Household Gods

Marcus Aurelius proved to be a rare politician in yet another way: he kept his promises. As soon as he had Carnuntum in some sort of order, he took his army across the Danube to bring the war home to the Quadi and Marcomanni. Nicole stood on the riverbank with most of the rest of the population of the city, and cheered as the Roman flotilla crossed over to enemy territory. People all around her marveled over and over at the great size and magnificence of the force. She held her tongue. Maybe she’d seen The Longest Day too many times on late-night TV. To her eyes, the flotilla was neither large nor imposing. It seemed no more than a collection of barges and rafts, and rowboats that reminded her of oversized racing shells.

And when they were gone, when fires began to burn on the northern bank of the Danube, she felt more alone than ever. Some of her – a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged – rejoiced that the Germans were getting what was coming to them. But she wished Marcus Aurelius had stayed in Carnuntum. She wouldn’t have found it easy to get another audience with him, but the lure of intelligent conversation, even in the second century, had a powerful appeal.

And she felt less safe with the Roman Emperor out of the city. Though he and his army were gone, Carnuntum remained full of legionaries: garrison troops, reinforcements passing through on their way to the northern bank of the Danube, wounded men coming back from the other side of the river to recuperate. Medical care here was better than it was with the army in the field. Nicole pitied the soldiers in the forests, stalked by Germans who knew the land far better than they did, and no help for them if they were wounded but the roughest of field surgery.

“Those whoresons’ll go hungry, that they will,” a veteran said as he eased himself down onto a stool in the tavern. He’d come in with the help of a walking stick, limping on a bandaged leg. “We hit ‘em as their grain was starting to get ripe, and we’ve taken a lot of it, and burned whatever we didn’t take.”

“Serves ‘em right,” Lucius said. In his biased opinion, legionaries were splendid creatures. He wore the wooden sword on his belt all the time now, and marched everywhere. Nicole was hard put to keep him from talking like a legionary, too, complete with the appalling vocabulary. She’d never told him what one of them had done to her. What point? He wouldn’t understand.

“It certainly does serve the Germans right,” Julia said. All the Roman soldiers in the tavern nodded. Most of them had their eyes on Julia. She could have said the sun rose in the afternoon, and the legionaries’ heads – among other things – would have bobbed up and down. Men, Nicole thought scornfully.

Every so often, a soldier would pat Julia or Nicole on the bottom, or try to pull one of them down onto his lap. Sometimes Julia would let a legionary get away with it, sometimes she wouldn’t. Nicole never did. She developed a whole range of ways to get the message across.

“Arr!” a legionary roared when she spilled a bowl full of stewed parsnips and salt fish into his lap. He sprang to his feet and did an impromptu war dance. “That’s hot! You did that on purpose, you miserable bitch.”

“You’d better believe I did, you stinking bastard,” Nicole snapped. “If your hands don’t stay where they belong, your supper won’t go where it belongs.”

He had a sword at his belt. If his hand dropped to the hilt, she didn’t know what she’d do. Scream and duck, probably – what other choice did she have? Instead, he cocked a big, hard-knuckled fist. “I ought to beat the crap out of you for that, lady,” he growled, glaring from her to his dripping tunic and back again.

But one of the soldiers at another table said, “Oh, take it easy, Corvus. You grope a broad and she doesn’t like it, shit like that’s going to happen to you.”

“Shit is right,” the legionary with the Roman hands said. “Look at the mess she made of me.” He swiped at his tunic, but only managed to smear it worse.

He didn’t get much sympathy from any of his cohorts. They laughed and jeered: “A little lower and to the left, Corvus! My, what a fine, artistic outfit you’ve got on!”

He spun on his heel and stamped out of the tavern. Nicole, freed of his attentions, made sure she didn’t keep too close a watch on the wine bill for the soldier who’d told Corvus off. If he got a free cup, or two, or three, then so be it.

It’s worth it, she thought. Only afterwards did it occur to her that she’d fallen into a way of thinking she’d always deplored. She’d needed a man to protect her from another man. There wasn’t any getting away from it – but neither did she have to accept it.

It was the way things were, here in Carnuntum.