Household Gods

And there was Julia, shocked out of her awe at the place and the proceedings, blurting out with a rather remarkable lack of circumspection, “Didn’t you know that, Mistress? Brigomarus knows it, I’m sure he does.”

“To the crows with Brigomarus,” Nicole snarled. “It’s outrageous. It’s unjust, it’s immoral, it’s unequal, it’s unfair, it’s absurd, it’s impossible.” Her voice had risen with every word. In fact, she was shouting. People were staring. She didn’t care. Was she any less a human being because she couldn’t piss in one of Calidius Severus’ amphorae?

The clerk was signally unimpressed by her vocabulary or her volume. “It’s the law,” he said primly.

“To the crows with the law, too,” Nicole snapped. Now there was a hell of a thing for a lawyer to say. And she didn’t care. She didn’t care one little bit. She got a grip on Julia’s arm, swiveled her about, and stalked off in high indignation.

8

Mistress!” Julia called from the street just outside the tavern, where she’d gone to peer at something or other outside. “Look at the sunset. Isn’t it beautiful? The sky is turning all those clouds to fire. I’ll bet you an as it will rain tomorrow.”

Nicole didn’t gamble, but she didn’t say so. Julia seemed unperturbed by the setback to her manumission. In fact, as they’d walked home, Nicole slamming her feet down furiously with every stride, Julia trotting along behind her, Julia had said, “Ah well. Isn’t that just like fate?”

Julia the slave might be a fatalist, but Nicole was damned if she’d sit around blathering about kismet or whatever else you wanted to call it. The idea that a man’s signature was required to make a document valid told her loud and clear where women stood in Carnuntum – and, no doubt, in the rest of the Roman Empire. In Los Angeles, at least the letter of the law had been on her side. There, hypocrisy had got her so frothing mad she’d wished herself centuries back in time to get away from it. Well – she’d succeeded. No hypocrisy here, oh no. Just pure naked oppression.

“Rain would be nice,” Julia was saying. “I heard the farmers saying in the market yesterday that it’s been too dry for too long – the crops are suffering. Much more drought and we’d be in trouble. You know what they say: dry summer, winter famine. Rain now would mean we eat well come winter.”

“I hope it’s a cursed flood,” Nicole said sullenly.

Julia pulled out the neckline of her tunic and spat down onto her bosom. Nicole stared at her. “What on earth did you do that for?”

“To turn aside the evil omen, of course,” the slave – still a slave – answered. “Drought’s bad, but floods are really and right-there bad.”

Spitting in your bosom was, Nicole supposed, like knocking on wood or crossing your fingers for luck. But in the twentieth century, most people who knocked on wood didn’t really believe it would do any good. Julia sounded as serious about averting the omen as Nicole’s grandmother had been when she made the sign of the cross.

Not a fair comparison. Nicole thought. Grandma was doing something religious. This is just superstition.

So? said the lawyerly part of her mind. Would you be so kind as to define the difference?

Well: religion got higher ratings than superstition. But that, she admitted to both sides of herself, was a less than useful distinction.

She’d had two cups of wine with her supper. They combined with the undercurrent of burning outrage to make her discontented with the idea of trudging upstairs and falling asleep. She’d done that every night since she’d come to Carnuntum, and it looked to be what everybody did every night, without variation and without exception.

“Julia,” she said suddenly, “I want some fun tonight.”

“Why are you telling me, Mistress?” Julia asked. “Go across the street.” She pointed toward the shop and house of Titus Calidius Severus.

Nicole’s face grew hot. “That’s not what I meant!” she said a little too quickly. “I meant someplace… oh, someplace to go: to a play, or to listen to music, or to go out dancing.” Yes indeed: no TV, no movies, no radio, no stereo – she was starting to go stir-crazy. It wasn’t quite like living in a sensory-deprivation tank – some of her senses, especially smell, got a bigger workout here than they ever had back in the United States – but it wasn’t far removed, either. If she didn’t do something besides get up and get to work and get hit over the head with culture shock and collapse into sleep, she was going to scream.

“Mistress,” Julia said, “you know daytime is the time for things like that.” She shrugged. Nicole, even through her haze of fury, thought Julia might just have decided that her mistress was intermittently simpleminded and needed to be humored. “Of course,” Julia went on, “the daytime is when we’re busy, too. But there’ll be plays and beast shows in the amphitheater all summer long.”