Household Gods

“If you want them so much, you can go out there and bring them back,” Nicole said. Julia shot her a look – as close to defiance as she’d ever come – and startled Nicole by doing exactly as she was told.

Nicole watched her as she paused at the door, looking rapidly up and down the deserted street, and scuttled toward the fish. When she was within a few feet of them, her face screwed up in disgust. Nicole wasn’t surprised. The reek of them still clung to the bowl they’d lain in.

Julia came back without the fish, and with a crestfallen expression. She’d gone out to make a point; but Nicole, for once, had won it instead. They scraped together a breakfast of stale barley bread and boiled water, punishment fare, and settled for another day of siege.

Toward midday, one of the gates went crashing down. Screams and shouting and something else – a deep, rhythmic, profoundly arrogant sound – proclaimed the legions’ arrival in Carnuntum. They were singing, Nicole realized, in a strong, marching beat, to the braying of horns and the beating of drums.

Nicole looked at Julia and Lucius. Julia and Lucius looked back. Was her grin as wide and crazy as theirs were? They leaped up all at once and whooped. Julia grabbed Nicole’s hand and Lucius’. His free hand grabbed Nicole’s. They danced madly around the room, kicking into stools and tables, and not caring in the slightest.

When they’d danced themselves breathless, Nicole and Lucius flung themselves down to rest, but Julia had something else in mind. She dipped a rag in the dishwater barrel and scrubbed at her arms. “Now I don’t smell like a chamberpot anymore,” she said triumphantly.

Then, as if she’d gone completely out of her mind, she unbarred the door and ran out into the street, headed toward Gaius Calidius Severus’. She was damned lucky: the street was full of Germans running away from the wall. None of them stopped to grab a last taste of Roman flesh.

Nicole stared after her. Then, incredulously, she started to laugh. Julia always had been consistent about what constituted a celebration.

It wasn’t all bad, either. Nicole was sick of smelling like eau de pissoir herself. She scrubbed her arms and neck, even added a little bit of vinegar from the stores. Better to smell like a salad than like a hot day in an outhouse.

When she looked up from what were still sadly inadequate ablutions – God, what she wouldn’t have given for a bar of soap – Lucius had disappeared, and his toy sword with him. She cursed, first in Latin, then, more satisfyingly, in English. He’d gone to watch the fighting, the little lunatic. He’d never in his life imagine that he could get caught in it. She could – and it scared the hell out of her.

She ran to the door and shouted his name. Nothing. She called again, louder. No sign of him. Why should there be? He had what the twentieth century had learned to call plausible deniability. “Oh, no, Mother, “ he would say, eyes wide and sincere. “I didn’t hear you. Everybody was yelling so loud.”

“I’ll warm his backside,” Nicole muttered. The idea didn’t give her the collywobbles, as it would have when she first came to Carnuntum. He’d proved himself immune to any lesser suggestion. He did not need to know just how vitally important his life was to her. He was, literally, her lifeline, the one assurance she had of her continued existence.

Without further pause for thought, Nicole ran out of the tavern. She barely remembered to shut the door behind her.

The street was even fuller of Germans than before. Some were headed at a gallop for the wall, swords drawn, faces set in masks of ferocity. Some were falling back, retreating deeper into the city. Their swords were notched or bloodied or broken, and their masks had cracked. Beneath lay fear – the first fear she’d seen in anyone but a Roman since this war began.

Serves you right, she thought viciously. Some of the Marcomanni and Quadi coming away from the wall were bleeding. That served them right, too. It was time they had a taste of their own medicine.

The barbarians yelled back and forth, comers to goers, incomprehensibly. None took the slightest notice of Nicole, any more than they had of Julia. Who was probably, right at that moment, screwing her brains out. Nicole didn’t know whether to be jealous or annoyed. Annoyed, she decided: if Julia had waited a little longer before running over and hopping into bed with Gaius Calidius Severus, maybe Lucius wouldn’t have had the chance to sneak out the door.

“Lucius!” Nicole called again, but her voice was lost in the chaos. Maybe he really couldn’t hear her. And maybe, too, if she stayed out here on the sidewalk any longer, one of those Germans running past was going to take a swipe at her with his sword, just for the hell of it.