Judith Tarr - Household Gods

She approached the problem obliquely: “If you don’t hit each other, I won’t have any reason to want to hit you. Why don’t we try that for a while and see how it works? Doesn’t it make sense?”

By their expressions, Lucius and Aurelia didn’t just wonder about the wisdom of what she proposed, they wondered about her sanity. They didn’t say anything, which was probably a good thing. Nicole found herself mortified at her ancestress’ habits: starting on wine when the sun came up, slapping the children around… What else did Umma do that would embarrass and worse than embarrass anyone who knew anything about health, hygiene, or progressive parenting? And when, and in what mortifying ways, would Nicole find out about it?

Lucius and Aurelia went off about some business of their own that, at least, did not involve fighting. Nicole went back to the flour mill. Before too long, she wondered how Umma found time to be any kind of mother, even a bad one. Grinding grain into flour was slow, dull work. “How many loaves do you think we’ll need today?” Nicole asked Julia.

“Doesn’t look like a fast day,” the slave said thoughtfully. “Doesn’t look like a slow day, either. Maybe we’ll get away with twenty-five; we have a good bit left over from yesterday. But thirty would be better, don’t you think?”

“I’m afraid I do,” Nicole said with a sigh. Baking thirty loaves from scratch was a long day’s work when scratch meant store-bought flour. When scratch meant wheat that needed to be ground before it could even be used, it was worse than that.

She’d made bread a few times, back in West Hills, before Frank walked out on her — when she’d had time, or made time, to cook her own, healthy meals. There was a wonderfully sensuous pleasure in mixing the flour and the yeast, adding the water or milk or buttermilk, honey or eggs or butter, mixing them in with strong slow strokes, then heaping the rich-scented elastic dough on the floured board and working it, kneading and rolling and kneading it again till it was just exactly right to let rise and bake. Later on, Frank had bought her a bread machine, but even before she realized it was a guilt-gift — a kind of material apology for his affair with Dawn — she’d put it away to gather dust. There just wasn’t any tactile pleasure in dumping ingredients into a plastic box and letting it do all the kneading and rising and baking for her.

No bread machines here. No KitchenAid, either, with its miracle of a dough hook. Her own fingers did the kneading now, hers and Julia’s and, after they’d been washed and washed again, Aurelia’s. Lucius was off somewhere else by then, or she’d have put him to work there, too.

She had to keep stopping for customers, too, which didn’t make things any easier. Most wanted something from the unwritten menu, whose contents everyone seemed to know. A few brought in meat or fish and expected her to do the cooking — that took her aback the first time, and nearly blew her cover. Luckily Julia took the fish and slapped it on the grill without a word or a look of surprise, giving Nicole the cue for her own reaction. Everyone, whether he ate or not, drank wine: plain for an as, better for a dipondius and the best she had for a sestertius a cup. People didn’t seem to have heard of distilled liquor. Wine was all there was here. It was enough, and bad enough. The smell of it would stay with her, she was sure, even if she were transported back to West Hills in an instant.

Since she was unfamiliar with the oven, she had Julia bake the first batch of bread, eight loaves’ worth, so she could learn by watching. It wasn’t so simple as setting the heat control at 350 and coming back in half an hour. The slave had to keep the fire burning evenly, and to go by guess when it came to timing. She had a knack, or the ease of long practice. She did it right the first time, and then a second, as casual about it as if she’d done nothing special at all. And maybe, in this world, she hadn’t.

After that, she popped the as Ofanius Valens had given her in her mouth, since there wasn’t a pocket anywhere in Carnuntum that Nicole had seen, and her tunic lacked a belt and therefore one of the ubiquitous pouchlike purses. With that, and with a grin and a wave to her mistress, she went off to the baths.

Nicole had a not very brief, completely cowardly thought of forbidding her to go. Julia’s departure left Nicole in charge of the taberna. Umma must have been able to do it on her own, or Julia would never even have offered to leave. Nicole felt overwhelmed as soon as the slave got out of sight. She had to bake the bread, cook for her customers, serve them, rinse their dishes in water that started out clean but didn’t stay that way — no lemon-scented dishwashing liquid here, and no dishwasher, either — and keep half an eye, or a quarter of an eye, or an eighth, on the children. Her children, she reminded herself. If she didn’t look out for them, nobody would.

She burned her hand getting her own first batch of loaves out of the oven. She plunged it into the dishwater, which, if not cold, was at least cool. The only soothing thing she could find to put on the burn was olive oil. It seemed to help a little. She would never have used it back in West Hills, but this was Carnuntum. No Aloe-Heal here. Not even an aloe plant. The price I pay for freedom, she thought.

Freedom, at the moment, looked suspiciously like drudgery. She was too busy even to notice how busy she was.

There were compensations. The loaves she’d turned out weren’t quite perfect; she’d let the crust get browner and thicker than Julia had done. But they were damn good, she thought, for a first try. The customers certainly didn’t object. If they said anything at all, it was to demand another piece hacked off the loaf.

The rest of her cooking passed the test, too, though a couple of people noticed her style wasn’t the same as Umma’s. “Next time I bring you a sow’s womb,” a plump fellow said, “I’ll want it seethed in honey and vinegar, the way you usually do it, not just grilled with garlic. This wasn’t bad, but I like the other better.”

She nodded, gulping a little. She hadn’t known what to do with the odd-shaped lump of meat she’d been handed. For that matter, she hadn’t known what the odd-shaped lump of meat was. Now that she did, she wished she didn’t.

She struggled for objectivity, the same mental distance she’d cultivated in the courtroom or in dealing with clients who weren’t quite the kind of people she’d want in the same room with her kids. What the plump man had suggested didn’t actually sound too bad, though she wouldn’t have chosen that particular cut or recipe for sweet-and-sour pork.

Just as Nicole was taking the last batch of loaves out of the oven, Julia came back at last from the baths. The slave smelled much better than she had before, and her skin was several shades lighter, closer to the milky white that Nicole would have expected with her fair coloring and Germanic features. She still wasn’t as fresh as Nicole would have been coming out of the shower. That newly milky skin smelled potently of olive oil. That, Nicole realized, was one of the many rank perfumes that impregnated the tunic Julia still wore. Not only hadn’t she had it cleaned, Nicole didn’t think it ever had been cleaned, not in the months — maybe years — Julia had been wearing it.

Still, thought Nicole, the bath had been an improvement. Julia carried herself a little straighter, hunched her shoulders a little less. She examined the new-baked bread with a judicious eye. “A little underdone,” she judged, “but no one will complain about it.” She beamed at Nicole. “I hope it wasn’t too much trouble, Mistress. The bath was wonderful.”