Household Gods

Julia didn’t seem to feel the lack. She shrugged indifferently. “What if I could? There aren’t many jobs that need it. Clerk for the city, I suppose, or bookkeeper – but even if I could learn enough or fast enough, I wouldn’t want to be locked up all day making birdtracks on papyrus. Besides, those are men’s jobs. Who ever heard of a lady bookkeeper?” She laughed and shook her head, as if the notion were too absurd for words.

Those are men’s jobs. Nicole heard the words with sick dismay. Who ever heard of a lady bookkeeper? She’d fled California not only for its sexism but for its hypocrisy. Camuntum was every bit as sexist – and not the least bit hypocritical about it. “What about Liber and Libera?” Nicole asked, a little hoarsely.

“The wine god and his wife?” Julia asked as if puzzled. “What about them, Mistress? They’re gods. They aren’t bookkeepers.”

“The – wine god and goddess?” Nicole felt as if she’d been slugged in the gut. What had she done to herself? Of all the deities she would have picked to help her…

But they had helped her, snickering at her ignorance, all too likely, but helping her nevertheless. And here she was, in the world they’d chosen for her, and she was damned if she knew what to do about it.

Maybe she was damned. Sunday school had included a long rant on sin and damnation, and a scenic tour of hell. Wine and drunkards had warranted a whole separate dissertation, along with fornicators, whom Nicole had thought of then, in her eight-year-old innocence, as people who had been put to work stoking the furnaces.

It wasn’t particularly warm in Carnuntum, but there was plenty of heat inside Nicole’s skull. It felt as if her brains were boiling. “Liber and Libera,” she managed to say. “Aren’t they – “ She softened what she’d been about to say: “Aren’t they also the gods of liberty?”

Julia thought about it briefly, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. Liberty from care – isn’t that what wine does? Frees your soul from worry, lets you forget for a while that life isn’t going the way you want it to?”

“Liberty – from care?” Again, Nicole’s echo was hesitant and filled with a dismay she tried to hide from Julia. That fit too well with what the god and goddess had done, her last night in West Hills. She’d been filled with care then. Liber and Libera had taken her out of it, had sent her back to their time, back to their town, where she’d thought – where they must have thought – she would be carefree.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Carefree? Wine, lice, slavery – and now sexism, too? Some freedom this was – all the new worries of this time and place, and a whole set of old ones from California, too. It was more than she could take.

She almost prayed to Liber and Libera to ship her back to California. But she wasn’t giving up yet, even for Kimberley and Justin. She’d asked for this. She had to make the best of it.

“Mistress?” Julia said. Nicole nodded to show she’d been paying attention, even if she hadn’t. “Mistress,” Julia said again, “I was thinking. If I work here as a freedwoman, not as a slave, I’ll be able to take men upstairs and keep all” – Nicole’s expression gave her pause, but she misinterpreted it – “all right, not all. But more of what they pay, for myself.”

“If you work here as my freedwoman,” Nicole said through clenched teeth, “you will not prostitute yourself.”

“But why not,” Julia asked, “if I’m free and if I want to?” She searched Nicole’s face as if she could find an answer there. “Mistress, I don’t understand.”

Nicole opened her mouth, then closed it again. Here was an issue she’d never imagined she’d have to face. If a woman wanted to go on selling herself, did another woman have the right to forbid it? She couldn’t face that, not on those terms. She sidestepped instead, as she had with Lucius and Aurelia: “Isn’t there anything else you’d rather do?”

Julia raised her hands and let them fall. “Mistress, you keep saying that, but what else can I do? I can cook some and bake some, so maybe I could work at another tavern, but it’s hard to find one that doesn’t already have its own slave – and slaves work for free. Remember that woman you wouldn’t hire last year because you owned me?”

Again, Nicole made herself nod. Because you owned me. Julia said it so calmly. She took it for granted. However unhappy she might be as a slave, she never blinked at slavery itself.

“I’m good at something else, too,” she said, “or the men say I am. But I don’t want to do that for a living, either. I’d have to take on men I didn’t want at all, and I wouldn’t much care for that.’’

Nicole lowered her aching head into her hands. Had she really expected life here to be simple? In California, she’d always known how to react, what to think, what was right and what was wrong. In Carnuntum, there was no such thing as simplicity – not to her twentieth-century mind.