Household Gods

Everyone cheered again. Through the last of the noise, Titus Calidius Severus said with a degree of indulgence, “Look at the kid spending my money. I’ll have to buy the next round, I suppose.”

“No,” Nicole said firmly, squelching them both. “The first round is on me.” She filled six cups from the amphora of Falernian — yes, even for herself. She might drink the cheap stuff for meals and the middle grade the one time she set out to get seriously drunk, but this called for the heavy artillery. To hell with the unleaded, she thought. One cup of premium in the tank won’t hurt.

It was definitely sweeter and stronger than the wine she was used to. Everybody sipped slowly, with suitably appreciative noises, just like a wine tasting at Spago.

Because she’d served the good stuff on the house, Gaius Calidius Severus bought a round of Falernian, too. Left to himself, Nicole suspected, he would have been more likely to order the two-as wine.

Just as Julia fetched the cups for Gaius Calidius Severus’ round, Ofanius Valens squelched in from the rainy outdoors. He hadn’t shown his face in the tavern since Nicole had pried Julia off his lap.

Well, Nicole thought, if he did have to show up, now was a good time for it. Teach him a lesson, and a good one, too.

Sure enough, he looked at the gathering by the bar, with a particularly keen glance at Julia, and asked, “What’s going on?”

“We’re celebrating,” said Julia. “I’m free.” She sounded more cheerful about the idea, now she had a cup of Falernian in her.

Ofanius Valens smiled with apparently unfeigned pleasure. “Now that’s worth celebrating,” he said. Nicole smiled back at him, a little smugly, until he added, “You cost me the same old two sesterces the last time.”

Nicole waited for Julia to throw something at him or pick up a stool and brain him with it, supposing he had any brains north of his crotch. But Julia’s laugh was loud and obviously genuine. The men in the tavern laughed, too, but they were men. What else could you expect from them? Only when Nicole heard Fabia Ursa giggling did she realize the joke wasn’t out of line here. Local community standards.

No matter what the local community thought, she didn’t like it.

“Next round is mine,” Ofanius Valens said, fitting himself into the party as if he had every right to do it.

“You’re going to be a couple of cups short, Ofanius,” Titus Calidius Severus said. They straightened out who owed how much wine to whom, with resigned amusement that showed they’d done such things many times before. Drunks, Nicole supposed, had plenty of practice in getting drunk.

She wasn’t as scornful as she had been, not with that drunken night with Julia under her own belt. In its own way, it had been fun — while it lasted. The next morning… The less she thought about the next morning, the better.

Sextus Longinius was not to be left out of the party. He bought the next round. Nicole wished he hadn’t, not with a baby on the way and him as far from rich as she was. But there wasn’t any way to tell him so without bruising his pride. A person had to be able to hold his head up in front of his friends and neighbors — as much here as in Los Angeles, or Indianapolis for that matter.

All the rounds included Nicole — they wouldn’t have been rounds if they hadn’t. She had to empty her cup each time, too, or people would wonder what was the matter with her. Their conversation, which hadn’t been particularly genteel to begin with, turned loud and silly. She turned loud and silly.

She wasn’t drunk. She was sure she wasn’t. She’d been drunk before. Drunk was when she couldn’t stand up without wanting to fall over. Now, although her feet didn’t quite want to do as she told them, she walked well enough. She said clever things, witty things: people laughed, didn’t they?

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been the life of the party. Had she ever been? Her memory was fogged a bit — time travel did that to a person, even without a few cups of Falernian — but as far as she could recall, mostly at parties she’d either circulated rapidly and got out as fast as possible, or found a corner to hide in while too many other guests got sloshed or stoned.

None of them had been as witty as she was being. She didn’t remember laughing this hard or feeling so much like someone who belonged, either. Now there was irony: she had to go back eighteen hundred years and halfway around the world to find people who accepted her as one of them.

Hardly anybody came in to distract from the celebration. She understood perfectly. She was amazed at how well she understood. Who would want to go wandering around on a wet, sloppy day? You couldn’t stay dry in a car, not here, not now. You couldn’t stay dry anywhere, unless you stayed indoors.

“You look happy, Umma,” Titus Calidius Severus said to her in the warm haze of the wine, “happier than you have in a while. I’m glad. ‘

Of course you are — you want to go to bed with me. But the thought lacked the sour edge it had had before. If she looked at him through the lens of better acquaintance — and several cups of wine — the fuller and dyer didn’t seem so bad. No — he wouldn’t have seemed so bad at all if he hadn’t smelled like a public toilet, and not a well-maintained one, either.

Gaius Calidius Severus pulled his hood up over his head and headed for the door. The rain hissed down outside. He ducked a runnel of water off the roof, sloshed to the edge of the sidewalk, and lifted his tunic. Through the sound of the rain, the sound of piss hitting flooded street was tiny but distinct.

When he came back in, he was grinning. “Running water, as good as the baths,” he said. Everybody laughed.

Or was it everybody? Nicole had missed a couple of voices. “Where’s Julia? ‘ she asked. She couldn’t have mislaid her, now, could she?

Fabia Ursa giggled in between sips of wine. Fetal alcohol syndrome, Nicole thought fuzzily. The thought, for a mercy, blurred and faded before it touched her tongue. “Didn’t you see her go upstairs with Ofanius?” Fabia Ursa asked. She seemed to think it wonderfully funny. “I wonder if that really is for free. The first time, maybe, but not many after that, I’ll bet. Julia will be minding her asses now.”

A pun lurked in there somewhere, but it needed to be in English to work. Nicole’s warm, happy mood went suddenly cold. Lucius and Aurelia were upstairs playing — and shame on Nicole for not thinking about them till just now. Were Julia and Ofanius Valens going at it right next door to them?

Someone pushed a cup into her hand. It was full and all but slopping over. She gripped it like a lifeline, raised it to her lips and drank deep. The wine flowed through her in the now familiar sensation, warm as an open fire. Central heating, she thought with a return of her antic mood. That was the wine, oh yes: making her forget cold things and sad things, grim things and bad things. So the kids were having a primal experience up there. It couldn’t be anything they hadn’t heard before — not the way Umma had been pimping Julia. They must have grown up to the sounds of flesh on flesh, thumps and moans and whatever other sound effects were in vogue in this age of the world.

She had to have another talk with Julia, yes. It might be normal behavior here, but it wasn’t nice behavior. Julia was a free woman now. She had to learn about nice.

But not right now. Tomorrow. If Nicole remembered.

A little while later, Julia came trotting lightly down the stairs with Ofanius Valens right behind her. They weren’t blushing in the least, or hiding anything either. He looked as if he should have been puffing smugly on a cigarette — if the Romans had had tobacco, Nicole was sure, they’d all have smoked like the chimneys they also didn’t have. Julia’s face had a loose, sated look. Her eyes were smoky; her tunic was awry. She straightened it absently, with fingers that paused to stroke the curve of a breast, then wandered on down past the rounded belly. Nicole held her breath, wondering in shocked fascination if she would start stroking her crotch right then and there, but her hand slipped sidewise over a hip and away. She smiled at them all with impartial benevolence.

“So,” said Gaius Calidius Severus, “how do you like being a free woman?” That wasn’t what he was asking. It was as clear as if he’d come with subtitles: How would you like to do me for free, too?

Julia’s smile widened and blurred. “If it’s this good all the time,” she said equally blurrily, “I’m going to like it just fine.”

Everybody gave that a round of applause. Everybody, that is, but Nicole. Even tiddly, she wasn’t about to approve of Julia’s notion of the proper way to celebrate her manumission.

But, said the voice that had been speaking up in Nicole’s mind the past few days, if Julia was going to