Household Gods

Slapping, cursing, wishing in vain for a vat of Woodsman’s Fly Repellent, she turned off her own street onto a larger one. A block or two down, that one ran into a bigger one yet, one big enough to boast a cobblestoned paving. At the intersection sat a fountain from which water splashed lethargically into a stone tank. Women stood around chatting and filling jugs from the tank.

They can’t use all that for cooking or washing, Nicole thought. They must drink some of it. She shuddered, wondering how often it made them sick. And that was just the water itself, without help from lead pipes and lead-glazed jars. She shuddered again. If the galloping trots didn’t get you, lead poisoning would.

A block farther down the cobblestoned street stood a marble statue, half again life size, of a nude, bearded man. The Getty Museum, twenty minutes from West Hills, had a marvelous collection of ancient statuary; the couple of times Frank dragged her there on one of his cultural-literacy jags, Nicole had admired the cool white elegance of the stone.

This statue was neither cool nor white nor elegant. It had been painted to look as lifelike as possible, down to eyeballs, nipples, and pubic hair. It was, in Nicole’s opinion, one of the tackiest things she’d ever seen. Hadn’t they run a Saudi sheik out of Beverly Hills for painting the statues on the grounds of his mansion like this?

Seeing her astonished stare, a woman in a grimy linen tunic mistook its meaning. She pointed to the marble penis – also half again life size – and said, “I wish my husband got that hard. How about you, dearie?” The woman didn’t wait or seem to expect an answer. She bustled on down the street, chortling at her own bawdy wit.

The statue had to be just as bad a joke as the one the woman had made. Nicole wondered if some civic-minded person would come along and sandblast the paint off the marble to make it decently pure again.

Then, as she rounded a corner, she came on the next one. This was of a woman, mostly and graphically nude. It had been painted with the same loving attention to detail and the same total lack of taste as the male statue.

If that physique represented Carnuntum’s ideal of beauty, Umma’s body was on the skinny side by local standards. At least half of the old wheeze, You can’t be too thin or too rich, didn’t apply here. Somehow, Nicole suspected the other half was still in force.

Distracted by the statue, she almost jumped out of her skin as a nightmare of teeth and glaring eyeballs lunged out of a shop almost into her face. Just as her scattered wits identified the thing as a dog, a stout iron chain brought it up short. Nicole’s yelp of alarm was lost in its yelp of surprise.

A roar from the shop reduced them both to silence: “Hercules! Blast you to Hades, you fornicating thing!”

The owner of the voice burst into the street, armed with a stout stick and a glare as red-eyed and wild as the dog’s had been. The glare reduced the dog to a whimpering puddle, but the owner never seemed to notice. The stick slashed the dog across the nose; a foot armed with a hobnailed sandal booted it in the ribs. The dog whined piteously and slunk back into the shop, chain rattling behind it.

The shopkeeper tucked the stick in his belt and shook his head. “Damn, Mistress Umma, I’m sorry for that. You know why I got the miserable beast – three break-ins in six months, and the last time the bastards got as far as the cash box before I drove them off. But even with the sign, the blasted dog’s scared off half my customers.” He tilted his head toward the wall, where a neatly painted inscription read, cave canem: Beware the dog.

Nicole was still shaking with reaction and a surprising, unexpected surge of anger. “I don’t care if you do have a sign,” she said. “If that dog had bitten me, I’d have sued.” The sentence came as naturally in Latin as it would have in English.

It had the same effect it would have had in English, too. The shopkeeper turned a chalky white, stuttered something she couldn’t make out, and scuttled back inside the shop. Thumps and anguished barks told her he was beating the dog again. Mean or not, no animal deserved that. But what could she do about it? There was no SPCA in this world. For the first time, Nicole really understood what the phrase “dog-eat-dog” meant.

As if the CAVE CANEM sign had flicked a switch in her head, Nicole found herself sharply aware of other signs and scribbles than the ones that announced a shopkeeper’s name and business. The Romans might not have spray paint, but they knew about graffiti. They wrote in chalk on dark walls and, more often, in charcoal on light ones.