Household Gods

“You’ll get it when it’s ready.”

She held her breath. If he got up and stomped off the way Ofanius Valens had when she wouldn’t let him play doctor with Julia, then let him.

Instead, and to her amazement, he wilted. “I’m sorry, Umma,” he mumbled into his greasy beard. “As soon as you can, please.”

“That’s better,” Nicole said briskly. She couldn’t help a last stab of guilt. Without the hangover, she probably wouldn’t have barked so loud. But, she told herself, let’s face it: in Carnuntum as in Los Angeles, a healthy dose of assertiveness was not at all a bad thing.

Rain pattered down on the roof of the tavern. Every so often, raindrops slipped in through the smokeholes in the roof and hissed angrily as they dove into the cookfires. Some of them missed the fires and hit the floor. That would have been a raving nuisance on carpet or linoleum. On rammed earth, it was a little too interesting for words. Rammed earth was fine when it was dry. When it was wet, it was mud.

Nicole had never understood mud before, not really. She picked her way past the muddy spots and the damp and odorous customers to peer outside. It had been raining for three or four days now, a mild, steady summer rain of a sort Indianapolis knew well. She’d lost the habit of it in Los Angeles, had forgotten the look and smell and feel of it, the long gray damp days, the dripping nights, the mildew that grew everywhere. In Los Angeles, there were only two kinds of rain: not enough and too much.

As far as Nicole was concerned, a mild, steady summer rain was too much in Carnuntum. Raindrops plashed down on puddles in the street. Or so they had done that first lovely wet day. By now, day three or four — God, she’d lost count — the whole street was a vast, muddy puddle. Something that had been alive once upon a time, but not too recently, bobbed in the water. She had no desire to find out what it was.

An oxcart came trundling along, a little quieter than the usual run of them: the axle, though bare of oil, had plenty of water for lubricant. The cart wasn’t going very fast. Every time the weary-looking ox lifted a foot, it lifted a clinging ball of mud. A mucky wake trailed the cart’s thick wooden wheels. Mud clung to them as to the ox’s hooves, clogging them till they seemed likely to stick solid.

Mud, in fact, clung to everything. Keeping it out of the tavern was shoveling against the tide. Whenever a customer walked in and set a dripping cloak on the edge of a table, a muddy puddle formed beneath it. Julia pulled dry rushes from a sack behind the bar to sop up a little bit of the worst puddles.

Concrete house pads weren’t likely to happen for another eighteen hundred years, but carpets might have been of at least some help. It seemed the Romans had never thought of them. They were easy enough to describe, and easy enough to make, too.

Maybe Nicole should invent them — or would discover be the right word? Though not right away. For the time being, she was only thinking about it. Rammed earth was not the ideal surface on which to lay carpets. She might have to invent the hardwood floor first, or do something with tiles. Saltillo wasn’t all that different from Roman brick, come to think of it.

As Nicole stood in her doorway with the rain misting on her cheeks, Fabia Ursa’s husband, Sextus Longinius lulus, poked his head out next door, evidently to get a look at the rain, too. The tinker was a cheerful little man, as garrulous as his wife, but where she was thin and frail and delicately built, he had the quick-moving round body, full cheeks, and buck teeth of a chipmunk. He smiled at her. She reflexively smiled back. It was hard not to. Chip or Dale? she caught herself wondering.

His voice, at least, was a normal voice, not the high gabble of an animated chipmunk. “Lovely day,” he said, “if you’re a goose.”

“I’m sick of rain,” she said. Heavens, she sounded like a Californian — and after all these years of being hopelessly Midwestern, too.

He shook his head, but his smile didn’t fade. She was glad. She didn’t want him to think she was annoyed at him. He was a good-natured sort, and, from everything she’d seen and heard, was devoted to his wife. “We do need the rain,” he said, “but it could go away now and even the farmers wouldn’t complain.”

“I certainly wouldn’t,” Nicole said with deep feeling. She paused. Well: so say it. Soonest started, soonest over, “Can you and Fabia come over for a little while?”

He seemed delighted at the invitation, though he couldn’t possibly know what it was for. “Why, of course! We’ll be right there.”

Nicole nodded with a faint and she hoped inaudible sigh of relief. “Good. Good, then. I’m going to fetch the Calidii, too.”

“Are you?” Longinius lulus laid a finger on the side of his nose. Probably he imagined that he looked sly. “Ah! I know what’s going on. Fabia doesn’t count for that, you know. She’s only a woman.”

Nicole wanted to wither him with a glare, but restrained herself. He might only be reminding her of how the law worked. She liked him; she’d give him the benefit of the doubt. This time.

“Fabia will come anyhow,” he said. “Liven up the day, and all that. She’s been a bit crabby lately, with the baby.”

Nicole could imagine. Late pregnancy, as she knew too well, was hell. She nodded and waved to Sextus Longinius, who popped back into his house to fetch his wife. Nicole walked down the narrow, muddy stone sidewalk, thankful, and not for the first time, that the street boasted a sidewalk at all; some didn’t. Like a mountain goat jumping from crag to crag, she crossed the street on the stepping stones. The sidewalk on the other side was even narrower. A patch of mud had oozed onto it from the overloaded street. She slipped and slid and almost fell into the morass; flailed wildly and caught herself up against the damp wall. She clung there for a moment, breathing hard, more with stress than with exertion. An involuntary swim in the odorous, ordurous mud of Carnuntum was not her idea of a good time.

Titus Calidius Severus hadn’t set the amphorae in front of his shop today. Maybe he thought the product he’d get would be too diluted to do him any good; probably he feared the jars would float away. A nice little river ran just about where he liked to thrust the pointy ends of the jars.

Nicole opened the door a little too quickly for her stomach’s peace of mind. A monumental stink assaulted her and almost knocked her off her feet.

Through streaming eyes and gagging coughs, she managed to discern Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus near the end of a row of wooden tubs, doing the double-double routine with something thick, dark, and cottony-looking. It was, she realized, some kind of wool, and the substance they were sloshing it around in was stale piss. When they straightened up to greet her, the stuff ran down their hands and arms and dripped from their fingertips onto the floor. They didn’t bother with rushes; they let the piss make its own noxious mud.

“Good morning, Umma,” Titus Calidius Severus said. If the stench bothered him — if he even noticed it — he didn’t show it. “Haven’t seen you in here for a couple of weeks. What can I do for you today?”

Did he sound hopeful? Maybe he did. Nicole ignored his tone just as he ignored the smell. Business, she thought. Stick to business. “Can you and your son come over to the tavern for a little while?” she asked.

Titus looked at Gaius. They knew what was going on, too. This wasn’t like Los Angeles, where people could live next door to each other for years without bothering to learn each other’s names. Here, everyone knew what everyone else was thinking.

“Who else have you got?” the fuller and dyer asked.

“Sextus Longinius lulus and his wife,” Nicole answered.

“Fabia Ursa doesn’t count,” Calidius Severus said, just as Sextus Longinius had. But maybe Calidius Severus had learned something from the past week or two of dealing with the stranger in Umma’s body. He held up his hand before she could snap at him, and said hastily, “Don’t blame me, Umma! It’s how the law works. You’ll still have three men as witnesses, which ought to do you well enough. Of course it would be even better if Brigomarus were acting for you, but — “

“No,” Nicole said sharply. “This is my business, and he’s too stubborn to see it. I’ll take care of it. She’s my slave, not his.”

“Now who’s the stubborn one? “ Titus Calidius Severus chuckled. So did his son. Nicole didn’t see the joke, herself. She waited till they finished their male bonding or whatever it was. It happened soon enough, and the fuller and dyer sobered. He said slowly, “I’m not sure this is the wisest thing, and I’m not easy about it in my mind, either, if you want the honest truth. But you’re clearly set on it, and you’re the one I’ve got to live with day to day.