Household Gods

Was he a slave? Was he her slave? Did the baths provide a masseur if you paid extra? Nicole didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. Another one occurred to the lawyerly side of her, one that made her laugh to herself: how many masseurs figured in divorce actions in Carnuntum?

Aurelia was hopping up and down with impatience. “Mother! Are you asleep? I asked you. Shall we go on the hot plunge now, or the cool one?”

Nicole shook herself back into line. “The hot one,” she answered promptly. The man’s muscles hadn’t roused her a bit, but her insides went all soft and quivery at the thought of hot water.

She’d chosen right for Aurelia, too: the child clapped her hands and danced. She skipped ahead through one of two doorways at the far side of the stripping-off room. More women had been going through that doorway than through the other. So it wasn’t just Nicole’s twentieth-century sensibility. In a world in which hot water wasn’t simply to be had at the turning of a tap, people valued it all the more.

The hot plunge was a small swimming pool, although Nicole had never before gone into a pool with a mosaic of voluptuously naked women on the bottom. Their hair was green – sea nymphs? She sighed as she lowered herself into the water: the temperature was just what she would have wanted in her own tub.

Some of her pleasure died abruptly. This water hadn’t come from a nice safe heater in a corner of the laundry room. Slaves had hauled wood to feed the fires that heated the pool. There was human sweat in it, and human blood, too.

She couldn’t wallow in liberal guilt every time she made a new move.

This whole world looked to be a liberal’s nightmare. Too much of it would have been her nightmare if she’d known what it was really like.

Well, she hadn’t. And she was here, and she was staying here, and that was that. She shut off the corner of her mind that niggled her with guilt, and went back to reveling in the feel of hot water on her skin.

Aurelia had slid into the plunge a little way down. Now she came paddling up to Nicole, sleek as a fish. “Come here,” Nicole said. “We’re going to do your hair.”

Aurelia didn’t like getting ducked, not even slightly. She spluttered and squawked and wiggled, none of which did her any good. Nicole was all for empowering children, but not when they had heads full of lice and nits. She did the best job she could with hot water and no shampoo, and had to hope it would be enough.

When she’d finished tormenting Aurelia, she worked at her own hair and scalp with fingers and nails till she could feel the sting of water in scrapes and scratches. Maybe she’d managed to unload the current cargo of vermin. But even if she had, how long would that last? She’d have to boil all the bedding and all the clothes in her house to have a prayer of banishing them for good – and she had next to no chance that they’d stay banished, not with customers bringing in a whole new shipment five minutes after she’d killed off the last one.

She could get used to stuffing her underwear with rags several days a month, because the other women in Carnuntum had to do the same. She supposed she could get used to chamberpots, because everybody in Carnuntum used chamberpots. Could she get used to being lousy, because everybody in Carnuntum was lousy? Not – bloody – likely. She scrubbed at her scalp again.

A woman a few feet away from her stopped trying to rub dirt off an arm that was hardly more than skin wrapped around bones and started coughing: long, wet, racking coughs that made her ladder-thin body shudder and her face turn dusky purple. When at last she seemed able to pause for breath, Nicole saw flecks of reddish froth in her nostrils and the corners of her lips, as if she’d literally coughed up bits of lung.

Tuberculosis, Nicole thought with a frisson of horror. The horror that followed was too big for a frisson: the woman spat the bloody foam into the water, as casual as if there were no harm in it at all, and went back to trying to get clean.

Nicole stared transfixed at the swirling, turbid water. The foam had melted right into it. In her mind’s eye, she saw the bacilli floating there, spreading through the plunge, multiplying in that wonderful warm, wet medium. But the germs were too small for her physical eyes to see – for anyone to see. And there were no microscopes here. She remembered that from some class or other, history of science or some such: what a world-shaking discovery that had been. It was still centuries in the future.

And, because germs were too small for human eyes to see, no one in Carnuntum would believe they were there. Everything she’d seen in the city made her sure of that.

But that didn’t mean they weren’t there, or that she didn’t know they were there. She grabbed Aurelia, who was doing her best to imitate an otter. “Time to get out,” Nicole said firmly.

“Oh, Mother! Do you want to go to the sweating room already?” Aurelia sounded like every kid ever born, in any corner of the world.