Household Gods

After that, she popped the as Ofanius Valens had given her in her mouth, since there wasn’t a pocket anywhere in Carnuntum that Nicole had seen, and her tunic lacked a belt and therefore one of the ubiquitous pouchlike purses. With that, and with a grin and a wave to her mistress, she went off to the baths.

Nicole had a not very brief, completely cowardly thought of forbidding her to go. Julia’s departure left Nicole in charge of the taberna. Umma must have been able to do it on her own, or Julia would never even have offered to leave. Nicole felt overwhelmed as soon as the slave got out of sight. She had to bake the bread, cook for her customers, serve them, rinse their dishes in water that started out clean but didn’t stay that way – no lemon-scented dishwashing liquid here, and no dishwasher, either – and keep half an eye, or a quarter of an eye, or an eighth, on the children. Her children, she reminded herself. If she didn’t look out for them, nobody would.

She burned her hand getting her own first batch of loaves out of the oven. She plunged it into the dishwater, which, if not cold, was at least cool. The only soothing thing she could find to put on the burn was olive oil. It seemed to help a little. She would never have used it back in West Hills, but this was Carnuntum. No Aloe-Heal here. Not even an aloe plant. The price I pay for freedom, she thought.

Freedom, at the moment, looked suspiciously like drudgery. She was too busy even to notice how busy she was.

There were compensations. The loaves she’d turned out weren’t quite perfect; she’d let the crust get browner and thicker than Julia had done. But they were damn good, she thought, for a first try. The customers certainly didn’t object. If they said anything at all, it was to demand another piece hacked off the loaf.

The rest of her cooking passed the test, too, though a couple of people noticed her style wasn’t the same as Umma’s. “Next time I bring you a sow’s womb,” a plump fellow said, “I’ll want it seethed in honey and vinegar, the way you usually do it, not just grilled with garlic. This wasn’t bad, but I like the other better.”

She nodded, gulping a little. She hadn’t known what to do with the odd-shaped lump of meat she’d been handed. For that matter, she hadn’t known what the odd-shaped lump of meat was. Now that she did, she wished she didn’t.

She struggled for objectivity, the same mental distance she’d cultivated in the courtroom or in dealing with clients who weren’t quite the kind of people she’d want in the same room with her kids. What the plump man had suggested didn’t actually sound too bad, though she wouldn’t have chosen that particular cut or recipe for sweet-and-sour pork.

Just as Nicole was taking the last batch of loaves out of the oven, Julia came back at last from the baths. The slave smelled much better than she had before, and her skin was several shades lighter, closer to the milky white that Nicole would have expected with her fair coloring and Germanic features. She still wasn’t as fresh as Nicole would have been coming out of the shower. That newly milky skin smelled potently of olive oil. That, Nicole realized, was one of the many rank perfumes that impregnated the tunic Julia still wore. Not only hadn’t she had it cleaned, Nicole didn’t think it ever had been cleaned, not in the months – maybe years – Julia had been wearing it.

Still, thought Nicole, the bath had been an improvement. Julia carried herself a little straighter, hunched her shoulders a little less. She examined the new-baked bread with a judicious eye. “A little underdone,” she judged, “but no one will complain about it.” She beamed at Nicole. “I hope it wasn’t too much trouble, Mistress. The bath was wonderful.”

She punctuated that with a happy wiggle that caught the eye of every male in the place. There all too obviously wasn’t anything between her body and the much-worn tunic. Equally obviously, she hadn’t been quite dry when she put the tunic back on after her bath. A wet T-shirt it wasn’t, but it left precious little to imagination.

Nicole couldn’t match Julia’s happy tone, not with the thoughts she was thinking. “All right,” she said a bit more roughly than she’d intended. “Get back to work.”

Julia obeyed her with evident contentment. From the way she was acting, she’d expected nothing gentler, and probably something a great deal more harsh. Even in her depths of disgust for the male half of the species, Nicole couldn’t seem to match Umma for ferocity.

Sometime in the late afternoon – Nicole kept glancing at her left wrist, at a watch that wasn’t there – Titus Calidius Severus strode briskly into the restaurant with a pair of plump trout. “Hello, Umma,” he said cheerfully. “Thought I’d wait till things thinned out over here before I brought you these to fry.”