Household Gods

“Enough,” she said, so harshly it made her throat ache. She took three deep breaths, each held a few seconds longer than the last. She made herself calm down. It wasn’t completely effective – she was still shaking, and her stomach was tied in a raw and painful knot – but it held her steady enough to lie on the bed. She couldn’t quite bring herself to pull the covers up over herself. She’d work up to that gradually. For now, just lie there. Just let the muscles relax one by one. Forget the worst blow this world had struck her. With everything else, untreated sickness, raw sewage in the street, rampant animal and child abuse, slavery – a few million lice were awesomely trivial. “It’s the small things that get you,” she mumbled. Sleep had seemed lightyears away, but, once she was horizontal, it crept inexorably up on her. It wasn’t just her body that was tired. Her mind was exhausted, wrung out and hung up to dry. Sleep was wonderful. Sleep was beautiful. Sleep would let her forget everything – even the myriad small live things that hatched and crawled and bred and died – but not soon enough – fight on her body.

Wine the next morning at breakfast seemed oddly welcome, not a poison to be drunk in slight preference to a different poison. Did it make her feel a little easier about the likelihood – no, the certainty – she was walking around with six-legged company? Maybe. Did it make her want to scratch a little less? Maybe. If it did, was that bad or good? For the life of her, Nicole didn’t know.

She had two cups with her bread. I’m thirsty, she told herself. When she finished the bread and that second cup of – after all – well-watered wine, she declared, “I’m going to the baths. Aurelia, you’re coming with me.” She sounded very loud and sure, even to herself.

“Oh, good!” Aurelia squealed with glee. No fights here, not like getting Kimberley into the tub. But this wasn’t just getting into the tub. This was an outing, which made it special.

Nicole wanted her to come for two very good and useful reasons. First and foremost was the chance to scrub Aurelia’s hair as well as she could, to get rid of as many lice and nits as possible. While she did that, she’d get an answer to a question that had occurred to her as soon as she remembered baths, ladies’ day, and the kids’ vermin: how would she go about taking care of that with Lucius? Could she bring a boy eight years old to the baths with her on a ladies’ day? Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. She’d have to see if she spotted any boys his size there today. If she couldn’t, could she ask Brigomarus, the brother she hadn’t met? Or would Titus Calidius Severus let Lucius go with him when he went to the baths? Did he go to the baths? The way he smelled, it was hard to tell.

Second, and not the least important of matters, either, Aurelia knew the ropes at the baths and Nicole didn’t. Nicole had learned how to run the tavern by watching Julia. Now she would learn how to take a Roman bath by watching… her daughter? She still didn’t think of Aurelia that way. How long did parents who adopted need to start thinking of their new children as if they were actual, blood relations? Aurelia, now – Aurelia was a blood relative, had come from this body, this blood and bone, these genes.

But Aurelia was not Nicole’s child in the spirit, where it mattered; not fully, not yet. Kimberley and Justin, who were… they were farther away than children had ever been from their mother; as far away as if she had died and not gone spiraling down through time. She hoped they were all right. She prayed they were all right, prayed to the deaf God in whom she’d almost given up believing and whom the Romans mocked, and prayed also to Liber and Libera. Let my children be all right. They’d listened to her once. Why not again?

She took a couple of asses out of the cash box, then scooped out a random handful of coins. Maybe she’d shop a little on the way home, or buy Aurelia a treat, or maybe there would be extras at the baths over and above the price of admission. Julia didn’t act surprised: Umma must have found some way to make those dupondii and sesterces disappear.

Poor Julia. She’d had to depend on the kindness of a customer or on Nicole’s generosity – on her owner’s generosity, a notion that still gave Nicole the cold grues – for even the small change that let her into the baths. She’d got a couple of dupondii while Nicole was out, but that wasn’t much, not set against the copper and brass and silver in the cash box.

My owner gets to take as much money as she wants, whenever she wants. That thought, or one like it, had to be echoing in Julia’s mind. How did everyone who owned a slave escape being murdered in her bed? It was evil, that was all. Just purely evil.