Household Gods

Carefully, she said, “What money can do, I think this money will do. Thank you, sir. You are very generous.” She’d said things like that more times than she could count. Far more often than not, she was conscious of the hypocrisy even as the words passed her lips. This time, she meant it from the bottom of her heart. How strange, in a world not just conspicuously but dreadfully worse than the one she’d been born to, to find at the head of the Roman Empire a man head and shoulders and torso above any of the rulers or statesmen of the late twentieth century. Mediocrities in expensive suits, every last one of them.

“I shall give you torchbearers to escort you back to your house,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Any town, even one so much smaller than Rome as this, may prove dangerous to an honest woman walking alone in darkness. Having suffered one calamity, you ought not to fear another.”

“Thank you again for your thoughtfulness,” Nicole said.

To her astonishment, she saw she’d embarrassed him. “Some take pride in claiming credit for service,” he said. “Some will not claim it aloud, but still secretly regard those whom they help as being in their debt. I try, as I believe all should try, to do one right thing after another, as naturally as a vine passes from yielding one summer’s grapes to those of the next.”

If another man had said such a thing, he would have sounded like a pompous ass. Marcus Aurelius brought it out as if it were, or should be, simple truth.

Nicole smiled. Now, finally, she understood what he was. It was more than a word. It was a whole manner of being. “The Romans are lucky,” she said, “to have a philosopher for an emperor.”

He surprised her again, this time by shaking his head. “A general at the helm, a Trajan or a Vespasian, would serve us better now,” he replied. “But I am what we have, and I can but do my best.” He rose from the table, and called for servants. They came quickly, torches at the ready, crackling and trailing a stream of fire. He handed her into their care, with a grace and a courtesy that were in keeping with all the rest of him. The last she saw of him, he was standing by the table in the light of those many lamps, his shoulders bowed a little, borne down by the weight of his office. It was late by second-century standards, but he looked as if he had a long night ahead of him still.

Outside in the darkness, the torches seemed dismayingly feeble, casting only a dim, flickering light at the feet of their bearers. The moon, which hung in the southeast on this clear late-August night, gave more and better light, but anything at all might have lurked in the moonshadows. A bright red star – Mars? – glowed a little above the moon. Even brighter was Jupiter, splendid and yellow-white below the moon, not far above the eastern horizon. Was that Saturn between them? Nicole would have known once, when it was a family pastime to spot the planets and call out names of the constellations. She hadn’t done it since – Indianapolis? A long time. Night skies in Los Angeles were drowned in light, and she was too busy, most of the time, to notice.

This was the first time that she’d had to navigate Carnuntum by night. It was a dangerous pastime if you were too poor to afford guards and torch-bearers. In the dark, in the absence of either streetlights or signs, she almost lost herself in the twisting ways of the city. Nothing looked the same as it did in daylight. Her steps grew slower and slower. The torchbearers began to mutter behind their hands, rude remarks in Latin and in another, unfamiliar language. Greek? It was much too mellifluous to be German.

At last, to her relief, she found the fountain near the tavern. From there, she had no trouble finding her way home. At the door, though she was suddenly, desperately tired, she paused to thank the Emperor’s servants. They were polite to her because Marcus Aurelius had been, but they plainly couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

Dim lamplight flickered through the slats of the shutters on the front windows. How nice of Julia, Nicole thought, to leave a lamp burning, so that Nicole wouldn’t have to fumble her way in the dark.

She opened the door and slipped through it into the familiar, slightly funky interior of the tavern. Julia was sitting on a stool beside the lamp. She looked ready to fall over.

“For heaven’s sake,” Nicole said, “what did you wait up for me for? Go to bed before you fall asleep where you sit.”

Julia shook her head stubbornly, though a yawn caught her and held her hostage in the middle. “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” she said. “I know Marcus Aurelius is supposed to be a good man, but he is the Emperor. He can do whatever he wants. I was afraid of what he might do when you had the nerve to ask him to pay you back for what that legionary did, as if it were his fault. “