Household Gods

10

Well have good weather for the beast show,” Titus Calidius Severus said, as smug as if he’d ordered it especially for the occasion. “This sort of thing is a lot less fun in the rain and mud.”

“Yes,” Nicole said, barely remembering to answer him at all. She was excited out of all proportion to the occasion, almost quivering with eagerness at the chance to do something out of the ordinary. She’d even fixed herself up with a sitter: she’d promised Julia a couple of extra sesterces above her usual wages, to ride herd on things. Julia had agreed so readily, Nicole suspected she was plotting to earn a few more sesterces on the side — or on her back.

Nicole almost didn’t care. Or, no: she cared. But there wasn’t anything she could do about Julia once Julia was out of her sight. And she wanted — God, how she wanted — to get away for the day.

“This will be — “ she began, but stopped abruptly, before she said something she might regret.

Titus Calidius Severus wasn’t about to let her off that particular hook. “Be what?” he asked in all apparent innocence.

“Fun,” Nicole said after a pause. It wasn’t what she’d intended to say. But, while this would be the first time she’d gone outside the walls of Carnuntum, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Umma had done so. Nicole wasn’t about to blow her cover now. Not after all this time.

A clamoring throng of people streamed toward the southwestern gate of the city, all heading, as she was, for the amphitheater. They chattered as they went, sounding at least as excited as she felt. “Lions, I heard,” one said. “I heard tigers,” somebody else declared. People scoffed at that, to his evident disgust: he folded his arms and set his jaw and retreated into injured silence. “Bears,” a woman said behind him. “There are always bears.”

“Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!” Nicole was wearing sandals, not ruby slippers, and the road was neither yellow nor brick, but she kicked up her heels regardless.

Cahdius Severus didn’t seem to find anything too strange about her behavior, though his glance was more than a little amused. “I’m with everybody else except that one idiot,” he said: “I won’t believe they’ve got tigers till I see ‘em with my own eyes.”

Nicole blinked at the absolute literality of his comment. For an instant — a very brief instant — she felt a little of the old, sinking sensation, the awareness that went all the way to the bone, that no, indeed, she wasn’t in Kansas anymore; nor in West Hills, either. She felt more as if she’d fallen into a sword-and-sandal epic from late-night TV.

They jostled through the gate. In the sudden coolness beneath it, as people crowded together to pass the bottleneck, Nicole found herself pressed against Calidius Severus. She had to clutch at his shoulder or trip and fall. He caught her easily, as if he’d done it often before, and held her in a calm familiar grip.

She stiffened. He let go. Neither exchanged a glance. Nicole was still breathing hard as she emerged into the sunlight. It was painfully bright after the dimness of the gate. That was why she blinked so hard, she told herself; and she’d been pushed to go a fair bit faster than she wanted to, to keep up with the crowd. That was why her breath came so quick. Of course it was. She wasn’t feeling anything toward the man who walked decorously beside her.

The amphitheater stood not far outside the city’s walls, a couple of hundred yards, she reckoned, surrounded by a meadow of knee-high grass.

At the sight of it, Nicole stopped cold. She’d come this way before, and seen almost exactly the same view, on her honeymoon. Frank had stood beside her then, a good deal cleaner and a good deal sweeter-smelling than the man who was with her now.

The impact, the sense of deja vu, was much stronger than it had been inside the baths. She’d seen only the floor plan, so to speak, in a twentieth-century landscape of ruins and modern town. Here and now…

Even in the late twentieth century, the amphitheater had been clearly recognizable for what it was, with banks of earth leading down toward a central stage dug out well below ground level. Eighteen-hundred-odd years had changed remarkably little. In this much older time, retaining walls supported the banked earth, but they had a look of surprising age: well-seasoned timbers and stone much worn and overgrown with moss. Nicole on her honeymoon had been bored, jetlagged, and only vaguely interested in old dead things. In this old dead world that felt all too distinctly here-and-now, she knew a moment’s vertigo, a confusion of places and times. That was then — nearly two thousand years in the future. This was now, eighteen hundred years in her own past.

She must have looked alarming. “You all right, Umma?” Titus Calidius Severus asked in evident concern.

“Yes,” she said quickly, and as firmly as she could. She pulled herself together and made herself walk on. “Maybe a touch of the sun.”

He eyed her sidelong, but he didn’t call her on the lie. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You won’t end up all brown like a farm woman.”

In the twentieth century, leaving skin cancer out of the equation, tan was in — it showed you weren’t confined to a factory or an office all day long. Here, it was just the opposite: a pale face was a face that hadn’t been out sweating in the sun all day. But both meant the same thing: leisure to do whatever you liked, whenever you wanted to do it.

Nicole’s head had begun to ache, as it usually did when she’d had enough of here-and-there, now-and-then. She distracted herself as she had before, with the details of her surroundings. The countryside, like the amphitheater, hadn’t changed much — wouldn’t change much — in eighteen centuries. It was still meadows and grainfields and patches of woods, with an apple orchard or two for variety. One of the meadows, off to the east, was planted thickly with — stones?

Gravestones. It wasn’t a meadow; it was a cemetery.

She shivered slightly. To the Nicole who had stood here — would stand here — eighteen centuries from now, all this country, and all these people, were dead. Long dead and gone to dust.

Her gaze swept south, toward what on her honeymoon had been Carnuntum’s largest and most imposing Roman monument. The locals called it the Heidentor, the Heathen Gate, a huge stone archway more than fifty feet tall. It had been partly ruined when she saw it. She wondered, as her eye searched for it, what it would look like intact.

It wasn’t there.

She stopped once more, gaping. The first emotion she felt was an absurd sense of outrage, as if she’d been cheated. Where in hell had the stupid thing gone? You couldn’t just pick up that much stone and drop it in your purse.

The answer came belatedly and with somewhat of a shock. The Heidentor hadn’t been built yet. When, in the United States, she’d thought about the Roman Empire at all — which hadn’t been any too bloody often — she’d envisioned its history as a single, compact entity. The Roman Empire. It was there, and then it was gone. There wasn’t any depth to it, or any development. It just was.

But that wasn’t actually the way things worked. There were lifetimes upon lifetimes’ worth of Roman Empire — and the lifetime in which the Heidentor went up hadn’t happened yet. She wondered how far in the future it lay. Would she live to see it built, or even begun? How long did something like that take to build?

“Come on,” Titus Calidius Severus said, loud in her ear, still determinedly amiable. “You keep stopping. Shall I dangle a parsnip in front of your face, the way the farmers do when their donkeys won’t go?”

Yet again, Nicole shook herself back into what passed for reality. “It’s a lot better than laying into me with a stick,” she said. “I’ve seen too much of that lately. I think it’s cruel. “

The fuller and dyer shrugged. “One way or another, you’ve got to get the work out of them. If they won’t go by themselves, you make ‘em. They’re just animals. It’s not like they feel things the way people do.”

Nicole was as certain animals did feel things the way people did as Calidius Severus evidently was that they didn’t. She opened her mouth to argue the point, but something else and more urgent pushed itself to the front of her mind. “People beat slaves, too, and they haven’t got any excuse at all for that.”

While they talked — she wouldn’t quite call it argued — they’d reached the entrance to the amphitheater. Titus Calidius Severus handed a sestertius to an attendant — a slave? He got no change back; admission was a dupondius apiece.

Only when that was done and they’d been waved through the gate did he respond to Nicole. As he had before, he said, “One way or another, you’ve got to get the work out of them.”

Nicole swallowed a sigh. She should have known what he’d say. How could she expect anything different? “I’d rather use the parsnip of freedom than the stick,” she said.

“The parsnip of freedom?” Calidius Severus grinned his crooked grin. “Now there’s a phrase to send men marching into battle!” His grin faded. “Some masters do that. For some slaves, it works. But one man’s not the same as another, same as one donkey’s not the same as another. Some are too stubborn to go forward unless you make ‘em do it.”

That held a hard core of common sense — if you believed there was nothing wrong with slavery. “If a free man won’t work, you can fire him and replace him with someone else who will,” Nicole said.

“Or more likely with someone else who won’t, either.” The fuller and dyer held up a hand before she could counter that. “Like I said before, it’s a nice day. We’re here at the beast show. Is this worth arguing about right now?”

That also was hard common sense, but Nicole didn’t like it any better for that. Her years in law school had left her convinced that anything was worth arguing about, any time she was in the mood to argue. But she was at the beast show, and she was curious about it; and she was also on a date. It was, in an odd way, both a first date and not. For her, yes; for Calidius Severus, no. “I guess it’ll keep,” she said, a little grudgingly.

“Good,” he answered with apparent relief. “For a while there, I figured they’d put us down on the floor, and the crowd could watch us go at it instead of the beasts.” He took a deep breath, shook his head, and held out his hand, offering it as if it had been a gift. His voice was brisk. “Come on.”

Nicole was getting just a small bit tired of take-charge masculinity; but not enough, yet, to kick at it. She let him take her hand — if nothing else, it made sure they weren’t separated in the jostle of the crowd — and lead her into the amphitheater.

It was larger than she remembered, or maybe it only seemed so because there were so many people in it. When there’d been no more than a handful of tired tourists and a guide droning on in three different languages, it hadn’t looked big enough to hold more than a few hundred. In fact, it held several thousand — maybe five, maybe ten; Nicole had never been much good at that kind of estimate. The seats on which they crowded together were backless wooden benches. Vendors ran up and down the aisles, singing out their wares: sweet rolls and sausages and wine. It wasn’t all that different, in looks and atmosphere, from a college football game.

Titus Calidius Severus pointed up along a row of benches. “Hurry up, Umma! There’s a couple of good ones, right on the aisle. Quick now, before someone else gets in ahead of us.” He suited action to words, flinging his backside down just ahead of another man who’d spotted the same seats at the same time. Nicole sat beside him with, she hoped, a little more decorum but no less dispatch. The man who’d been aiming for the seats, and his wife or lady friend, glowered at them but didn’t offer to fight over it.

Nicole took a deep breath of air that was, for a change, not particularly redolent, and made herself as comfortable as she could. She’d have been glad of a cushion like the one she’d carried to football games.

Some people nearby actually had cushions, or had thought ahead and brought a cloak or extra tunic to soften the seat. Next time, she thought. “How long before the show starts?” she asked.

“Shouldn’t be too much longer.” The fuller and dyer looked over his shoulder. She did the same, to see what he saw: rows of benches still open, and people shuffling into them, picking spots, calling to escorts and friends as they found good ones. “They’ll let it get fuller than this before they turn the first critters loose. Slowpokes always grumble when they miss the opening rounds.”

While Calidius Severus spoke, a vendor had been working his way toward them. Calidius Severus raised a brow at Nicole. “Want some wine?”

Nicole nodded with barely an instant’s hesitation. She was hesitating less and less over it now, and worrying less about it, too — which worried her in itself.

Calidius Severus ordered wine for them both, and paid for it, too, playing by rules as old, it seemed, as recorded time. The wine wasn’t even as good as her one-as special in the tavern, and the cup she had to drink it from was indifferently clean. The vendor stood hovering expectantly till she and Calidius Severus finished, then took back the cups — no disposable paper or styrofoam here. He filled them again for a pair of young men down the row, and handed them over without bothering even to wipe the rims. Nicole ducked her head and wiped surreptitiously at her mouth with the sleeve of her tunic. It wouldn’t even begin to do any good, but it did make her feel a little better.

Calidius Severus saw her do it, but he misunderstood why. “I know it’s not very good stuff,“ he said, “but you can’t expect much at a place like this.”

Nicole nodded. God knew, she’d had food and drink as bad as this wine or worse at games and concerts, and probably not much more sanitary, either.

As she opened her mouth to respond to him, a stir, a change in the crowd, drew her eye downward. A plump little man strutted out into the middle of the sand-strewn floor of the amphitheater. He turned this way and that, arms spread wide, inviting people to notice him. The crowd’s noise sank to a dull roar. He lifted his head and sent a surprisingly deep and resonant voice ringing up through the levels. “Welcome to the beast show for today. ‘

Applause was his answer: shouting, cheering, clapping of hands. He turned all the way about, arms spread even wider than before, till the applause died to a few fugitive finger-snappings and a catcall or two. Then he went on, “As one half of our first event, we have a… lion!” The crowd roared at that, louder than any lion Nicole had ever heard of. The emcee — Nicole couldn’t think of him any other way — went on, “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, captured with incredible courage and risk in the jungles of distant Cilicia and brought to Carnuntum across land and sea for your entertainment and delight, the fiercest killer in all the world — the king of beasts!”

Nicole was glad she wasn’t drinking wine just then. If she had been, she would have snarfed it right out her nose. The tubby little Roman sounded exactly like every fast-talking pitchman she’d ever loathed on late-night TV. She couldn’t help it; she started to giggle.

Titus Calidius Severus didn’t giggle. It would have been unmanly. But he chuckled. “Faustinianus does lay it on with a trowel, doesn’t he?” he said.

It wasn’t particularly witty, but between wine and sun and the absurd little man with his oversized voice, Nicole laughed out loud.

From somewhere under the amphitheater, the lion let out a short, coughing roar. Nicole shut her mouth with a snap. God only knew how many millions of years of evolution were screaming at her, That noise means danger!

Calidius had fallen silent, too. His right hand snatched at something across his body, caught at air and stopped. “Mithras!” he said with a note of surprise. “I’ll be cursed if I wasn’t reaching for my sword.”

“There you hear him, folks — the king of beasts indeed,” the emcee — Faustinianus — said. His voice echoed up through sudden silence. “And with him today you’ll be seeing a creature you know well. Yes, ladies and gentlemen: with him we have one of our very own Pannonian bears! “

He didn’t get much in the way of applause this time: a scattering of handclaps from here and there around the arena. “Cheapskates,” Calidius Severus muttered, speaking for them all. “Probably be the only lion in the whole show, too.”

Nicole didn’t say anything. She had never seen a Pannonian bear, whatever that was.

Faustinianus, it seemed, had finished his spiel.

The wall around the floor of the amphitheater was perhaps ten feet high. Faustinianus scurried toward it, not taking much time for dignity. Someone on the rim let down a ladder. He swarmed up it with speed commendable for one of his bulk.

No sooner had the ladder gone back up behind him than a rattle of chains drew Nicole’s eyes to the rear wall of the pit, stage, whatever one wanted to call it. Two gates rose at once, one on either side. The crowd hushed, expectant.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the lion roared again. Its first roar had been in the order of inquiry. This was raw fury.

A tawny shape bounded out of the darkness of the right-hand gate, sudden as if someone had stabbed it in the backside with the point of a spear. Cheers went up, whooping and whistling, like a football crowd when the star of the team comes loping onto the field.

A football player in full armor looked a whole lot more imposing than the beast that halted in the center of the arena and crouched with lashing tail. The lions Nicole had seen in zoos were fat, lazy, contented-looking things. They had nothing much to do but eat, sleep, and stroll around their enclosures.

This lion was anything but fat. She could count its every rib. Old scars, and others not so old, seamed its hide. Nor was contentment anything it knew the meaning of. It was more than furious. It was in a red rage. Maybe someone had goaded it out of its cage. Its mane stood on end. Its yellow eyes blazed. It snarled hatred at the people who watched it so avidly. The sound was like ripping canvas.

Nicole half rose from the bench. Her body shook. Her voice was no steadier. “They’ve been tormenting that poor animal!”

Calidius Severus shrugged, unimpressed at her outrage. “Can’t be helped. They’ve got to get the beasts ready to fight.”

“Fight?” Nicole said. So it was going to be that kind of beast show, was it? She gulped. She’d feared as much, though she hadn’t wanted to believe it. “Oh, Christ.”

But the fuller and dyer, fortunately, didn’t hear her. His attention was fixed on the other gate, the gate to the left. The bear was shambling out of it, less precipitous than the lion, but no happier with its lot. It was skin and bone; its fur was eaten away with mange. Pus seeped from a sore on its muzzle, dripping to the sand. When it opened its mouth to snarl, a broad swath of teeth was gone. But those that were left looked long and sharp, though not so formidable as the lion’s.

Still, the bear was larger, and even in this condition it had to be heavier. Which meant -

Nicole gasped and cut off that train of thought. She was — good God, she was figuring the odds.

Nor was she the only one. A man in the row behind her leaned forward and tapped Calidius on the shoulder. “Five sesterces on the bear,” he said.

“I’ll take you up on that,” Calidius answered promptly. “If the lion’s even close to healthy, he’ll rip old bruin there to shreds.”

Nicole might have caught herself reckoning the beasts’ relative chances, but she still had trouble believing what she was hearing. “I wish they weren’t fighting,” she said mournfully. “I wish we could just… admire them.”

Titus Calidius Severus looked at her as if she’d started speaking in tongues — or, more to the point, in English. “You can look at beasts for a little while, I suppose,” he said with the air of a man making a sizable concession. “But then you fall asleep. If the beasts are fighting, it keeps you awake. It’s interesting.”

Nicole sucked in a breath. She was damned close to blowing her cover, if she hadn’t blown it already. But she couldn’t make herself care. It was the wine in her, she knew that. And the shock, and yes, the disappointment. Calidius Severus, whom she’d been thinking of as a kind man, could think this horror was interesting.

“Interesting!” she said. “It’s not interesting. It’s cruel.”

His brows climbed up, then dropped down in a scowl. “Life’s cruel,” he said with callousness that had to be deliberate. “The faster people figure that out, the better they understand it, the easier they can bear it when the world flies up and hits them in the face.”

That was as cold-blooded a way of looking at things as she’d ever heard. She opened her mouth to protest, but even if she’d managed a word, the lion’s roar would have drowned it out. It echoed in that deep hollow space, set deep in her bones and shook them into stillness.

The bear too seemed caught off guard by the power of that sound. The lion sprang. Its body was a tawny blur. She’d never imagined anything so big could move so fast.

The bear reared up to meet the challenge, and it roared, too, a deep, grunting sound. As the lion fell upon the bear, the crowd went wild. Nicole, reeling, deafened by the noise, had a dizzy memory of a college football game, when the home team sacked the visiting quarterback. He’d even looked a bit like the bear.

For an instant, she was there, in that crisp autumn afternoon, with the cheerleaders flaunting their assets and the band sending a razzberry across the field. Then the heat and the human stink of Carnuntum fell around her again. Someone was pounding on the bench close by her, shrieking, “Eat him! Eat him for lunch!” Whether the woman meant the bear or the lion, Nicole couldn’t tell. But that she meant it literally, Nicole hadn’t the slightest doubt.

That was the point, wasn’t it? Starve the poor things till they were mad with hunger, then offer them fresh meat — if they fought for it. It was an endgame. Winner take all, and devil take the hindmost.

The lion and the bear tumbled together to the ground, rolling and kicking. Sand flew from their flailing feet. The bear’s jaws clamped on the lion’s shoulder, just below the neck. The bear’s paws raked the lion’s tawny flanks; its claws ripped blood-red gashes.

But the lion’s hind claws ripped at the bear’s belly, as if the great cat were a kitten playfully disemboweling a ball of yarn. Yet this was no game, no kitten-silliness. It was as real as death. The lion’s teeth were sunk in the bear’s throat.

If the lion growled, even if the sound had not been muffled in thick fur, Nicole couldn’t possibly have heard it. The crowd was roaring louder than the lion ever had. Titus Calidius Severus, beside her, was yelling his head off. That calm, contained man with his easy affability and his air of quiet competence was as lost to the world as the most rabid twentieth-century football fan. And not just because he had money on the line, either. This was sports. You could sit him down on a couch in front of a TV in Los Angeles, shove a Miller Lite into his hand, and leave him there, rooting for the Lions against the Bears. Some things never changed.

She wanted to clap hands over her ears, and over her eyes, too, and why not her mouth while she was at it? It was all or nothing; so nothing it was.

Calidius Severus bounced right up off the bench. Her eye leaped to the arena, to see what had got him going.

The bear’s paws had stopped flailing at the lion. Its jaws had slackened and fallen away from the tawny throat. And yet it wasn’t, quite, still. It wasn’t dead.

The lion drew away a little and began to lick its wounds. The bear lay stirring feebly, but made no move to attack the lion. When its wounds were as clean as they could be, the lion lifted itself, stretched stiffly, yawned. Then it bent its ragged-maned head and began to feed.

The amphitheater was a perfect bedlam of noise. Nicole’s head was pounding. There was a sour taste in her mouth, a burn of acid in her throat. She was going to be sick, she knew it. Right there. Right in front of everybody. And especially Calidius Severus.

He beamed at her, as oblivious to her state of mind as any man whose team ever won a game. “That was a good fight, wasn’t it, Umma? That lion could serve in my legion any day.” He turned to the man behind him and held out his hand. “All right. Pay up.”

The man shrugged and reached into his purse. Brass clinked as sesterces changed hands. “My turn next time,” he said. Calidius Severus grinned as he stowed his winnings away. He wasn’t gloating — much.

Down on the floor of the amphitheater, a group of men advanced warily on the lion. They carried spears and wore armor that looked amazingly like movie-Roman armor. Except that movie armor was always clean and shiny and impressive. This was battered and dented and dull. It wasn’t a prop. It was real; everyday gear that had seen hard use.

The lion’s rail twitched. In the silence that had fallen, as if the crowd had sated itself for a moment, Nicole heard it growl as it ate, a rumble of warning. Even in armor, even with a spear in her hand, Nicole wouldn’t have wanted to go near it.

The men moved quickly enough. A bomb squad might move like that: fast, efficient, aware of the danger but not stopping to dwell on it. Stopping would get them killed.

Along with their spears, they carried a weighted net. One of them, the one nearest the lion, snapped a command: “Now!”

They would only have one chance. The lion tore at the bear’s soft underbelly, but with each rending stroke, his head came up higher and his tail lashed harder. If the net missed, or failed to fall cleanly over him, there would be hell to pay.

They flung the net. It seemed to hang forever in the air. Nicole held her breath. So, she thought, did everyone else in the amphitheater. The net dropped — fell clean, enveloping the lion.

He roared his fury, and tried to spring. The net tangled him all the tighter. The more he struggled, the more thoroughly he was caught.

The handlers dragged the snarling, slashing bundle across the bloody sand. They were as matter-of-fact about it as if they’d been hauling a sackful of rocks.

They were still dragging the lion toward one of the gates as another group of men, these in ordinary tunics, trotted out of that same gate toward the carcass of the bear. They worked altogether without ceremony, lashing ropes around its hind legs and hauling it away. To the victor, obviously, went what passed for spoils: a few mouthfuls of stringy meat, a weighted net, and a chance to fight another day. At least, thought Nicole, the bear was out of his misery. The lion wouldn’t win any such reprieve till something else killed him.

She looked down at the sand. It was empty now, if briefly. Only drag marks and bloodstains showed what had passed there.

Then, like groundskeepers manicuring an infield, two more men emerged from the lion’s gate. They carried rakes and sacks of fresh sand. In a few moments, the arena was smooth again, unmarked. Ready for the next battle.

Nicole didn’t even dare to hope that the first fight would be the only one. She got as far as tensing her body to stand, but she was hemmed in. There were people on all sides of her, and a vendor blocking the aisle. The smell of his sausages made her knees go weak with revulsion.

Inert and trapped, she watched the emcee make his pompous way back down the ladder. His feet left a ragged line of prints in the freshly raked sand. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaimed in his deep fruity voice, “a northern fight next! From the trackless forests of Germany, fierce wolves will challenge the brute strength of the terrible aurochs. Enjoy the show!”

Again he climbed back to his front-row seat, where he sat mopping his brow while the ladder went up once more. A person in a tunic rather better than Nicole’s best one — but a slave nevertheless, she was pretty sure — handed him a cup. He drank from it with evident pleasure. He wasn’t getting the rotgut the rest of them were, she’d have been willing to bet.

How long does this go on? She wondered miserably. She couldn’t ask; it was surely something Umma already knew. It was also something Umma surely enjoyed. Titus Calidius Severus, sitting there beside her, hadn’t asked her to come as if to something exotic. He’d taken it for granted that she knew what would happen — and taken it for granted that she liked it, too. There was no way, knowing that, that Nicole could get up and bolt. No matter how much she wanted to — if she did, there was no way she could explain and still keep up the pretense.

To let go, to fall off the tightrope she’d walked for — Christ, how long? She had to stop and think before she could even remember. To stop pretending. To burst out with the truth, the whole truth — to just give up. Nicole almost wept with wanting it. But she wasn’t as brave as that, or as crazy, either. Not yet. What did they do to the mentally ill here? Feed them to the lions? She wouldn’t have put it past them.

That first morning here, she’d wanted to call the SPCA because a man had beaten his donkey. The only SPCA the Romans would have recognized was a Society for the Promotion of Cruelty to Animals.

She sat where she’d been sitting since Calidius Severus brought her here, sunk in on herself. Her eyes fixed on the arena with a kind of fascinated horror.

One of the gates opened. The one, she recalled, that had disgorged the lion. It was wolves this time, ten or twelve of them. They trotted around the arena in rapid, businesslike fashion, too fast for Nicole to count them exactly. They looked something like huskies, but they were bigger and meaner and scrawnier than any dogs she’d ever seen. A phrase she’d read somewhere — a lean and hungry look — niggled in her mind. It hadn’t been written about wolves, she didn’t think, but it fit tighter than O. J. Simpson’s glove.

Nicole was as perfectly horrified as the emcee would have wanted her to be. But it seemed she was alone in that. “What’s so much of a much about wolves?” Titus Calidius Severus said discontentedly. “Anybody wants to see wolves, all he has to do is go a couple of miles outside of town in the wintertime. He probably won’t be very happy about it afterwards, but that’s something else.”

The other gate yawned open. The aurochs loomed in it, stamping its feet and tossing horns that seemed as wide as the whole of Carnuntum.

Nicole gaped, even sickness forgotten. Wolves she knew about. Didn’t everybody? The aurochs — if she’d expected anything, she’d thought maybe it was a kind of deer, or another bear. She’d never imagined it would be a bull. A Texas longhorn bigger than the biggest buffalo she’d ever heard of.

Nothing like it walked the earth she’d come from. Of that she was almost sure. She would have heard about it, seen it in a documentary, found it in a zoo. It must have gone extinct sometime between this era, whenever exactly it was, and her own. For all she knew, it was an endangered species right now. And the Romans were killing it for their amusement. Didn’t they have any idea what they were doing?

Calidius Severus turned to her with a bemused lift of the brow. “This should be interesting,” he said over the rising roar of the crowd. “You never can tell what an aurochs will do. Remember the one that caught a wolf on its horns and pitched it up into the seats? Wasn’t that a wild day?”

“Yes,” Nicole lied. She cast about for ways to put some of what she was feeling into terms Umma might have used. “It seems a shame to see such a splendid beast fighting for its life.”

“Wouldn’t be very exciting, watching lapdogs and sheep,” the fuller and dyer answered. “Besides, you know the aurochs is as mean a bastard as the Germans he shares the forest with. One less of them is one less mankiller roaming the woods.” He leaned forward with sudden intensity. “Here we go-”

To the wolves, obviously, the aurochs was not a splendid beast. It was lunch on the hoof, and they looked to have missed a lot of lunches. They circled it in a slow and surprisingly graceful dance, tongues lolling, golden eyes intent. Those eyes surprised Nicole, a little. She hadn’t been thinking; she’d been expecting plain doggy brown, not yellow.

The aurochs knew what they were after. It would have met wolves before, away in the forest. It pawed the earth and bellowed. The noise was more like the bottom register of a bassoon with a bad reed than any sound Nicole could have conceived of as coming from the mouth of a cow. And yet, if the aurochs was a cow, it was the biggest damned cow she’d ever seen or heard of.

It lowered its head and charged. Sand flew beneath its hooves. The wolf in its path flung itself aside. Two more sprang at the aurochs from behind. The aurochs spun, impossibly agile. The wolves braced forelegs and skidded, scrambling out of reach of those arena-wide horns.

One escaped. The other had stopped a fraction too late. The broad curving sweep of the left horn caught it broadside, hooked underneath, pierced and thrust and ripped. The aurochs shook its head as if in irritation. The wolf flew through the air and landed rolling. Its yelp of agony rang over the shouting and hooting and catcalls that filled the amphitheater.

Nicole pounded her fists on her thighs. “Yes! Give it to him!”

She clapped a hand over her mouth. God. She’d got into it. For a few seconds, she’d become one of these people. She’d understood why they came to these shows, what went through their heads as they watched poor innocent animals slaughter one other for humans’ sport.

The worst of it was, the wolf didn’t die right away. Blood poured from the terrible wound in its belly, soaking into the sand. A loop of glistening pink gut slipped out and trailed the ground. The wolf tripped over it, shook its hind foot as if in annoyance, and went on with the hunt, as if pain and mortal wound were, after all, nothing to it. It wanted its prey. It fully expected its share of the kill when the fight was over. It didn’t know it was dead.

Even as the great bull gored the one wolf, others snapped at its legs, at its belly, and at its privates. “A eunuch for Cybele!” someone shouted near Nicole in a screechy falsetto. That drew a laugh from the crowd.

Cruel, thought Nicole. But the edge of censure was gone for a while. She’d been inside these people’s heads. She’d seen the fight as they saw it. She didn’t want to go back there, but neither could she maintain her position of moral superiority.

Wolves were everywhere now, swarming over the aurochs. They launched themselves at its side and shoulders. They clung, teeth sunk in flesh, eating the aurochs alive. Blood streamed and spattered. Who would have thought there could be so much blood in the world?

The aurochs bellowed in torment. It scraped off one of the wolves against the wall, as it might have used a tree trunk in the forest. Nicole gave up on trying to control herself. She cheered. The aurochs stamped with an enormous hind hoof, full on the wolf’s panting middle. She heard bones crunch even through the roar of the crowd.

Titus Calidius Severus nudged her in the ribs with his elbow. She started and suppressed a shriek. “You’re for the bull, are you?” he said. “Me, I always cheer for the wolves. They fight as a team, like legionaries.”

It was, Nicole realized, a perfectly rational way of looking at the fight, if you wanted to look at it at all. Regardless of his taste in amusement — a taste plenty of people in Carnuntum obviously shared — the fuller and dyer was a long way from a fool. Could she blame him for having the same tastes as his neighbors? How far did cultural relativism stretch? Not to slavery. She’d be damned if it stretched that far. To actively enjoying animals in torment?

That she could come up with the idea in the first place didn’t worry her. That she didn’t dismiss it out of hand did worry her, a lot.

Calidius couldn’t have imagined what she was thinking, or even known such a way of thinking could exist. It wasn’t in his worldview.

“Mithras slew the great bull, you know,” he said. She nodded, though she didn’t know what he was talking about except that it must have something to do with his religion. She’d have to learn more about that one day. One day…

The aurochs gored another wolf in the side, not quite so terrible a wound as the first, and trampled another to death under its hooves. But while it slaughtered its enemies, the rest of the pack was literally eating it alive. It kicked and stamped and gored and swept its great horns in wild arcs, but its strength was failing. Its bellows grew weaker. At last, it sank to its knees. It struggled to lift itself, got one foot under its body, heaved. But its life had poured out of it with its blood. With a deep, shuddering moan, it rolled onto its side.

Like the bear, it didn’t die completely, not then, and not for a long while afterwards. It was still kicking feebly when the wolves were shoulder-deep in its carcass.

Calidius Severus folded his arms and nodded, pleased. “They got it down and lost only four,” he said. “That’s good work from the wolves’ side. I’ve seen an aurochs clean out a whole pack of them — not often, but I’ve seen it.”

How many beast shows had he seen, to speak with such casual expertise? How many had Umma seen? How many had been staged in Carnuntum that they hadn’t seen? How many other towns were there in the Roman Empire, and how often did they stage beast shows? How many animals died bloody deaths for no better reason than to amuse a theaterful of Romans with time on their hands?

Her thoughts must have run away with her: she spoke that last question aloud. Titus Calidius Severus frowned for a moment. Then he asked, “What sort of deaths do you think they’d die if we left them where they were?”

Nicole started to answer, but stopped herself abruptly. She didn’t think about death if she could possibly help it, no matter what form it came in. Death was bad. Death was unmentionable. It was — indecent.

Here, they took it as much for granted as they did any number of other indecencies. Head lice. Halitosis. Pissing in jars on a public street.

If she absolutely had to think about how a wild animal died, she supposed it went off somewhere quiet and died with dignity. But if wolves would eat an aurochs in an amphitheater before it was properly dead, what was to keep them from doing the same thing in the forest? They were starved, granted. But if they were hungry enough to take on something that big, they’d eat it alive wherever they were, in a desperate and completely instinctive bid for survival. That was the law of the jungle.

The year Nicole turned thirteen, the family dog had gotten sick. It was cancer, the vet said. Squamous-cell sarcoma: she’d looked it up, because something in her wanted to know exactly what it was that was killing fat old Gaylord. He stopped being able to eat his kibble. He left spots of blood on the carpet, which amazed her because her mother hadn’t seemed to mind. Then one day Nicole came home from school to find the carpets all freshly cleaned and Gaylord gone. Her mother had had him put to sleep. It was for the best, she’d said. He was in pain. It was only going to get worse. There wasn’t anything anyone could do to make it better.

If a wolf got squamous-cell sarcoma, there was nothing and no one to put it out of its misery. It would suffer till it died, which might take a long time.

There’d been little enough dignity for Gaylord, near the end. His muzzle had swollen with the tumors. Blood and saliva had dripped from his mouth, and mucus from his nose. He’d whimpered when he slept, from the pain. If he’d died quietly, it had been because he’d been given a lethal dose of whatever it was vets gave dogs to put them to sleep.

Out of all that, the only reply Nicole could find for Calidius Severus’ question was a second, much lamer question: “We ought to be better than nature, don’t you think, instead of as bad or worse?”

“Hmm.” Calidius Severus gave her another look, an appraising one this time. “While you were teaching yourself to read and write, you made yourself into a philosopher, too, didn’t you?”

Nicole laughed shortly. “Why, of course not,” she said with bitterness that surprised even herself. “I’m a woman. I can’t possibly be anything as elevated as a philosopher.”

“Socrates’ teacher was a woman,” Calidius Severus said, and that startled her, too. Then he shook his head. His expression was odd, half a smile, half a scowl. “You’re sticking pins in me to make me jump. I don’t much feel like jumping today, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Not even a little?” she asked with a touch of archness — God, she was flirting. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. It had to be the atmosphere in this place. It warped her out of her usual, enlightened self.

He didn’t mind it a bit. His scowl faded; his smile grew just a little. He shook his head and turned his attention back to the arena.

The aurochs’ death and the arrival of the beast-handlers hadn’t put an end to the show. The lion had been an easy capture: there was only one of him, and he was weak with starvation and loss of blood. There were still half a dozen wolves, which weren’t in any mood to be herded back to their cages. They had the taste of fresh blood, and a glimpse of freedom.

The first one or two were taken by surprise, netted and hauled away. The rest had time to fight back. They circled the handlers as they had the aurochs, snarling fit to curdle the blood.

The handlers seemed impervious. Their shields were long and tall, and looked heavy. They were as much weapons as defense. The handlers crouched behind them, and the wolves leaped futilely, snapping at the portable walls. One that moved quicker, or was luckier than the rest, almost got around a shield. Its edge caught him and sent him flying, to fall limp, with a split skull.

The wolf the aurochs had disemboweled was still alive, still feeding on the carcass. It hadn’t joined the pack against the handlers. Maybe it was confused, or maybe just intent on finishing its last meal.

It looked up as one of the handlers advanced on it, and lifted its lip in a snarl. Coldly, calmly, the handler smashed its skull with a club.

Nicole swallowed bile. It was hideous, disgusting. It was also merciful. The man had put the wolf out of its misery. No lethal injections here. No peaceful slipping into sleep.

She wasn’t any happier for knowing that. Whose fault was it, after all, that the beast had been in pain?

When the last of the wolves had been caught or killed, and taken away dead or alive into the bowels of the amphitheater, a team of mules hauled off the aurochs’ carcass. They made a great deal of noise and some little fuss, braying and kicking against the drover’s whip.

Titus Calidius Severus was not amused. “Takes too long between fights,” he muttered in Nicole’s ear. Other people had taken advantage of the intermission to call for wine or sausages, or to slip away to — the privies? There must be public privies somewhere in this man-made hill.

Nicole thought about it, but she wasn’t inclined to fight the crowds. There’d probably be a line for the ladies’ here as there always was in the twentieth century. Potty parity wasn’t any more likely here than it would be in eighteen centuries.

The man beside her wasn’t showing signs of going anywhere, either. He yawned and stretched and cracked his neck, and grimaced as Nicole winced. “Not getting any younger,” he said, “and the day isn’t getting any shorter, either.” He shrugged. “Ah, well, the gods will have fat-wrapped thighbones for their altars, and the butchers will have fresh meat for their stalls.” He paused. His eyes sharpened. “Are you all right, Umma? You look a little green.”

“I’m fine,” Nicole lied. Here was a beast killed by wolves, and they were going to sell the meat? If that wasn’t the most unsanitary thing she’d ever heard of… She caught herself again. If that wasn’t, then any of several other unfortunate practices was. The Romans’ notions of hygiene, however proud of them they were, left damn near everything to be desired.

The day dragged on. There was no discernible end to the slaughter, and precious little variety, either. Bears and wolves and another aurochs — smaller than the first, but more agile, and almost fast enough to kill all of its attackers before the survivors pulled it down. And once, to frantic applause, a leopard. “Don’t see that every day,” Calidius Severus declared, clapping and stamping his feet along with everybody else.

Nicole would sooner not have seen any of it. Whenever a vendor came by with wine or food, she bought a cupful or a handful. By the time the leopard sprang snarling into the arena, she was full to the gills and halfway down the road from tiddly to snockered. Knowing she was abusing alcohol to keep from watching animals being abused didn’t make her feel any better.

The leopard’s adversary was a black bear. It was, Nicole gathered from the commentary around her, quite a large specimen of its kind. It made short work of the leopard. People hissed and whistled in anger — not, she thought, out of sympathy for the cat. Because it hadn’t fought well enough to amuse them.

A pair of handlers dragged the beautiful spotted body toward one of the gates. Nicole’s eyes fixed on the bloody trail that it left behind. She swallowed hard against tears.

Somewhere down in Africa, the leopard had been living its own life, minding its own business. The Romans had expended heaven only knew how much effort (and courage, she admitted to herself with no small reluctance) to capture it and bring it up here alongside the Danube. And for what? To have it torn to bloody rags between one eyeblink and the next. Where was the justice in that? What was fair about it at all?

Life isn’t fair. Titus Calidius Severus had said to her earlier. All of this was as graphic an illustration of that fact as she could have imagined.

Yet again, Faustinianus puffed and strutted his way down to the arena and raised his grand trumpet of a voice. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, something you’ve been waiting for for longer than most of us like to remember: the criminal Padusius, who murdered Gaius Domitius Zmaragdus the spice merchant and Optatus the physician even as he robbed them, having been duly and properly convicted of his crimes, now faces the maximum penalty.” He paused as if waiting for a round of applause. The silence was thick enough to cut with a sword. Somewhat feebly, if not more faintly than before, he called out, “Enjoy the show!”

He left the arena, still in that thick-bodied silence. Nicole could hear clearly the puffing of his breath and the creaking of the ladder as he climbed back to his seat. When he had settled in it and the ladder been pulled up, scraping and rattling against the stones of the wall, a low growl ran through the crowd. There was nothing human in it. They sounded like wolves themselves, closing in for the kill.

Beside Nicole, Calidius Severus struck his fist on his thigh. “About time that bastard got what’s coming to him. I thought they’d crucify him, but this will do as well.”

“Cru — “ Nicole began. He couldn’t have meant it literally. Could he?

She’d never thought of crucifixion in connection with anyone but Jesus, even though she knew the Romans had crucified two thieves with him. Yet again, the phrase cruel and unusual punishment ran through her head. Crucifixion was cruel, no doubt about that. What if it wasn’t unusual?

Two thieves and a revolutionary had died on that hill in Jerusalem. What were they going to do to the murderer Padusius, if they weren’t going to crucify him?

Calidius assumed she knew. It was something everyone knew, just as everyone in twentieth-century Los Angeles knew the death penalty was hardly ever used in California. She didn’t think Carnuntum was any more like California in this than in anything else. Whatever was going to happen to Padusius, she was sure it would be both bloody and painful.

She’d come to the conclusion some time since that the underdog in any fight came out of the left-hand gate. It opened now. There was a pause, a long holding of breath in the amphitheater. Then a shape wavered in it. A filthy man in a filthiest tunic stumbled, or was pushed, into the arena.

He stood swaying, blinking in the dazzle of sunlight. A shield hung on one arm, a flimsy thing Lucius would have scorned to play with. In his free hand he clutched a club no bigger and apparently not much heavier than a child’s baseball bat. It might have been adequate for killing mice. A rat would have laughed at it.

Nicole had deliberately stayed away from criminal law in her practice, but it wasn’t from lack of experience. She’d done an internship one term in the county prosecutor’s office, and had spent time and enough in the courthouse, watching plaintiffs and defendants come and go. Black, white, Asian, or Hispanic, the faces had all had a certain sameness, a common expression. She’d never quite taken the time to define it.

Now she knew. It was guilt. Even when they didn’t care, even when they defied the system, something deep down in them told the truth. If they hadn’t done what they were brought in for, they’d done other things perhaps even worse. Or else, if they were innocent, the sheet weight of their surroundings pulled them down till they looked as guilty as the rest.

Innocent until proven guilty, Nicole thought. Did Roman law even acknowledge the principle?

Whether it did or it didn’t, this man had been tried, convicted, and sentenced — to death, she could assume, though the law made a pretense of giving him a fighting chance. It didn’t stop him from standing in the middle of the arena with his flimsy shield and his ridiculous little club, and shrieking up at them all, “I’m innocent! By all the gods, I didn’t do it! “

Jeers and catcalls answered him, and a rain of more solid insults: eggs and rotten fruit that people must have brought for the purpose, half-eaten sausages, even stones and bits of brick. Padusius lifted his shield against the barrage. He was still shouting: Nicole saw his lips move. But the crowd drowned him out.

Nicole had no idea of the rights and wrongs of the case. She wondered if anyone else did, either. Nobody around her looked to give two whoops in hell for rights, wrongs, or anything in between. They wanted blood.

And they got it. A pair of lionesses bounded from the right-hand gate. Nicole didn’t know what she’d expected. A man, probably, or men. An execution squad, or another criminal pitted against this one, with the winner to be granted his life. She’d seen something like that in one of Frank’s old movies.

As she looked at the lionesses, and as the truth dawned on her, she wished she hadn’t eaten and drunk so much. She was going to lose it, right here between her grubby sandaled feet.

She’d heard in catechism class of Christians thrown to the lions. It was a cliche. She’d assumed — Sister Agatha had made her assume — that that was the punishment reserved for Christians. What if that wasn’t it at all? What if they were sent to the lions simply because they were criminals, or because they were reckoned criminals?

She should have been used by now to the shock of her preconceptions crumbling. It wasn’t going to let up — but it never seemed to get easier.

She closed her eyes and breathed as deep as she dared, which wasn’t very; the people around her, and for that matter she herself, were getting fairly ripe in the heat of the sun. She counted carefully to a hundred. She scraped together all the calm she had, and made herself open her eyes.

At sight of the lionesses, the crowd had gone crazy. Padusius’ scream of terror pierced even that pandemonium like a hot needle piercing butter.

If he’d wanted to live a little longer, a cold small part of Nicole observed, he should have kept his mouth shut. The lionesses had come out more baffled than furious; in fact, they seemed a little better fed than the animals that had fought earlier. They stood together just outside their gate, sniffing the air, crouching down under the force of the crowd’s roar. One looked ready to bolt back into her den, if the gate hadn’t slammed shut behind her.

Padusius’ shriek brought both of them to abrupt and complete attention. There was their dinner bell, loud and clear. They shook off the daze of sudden sunlight and the crowd’s roar, and loped toward the condemned man. They weren’t even bothering with stealth. Something in their manner told Nicole they’d hunted criminals before, and killed, too. They had no fear at all of his humanity, and took not the slightest notice of his flimsy excuse for a weapon.

Nor, for that matter, did he. He dropped the useless shield and club and bolted for the wall. Nicole had never seen a human being move so fast or jump so high. His fingers actually caught the topmost edge; a good ten feet up, and hooked over it. His feet scrabbled at the wall below, inching the rest of his body upward.

There were people sitting in the first row above the wall, men and women better dressed than most, some with parasols to protect them from the sun. One such, a creature so epicene Nicole took it for a woman till it turned slightly and she saw the curled beard, stamped down hard on the straining fingers. The crowd cheered. The dandy turned grandly about, bowing and throwing kisses.

Padusius dropped wailing to the sand. The lionesses sprang.

He was unarmed, his toy weapons flung aside and far out of reach, not much more useless there than they would have been in his hands. His fists beat against one great cat’s side. He kicked at the other. The lionesses took no more notice of his struggles than of the death-throes of a gazelle. He was nothing more to them than meat.

Nicole watched Padusius’ writhing ebb. She couldn’t shut her eyes, or turn her face away. She was caught in a sick, and sickened, fascination.

She’d never watched a man die before. Not for real, not right in front of her. People in California, in that world so far away in space and time, had spoken in favor of televising executions. Let the public see what capital punishment was really like, they had said. They’d abolish it then, in a fit of righteous horror.

Nicole had been rather inclined toward that view herself. Now she was sitting in a place where public executions were, from the looks of it, a common thing. The faces around her were avid, the eyes greedy, drinking in the sight of a human being dying hideously under the teeth and claws of lions. They’d made it a sport, like the slaughter of animals. It was a spectacle for their amusement.

Padusius’ struggles had all but stopped. The lionesses paused to lick red and dripping jaws, then bent their heads and began to feed. They wouldn’t wait for him to finish dying, any more than the male of their species had waited for the bear, or the wolves for the aurochs.

Calidius Severus spoke beside Nicole, startling her half out of her skin. The crowd’s roar had sunk to background noise. His voice was surprisingly distinct, and rather loud. “Well, that’s that. Pretty cursed quick, too — quicker than the son of a whore deserved.” He paused as if to ponder that, then sighed and shrugged. “Still and all, he won’t be breaking in the heads of honest people again, or doing worse, for that matter. I hear he outraged Domitius Zmaragdus’ wife after he’d murdered her husband in front of her.”

“Did he?” Nicole said faintly. It seemed her overloaded stomach would stay where it belonged. A few minutes before, she wouldn’t have bet on it. Calidius Severus had just given her the most powerful argument of all in favor of capital punishment: Now we know he won’t do it again.

Did hearing that Padusius was a rapist as well as a murderer make her feel easier about watching him die? Almost with his dying breath, he’d sworn he hadn’t committed the crime for which he’d been condemned. Was he telling the truth?

There was no way, now, to know. All the witnesses were dead. The suspect was dying, was maybe already gone. His foot jerked beneath a lioness’ paw, startling Nicole. The lioness snapped at it and began to gnaw, as a dog will gnaw on a favorite bone.

Whatever the truth was, whether the man was guilty or innocent, it didn’t matter now. One way or the other, he was just as dead.

They — the authorities, Faustinianus, whoever was in charge — let the lionesses eat their fill of Padusius’ body. People started getting up, stretching and belching, jostling one another as they headed for the exits.

Calidius Severus touched Nicole’s arm, a light brush of the fingers, quickly taken away. Nicole shivered. She wasn’t repulsed, not at all, but neither was she in a mood to be touched.

“Shall we go?” he asked. “No gladiators this afternoon; it’s too early on in the games. The last couple of days, I expect they’ll put on a healthy show.”

“Gladiators?” Nicole knew what the word meant: she could hardly help it. She hadn’t thought she would need the knowledge. Carnuntum kept surprising her, as usual in ways dismaying rather than delightful.

If you looked at them the right — no, the wrong — way, gladiatorial shows made a horrid kind of sense. Beasts killed beasts for the Romans’ amusement. Beasts killed men for the Romans’ amusement, too; the lionesses were still gnawing meat from the bones of the man who had insisted he wasn’t a murderer. If you took those two for granted, why not have men kill men for the Romans’ amusement?

Nicole thrust herself to her feet and turned her back on the bloody spectacle below. “I have no interest in watching gladiators,” she said firmly.

“All right,” Calidius Severus said equably. “If I have time to go, I’ll go with Gaius. He’s always been more interested in the finer points of the fighting than you have, anyway. “

He didn’t sound annoyed at all, or even particularly disappointed. It was like a father taking his grown son to a football game and leaving his girlfriend at home.

And what did they show of football on the news? Half the time, it seemed to Nicole, they showed players getting spectacularly, if not usually bloodily, hurt. Maybe the gap between Carnuntum and West Hills was narrower than she’d supposed.

No. She shook her head. Football injuries were incidental to the game. They weren’t the point of the exercise. Boxing? That was legalized mugging, pure and simple. But people didn’t usually die in a boxing match.

But that wasn’t all Calidius Severus had meant. He was a veteran, an ex-legionary. He’d really used sword and spear and shield. (And… killed people with them? Nicole didn’t want to think about that. Not just this moment.) Fine points in his line of work weren’t just about winning a game. They were about staying alive.

When in Rome… Nicole shook her head again, and shivered slightly as she always did when she caught herself understanding how the Romans saw the world. Things made sense if you looked at them in that particular way. It didn’t make them any more right.

The crowd by now had thinned quite a bit. Calidius Severus led her back down the rows of benches, sidestepping the debris of a long day’s entertainment. Instead of paper cups and cigarette butts and hotdog wrappers, Nicole made her way past empty sausage casings and half-eaten buns and spilled wine. It seemed an unconscionably long time before they reached the exit, and longer still before the bottleneck of people let go and disgorged them into the sunlit field. The green of its grass was cool and restful after the hard glare of sand in the arena.

Nicole let out a long sigh of relief. Her eyes slid back to the place where the Heidentor didn’t stand. In much the same way, her tongue ran over the broken teeth in her mouth more often than it sought out the whole ones. What was missing and should have been there was more interesting than what was where it belonged.

“I hope you had a good time.” Titus Calidius Severus sounded more like a nervous teenager coming home from his first date with a girl than a middle-aged man out with a longtime lover. He’d been eyeing her the same way she’d eyed the Heidentor: wondering where the familiar had gone.

She didn’t let him see her smile. He’s not taking me for granted, she thought. Good. Aloud, she said, “I enjoyed the time with you, but I’ve lost my taste for beast shows. “

He started to speak. She would have bet a fistful of denarii it was something about womanish weakness. If that was so, he visibly and prudently decided against it, and cleared his throat instead. He walked on for a bit, toward the city gate. Then he said, with some care, “I always enjoy the time I spend with you, Umma.”

Nicole regarded him with widened eyes. “Why, Titus! That’s sweet.” Did he blush? Hard to tell. She found she was smiling. He might smell like ancient piss, but he had more style than most of the California yuppies she’d known.

The moment she stepped through the gate of Carnuntum, Titus Calidius Severus’ familiar stench blew right out of her head. She’d been away from the city stink for a few hours; it was gone from her nose. Now it struck her full force, every bit as strong as the day she found herself in Umma’s body. It was like being slammed in the face with a long-dead salmon.

She must have grimaced. Calidius Severus slanted one of his lopsided grins at her. It warmed her in ways she hadn’t expected, and didn’t, at the moment, particularly want. “Always something in the air that lets you know when you’ve come to a town,” he said dryly. “You do stop noticing after a while, the gods be praised.”

“A good thing you do, too.” Nicole tried her damnedest not to breathe. Yes, dammit, she’d lost the immunity she’d taken so long to acquire.

At least it cooled her down, and let her look at her companion through something other than a hormonal haze.

She let him lead her back through Carnuntum. She was reasonably sure she could have found her way back to the tavern without him; she’d come to understand that the main streets of the city were laid out in a grid, a sequence of large squares. But in between these wider avenues, lesser streets and alleys twisted in a bewildering maze.

Those were, at the moment, dry. For that, Nicole was deeply grateful. None was paved, and few had sidewalks.

Calidius Severus walked her back to the tavern. Outside the door, he hesitated. Nicole hadn’t seen a man hesitate like that since her dates worried more about acne than about five o’clock shadow. Working up the nerve to kiss me, she thought with a glimmer of amusement. If he hadn’t hesitated, if he’d tried to take a kiss as if he were entitled to it, she would have sent him on his way, with a clout in the ear to remember her by.

Because he was so diffident about it, so obviously unsure she’d allow it, she let the kiss happen. He tasted of wine. For all his shyness going in, he knew how to kiss. He was eager, but he didn’t try to swallow her alive.

Something quivered, deep down inside. It wasn’t desire, not quite, but a shadow of it: an awareness that if she wanted to, if she let it happen as she’d let the kiss happen, she could feel desire.

She didn’t know which of them broke the kiss first. If it was Calidius Severus, he was in no hurry to let her go. As close as he held her, she couldn’t be in any doubt as to how he felt about it.

Before things could get awkward, she slipped out of his arms.

He stood flatfooted, still reaching for her, though she’d moved just out of reach. “Umma — “ he began.

She tilted her head. “Yes?” she asked. She didn’t mean to be unfriendly, but neither did she want him to think she wanted to hop into bed with him then and there.

One thing she’d seen before this, and for which she gave him credit, was that he did actually listen to her. He paid attention not only to what she said but also to how she said it.

His frown, right now, said he understood perfectly well that that yes didn’t mean, Yes, let’s do it. “You’ve been funny lately,” he said.

Nicole laughed. Once she’d started, she found she couldn’t stop. Part of it was the wine. Part was the sheer magnitude of Calidius’ understatement, and how little he knew, or could know, how great it was.

He waited with commendable patience for her laughter to run down. When at last it did, he said, “I didn’t think I was that funny.” His tone might have been wry, or it might have been bewildered. With a shrug that matched it, he turned away from her and headed across the street toward his own shop.

She watched him go. She didn’t know what she was feeling. Regret. Relief. A little guilt — and that made her angry, because she’d wished herself into this place to get away from just this kind of emotional bullying. She hadn’t wanted him. Why should she feel as if she’d done something wrong?

She turned abruptly, pivoting on her heel, and stalked into the tavern.

It was empty except for Julia, but, from the looks of the cups and bowls that the freedwoman was scrubbing, business had been brisk just a little earlier. Bread was baking, fresh and fragrant. The aroma of garlic and herbs wafted from the pot over the hearth. Julia had made one of her pot-dishes for the evening trade.

Julia didn’t seem to notice anything odd in Nicole’s face or gait. She was grinning, in fact, and clapping her hands. Nicole wondered dourly what Julia had been up to while she was away.

“Well?” the freedwoman pressed when Nicole didn’t say anything. “Did you have a good time at the beast show?”

Watching animals fighting and killing one another, watching the lionesses pull down and feed on the condemned criminal — no, Nicole had not enjoyed the show. But that wasn’t quite what Julia had asked.

In Indiana and later in California, Nicole had gone to plenty of lousy movies and still come home happy. She didn’t know that happy was the word she’d have used of herself at the moment, and yet… “Do you know,” she said, surprised and not altogether displeased, “after all, I think I did.”