Household Gods

When she’d barred the door of her room and lain down in bed, then she prayed. She prayed as she’d never prayed before. Not just to be free of a world and time that weren’t and had never been her own. To be safe. To be where war like this never came, and cities weren’t sacked, or women raped in the street in broad daylight, except in backward parts of the world where she need never go.

For all the potency of her wishing, and for all the strength of her prayer, when she woke, she woke to Carnuntum. Down below, men were groaning and swearing in guttural German, cursing the wine they’d drunk and the hangover it had given them.

She shook her head. They’d be wanting breakfast, and she’d better see what she could find. No matter who was in charge here, she had to stay alive until she could find a way to escape. There was a way. There had to be one. Didn’t there?

The sack of Carnuntum went on for five days. As long as chaos was the order of the day, Nicole and Julia made daily trips across the street to keep themselves stinking and unattractive to would-be rapists. Gaius Calidius Severus had needed to be watched for much of that first night, according to Julia, but by morning he was groggy, headachy, but on the mend. He didn’t need much looking after, once he was back on his feet, except what Julia was minded to give him.

One morning, just as Nicole was coming out of the shop with Julia, pungent with a new application of what Nicole was thinking of as rape repellent, they met Antonina on her way in. She wrinkled her nose, nodded, and went on by. Nicole swallowed a smile. So: Antonina had decided to join the anti-rape league. Good for Antonina.

Young Calidius Severus endured several days of dreadful, pounding headaches before the pain gradually began to recede. He never did recall how he’d got that lump on the side of his head. “It must have been a rock,” he said, over at the tavern, in an hour when it was blessedly empty of Germans. “It must have been. If a German had caught me with the flat of his blade, he wouldn’t have stopped there. He’d have slit my throat or cut off my head.”

Nicole nodded. “I think you’re right. It had to be something like that, something that made you drop your sword.”

“I suppose so,” he said, “but I don’t know. I expect I never will.”

He dipped his bread in olive oil and ate. Nicole still had plenty of grain and, if anything, an oversupply of oil for the tiny amount of business she was doing. She was out of wine: the Germans had made sure of that.

Being out of wine meant drinking water. She didn’t dare go over to the market square to find out if more wine was to be had, not yet. She didn’t think any would be, anyhow, not judging by all the drunken barbarians she’d seen. At her insistence, Julia boiled water in the biggest pots they had. “This is a silly business, Mistress,” the freedwoman insisted.

“Do it anyhow,” Nicole said. Being the boss gave her the privilege of being arbitrary. She’d long since seen that arguments and explanations based on what the twentieth century knew and the second century didn’t were worse than useless. “It can’t hurt anything, can it?”

“I suppose not.” Julia was still dubious, but did as she was told. When, after a day or two, nobody came down with the runs, she allowed as how it might not have been such a bad idea. That was the biggest concession Nicole had ever wrung from her.

More and more Germans came into Carnuntum. Some were celebrating the destruction of the legionary camp down the river. Some came to plunder and steal, though the pickings by now were thin. A lot simply passed through, on their way south toward other Roman towns and more Roman loot.

“All the Roman Empire will be ours,” Swemblas boasted one day. “Every bit of it.”

Nicole didn’t argue with him. She thought there’d been Roman Emperors after Marcus Aurelius, but she wasn’t sure enough of it to say so. Not to mention that disagreeing with one of the new German masters of Carnuntum was likely to prove hazardous to her health.

He didn’t stay long, in any case. A tavern without wine had far less appeal to him than one with it. “If you have no wine, what good are you?” he demanded.

“You and your friends drank all I had,” Nicole answered, not too sharply, she hoped. “How am I supposed to get more?”

“In the market, of course,” Swemblas said in a tone she knew all too well. Male arrogance and superiority, patronizing the silly little woman, and letting her know just what an idiot she was.

His astonishment was all the stronger for that, when Nicole laughed in his face. “Suppose I can go to the market without having a dozen of your friends pull me down and rape me, the way they did to my neighbor,” she said. Swemblas’ expression went from astonished to shocked, likely because she dared talk so directly about what he did for fun. “Suppose I can do that,” she said. “I’m not sure I can, but suppose. You people have drunk or stolen all the wine the merchants had on hand. Where are they going to get more?”