Household Gods

a little bit careful. Fabia Ursa will wallop us if we’re naughty. “

Nicole stiffened — a reaction she had much too often in this world and time. What was she supposed to make of that? Should she tell Fabia Ursa not to hit them even if they misbehaved? Fabia Ursa was a gentle soul, as people went in Carnuntum, but she was completely unsentimental — and Nicole had heard her, more than once, approve of a woman who spanked her children. If Nicole tried to force her to lay off the kids, she’d smile, pat Nicole’s arm, and say kindly, “Oh, very well, dear, if you insist — but since I can’t possibly keep from hitting a child who’s being a brat, I can’t possibly look after your children for you, now, can I?”

It wasn’t easy, understanding these people. Worse: Nicole was starting to think they might have a point. Children were, as a species, better behaved here than she remembered them being in L.A. They said please and thank you. They called women ma’am. If they ran around yelling and being a pain in the ass, somebody smacked them, and that was that.

So. Should she tighten up herself? Even her own — well, Umma’s — children thought her soft. They were used to being smacked and brought up short. It hadn’t damaged them that she could see.

No. She shook her head. She couldn’t hit them; she just could not. It was too much like her father coming home drunk and slapping his wife around, or one of the kids if they were closer. Her hand, upraised to strike a blow, mutated into her father’s hand in her mind’s eye, and she froze.

She’d pretend she hadn’t heard. Better that than trying to explain everything to a pair of children who couldn’t imagine equating a well-earned slap or two with abuse.

If the tavern was going to be closed for the morning, she needed a sign to say so — but there wasn’t any paper, no cardboard, nothing. Here was a world without scrap paper or Post-its, empty of anything handy to write with or on.

But people still did write, and wrote on things. Walls, for example. A piece of charcoal on the whitewashed wall in front of the house did as well as could be expected. It looked like a graffito but it said what she needed it to say, which was the important thing.

Julia watched in wide-eyed wonder. “Calidius Severus was right!” she said. “You don’t just know how to read, you know how to write, too. How did you ever learn that?”

Nicole started to answer, then caught herself. She’d told the fuller and dyer she’d studied on her own, but could she have studied so secretly her own slave didn’t know about it?

A lawyer learned when to talk fast — and when to say nothing. Julia was expecting something; Nicole gave her the barest minimum. “I managed,” she said, and let it go at that.

It seemed to work. Julia looked greatly impressed. Even better, she asked no more awkward questions. Her calm acceptance of the stranger things in life had to be a side effect of her slavery; an art of not seeing what she wasn’t supposed to see, and keeping quiet when silence was the safest course.

Not for much longer, Nicole thought with satisfaction — and the barest hint of guilty apprehension. Julia, free, might ask questions that Julia the slave had never dared to think of.

Then again, she might not. At the moment, she was full of Nicole’s hitherto unsuspected ability. She walked along beside Nicole as if she’d had a whole new world opened to her, pointing to this sign or that bit of graffiti, then listening in awed delight as Nicole read it off to her.

Nicole didn’t mind. It was a lot like going for a walk or a drive with Kimberley or Justin, when they played Read the Sign, Mommy, and tried to figure out what it said before she read it.

Remembering that made her throat tighten a bit. She put the memory aside, focused on this world she’d wished herself into, and worked herself up to enjoying the game. In Carnuntum, after all, you made your own fun, or you didn’t have any. You couldn’t turn the car radio on or dump the kids in front of the TV when you or they got bored. This was all there was: people, imagination, and, at the moment, bits of Latin scribbled on walls.

It was a men’s day at the baths. As Nicole and Julia walked by, clots of freshly bathed and barbered men whistled and called and made propositions that would have made a twentieth-century construction worker blush. One even flipped up his tunic to show what he was offering.

Nicole bristled. Julia slid eyes at the merchandise and sniffed. “I’ve seen better,” she said with a toss of her head — and a sway of the hips that made a whole row of yahoos moan in unison.

“Stop that,” Nicole hissed. “You’re encouraging them.”

“Of course I am,” Julia said, and giggled. “Why not?”

You made your own fun, or you didn’t have any. Nicole’s thought of a moment before rose up and bit her. These grunting pigs were committing blatant sexual harassment. Julia was having a grand time encouraging it. If she wasn’t harassed, in fact wasn’t bothered at all, was it harassment?

“What if they do more than just ogle you?” Nicole demanded. “What if one of them tries to rape you?”

“I’ll stick a knee in his balls,” Julia answered equably. “I’ve done that a time or two. Didn’t take much doing. Word gets around, you know. ‘That one’s tough,’ they say. ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ “

Nicole found that hard to believe. No way men were ever that reasonable. Before she could say so, one of the rougher-hewn types on the steps called out, “Hey, girls! Yeah, the two of you! Come up here to papa. I’ll make you think you died and went to Elysium.” As if that weren’t explicit enough, he grinned and pumped his pelvis, showing off a decent-sized erection under the grubby tunic.

Julia looked him up and down, good and long, tilting her hips and thrusting out her breasts till his tongue was hanging halfway to the ground. Her eye came to rest at last on the bulge under his tunic. Her lip curled. “Will you now?” she said in ripe scorn. “You and what legion?”

Nicole didn’t think that was very funny, but the whole crowd roared with laughter. The would-be superstud flushed crimson and slunk away — back to his wife and sixteen snotty-nosed children, Nicole rather devoutly hoped.

The market square was as loudly frenetic as it had been when Nicole went shopping. From everything she’d gathered, it was like that from sunup to sundown every day of the year. Not far beyond it lay the building where the town council met. Despite a fine display of fluted columns and an entrance-way cluttered with statuary, it wasn’t nearly so splendid as the baths — and it seemed to know it. As if embarrassed to be left behind, it tried to make up for its deficiencies with an excess of gaudy paint. One of the statues, a Venus, boasted a pair of gilded nipples. They looked like pasties in a Vegas strip joint. Bad taste, evidently, was a universal constant.

Nicole hadn’t quite figured out how Carnuntum’s city government worked. She knew there was a town council, and a pair of magistrates called duovirs above it. Both duovirs had to approve council measures, she thought; if one vetoed them, they didn’t become law.

Veto, she realized suddenly, working back and forth between English and Latin, meant I forbid. Chunks of this legal system lay embedded in the one she’d studied, maybe not so much in the law itself as in the language in which it was framed. It was an obvious discovery, she supposed — but she’d never thought of it before. It hit her with the force of a revelation, a piece of historical knowledge that she’d never have conceived to be remotely relevant… until she found herself in a place where Latin was a living, and lively, language.

How Carnuntum’s city government stacked up against that of the province of Pannonia, or against that of the Roman Empire as a whole, she didn’t know yet. Nor was she going to worry about it. She wasn’t going anywhere. She had time to learn.

She and Julia walked between the central pair of columns, past the striptease Venus and a statue of someone male, pinch-faced, and heroically proportioned — it looked as if someone had taken the head of a skinny little nerd and stuck it on the body of a Rambo clone.

Once past these monuments to kitsch, however, and once her eyes had adjusted to the dimness of a building without electric lights, she saw that she was in a more familiar place than any she’d found since she came to Carnuntum. There was no mistaking what kind of place this was. For a moment, she had a potent feeling of home — of standing in one of the interminable lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles office on Sherman Way.

What was it they used to write on the old maps? Here be Dragons, yes. Here, she thought, be Bureaucrats.

Oh, there were differences. The clerks wore tunics instead of suits; some of the snootier-looking ones even wore togas. They sat behind folding tables rather than desks, each flicking the beads of an abacus rather than the keys of a calculator — fingers flying, beads clicking, narrow-mouthed faces screwed up and sour.

None of the differences mattered. Bureaucrats were bureaucrats, it seemed, in every age of the world: bored,