Household Gods

She and Brigomarus were almost home safe, and unmolested, when two big red-faced Germans planted themselves in their paths. One rested a meaty hand on the hilt of his sword. The other proved to speak some Latin. “What have you in those jars?” he demanded. “Is wine, yes?”

Nicole’s mind raced. “Is wine, no,” she answered. “Is piss for my dye-works. Want to drink some?” She thrust her jar at the German.

The outhouse reek that still came off her lent force to her words. The barbarian recoiled, spitting out dismayed gutturals. His friend asked a question. The answer he got left him revolted, too. They both took off in a hurry.

Brigomarus looked ready to burst with suppressed laughter. He kissed her instead, quick but firm, as a brother should. “Even if you do smell bad,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said. “That’s better than all right.”

They were still laughing when they walked into the tavern. Julia looked up at them in surprise. “I haven’t heard the two of you laugh like that in a long time,” she said.

“Since the pestilence,” Nicole said. Her laughter had died.

“Longer than that,” Julia said. “It’s probably been since – hmm.” She paused. “Since last spring, I guess.”

Since Umma moved out and Nicole moved in. I ruined the neighborhood – and the neighborhood has been doing its best to ruin me.

She actually enjoyed telling Julia why she and Brigo had been laughing. God, she had changed.

Not for the worse, she hoped. Julia laughed at the joke. So did Lucius, when he came running in from outside. He laughed harder than anyone else. At his age, gross-out humor was the best kind.

Nicole set her jar of wine behind the bar. Brigo followed suit. She grinned at him suddenly. “Let’s have some wine,” she said. And if she’d known a year ago that she’d say such a thing, let alone say it with such relish, she’d have been flatly appalled. Carnuntum had changed her in ways she never could have imagined. It had also, and forcibly, changed her attitude toward life in Los Angeles. She longed for that life, even while she laughed and bantered and poured out cups of horrible wine. But she was trapped here, in this life she’d thought she wanted. She might never escape; never be free of it, unless or until she died.

18

Little by little, the folk of Carnuntum learned to live with the occupation of their city. They drank water, though sometimes it made them sick, or beer or bad local wine in place of the better vintages that could not come up from the south. When the olive oil ran out – which took a while, because, in contrast to the wine, the Germans had no interest in helping to consume it – they made do with butter. They complained about it, too, loud, long, and rarely with any inventiveness. Nicole liked butter quite a bit, as long as it was fresh. But without refrigeration, it went rancid much faster than oil.

Gaius Calidius Severus despised the stuff. “The smell stays in my mustache,” he complained, “and I have to live with it all day long.”

Compared to rancid piss, rancid butter didn’t seem that bad to Nicole, but she didn’t tax him with it. She was too fond of him. He’d done a great deal for her, and he was a hell of a good kid. Very soon now, he was going to be a very nice young man.

Little by little, she and Julia left off splashing themselves with eau de pissoir. The Marcomanni and Quadi still sometimes casually walked off with things without bothering to pay for them, but the excesses of the sack didn’t go on for long. It gradually dawned on the Germans that, having overrun Carnuntum, they would get the most out of it if it ran as near normally as possible.

One day, a man who happened to be selling apples in the market square said to Nicole, “Umma, have you heard? My cousin Avitianus, the one with the farm out past the amphitheater – you know, the one who’s got the six girls and just the one boy and that one’s addled in the head? Well, the Germans took two of his sheep and wouldn’t pay him, which is nothing at all new, you know, but you know what he did?”

Nicole hadn’t the faintest. She opened her eyes wide and looked expectant.

“He complained to the chiefs, that’s what!” the man said. “Imagine that.”

Nicole could imagine. She didn’t like the picture she was getting. “That was brave, but it can’t have been very smart.”

“Well, that’s Avitianus, you know?” The apple-seller sighed. “They gave him a kick in the arse and sent him on his way. That Avitianus, he’s got bigger balls than a he-goat, but he’s got to use his thumbs to count them.”

“And so much for justice, too,” Nicole said.

“Only justice a poor man ever knows is what he gets hit over the head with,” the man replied. “The Germans’ll hit you over the head with a sword. Before they came, the rich bastards would hit you over the head with a lawyer. The sword hurts more, but the lawyers took more.”