Household Gods

“So many people all in one place is not good,” the German said. His friends nodded. So did Nicole, though perhaps not for the same reason. With people more thinly scattered on the northern bank of the Danube, the pestilence wouldn’t have had such a large reservoir in which to flourish. But then the German said, “So many good things all in one place is very fine and wonderful.”

His friends nodded again, in a way Nicole didn’t like. It wasn’t so much admiring as covetous.

At long last, they seemed to have filled up on wine and bread and meat – she’d begun to wonder if each of them had a black hole where his stomach should be. They got up from their stools, belched in an ascending chorus, and swaggered out as they’d swaggered in.

Nicole breathed a sigh of relief. She’d made a good day’s living from them, but she’d been braced for them to start breaking up the place if they had much more to drink. They’d had a look she knew too well: elevated, but not actually drunk. Her father had come home from the bar that way sometimes. If he stayed away from the kitchen cabinet, he wasn’t too bad; he’d go into the den and sit in front of the TV till he fell asleep. But if he went to pull a bottle out of the cabinet, that meant trouble.

The Germans hadn’t been gone five minutes when Julia trotted downstairs and applied herself to making a new batch of bread. “Nice of you to join me,” Nicole said with a sardonic edge.

Julia bent over the bread-bowl, her hair falling forward, hiding her face. Her voice was subdued, as it had been when she was still a slave, and very seldom since. “I’m sorry, Mistress. I couldn’t be in the same room with those – those barbarians. They’re nothing but trouble. If you remember – that pack of Quadi, last year…”

She didn’t go on. Nicole wondered if she was being challenged, if Julia was testing her memory.

Of course not. That was trauma, that set to Julia’s shoulders, and that tension in her fingers. Nicole could easily imagine what kind. “It’s all right,” she said. “I remember.” Which of course was a lie, but not if she’d been Umma.

Julia lifted her head. Her face was as tight as her shoulders, but it eased a little as she looked at Nicole. “I’m glad they didn’t bother you,” she said.

“So am I,” Nicole said. “I could have grabbed a knife, I suppose, and fought them off, or tried to. They might have been too surprised to go for their swords. Or I could have yelled, and all the neighbors would have come running.”

“Like last time?” Julia shook herself hard, and went back to working flour and water and yeast together. “Maybe they’d even have got to you before -“ She stopped. She bent over the dough, attacking it as if it had been a broad and greasy German face. In a very little while, she’d pounded it to a pulp.

Nicole stood where Julia’s words had left her. Rape was too familiar a thing in Los Angeles, too; but no neighbors would have come running to the rescue. People didn’t get involved. The most they did, if they did anything at all, was call 911. Or grab a camcorder and go for the media gold. Nevertheless, that was a world she understood. She wanted it back. That night before she went to bed, she prayed to Liber and Libera as she had done for the past however many nights, till the prayer was worn to habit, and the words were turned to ritual. Please, god and goddess. Take me home.

Slowly and reluctantly, winter gave way to spring. After the last snow fell, a hard and driving rain moved in like insult on top of injury. Snow over mud was bearable; the mud froze, and you could cross the street without choking on dust or sinking in muck. To be sure, if it rained, or if there was a thaw and then a freeze, the snow froze into ice, and you slipped and slid and cursed and tried not to fall down and break an elbow or your tailbone. But then snow had a way of falling and making the ice passable again.

Spring rain melted the snow and with it the mud beneath. Every unpaved road in Carnuntum turned into black bean soup. Cold, glutinous, congealed black bean soup, ankle-deep and as apt to suck your boot off as to turn suddenly treacherous and send you skidding into a knot of passersby.

The tag end of winter was a lean time. The storerooms were nearly empty of grain. There were no fresh vegetables to be had, and not much meat on the market that wasn’t salted, smoked, or cured. Nicole didn’t even want to think how much sodium was in each portion that she served out to customers or to her family. There was fish, at least, fresh as well as salt. Fresh fish kept better in this weather, and she bought more of it. Her basic fish fry – olive oil, with crumbs from yesterday’s bread – was rather a popular item. She only wished she’d had some tartar sauce to put on it, or some chips to go with it. Nobody here had ever heard of the potato, though an experiment with onion rings didn’t turn out too badly.