad you enjoy it. It is from Mount Hymettus, in the Athenian land.”

Nicole realized she was supposed to be impressed, though he was obviously trying to make little of it. She was certainly impressed with the flavor, whatever the origin. Of course the Emperor would have only the best.

After the bread came apples, just as he’d promised at the beginning of the meal: apples sliced and candied in more of that wonderful honey. When she’d licked her fingers clean, Nicole felt replete for the first time in longer than she liked to think. She savored it. She’d known so little bodily well-being lately; it was delicious just to sit there and feel that sense of fullness.

The servant cleared away the remains of the dinner. The sun had gone down, leaving only fading twilight beyond the windows. More lamps glowed in the chamber than Nicole had ever seen in one room. Even so, they did not, could not, banish darkness as electricity did. They pushed it back a bit, that was all. Every time Marcus Aurelius moved, fresh shadows stole out and sheltered themselves in the lines of his face. He looked older than he had in the daylight, a tired, fiftyish man who’d had too little sleep and too much stress for much too long.

He made a steeple of his fingertips and studied her over it, homing in at last on the purpose of the meeting. “I am curious as to the logic by which you reached the conclusion that the Roman government is in some way responsible for the vicious and lewd act of one soldier.”

Now he got down to it. This wasn’t a courtroom; it felt more like settling out of court. But she was working — playing — with the law again even so. Parts of her that had felt dead, closed off, since she’d come to Carnuntum awoke to sudden and vibrant life. Rain in the desert, she thought, awakening seeds in the dry earth, a bloom of flowers after years of drought.

Oh, she had missed it, if she was waxing rhapsodic about its return. She pursed her lips and folded her hands and got down to business. “It seems plain enough to me,” she said. “If a soldier isn’t the agent of the government that employs him, what is he?”

“A collection of the atoms that make up a man,” Marcus Aurelius replied. “A product of the divine fire, living according to nature.”

“That’s philosophy,” Nicole said. “I thought we were talking about law.”

“There is a connection between the two, you must admit, for good law can spring only from a sound grounding in that which is ethically proper. Would you not agree?”

He sounded like a book, with his rounded sentences and his careful ordering of ideas. But they were fuzzy, muddy ideas compared to the crisp architecture of the law.

All theory and no practice, she thought. He wasn’t the first such thinker she’d seen, or even the tenth. With a faint sigh of exasperation, she said, “Isn’t that irrelevant for the moment? We’re talking about what the law is, not what it should be.”

Marcus Aurelius startled her with a disarmingly boyish grin. “Oh, indeed, Alexander did not err when he sent you to me,” he said. “You have a great natural aptitude for a profession of which you must hitherto have been altogether ignorant.”

Nicole drew breath to object to that, but a belated attack of sense kept her silent. There was no way she could explain how she really knew about the law. Let him think her a prodigy, if it got her what she wanted.

She hadn’t diverted him from his line of thought, either. He veered right back to it with a quiet obstinacy that would have served him well on the tenure track at a university. “A soldier, like any other man,” he said, “is obliged to live according to that which is ethically right.”

Nicole pounced with a cry of glee. “Ha! How can you say that a soldier is doing what is ethically right, when he rapes a woman he’s supposed to defend?”

“I do not. I never have,” Marcus Aurelius replied. “I do, however, dispute your claim of agency applying to my government.”

My government. Maybe he didn’t even notice he was reminding Nicole of who he was. It was literally true. The government was his. He owned it. No one in the United States could say such a thing, not and be believed. That was not a phrase she would ever have heard in the United States. “You still haven’t answered my question,” she said. Marcus Aurelius smiled again, perhaps at her stubborn presumption. “If he’s not an agent, what is he? What can he be? If a soldier doesn’t belong to a government, what is he?”

Nothing, was the answer she expected. But Marcus Aurelius said, quite seriously, “A brigand.” Once again she realized, as Dorothy had after the tornado, that she wasn’t in Kansas — or Indiana, or California — anymore.

“I suppose that may be true,” she said, “but it hasn’t got anything to do with what we’re talking about here.”

“I should be hard pressed to disagree with you. “ The Emperor inclined his head with studied courtesy. “By all means continue your argument; perhaps you may persuade me.”

He meant it. Nicole had long experience in the ways of judges and juries, and he was telling the truth. If she could persuade him, he’d give her what she wanted.

This was an honestly, incontestably good man. He wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t playing a part. He was a little on the imperial side for her democratic tastes, but of his goodness she had no doubts whatever. Nor was he doing it to gain himself a jump in the polls. He did it because of what he was; because, for him, there was no rational alternative.

Nicole had to stop to get her wits together. Genuine goodness in a politician was profoundly disconcerting.

She took refuge in the security of legal reasoning. “Your soldier was under orders to recapture Carnuntum from the Marcomanni and the Quadi, was he not? He was your agent — one of your agents — in that, am I correct?”

He nodded and smiled, as pleased as if she’d been his own protegee. “I believe I see the argument you’re framing,” he said. “Go on.”

“If that soldier was your agent when he was doing the things he was supposed to do, how can he stop being your agent when he commits a crime against me?” Nicole demanded. “He wouldn’t have been in Carnuntum in the first place if he hadn’t been acting on your behalf.”