Household Gods

And every morning, as surely as the sun rose over the eastward wall of Carnuntum, she woke in Umma’s bed, in Umma’s body. The gods were ignoring her, or else, as she began to fear, actively refusing to grant her prayer.

They’d brought her here. They could damned well send her home again.

Julia approved of this sudden access of piety. “We’re sure to have better luck around here now,” she said. Julia had two mottoes: Never ask questions and Always look on the bright side. Manumission hadn’t done a thing to change either of them.

That much Nicole had given her: her freedom. Umma, when she came back to this body, if she came back to it – small dark difficult thought, there, quickly suppressed – couldn’t legally undo what Nicole had done. It was a good thing, a decent gift to leave behind.

Nicole wasn’t ever tempted to stay. The one real friend she’d had here, Titus Calidius Severus, was dead. Lucius was Umma’s child, not her own, though yes, she’d miss him. Julia, too, and young Gaius, and one or two others. She was fond of them as she might have been of people she met on a long vacation, but with the sense, always, that this was their world and not hers; that whatever happened here, it was temporary. She wasn’t going to live out her days here.

Liber and Libera were silent, though their plaque was smeared with wine and the cup in front of it had been filled and refilled and filled again. Nicole, in the beginning of despair, prayed to the God she’d grown up with, the God whose followers in second-century Carnuntum seemed so much like twentieth-century extremists. He gave her no more answer than the Roman deities had. He was angry at her, she was sure, for having other gods before Him. Or maybe the Christians here and now were shouting so loud, they drowned her out.

She hadn’t wanted anything or wished for anything so strongly or with such concentrated determination since – when? Since she passed the bar, at the very least. Even the prayer that had brought her here was a dim and halfhearted thing beside this.

Imade it one way, she thought on waking up yet again on the hard narrow bed in the upstairs bedroom behind the tavern. There has to be a way for me to go back.

The legally trained part of her mind pointed out that there didn’t have to be any such thing: hadn’t she ever heard of a one-way ticket? The rest of her was damned if that was the case. Really, truly, literally damned.

Slowly, reluctantly, and almost unregarded, the hole in the back of her mouth healed. When it was finally gone, she found herself free of pain for the first time since she’d come to Carnuntum.

The difference it made was amazing. “I should have had that tooth pulled a long time ago,“ she said one day in the dead of winter, a long way still from spring.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” Julia responded, looking up from the dough she was kneading. “They say it afterwards, yes, but before? You couldn’t get a one of them near the nice man with the forceps in his hand.”

Remembering the burly man holding her arms and the other one grabbing her legs, remembering the forceps in her mouth and the roots of the molar tearing out of her jawbone, Nicole shuddered. “You are right,” she conceded. “You are too right.”

That afternoon – a fine one, as winter days went, with the temperature probably in the high forties and the sun peering out between spatters of rain – some very unusual customers swaggered into the tavern. The room that had always seemed, if not spacious, then large enough to swing a cat in, was suddenly not much larger than a closet.

There were only three of them, though at first there seemed to be more: big men, burly, and ripe even by the standards of this age. They were Germans, no doubt about it, Marcomanni or Quadi, she couldn’t tell which. They ordered wine in Latin with a distinct accent, guttural but understandable.

“One-as, two-as, or Falernian for four asses?” she asked, warily but crisply. As had the tribesmen in the market square, they surveyed the place as if they owned it. If they drew their swords and demanded the cash box, she couldn’t do much but hand it over. Really, when she stopped to think, it was a wonder she hadn’t ever been robbed or mugged – crime here was low, though not nonexistent.

Nor was she about to become a statistic now. One of the Germans set a shiny silver denarius on the bar. “Falernian,” he said. The others nodded, tripling the order. “And you will give us bread and raisins and smoked pork to eat with it.” That was an order, and in more ways than one.

Nicole kept her temper. She nodded curtly, bringing to bear the skills she’d acquired perforce, for dealing with obnoxious customers. They’d given her money instead of simply taking what they wanted – that went a long way toward easing her temper.