Household Gods

She stared at it. It was a sheep’s leg. No doubt about it. It had been hacked right off the body, hide and all. She gulped down a new rush of bile. The leg was bloody at the top, with the pink knob of bone showing through. The hoof was still on it. It wasn’t a particularly clean hoof, either.

The butcher grinned at her. “It’ll go about twelve pounds, I’d say. How does twenty-five sesterces sound? Buy it for that, and I’ll throw in the head for another, mm, seven. Brain, tongue, eyeballs – all sorts of good things in a sheep’s head.” He pointed. There it was, nailed to a board, staring at Nicole with idiot fixity.

The mouth hung open. A big fly walked across the sheep’s tongue. It paused to nibble on some dainty or other, washed its face fastidiously, walked on. Nicole watched in sick fascination. Another fly buzzed down beside the first one. Calmly and without any fuss, the second climbed on top of the first. They began to mate.

“No, not the head.” Her voice came from far away; she was trying not to lose her breakfast. Good God, how did any Romans ever live to grow up? “I’ll give you fifteen sesterces for the leg.”

They ended up splitting the difference. By the butcher’s smirk, she knew he’d ripped her off, but she didn’t care. She only wanted to get away. Magnanimously, the butcher tied a strip of rawhide around the leg of mutton above the hoof and looped it into a carrying handle. Even more magnanimously, he didn’t charge her for it.

By the time she found two men and a woman selling scallions within twenty feet of one another, she’d recovered… somewhat. She wasn’t quite compos mentis enough to do any haggling of her own, but an inspiration saved her the effort: she let them do it for her. She went to the first, got his price, went on to the next for a better offer, challenged the third to top it. By the time she was done, she’d got the green onions for next to nothing. She left the three vegetable dealers shouting and shaking their fists at one another. The woman’s curses were most inventive. The smaller, thinner man had, surprisingly, the most impressive voice.

She decided to get out of there before they started a riot. She tucked the bunch of onions into the top of her bundle of raisins, got a grip on the leg of mutton, and beat a prudent retreat.

There were lots of fishmongers in the market, what with Carnuntum lying on the bank of the Danube. Nicole went from stall to stall in search of the one that smelled least bad. It wasn’t easy. The fish peered up at her with dead, unblinking eyes: bream and pike and trout and carp that looked amazingly like ornamental koi except for their dull gray scales.

She couldn’t move fast, not weighted down as she was. While she strolled, she let the gossip from other strolling shoppers wash over her. She’d done that every so often at Topanga Plaza, too; people-listening could be as interesting as people-watching. A lot of the stories could have come from her time as readily as this one: So-and-so had found her husband in bed with her friend (Nicole’s lips tightened), one partner was supposed to have cheated the other in a real-estate deal, Such-and-such had got his brother-in-law drunk and buggered him.

But there were differences. When a boy of six or seven started crying and wouldn’t stop, his mother whacked him on the bottom, hard. He kept crying. His mother whacked him again and bellowed, “Shut up!”

He shut up. In Topanga Plaza, that would have been a minor scandal, with people rushing to the child’s defense. Nicole might have done it here, if she’d been a little closer and a lot less loaded down.

Nobody else even offered to try. Nobody seemed to want to. Quite the opposite, in fact. Three different people congratulated the mother. “That’ll teach him discipline,” growled a grizzled fellow who carried himself like a Marine. Heads bobbed in agreement.

Nicole gaped. So it wasn’t just Umma abusing Lucius and Aurelia. Everybody abused children, and expected everybody else to abuse them, too. That was… appalling, that was it. That was the word she wanted.

The little Roman boy’s filthy face and snot-dripping nose struck Nicole with a powerful memory of Kimberley and Justin as she’d seen them last, clean and sweet-smelling and tucked up in bed. Nobody had ever laid a hand on them in anger; not Nicole, and no, not Frank, either. Frank had never been abusive. Absent, yes; abusive, no. Dawn? Who could say? Stepmothers were wicked by definition. There wasn’t a fairy tale that didn’t say so – and some of those were pretty horrifying.

Everything was suddenly horrifying. Even the bit of gossip she heard, one woman to another, cool and matter-of-fact as if it were nothing out of the ordinary: “Just got news my husband’s brother died down in Aquileia.”

“Ahh,” her friend said, sounding just as calm about it. “That’s too bad. What was he doing down in Italy, anyway?”

“Didn’t you know Junius? I thought you did. He was a muleteer.”