Judith Tarr - Household Gods

Women still got treated like that in the twentieth-century world — some even in the United States. People in the Third World lived like that. But not like this. Not quite.

And what, Nicole wondered, did this slave really think of her mistress? What was going on, deep down, when she bent her head and said the words she judged it best to say? Nicole shivered. The likely answer wasn’t comfortable. In fact, it was scary.

Ofanius Valens couldn’t know, any more than anyone else in this world and time, what Nicole was thinking — or even that Nicole was there; that it wasn’t Umma standing by him, waiting for him to get up and go on his way. He obliged with a cheerful air, oblivious to any undercurrents. “Tomorrow, then, Umma,” he said. “Then maybe I’ll order something different. Wouldn’t that be a jolt?”

He went off whistling and laughing to himself at what was evidently a great joke. Well, Nicole thought a trifle wryly, there was a rarity: a man who knew how much a creature of habit he was.

She shook her head and forgot about him — until tomorrow. Julia was still standing there, the coin clenched in her fist as if she feared her mistress would take it away after all. Nicole tried to reassure her with a smile. “What will you do with your as, Julia?” she asked. She hoped she didn’t sound too patronizing, or too much like an adult talking, uncomfortably, to a child.

Julia didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with the tone, or, if she did, it was a wrongness she was used to. She answered readily enough: “When things slow down this afternoon, Mistress, if you’ll let me, I’ll go over to the baths — it’s a ladies’ day today — and get clean. Is that all right? I’ll work hard all morning, I promise, so I won’t put you to any trouble. Please? “

A grown woman shouldn’t have to beg like that. Nicole’s anger at Julia’s condition heated up again. She should not have to ask permission for every little thing, as if she were a small child.

There was nothing Nicole could do, not right this instant, except give Julia what little she had to give, which was her permission. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s all right.”

Julia smiled in pure happiness. Considering how rank she was, it had to be excruciating to have to be herself, and smell herself. Nicole wasn’t quite willing to admit that she was surprised. She’d let herself think nobody minded smelling bad — but if that was the case, why did the Romans have baths at all? Lord knew the ruins she’d seen here on her honeymoon were the biggest building in town.

Now she was here, in the time when Roman baths were whole and in use, and she’d passed a milestone. She’d survived her first customer. That was worth a pause, and a gathering of forces. If one had come in for his breakfast, another couldn’t be far behind.

Another customer did come, a few minutes after the first; and two more after that, and then a whole flood of them. Most were men, all hungry or thirsty or both — hungrier in the morning, thirsty as the day went on, hungry again toward evening. Without a clock, Nicole couldn’t know how many hours were passing. She was too busy most of the time to care.

What with one thing and another, talking fast and ducking faster and calling on Julia to do the honors whenever she was caught up short, she survived the rest of the day. By the time the sun went down, she was wondering if she would go down, too: down for the count. In spite of Julia’s promise that things would slow down in the afternoon, Nicole was hopping every moment of the day.

The first crisis came early, when someone bought two cups of wine, some bread, and a piece of smoked pork. Nicole hadn’t even noticed that the tavern boasted smoked pork; Julia used a forked pole to get it down from a hook in the ceiling. The hook was secured in a beam next to a hole through which smoke from the cookfires — or some of it, at least — escaped. As the smoke dribbled out the hole, it happened to preserve the meat. Nicole watched the middle-aged man happily devour the pork — ham, she supposed she should call it — and tried not to think about the carcinogens he must be ingesting with it.

“That’ll be a sestertius altogether,” Julia said. She’d been giving out all the prices this morning, readily enough but with a glance at Nicole each time as if she expected Nicole to do it instead.

After he’d fished in his belt pouch for what seemed like a very long time, the man confessed that he didn’t have enough small copper and brass coins to make up the value of a large — silver-dollar-sized — brass sestertius. His expression was sour. “I’m going to have to give you a denarius, curse it. Jupiter! I hate paying out silver for trifles, when I know cursed well I’ll get back nothing but base metal. Say whatever you like, but you know as well as I do, three bloody brass sesterces don’t come near being worth three-quarters of a silver denarius.”

Four sesterces to a denarius. Nicole filed that away. And two asses made a dupondius. and two dupondii a sestertius.

What was even worse, considering how unhappy her customer already was, she was still an as short of being able to give him the right change. He’d already complained about shelling out silver — real money — for fiat-currency pocket change. He’d be even less delighted to come up short of what he was supposed to be owed. It wasn’t just that he was getting toy money for his fifty-dollar bill — that toy money didn’t even equal the amount of his change.

Julia saw the same thing at the same time. She looked around, seemed not to find what she was looking for, and turned back to Nicole. “Mistress, didn’t you bring the cash box downstairs with you this morning?”

Nicole’s stomach clenched, as it had been doing at intervals since she woke in a strange bed. If it did much more of that, she’d end up with an ulcer. She shook her head in reply to Julia’s question.

Julia made a noise that hadn’t changed between whenever this was and the 1990s: a small sigh that meant, I may be stuck working for you. but which one of us is the dummy?

Nicole sighed herself and prayed for calm — never mind whom she prayed to; it didn’t matter. “Go and get the box,” she said. And added, probably not wisely: “Please.”

For the first time Julia didn’t go running to do her mistress’ bidding. “Oh, no, Mistress,” she said. “You can’t trick me that way. I don’t spy on you, no I don’t.” She folded her arms and set her lips thin and made herself a picture of triumphant virtue. It was so exaggerated, so downright stagey, that Nicole almost laughed and told her come off it — but she didn’t dare. This was worse than dealing with the secretarial pool, and much worse than knowing what to do with all the flocking servers in an upscale restaurant. She didn’t own the secretaries, and she certainly didn’t have the power to torture or kill the maitre d’ at Spago.

“Well,” she said to cover the pause, which was stretching a little too long. “I certainly am glad that I can trust you.” If she could. But she wasn’t going to think about that. She nodded to the customer, who was starting to twitch with impatience, and almost fled up the stairs. If a slave had to get permission from her owner to receive even an as of her own, it made a horrid kind of sense that she wouldn’t be allowed to know where the cash was stashed. Unfortunately, neither did Nicole.

It seemed logical that the money should be somewhere in the room where she’d awakened. But when she stood in the doorway, the little bare box of a place didn’t look as if it offered a hiding place for one sestertius, let alone a box full of them. She dropped to one knee to peer under the bed. Only the chamberpot there, as she’d seen earlier in the morning. Fear rose to choke her. If the box was lurking behind a loose board or in some kind of hidden compartment, she’d never find it — and her customer was waiting. Everyone was waiting for Nicole to give herself away, to prove she wasn’t Umma.