Household Gods

thought she was rid of her lice, once even for three whole days. But they came back. They always came back. It didn’t matter how — whether she’d missed a few, whether a customer had brought a new batch into the tavern, whatever. There just was no getting rid of them.

Titus Calidius Severus and Lucius headed off for the baths. The boy walked easily beside the man, chattering at a great rate, more than he ever did with Nicole or Julia. They looked, she thought, like son and father.

That thought brought her up short for a moment, stopping her on a stepping stone before she recovered herself and went on across the street. Were they father and son? Calidius and Umma had not exactly had a platonic friendship before Nicole arrived to disrupt it.

She shook her head. No. In all the gossip she’d overheard or been regaled with, she’d never heard the slightest suggestion that Umma had been getting it on the side with her neighbor while her husband was still alive. And he hadn’t died that long ago, from things that Fabia Ursa had said: three or four years at most. Both Lucius and Aurelia were older than that.

Damn, what had the man’s name been? The clerk in the town hall had told her, but it had slipped right out of her head. So far she hadn’t needed it, but the way her luck ran, eventually she was going to. She just had to pray that the rest of her luck held, and someone said his name before she had to come up with it.

She glowered at the graffito on the tavern’s wall. If she took a brush to it, she’d probably get rid of the whitewash, too. She’d have to buy more whitewash, then, and paint over it. She glowered more darkly. Another couple of sesterces thrown away. Maybe she’d leave it up, at least until the beast shows were done. It might, she told herself, even draw a couple of customers into the tavern.

Aurelia erupted through the front door, spotted Nicole, and said, “Eep!” She ducked back in even faster than she’d come out. Nicole laughed. She knew what that meant. Aurelia had been all set to play in the mud, like her brother before her. Foiled, Nicole thought wickedly.

She went inside with more decorum. The warm rich smell of baking bread fought and almost overwhelmed the city stink. Julia was over at the counter, grinding flour for the next batch.

As Nicole went to spell her at the mill, a man’s voice spoke behind her. “Mistress Umma?”

Nicole turned, trying not to seem too startled. The newcomer was a dapper little man, and a total stranger. He knew her, however, or thought he did. Little by little, she was getting used to that. It didn’t drive her to panic much anymore, not the way it had at first.

Then again, maybe Umma hadn’t known him. He blinked and peered at her as if he might be a bit nearsighted. “My name is Julius Rufus,” he said. He was carrying a small wooden keg, which he set on one of the tables. “I hear you’ve been in the mood to try new things lately.”

Her heart leaped from a standstill into a pounding gallop. “What? What about it?” Damn — were people all over Carnuntum gossiping about the new and highly eccentric Umma? Old Umma used to be sharp, you bet, but lately she’s gone soft in the head. God — that could get dangerous. Somebody might even -

But Julius Rufus said, “I’ll tell you what about it,” and her heartbeat slowed to a fast canter. Safe, she was safe. This was a salesman, or she wasn’t a Hoosier of Hoosier born. As if to reassure her even further, he went on in a fast patter that had to be as old as the hills, “I know this tavern has always served nothing but wine — good wine, too, everybody agrees on that. Still and all, if you’ve taken it into your head to try things you haven’t tried before, how about this delicious barley brew here? It’s my very own, brewed up of the finest ingredients, according to an ancient recipe that’s come down through my family since the first Pyramid was a pup.”

Julia looked up from the quern. “The Marcomanni and Quadi drink beer because they don’t know any better,” she said flatly. “When they get smart, they buy wine from us Romans.”

Julius Rufus showed teeth as irregular as Calidius Severus’ in an insouciant grin. “Beer has been good enough for the Egyptians since time out of mind, and my beer has been good enough for a nice lot of people in Carnuntum for a good ten years now. There’s some very fine taverns go through a whole barrel of it before they’ve emptied their amphorae of wine.”

“Barrels,” Nicole murmured. Beer had alcohol in it, of course. But, if it came in barrels, it wouldn’t be full of lead. She fetched a clean cup and a dipper, and bore down on Julius Rufus and his sample cask. “Let me try some.”

Julia looked astonished. Julius Rufus looked delighted. He lifted the lid of his keg with a flourish. “Help yourself, Mistress Umma — and see for yourself that you’ll have no reason whatsoever to look down your nose at this fine product.”

When Nicole and Frank toured Austria on their honeymoon, Frank had drunk Austrian beer with conspicuous pleasure. Nicole, despite his urging, had stuck to mineral water. What she wouldn’t give to do that now…

She shook herself and focused on the task at hand. No help for it, and no escape, either. She dipped up a cupful, raised the cup to her lips, and sipped.

She had to work hard to hold her face straight. Wine, at least, was sweet. Frank had always said beer was an acquired taste. Nicole wondered why on earth anyone would want to acquire it. The stuff was bitter. It was sour. She could taste the alcohol in it. The only thing she could say for it was that it might make drunkenness more trouble than it was worth. If everyone reacted to beer the way she did, she might actually make some inroads against alcoholism in Carnuntum.

She made herself take another sip. It tasted no better than the first. “It’ll never take the place of wine,” she said.

“Told you so,” Julia said from behind the counter.

But Julius Rufus was undeterred. “I don’t intend it to take the place of wine,” he said. “I drink wine myself — in fact, if you’ll serve me a cup of your two-as there, I’ll be grateful.” He set a dupondius on the table by the keg. Nicole nodded to Julia, who poured out the wine for him.

He tossed it down, smacked his lips with stagey relish, and said, “Sure, wine’s good, and plenty of it. But the more choices you give your customers, the more customers you’re likely to get. Don’t you think so, Mistress Umma?”

He was good. If he’d lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, he would have sold a hell of a lot of encyclopedias or aluminum siding or whatever he was peddling, because sure as hell he would have been peddling something.

Even so, if Nicole had intended to say no, he would have been out the door before he got well warmed up to his pitch. Her mother had been death on door-to-door salesmen, and Nicole had continued the family tradition with telemarketers.

But she wasn’t going to turn this salesman down. If she could get in more choices that didn’t involve ingesting lead in toxic quantities — not to mention a choice that might not involve ingesting quite so much alcohol — then she might not be totally happy, but she’d be happier than she was now. She looked him in the eye and said, “How much do you want for each barrel, and how many cups can I get per barrel?”

Julius Rufus beamed at her. “You think of your profit margin, I see. Good for you! If your arithmetic is weak, I’ll be happy to help you with your figuring, so that you — “

“My arithmetic is fine, thank you,” Nicole snapped. Her arithmetic, from what she’d seen, was a damn sight better than that of any local without a counting board in front of him. The Romans, naturally enough, used and thought in terms of Roman numerals, and Roman numerals were to arithmetic what cruel and unusual punishment was to jurisprudence.

The dicker that followed left Julius Rufus sweating. “Mistress Umma, do you want my children to starve?” he wailed at the midpoint.

“They won’t starve,“ she retorted. “They can drink the beer you don’t sell me. This isn’t something I have to have. It’s something I might want to have — if the price is right. This tavern’s done fine without beer for a long time. We can go right on doing fine without it, as long as it’s going to cost six times as much as it’s worth.”

“What a terrifying woman you are,“ Julius Rufus muttered.

Nicole smiled a smile that Frank had likened to a shark’s. “You say the sweetest things,” she said. He flinched as if she’d slapped him.

She ended up buying the beer at something less than half the price he’d quoted. She still had a scrap left of the papyrus on which she’d written out Julia’s letters of manumission; she got out the pen and ink and set down on the scrap the terms to which she and Julius Rufus had agreed. When it was written up as it should be, she shoved the papyrus across the bar at him. “Just sign this, if you would.”