Household Gods

Inside Nicole, something snapped. “Stop that!” she shouted at the strawboss. “You stop that this instant!”

“Ah, butt out, lady, “ he said, sounding barely even annoyed. “I ain’t gonna hurt him so bad he can’t work.” He hardly paused to talk to her, but kept right on whaling the slave. He was only doing his job, his manner said. No point in getting upset. If it was nasty — well, that was life, wasn’t it?

The guards at Auschwitz had been like that, Nicole had heard somewhere. Just doing their job. “Leave him alone,” she said. “You’ve got no business abusing him that way.”

“Who says I don’t?” the boss retorted. “I’m supposed to get work out of him, ain’t I? How’s he supposed to feed the fires if he’s out here picking up all this crap? His skull’s so thick, the only way to get anything in is to beat it in.” As if to prove his point, he laid into the slave again.

“Stop that!” Nicole’s voice held itself just on the edge of a scream.

“You don’t like the way I do my job, take it up with the town council. I’ll tell you, though, they like it fine.” The strawboss’ stick went right on flaying the poor man’s hide, rising and falling, rising and falling.

But the worst part was that the slave didn’t even bother to cower, except when the stick cut a little too close to an eye or an ear. By all the signs, he’d been through it before. While the blows rained down on his back, he gathered up his burden again and mended the lashings till they’d hold without snapping. While Nicole stood gasping for breath and coherence, he looked up and snarled, “Shut up, lady, why don’t you? You’re just making it worse.”

Where nothing else had, that stopped Nicole cold. She didn’t want to make trouble for the poor fellow. She wanted to save him from it. But she couldn’t, dammit. That was the worst thing she’d seen about slavery yet. An instant later, she shook her head. No. The worst thing about it was the way the slave himself accepted it.

Aurelia plucked at her tunic. “Mother, are we going to have a bath, or are we going to quarrel all day?” By the way she said it, she was ready for either, but would have preferred the bath, probably because it was more unusual.

Nicole drew a slow, careful breath. “All right.” As tight-lipped with fury as she’d been since — since Frank’s e-mail, she thought — she stalked past the strawboss, Aurelia skipping at her side. The look she gave the man should have scorched him to a cinder. He leered back, running his eyes over her as if were stripping her naked under her tunic.

Her back stiffened. He laughed, impervious to the heat of her glare. Testosterone: it gave a man all the tact and sensitivity of a rhinoceros.

He laid off the slave, at least, and let him make his way wincing and stumbling through the side door to the baths. Nicole was a little bit glad of that.

The attendants at the top of the stairs today were women. Nicole eyed them with horrified fascination. Were they slaves, too? If she’d grown up here, she’d know as automatically as she breathed. Since she hadn’t, she couldn’t tell. Things weren’t so cut-and-dried here as they had been in the South before the Civil War, where if you saw an African-American you knew she was a slave.

How did the Romans keep all their slaves from walking off and settling down two towns over as free men? She couldn’t for the life of her see. There were rules, obviously; but no one had bothered to give her a rulebook. It was like walking cold into a game of bridge, being handed a pack of cards, and told to play — without even knowing what trumps meant. And if she asked, or was too blatant about not knowing, all the other players would think she’d gone insane.

No time to worry about it, not now. She’d be here for the rest of her life. It hit her hard, thinking that — knowing it as surely as, say, Julia knew she was a slave. Right behind it came a stab of real pain, a pang of longing for Kimberley and Justin, so strong that she almost couldn’t go on.

She put it down. There was nothing she could do for them but pray. She’d done that. For the rest of it… sooner or later, she’d have to sit down, take a deep breath, and do some serious sorting out. For now, for this moment at least, she gave one of the women an as for herself and another for Aurelia, then walked into the baths. She was getting good, perhaps too good, at segueing in and out, alternating between near-horror at her situation and a somewhat desperate determination to cope with it. Coping was all she could do — unless she broke and ran screaming into the Danube.

Though the sun streamed in through many windows, her eyes needed a moment to adapt from the brighter light outside. As her vision cleared, she had to work hard not to burst into a torrent of helpless giggles. When, back in the twentieth century, she’d thought about the Romans at all, which wasn’t often, what came to mind was cool white marble, as at the Getty. She’d learned in the street that that wasn’t exactly accurate, but she hadn’t realized, till just now, how very far off the mark it was.

They had cool white marble here — had it and painted it. Or, even better, plastered it over, then painted it. Statues decorated the antechamber, every one of them painted in the same disturbingly lifelike and gaudy style as the ones at street corners. The plastered walls were painted with garden scenes, each individual flower or shrub rendered realistically in itself but without perspective, so that everything was on the same flat, oddly dreamlike plane. The ceiling, lost in lofty dimness, showed a glimmer that might have been gilding and probably was. And as if all that had not been enough, the floor under her foot was a riot of reds and greens and golds, browns and bronzes and blues, hundreds, maybe thousands of vividly glazed tiles arranged into a mosaic of hunters and hounds, stags and wild boar.

The room beyond that was unroofed, a courtyard open to the sky. Something about that, about the transition from enclosed space to outer air, the shape and placement of entry and courtyard, reminded Nicole of something, as if she’d seen them before. Of course: on her honeymoon in Carnuntum, she’d walked in the ruins of this place. She looked around, taking it all in, trying to keep it in memory so that she could come back here and know where she was.

The flowers in this courtyard weren’t painted on the wall. They were real, planted in orderly rows, the bushes near the walls trimmed with geometric severity. Women exercised in the middle of the yard, some with dumbbells, others tossing around what looked like green balloons. “Pig bladders! “ Aurelia was jumping up and down with delight. “Mother, may I? Pig bladders are so much fun!”

“Pig… bladders.” Nicole had already seen that the Romans used every part of the pig except the squeal. One more proof here. They had to paint or dye the bladders that interesting shade of green: it didn’t look like anything one would find inside of a pig.

Most of the women who were exercising had rounder, fleshier bodies than Umma’s — they were built more as Nicole had been back in twentieth-century California. They had to be exercising to lose weight, Nicole thought, as in a health club in that other world and time. She had a moment’s sensation almost of relief — at last, something that resembled the things she’d known before.

Then she overheard two women sitting on a bench, watching the show and offering commentary. One pointed to a woman who to Nicole’s eyes was somewhat on the beefy side. “What’s Pollia doing hefting those weights? Her figure’s perfect as it is. Her husband never complains about sticks and bones.”

Her friend, whom Nicole would have called nicely if not overly slim, sighed in clearly evident envy. “Doesn’t he now? Nor,” she added with a flash of malice, “her boyfriend either.”

“Do tell!” the first woman said. “So who is it now? Faustus still? Or is she creeping around in corners with that pretty young Silvius instead?”

“Why, both!” her friend declared.

They laughed together, rocking back and forth on the stone bench, clinging to each other as if they’d never heard a better joke. When they were under control again, the second woman said, “It’s chic, that’s why she does it. Run around, show off your nice breasts and your firm buttocks, let everybody admire your technique. What’s it to her how much meat and oil she needs to scarf up, to keep the weight on? Everybody knows she married old Aulus for his money — and his handsome slaves.”

Nicole moved past them before they could guess she was eavesdropping, taking a second, longer look at the women playing what looked like a cross between volleyball and soccer.

Their rings and earrings and bracelets were gold, most of them. They’re the rich ones, she realized with yet another shock to the tottering structure of her assumptions: the ones who can eat enough to put on weight, and who don’t do enough real work to take it off again. She thought of her own new body, and how she’d admired its slimness. A sigh — half rueful laugh — escaped her. Wasn’t that just like her luck? Thin was not In in Carnuntum. The body that had been on the chunky side in California would have been perfect here — and this one, which would