Household Gods

Calidius Severus misunderstood her deliberately, and with a spark in his eye, too. “I like the way we get along just fine.” He’d been over the night before, fresh from the baths and smelling as sweet as anyone ever smelled here. Nicole, remembering one or two things they’d done together between dusk and dawn, stretched almost as Julia liked to, like a huge and sensuous cat. She liked it fine, too – and she was glad of it. Finally, she’d found something in Carnuntum that wasn’t painful, barbaric, or shocking.

Even if nobody got killed or maimed, she hadn’t expected to like the mime show. And yet she liked it very much indeed. It was called The Judgment of Paris, which at first meant nothing to her but seemed perfectly familiar to the crowd. Paris, who came from Troy, not France, was trapped into judging a beauty contest among goddesses: Juno, Athena, and Venus.

If it had been on TV, she would have called it a comedy-drama. The audience laughed at the machinations of their deities, a level of irreverence that brought her up short. It was as if one of the networks had made a sitcom out of the Bible.

After a little while, however, she stopped fretting. Obviously no one expected to be struck by lightning, or found this levity anything but tight and proper. She settled back with a gusty sigh, and determined to enjoy the show.

The plot was thin, like the plot of a TV sitcom. As with a sitcom, she let it wash over her instead of analyzing it like a legal brief. The music – flutes and drums and horns – was loud and insistent. The costumes were gaudy: yellows and reds and greens of an intensity that no one ever saw in everyday clothes. If Rome had known day-glo colors, these actors would have used them. They had a distinct, almost fluorescent glow as they strutted and danced in the arena where, not so long ago, so many beasts and a single man had died. The women who played the goddesses and Helen of Troy took every opportunity to wear as little as possible. Whenever those opportunities arose, as they frequently did, the men in the audience roared their approval.

Sex sells, Nicole thought. It was as true for ancient Rome as for modern Hollywood.

Titus Calidius Severus didn’t shout, but he was most attentive to the actresses jiggling and strutting across the ground where lions and wolves and bears had prowled not so long before.

Watching him watch the pretty women, Nicole decided she didn’t mind the way he did it. She could hardly have asked him not to pay attention to them; that was what they were there for, and he was a healthy male with all his hormones in working order… as she had good reason to know. What mattered was that he didn’t give the impression that he would sooner have been with one of them than with his real companion, as so many men would have done. Frank had stared up at an awful lot of movie screens as if he’d forgotten she was there beside him, and not just toward the end, either. And what had he gone for when he was ready to dump Nicole? Ms. Blond Hollywood Bimbo, what else?

She surprised herself, not with the virulence of the thought, but with the coolness of it. Frank Perrin was centuries unborn and half the world away. The edge was off her bitterness. She was too busy surviving in this world to waste energy on a marriage that had been dead long before Frank walked out the door.

Calidius Severus for sure was better-looking than Frank, though Frank smelled a whole lot better. He was also just as attentive to the swordfights as to the women in their skimpy draperies. He leaned forward on the bench, muttering under his breath at this bobble or that wobble. “If I’d used a sword like that,” he told Nicole in a pause between acts, “I’d be twenty-five years dead. “

The swordplay was as obviously choreographed as a bar fight in a Western. Like a Western, it wasn’t meant to be realistic. But she could hardly explain that to Calidius Severus. She settled for the glaringly obvious instead. “It’s only make-believe,” she said.

He muttered and scowled and shifted on the bench, but little by little he subsided. He was almost too reasonable a man to be real. Nicole tried to imagine him in a Stetson and carrying a six-shooter, sauntering into a saloon in time-honored movie-cowboy fashion. It was amazingly easy, though his looks tended more toward the Mexican sidekick than the tall lanky cowhand.

Not very many movie Westerns were as extravagantly gory as this Roman equivalent. Still, despite the copious blood, the killings were obviously faked. She’d believed Calidius Severus when he said there wouldn’t be any excessive realism in the mime, but she couldn’t help the small sigh of relief that, after all, the actors would get up to strut the stage another day.