Household Gods

She stared at him. Even in ancient Rome, people made snide jokes about attorneys? “If it weren’t for lawyers, we’d all be after each other with swords all the time,” she said with a touch of asperity.

“Well, maybe,“ the apple-seller said. “But maybe we’d leave each other alone more, too, if we had swords instead of lawyers.”

“Tell it to the Germans,” Nicole said, bending his own words back against him. He grunted, shrugged, and finally, grudgingly, nodded.

“Those are nice ones,” Julia said when Nicole brought the apples back. “You must have bought them before they were picked over. “

“I suppose I did,” Nicole answered. The apples didn’t look that nice to her. They were on the smallish side compared with what she’d been able to buy in the supermarket. Produce here was wildly inconsistent; some apples would have a firm texture and a delicious, complex sweetness as good as anything she could have hoped for back in L.A., while others from the same orchard wouldn’t be worth eating.

While she stared at them, inspiration struck. She rummaged through the spices in back of the bar till she found a quill of cinnamon. Spices, she’d discovered, traveled more than most things: they were valuable, didn’t take up much room, and didn’t spoil. She ground up part of the quill in a mortar and pestle. The sweet pungent fragrance made her nostrils twitch. It smelled of autumn in Indiana, and a bakery on a rainy day, and apple pie on the table at Thanksgiving. It was wonderful, and it made her throat go tight and her eyes sting. Julia saved her from bawling into the mortar. “What are you going to do with that, Mistress?” she asked.

“I’m going to make some baked apples,” Nicole answered.

Julia’s eyes went wide. “I’ve never heard of anyone eating apples any way but raw.”

“Well, you’ll learn something, then,” Nicole said.

They weren’t perfect. Had they been, they would have been sweetened with sugar instead of honey, and they would have been swimming in cream. But Julia and Lucius didn’t have to know there was anything missing. They devoured theirs in what seemed like two bites apiece, and loudly demanded more. Nicole savored hers, the taste on her tongue and the aroma in her nose. It filled the whole tavern, and for a little while drove away the stink of Carnuntum. “You could make a fortune with those,” Julia said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

“No,” Nicole said. “Too easy to figure out what I did. Besides, where can I get more cinnamon once this is gone?”

Julia made a face. “You’re right about that – it won’t be easy. There’s probably not any left in the city, and no merchants in their right minds are going to come this way, not with the Germans running wild through Pannonia. By the gods, no merchants who are out of their minds would come this way, either.”

Nicole and Lucius laughed, Nicole with a little incredulity; serious, literal-minded Julia almost never said anything witty. Still, Nicole sobered quickly: the joke cut too close to the truth. She said, “Nobody much will come this way, except for the farmers close to town. The market square is half empty.”

“We didn’t have a famine in spite of the pestilence,” Julia said. “If we don’t have a famine in spite of the pestilence and the Germans, the gods will truly be looking out for us.”

Lucius said, “If the gods are truly looking out for us, why did they let the pestilence happen? Why did they let the Marcomanni and Quadi conquer Carnuntum in the first place?”

“Why? Why, because… because…” Julia floundered. She scratched her head. In scratching, she found something, which she squashed between two fingernails. That still gave Nicole the horrors. She kept on fighting the battle against lice, though now she knew it was a losing battle. Julia turned to her. “Mistress, why do you suppose the gods did let those terrible things happen, if they are looking out for us?”

Nicole swallowed a sigh. Such was the lot of mothers everywhere: to be expected to answer the unanswerable. “I don’t know why the gods do anything,’ she said. “I don’t think anyone does. You can believe, but how can you know? No one has ever questioned a god, that I know of.“ Maybe no one ever had, but Nicole certainly wanted to. She’d have given a lot to ask some good, hard questions of Liber and Libera – and better yet, to actually get answers. Why on earth did you send me back here? Why on earth won’t you send me home to California? She’d done everything she knew how to do to get the attention of the god and goddess. She’d prayed, and nobody could doubt her prayer was sincere. She’d given enough wine to swim in if they’d been so inclined. But they weren’t listening to her.