Household Gods

celebrate, what else could she do? There wasn’t a whole lot to do except get drunk and screw the customers.

Time was, and not so long ago either, when Nicole would have felt obligated to say something censorious — for everyone’s own good, of course. But there were just too many things to be censorious about. She’d hit overload. She couldn’t raise the proper degree of indignation, or the right amount of crusading zeal, either.

She put on a smile. Wet blanket, that was the term for what she’d been tempted to be. Today was simply not the day for that. Things were more than wet enough as it was.

“Seems it’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights,” she said. Only after the words were out of her mouth did she recall that that was a Biblical allusion. These people — her friends and neighbors and freedwoman — were pagans. It would mean nothing to them. And if it did — might it not tell them that she was a Christian? Christians were fair game here. She’d seen that much already.

Well, as to that, wasn’t she at least nominally pagan herself? She certainly hadn’t come here by invoking any Christian deity.

They wouldn’t know what she’d said. Of course they wouldn’t. She was being ridiculous.

Then Sextus Longinius lulus said, “That’s a Jewish myth, isn’t it? I’ve heard it from Jews, I think.”

“Where have you known Jews?” Nicole asked in surprise; Carnuntum was about as far removed from cosmopolitan Los Angeles as she could imagine.

It could have been a stupid question, or even a dangerous one, but he answered quite matter-of-factly: “A lot of coppersmiths are Jews. They’ll drink wine with you, sometimes, and talk shop, even if their silly religion doesn’t let ‘em eat your food. They don’t bother anybody, far as I can see.”

“Not like those crazy Christians,” Fabia Ursa said. She shivered a little. “You never know when those people are going to do something outrageous, when it’s not outright dangerous. If you ask me, they want to be killed.”

“They think they’ll go straight to their afterworld,” her husband said, as if reminding her of something that everyone knew. “Me, as long as this life’s all right, I won’t worry too much about the next one.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Gaius Calidius Severus, and did, draining his cup in a long gulp. When he came up for air he said, “You know what they do? They take babies, girl babies that they’re going to expose anyway, and sacrifice them and eat them.”

“I didn’t hear that,” his father said. “They bake bread in the shape of a baby, and call it their god, and eat that.”

“Crazy,” the others said, nodding and passing the winejar round. “Listen, didn’t you hear tell…?“

Nicole listened in a kind of stunned amazement. After a while, it dawned on her what their conversation reminded her of. In her own time, in her own country, people had talked the same way about Muslim suicide bombers in the Holy Land.

To the Calidii Severi, to Julia, to Ofanius Valens, and to Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Ursa, whatever Christians Carnuntum had — all the Christians in the Roman Empire, for that matter — were wild-eyed fanatics. Their whole purpose in life was to cause trouble, to make martyrs for their faith. They were, in a word, Terrorists.

So — was it true? Nobody had said any such thing in Sunday school. That was all holy Christian martyrs and wicked Romans and bloody-minded lions. Of course the Christians were right — they’d won in the end, hadn’t they? Nobody ever showed the other side of it. Just the Christians defending their one and true and only faith.

Nicole had been awfully young then, young enough that the world could seem so simple. The older she’d grown, the less things seemed to fit the pattern of her Sunday-school lessons. She shouldn’t be surprised to find this new truth, too: Christians as terrorists, Romans as solid citizens appalled at their extremism.

Or maybe that wasn’t the way it really was, either. Maybe these people here were ignorant, and blindly prejudiced. If they were, and if everyone had a side and no one was all right or all wrong, what did that say about the way the people Nicole had called friends and colleagues in Los Angeles thought about Muslims? Was there any real difference between an early Christian martyr and a car bomber?

Somehow, the fact that there were Jews here bemused her even more than the presence of Christians. This was, after all, the second century of the Christian era. There would have been Christians around here somewhere. Wouldn’t there? Bur Jews back then had had the Holy Land, or so she’d heard. What would they be doing in a remote backwater like Catnuntum?

Titus Calidius Severus spread a fistful of sesterces on the table. “Another round of Falernian,” he declared grandly; like everybody else in the tavern, he was flying high. Nicole scooped up the money, pausing to savor the feel of the coins: cool and round, sliding over one another with a soft clink. They were heavy compared to twentieth-century small change, solid and unmistakably there. When you had a sackful of Roman money, you knew it. No losing a fifty-dollar bill in your pocket here.

She made her way back to the bar to fill more cups. She had to use the dipper slowly and carefully, to keep from dribbling wine on the stone countertop. As long as she didn’t move too fast, she was just fine.

When she carried the cups back to the table, she had a couple of extras. She squinted at them, counted them, counted them again to be sure. Seven — that was the right number, wasn’t it? She looked up from the cups to count noses. Fabia Ursa, Sextus Longinius lulus, Ofanius Valens, Titus Calidius Severus — lord, these names were a mouthful. Didn’t anybody do names like Joe and Bob and Sue here?

Probably just as well they didn’t. She was letting her mind wander again, too. Four people. Five, counting herself. (Umma. Now that was a nice short name. Everybody should have a name like Umma.) Who was missing?

Julia, of course. And Gaius Calidius Severus.

Where they were, and what they were doing up there, required only one guess, especially since Ofanius Valens was staring at the stairway with a discontented expression. What was he thinking? Was he jealous? Or was he wondering if he’d left Julia dissatisfied?

Maybe he had, at that. Maybe, on the other hand, Julia was just setting out to get as much as she could today.

Fabia Ursa spoke Nicole’s thought aloud, as if she’d caught it floating in the rain- and wine-soaked air. “She’ll sleep sound tonight, I’m sure,” she said with a small giggle that ended in a hiccup. Under the tight-stretched fabric of her tunic, the baby kicked as if in protest. She laughed with a catch in it, as if the baby had caught a rib, and rubbed her belly. “It will be a while before I can sleep that way again — what with the baby between us now, and, if Mother Isis is kind, it will wake me up in the night, and keep me running from sunup to sunup.”

Nicole had heard Fabia Ursa mention Isis before; but she’d known the name even before that. She’d read a book once with the goddess’ name in the title. Isis, the book had said, was a goddess in Egypt. Carnuntum and Egypt were a long way apart. The Romans might have had only those hideous, squeaking carts to haul goods and people, but ideas seemed to travel on wings.

Fabia Ursa and Sextus Longinius lulus had retreated into a private and connubial world. She was simpering, he was smiling sappily. They gazed fondly into each other’s eyes. He had taken her hand; she rested the other on the swell of her belly. He didn’t seem too dismayed to be denied his wife’s embraces. Probably getting it from one of their slaves, Nicole thought sourly.

While the tinker and his wife shared their little moment and the other two men engrossed themselves in the latest round of Falernian, Julia and Gaius Calidius Severus came bounding down the stairs. They looked indecently pleased with themselves.

Yes, that was the word. Indecent. Nicole fixed Julia with a jaundiced stare. No matter how much wine she’d taken on board, she could not bring herself to approve of Julia’s conduct. Julia wasn’t a slave any longer. She wasn’t property — and she wasn’t a sex object. Women weren’t supposed to think of themselves as nothing but receptacles for men to fill. They certainly weren’t supposed to have as good a time doing it as Julia was. It was not dignified.

Julia aimed in a straight line for her cup of wine, drained it in one long gulp, dropped to a stool and laid her head on the table and fell sound asleep.

They all regarded her in varying degrees of amusement — Nicole’s the least, the men’s the most, and Fabia Ursa’s somewhere in the middle. “I take it back,” said the tinker’s wife. “She’ll sleep sound right now.”

Everyone laughed but Nicole. Julia never even stirred.