Household Gods

While she tried to figure out how not to have to make more than one trip – and kept coming up with the answer, No way, Jose – someone at her elbow spoke in a dry voice: “Want me to give you a hand with some of that?”

She whirled. There stood Titus Calidius Severus, one eyebrow raised in an expression of sardonic amusement. All he carried were half a dozen dead thrushes, their scrawny yellow legs bound together with twine. How could he want to eat them? she thought in faint disgust. They’re too cute to eat.

But that wasn’t what he’d asked her. “Thank you, Calidius,” she said with as much grace as she had to offer, and a good bit of relief. “I’d love a hand.”

His mouth tightened. She’d said something wrong, and she didn’t even know what. Nor did he say anything that might give her a hint. He simply picked up the amphora and the raisins, leaving her with meat, fish, and scallions, and strode off through the market. Nicole followed, not least because she was sure he knew how to get back. She wasn’t at all sure she did.

As they were leaving the market square, four men tramped past them. They weren’t Romans; they were speaking a guttural language Nicole didn’t understand. It reminded her somehow of the German she’d heard on her honeymoon. She didn’t think it was – didn’t think it could possibly be – the same language, but she couldn’t have proved it, not with only a dozen or so words of German to call her own.

Even if the men had been speaking Latin, she would have tagged them for foreigners. They were taller, thicker through the chest, and ruddier than most of the locals. They let their beards and hair grow longer than the Romans did, and – Nicole’s nose wrinkled – used rancid butter for hair oil.

They wore the first trousers she’d seen in Carnuntum – baggy woolen ones, tied tight at the ankles – and short tunics over them. Each of them wore a long sword on his left hip.

They stared around the square as if they owned it, or perhaps as if they planned on robbing it. People stared at them, too, in fear and alarm, and muttered behind their hands. Nicole had seen exactly the same reaction in Topanga Plaza when a pack of gangbangers walked into the Wherehouse or Foot Locker.

“Mithras curse the Quadi and Marcomanni both to the infernal depths,” Calidius Severus growled. He was eyeing the strangers as a cop might eye gangbangers at the mall. He’d made it plain he was a veteran. Had he fought these Quadi or Marcomanni? Maybe he had, from the bitterness in his tone. “Miserable barbarians have their nerve, coming into town to buy this and that when they invaded the Empire three years ago not far west of here.”

“Invaded?” Nicole said, and then, hastily, “Yes, of course.” Odd bits of gossip began to fit together like pieces of evidence. The Marcomanni had conquered Aquileia in Italy, and been driven back from it. She didn’t know where in Italy Aquileia was, but nowhere in Italy was particularly close to the Danube. She shivered a little, though the day was fine and mild. “It must have been quite an invasion.”

“That it was.” To her relief, Calidius didn’t notice the odd phrasing; he was intent on his own thoughts. “Some officers I’ve talked with – educated fellows, you know – say it was the worst since the Cimbri and Teutones came down on us, and that was – what? – almost three hundred years ago”

Longer than the United States has been a country, Nicole thought, and shivered again. On her honeymoon, she’d caught glimpses of the sense of history that filled Europe but was so conspicuously absent from America. She hadn’t expected to find that sense in second-century Carnuntum. After all, this was ancient history, wasn’t it? Not so ancient, evidently, that it didn’t have history of its own. She hadn’t gone back to the beginning of time, as she’d sometimes felt – never more urgently than when her belly griped her. She was stuck somewhere in the middle.

She stayed close to Titus Calidius Severus. He hadn’t been afraid of the Marcomanni or Quadi or whoever they were. He’d been angry at them. From the way he stamped resolutely ahead, he was still angry. But that anger might not all have been aimed at the men he called barbarians: after a while, he said, “Umma, if you tell me what you think I’ve done wrong, I may decide to be sorry for it. If it’s something I ought to be sorry for.”

Nicole couldn’t quite suppress the twitch of a smile at his careful phrasing. He could have been a lawyer, with that kind of mind. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong,” she said.