Household Gods

You’ll settle it with your family, or you won’t — that’s between you and them. Personally, I hope you do. Meanwhile,” he said with an air of decision, “we’ll do what you ask. Gaius, run upstairs and get our cloaks, would you? It’s still coming down out there.”

Gaius wasted no time in obeying. He had to be as hungry for entertainment as Sextus Longinius was.

He and his father threw the cloaks on over their tunics and pulled up the hoods. Nicole hadn’t seen any umbrellas in Carnuntum. A parasol, yes, shielding the face of an obviously wealthy woman from the sun in the market square one day, but no umbrellas. Maybe I could discover those, too, she thought. She was developing a whole list of potentially profitable “inventions,” any one of which would make life a fair bit easier.

Picture it now, she thought: a nice little operation, eight or ten or a dozen employees — all free men and women, of course — chatting happily as they made umbrellas. It was a bit too much like a Worker’s Paradise ad, but then again, why not? They’d make a good living, collect benefits — another thing to invent, right there — and she… she’d get rich. Or well-to-do, at least. Latin might even come up with a new word, a word for yuppie, luppa?

What were Roman patent laws like? Were there any? Could somebody who owned slaves set them to making umbrellas eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, undercut her, and drive her out of business? What were Roman bankruptcy laws like?

She shook her head and suppressed a wry smile. From rich to down and out in five seconds flat. The Calidii Severi hadn’t even noticed. She turned on her heel with a touch more dispatch than strictly necessary. “Let’s go,” she said.

Gaius slipped on the same stretch of muddy sidewalk that had almost sent her into the much muddier street. His father caught him, whirled him around and wrestled him up against the wall, so convincing that Nicole was briefly alarmed. But they were both laughing, pushing each other like rowdy boys, all the way down the wall and over the stepping stones. Why neither of them splashed into the muck, Nicole couldn’t imagine.

Pointedly, Nicole said, “If the law needs grown men and not little boys, maybe you two should go back home. I’ll look for someone else.”

“By Jupiter!” Titus Calidius Severus cried in mock dudgeon. “Methinks I’ve been offended.” He lunged at Nicole, as if to knock her off the stone block on which she stood. She leaped by pure instinct to the next one, and from there to the safety of the sidewalk. The fuller and dyer followed, grinning like a blasted idiot.

Nicole planted fists on hips and glared. “That wasn’t funny!”

“Oh yes it was,” said Calidius Severus. Not even Nicole’s deadliest scowl could wipe the grin off his face.

The tavern was a welcome refuge, stuffy air, odor of mildew, and all. Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Ursa were there already, drinking wine and eating bread and salted onions. Nicole flinched to see a pregnant woman swilling down wine — just as she flinched at so many other things in Carnuntum. As with all the rest of them, there wasn’t a thing she could reasonably expect to do about it.

Unreasonably, of course, she could tell Fabia Ursa she ought to be drinking milk instead. And Fabia Ursa would stick out her tongue and look revolted, just as Lucius and Aurelia and Julia had done on the first morning after Nicole found herself in Carnuntum. Life was too short.

For that matter, who could guess what diseases lurked in the milk here? Pasteurization was as unheard of as aspirin or carpets.

Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus pushed past her, not exactly rudely, and settled themselves at the table with the others, calling for wine. “The Falernian,” Calidius Severus senior said. “Why not? This is an occasion.” When Julia brought it, they lifted their cups in salute.

Her eyes went wide. Odds were, nobody had ever done that for her before — who would, for a slave? Her fair skin showed a blush as bright as a sunset, rising from the neckline of the tunic all the way to her hairline.

Gaius Calidius Severus watched as Nicole did, most attentively. If he’d been any more attentive, he would have thrown her down on the floor then and there.

Nicole coughed, rather more sharply than she’d intended, and said, “I think we all know why I asked you to come here. I wanted to set Julia free the formal way, but my brother has made it plain he won’t sign the document, and my signature by itself isn’t good enough. “ And to one damned warm climate with that clerk in the town hall, too, she thought. “So I’ll set her free the informal way, among friends.” She held out her hand. “Come here, Julia.”

Julia came, walking slowly, as if in a formal procession — or as if she didn’t quite believe it all was real. Nicole set a hand on her shoulder. It was stiff, held still by a clear effort of will. “Friends,” Nicole said, “it is my wish that this woman should no longer be a slave, but should now and forever after be a freedwoman. You are witnesses to the fact that I am manumitting her in this way, and that I no longer claim her as a slave.”

“I’ve heard lawyers in togas who didn’t talk that fancy,” Titus Calidius Severus said admiringly. Nicole looked at him in surprise and sudden, completely unaffected delight. He could have searched for a long time before he found a compliment that suited her better.

She was, she discovered, smiling widely and more warmly than she could remember doing, ever, in Carnuntum. She had to reel herself in, to remember the rest of what she’d planned. She went around behind the bar and rummaged in the box she’d found there. “I’ve written the manumission right here on papyrus: one copy for Julia and one for myself. If you please, you two Calidii and you, Longinius lulus, should sign them as witnesses.”

Julia’s eyes and mouth were wide open. “Mistress! I didn’t know you’d done that.”

“Well, I did,” Nicole said robustly, “and you don’t have to call me Mistress anymore, either. You’re free now, just as I said you would be.”

She’d printed out the manumissions in block capitals, that being the universal style in Carnuntum. The reed pen she’d bought with the papyrus sheets worked about as well as a fountain pen, except she had to re-ink it every line or two. She’d spelled the Latin by ear and by guess, but she’d seen from signs and graffiti that she wasn’t alone in her uncertainty.

Titus Calidius Severus mumbled to himself as he read one copy. “Not bad. Not bad at all. Nice and clear, nothing too pretty, no flowers of rhetoric, but it gets the job done. I’ve seen lots worse.” He seemed to be surprised, too — probably because no one expected a woman to show even basic literacy, let alone a decent writing style.

Gaius Calidius Severus agreed with Nicole’s impatience. “Come on, Father, leave off. This is no time for literary criticism. “

Titus Calidius Severus shot his son a narrow glance, but he didn’t seem inclined to pull rank. “No, it’s not, is it? Umma, where’s the pen and ink?” Nicole brought them to him. He signed his name on each sheet of papyrus, and his son followed suit. Both of them wrote with great labor and effort, tongues stuck out, as if they were a pair of second-graders. Nicole couldn’t have proved they weren’t, either, not by their handwriting. Which of them had the more painful scrawl was hard to judge, but neither would be entering a calligraphy contest any time soon.

Sextus Longinius lulus couldn’t write at all. He made his mark instead, a sprawling Roman numeral six — VI — for Sextus. The Calidii Severi witnessed it. There didn’t appear to be any stigma attached to his illiteracy, no patronizing looks or one-syllable explanations. Some people wrote. Most didn’t. That was the way the world was.

Once the documents were signed, witnessed, and duly executed, Nicole handed one copy of the manumission to Julia. “Here you are,” she said. “I don’t think we can get much more official than this, not without Brigomarus. Head up, now, and eyes front. You’re a free woman.”

Everybody clapped and cheered as if at a play. Julia clutched her sheet of papyrus in stiff fingers. She looked glad — oh yes, very glad indeed. But apprehensive, too, if not outright terrified.

Maybe she had a point, at that. She’d been dubious about the idea from the beginning; had done her best to impress on Nicole that freedom wasn’t a purely abstract thing. It meant changes, profound ones, in her status, in her position, in her mode of living. Suddenly, she wasn’t property anymore. She was her own person, with rights and privileges, but with responsibilities too. Slaves had none of those things, nor anything else but what their masters gave them.

Nicole might have been tempted to drop the whole thing, to let Julia go on as before, bound but safe. But she couldn’t bear the thought of owning another human being. She knew — she’d known for a while now — she was going through the manumission at least as much for herself as for Julia.

“Now we celebrate! “ Gaius Calidius Severus declared. “Wine all around, on me!”