Household Gods

Umma’s mother seemed to gather herself. Her hand rose again, finger stabbing at Nicole. “Go back,” she rasped. “I am done. Go back.” Did she mean, Go back to the tavern? Did she mean, Go back to Los Angeles and the end of the second millennium?

It was like a blow in the solar plexus. Nicole actually gasped. Go back? Back to Los Angeles? God; if only she knew the way. The past she’d dreamt of, wished for so desperately, prayed for till she found herself in it, was nothing like what she had imagined. It was crammed full of ignorance and drudgery, filth, superstition, disease and brutality and more sheer blatant sexism than she’d ever thought possible. In California, she’d been oh so sure that her glass was half empty. Now she saw, with painful clarity, that it had been more, much more, than half full.

But she was not in California. She was in Carnuntum, with only a tiny splash of water – and polluted water, at that – in the bottom of her glass.

“Why are you still standing there?” Ila snapped at her. “Didn’t you hear Mother? She doesn’t want you here anymore. I never wanted you here.”

Nicole looked at this woman, this stranger who was her own, if distant, kin. She saw nothing there that she could relate to. And from the look and sound of it, this wasn’t new hostility. It was much older than Nicole’s presence here, and than Nicole’s freeing of a slave. Umma hadn’t received any better treatment than Nicole was getting, nor ever had.

“Sweetheart, “ Nicole said for both of them, “the sooner I leave your sour face behind, the happier I’ll be. “

She’d guessed right about Ila: the woman could dish it out wholesale, but she couldn’t take it. The splutters were utterly gratifying. They followed her all the way out of the room and down the stairs.

And there stood the other half of the act, even less witty than his wife. “Good riddance,” he growled to the table leg that he was fitting to its table. Nicole started to flip him off, but she hadn’t ever seen the one-fingered peace sign here. She replaced it with the two-fingered gesture a muleteer had given an oxcart driver in front of the tavern a day or two before.

Flavius Probus staggered back as if she’d struck him a physical blow. “Don’t you put the evil eye on me,” he gasped. “Don’t you dare!”

He was white as a sheet. He really did believe she could do it. It wasn’t nice of her at all, and it might blow up in her face later as family quarrels had a way of doing, but she didn’t care. It felt good to scare the spit out of that pompous ass and his bitch of a wife.

She was smiling as she turned back toward the tavern. Brigomarus hadn’t followed. None of them had. Were they all that superstitious? Or were they just as glad to be shut of her as she was of them?

She walked slowly, with frequent glances about her. Ila and her husband lived in one of the mazes that made Carnuntum a warren between the main streets of its grid. Nicole had paid close attention to the route Brigomarus took once he left the grid, or thought she had. But when she should have been turning back onto one of those main streets for an easy walk home, she found herself in a twisting alley instead.

The alley was deserted except for a skinny young man in a threadbare tunic of no color in particular. He had a lump of charcoal in his hand, and was scribbling on a wall with it. At the sound of her step, he whipped about. His face was as thin as the rest of him, set with a pair of enormous eyes. They fixed on her, and held her rooted.

In Los Angeles, a meeting with a tagger could be dangerous. In Carnuntum…

The young man flung down the charcoal and bolted as if the whole nation of barbarians were on his tail. She’d never seen anybody run so fast.

He was scared right out of his wits. Nicole couldn’t imagine why. If the penalties for writing graffiti were that severe, surely there wouldn’t be any graffiti – and the walls of Carnuntum were covered with scribbles and scrawls and amateur art.

She moved closer to see what he’d written that was so dangerous. I am the resurrection and the life, she read. He who believes in me, even if he should die, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me shall not die, not ever. The simple Latin lacked the flavor of the English Bible she knew, but that text was unmistakable. Even if it hadn’t been, the young man had drawn a cross on one side of the passage and on the other a two-stroke fish like those she’d seen in gold plastic mounted on car bumpers.

Nicole frowned. The message seemed perfectly harmless – until she remembered what people in Carnuntum thought of Christians. That young man had taken his life in his hands to scribble the graffito. If she’d recognized him, if she’d raised a hue and cry here, or given his name to the town council…