Household Gods

Microsoft.

Unfortunately, she didn’t. And, even if she had, she wouldn’t have had time to do it while the raisin-seller waited. She had to stand watching and feeling foolish while he borrowed a modius-sized pot from the bean-dealer next door, filled it full of raisins, then poured the raisins into a big pile on a grimy linen sheet and tied it around them with what looked like a leather bootlace. He charged her an as for the packaging, too, and sounded as if he had every right in the world to do it. She gave him the little copper coin without a murmur.

She wandered on down the line of stalls, finding in them a bewildering variety of things in no discernible order: fruit next to sandals next to bolts of cloth next to the kind of beads and bangles she’d expect to see on the street in San Francisco.

When she came to a butcher’s stall, she wondered if she’d ever eat meat again. No neat, clean packages wrapped in polyethylene film here. Some of the meat lay on platters. Some — she peered, doubting her eyes — was nailed to boards. All of it was crawling with flies. Once in a while, the butcher swiped halfheartedly at them, but they came back in buzzing swarms.

What was it some friend of Frank’s had said after spending a semester in Africa? All about picturesque markets and the African equivalent of hot-dog stands: kabob-sellers. “They’re called fly kabobs,” Frank’s friend had said. Nicole had thought he was exaggerating.

Not anymore, she didn’t.

There was blood everywhere — literally. As Nicole moved closer, drawn as much by revulsion as by curiosity, she realized the butcher was hawking it. “Pig’s blood for blood sausages! Three asses for a sextarius!” He held up a small pot, about the size of a one-cup measure in West Hills. “One more as buys you the gut to case it in.”

His eye caught Nicole’s. Before she could back away, he put down the pot and scooped up a wriggling, pink- and-gray mass that had to be pig intestines, and thrust them in her face. They stank of pig, and of the pig’s last meal. Garbage, from the smell of it, and other things even less savory.

She recoiled. Her stomach, which had forgotten its complaints, abruptly remembered them. She swallowed bile. It burned going down, and made her voice even tighter than it would have been to start with. “I don’t want pig guts,” she said through clenched teeth. “I want a leg of mutton.”

He never even blinked. “I’ve got a nice one with the hide still on,” he said. “You can get it tanned with the wool, if you want, or do the shearing and spin yourself some nice thread.” He reached under his counter and rummaged, muttering to himself. With a grunt that sounded excessively satisfied, he pulled something out from below and slammed it down in front of her. “Here you go,” he said.

She stared at it. It was a sheep’s leg. No doubt about it. It had been hacked right off the body, hide and all. She gulped down a new rush of bile. The leg was bloody at the top, with the pink knob of bone showing through. The hoof was still on it. It wasn’t a particularly clean hoof, either.

The butcher grinned at her. “It’ll go about twelve pounds, I’d say. How does twenty-five sesterces sound? Buy it for that, and I’ll throw in the head for another, mm, seven. Brain, tongue, eyeballs — all sorts of good things in a sheep’s head.” He pointed. There it was, nailed to a board, staring at Nicole with idiot fixity.

The mouth hung open. A big fly walked across the sheep’s tongue. It paused to nibble on some dainty or other, washed its face fastidiously, walked on. Nicole watched in sick fascination. Another fly buzzed down beside the first one. Calmly and without any fuss, the second climbed on top of the first. They began to mate.

“No, not the head.” Her voice came from far away; she was trying not to lose her breakfast. Good God, how did any Romans ever live to grow up? “I’ll give you fifteen sesterces for the leg.”

They ended up splitting the difference. By the butcher’s smirk, she knew he’d ripped her off, but she didn’t care. She only wanted to get away. Magnanimously, the butcher tied a strip of rawhide around the leg of mutton above the hoof and looped it into a carrying handle. Even more magnanimously, he didn’t charge her for it.

By the time she found two men and a woman selling scallions within twenty feet of one another, she’d recovered… somewhat. She wasn’t quite compos mentis enough to do any haggling of her own, but an inspiration saved her the effort: she let them do it for her. She went to the first, got his price, went on to the next for a better offer, challenged the third to top it. By the time she was done, she’d got the green onions for next to nothing. She left the three vegetable dealers shouting and shaking their fists at one another. The woman’s curses were most inventive. The smaller, thinner man had, surprisingly, the most impressive voice.

She decided to get out of there before they started a riot. She tucked the bunch of onions into the top of her bundle of raisins, got a grip on the leg of mutton, and beat a prudent retreat.

There were lots of fishmongers in the market, what with Carnuntum lying on the bank of the Danube. Nicole went from stall to stall in search of the one that smelled least bad. It wasn’t easy. The fish peered up at her with dead, unblinking eyes: bream and pike and trout and carp that looked amazingly like ornamental koi except for their dull gray scales.

She couldn’t move fast, not weighted down as she was. While she strolled, she let the gossip from other strolling shoppers wash over her. She’d done that every so often at Topanga Plaza, too; people-listening could be as interesting as people-watching. A lot of the stories could have come from her time as readily as this one: So-and-so had found her husband in bed with her friend (Nicole’s lips tightened), one partner was supposed to have cheated the other in a real-estate deal, Such-and-such had got his brother-in-law drunk and buggered him.

But there were differences. When a boy of six or seven started crying and wouldn’t stop, his mother whacked him on the bottom, hard. He kept crying. His mother whacked him again and bellowed, “Shut up!”

He shut up. In Topanga Plaza, that would have been a minor scandal, with people rushing to the child’s defense. Nicole might have done it here, if she’d been a little closer and a lot less loaded down.

Nobody else even offered to try. Nobody seemed to want to. Quite the opposite, in fact. Three different people congratulated the mother. “That’ll teach him discipline,” growled a grizzled fellow who carried himself like a Marine. Heads bobbed in agreement.

Nicole gaped. So it wasn’t just Umma abusing Lucius and Aurelia. Everybody abused children, and expected everybody else to abuse them, too. That was… appalling, that was it. That was the word she wanted.

The little Roman boy’s filthy face and snot-dripping nose struck Nicole with a powerful memory of Kimberley and Justin as she’d seen them last, clean and sweet-smelling and tucked up in bed. Nobody had ever laid a hand on them in anger; not Nicole, and no, not Frank, either. Frank had never been abusive. Absent, yes; abusive, no. Dawn? Who could say? Stepmothers were wicked by definition. There wasn’t a fairy tale that didn’t say so — and some of those were pretty horrifying.

Everything was suddenly horrifying. Even the bit of gossip she heard, one woman to another, cool and matter-of-fact as if it were nothing out of the ordinary: “Just got news my husband’s brother died down in Aquileia.”

“Ahh,” her friend said, sounding just as calm about it. “That’s too bad. What was he doing down in Italy, anyway?”

“Didn’t you know Junius? I thought you did. He was a muleteer.”

“I never met him, though you’ve told me about him before. What happened to him? Did the Marcomanni get him?”

“No, he didn’t have any trouble with the barbarians. Anyhow, they got driven out of Aquileia — was it year before last? I forget. No, it was this pestilence that’s going through Italy. It’s very bad, they say. The gods grant it doesn’t come here.” At that, for the first time, the woman sounded less than nonchalant. This wasn’t gossip. This was honest fear.

Wonderful, Nicole thought. An epidemic. Of what, flu? She remembered only too vividly the sound of Kimberley losing her corn dog in the backseat of the Honda.

She also, after a moment and with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air, remembered another kind of epidemic, one much deadlier, that people might speak of with the same fear she heard in the women’s voices. She’d known three people who’d died of AIDS. Two gay men, and a woman friend from law school, who hadn’t known till too late that the man she’d had a brief affair with was bisexual.

Resolutely, she shut that out of her mind. It would happen on the other side of the world, eighteen hundred years or so from now. There was nothing she could do about it. Nor, frankly, could she do anything about this “pestilence” that had taken a life hundreds of miles from here. This wasn’t the twentieth century. People couldn’t