Household Gods

One if by land, two if by the Danube, she thought dizzily. She leaned on the window frame for a moment, letting the wan sun warm her face. It would cloud up later, she suspected. It almost always did.

She dressed with a little more than her usual care, and went downstairs to a breakfast of cold fish. Julia and Lucius were not far behind her. She was interested to note that Julia was also a bit cleaner than usual, though Lucius was his disheveled small-boy self.

They didn’t open the tavern, or even unbar the door. “With any luck at all, this will be over soon,” Nicole said. She glanced at the image – the image – of Liber and Libera. If you won’t send me home, will you at least let me live as good a life here as I can?

A prayer wasn’t supposed to be reproachful, but she didn’t care. They’d brought her here. They could live with the consequences.

In the beginning, the second battle for Carnuntum sounded very much like the first. The shouts from the walls were in German now and not in Latin, but the tones of anger, desperation, rage, even wild glee, were much the same.

But after a while, as the morning went on and the sun began to play hide-and-seek with the gathering clouds, a new sound brought Nicole bolt upright. It sounded like the beating of an enormous heart, deep and ponderously slow.

Lucius looked up excitedly from the board game he was playing with

Julia. “Battering ram! That’ll do it for the gate. Then – in come the legions. March! March! March!”

He marched himself all the way upstairs to fetch his sword, and all the way back down and around the room, leaping and spinning and stabbing with it, till Nicole ducked in and caught him and held him fast. He was hot and sweaty and breathing in gulps. And he’d forgotten completely how little use his wooden blade had been against the Germans.

Nicole’s grip slackened. He wriggled free, still panting, but he’d calmed down enough to sit on a bench conveniently near the door.

He didn’t go back to his game, which he’d been losing anyway. Quietly Julia stowed the pieces inside the board and put it away, and sat with folded hands, waiting with a slave’s patience for whatever was going to come.

The Romans kept knocking on the door to Carnuntum. A second ram joined the first, striking a counterpoint from another gate. With each crashing thud, Nicole thought surely it would break through.

But the gates had been built strong, nor did they care who tried to break them. They held for the whole of that day, until the pounding became as monotonous as a migraine, as relentless as the pulse of Nicole’s own heart in her ears.

Lucius alternated between playing legionary and waiting for the real legionaries to come marching down the street. At length, Nicole prevailed on him to go upstairs with Julia and, if not sleep, then at least get off her nerves.

She sat where she’d been for most of the day. If she’d had a stack of magazines to read, she’d have been too twitchy to bother with them. She contemplated a big job, a job that would keep her too busy to think, but even if she’d had tools to sand down and refinish the tables, she’d never get it done before dark. She’d have to ask Brigo next time he came by, whether she could borrow any – for that matter, whether he’d like to help. He’d might surprise her by agreeing to it.

Daylight faded, and the pounding went on. Nicole circled the room, coming to a halt in front of the votive plaque. Liber and Libera regarded her with serene complacency. “All right,” Nicole said to them, rather defiantly, in English. “Maybe you wanted me to see the Romans take back Carnuntum. Maybe I was supposed to see that, sometimes, the good guys win.” She glowered at them. “With all due respect, I’d sooner have taken that on faith, and gone home.”

The god and goddess didn’t move, or say a word. A little wear and tear aside, they looked just as they had when their plaque had stood on her nightstand in clean, quiet, safe West Hills. Nicole looked around at this filthy tavern in a barbarian-held town taken from an empire that reckoned itself civilized only because everything around it was so absolutely barbaric. She sighed deeply, turned her back on the heedless divinities, and trudged upstairs to bed.

She slept rather better than she’d expected, a deep, sodden sleep, though she’d drunk no wine the night before. She woke as she’d fallen asleep, to the sound of the rams battering away at the gates.

The last of the fish weren’t fit for human consumption. Nicole tossed them out the window. Julia, who was just coming down the stairs, exclaimed in dismay and ran to the window beside Nicole, but Nicole had done the job a little too well: they’d landed in a steaming pile of ox manure.

“Mistress!” Julia said. “They might still have been all right to eat. Now when are we going to get any more?”