Household Gods

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 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…?“