Household Gods

whatever else you wanted to call it. The idea that a man’s signature was required to make a document valid told her loud and clear where women stood in Carnuntum — and, no doubt, in the rest of the Roman Empire. In Los Angeles, at least the letter of the law had been on her side. There, hypocrisy had got her so frothing mad she’d wished herself centuries back in time to get away from it. Well — she’d succeeded. No hypocrisy here, oh no. Just pure naked oppression.

“Rain would be nice,” Julia was saying. “I heard the farmers saying in the market yesterday that it’s been too dry for too long — the crops are suffering. Much more drought and we’d be in trouble. You know what they say: dry summer, winter famine. Rain now would mean we eat well come winter.”

“I hope it’s a cursed flood,” Nicole said sullenly.

Julia pulled out the neckline of her tunic and spat down onto her bosom. Nicole stared at her. “What on earth did you do that for?”

“To turn aside the evil omen, of course,” the slave — still a slave — answered. “Drought’s bad, but floods are really and right-there bad.”

Spitting in your bosom was, Nicole supposed, like knocking on wood or crossing your fingers for luck. But in the twentieth century, most people who knocked on wood didn’t really believe it would do any good. Julia sounded as serious about averting the omen as Nicole’s grandmother had been when she made the sign of the cross.

Not a fair comparison. Nicole thought. Grandma was doing something religious. This is just superstition.

So? said the lawyerly part of her mind. Would you be so kind as to define the difference?

Well: religion got higher ratings than superstition. But that, she admitted to both sides of herself, was a less than useful distinction.

She’d had two cups of wine with her supper. They combined with the undercurrent of burning outrage to make her discontented with the idea of trudging upstairs and falling asleep. She’d done that every night since she’d come to Carnuntum, and it looked to be what everybody did every night, without variation and without exception.

“Julia,” she said suddenly, “I want some fun tonight.”

“Why are you telling me, Mistress?” Julia asked. “Go across the street.” She pointed toward the shop and house of Titus Calidius Severus.

Nicole’s face grew hot. “That’s not what I meant!” she said a little too quickly. “I meant someplace… oh, someplace to go: to a play, or to listen to music, or to go out dancing.” Yes indeed: no TV, no movies, no radio, no stereo — she was starting to go stir-crazy. It wasn’t quite like living in a sensory-deprivation tank — some of her senses, especially smell, got a bigger workout here than they ever had back in the United States — but it wasn’t far removed, either. If she didn’t do something besides get up and get to work and get hit over the head with culture shock and collapse into sleep, she was going to scream.

“Mistress,” Julia said, “you know daytime is the time for things like that.” She shrugged. Nicole, even through her haze of fury, thought Julia might just have decided that her mistress was intermittently simpleminded and needed to be humored. “Of course,” Julia went on, “the daytime is when we’re busy, too. But there’ll be plays and beast shows in the amphitheater all summer long.”

“Beast shows,” Nicole said, distracted almost out of her mood. So what were those? A traveling zoo, maybe? That would make sense, with no planes or trains or automobiles, and not much chance to go much of anywhere. It stood to reason that enterprising types might think to bring the zoos to the people, rather than the other way around.

That didn’t help her immediate predicament. “What do I do now?” She sounded like a bored four-year-old, she knew that, but she couldn’t help it.

“I still don’t know why you’re mad at Calidius Severus” — Julia shrugged again, as if to say she wasn’t and wouldn’t be responsible for Nicole’s vagaries — “but since you are, there isn’t much else to do but get drunk.”

“No!” The answer was quick and sharp and automatic.

“Well,” Julia said, “it’s one way not to notice the time crawling by. It’s here” — she held up a hand — “and then it’s there, and you don’t care what happened in between.”

“No,” Nicole said again, remembering her father coming home plastered night after night. For the first time, she thought to wonder why he’d got drunk. Was he trying to blot out the time he spent in the factory every day? It wasn’t enough reason, but it was a reason. She’d never looked for a reason before; it had just been part of her life. She scratched her head, then wished she hadn’t — what was crawling through her hair?

“You feel pretty good, too,” Julia went on, not really arguing with Nicole so much as reminding herself. “Oh, you may not feel so good the next morning, but who cares about the next morning? That’s then. This is now.” She looked longingly toward the long stone bar, as if to say she wouldn’t mind at all if she got drunk.

“No,” Nicole said once more, but she heard something in her voice she’d never expected to find there: hesitation. She’d smoked marijuana a few times, at Indiana and afterwards. She would have enjoyed it more, she thought, if it hadn’t felt as if she were lighting smudge pots in her lungs. What could be so different about alcohol? She’d been drinking wine — watered wine, but wine — with meals, and she hadn’t turned into a lush.

But your father did, said the stern voice in her mind. For the first time it sounded less authoritative than merely prim. Miss Priss, Frank had called her sometimes. At first it was affectionate, but later it gained an edge. Then he started adding, “You know, Nicole, people who preach like that usually do it because they’re afraid they’ll be tempted — and they’ll like it.” Not long after that, he was gone. Lady number two hadn’t ever been prim in her life, or sensible either.

Nicole couldn’t help it if she was congenitally sensible. Maybe that good sense was what she needed now, instead of blind abhorrence. Dad drank boilermakers, for heaven’s sake. A few cups of wine don’t even come close.

Do they?

“Can’t do it all the time,” Julia said, “but everybody needs to get drunk once in a while.”

Moderation in everything, including moderation. Nicole couldn’t remember where she’d heard that. She’d always thought it made good sense, but she’d never applied it to alcohol before. She’d been too busy running in the opposite direction — running away from the father figure, a therapist would say. So did it make sense now? God — gods — knew this wasn’t Los Angeles. Life here in Carnuntum was profoundly, sometimes unbearably, different.

Gods, yes. Liber and Libera had, somehow, granted her wish, her whine, her prayer. They’d brought her to Carnuntum. They were, as she had discovered to her dismay, god and goddess of wine. What would they think, what would they do, if they realized how she felt about their very own and most protected substance? Or had they known all along, and set her up for just this dilemma?

Hadn’t Christianity turned a lot of the old gods into devils? Right now, Nicole could see why. But she hadn’t felt anything bad in Liber or Libera, not in their faces on the plaque and not in the way they’d granted her prayer. So maybe it was a creeping evil — or maybe it was simple godlike benevolence. Be careful what you wish for, she’d heard said: you might get it.

She was, she knew, talking herself into something she would have rejected in horror a few days — or, heavens, was it weeks? — before. She had rejected wine, and what had that got her? A case of the runs that almost turned her inside out, and derision from everybody who heard about her drinking water.

“Well, maybe,” she heard herself say. “Maybe it’ll get the taste of that cursed clerk out of my mouth.” An excuse, an alibi — she knew as much. She also knew life was a bore, and an unpleasant bore at that.

Julia must have had a much more solid understanding of that than she did. The slave went over to the bar and filled two cups with wine, brought them back, and plunked one on the table in front of Nicole. Nicole stared at it. It was one of the cups she filled and washed and filled again all day long, brimful of the middle-grade wine. That was boldness on Julia’s part, mixed with prudence: not the cheap stuff if they were going to drink it neat, but not the expensive stuff either, since they were going to drink a lot.

Nicole reached out a hand that was gratifyingly steady and lifted the cup. With the same deep breath she’d have drawn just before she jumped into a lake of cold water, she touched it to her lips and sipped.