Household Gods

She’d been persisting in the conviction that Carnuntum was the hallucination. But – what if it wasn’t? What if it was real, and West Hills a dream? Had she really known frozen food and printed books and automobiles and air conditioning and computers and airplanes and the United States Constitution? Or had she been Umma all along, gone round the bend for a while, and now at last begun to recover?

“I am Nicole Gunther-Perrin,” she said in quiet but impassioned English, “and I will go back to California.” She clenched her work-battered hand into a fist and slammed it down onto the thin mattress. “I will. But not today, God damn it.”

She believed that. She had to believe it. If she didn’t… she’d have to come to terms with staying in Carnuntum for the rest of her life. With the Marcomanni and Quadi holding the city and the Roman legions likely to be knocking on the door any minute now, the rest of her life probably wouldn’t be measured in decades. Days, more likely. Or hours.

“God be thanked for small mercies,” she muttered.

She trudged downstairs to a meager breakfast of barley bread that sat like a brick in her stomach – but a small brick, oh, a very small brick. Julia was already up and gone, as far as she could tell. Lucius was nowhere to be seen. Out playing with the neighborhood kids, she had to hope. She raided the cash box and went out to see what she could find to keep herself and Lucius and Julia eating for another day or two, or maybe just for another meal.

Few Germans roamed the street so early. They didn’t have to worry about making a living; they lived off everyone else’s labor. They could sleep late – or later, anyhow, since no one here moved too far out of rhythm with the sun. For that reason, the early morning was a good time to hit the market square, if anyone happened to have anything out for sale.

Nicole felt like clapping her hands when she saw not one but two fishermen setting out a gleaming array of trout and carp. She wasn’t the only one buying, but there weren’t so many people there that they started frenziedly bidding against one another, as she’d seen happen once or twice. She paid an arm, but managed to keep the leg in reserve for a jar of wine a farmer had brought into Carnuntum. It was the last one he had left. “Glad to be rid of it,” he said. “Now I’m going to get out of town while the getting’s good.”

That struck Nicole as eminently sensible; what hadn’t made a lot of sense was his coming into town in the first place. She got out of the market while the getting was good, too, and the gods were kind. The streets were still all but deserted. She made it back to the tavern unmolested, without even the usual quota of whistles and catcalls from passing Germans.

Julia had been to the baths: she was clean and relatively fresh. Nicole made a mental note to go later, if the quiet continued. Julia regarded Nicole’s purchases dubiously. “That’s a lot of fish, Mistress,” she said. Then she shrugged. “Well, we’ll stuff ourselves like force-fed geese, because it won’t keep long. And then we’ll moan and groan about how full we are – and then we’ll be empty again.”

“So we will,” Nicole agreed. “But being full for even a little while feels good.”

“It certainly does,” Julia said, in a tone and with an expression that made it plain she was not talking about food. Nicole snorted. Julia looked altogether unabashed. Nothing Nicole had ever done could make her feel that her way of dealing with men – and striking deals with them – was wrong.

It worked for her. In times like these, that meant something. More power to her, Nicole thought, with a little wrench of the gut. Paradigm shift. That was never either easy or painless.

Baked fish and a quarter of a small loaf of barley bread did not make for a balanced diet, but Nicole went to bed without the feeling that, if she had a tapeworm, it was about to sue for lack of proper maintenance. She’d had that feeling too often lately. Now that she was without it for a little while, she wasted very little time worrying about proper nutrition. Any nutrition at all was enough to carry on with.

When the sun rose the next morning, the Marcomanni and Quadi rose with it. So did the rest of Carnuntum; Nicole would not have been surprised to learn that the braying of the Germans’ horns had roused the recently dead from the graveyard outside the walls. It sounded like an elephant being flayed with a dull pocketknife.

The street outside the tavern was hardly quieter. Germans ran in packs down the street, swords in hand, baggy trousers flapping against their legs, shouting back and forth in their guttural dialects. Nicole had picked up a few words – enough to be quite clear on what they were yelling about: “The Romans are coming! The Romans are coming!”