Household Gods

Nicole wasn’t pleased to note how glad she was that Julia had gone back to being servile again. “Bread and watered wine, same as the children,” she said – and that was a capitulation, too, but she couldn’t see any way out of it. Except possibly one. “The one-as wine,” she added, “nothing fancy.” That was the one that came in the unglazed amphora. If it was bad wine, so much the better. Then maybe she could keep from growing too fond of it.

Even if it didn’t have lead – she hoped it didn’t have lead – it still had alcohol in it. The odor rising from the (unglazed, thank God) cup made her shiver. She could all but hear her father downstairs yelling at her mother, while she lay in bed with the covers pulled up over her head and tried not to listen. She had to will herself to sip.

Diluted, the wine tasted like watery, half-spoiled grape juice. It had a tang to it, a sharpness and a kind of dizziness in back of it, that had to be the alcohol. She’d never tried any before, to know. She’d refused.

Her heart was thumping again, as it had when she discovered her face was armored in lead. She’d thought, somehow, that the first taste would do it: would hit her hard enough to make her stagger. Apparently, that wasn’t how it worked. She sipped again, deeper, and again, till the cup was empty.

Did she feel anything? Was there anything to feel? Maybe she was a tiny bit more detached from the world than she had been before. Maybe she wasn’t. She’d been in varying degrees of fog since she woke up in Carnuntum – and for certain sure she was detached; she was a complete stranger to this whole world and time.

Julia was watching her, nodding sagely, as if she could see an effect Nicole couldn’t feel. “That will do you good, Mistress,” she said.

“I doubt it,” Nicole said. Her belly was rumbling again, knots and snarls that were more nerves than sickness. The wine hadn’t made it worse, at least. She was grateful for that.

Medicine. She could think of it as medicine. Even her mother had had a stash of medicinal brandy, that her father had never managed to find.

Julia’s voice broke in on her thoughts, as so often before: as if it were a kind of lifeline, an anchor to this world. “Are you feeling well enough to go out and buy things today, Mistress, or will you send me? “

Nicole focused abruptly and too sharply, though the edges of things still wavered just a little. Julia was watching her alertly, with a look she’d seen on a dog hoping for a portion of the humans’ dinner. So was this a new game, then? A gambit to get hold of some money, to do God knew what with it?

Nonsense, Nicole thought. Julia could get at the till either way, whether she stayed to mind the tavern or went out shopping. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the house.

If that was it, too bad. Nicole hadn’t gone out since she got here, either. Her insides still felt very uncertain; and even though Imodium looked like a Latin word, it surely wasn’t, or she’d have found a bottle of it by now. Maybe if she could get out, breathe relatively fresh air, see more of Carnuntum than she could from window or doorway, she’d forget her indisposition for long enough to make it go away.

“I’ll go,” she said. Julia’s face fell, but she didn’t argue. After all, her expression said, she wasn’t the boss. Nicole did her best to sound brisk. “Let’s see – what do we need?”

Julia visibly swallowed her disappointment to focus on the duties at hand. “That amphora of Falernian in there” – she pointed to the bar – “will last the day out, I think, but not tomorrow. And we’re out of scallions and raisins, and we could use some more mutton.”

“I’ll get some fish, too, if I see any worth buying,” Nicole said. She had to say something, if she expected people to think she was staying on top of things.

“All right, Mistress.” Julia sounded vaguely dubious, but then she nodded. She’d dropped her facade of submission again, Nicole noticed. It seemed to go up when Nicole was giving orders, but to go down when they were working together – as if a slave could think for herself, sometimes, if her mistress gave the signal. Had Nicole been giving the right signals after all?

Maybe it was all those years of dealing with secretaries – pardon, administrative assistants – and paralegals. They hadn’t been much more than slave labor either, not at the pay they got and with the workload they carried.

Julia had gone right on talking, in a tone that reminded Nicole almost poignantly of a paralegal invited to voice an opinion on a case: “Fish spoils fast, so there’s always that risk, but we can eat it ourselves tonight if no one else does. And people will probably order it. You were doing some interesting things with it yesterday when they brought it in for you to cook. Word will get around.”

“I suppose so,” Nicole said, though she wondered how. No TV, no radio, no telephones, no e-mail. How did people find out what was going on in the world, or even in Carnuntum?