Household Gods

hips. “You don’t think that wool got there in your room by itself, do you? Or the resin?”

“Maybe they walked,” Nicole answered, deadpan. Julia stared at her. Nicole stared levelly back. Julia began to laugh; she laughed and laughed, till she had to hug herself to stop. Some of the stale jokes of the twentieth century passed for fresh wit here.

Seeing her freedwoman break up made Nicole relent… a little. “Everything is just fine, Julia.”

“Well, that’s good,” Julia said after a pause in which she plainly perceived that she wasn’t going to find out any more. “It’s about time, if you ask me.”

Nicole had gathered some while since what Julia thought of her relations — or lack thereof — with Titus Calidius Severus. While Julia set about building up the fires for another day’s cooking and baking, Nicole went to the front door, unbarred it, and threw it open to show the tavern was ready for business.

Across the street, Titus Calidius Severus was just opening up, too, and setting out the amphorae that gave him the urine he needed for his work. “Good morning, Umma,” he called with a smile and a wave.

Nicole caught herself stiffening, searching for hidden meanings. Stupid, she cursed herself. She waved back — lightly, good; not too strained. “Good morning, Titus,” she said.

Behind her, Julia made a small, interested noise. Nicole realized she hadn’t greeted the fuller and dyer like that of a morning since she’d come to inhabit Umma’s body. This had the look and feel of a custom returned to after a hiatus.

Calidius Severus noticed, too. His smile broadened. He blew her a kiss. Julia made that interested noise again. Absurdly, Nicole felt herself blushing as if she’d been caught in flagrante delicto — a fine Latin phrase — rather than simply receiving a friendly greeting from the neighbor across the street.

She fought down the heat of memory, and blew the kiss back toward him. He grinned and bowed and went inside.

Nicole rounded on Julia. Julia had the sense to get very busy very fast.

Lucius and Aurelia put a merciful end to what was becoming an uncomfortable stretch of silence. Their noise and clatter drove the shadows out of the tavern. Their voices rang in it, demanding breakfast this instant. Julia was quick to shut them up. She ate with them, and Nicole after a short pause. She was hungrier than she’d expected. She realized, in the middle somewhere, that she’d used her bread to sop up all the olive oil in the little bowl Julia gave her. She didn’t remember having starred to do that, but it seemed a habit these days. It wasn’t making her fat. Some days, in fact, that oil was the only fat she got in her diet. Maybe her body had quietly told her she needed it.

Ofanius Valens was her first customer. He wasn’t a regular anymore, but he had started coming back now and then since Julia’s manumission party. Nicole brought him his bread and scallions and walnuts and a cup of the two-as wine. His usual, she thought, and remembered how terrified she’d been the first time she saw him. Now she knew what two or three dozen people liked to order, maybe more. It felt as easy, as natural as keeping track of the files in her computer.

Titus Calidius Severus came in at midmorning for a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. And thou, she thought facetiously, till she caught a whiff of him. His ammoniacal reek was back in force. Nicole let out a small, silent sigh. If he ever tried to get her to take him to bed when he smelled like that…

Surely he had better sense. If he didn’t, she’d teach him some, and fast. Not that she really thought he needed any education. He’d never even tried to kiss her when he smelled bad.

She realized she was standing over him, staring blindly at him. As she moved to busy herself somewhere else, he said between bites of Julia’s fresh and still-warm bread, “Fellow who came into the shop to pick up some wool I’d dyed for him told me there’s a troupe of actors coming in from Vindobona in a few days. Do you want to take in one of the mimes they put on? He said they were supposed to be pretty good — and if they’re not, we can always throw cabbages at them.”

Vindobona, Nicole had learned, was the name by which Vienna went these days. Although Vienna would go on to put Petronell in the shade, here-and-now Carnuntum was at least as important a city.

“Yes, I’d like that,” she said. Then the apprehension struck. She’d thought she’d like the beast show, too. Who knew what surprises might lurk in a seemingly innocent mime? “They’re not going to kill anybody, are they?”

Calidius Severus arched a brow, but he answered seriously enough. “I wouldn’t think so. Too expensive for a troupe outside of Rome or maybe Alexandria to butcher a slave when the show calls for somebody to die. The gore’ll just be pig’s blood in bladders, same as usual. But it’ll look real.”

She stood flatfooted. She was always taken aback when a cultural difference flew up and hit her in the face, but this time was worse, somehow. This man was her lover, and she was glad of it, too. He was genuinely thoughtful and considerate, out of bed and in it. Her kids — Umma’s kids, but one way and another she’d come to think of them as her own — thought the sun rose and set on him; there stood Lucius now, hanging on his every word. And the only thing he saw wrong with killing slaves in a show was that it was too expensive to be practical.

His attitude was standard here. Witness the beast show. Witness the execution that was its climax. Witness the gladiatorial shows — which she hadn’t, and for which she thanked God. In Carnuntum, life was cheap.

It shouldn’t have been surprising. She could still feel Fabia Ursa’s absence like the healed socket of a tooth; and Fabia Ursa had lost two babies before she died delivering a third. Maybe, since life was so easy to lose, it was that much easier to take. People lived surrounded by death, till death was commonplace.

Resolutely, she pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. She couldn’t afford to linger over every incidence of culture shock. She had to live in this world, regardless of what she thought of certain parts of it. And that meant recording the datum as Calidius had given it, a thing she needed to know to survive. She would deal with that. Later, if she had time — if she ever had time — she’d worry about other things.

All of which added up to the simple answer she gave him. “I’ll come to the mime,” she said.

He’d taken time to sip from his winecup while she woolgathered. Once he had her answer, he set down the cup. “Well, good,” he said. “I don’t quite know when they’re getting into town, but they should be worth an afternoon’s diversion when they do. Anything to make one day different from another.”

“Oh, yes,” Nicole said, this time without hesitation. Most people in Carnuntum didn’t come close to agreeing with her on the importance of life, but when it came to making life interesting, she agreed wholeheartedly with the rest of the population. Life might be precious, but it was also, without TV, the VCR, or even electric lights, rather massively tedious.

The players arrived none too soon, in Nicole’s estimation. Schedules weren’t set months in advance as they would have been in L.A. Entertainers came and went as weather and the roads allowed. In this case, a spell of good weather gave way to several days of pouring rain. When the clouds cleared away and the sun came boldly out, the players appeared in Carnuntum. Graffiti on the walls proclaimed their arrival, and one morning, as Nicole headed to market, she saw an outlandishly dressed person standing in front of a market stall, haggling with the vendor over the price of white lead. Nicole bit her tongue before she pointed out that the stuff was poisonous. She was learning, though it was taking her a while.

She did her marketing and went home with suitable dignity, but once she was there, she couldn’t resist telling Julia about the actor she’d seen. Julia clapped her hands and did a little dance. One of the regulars half- choked on his bit of sausage. Julia in her almost-new but still somewhat too tight tunic, dancing with glee, was a sight for hungry eyes.

Nicole suppressed the frown that thought engendered. “You like the mime shows? ‘ she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Julia said, and transparently remembered not to add the habitual Mistress.

“Well,” said Nicole. “Then we’ll have to see that you get a day off, won’t we?”

She’d made Julia a happy woman — but not so happy she forgot to be diligent in her duties. Quite the opposite. Julia with a break in sight was determined to be the best freed servant anyone ever had. She was a little too eager, if truth be told; but she didn’t ask Nicole to let her go to the show first. That wouldn’t have been proper. She conceded Nicole the right to opening day, and stayed behind uncomplaining. It would be her turn tomorrow. She’d made sure everybody in the tavern knew it, and cared about it, too.

The mime show was in the same place as the beast show had been, the amphitheater outside the city’s southern wall. There wasn’t really anywhere else in Carnuntum that could hold a crowd in comfort.

Nicole wasn’t exactly comfortable. The memory of the beast show was still too fresh. But she was