Household Gods полностью

“You bet it is,” Nicole agreed. “Nobody messes with a -“ She wanted to say skunk, but Latin lacked the requisite word. She did the best she could:“ – with a polecat.”

“You smell worse than a polecat,” Lucius declared. He got up and ran off – fortunately inside and up the stairs, not out in the panicky streets. Nicole shrugged, sighed, and almost gagged. God, she smelled bad. “We’d better wash our hands,” she said to Julia, “or we’ll make our customers sick.”

“Sick of the way our food tastes, that’s for sure,” Julia said. That wasn’t quite what Nicole had meant, but it wasn’t wrong, either.

As it happened, they had only a handful of customers. The people who weren’t trying to hold the Marcomanni and the Quadi out of Carnuntum were staying close to home.

Nicole couldn’t blame them. She was doing the same thing, and trying to figure out how long the supplies in the tavern would last for her and Lucius and Julia if they couldn’t get any more. She hadn’t stored away the emergency kit – she’d kept putting it off. She swore at herself for not doing it as soon as she thought of it.

It was a tense, watchful day, punctuated by shouts and screams from the direction of the wall, which was only a couple of hundred yards away. Every so often, she or Julia or Lucius or sometimes all of them together would go out into the street and listen to the fighting.

Sometimes a cry would ring clearly through the general din: “Ladders!” or “Look out!” or “There they are!”

Once, a rattling crash startled Nicole half out of her skin. “What in the gods’ name was that?”

“Ladder full of Germans in armor going over, I hope,” Lucius answered.

Nicole hoped so, too. She was astonished to discover how much. She’d been a politically correct, enlightened woman, with a properly modern attitude toward war: A plague on both their houses. But now she was inside one of the houses. Amazing, how much difference that made.

A little before noon, the quality of the noise from the wall changed: it grew both louder and more frantic. A moment later, a man in a torn and filthy tunic came running down the street, shrieking, “The Germans! The Germans are in Carnuntum!”

Nicole was very calm. Calmer than she’d ever thought she’d be. She stayed by the bar where she usually was when business was slow and the chores were done. It happened to be within easy reach of the shelf on which she kept the knives.

Not that she was sure she could use a knife on another human being, or, if she could, whether it would do anything much more than make an attacker angry, but she wanted the option. It made her feel better; and that, in the circumstances, mattered a great deal.

The shouting died down for a while. Then, rather abruptly, it came back in force. The tavern was empty; the last customer had gulped his wine, left half a loaf behind, and headed on home.

Nicole went to the door, shut it and barred it. She turned in the sudden gloom. “Julia, Lucius, shut the side windows,” she said. “We’ll leave the front ones halfway open.” Neither Julia nor Lucius argued with the order. As Julia closed the shutters on one side, she said, “There – now we can see out, but nobody can see in; it’s too dark. That’s clever – as clever as slathering piss on us to keep the barbarians away. You’re lucky, Mistress; you can be clever even when you’re scared to death.”

Not lucky, Nicole thought. Combat-trained in the streets of Los Angeles. And by an awful lot of war movies. Still, she felt a small quiver of pride, one of the very few she’d felt since she came to Carnuntum. Nothing she did might make the least difference, she knew that, but it felt good to do something – and to be admired for it, besides.

Would Umma have been as clever? It was hard to tell, from Julia’s reaction. And Lucius was too scared to notice much, and too busy hiding it to care if his mother was acting out of character again.

Iron clanged on iron, too close for comfort and getting closer fast. It sounded like kids at a construction site, playing let’s-make-the-biggest-racket with lengths of steel reinforcing rod. Which meant – she found that she was breathing too shallowly; she made herself draw a deeper breath – those were swords clashing on swords. And it wasn’t a game. It was real.

Caution would have kept her deep inside the tavern, even upstairs if she’d been truly sensible, but she found herself beside one of the front windows, peering cautiously around the shutter. Julia had done the same, and Lucius crept in under Nicole’s arm like a dog in need of a pat.

A Roman legionary turned at bay in front of the tavern. His helmet was gone, his curly dark hair a wild tangle. He was panting and cursing, both at once. Sweat cut channels of clean olive skin through the dust caked on his face. A big redheaded German hammered at him with a sword that looked twice the size of his short, thick-bladed gladius.