Household Gods

someplace were being banned from the USA because their glazes had too much lead. The amphorae of wine under the counter were glazed, too, all but the one that held the cheapest local stuff. You couldn’t even put lead foil over the corks on wine bottles anymore, not in California you couldn’t.

God knew, this wasn’t California. This wasn’t anyplace fit or healthy for human occupation, from the looks of it.

What about the terra sigillata pitcher and bowl in her room? How was she going to know? How could she find out?

God. God, God, God. What was that book she’d seen in a used bookstore once, with the day-glo pink cover? Future Shock, that was it. So what was this? Past shock? Culture shock? Pure unadulterated shock? Nothing here was safe. Everything could poison you. Every little taken-for-granted thing.

Julia was happily oblivious to Nicole’s confusion. She seemed to think they were still playing some kind of game, a game of wits maybe, a test of her cultural literacy. Or was it literacy, if it had nothing to do with reading?

Julia spoke again as the voice of sweet reason, as if that were the role she’d decided she was cast in. “Besides, Mistress, if lead were poisonous, we’d all be dead, wouldn’t we?” She laughed at the absurdity of the notion, the same way people in the twentieth century had laughed at the notion that DDT might hurt the environment.

Lead poisoning was insidious, Nicole knew that. It took a long time to build up. But she couldn’t explain that here, even if there were words to express it. Julia wouldn’t listen, any more than people had listened about DDT, or fluorocarbons, or the hole in the ozone layer.

Julia seemed to have decided the game was over; that it was time to go back to work. Her tone had changed, and even the way she held herself. She was the slave again, carefully submissive; no more arguments, no thinly veiled rebukes. “What would you like for breakfast, Mistress?” she asked.

Nicole wasn’t pleased to note how glad she was that Julia had gone back to being servile again. “Bread and watered wine, same as the children,” she said — and that was a capitulation, too, but she couldn’t see any way out of it. Except possibly one. “The one-as wine,” she added, “nothing fancy.” That was the one that came in the unglazed amphora. If it was bad wine, so much the better. Then maybe she could keep from growing too fond of it.

Even if it didn’t have lead — she hoped it didn’t have lead — it still had alcohol in it. The odor rising from the (unglazed, thank God) cup made her shiver. She could all but hear her father downstairs yelling at her mother, while she lay in bed with the covers pulled up over her head and tried not to listen. She had to will herself to sip.

Diluted, the wine tasted like watery, half-spoiled grape juice. It had a tang to it, a sharpness and a kind of dizziness in back of it, that had to be the alcohol. She’d never tried any before, to know. She’d refused.

Her heart was thumping again, as it had when she discovered her face was armored in lead. She’d thought, somehow, that the first taste would do it: would hit her hard enough to make her stagger. Apparently, that wasn’t how it worked. She sipped again, deeper, and again, till the cup was empty.

Did she feel anything? Was there anything to feel? Maybe she was a tiny bit more detached from the world than she had been before. Maybe she wasn’t. She’d been in varying degrees of fog since she woke up in Carnuntum — and for certain sure she was detached; she was a complete stranger to this whole world and time.

Julia was watching her, nodding sagely, as if she could see an effect Nicole couldn’t feel. “That will do you good, Mistress,” she said.

“I doubt it,” Nicole said. Her belly was rumbling again, knots and snarls that were more nerves than sickness. The wine hadn’t made it worse, at least. She was grateful for that.

Medicine. She could think of it as medicine. Even her mother had had a stash of medicinal brandy, that her father had never managed to find.

Julia’s voice broke in on her thoughts, as so often before: as if it were a kind of lifeline, an anchor to this world. “Are you feeling well enough to go out and buy things today, Mistress, or will you send me? “

Nicole focused abruptly and too sharply, though the edges of things still wavered just a little. Julia was watching her alertly, with a look she’d seen on a dog hoping for a portion of the humans’ dinner. So was this a new game, then? A gambit to get hold of some money, to do God knew what with it?

Nonsense, Nicole thought. Julia could get at the till either way, whether she stayed to mind the tavern or went out shopping. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the house.

If that was it, too bad. Nicole hadn’t gone out since she got here, either. Her insides still felt very uncertain; and even though Imodium looked like a Latin word, it surely wasn’t, or she’d have found a bottle of it by now. Maybe if she could get out, breathe relatively fresh air, see more of Carnuntum than she could from window or doorway, she’d forget her indisposition for long enough to make it go away.

“I’ll go,” she said. Julia’s face fell, but she didn’t argue. After all, her expression said, she wasn’t the boss. Nicole did her best to sound brisk. “Let’s see — what do we need?”

Julia visibly swallowed her disappointment to focus on the duties at hand. “That amphora of Falernian in there” — she pointed to the bar — “will last the day out, I think, but not tomorrow. And we’re out of scallions and raisins, and we could use some more mutton.”

“I’ll get some fish, too, if I see any worth buying,” Nicole said. She had to say something, if she expected people to think she was staying on top of things.

“All right, Mistress.” Julia sounded vaguely dubious, but then she nodded. She’d dropped her facade of submission again, Nicole noticed. It seemed to go up when Nicole was giving orders, but to go down when they were working together — as if a slave could think for herself, sometimes, if her mistress gave the signal. Had Nicole been giving the right signals after all?

Maybe it was all those years of dealing with secretaries — pardon, administrative assistants — and paralegals. They hadn’t been much more than slave labor either, not at the pay they got and with the workload they carried.

Julia had gone right on talking, in a tone that reminded Nicole almost poignantly of a paralegal invited to voice an opinion on a case: “Fish spoils fast, so there’s always that risk, but we can eat it ourselves tonight if no one else does. And people will probably order it. You were doing some interesting things with it yesterday when they brought it in for you to cook. Word will get around.”

“I suppose so,” Nicole said, though she wondered how. No TV, no radio, no telephones, no e-mail. How did people find out what was going on in the world, or even in Carnuntum?

She wasn’t going to find out by staying cooped up here. Under Julia’s eye, she unlocked the cash box and chose a selection of coins, picking them out with care, as if she knew to the as how much she was leaving behind. Julia’s glance didn’t flicker; her brow didn’t wrinkle. Nicole drew in a breath of relief, and escaped out the door.

She turned left more or less at random. She’d gone several steps before she realized: she didn’t know where to buy any of the things on her mental list. Nothing in sight looked like a supermarket, or even like the corner grocery stores the supermarkets had forced out of business. A vague memory of her honeymoon brought to mind tiny shops, boucheries and boulangeries and something with a horse’s head out front that she’d found very pretty till she learned it was a horsemeat butcher. She didn’t see anything like that, either.

A voice called out behind her. She stopped and turned, expecting it to be Julia, calling out that she’d gone the wrong way. But it was someone from the next house down, a little bony bird of a woman with an extraordinary crown of curled and frizzed hair, waving and calling, “Umma! Oh, Umma! Good morning!”

Nicole almost didn’t respond. But the woman was looking straight at her, looking so delighted that Nicole wondered if Umma and she were long-lost sisters. She raised her hand and waved back, trying to put a little enthusiasm in it, so as not to seem suspicious.

“Off to market then?” the woman asked. “And isn’t it a lovely morning? Do come over later, will you please, dear? It’s been ages since we had a good gossip!”

Nicole hoped her expression didn’t betray what she felt, which was a kind of horror. Neighbors in West Hills didn’t lean out of upstairs windows — if they had any — and yodel at passersby. This neighbor obviously thought she was a friend, too. Or else she really was a relative.

“Later,” Nicole managed to say. “Yes, I’ll come over later.” In about ten years. She put on a bright company smile, and wished she had a watch to glance at significantly. “Well. I’m off, then. Good morning.”

“Good morning!” the stranger caroled, and mercifully ducked back inside.