Household Gods

That relief – and whatever she got from the cabbage and wine, which wasn’t much – didn’t last long. Lucius and Aurelia came downstairs and started raising hell. Probably they weren’t any noisier than usual, but no way was Nicole up for kid-noise on that scale.

Nicole told them several times to be quiet, which did as much good as she’d figured it would: zilch, zero, zip. Her head hurt. Her tooth throbbed in sledgehammer rhythm.

Aurelia stampeded past with Lucius in roaring pursuit. Nicole snagged first one and then the other, and laid a solid smack on each backside. “Shut up!” she yelled at them both. “Just – shut – up!”

She stopped cold. Oh. God. Her father had done the same thing – the exact same thing – on his mornings after. She looked at her hand, appalled. “I’m sorry,” she started to say. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

She never said it, because even while the words took shape on her tongue, she noticed something. It was quiet in the tavern. The kids had slunk off to do something useful: Lucius chopping nuts, Aurelia helping Julia grind flour for the next batch of bread. They weren’t sniveling or acting abused. They were simply… quiet. And they stayed quiet for a good while. Not forever, but long enough.

Nicole never did voice her apology. She didn’t like herself much for it, either.

Were peace and quiet worth an occasional whack? The people of Carnuntum certainly thought so. Nicole never had. She’d sworn when she was a little girl, after her father had left another set of bruises on her mother’s face – and her mother told people she’d walked into a door – that she’d never raise her hand in anger to anyone, adult or child. And here she’d broken that vow.

When in Rome…

She was breaking down, belief by belief, conviction by conviction. If the parents of Carnuntum had been transported as suddenly to Los Angeles as Nicole had to Carnuntum, every last one of them would have faced losing custody of their children. Most would have done jail time for child abuse. But here no one looked twice, even when a father was caught beating his son till the boy screamed for mercy.

From everything she’d read, that should have made the adults of Carnuntum – the grown-up survivors of abuse – a hateful pack of social misfits. And yet they weren’t. They were just people. Maybe they were cruder than people in Los Angeles, but there was no denying the resemblance. Human nature, whatever that was, hadn’t changed. People fell in and out of love, they quarreled and made up, they did business, they gossiped, they got drunk – as Nicole’s aching head too well knew – all as they might have done eighteen hundred years later on the other side of the Atlantic.

So what did that say about all the books she’d read and the television talk shows she’d watched, and all the theory she’d taken as gospel? The Romans had a theory that it was perfectly acceptable for one human being to buy and sell another. That theory, as far as she was concerned, was dead wrong, no matter how elaborately they justified it.

The next thought, the corollary, was amazingly hard to face. What if her own theories – her own assumptions – weren’t exactly right, either? What if they were all skewed somehow? So where did right end and wrong begin? Who could know, and how?

She clutched her head in her hands. It was pounding worse than ever, but not with the hangover, not any longer. Tough questions of law and ethics had done that to her, too, when she was in law school. She’d been glad to get out of those courses with a passing grade.

There wasn’t anybody standing over her now, demanding that she think about things that she plain didn’t want to think about. It didn’t make any difference. The thoughts were there. She could make them go away, but they kept coming back, mutating and changing, till they changed her, and made her into something different from what she’d been. Something, maybe, she didn’t want to be.

“Hurry up with my order there,” a customer said. He hadn’t given it much more than a minute or two before. Julia was scrambling as fast as she could to fill it.

And Nicole had had it up to here. If she wasn’t going to take any guff from Lucius and Aurelia, she sure as hell wasn’t about to let an obstreperous customer push her around, either. “Keep your drawers on,” she snapped. “You’ll get it when it’s ready.”

She held her breath. If he got up and stomped off the way Ofanius Valens had when she wouldn’t let him play doctor with Julia, then let him.

Instead, and to her amazement, he wilted. “I’m sorry, Umma,” he mumbled into his greasy beard. “As soon as you can, please.”

“That’s better,” Nicole said briskly. She couldn’t help a last stab of guilt. Without the hangover, she probably wouldn’t have barked so loud. But, she told herself, let’s face it: in Carnuntum as in Los Angeles, a healthy dose of assertiveness was not at all a bad thing.