Household Gods

Nicole didn’t care what excuses she made, nor listen to her beyond that first, damning yes. “You gave them wine,” she said again, incredulous. “What are you trying to do, turn them into – “ She groped in her new Latin vocabulary, hunting for the word that was so clear in English: alcoholics. There wasn’t any such word. The best she could wasn’t quite good enough: “Are you trying to turn them into drunkards?”

“I said,” Julia said with an air of shaky determination, “I watered it exactly as I should, as I was supposed to – as you, Mistress, always told me to – till now.”

She thought she’d done right, Nicole realized. She was so sure of it that she’d even held her ground against her – her owner. Nicole shuddered. Julia, oblivious, went on, “Mistress, by all the gods I don’t know why you’ve taken so against wine today. Are you feeling well? Are you ill? Should I fetch you some poppy juice?”

Poppy juice? Opium? One can of worms at a time. Nicole thought. “I am not ill,” she said with taut-strung patience. “And you are not to give my children wine for breakfast.”

“Then,” said Julia, still defiant, “what am I supposed to give them?”

“Milk, of course,” Nicole answered sharply. Didn’t she know that? Didn’t anybody?

Apparently not. “Milk?” the children and Julia said in chorus, all three; and in the same shocked tone, too. Lucius and Aurelia hacked and gagged and made disgusted faces. You’d have thought she’d just tried to feed them a plate of lima beans.

“Milk?” Aurelia repeated. “It’s slimy!”

“It tastes horrible,” Lucius said. They looked at each other and nodded in perfect, and horrified, agreement. Nicole didn’t think they agreed like that very often.

“It’s expensive,” Julia said, making it sound like a clincher. “And besides, Mistress, you can’t keep it fresh. It’s even worse than fish. You waste what you don’t use, because it’s sure to be sour the next day, especially this time of year. Please pardon me for telling you, but really, Mistress, what in the world makes you want to feed them milk?”

“Because it’s full of – “ Nicole found she couldn’t say calcium in Latin, either, even though it sounded like a Latin word to her. This time, her circumlocution was clumsy: “It helps make bones strong.”

“Barbarians drink milk,” Lucius said, as if that settled everything. “The Marcomanni and the Quadi drink milk.” He stuck out his tongue. Not to be outdone, Aurelia stuck out hers, too.

Some arguments you just couldn’t win. This looked like one of them. Religion, politics, divorce – on some things, people’s minds locked themselves shut and lost the key. If she tried to force it, she’d get into a fight; and that wouldn’t gain her anything.

Sidestep, then. “If you won’t drink milk, will you drink water?” she asked. The children didn’t look happy, but they didn’t screw up their faces and make puking noises, either. Neither did Julia, though her expression was eloquent. Nicole threw an argument at the kids to bolster her case: “I drank water this morning, and it hasn’t hurt me.”

“You did?” Lucius sounded as if she’d just told him – well, as if she’d told him that she’d traveled in time from the twentieth century and she wasn’t his mother at all.

What joy, she thought. A whole family of alcoholics in training, from the baby on up – and their mother is in business selling wine. She’d fix that, maybe not all in a day considering how Julia and the children had reacted to her suggestion that wine maybe wasn’t the best thing for a human to drink, but by Liber and Libera she would show them how a healthy person ought to live. “I certainly did drink water this morning,” she said to Lucius. “Ask Julia if you don’t believe me. She watched me do it. She even fetched the pitcher and poured me a cup. “

Lucius laughed. It was a distinctly and viscerally unpleasant sound, a Beavis-and-Butthead snigger. “Huh! That’s funny, Mother. You can’t believe a slave about anything. Only way they can testify is if you torture them.” He made a horrible face at Julia, a twisted devil-snarl, and jabbed his finger at her, with indescribable boy-type sound effects: hissing and bubbling and an abrupt, blood-curdling shriek.

He was making it up. He had to be. But Julia’s white face and the sudden change in her silence, the way her shoulders went tight and hunched under her sad bag of a tunic, ate away at Nicole’s disbelief.

She’d never taken legal history. It hadn’t been required, and she hadn’t been interested, and she hadn’t had time even if she had been interested. Now, with piercing intensity, she wished that she had.

Legal history she might have missed, but she’d been a parent long enough to know how to shut down a thread of discussion that was going in a dangerous direction. Briskly, she said, “We’re not talking about court right now, young man. Are you saying Julia and I would both lie to you about what I drank? ‘