Household Gods

“Well, that’s so twelve months a year, and an extra day on leap year,” Calidius answered. He too hesitated, as if looking for something else – he couldn’t remember what – that needed saying. Then, as if he’d found it, he grinned. “And I won’t chuck you under the chin anymore, either. I really didn’t know you didn’t like it.”

He was trying. She could say that much for him. Of course, he had an ulterior motive. What male didn’t, in whatever century she found herself in? Nicole nodded, but said simply, “Let’s get on back.”

Titus Calidius Severus started walking. She followed again, with one pause to set down the leg of lamb and scratch her head. No Head and Shoulders, she thought with more sadness than she’d ever expected to feel. No Selsun Blue. No Denorex. Still, there was a bright side. No idiotic commercials for them, either.

They passed the two graffiti about Lydia, in reverse order this time. Pointing to the one and then, a bit farther along, to the other, Nicole said, “Put those two together and they’re pretty funny.”

“I think so, too, but I’ll bet you Marcus doesn’t,” Calidius said wryly. He walked on a couple of paces, then stopped so abruptly, Nicole almost ran into him. “You read them.” He sounded almost accusing.

Uh-oh. “Yes, I read them.” If Nicole stayed cool, kept it light, maybe he wouldn’t fuss about it.

No such luck. “All these years I’ve known you, and I never knew you had your letters.” When he frowned, his face looked absolutely forbidding. “Mithras, I can think of plenty of times when you’ve had me read things for you.”

“I’ve been studying lately,” Nicole said. It was weak, but it was the only explanation she could come up with on the spur of the moment. “Not knowing how always seemed such a lack.”

Muscle by muscle, he relaxed; he’d gone as tense facing her as he might have before a battle. “Well, I’ve heard you say that before,” he allowed. Thank you. Umma. Nicole thought. Calidius went on, “But why didn’t you tell me you wanted to learn? I’d have helped.”

“For one thing, I wanted to surprise you,” she said: again, the path of least resistance.

“You did it, all right,” he said, and chuckled. “And now that you can read a little, you’ll think you can read everything. Isn’t that just like a woman?”

He’d been doing so well for himself. Now he’d pressed the wrong button – no, he hadn’t just pressed it. He’d stomped on it. “I can read anything,” she said in the frosty voice she used to reserve for asking Frank why the check was late. Titus Calidius Severus started to say something. She overrode him. “And I’ll show you.”

And she did. She read every sign, every graffito, every inscription between marcus loves lydia and her restaurant and Calidius’ shop across the street from it. She didn’t stumble once. She made no mistakes. After she’d read the sign above his door, she added, sweetly, “And thank you very much for carrying the wine and the raisins all this way… Titus.”

His sour expression proved she’d done that just right. He looked as if he wished he’d been born without a praenomen, let alone been so rash as to make a big deal of it. But under that, and rapidly swelling through it, he looked astonished. “How did you do that? I don’t think I ever heard anyone read that way, not even men who called themselves philosophers. You didn’t mumble the words at all to see what they were. You just… read them straight out. That’s amazing. How do you do it?”

Nicole’s astonishment couldn’t have been much less than his, though she tried to keep it buried underneath her courtroom mask – the one with the faint, superior smile and the slightly lifted eyebrow. She’d gone to a public school in Indianapolis that was no better than it had to be, and then to a medium-good university. That had landed her a job at a medium-good law firm in Los Angeles, which had not even been a medium-good job by the time it was done with her.

Here… Here, if what Calidius was saying was right, simply being able to read without moving her lips set her above the local equivalent of a Ph.D. He had to be exaggerating. He knew more about it than she did, didn’t he? Anybody who’d grown up here knew more about it than she did.

And if it was true, if literacy was as rudimentary as that, it didn’t promise much for the rest of civilization, either. This wasn’t what she’d expected when she’d wished herself to Carnuntum.

She needed to think. There was never time to think. That was just as true here, since she’d wakened in Umma’s bed, as it had been when she went to sleep in West Hills.

Calidius was still waiting for an answer. Simplest, again, seemed best: “I don’t know how I learned to read like this. It’s how I taught myself, that’s all.”