Household Gods

light it from the fire. The oil-soaked wick sputtered and guttered before it came alive. The flame did next to nothing to push back the gathering gloom. Not for the first time, and very probably not for the last, she missed the daily magic of electric power.

The taberna was empty. So was the street. The children had come in not long before, devoured a supper of bread and cheese and a little of the smoked pork, and gone upstairs with Julia. They hadn’t insisted that she kiss them, though they’d stood in a line, slave and children alike, and said a polite good night. Nicole hadn’t tried to keep them downstairs, or tried to persuade them to eat a few vegetables with their bread and protein. She was too tired to fight that battle tonight. Tomorrow, she’d promised herself, on the children’s behalf. Even as she thought it she’d been struck with a memory of older guilt: Justin and his chicken nuggets and French fries, eating a meal that couldn’t possibly be good for him, because his mother was too tired to fix a proper dinner.

She missed him suddenly, so fiercely that for a moment she couldn’t breathe. She missed Kimberley. She missed the house in West Hills. She even -

No. She didn’t miss Frank. Not for one split second.

She took the lamp with her to the front door and stood in it, peering out. Good Lord, she thought: she hadn’t set foot outside all day. She looked across the street, then up and down. A few torches and lamps flickered, but only a few. Above the flat black line of roofs, a piercingly bright star — Venus? — hung in the western sky, at the edge of the skirts of twilight.

After work back in West Hills, she would have watched TV or read a magazine or put a CD on the stereo. No TV here, no magazines, no stereo or CDs.

Even if she’d had the energy for them, she’d have been too exhausted to bother. She pulled the solid weight of the door shut and barred it, then shuttered the windows. Picking up the feeble lamp again from where she’d set it on the table by the door, she retrieved the cash box and carried it upstairs. The stairs seemed steeper than ever in that bare hint of light, narrow and precipitous and ripe for a fall. But she managed them without even tripping, let alone breaking her neck.

The curtains were drawn in the other rooms. She ventured to look in. Two were empty, though one had a bed in it. The third was full of the sound of quiet breathing. Something large lay across the door. The rasp of a snore sent Nicole starting back, even as she realized what it was. Julia, sleeping on the floor, being a living obstacle to anything that tried to come in and get at the children. It was touching, in its way, though Nicole made a mental note to give Julia permission to sleep in one of the unused rooms. Whatever those were for. Guests? Storage? In the morning, or whenever she could, she’d have to look and see.

But not tonight. She was swaying on her feet. If Julia hadn’t been in the way, she might have gone in and tucked the children in as she would have done with Justin or Kimberley, but she wasn’t at all sure she could do it without waking the slave. Best to let them be.

In the room that she’d begun to think of as hers, she set the lamp on the chest and the cash box beside it. She had no energy at all for wrestling the heavy chest and hiding the box. What could happen to it, after all? The door was locked below, and she’d barred the door up here. She used the chamberpot — a luxury she’d had too little of in that long full day — and let herself sink down on the bed. Before she could even rise to blow out the lamp, she was deeply and soundly asleep.

5

Nicole woke earlier than she’d intended. The lamp had gone out. It was pitch-black outside, though the moon had climbed over the roof of the house, the shop, whatever it was, next door and sent a thin strip of wan gray light through the bedroom window. She hadn’t bothered to shutter it: this was the second floor; what could get in?

She noticed the light only peripherally, in that it helped her find the chamberpot. The one advantage of having the damned thing right there under the bed was that she didn’t need to race down the hall to the bathroom. That was as well, for she didn’t think she would have made it. The next couple of minutes were among the most urgently unpleasant she’d known for as long as she could remember.

“Stomach flu!” she groaned when the worst of it was over. What awful luck!

It was even more awful than she’d thought at first. There wasn’t any toilet paper. She used one of the rags from the drawer in the chest, and threw it into the chamberpot afterwards. And regretted instantly and powerfully that it wasn’t a toilet after all. A toilet you could flush. A pot just sat there, stinking. She lay back down with another groan. Even without the stink, she didn’t think she’d have gone back to sleep again in a hurry. She could tell she wasn’t done yet. A herd of buffalo with iron hooves was stampeding through her guts.

Just as she finished the second bout — almost as bad as the first, and no promise more wasn’t coming — somebody knocked on her door. “What is it?” she said weakly, amazed she’d remembered to use Latin. If it wasn’t the end of the world, she had no intention of getting up for it.

It was worse than the end of the world. “Mistress,” Julia said through the door, “Aurelia is puking something fierce, and Lucius has the trots.” She sounded as if she was afraid she’d be killed for bringing the bad news.

Who knew? Maybe in Carnuntum, a slave would be. “I’m coming,” Nicole groaned. She got out of bed and stood swaying. These were, in effect, her kids. If her guess was right, they really were her relatives. They were her responsibility, that was certain. Single mother then, she thought in weary disgust. Single mother now. She hadn’t figured on that when she came back to Carnuntum.

She unbarred the door. Julia was standing in the hallway holding a wan and flickering lamp. She looked like a ghost with her sleep-disheveled hair and her pale face.

Her voice was real enough, shakily stern — almost smug. It reeked of I told you so. “Mistress, it really wasn’t very wise of you to give them water to drink all day. You know perfectly well — “ She paused to inhale, which must have given her a good whiff of the chamberpot. “Oh, dear, Mistress — you’ve got it, too!”

“Yes, I’ve got it, too,” Nicole said. “Happy day.” A piece of limerick ran through her head: Her rumblings abdominal were simply phenomenal. And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth? Any minute now, dogs would start barking at the noises her insides were making.

But that had nothing to do with anything. She was on mommy duty now. “Come on,” she said as brusquely as her queasy innards would allow. “Take me to the kids.”

As they walked down the hall, Julia picked up where she’d left off. “Drinking water all the time isn’t healthy,” she insisted. “I did try to tell you, but you didn’t want to hear, Mistress, even though everybody knows it.”

A lot of what everybody knows was nonsense. That had been so in Los Angeles, and was bound to be so in Carnuntum. Still, Nicole thought, what if the water really was bad, the way it was in Mexico? She hadn’t had any trouble drinking it in Petronell or Vienna on her honeymoon.

Her mouth twisted. That was the twentieth century, not the second. Evidently chlorine had something going for it after all.

But wine? Her frown deepened. People here drank like fish. If they weren’t alcoholics, it wasn’t from lack of trying.

There was no way she was taking that route herself. She’d watched her father crawl into a bottle and pull the stopper in after him. She’d never touched a drop of alcohol, and she was damned if she was going to start now.

Her belly tied itself in a knot and yanked hard. She gasped and doubled up. God! She hadn’t felt this bad since she went into labor with Justin. Whatever this was, it was nasty.

This time, it let her go. She straightened and made it the rest of the way down the hall, where Julia was waiting beside one of the curtained doorways. Her nose told her it was the right place. It smelled even worse in there than in her bedroom: between the two of them, Lucius and Aurelia had been sick from both ends.

Nicole took the lamp from Julia. Its flame was low. “Go fetch another one,” she said. “This one’s almost out of oil.”

Julia didn’t seem to mind the errand. The air would be fresher where she’d been sent, that was certain. “Yes, Mistress,” she said with suspicious good cheer.

As Nicole listened to her thump her way downstairs, it struck her that she hadn’t even bothered to say