Household Gods

Nicole slid a glance at the slave. Julia was wearing one of her blander expressions. Was she figuring things out? Had she kept quiet deliberately, to see what would happen?

Of course not. Nicole thought. How could she know Umma wasn’t Umma anymore? Nicole had been scrambling as fast as she could, as hard as she could, to keep up with things. She’d been doing well, she’d thought. Till now.

She had to say something. Julia was starting to shuffle her feet. She put on a kind of frantic nonchalance, straightening up, dusting her hands, making a show of inspecting the row of nicely browned loaves. “Well,” she said, “that’s done. As for Pnmigenia… I must have had too much on my mind. I swear I didn’t even see her. I’ll make it up to her next time, that’s all.”

That was only about half true. Nicole had seen Primigenia. The woman was a little hard to miss: she had the beginning of a harelip. A surgeon in the twentieth century would have repaired it while she was a baby. Here, she had to live with it. Nicole remembered thinking, What a shame. She’s not bad-looking otherwise.

At the moment, she hoped Julia hadn’t seen her looking. Or had taken her stare for abstraction, figuring the accounts, maybe, or making a mental shopping list for tomorrow’s trip to the market.

Julia didn’t appear to have seen, or else had decided to play the game by Nicole’s rules. In a way. “I hope she doesn’t take it too hard, “ she said. “Your brother’s angry at you as it is. You don’t want to get your whole family up in arms.”

“That’s the last thing I want.” Nicole paused. That was it; she’d had it. She had to say it, and never mind what Julia thought. “No, the next to last thing. The last thing I want is for people to think they can tell me what to do.”

Julia sighed. People had been telling her what to do since she was born. That thought, and the thought of a family row on the horizon, crystallized the timing of the decision Nicole had already made. “Come on, Julia. We’re going over to the town-council building and do what we have to do to set you free.”

“Right now?” Julia said. Nicole nodded. Julia still looked as if she didn’t believe it. “You’re going to close the place down and everything?”

“That’s right,” Nicole said with the crispness of a decision well and firmly made. It felt wonderful. “Fabia Ursa can keep an eye on the children while we’re gone.” Fabia Ursa was by now a fixture of Nicole’s morning routine. Nicole had learned in the course of her chatter that she and her husband owned the house-shop combination next door to Nicole’s, the one she’d seen across the alley the first morning she’d awakened in Carnuntum. They were brassworkers and tinkers: they made and repaired pots and pans. Or rather, the husband did; Fabia Ursa had the skill and the craft, she said, but with this baby coming after she’d lost two, she was taking things slower than usual. Hence her mornings in Umma’s tavern.

She’d just left a while before, in fact, saying that she needed to see to something in the shop. If Nicole strained, she could hear that clear, somewhat strident voice chattering to a customer as it chattered in her own ear every morning.

Lucius and Aurelia didn’t raise a ruckus about having Fabia Ursa watch them; they had someplace less familiar in which to get into mischief. Nicole overheard Aurelia reminding Lucius, quite seriously, “We do have to be a little bit careful. Fabia Ursa will wallop us if we’re naughty. “

Nicole stiffened – a reaction she had much too often in this world and time. What was she supposed to make of that? Should she tell Fabia Ursa not to hit them even if they misbehaved? Fabia Ursa was a gentle soul, as people went in Carnuntum, but she was completely unsentimental – and Nicole had heard her, more than once, approve of a woman who spanked her children. If Nicole tried to force her to lay off the kids, she’d smile, pat Nicole’s arm, and say kindly, “Oh, very well, dear, if you insist – but since I can’t possibly keep from hitting a child who’s being a brat, I can’t possibly look after your children for you, now, can I?”

It wasn’t easy, understanding these people. Worse: Nicole was starting to think they might have a point. Children were, as a species, better behaved here than she remembered them being in L.A. They said please and thank you. They called women ma’am. If they ran around yelling and being a pain in the ass, somebody smacked them, and that was that.

So. Should she tighten up herself? Even her own – well, Umma’s – children thought her soft. They were used to being smacked and brought up short. It hadn’t damaged them that she could see.

No. She shook her head. She couldn’t hit them; she just could not. It was too much like her father coming home drunk and slapping his wife around, or one of the kids if they were closer. Her hand, upraised to strike a blow, mutated into her father’s hand in her mind’s eye, and she froze.