Household Gods

She hadn’t given up her search for the actual plaque, the one that had brought her back here. Once it was safe to go out again, and while she had errands to run – trips to market, women’s day at the baths – she took time to hunt. She hadn’t seen anything closer to it than the one she’d bought from the stonecutter near the market, but she hadn’t given up. Nor did she intend to, not till she’d scoured every street and poked into every shop.

Looking for something in Carnuntum, she’d discovered, was nothing like shopping in L.A. or Indianapolis, not if you wanted to be thorough, as she emphatically did. She couldn’t let her fingers do the walking; she had to do it with her feet. It wasn’t just that there were no phones here. There were no phone books, nowhere she could check under STONECUTTERS to see if she’d found them all. There wasn’t a Chamber of Commerce from which she might have got a list of such artisans, either. If she wanted to hunt them down, she had to do it herself.

“In all my spare time,” she muttered, which would have been funny if only it were funny. She’d thought she was busy in Los Angeles. Work here in Carnuntum never seemed to get done. If she couldn’t find the plaque, if she couldn’t escape the second century… Had she seen her own gravestone when she came to Petronell on her honeymoon? She didn’t remember seeing any inscribed to a woman named Umma, but that proved nothing. She could as easily say it proved Umma had never existed, and all this was a dream.

In which case, Nicole had taken to dreaming historical epics.

A week or two after Nicole invented baked apples, the tavern ran low on grain. When Nicole went to the market square in search of more, she found none for sale: no wheat, no barley. She’d never seen rye or oats. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked a man who was selling plums at a preposterous price.

“Tighten your belt,” he answered.

She hissed at his total lack of sympathy, and went searching elsewhere.

As she’d recalled, a miller or two had shops between the market and her tavern. One of them sold her a little barley flour at five times what it should have cost. The other shook his head and said, “Sorry, but I haven’t a kernel to spare. I’m hanging on to every grain in every jar to keep myself and my kin alive. Hard word to give you, I know, but that’s how it is.” Nor would he give way, even when Nicole pleaded for something, anything, a handful would do. “My wife’s having a baby,” he said. “I’ve got to keep her strength up.”

Nicole left the miller’s shop in a state of considerable aggravation. Before she could make it out into the street, a gang of Germans swaggered down the sidewalk, arm in arm and giving way to no one. She had to flatten herself against the wall to keep them from walking right through her. They laughed to see her cringe. They were big and ruddy-cheeked and healthy. They hadn’t missed any meals lately, and didn’t look likely to, either. Whatever grain there was or had been in Carnuntum, it was in their hands now. And the Romans? They plainly didn’t give a damn about the Romans.

She waited till they were well past before going on her own way. As she walked, she found her eyes following a flock of pigeons in the street. Their brainless strut wasn’t a whole lot different from that of the mighty conquerors. If this lot learned to carry swords, the rest of the birds would be in trouble. And how, she wondered, would they taste roasted, or stewed, maybe, with the few herbs she had left, and some of that awful local wine? They hadn’t changed a bit, to be sure. Their habits were just as disgusting as they’d ever been. Even as she watched, one of them pecked at an ox turd in the street. Her stomach turned over. But as it did that, it growled. Pigeons were meat. Her stomach knew it, regardless of what her brain might have to say.

Julia exclaimed in dismay when she brought home so little in the way of grain. “Mistress, what will we do?”

“Tighten our belts,” Nicole replied, as the man with the plums had done with her. It was no answer, and yet the only one possible.

No, not quite the only one possible. “I think we’ll close down for a while,” she said, “just worry about feeding ourselves, till more food comes into the city. And… I think I’ll send Lucius out tomorrow, to bring us back as many snails as he can catch.”

How many calories in a snail? How many other people, children and adults alike, had gone out hunting snails? How long before Carnuntum had not a snail left in it, and people still hungry? Those were all good, relevant questions. She had answers for none of them – yet. What she did have was the bad feeling she would not only get answers, they wouldn’t be anything either easy or comfortable to deal with.