Household Gods

For a while, at least, they’d manage. The next day, Lucius went out hunting and returned with a good-sized basket full of snails. The tavern smelled of garlic and fried molluscs the rest of the day. Nicole, Lucius, and Julia all ate till they were full, and there were still live snails left in the basket for tomorrow.

A German came in while they were eating. He grimaced at what was to Nicole the wonderful odor of garlic, and turned the color of a bream’s belly when he found out what she and the others were eating. He literally fled the tavern, a hand clapped to his mouth.

Nicole laughed for a long while after he was gone. The others followed suit, but they were a little puzzled. She had to stop, wipe away the tears of mirth, and try to explain. “Isn’t it strange? Murdering people for fun doesn’t bother these bastards. Violating women doesn’t faze them. Robbing people doesn’t trouble them in the slightest. But snails with garlic? That makes them turn up their toes.”

“If we’d known it, we could have splashed ourselves with garlic juice instead of sour piss, “ Julia said seriously – she still wasn’t quite inclined to laugh at a German. “We would have liked it better, and the Germans still would have left us alone.”

“They might have left us alone,” Nicole said. “What we did worked. That’s good enough.” She patted her belly, which felt wonderfully full. “And a big mess of snails is good enough – or better than good enough – too, no matter what a cursed barbarian thinks.”

Julia nodded. So did Lucius. It took Nicole a moment to realize what she’d just said. Cursed barbarian? If that wasn’t the precise local equivalent of damn nigger or stinking wetback, what was it? She looked up at the soot-smeared ceiling. She was horrified, but she was also a little amused – that wasn’t like the old Nicole at all, at all. Of all the things the second century had done to her, slinging casual ethnic slurs was one of the last she’d expected.

Neither of the others saw anything at all unusual or reprehensible in it. Lucius packed away the last snail from the bowl, sat back, and belched luxuriously. Nicole frowned, but she held her tongue – still more evidence of the new, far from improved version. “I’ll catch more snails tomorrow, Mother,” Lucius said.

“Good.” Nicole ruffled his hair. He ducked his head, but not too much, and put up with it better than she might have expected. She patted her belly again. It came down to a simple choice, she thought. She could worry about whether her belly was full, or she could worry that she was improperly denigrating the magnificent achievements of the Quadi and Marcomanni and, as far as she could tell, the Lombards.

It took leisure to be politically correct, and to see all sides of the question.

Leisure – and a well-stocked larder. And no good and sufficient and very immediate reason to blame the ethnic group of choice for the gnawing in her middle.

Snails grew scarce, as she’d known they would. Pigeons proved tasty, though she cooked the meat right off the bones to make sure it was safe to eat. After a while, they got harder to catch: the survivors turned streetwise. The sight of a human within a stone’s throw sent them skyward in a whirring racket of wings.

There was always fish in the market, no matter how hard the times were. The Germans didn’t mind if the locals went out in their little boats with nets or hooks and lines. But, when it was almost the only food available, fish became expensive. Nicole regretted every frivolous as she’d spent since she entered Umma’s body – to say nothing of the coins Umma had spent before Nicole came to Carnuntum.

That aureus Swemblas gave her had seemed a huge sum of money, like a thousand-dollar bill. And, like a thousand-dollar bill when no other cash was coming in, it melted away, an as here, a dupondius there, a couple of sesterces somewhere else.

Nicole found herself in a cruel dilemma: if she sold the food she managed to find, she earned money with which to buy more food, but she couldn’t eat what she sold. If, on the other hand, she ate the little food she managed to lay hold of, she stopped being hungry for a while, but money flowed out of the cash box as inexorably as sand running through an hourglass.

The uneasy compromise that she settled on left the three of them both hungrier and closer to broke than she wanted them to be. Her drawers fit more loosely than they had when she first woke in Umma’s body, even more loosely than they had when she was recovering from the pestilence. Her belly growled at her all the time.