Household Gods

MARCUS loves LYDIA, someone had scrawled in charcoal now faded. Nicole wondered if Marcus had done it, or if some of his friends were giving him a hard time. Either way, the graffito had a modern ring to it. Two doors farther down the street she found another, fresher, charcoal scrawl: balbus screwed lydia against this wall. Was he boasting? Was he teasing Marcus? Was he talking about a different Lydia?

Nicole didn’t usually wonder about things like that, questions she might never answer, things she’d likely never know. Somehow, here, now, time seemed more flexible.

Across the street, somebody had drawn an elaborate sketch of a man with a donkey’s head, hanging from a cross, with a normal man standing below, lifting up his hands. Scribbled under it she read, ALEXANDER WORSHIPPING HIS GOD.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nicole murmured in absent-minded English. It hit hard when it hit, as the painfully obvious can do, taking her straight back to Sunday school. So when was this, the age of Christians and lions? Someone here obviously didn’t think much of the Christians.

A scribble like that would have brought Sunday school down around everybody’s ears. No one here seemed to take the least notice of it. Maybe people agreed with it. Maybe it honestly didn’t matter to them. No wonder Julia had thought Nicole was acting strangely when she’d asked about the Christian calendar.

Just down the street from the shop with Alexander’s portrait on its wall stood an enormous building, by far the largest Nicole had seen in Carnuntum. City hall? she wondered. State capitol? Whatever it was, it was busy. People – all men, she noticed with a reflexive feminist sting – bustled in and out of several side entrances. Smoke poured from the slits of windows and out the doors as people came and went. In Los Angeles, she’d have been sure the place was on fire. In Carnuntum, where chimneys hadn’t been invented, smoke seemed ubiquitous and, for all she could tell, harmless.

Nicole walked along beside the building for what had to be 150 yards before she came to a corner. Around that she found what she’d been hoping for: the main entrance. It was even more floridly ornate than she’d started to expect. An inscription ran above it in the spiky and portentous Roman capitals, proclaiming that Marcus Annius Libo, to celebrate assuming the consulship for the second time during the reign of the august Emperor Hadrian, had erected for the city of Carnuntum these… public baths.

Nicole laughed out loud. “That’s right!” she said, remembering the ruins again. Any town whose grandest building was a bathhouse was her kind of place. She wondered if it was as fancy on the inside as its white-marble, columned elegance suggested. On impulse, she started up the low stairs. She hadn’t bathed the day before, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d missed before that.

But, at the top of the stairway, a bored-looking attendant held up a hand to stop her. “Gents today,” he said. “Ladies yesterday, ladies tomorrow, gents today.” He sounded like a broken record.

“Oh. “ Nicole felt like an idiot. Hadn’t Julia said yesterday was a ladies’ day? So men and women alternated. How bloody inefficient. Couldn’t they have had separate sections? Alternating half-days? Coed facilities? What if someone needed a bath now and it was the wrong day? What was she supposed do then?

Damn it, her skin was crawling just thinking about two days without a hot shower, let alone an all-over bath.

She opened her mouth to say something of that, but shut it again. She wasn’t, at the moment, feeling quite up to fighting weight. As she turned on her heel, letting that be her whole expression of temper, she stopped short. Two women strolled out of the baths, laughing and chattering and jingling coins in little dyed-leather pouches. Nicole forgot the flutter in her belly and the ache in her head. She rounded on the doorman, porter, whatever he was, and jabbed an indignant finger in their direction. “What about them?”

The attendant sneered. She’d seen that look back in L.A., once or twice, when her clothes weren’t fancy enough to suit a maitre d’. “They didn’t go in to bathe, lady,” he said.