Household Gods

The market square was as loudly frenetic as it had been when Nicole went shopping. From everything she’d gathered, it was like that from sunup to sundown every day of the year. Not far beyond it lay the building where the town council met. Despite a fine display of fluted columns and an entrance-way cluttered with statuary, it wasn’t nearly so splendid as the baths – and it seemed to know it. As if embarrassed to be left behind, it tried to make up for its deficiencies with an excess of gaudy paint. One of the statues, a Venus, boasted a pair of gilded nipples. They looked like pasties in a Vegas strip joint. Bad taste, evidently, was a universal constant.

Nicole hadn’t quite figured out how Carnuntum’s city government worked. She knew there was a town council, and a pair of magistrates called duovirs above it. Both duovirs had to approve council measures, she thought; if one vetoed them, they didn’t become law.

Veto, she realized suddenly, working back and forth between English and Latin, meant I forbid. Chunks of this legal system lay embedded in the one she’d studied, maybe not so much in the law itself as in the language in which it was framed. It was an obvious discovery, she supposed – but she’d never thought of it before. It hit her with the force of a revelation, a piece of historical knowledge that she’d never have conceived to be remotely relevant… until she found herself in a place where Latin was a living, and lively, language.

How Carnuntum’s city government stacked up against that of the province of Pannonia, or against that of the Roman Empire as a whole, she didn’t know yet. Nor was she going to worry about it. She wasn’t going anywhere. She had time to learn.

She and Julia walked between the central pair of columns, past the striptease Venus and a statue of someone male, pinch-faced, and heroically proportioned – it looked as if someone had taken the head of a skinny little nerd and stuck it on the body of a Rambo clone.

Once past these monuments to kitsch, however, and once her eyes had adjusted to the dimness of a building without electric lights, she saw that she was in a more familiar place than any she’d found since she came to Carnuntum. There was no mistaking what kind of place this was. For a moment, she had a potent feeling of home – of standing in one of the interminable lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles office on Sherman Way.

What was it they used to write on the old maps? Here be Dragons, yes. Here, she thought, be Bureaucrats.

Oh, there were differences. The clerks wore tunics instead of suits; some of the snootier-looking ones even wore togas. They sat behind folding tables rather than desks, each flicking the beads of an abacus rather than the keys of a calculator – fingers flying, beads clicking, narrow-mouthed faces screwed up and sour.

None of the differences mattered. Bureaucrats were bureaucrats, it seemed, in every age of the world: bored, crabby, and studiedly insolent. As if to prove the point, one of them yawned in her face.

They were all men. The other differences hadn’t bothered her. This one did. A lot. This was exactly why she’d come – why she thought she’d come to Carnuntum – to get away from sexism, covert and overt, and find a world where men and women lived as equals. There was nothing she could do about it now. She could whine and carry on and get herself nowhere, or she could make the best of it – and do what she could to make things better.

When yawning in her face didn’t make her disappear, the clerk said, “May I help you?” With a faint but elaborately long-suffering sigh, he shoved to one side the sheet on which he’d been writing. It wasn’t paper; it was thicker and grainier, as if made from pressed leaves. A word came into her head: papyrus. A thought followed the word: No paper, but paperwork after all. A moment later, another thought: Damn.

She suppressed it all, even the mild but heartfelt curse, and said briskly, “Yes, you can help me.” She pointed at Julia. “I want to emancipate my slave.”

The clerk was the first person Nicole had said that to, who didn’t react in the slightest. “And you are…?” he said.

“My name is Umma,” Nicole answered – congratulating herself that she’d remembered.

“Oh,” the clerk said, as deadpan as ever. “Of course. The widow of Satellius Sodalis.” And a good thing he knew that, too, because Nicole hadn’t. Were Liber and Libera looking after her after all, making sure she didn’t stumble more often than she had to? “Now, then, since you’ve come here, I suppose you’ll want formal manumission, not just the informal sort you could get by emancipating her in front of a group of friends.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Nicole said, and then, with trained caution, “Remind me of the differences between formal and informal manumission.”