Household Gods

customers, she hoped not about how strangely Umma was acting today; he broke it off in his own good time, and took the three sesterces that she handed him, scowling at their brassy gleam. “Took you long enough,” he growled. “What did you have to do, fetch them from the mint?”

“Was that lock giving you trouble again, Mistress?” Julia asked with an air of great solicitude. Turning to the customer, she went on, “You should hear all the things Mistress Umma calls that lock. Anybody would think she’d been in the legion herself, not just married to a veteran — may he rest in peace among the shades.”

“Heh,” the man said: one syllable’s worth of laughter. He tossed the change into his purse and stalked off jingling.

When he was gone, Nicole lifted her brows at Julia. “Am I really as bad as that about the lock?” she asked.

Julia nodded, wide-eyed: another of her exaggerated stage effects. “Worse, Mistress, since you’re the one who wants to know,” she replied. Lucius and Aurelia mirrored her nod, big eyes and all. So were they in it together, or was Nicole — Umma — as paranoid as that?

It paid to be paranoid in Los Angeles, but here? What could there be to be afraid of, that anyone from the twentieth century should worry about — except being discovered for what she was?

It was midmorning, as best Nicole could determine, and the children still showed no sign of going off to school. Either this was a weekend (did the Romans have weekends?), or they didn’t go. Nicole could read and write, of course, and she’d seen that she was literate in Latin, too. Had Umma been as well? She hadn’t seen any books in the bedroom, but that didn’t prove anything. There hadn’t been any in her bedroom in West Hills, either, only the latest issue of Cosmo. Most of the books in the house, and all the bookcases, had gone with Frank. If Nicole ever had time to read at all, she read legal briefs that she’d brought home from the office.

These children of Umma’s weren’t completely idle. They seemed to have their chores: cracking nuts, chopping scallions, sweeping out between waves of customers. They played, too, at headlong speed, till the inevitable happened: Aurelia screeched, Lucius whooped, they were on each other like cats and dogs. Nicole, as much amused as not — children, it seemed, were the same in every place and time — waded in and separated them. “There now,” she said, “you know that’s not nice. Lucius, be good to your little sister. Aurelia, don’t poke your brother, it’s rude. Now be good. Mother’s busy.”

Nicole went back to grinding wheat into flour. It was hard work: her shoulder had already started to ache. Lucius and Aurelia watched her for a little while in silence, as if fascinated; then they were at it again, Aurelia poking, Lucius thumping with his fist, one screeching, the other jeering, till it escalated into honest violence.

Nicole hissed between her teeth, left the mill for the second time and pulled them apart again, not quite so gently as before. Sore shoulder, toothache that never went away, and now children who refused to yield to reason, left her very little patience to spare. She held them apart in a firm grip, and glared into their flushed faces. “Didn’t the two of you listen to a word I said?”

“Well, yes, Mother,” Lucius answered seriously, “but you didn’t hit us, so you couldn’t have really meant it.” Aurelia nodded as if she thought exactly the same preposterous thing.

Nicole stared at both of them. She understood the words they said — as words. The thoughts behind them were as strange to her as the far side of the moon. Umma must beat them, she thought, for them to talk that way. Hadn’t Lucius flinched earlier when he’d thought she was going to wallop him?

At the same time, they didn’t act the way abused children were supposed to act — the way she’d learned in law school they acted. There weren’t any marks on them, bruises or evident broken bones. They didn’t cringe when she lifted a hand, not unless they’d done something they thought deserved a spanking, or go mute when she spoke. There was nothing subdued about them. Lucius spoke of being hit calmly, as if it were something he was used to, and nothing exceptional at all.

What kind of world was this, where children expected to be beaten, and weren’t obviously traumatized by it? That it wasn’t a world without violence, she’d certainly known, between Frank’s old movies and her own Sunday- school lessons: the Crucifixion, the persecution of Christians. But she’d never expected it to be as violent as it had turned out to be — or, what was worse, quite so easy about it. Her own century, after all, was the century of mass destruction, but life in America was sacred, and abuse, particularly abuse of children, was anathema. She’d thought better of this older, simpler age, and hoped for more than she was apparently going to get. Her jaw set in determination. These children were hers, it seemed, for the duration. Surely she had an obligation to teach them how civilized people should behave.

She approached the problem obliquely: “If you don’t hit each other, I won’t have any reason to want to hit you. Why don’t we try that for a while and see how it works? Doesn’t it make sense?”

By their expressions, Lucius and Aurelia didn’t just wonder about the wisdom of what she proposed, they wondered about her sanity. They didn’t say anything, which was probably a good thing. Nicole found herself mortified at her ancestress’ habits: starting on wine when the sun came up, slapping the children around… What else did Umma do that would embarrass and worse than embarrass anyone who knew anything about health, hygiene, or progressive parenting? And when, and in what mortifying ways, would Nicole find out about it?

Lucius and Aurelia went off about some business of their own that, at least, did not involve fighting. Nicole went back to the flour mill. Before too long, she wondered how Umma found time to be any kind of mother, even a bad one. Grinding grain into flour was slow, dull work. “How many loaves do you think we’ll need today?” Nicole asked Julia.

“Doesn’t look like a fast day,” the slave said thoughtfully. “Doesn’t look like a slow day, either. Maybe we’ll get away with twenty-five; we have a good bit left over from yesterday. But thirty would be better, don’t you think?”

“I’m afraid I do,” Nicole said with a sigh. Baking thirty loaves from scratch was a long day’s work when scratch meant store-bought flour. When scratch meant wheat that needed to be ground before it could even be used, it was worse than that.

She’d made bread a few times, back in West Hills, before Frank walked out on her — when she’d had time, or made time, to cook her own, healthy meals. There was a wonderfully sensuous pleasure in mixing the flour and the yeast, adding the water or milk or buttermilk, honey or eggs or butter, mixing them in with strong slow strokes, then heaping the rich-scented elastic dough on the floured board and working it, kneading and rolling and kneading it again till it was just exactly right to let rise and bake. Later on, Frank had bought her a bread machine, but even before she realized it was a guilt-gift — a kind of material apology for his affair with Dawn — she’d put it away to gather dust. There just wasn’t any tactile pleasure in dumping ingredients into a plastic box and letting it do all the kneading and rising and baking for her.

No bread machines here. No KitchenAid, either, with its miracle of a dough hook. Her own fingers did the kneading now, hers and Julia’s and, after they’d been washed and washed again, Aurelia’s. Lucius was off somewhere else by then, or she’d have put him to work there, too.

She had to keep stopping for customers, too, which didn’t make things any easier. Most wanted something from the unwritten menu, whose contents everyone seemed to know. A few brought in meat or fish and expected her to do the cooking — that took her aback the first time, and nearly blew her cover. Luckily Julia took the fish and slapped it on the grill without a word or a look of surprise, giving Nicole the cue for her own reaction. Everyone, whether he ate or not, drank wine: plain for an as, better for a dipondius and the best she had for a sestertius a cup. People didn’t seem to have heard of distilled liquor. Wine was all there was here. It was enough, and bad enough. The smell of it would stay with her, she was sure, even if she were transported back to West Hills in an instant.

Since she was unfamiliar with the oven, she had Julia bake the first batch of bread, eight loaves’ worth, so she could learn by watching. It wasn’t so simple as setting the heat control at 350 and coming back in half an hour. The slave had to keep the fire burning evenly, and to go by guess when it came to timing. She had a knack, or the ease of long practice. She did it right the first time, and then a second, as casual about it as if she’d done nothing special at all. And maybe, in this world, she hadn’t.

After that, she popped the as Ofanius Valens had given her in her mouth, since there wasn’t a pocket anywhere in Carnuntum that Nicole had seen, and her tunic lacked a belt and therefore one of the ubiquitous pouchlike purses. With that, and with a grin and a wave to her mistress, she went off to the baths.

Nicole had a not very brief, completely cowardly thought of forbidding her to go. Julia’s departure left Nicole