Household Gods

She looked around for Julia, but the freedwoman had made herself scarce. If these bruisers from beyond the Danube wanted a little ripe woman with their smoked pork, they weren’t going to get it. Nicole was somewhat annoyed: she’d have welcomed backup, and some help filling plates and cups and bowls. But Julia had made it clear when she was manumitted that while she’d cheerfully sell her body, she wasn’t about to sell it to just anyone.

And if they took a fancy to a skinny black-haired piece with a missing tooth?

Not likely, Nicole thought grimly. Nor were they eyeing her in that particular way. They emptied their bowls and licked them clean, and ordered another round of Falernian, with another denarius to pay for it.

“Wine,” one of them said in reverent tones. “Wine is… good.” The others nodded as if he’d said something profound.

Nicole set a sestertius on the bar as change. The man pushed it back. “No. Give us more bread and meat and raisins. Tell us when we need to give you more money for it.”

Nicole nodded again, more warmth in the gesture now – the professional warmth any businessperson offered to big spenders. “Would you like some olive oil to go with your bread?”

They all made faces at her, the same sort of faces Lucius and poor Aurelia had made when she suggested they drink milk. “Olive oil is not good,” said the one who’d declared that wine was. “Have you butter?”

If only, Nicole thought, with a fleeting memory of cold, sweet butter on fresh crusty bread from the bakery near the law offices. She overrode it with the reality she was condemned to. “No, I have no butter. People here like olive oil better.”

She resisted the temptation to tell them to rub the bread in their hair if it was butter they wanted – they were downright rancid with it; she had to hold her breath when she came close. It might offend them. Even worse, they might do it.

The three Germans sighed in unison. “We will eat the bread bare, then,” said the spokesman, whose Latin seemed to be best.

Before long, they laid down another denarius for still more wine and bread and meat. All three coins, unquestionably, were Roman. Nicole held up the third one. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you get so much of my country’s money?”

They smiled. They looked, just then, like the beasts in the amphitheater when they had spotted prey. The one who did most of the talking said, “We have been in the Roman Empire before.” He turned and spoke to his friends in their own language. Nicole caught the word Roman again. He had to be translating the remark. They all laughed.

She didn’t like that laughter. Like the smiles, it seemed… carnivorous. Had these Germans been part of the war farther west? Had they come into the Roman Empire as invaders, robbers, looters? Was that how they’d got their hands on Roman coins?

They were behaving themselves now. Whatever might be happening farther west, things were peaceful in Carnuntum. Nicole couldn’t turn on the evening news and watch the latest videotape of Romans and Germans fighting… wherever they were fighting. Wolf Blitzer was eighteen hundred years away. Without daily reminders, the war felt unreal.

Best change the subject. “Has the pestilence been very bad on your side of the river?”

They talked among themselves for a while, low and somehow urgent, though they were smiling and acting casual. Then the spokesman said, “No, the sickness has not among us been too bad. We have had some among us take ill and die, but not many.”

“I wonder why that is,” Nicole said. At first, it was just another polite phrase. Once it was out of her mouth, however, she really did wonder. She asked, “You don’t live in cities on the other side of the river, do you?”

The two who hadn’t said much – at least one of whom, she suspected, had little or no Latin – conferred with the spokesman again, and shook their heads. He did the talking, as before: “Oh, no. So many people all in one place? Who could imagine that on our side of the river?”

Nicole had all she could do not to laugh in his face. Carnuntum was a real city, no doubt of that. It might have held fifty thousand people, maybe even seventy-five, before the pestilence cut the population by at least a third. What would this solemn German have made of Los Angeles, with three and a half million people in the city, nine million in the county, fourteen or fifteen million in the metropolitan area? For that matter, what would a Roman have made of Los Angeles?

Los Angeles had been horrifying enough for somebody from Indianapolis, which was no small city itself. You could drop Carnuntum into Eagle Creek Park and still have room to run your dog.