Household Gods

But Calidius Severus didn’t seem to want just that. There was no way to tell for sure, not yet, and she’d been burned so badly that she wasn’t going to believe it till she saw it – but she got the distinct feeling nonetheless that even if she kept on saying no to him, he wouldn’t stop being her friend.

That was the most refreshing discovery she’d made in years. She nodded in his expectant silence, and said, “Yes, I would like that. I’ll even pay Julia a little something extra to keep the kids from killing each other. “

“If you hadn’t set her free, you wouldn’t have to worry about that,” he said. But he shrugged, and let go a sudden and amazingly charming smile. When he smiled, snaggle teeth and all, he was almost handsome. No, Nicole thought; clean up his teeth, wash and deodorize him, and he’d cut a nice swath through the bored wives’ set in West Hills. Those Latin looks of his weren’t bad – weren’t bad at all.

Fortunately, he couldn’t read her mind, or she’d have been well and truly embarrassed. “Well,” he said, “she’s a freedwoman and that’s that. You make your arrangements with her, and I’ll be by sometime in the morning, to make sure we get good seats.”

Nicole nodded, but he didn’t give her time to say anything more before he turned to Lucius. “Meanwhile, you, let’s go get that mud off, and I’ll have a bath, too, while we’re at it. Won’t do me a bit of harm.”

“I should say not,” Lucius said with rudeness that would have won him a swat from Nicole if he’d been close enough. “I might be muddy, but you stink. “

Titus Calidius Severus didn’t seem offended. He certainly didn’t clobber the little brat. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a judicious air. “There’s enough shit mixed in with the mud to give stale piss a run for its money, don’t you think?” He ruffled the boy’s hair, though Lucius ducked and spluttered and protested. “And I don’t get piss up here, either.”

Nicole swallowed bile. She’d watched her fair share of animals dropping dung in the middle of the street – and pissing in it, too. Somehow, that hadn’t quite impressed itself on her in connection with Lucius. Mud, so far as she’d ever known it, was nothing but wet dirt. In Carnuntum, it was a lot more than that. It was wet, shitty dirt, full of tetanus and lockjaw – or were they the same thing? – and who knew what else. Christ, what was Lucius liable to come down with, now he’d had his wallow?

No doubt she’d find out, and quickly enough, too. For the time being, she focused on the thing that Calidius Severus’ gesture reminded her of, the most urgent thing. “Please, make sure you get rid of as many lice and nits as you can. Will you do that for me?”

“I’ll do my best,” Calidius said, scratching his own head vigorously, as if she’d put him in mind of the colonies thriving there. “Not that you can ever get rid of all of them, but it never hurts to put them down as much as you can.”

Nicole nodded tightly. Her jaw had set, grinding her teeth together – nothing she intended, and not much she could do about it, either. The broken tooth in back twinged worse than usual. She ignored it. Once or twice, after a trip to the baths and washing lots of bedding – to the dismay of Julia, who’d done most of the work – she’d 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.