Household Gods

two of them.

Maybe that was why, when Nicole went upstairs as gray day turned into black night, she was only tired, not exhausted. She lay down, but did not fall asleep as fast as she usually did — as fast as if someone had whacked her over the head with a club. The wine had worn off long ago. If she’d had a hangover, it had dissipated somewhere in between customers. So that was how to do it: get drunk in broad daylight and work it off. She’d have to remember that.

Except for the chirping of crickets, the buzzing of mosquitoes, and, somewhere far off, a dog that would not stop barking, it was eerily quiet behind her barred door. No distant racket of TVs and radios, no hiss of cars going past as was commonplace in L.A. even at three in the morning. Nothing. People were snug in their warm buggy beds, and would be till sunrise.

She was snug, too, snug but restive. She tossed and turned. Side to belly to back. Back to belly to side. Of itself — or so she thought till it got there — her hand slid between her legs and crept under her loincloth. It was the first time since she came to Carnuntum, the first interest she’d had in anything but falling flat on her face in bed and waking up however many hours later in some new state of misery or other: itching, griping, cursing dirt and vermin and discomfort.

It had been a long while. It was still strange to find herself smooth down there, except for the small itching scab where she’d cut herself shaving at the baths a day or two before. The difference aroused her. On the fantasy screen behind her eyes, where Mel Gibson and Adrian Paul had used to play out their little dramas, a completely new and different face took shape. It wasn’t, God forbid, Titus Calidius Severus, but it wasn’t not, either. He had a beard; bearded men had never fed her fantasies. He had warm dark eyes and a smile that had never known orthodontia. His shoulders were broad, the skin of his chest warm and shaved smooth: she could feel the faint catch of the stubble. He shaved below, too, around the noble loft of his organ — not huge, not as a man might imagine a woman would want, but a good size, a comfortable size, like the ones she’d seen on the gaudy statues in the market. She felt the shape and hardness of it, the heat that mounted as he smiled at her, smiled and smiled, and — wise man — said nothing at all.

Her hand quickened. Her breathing matched pace with it. Caught; paused. A little moan escaped her.

She relaxed all at once, let her body go limp. Oh, that was good; that was what she’d needed. And yet she shrugged as she often did afterwards, alone in the dark. It was good, but she knew better. The real thing could be as lonely as this, if he did what he wanted to do and then rolled off her, snoring before he hit the pillow. But when it was good, there was nothing like it. No, nothing in the world.

This would do. It had eased the worst of the tightness out of her, which was what she had wanted. She could sleep now.

As she drifted off, she felt one last, small stab of jealousy. Lucky Julia, who didn’t bother her head — or her body — with such frettings.

Nicole woke to total strangeness. For a terrible instant, she knew she’d been yanked out of time again, to who knew where. Then she recognized the familiar bed underneath her, the familiar itch and skitter of her personal vermin, and the familiar septic stink of Carnuntum. The strangeness was in the light. It was just sunup — and there was a sun to light the sky. The clouds that had lain so heavy on the town for so long had tattered and torn. When she got up and stumbled to the window to look out, she saw patches of pale blue amid the scudding gray. The air that washed her cheeks was damp still, and cool, but no rain fell. The rain had gone away.

She yawned and stretched, arching her back like a cat. A good hot shower and a Thorough delousing would have done her a great deal of good, but even without them she felt as good as she’d felt since she came to Carnuntum.

She was smiling as she went downstairs, a smile Julia returned — up before Nicole as usual, baking the morning bread. Freedom didn’t seem to have done much damage — yet — to her work ethic. She might even work harder, now she worked for wages: now she had a stake in working well.

They did their morning chores as they’d come to do, moving through and around each other like partners in a dance. There was a kind of pleasure in it, the pleasure of a pattern well executed. The first customers — a handful of morning regulars — came in with their usual greetings: a smile and a cheery wave, a rheumy scowl, a hungover wince, depending on the individual. They settled in their usual places with their usual breakfasts, wine and fresh bread for the most part. Some liked to banter with Nicole or Julia.

Nicole had just finished a long and lively exchange with a muleteer whose name she could never remember but whose face she couldn’t forget — he had a quite imposing wen at the corner of his left eye — when a half-dozen new customers came trooping in. All but one were strangers. That one, coming in behind but clearly a part of the group, as if he were herding it onward, was Umma’s brother Brigomarus. His expression mirrored the rest. The best word Nicole could find for it was thunderous.

Her bright mood darkened, and not slowly either. From the way Brigomarus acted toward the others, and the resemblance the women bore to him and to each other — and, for that matter, to Umma — she couldn’t exactly miss who they were. The two younger women had to be Umma’s sisters, and the older one, she of the steel-gray bun and steely stare, their mother. The men, in turn, had to be the sisters’ husbands. One was a great deal older than the woman whose elbow he supported. The other was thirty-five or so, and probably a few years older than his apparent wife.

Nicole had learned in her time in Carnuntum that clothes very definitely made the man here — or the woman. The rich never affected the local equivalent of torn jeans and ratty T-shirts, and the poor never tried to dress up like the rich, even if they could have afforded it. There were no designer knockoffs in discount outlets here. One could, quite easily, determine a person’s status by the type and quality of clothes he or she wore, and by the kind and quantity of jewelry, as well as by the intricacy of a woman’s hairstyle.

These women, these sisters of Umma the tavernkeeper, were a good cut above her with her combed-out- anyhow hair and her two good tunics. They wore soft wool dyed in amazingly off-key colors, and linen that might have made a decent summer power suit in Los Angeles; and they were hung everywhere, it seemed, with necklaces and armlets, rings and earrings. Not all or even most of it was gold, but enough of it was, particularly on the sister with the older man, that Nicole was left in no doubt as to their economic status. These were the local equivalent of prosperous businessmen and their wives. The older man was even tricked out in a toga — about as formal as a dinner jacket, and overwhelmingly so in the humble surroundings of a tavern.

Even the mother’s simplicity of hair and dress — a couple of layers of black tunic and a black cloak — was deceptive. Her one ornament was a ring on her finger where Nicole’s twentieth-century eye looked for a wedding ring, and it was gold.

Nicole was more than glad she’d drunk well-watered wine with breakfast, and eaten a good half-loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese. If she’d been as full of Falernian as she was at Julia’s manumission party, she’d have said exactly what she thought: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Slumming, I suppose?”

They did have the look, and no mistake. The younger man, a tall reedy fellow with the scars of old acne on his sparsely bearded cheeks, dusted off a bench with an air of great fastidiousness, and helped his mother-in-law to a seat thereon. She allowed him to assist her, but not without paying for it: “Not so solicitous, Pacatus, if you please. It makes you look like a legacy-hunter. Not, I suspect, that you aren’t eager to see me die and leave you my holdings, but it’s more polite to act as if it doesn’t matter.”

She had a voice like poisoned honey, which was probably what had brought her this far up in the world — widow of a well-to-do man, Nicole guessed, but that man hadn’t been Umma’s father, not by a long leap up the social ladder.

The old lady got herself settled with much clucking and fussing from all concerned; all but Nicole, who stayed right where she was, safe behind the bar. In the process she picked up names to attach to faces: Pacatus the younger son-in-law, Tabica his wife, Ila the older — and probably oldest — sister; she looked older than Umma. And, most overweeningly pompous of that whole pompous crew, Ila’s togaed husband, Marcus Flavius Probus. No one, not even his wife, called him by his praenomen. Nicole doubted Ila ever did, even in bed. He bore the full triune burden of his name, wherever and whenever he was.

While the in-laws catered to the old lady, whom Marcus Flavius Probus addressed as my dearest Atpomara, but everyone else called simply Mother, Brigomarus stood a little apart with arms folded, quietly but conspicuously removed from the fray. Nicole didn’t know that she liked him any better for it. He was the light of his mother’s eye, she could see that without half trying. Atpomara sneered at her sons-in-law and tyrannized over her daughters, but when she looked at her son her terrible old eyes went almost