Household Gods

It was even more awful than she’d thought at first. There wasn’t any toilet paper. She used one of the rags from the drawer in the chest, and threw it into the chamberpot afterwards. And regretted instantly and powerfully that it wasn’t a toilet after all. A toilet you could flush. A pot just sat there, stinking. She lay back down with another groan. Even without the stink, she didn’t think she’d have gone back to sleep again in a hurry. She could tell she wasn’t done yet. A herd of buffalo with iron hooves was stampeding through her guts.

Just as she finished the second bout – almost as bad as the first, and no promise more wasn’t coming – somebody knocked on her door. “What is it?” she said weakly, amazed she’d remembered to use Latin. If it wasn’t the end of the world, she had no intention of getting up for it.

It was worse than the end of the world. “Mistress,” Julia said through the door, “Aurelia is puking something fierce, and Lucius has the trots.” She sounded as if she was afraid she’d be killed for bringing the bad news.

Who knew? Maybe in Carnuntum, a slave would be. “I’m coming,” Nicole groaned. She got out of bed and stood swaying. These were, in effect, her kids. If her guess was right, they really were her relatives. They were her responsibility, that was certain. Single mother then, she thought in weary disgust. Single mother now. She hadn’t figured on that when she came back to Carnuntum.

She unbarred the door. Julia was standing in the hallway holding a wan and flickering lamp. She looked like a ghost with her sleep-disheveled hair and her pale face.

Her voice was real enough, shakily stern – almost smug. It reeked of I told you so. “Mistress, it really wasn’t very wise of you to give them water to drink all day. You know perfectly well – “ She paused to inhale, which must have given her a good whiff of the chamberpot. “Oh, dear, Mistress – you’ve got it, too!”

“Yes, I’ve got it, too,” Nicole said. “Happy day.” A piece of limerick ran through her head: Her rumblings abdominal were simply phenomenal. And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth? Any minute now, dogs would start barking at the noises her insides were making.

But that had nothing to do with anything. She was on mommy duty now. “Come on,” she said as brusquely as her queasy innards would allow. “Take me to the kids.”

As they walked down the hall, Julia picked up where she’d left off. “Drinking water all the time isn’t healthy,” she insisted. “I did try to tell you, but you didn’t want to hear, Mistress, even though everybody knows it.”

A lot of what everybody knows was nonsense. That had been so in Los Angeles, and was bound to be so in Carnuntum. Still, Nicole thought, what if the water really was bad, the way it was in Mexico? She hadn’t had any trouble drinking it in Petronell or Vienna on her honeymoon.

Her mouth twisted. That was the twentieth century, not the second. Evidently chlorine had something going for it after all.

But wine? Her frown deepened. People here drank like fish. If they weren’t alcoholics, it wasn’t from lack of trying.

There was no way she was taking that route herself. She’d watched her father crawl into a bottle and pull the stopper in after him. She’d never touched a drop of alcohol, and she was damned if she was going to start now.

Her belly tied itself in a knot and yanked hard. She gasped and doubled up. God! She hadn’t felt this bad since she went into labor with Justin. Whatever this was, it was nasty.

This time, it let her go. She straightened and made it the rest of the way down the hall, where Julia was waiting beside one of the curtained doorways. Her nose told her it was the right place. It smelled even worse in there than in her bedroom: between the two of them, Lucius and Aurelia had been sick from both ends.

Nicole took the lamp from Julia. Its flame was low. “Go fetch another one,” she said. “This one’s almost out of oil.”

Julia didn’t seem to mind the errand. The air would be fresher where she’d been sent, that was certain. “Yes, Mistress,” she said with suspicious good cheer.

As Nicole listened to her thump her way downstairs, it struck her that she hadn’t even bothered to say please. She’d treated Julia like a… like a slave again.

No time to waste in feeling guilty. Both children were groaning, a sound she knew too well. At the same time, the lamp guttered and went out. There was no moonlight on this side of the house, no way to see anything. She tracked the kids by their moans and their heavy breathing, and a little catch that must have been a sob. She barked a shin against the hard side of a bed, swallowed a curse – damn, that hurt! – and bent to feel for a forehead. She found one, and another next to it. Hot. Hers was probably hot, too, not that she had time to care. Kids first.