Household Gods

“Come on,” Nicole said to Aurelia. “Let’s go get clean.” That was cowardice, but she didn’t care. As long as she was in the baths, she wouldn’t have to look at Julia. She wouldn’t be reminded of the injustice she was still perpetrating.

Aurelia knew the way to the baths. Nicole thought she could have found them again by herself – not finding them would have been like mislaying an elephant – but letting the little girl scamper ahead and then catching up every fifty yards or so worked very well. Aurelia paid no attention whatever to the anatomically correct statues. Nicole shouldn’t have been surprised, not with men casually pissing in a jar right across the street from the tavern. Nonetheless, she was. It was all too different. She had to take it in a piece at a time, and pray she could put it together before she made a fatal mistake.

As men had the day before, women trooped up the steps and into the baths. The only men now in evidence around that enormous place were half a dozen burly types in ragged tunics, each of them bent under a load of wood that looked almost as enormous as the baths.

Off to one side of them marched a self-important little man who was obviously their boss. His tunic was not only fairly new bur dyed the rust brown of the one Nicole was coming to think of as her best dress. More important than that, however, the only wood he carried was a single, straight, peeled stick.

“Keep moving, you lazy bastards, keep moving!” he shouted. “Got to keep the fires fed, so we do, so we do. Ladies’ day today. Ladies want their water nice and hot, that they do. Ladies want lots of nice steam, too. Ladies want hot air going through the hypocausts, yes indeed. Can’t let their pretty little feet get cold, oh no.” What the workmen no doubt wanted was for the overbearing little twerp to shut up and let them do their job.

Suddenly, not ten feet from the little door they were approaching – Nicole looked for but didn’t see an authorized personnel only sign – one of the workmen tripped and fell. The leather lashings of his bundle parted. Twigs and branches and hacked chunks of treetrunk spilled over the paving stones.

“You oaf! You cocksucking idiot! You dingleberry hanging off the ass of the city of Carnuntum!” The strawboss literally hopped with rage. Nicole had never seen anybody do that before. He kept right on cursing while he did it, too. Aurelia giggled. Nicole’s hands flew up to cover the child’s ears, but the fellow was yelling too loud for that to do any good.

Slowly, the workman shook himself free of lumber and climbed to his feet. Both knees and one elbow dripped blood on the cobbles. “I’m sorry,” he said in gutturally accented Latin. “I pick it up and – “

“Sorry!” the nasty little strawboss screamed. “Sorry? You think you’re sorry now? I’ll have ‘em sell you to the mines. That’ll make you sorry, by Jupiter’s great hairy balls!”

The workman quailed. Nicole didn’t fully understand the threat, but he did, and it terrified him. She did understand that he wasn’t just a workman. He was a slave. He would have to be, to get stuck with a job like the one he had. His abject manner said so as loudly as the threat to sell him.

And the boss’ stick wasn’t only for show. He swept it whistling up over his head, then down, again and again, beating the workman as cruelly – and, worse, as casually – as that man whom Nicole had seen whipping his poor overburdened donkey the morning she came to Carnuntum.

And the slave let him. He stood there and took it with the air of a man who knew he’d get worse later if he tried to do anything about it now.

Inside Nicole, something snapped. “Stop that!” she shouted at the strawboss. “You stop that this instant!”

“Ah, butt out, lady, “ he said, sounding barely even annoyed. “I ain’t gonna hurt him so bad he can’t work.” He hardly paused to talk to her, but kept right on whaling the slave. He was only doing his job, his manner said. No point in getting upset. If it was nasty – well, that was life, wasn’t it?

The guards at Auschwitz had been like that, Nicole had heard somewhere. Just doing their job. “Leave him alone,” she said. “You’ve got no business abusing him that way.”

“Who says I don’t?” the boss retorted. “I’m supposed to get work out of him, ain’t I? How’s he supposed to feed the fires if he’s out here picking up all this crap? His skull’s so thick, the only way to get anything in is to beat it in.” As if to prove his point, he laid into the slave again.

“Stop that!” Nicole’s voice held itself just on the edge of a scream.

“You don’t like the way I do my job, take it up with the town council. I’ll tell you, though, they like it fine.” The strawboss’ stick went right on flaying the poor man’s hide, rising and falling, rising and falling.