Household Gods

He chewed on that for a while, frowning. Then he nodded. She was supposed to be grateful, obviously, that he, the mighty male, had come round to her way of thinking. He wasn’t any different from a German, when you got down to it.

At least he wouldn’t hack her head off for talking back to him, though he might try to bite it off. “All right,” he said ungraciously. “Tabica’s staying in, yes. Now let it go. I didn’t come over to start the fight again.”

“No?” Nicole inquired. “It sure seemed that way.”

“I said I didn’t.” He scowled. After all this time, he still wasn’t used to backtalk from someone he recognized as his sister. “What do you want from me?”

“An apology would be nice,” Nicole said.

Now he stared. So did Julia. Nicole knew she was pushing it, but she didn’t care. If Brigomarus didn’t want to play by her rules, she was perfectly willing and able to have nothing more to do with him. It had taken her a while, but she’d come to realize just how much leverage that gave her. She really didn’t care – and he did. Desperately. As far as he knew, she was family. As she very well knew, she wasn’t. What mattered greatly to him meant nothing to her.

She held all the power. He might not understand it, but he knew it. Therefore, with bad grace, he yielded. “I’m sorry,” he said, doing a better job of it than Lucius might have, but not much. “I’m glad you’re safe here.” That sounded a little more as if he meant it.

“Safe?” Nicole’s laugh had a raw edge. She saw in her mind Antonina turned into a toy, a thing, for the amusement of any barbarian who happened to wander down the street. She knew how easily that could have happened to Julia, or to her. She saw Antonina’s husband, too, with the side of his head smashed in and blood puddled in the street, soaking into the dirt. “We’re not safe. It’s just that nothing horrible has happened to us yet.”

Brigomarus didn’t like that anymore than anything else she’d said, but he was an honest man, on the whole. He nodded. “I see. Anything can happen to any of us, any time. And there’s nothing we can do about it.” He paused. “I suppose… it must be worse for a woman.”

Nicole and Julia exchanged glances. Amazing, Nicole thought. He sees it. He actually sees it.

It was amazing. Women here really were the weaker sex. On the whole, they were smaller than men, and not so strong. Without the machines that made brute strength largely irrelevant, that mattered. Nicole had never realized how much women had benefited from the Industrial Revolution. She’d either taken machines for granted or sneered at them. If she ever got back to California, she promised whatever gods might be listening, she would never sneer again.

And, beyond even that, women had babies. That still complicated their lives in the twentieth century, but by that time the risk of dying in childbed had grown very small. It was alive and well in Carnuntum. So was the risk of getting pregnant whenever a woman lay down with a man. She knew how unreliable the plug of wool she’d used had been, and how lucky she was not to have been caught.

Engineering. Science. Medicine. She’d never realized how important they were till she had to do without them. Without them, could women in the modern West have come as close to equality as they had? She doubted it.

Resolutely, she dragged her mind back to the here-and-now. This was no time to be mulling over the extent of her education, still less to be yearning for her own place and time. Brigo, unlike Julia or the Calidii Severi, wasn’t likely to cut her slack while she lost herself in a reverie. She put on an expression of polite interest and inquired, “What are you doing these days?”

He seemed relieved to take refuge in small talk. “Same as always,” he answered: “making shields. Only difference is, the Germans take them now, not the legion. My work is good enough to keep them happy, so mostly they leave me alone.”

“You make shields… for the Germans?” Nicole asked in disbelief. What was the old word for a collaborator? Quisling, that was it. Umma’s brother was a quisling.

Or was he? “Yes, I make shields for them,” he said. “If I say no, they’ll kill me – either that or I’ll starve, which amounts to the same thing. When they come in here, do you say, ‘No, I won’t give you any bread. Get out!’?”

She lowered her eyes. No. She didn’t. She never had, not even when they’d come straight in from gang-banging Antonina. She’d been afraid, and she’d wanted to live. So – was that what a quisling was? Someone who went right on doing what he would have been doing if the Germans hadn’t come, but doing it, now, for the Germans?

But he was making an implement of war. She was simply feeding them. An army ran on its stomach. Where had she heard that? It didn’t matter. Collaboration was collaboration, whatever the extent of it.