Household Gods

On mornings when he was feeling the worse for wear, her father had dosed himself with aspirin and black coffee. No coffee here; she’d found that out the hard way. Would that willow-bark decoction make the rock drummer in her head stop his demented solo? What did the Romans do about hangovers – besides suffer, that is?

She got up: slowly, because her whole body ached, as if from a low-grade flu. When she looked in the polished bronze mirror in her makeup kit, she winced. Eyes like two pissholes in the snow, her mother had said of her father on mornings after he’d come reeling back late from another foray against the bottle. She’d been too young then to understand what that meant. Now here they were, staring back at her: two reddish-yellow holes in a flat white face.

She couldn’t just sit here wishing she were dead. There was money to earn: bread to bake, food to cook and serve, wine to ladle out into waiting cups. It didn’t, at the moment, seem any more appealing than sucking up to fat assholes of law partners. A couple of weeks in the tavern business had shown her all too clearly that, while a woman could make a living at it, she wasn’t going to retire to the Riviera any time soon.

The loss of a day’s proceeds would hurt.

Inspiration struck. She winced. Julia! Julia could run the tavern. She usually did anyway, more than Nicole hoped she knew.

No. Nicole winced again. That wouldn’t do, not for more than a few hours. Some things – the cash box, for example – had to stay under Nicole’s supervision. And it really took two to run the tavern properly; actually they could have used a third pair of hands, even with the kids’ intermittent help.

No real help for it. Running a tavern in any era was no easy nine-to-five. Sunup to sundown, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, no paid vacations – and no sick leave. She had to get herself out there and get to work. If she looked like grim death… she did, that was all. She’d had plenty of customers who looked the same way, and for the same reasons, too.

Julia was already downstairs, getting things ready for a new day. To Nicole’s guilty relief, Julia, who was normally resilient to the point of perkiness, looked as if she’d been ridden hard and put away wet, too.

“Hello, Mistress.” Julia managed a smile, but it was wan. “Now we remember why getting drunk all the time isn’t such a good idea.”

“What, you needed reminding?” Nicole said – not too loud; her own voice hurt her ears. Julia, she noticed, hadn’t opened the shutters. Nicole didn’t blame her one bit. The light creeping between the wooden slats already seemed bright enough to blind a person.

Another cart banged and rattled along the street outside. Nicole and Julia winced in unison. Aspirin, Nicole wished with all her heart. Coffee. Of course they didn’t materialize. She’d run fresh out of wishes when she wished herself back in time to Carnuntum. “What do we do about this?” she moaned… quietly.

“I ate some raw cabbage,” Julia said, “and I drank a little wine – not too much, by the gods!” Her sigh was mournful. “Hasn’t done much good yet.”

“Raw cabbage?” Nicole sighed just as Julia had, gustily. “I’ll try some, too – and a tiny bit of wine.” She held thumb and forefinger close together.

She wasn’t fond of raw cabbage to begin with. She was even less fond of it after she’d choked down a handful of leaves. Her stomach asked, loudly and pointedly, what the hell she thought she was doing to it. Maybe the idea behind this particular hangover cure was to make you feel miserable somewhere else, so you wouldn’t worry about your head falling off. If that was the case – she’d rather carry her head around under her arm than deal with a stomach in open revolt.

She also discovered that, if there was any one thing in the world wine didn’t go with, raw cabbage was it.

“Time to bite the bullet,” she muttered. There was no toilet to run to, and no sink either, just the open front door. She couldn’t even say the words in Latin; she had to resort to English. Latin knew nothing about bullets. Bite the ballista bolt didn’t cut it, somehow.

Life in the second century was nothing like what she’d expected. One by one, every idea she’d had, had turned out to be wrong. Still, she thought with a kind of desperate optimism, this was a world without bullets, without guns. It had to be safer, didn’t it? It had to be more secure than the world she’d left behind.

A few minutes after Nicole opened the door, the sun went behind a cloud – a nice, thick, rainy-looking cloud. Clouds like that had been a cause for universal groans in Indiana, but in California they were wonderfully welcome.

Here, too, after so long a drought – and after a hangover. She beamed at Julia. Julia beamed back.