Household Gods

More and more Germans in filthy bandages prowled the streets of Carnuntum. Fewer and fewer peasants brought in produce from the villages and farms around the city. Carnuntum might have been the only place where they could get money for it, but Carnuntum was also the place where they were most likely to be robbed and killed. They didn’t need any sort of cost/benefit analysis to draw the appropriate conclusion. They stayed away. And Carnuntum went hungry.

One who did dare the market square brought news of a battle outside Scarabantia. “Who won?” Nicole demanded in the middle of trying to haggle down the price of his prunes.

He wasn’t inclined to haggle. Intellectually, Nicole understood that: if she didn’t feel like paying his price, some other hungry citizen would. It infuriated her even so. He had a lot of damn nerve, lining the pockets he didn’t wear with profits made from hunger. He also wasn’t inclined to answer her question in a hurry. He reminded her of a farmer from downstate Indiana, sparing of words and suspicious of everybody he hadn’t known since he was four years old.

“Who won?” she repeated, wishing she could appeal to a judge to get an answer out of the reluctant witness.

“Cursed lot of dead on both sides,” he answered at last, which made her want to feed him all his prunes at once – if she couldn’t loosen up one end, she’d damned well loosen up the other. Then, grudgingly, he let drop a kernel of information: “Romans are still coming north.”

Nicole let out a long sigh of relief. “Why don’t you sound happier about it?” she asked. “There aren’t any Germans around to hear you.” Even as she spoke, she looked about to make sure she was right: the age-old glance of the occupied, checking to see that the occupiers were busy elsewhere.

The farmer shrugged. “I’m making good money these days. And the Marcomanni and Quadi haven’t got the faintest notion what taxes are: haven’t had to pay ‘em an as on my land or my crop. You can bet it won’t be like that when the usual pack of clerks is back in the saddle.”

That he was surely right didn’t make his attitude any more appealing. Nicole had to remind herself she wasn’t likely to improve his outlook by tearing him limb from limb, strictly rhetorically of course. Nor was she inclined to call a German to do it for her. And she needed those prunes. Reluctantly, she shelled out ten times what she reckoned they were worth, raked them into her sack, and left him to his prosperity.

Hunger had long since taken Lucius past the point where he turned up his nose at anything even vaguely resembling food. He would have gobbled all the prunes if Nicole had given him even half a chance. She snatched the bag out of his greedy fingers and stowed it safe behind her. “Oh, no, you don’t! Julia and I get to have some, too. Do you want to spend the whole night squatting over a pot because you made a pig of yourself?”

Lucius scowled and stamped his foot. “I don’t care. I want to eat. I’m all empty inside!”

“We all are,” Nicole said. Not that he cared: he was a child. To children, nothing mattered but the moment. She tried to console him, at least a little. “Maybe we won’t be hungry much longer. The man who sold me the prunes said the Romans won a battle outside of Scarabantia.”

“Outside Scarabantia?” Julia echoed. “That isn’t very far away at all. The Emperor could be here in just a few days.” Her face had been bright with hope, but all at once it fell. “I hope the Germans don’t try to stand siege here. They might hold off the legions for weeks, maybe even months.”

“Siege?” That hadn’t occurred to Nicole. She wished it hadn’t occurred to Julia, either: now they both had something to gnaw their empty bellies over. “God, I hope not, too.” She tried to look on the bright side, if there was such a thing: “We didn’t keep out the Marcomanni and Quadi for very long. Maybe they won’t be able to hold off the legions, either.”

“I hope you’re right.” But Julia didn’t sound convinced. “We didn’t have much of a garrison here, and the Germans took us half by surprise. The legions won’t be so lucky. The Germans will be expecting them – and there are an awful lot of Germans in Carnuntum.”

That made a depressing amount of sense. Nicole stared blankly at Lucius’ outstretched hand, blinked, doled out a handful of prunes. He might be greedy about the whole bag, but he’d learned how to eat his prize once he won it: piece by piece, savoring it, making it last. When he’d got the last scrap of flavor out of the first one, he spat the pit on the floor and said, “If it is a siege, the barbarians will keep all the food for themselves. We’ll starve.”