Household Gods

Nicole snapped her mouth shut on a retort, and looked again at the women. Even for women in Carnuntum, they were heavily made up. Their faces looked like the masks she’d seen hanging over the stage in every theater she’d been in. And every inch of it, she had no doubt, the same deadly white lead that she’d thrown out the window this morning. Their tunics seemed made of gauze, wafting in whatever breeze happened to blow, and leaving exactly nothing to the imagination. Their pubes, she couldn’t help but notice, were shaved as – she blushed inside herself, and snarled at herself for it – as her own was. Their nipples appeared to be rouged or painted. The scent that wafted from them was so strong she nearly gagged. Rosewater and musk and something oddly… culinary? Was that cinnamon? Even as strong as it was, its sweetness was welcome amid the smoke and stench of the city.

It was also, she realized, advertising.

“Oh!” she said again before she could catch herself. She wasn’t supposed to feel what she was feeling, which was all the indignation of the Midwestern matron at being brought face to face with a pair of hookers. Umma was a respectable woman; no one had indicated otherwise. And yet these two prostitutes sashayed past her in their waft of perfume and their flutter of inadequate draperies, acting as if they had just as much right to promote their business as she did hers.

So what was she supposed to feel? As a feminist, she should deplore the reduction of her fellow women to mere commercial sex toys – and be dismayed to realize that the so-called oldest profession probably was that ancient. As a liberal, she should approve the lack of hypocrisy of a culture that allowed the same freedom from persecution to hookers as to Johns.

It was the good old liberal feminist’s dilemma, as insoluble now as it had ever been. The two contrary notions jangled together uneasily in her mind as she hurried down the stairs.

Just past the baths lay a large open square with colonnades on all four sides. Rows of stalls filled it and spread out under the colonnades. It reminded Nicole of the Farmers’ Market in Los Angeles, only more so. Nothing had a price tag. Buyers and sellers haggled with loud shouts and frantic gesticulations. Some of them grinned, enjoying the game. Others tackled it with grim determination, as if dickering were a matter of life or death.

Nicole could understand the grim ones a fair bit better than the grinning ones, just then. Her head was aching again, and not just with the aftermath of the trots. She’d been in supermarkets bigger than this. Hell, she’d been to the Mall of America.

In the Mall of America, she knew the rules. What to expect, what to look for, where the maps were if she couldn’t find her way. Here there was nothing to guide her. No nice little map on a pillar with a pink dot labeled, “You Are Here.” Nothing but a churning mass of people and things. Far too many of those things were alive. No shrink-wrap or cold cases here. Dinner came on the hoof or just recently killed, with head and feet still on.

Nicole took a deep breath that didn’t steady her quite so much as she’d have liked it to, and set out around the edge of the cobblestoned square. She’d look things over, she told herself, before she tried to buy anything.

She’d got about halfway round when a man called out to her: “Hello, Mistress Umma! Look at the lovely raisins I’ve got for you today.”

As far as Nicole was concerned, raisins were raisins. These could have come straight out of a red SunMaid box. She looked down her nose at them, as if they were a legal brief she intended to tear to pieces. She’d learned to do that in Mexico, and found there that she liked it. A little of the thrill started to come back through cranky stomach and culture shock. She let it build up. She was going to need it, if she expected to get out of here with any cash left over.

Focus, then. Forget the bellyache, the headache, the overtaxed brain. Think of it as an exercise, like moot court in law school: up all night and running on caffeine, briefcase full of illegible notes and brain full of irrelevant data, but everything coming to one single, all-important point.

Raisins. Never act as if you really want what you intend to buy, she’d learned south of the border. That was easy enough now. She never had cared much for raisins. But Julia had said the restaurant needed them. Therefore, the restaurant was going to get them.

“Go on, taste a few,” the seller – dealer? huckster? – urged her. “You’ll see how fine they are.”

She took one, examined it on all sides, ate it. She shrugged. “Yes, it’s a raisin. How much?”

“Eight sesterces for a modius,” he answered, not quite promptly.