Household Gods

Every time she went to the market, she saw more Germans: big fair men with, now and then, a big fair woman striding robustly alongside. They seemed on their best behavior, but everyone watched them warily. Some of the veterans of the legion that had its encampment a few miles downstream took to wearing swords, which they hadn’t done before.

One men’s day at the baths, Nicole was amazed to see several Marcomanni or Quadi – she still couldn’t tell one tribe from another – coming down the stairs. They looked mightily contented. She wondered how they bathed on their side of the Danube. To her way of thinking, the baths left something to be desired, but her basis of comparison was a hot shower and soap. Compared to a plunge into an icy stream or a half-frozen lake, the Roman baths had to seem like heaven.

A detachment of Roman soldiers in their fancy armor came over from the legionary camp and began patrolling the walls and streets of Carnuntum. Every so often, one or two of them would drop into the tavern.

One day when spring was well advanced, a pair of legionaries came rattling and jangling in just as Nicole finished pouring a round of wine for a tableful of Germans. The air was always vaguely tense when the Germans were in the tavern, but Nicole had learned to ignore the tension.

She couldn’t ignore this. The legionaries didn’t say a word except to order the one-as wine. The Germans, drinking Falernian and paying for it in silver as they always did, went on with their low growl of conversation. Neither side acknowledged the other.

Nobody else spoke, or moved much either. Julia, who hadn’t been able to make herself scarce this time, took refuge in scouring plates and cups and bowls. Lucius helped her, or tried; he kept dropping things. The two or three ordinary customers, trapped in the back and unable to escape without running the gauntlet between the soldiers and the barbarians, nursed whatever they were eating and drinking, and did their best to seem inconspicuous.

The Germans finished their wine, belched – a little louder than usual, maybe – and left. A few minutes later, the legionaries did the same.

As soon as the soldiers were out the door, a long sigh ran through the room. Nicole hadn’t known she was holding her breath till she let it out.

“Phew!” Ofanius Valens said for them all. “Another cup of the two-as for me, Umma. That could have been ugly.”

“It was ugly,” Nicole said.

“It could have been uglier,” he said. He took the cup Nicole had filled for him, thanked her, and drank deep.

Nicole was tempted to keep him company. She’d had precious few brawls in the tavern, and nothing worse than a pair of young idiots going at each other with fists and getting pitched into the street. The Calidii Severi, father and son, had played bouncers that day, she remembered. It still hurt to think of Titus, how he was dead and would never walk through that door again.

She remembered, too, how surprised she’d been, not by the fight, but by the fact that it was the first that had escalated that far. She’d come to Carnuntum convinced that drinking equaled drunkenness and that was that. And drunkenness, she’d been just as sure, had meant a fight – her father sending her mother to the ER yet again, where she’d lie as always, claiming she’d run into a door or fallen down the stairs.

In fact, neither of those assumptions had turned out to be universally or even generally true. Most of her customers drank without getting drunk. Of the ones who did go over the edge, more got friendly or talky or sleepy than got belligerent. She’d made a point of sending the nasty drunks on their way, and making it clear that they weren’t to come back. They’d mostly stayed away, too. “Plenty of other places to get a load of wine,” as one of them had informed her before she booted him out.

She’d been running a tavern in small-town Indiana. And the L.A. gang scene had come to town. “If those barbarians had gone at it with those legionaries,” she said, “it wouldn’t have been a tavern brawl. It would have been a war.”

Ofanius Valens finished off his cup of wine and held it up for another. When Nicole had brought it, and scooped up the dupondius he set on the table, he said, “Yes, it would have been a war. It might have started a fire here to match the one that’s been burning farther west.”

Nicole needed a moment to realize that, whereas she’d been using a figure of speech, Ofanius Valens had meant his words literally. “You don’t really think so, do you?” she said. “We’ve stayed at peace all this time. Why should it all blow up in our faces now?”

“We’ve been at peace, and the gods know I’m glad of it, too,” Ofanius Valens said. “But the gods also know I’ve never seen so many Quadi and Marcomanni in town as I have the past month or so. We’d always get a few: they’d cross the river to buy things in the market or drink in the taverns or just to stare at our fancy buildings. The barbarians couldn’t build a bathhouse like ours in a thousand years.”