Household Gods

“I never met him, though you’ve told me about him before. What happened to him? Did the Marcomanni get him?”

“No, he didn’t have any trouble with the barbarians. Anyhow, they got driven out of Aquileia – was it year before last? I forget. No, it was this pestilence that’s going through Italy. It’s very bad, they say. The gods grant it doesn’t come here.” At that, for the first time, the woman sounded less than nonchalant. This wasn’t gossip. This was honest fear.

Wonderful, Nicole thought. An epidemic. Of what, flu? She remembered only too vividly the sound of Kimberley losing her corn dog in the backseat of the Honda.

She also, after a moment and with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air, remembered another kind of epidemic, one much deadlier, that people might speak of with the same fear she heard in the women’s voices. She’d known three people who’d died of AIDS. Two gay men, and a woman friend from law school, who hadn’t known till too late that the man she’d had a brief affair with was bisexual.

Resolutely, she shut that out of her mind. It would happen on the other side of the world, eighteen hundred years or so from now. There was nothing she could do about it. Nor, frankly, could she do anything about this “pestilence” that had taken a life hundreds of miles from here. This wasn’t the twentieth century. People couldn’t travel that far that fast. What had they said about the Ebola virus? If it hadn’t been for air travel, it might never have left Africa.

No air travel here. Of that she was absolutely sure.

What she could do now, and what she was going to do, was buy fish. She bought some trout that didn’t look too flyblown: she’d already seen they were popular in Carnuntum. She bought some bream, too, partly in the spirit of experiment, partly because a couple of them were so fresh they still quivered a little. The fish were cheaper than the meat. In Los Angeles, it would have been the other way round.

The fishmongers strung their catch on the leather thong that the butcher had given her to help carry the leg of mutton. Nicole felt like a comic-page fisherman who’d hooked a sheep along with the rest of his catch. She was glad by then of the wool that still wrapped the mutton: it let her sling the thing over her shoulder with the fish dangling, and carry it a little less awkwardly than if she let the whole lot hang. With the meat and fish balanced on her shoulder and the bundle of raisins and onions under her arm, she paused to run through her mental shopping list.

A stall nearby reminded her of one item that she couldn’t get out of. “Wine,” she said reluctantly to herself. The dealer in the stall she’d seen first wasn’t the only one with wine to sell. They were all ready, no, eager, to sell it to her. Every one of them wanted her to taste his particular brand, too, “To be sure it’s the genuine article,” one said in a voice as fruity as his wine. She couldn’t get out of it, but neither could she tell one wine from the next, except that they were all darker and sweeter than the cheap stuff she’d drunk with breakfast.

Of course she wasn’t about to admit that. She remembered how she’d seen people in restaurants and on TV, sniffing and making portentous faces and tasting tiny bits from crystal goblets. Here she was given a whacking big ladle – God knew where that had been or how many people had put lips to it before her – and invited to taste, taste!

She tasted, for what that was worth, and settled to the inevitable haggle. Meat and fish might be cheap here compared to L.A., but wine cost the living earth.

She didn’t have nearly the luck beating them down that she’d had with the scallion-sellers. “Mistress Umma, it’s real Falernian,” said one who recognized the body she was wearing. “That means it has to come all the way from the middle of Italy on muleback, so you can’t wonder that it’s not cheap. I can’t go any lower, or I lose money.” Something about his tone, the mixture of patience and exasperation, overcame her court-trained skepticism. He was telling the truth as he saw it.

Nicole hadn’t had to worry about transportation costs, except at the office when she had to decide whether to throw something in the mail or FedEx it. No trucks here, she reminded herself. No trains, either. She wondered how long the wine had taken to get here, and what problems it had had along the way.

Once she’d bought an amphora, she had a transportation problem of her own: how to get home with a big clay jug, some dead fish, a leg of mutton, a makeshift sack of raisins, and, for good measure, the green onions. She wished she’d brought Julia after all, even if that meant bringing the children, too, and closing the tavern while everybody was gone. For that matter, she wished she had one of the pack mules that had brought the Falernian wine from Italy.