Household Gods

Her gaze swept south, toward what on her honeymoon had been Carnuntum’s largest and most imposing Roman monument. The locals called it the Heidentor, the Heathen Gate, a huge stone archway more than fifty feet tall. It had been partly ruined when she saw it. She wondered, as her eye searched for it, what it would look like intact.

It wasn’t there.

She stopped once more, gaping. The first emotion she felt was an absurd sense of outrage, as if she’d been cheated. Where in hell had the stupid thing gone? You couldn’t just pick up that much stone and drop it in your purse.

The answer came belatedly and with somewhat of a shock. The Heidentor hadn’t been built yet. When, in the United States, she’d thought about the Roman Empire at all – which hadn’t been any too bloody often – she’d envisioned its history as a single, compact entity. The Roman Empire. It was there, and then it was gone. There wasn’t any depth to it, or any development. It just was.

But that wasn’t actually the way things worked. There were lifetimes upon lifetimes’ worth of Roman Empire – and the lifetime in which the Heidentor went up hadn’t happened yet. She wondered how far in the future it lay. Would she live to see it built, or even begun? How long did something like that take to build?

“Come on,” Titus Calidius Severus said, loud in her ear, still determinedly amiable. “You keep stopping. Shall I dangle a parsnip in front of your face, the way the farmers do when their donkeys won’t go?”

Yet again, Nicole shook herself back into what passed for reality. “It’s a lot better than laying into me with a stick,” she said. “I’ve seen too much of that lately. I think it’s cruel. “

The fuller and dyer shrugged. “One way or another, you’ve got to get the work out of them. If they won’t go by themselves, you make ‘em. They’re just animals. It’s not like they feel things the way people do.”

Nicole was as certain animals did feel things the way people did as Calidius Severus evidently was that they didn’t. She opened her mouth to argue the point, but something else and more urgent pushed itself to the front of her mind. “People beat slaves, too, and they haven’t got any excuse at all for that.”

While they talked – she wouldn’t quite call it argued – they’d reached the entrance to the amphitheater. Titus Calidius Severus handed a sestertius to an attendant – a slave? He got no change back; admission was a dupondius apiece.

Only when that was done and they’d been waved through the gate did he respond to Nicole. As he had before, he said, “One way or another, you’ve got to get the work out of them.”

Nicole swallowed a sigh. She should have known what he’d say. How could she expect anything different? “I’d rather use the parsnip of freedom than the stick,” she said.

“The parsnip of freedom?” Calidius Severus grinned his crooked grin. “Now there’s a phrase to send men marching into battle!” His grin faded. “Some masters do that. For some slaves, it works. But one man’s not the same as another, same as one donkey’s not the same as another. Some are too stubborn to go forward unless you make ‘em do it.”

That held a hard core of common sense – if you believed there was nothing wrong with slavery. “If a free man won’t work, you can fire him and replace him with someone else who will,” Nicole said.

“Or more likely with someone else who won’t, either.” The fuller and dyer held up a hand before she could counter that. “Like I said before, it’s a nice day. We’re here at the beast show. Is this worth arguing about right now?”

That also was hard common sense, but Nicole didn’t like it any better for that. Her years in law school had left her convinced that anything was worth arguing about, any time she was in the mood to argue. But she was at the beast show, and she was curious about it; and she was also on a date. It was, in an odd way, both a first date and not. For her, yes; for Calidius Severus, no. “I guess it’ll keep,” she said, a little grudgingly.

“Good,” he answered with apparent relief. “For a while there, I figured they’d put us down on the floor, and the crowd could watch us go at it instead of the beasts.” He took a deep breath, shook his head, and held out his hand, offering it as if it had been a gift. His voice was brisk. “Come on.”

Nicole was getting just a small bit tired of take-charge masculinity; but not enough, yet, to kick at it. She let him take her hand – if nothing else, it made sure they weren’t separated in the jostle of the crowd – and lead her into the amphitheater.