Household Gods

4

IT went, thank God, better than she’d dared hope. It still wasn’t easy, not for her, but the kids, like the servant, seemed prepared to take her on faith. Why not? She looked like their mother. She sounded like their mother. Who else could she be?

By now she took in data as automatically, and almost as effortlessly, as she had when she was studying for the bar exam. As she had then, she shut out emotions that wouldn’t immediately serve her purposes, simply recorded them and filed them away to deal with later.

She had — Umma had — two children: a son named Lucius, who looked about eight years old, and a daughter called Aurelia, a couple of years younger. Aurelia reminded Nicole of Kimberley. It wasn’t just that they were near enough the same age, and it certainly wasn’t that they looked alike — Aurelia, naturally enough, looked like a smaller version of Umma. But the way she carried herself, the turn of her head when she looked at her mother, the prim little purse of her mouth, were all strikingly like Kimberley.

It struck Nicole rather strongly, if belatedly, that Umma might be one of her ancestors. The dream she’d had, the double spiral ladder of DNA, could have been the way she’d traveled here. Almost all of her great-grandparents had come to the United States from Austria. Carnuntum was — had been — would be — in Austria. Suppose their several-dozen-times great-grandparents had come from here, from this town?

What a chain of coincidences if it was true: that she should have honeymooned in Carnuntum, that she’d found the votive plaque, that it had become the constant occupant of her nightstand, even long after it stopped being a symbol of her marriage to Frank Perrin. And after that marriage had gone sour beyond all repair, when her job imploded on her and her whole life was falling apart, a prayer expressed as a wish had done the impossible, had brought her down through the long chain of genes into this one of all her myriad ancestors.

Another thought trod on the heels of the first. If Umma was her ancestor, then so was either Lucius or Aurelia — or, for that matter, so were both of them. She swallowed a sudden, nearly hysterical giggle. They were children, half her size. Hard to imagine that they’d grow up, have children of their own, and those would have children, and…

Right now, at this moment in the long skein of time, they were children, as real and unmistakable as Justin or Kimberley. They tore into breakfast as if, if they ate it fast enough, they’d grow into adulthood between the first bite and the last. She kept her mouth shut when they soaked their bread in olive oil and ate it greasy and dripping. They were growing children. They could get away with it.

At least, she thought, they aren’t swilling down cholesterol with the fat. Did people in the Roman Empire even know what cholesterol was?

The children’s table manners could have been better, but she kept quiet about those, too. For now. Lucius wolfed down every crumb of his bread, licked lips glistening with oil, and snapped to the young woman, “Julia! More bread.”

“Yes, young sir,” Julia said, and dropped her own breakfast to rise and do as he ordered. She smiled a-trifle sadly at Nicole. “Doesn’t he sound just like his father, Mistress? He tries so hard to be a little man — so good of him, and so well done, with your poor husband gone among the shades so young. We’ve need of a man about the house.”

Nicole reined in her first response, which was to demand to know what was so good about a man underfoot. So she was a widow, was she? Well, good for the late Mr. Umma, whatever his name had been. At least he’d had the courtesy to die instead of running off with the cute young thing next door.

Lucius snatched the bread that Julia brought him and sopped it in oil, without so much as a word or a glance. Nicole frowned. Table manners were one thing. Courtesy was another altogether. “Lucius,” she said sternly, “that was impolite. I didn’t hear you say ‘please’ to Julia. And what should you have said when she brought you your bread?”

Lucius looked at her as if she’d gone off her head. “What should I have said, Mother?”

He didn’t sound as if he was sassing her, though the words could hardly mean anything else. Nicole took a deep breath and counted to five before she answered. “What about ‘thank you’?”

Lucius’ straight black brows went up. “ ‘Thank you? To a slave?”

Nicole’s mouth was open. She shut it. She looked at Julia in a dawning horror. She couldn’t be a slave. Slaves were something out of -

Something out of old dead history. This was old dead history. This, right now, this world she was living in.

Julia didn’t even blink at what Lucius had called her, or at his tone. She sat back down in her place — a little apart from the others, Nicole saw as if for the first time, and on a lower stool, so that her head was a little below theirs. She kept it bowed even lower as she tucked into her own bread and oil and, with a sort of cautious defiance in the glance she shot at Nicole, her wine.

When Nicole thought of slavery, she thought of African-Americans and cotton fields and the Civil War. She vaguely recalled a movie or two about Rome, and something about slaves. Slave revolts? Chariot races? Charlton Heston? Frank would have known, damn him. Frank had a thing for Fifties movie epics. She’d ignored them when he had them on, except to notice that there was a lot of noise and bare skin, and costumes that made her think of a slow night in a Vegas casino. She’d forgotten all that when she prayed to come back to Roman days. She’d never imagined that she’d come back as a slaveowner. No late-twentieth-century minds thought like that.

Neither did they think of traveling back in time at all, not seriously. Not unless they were heavily into fantasy and gaming and all the rest of that unreal nonsense.

This was real enough. So was Julia, sitting there drinking the last of her wine with a little too clearly evident enjoyment.

While Nicole sat speechless, Aurelia held out her cup to Julia and said, “Get me some more wine.” Her eyes flicked to Nicole. She added, “Please.” Her smug little smile was the image of Kimberley’s. Look how good I’m being, it proclaimed to the world, and look what a nasty brat my brother is.

Nicole had always detested that smugness in Kimberley. It didn’t look any better in Aurelia, or do her any more good, either. Nicole snatched the cup from her hand before Julia could take it. She raised it to her nose and sniffed. The odor was unmistakable. “You are giving the children wine?” Her voice was quiet, dangerously so.

Julia understood her. “Yes, Mistress,” she said, as quietly, but without the deadly edge. There was a suggestion of great patience and of indulging a preposterous fancy, but it was too faint to do more than bristle at. “Of course I am, Mistress. I watered the wine half and half, just as I always do. I’d never give it to them neat. You know that, Mistress.”

Nicole didn’t care what excuses she made, nor listen to her beyond that first, damning yes. “You gave them wine,” she said again, incredulous. “What are you trying to do, turn them into — “ She groped in her new Latin vocabulary, hunting for the word that was so clear in English: alcoholics. There wasn’t any such word. The best she could wasn’t quite good enough: “Are you trying to turn them into drunkards?”

“I said,” Julia said with an air of shaky determination, “I watered it exactly as I should, as I was supposed to — as you, Mistress, always told me to — till now.”

She thought she’d done right, Nicole realized. She was so sure of it that she’d even held her ground against her — her owner. Nicole shuddered. Julia, oblivious, went on, “Mistress, by all the gods I don’t know why you’ve taken so against wine today. Are you feeling well? Are you ill? Should I fetch you some poppy juice?”

Poppy juice? Opium? One can of worms at a time. Nicole thought. “I am not ill,” she said with taut-strung patience. “And you are not to give my children wine for breakfast.”

“Then,” said Julia, still defiant, “what am I supposed to give them?”

“Milk, of course,” Nicole answered sharply. Didn’t she know that? Didn’t anybody?

Apparently not. “Milk?” the children and Julia said in chorus, all three; and in the same shocked tone, too. Lucius and Aurelia hacked and gagged and made disgusted faces. You’d have thought she’d just tried to feed them a plate of lima beans.

“Milk?” Aurelia repeated. “It’s slimy!”

“It tastes horrible,” Lucius said. They looked at each other and nodded in perfect, and horrified, agreement. Nicole didn’t think they agreed like that very often.

“It’s expensive,” Julia said, making it sound like a clincher. “And besides, Mistress, you can’t keep it fresh. It’s even worse than fish. You waste what you don’t use, because it’s sure to be sour the next day, especially this time of year. Please pardon me for telling you, but really, Mistress, what in the world makes you want to feed them milk?”

“Because it’s full of — “ Nicole found she couldn’t say calcium in Latin, either, even though it sounded like a Latin word to her. This time, her circumlocution was clumsy: “It helps make bones strong.”

“Barbarians drink milk,” Lucius said, as if that settled everything. “The Marcomanni and the Quadi drink milk.” He stuck out his tongue. Not to be outdone, Aurelia stuck out hers, too.

Some arguments you just couldn’t win. This looked like one of them. Religion, politics, divorce — on some things, people’s minds locked themselves shut and lost the key. If she tried to force it, she’d get into a fight; and that wouldn’t gain her anything.

Sidestep, then. “If you won’t drink milk, will you drink water?” she asked. The children didn’t look happy, but they didn’t screw up their faces and make puking noises, either. Neither did Julia, though her expression was eloquent. Nicole threw an argument at the kids to bolster her case: “I drank water this morning, and it hasn’t hurt me.”

“You did?” Lucius sounded as if she’d just told him — well, as if she’d told him that she’d traveled in time from the twentieth century and she wasn’t his mother at all.

What joy, she thought. A whole family of alcoholics in training, from the baby on up — and their mother is in business selling wine. She’d fix that, maybe not all in a day considering how Julia and the children had reacted to her suggestion that wine maybe wasn’t the best thing for a human to drink, but by Liber and Libera she would show them how a healthy person ought to live. “I certainly did drink water this morning,” she said to Lucius. “Ask Julia if you don’t believe me. She watched me do it. She even fetched the pitcher and poured me a cup. “

Lucius laughed. It was a distinctly and viscerally unpleasant sound, a Beavis-and-Butthead snigger. “Huh! That’s funny, Mother. You can’t believe a slave about anything. Only way they can testify is if you torture them.” He made a horrible face at Julia, a twisted devil-snarl, and jabbed his finger at her, with indescribable boy-type sound effects: hissing and bubbling and an abrupt, blood-curdling shriek.

He was making it up. He had to be. But Julia’s white face and the sudden change in her silence, the way her shoulders went tight and hunched under her sad bag of a tunic, ate away at Nicole’s disbelief.

She’d never taken legal history. It hadn’t been required, and she hadn’t been interested, and she hadn’t had time even if she had been interested. Now, with piercing intensity, she wished that she had.

Legal history she might have missed, but she’d been a parent long enough to know how to shut down a thread of discussion that was going in a dangerous direction. Briskly, she said, “We’re not talking about court right now, young man. Are you saying Julia and I would both lie to you about what I drank? ‘

Lucius shrank suddenly, startling her: flinched into himself, as if he’d expected a slap. “No, Mother,” he said. “I’ll drink water after this, Mother. I promise I will.”

God, what had he expected? That she’d clobber him, just because he’d been obnoxious? What kind of mother had this Umma been? Not just alcoholism — abuse. Her stomach, even as full of breakfast as it was, felt small and tight and cold.

It knotted even tighter when Aurelia hastened to agree with her brother. “I’ll drink water, too,” she said. “I’ll drink it right now. Julia, get me some water!”

Julia glanced at Nicole. Nicole nodded sharply. Julia sighed just audibly, poured Aurelia’s wine into her own cup, and filled Aurelia’s again with water.

Nicole’s triumph, such as it was, was evaporating fast. Julia had just manipulated herself into a double ration of wine. Umma’s children were flat-out terrified, and their fear had given Nicole the victory. What kind of mother raised her children to be afraid of her? Not any kind of mother I am, Nicole resolved grimly. And Julia — tricky bits aside, Julia obeyed her mistress, oh, sure. But she did it with slow sullenness, neither too slow nor too sullen to be caught and punished, but just enough to make her feelings clear.

Just what did Julia think wine was? Or was it water she was afraid of? Nicole knew about not drinking the water in Third-World countries, but that was for Americans traveling away from their chlorinated, fluoridated, homogenized, pasteurized, all-clean-and-sanitized local water companies. People who actually lived in those countries did perfectly well on the water there. Wasn’t she — in Umma’s body — still standing up and not crouched groaning over a chamberpot?

So much ignorance. So much misunderstanding of what was best for people’s health. Maybe Liber and Libera had sent her back to make life better for these people, to teach them about sanitation and hygiene and healthy food and drink. Surely they hadn’t given her her wish just because she wanted it. There had to be something they meant her to do in return.

If she was to do any good, if that was what she was here for — and never mind if she wasn’t; she’d do it anyhow — she had to learn much more of this world and place than she knew. Knowing Latin, for instance, didn’t seem to let her know where anything was in Carnuntum.

Still, how hard could that be? Social mores and mental attitudes were rough, and she was working her way gingerly through those. Carnuntum itself was much simpler. If she’d found her way around Los Angeles, all hundreds of square miles of it, and even learned to drive its freeways without going catatonic with terror — she could learn what she needed to know about this much smaller, much less complicated town.

She didn’t know the date, either. Well, she could ask that, and she did, casually, as if it had slipped her mind.

“It’s four days before the Kalends of June, Mistress,” Julia said, and then added, “I think.” At least she wasn’t surprised to be asked.

May 28, Nicole thought after a moment of going back and forth between what she knew in Latin and what she knew in English. It was only half an answer, and the smaller half. “Everything’s going out of my head this morning,” she said with what she hoped was a light little laugh. “What year is it?”

“It’s — what? — the ninth year of the reign of Marcus Aurelius,” Julia said. Her voice held a little of the tone Nicole knew well: The boss is an idiot. it meant. But only a little. It was, oddly, maybe deceptively reassuring. Maybe Umma wasn’t a brutal slavemaster after all.

Or maybe it meant a slave didn’t dare step too far over the line. Nicole had seen that in offices with tyrannical bosses, or in houses where the parents were too strict. Employees, and kids, learned just how far they could go, and went that far and no further.

Lucius broke in on her thoughts with the air of the know-it-all proving he really did know it all: “The consuls for the year are Marcus Cornelius Cethegus and Gaius Erucius Clarus.”

Nice, Nicole thought. And no help at all. She might have heard of Marcus Aurelius once upon a time, but no way in the world did she know when he’d reigned. The other two names had a fine and ringing sound, but they meant exactly nothing. And what difference did it make, anyway, who or what a consul was? Were they like President and Vice President? King and queen? Lord Mayor of London?

Careful; she was getting sarcastic. She tried one more time, and hoped the strain didn’t show in her voice: “I wonder what year this would be by the Christian calendar?”

Lucius and Aurelia gaped, then made gagging noises — exactly as they’d done when she’d suggested they drink milk. Julia said with prim firmness, “I didn’t even know those nasty people had a calendar. I don’t have anything to do with them. They’re all crazy, or so you’d think, the way they act. Even I know better, and I’m only a slave. They don’t respect the gods. They won’t worship the Princeps — why, they throw themselves on legionaries’ swords if anyone tries to make them. If you ask me, they deserve whatever they get.”

That was more than Nicole had bargained for. She thought of herself as a Catholic, though she’d gone to church only a handful of times since she got married, and not at all since the divorce. Visions of catechism class, crucifix on the wall and sappy long-faced Jesus, Christians and lions and legionaries dicing in front of the Cross, swirled in her head, fast enough to make her dizzy. All that, and Victor Mature standing up to Peter Ustinov in a purple gown, while the choir’s voices swelled in the background.

She’d gone back that far? God. Or Jesus. Or somebody. And she hadn’t come back as a Christian, either. Somehow it had never occurred to her that that could happen, that she’d be — a pagan. Or something. It was startling how that struck her, that same twisting in the stomach she’d had when she was seven years old and had learned that not only were some people not Catholic, some people didn’t even believe in Jesus. “Will they go to hell?” she’d asked her mother.

She didn’t remember what her mother had said. Something impatient, probably: “Shut up and eat your dinner.” Her mother didn’t like answering hard questions. Her catechism teacher, when she asked the same question, had gone on about sincere belief, tolerance for other religions, and differing views of the afterlife. It had been more than she’d been ready to swallow, at that age. In a lot of ways, it still was.

Even worse than being a pagan, than being surrounded by pagans, was hearing one of them scorn the religion she’d grown up in. Never mind that she’d fallen away from it. Maybe political correctness had something in it after all. For that matter, so did simple politeness.

She drew breath to begin a reprimand, but let it out again without saying anything. What good would it do? She’d learned long ago never to get into arguments over politics or religion. People’s minds were always made up.

She glanced at Lucius and Aurelia. Was Aurelia named for Marcus Aurelius? Did they do things like that here?

For that matter, weren’t the children supposed to be getting ready for school? Did they even go to school? If they did, they weren’t showing any signs of it. Or was today Saturday? Sunday? Did Saturday or Sunday matter in Carnuntum in the ninth year of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, whenever that was? How could she find out without looking like an idiot again?

Before she could find an answer to any of those crowding questions, Julia said, “Oh! Mistress, here’s Ofanius Valens. He’s early today.” She leaped up and ran busily about, as if the boss had come into the office and found the secretaries in the middle of a kaffeeklatsch.

Nicole leaped up, too, but, once she was up, had no idea what to do. Christ! she thought in panic. A customer! At least Julia had given her his name. She scrambled to remember what a proper restaurant owner would say to a regular. “Good day to you, Ofanius Valens,” she said as smoothly as she could manage — fund-raisers were good practice; so were jury selections. “What can we get for you?”

He sat down on a stool: a thin fellow a few years younger than she, not too clean but not too dirty, either. He’d had horrible acne in his youth, which couldn’t be that long ago; his beard didn’t hide all the scars. “First time you’ve even asked in a while,” he said with a familiar chuckle. “My usual will do fine, thanks.”

And thank you, Ofanius Valens. I’ll remember you in my nightmares. Umma, no doubt, had known what his usual was. Nicole hadn’t the faintest idea. But maybe, she thought with a stab of relief, someone did. “Julia,” she said, “take care of him.”

“Yes, Mistress,” Julia said, and did. Along with his bread and oil, Ofanius Valens favored walnuts and green onions and the wine from under the second lid from the left. As he ate, the eye-watering pungency of the onions moved in around him and settled to stay.

He seemed content enough to have Julia deal with him rather than Umma in person. Nicole congratulated herself for escaping unscathed, for once, from yet another difficult situation. What she’d done didn’t dawn on her for a few moments. She’d ordered Julia about as a mistress would order a slave.

No, she told herself. I’d have handled it the same way if she were free and working for me. Maybe that was true. She thought it was true. She devoutly hoped it was.

She shivered, though the room was warm enough. Every word she spoke to Julia, every gesture she made, couldn’t be a normal human interaction. Not as long as Julia was her property. Everything she did, as long as she knew that, was a political act.

As soon as Nicole knew how it was done, if it could be done, she’d have to free Julia. She couldn’t go on living like this, owning another human being, treating her like an object. Pretending Julia was a hired servant didn’t cut it. The truth remained, insurmountable.

Should she free the rest of the slaves, too? For of course there had to be more. Lots of people had to have them, if Umma, who wasn’t particularly wealthy or powerful, could own one. But Nicole couldn’t start right this instant. She didn’t know enough — and reality, in the person of Ofanius Valens, intervened. He fumbled in the pouch he wore attached to his belt. “An as for the bread,” he said, and slapped a copper coin about the size of a quarter on the table in front of him. “An as for the oil.” He brought out another copper coin.

Nicole was glad he knew what everything cost, because God knew she didn’t. “Two asses for the nuts and onions. “ Two more of the copper coins. “And two asses for the wine. Here, I’ll give you a dupondius, because I’m running out of asses.” This coin was bigger and brighter, yellowish instead of dirty-penny brown. It couldn’t have been gold, not if it was worth only two of the copper ones. Brass, maybe? Julia, watching him count up the bill, nodded at the amount. Nicole breathed a faint sigh of relief. She wasn’t being ripped off, then.

“Here,” Ofanius Valens said with a wink, “I’ve got one lonely as left in my purse. If I give it to Julia, you will let her spend it on herself?”

For an instant, Nicole didn’t understand why he’d asked her that. Julia was an adult, wasn’t she? Then realization smote. Legally speaking, Julia wasn’t an adult. Probably, she wasn’t even a person. Which had to mean that, technically, that as belonged to her owner. Before Julia could accept it, Nicole had to assent. “Yes,” she said, trying not to let anger at the system show. “Yes, of course.”

Ofanius Valens nodded and smiled. He hadn’t intended her to refuse, nor given her much room to do it, either, by the signs. Nicole might have lousy taste in men, but she could read them perfectly well — too well, maybe, if you asked any one of a number of male lawyers whom she’d shown up in front of a judge. Men didn’t like to know how transparent they were.

“Thank you very much, Mistress,” Julia said. If Ofanius Valens had expected Nicole to say yes, she probably had, too. Her gratitude had a hint of calculation in it, the calculation of the extremely disadvantaged. If she didn’t grovel enough, she might be thinking, then maybe next time she wouldn’t be allowed to keep the money she got. Children could think like that. So could employees. But there was an edge to it, a hint of ugliness. More than anyone else, a slave had to keep her mistress sweet, or who could say what might happen? If a slave wasn’t considered human, how could she have human rights?

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.

She rummaged hastily through the drawers of the chest. The only box there was the one she’d found earlier, with its pots and jars of makeup. More out of desperation than anything else, she pulled the chest away from the wall — and nearly fell down in relief. There where it must have rested between chest and wall sat a wooden box. She picked it up, and grunted a little with surprise. It was heavy — and it rattled, a lovely, faintly sweet sound, the sound — she hoped — of coins sliding against one another.

The dizziness of relief went briefly dark. She’d crowed too soon. This had to be the cash box, and that was wonderful — but the box was locked.

The lock, broader and deeper than a regular padlock, was of shiny brass like a sestertius. So were the hasps holding it to the cash box. Those hasps looked stout. Nicole tugged hard at the lock. No give at all. No way she’d pull that lock off, or break it either, not without tools. She had to find the key.

And if she wanted to keep people downstairs from suspecting that she wasn’t Umma, she’d have to find the key pretty damn quick. “Where the hell did she put it?” she muttered in English. The words felt strange on her tongue after so many hours of speaking Latin.

She knew what was in the drawer with the makeup case. She’d emptied that one out most thoroughly. She shuffled through the others one at a time, with rapidly receding hope. Last of all and reluctantly, with the same sensation she’d had when she had to change a loaded diaper, she opened the drawer filled with stained rags. She tossed them on the floor, trying to touch them as little as possible. Close to the bottom, tangled in a knot of ill-washed scraps, something caught at her fingers. She pulled at the rags. The thing inside them slipped free. She’d been afraid it would be a brooch or a buckle or a bit of useless jewelry, but her luck had finally turned. A brass key gleamed in the shadow of the drawer. It was an odd-looking thing, the teeth cut perpendicular to the shaft instead of along its edge as on the keys she knew.

When she thrust the key into the lock, it refused to turn. “Oh, come on!” she snapped at it. She twisted and jiggled. Nothing. Her fingers clenched till they began to ache.

She hissed at them and at the intractable lock — God, don’t tell me that’s not the key, it’s got to be the key. Just as she was about to scream in frustration, the lock clicked and, grudgingly, ground open.

She held her breath as she opened the box. If it proved to be full of buttons or bangles or something equally worthless, she really was going to scream.

Her breath rushed out in a groan of relief. The box was filled nearly full: copper, bronze, even a little silver, coins of all sizes and states of wear, from dim and almost illegible asses to silver denarii like the one she had to make change for, and quickly too. It would be just her luck if the customer had cursed her and her fool of a slave, taken his change and his denarius too, and left in a snit.

She hurled the rags all anyhow back into the drawer, slammed it shut, shoved the chest against the wall, and fairly fell downstairs. The man was still there, for a miracle. He’d fallen into conversation with another of the customers, she hoped not about how strangely Umma was acting today; he broke it off in his own good time, and took the three sesterces that she handed him, scowling at their brassy gleam. “Took you long enough,” he growled. “What did you have to do, fetch them from the mint?”

“Was that lock giving you trouble again, Mistress?” Julia asked with an air of great solicitude. Turning to the customer, she went on, “You should hear all the things Mistress Umma calls that lock. Anybody would think she’d been in the legion herself, not just married to a veteran — may he rest in peace among the shades.”

“Heh,” the man said: one syllable’s worth of laughter. He tossed the change into his purse and stalked off jingling.

When he was gone, Nicole lifted her brows at Julia. “Am I really as bad as that about the lock?” she asked.

Julia nodded, wide-eyed: another of her exaggerated stage effects. “Worse, Mistress, since you’re the one who wants to know,” she replied. Lucius and Aurelia mirrored her nod, big eyes and all. So were they in it together, or was Nicole — Umma — as paranoid as that?

It paid to be paranoid in Los Angeles, but here? What could there be to be afraid of, that anyone from the twentieth century should worry about — except being discovered for what she was?

It was midmorning, as best Nicole could determine, and the children still showed no sign of going off to school. Either this was a weekend (did the Romans have weekends?), or they didn’t go. Nicole could read and write, of course, and she’d seen that she was literate in Latin, too. Had Umma been as well? She hadn’t seen any books in the bedroom, but that didn’t prove anything. There hadn’t been any in her bedroom in West Hills, either, only the latest issue of Cosmo. Most of the books in the house, and all the bookcases, had gone with Frank. If Nicole ever had time to read at all, she read legal briefs that she’d brought home from the office.

These children of Umma’s weren’t completely idle. They seemed to have their chores: cracking nuts, chopping scallions, sweeping out between waves of customers. They played, too, at headlong speed, till the inevitable happened: Aurelia screeched, Lucius whooped, they were on each other like cats and dogs. Nicole, as much amused as not — children, it seemed, were the same in every place and time — waded in and separated them. “There now,” she said, “you know that’s not nice. Lucius, be good to your little sister. Aurelia, don’t poke your brother, it’s rude. Now be good. Mother’s busy.”

Nicole went back to grinding wheat into flour. It was hard work: her shoulder had already started to ache. Lucius and Aurelia watched her for a little while in silence, as if fascinated; then they were at it again, Aurelia poking, Lucius thumping with his fist, one screeching, the other jeering, till it escalated into honest violence.

Nicole hissed between her teeth, left the mill for the second time and pulled them apart again, not quite so gently as before. Sore shoulder, toothache that never went away, and now children who refused to yield to reason, left her very little patience to spare. She held them apart in a firm grip, and glared into their flushed faces. “Didn’t the two of you listen to a word I said?”

“Well, yes, Mother,” Lucius answered seriously, “but you didn’t hit us, so you couldn’t have really meant it.” Aurelia nodded as if she thought exactly the same preposterous thing.

Nicole stared at both of them. She understood the words they said — as words. The thoughts behind them were as strange to her as the far side of the moon. Umma must beat them, she thought, for them to talk that way. Hadn’t Lucius flinched earlier when he’d thought she was going to wallop him?

At the same time, they didn’t act the way abused children were supposed to act — the way she’d learned in law school they acted. There weren’t any marks on them, bruises or evident broken bones. They didn’t cringe when she lifted a hand, not unless they’d done something they thought deserved a spanking, or go mute when she spoke. There was nothing subdued about them. Lucius spoke of being hit calmly, as if it were something he was used to, and nothing exceptional at all.

What kind of world was this, where children expected to be beaten, and weren’t obviously traumatized by it? That it wasn’t a world without violence, she’d certainly known, between Frank’s old movies and her own Sunday-school lessons: the Crucifixion, the persecution of Christians. But she’d never expected it to be as violent as it had turned out to be — or, what was worse, quite so easy about it. Her own century, after all, was the century of mass destruction, but life in America was sacred, and abuse, particularly abuse of children, was anathema. She’d thought better of this older, simpler age, and hoped for more than she was apparently going to get. Her jaw set in determination. These children were hers, it seemed, for the duration. Surely she had an obligation to teach them how civilized people should behave.

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.”

She punctuated that with a happy wiggle that caught the eye of every male in the place. There all too obviously wasn’t anything between her body and the much-worn tunic. Equally obviously, she hadn’t been quite dry when she put the tunic back on after her bath. A wet T-shirt it wasn’t, but it left precious little to imagination.

Nicole couldn’t match Julia’s happy tone, not with the thoughts she was thinking. “All right,” she said a bit more roughly than she’d intended. “Get back to work.”

Julia obeyed her with evident contentment. From the way she was acting, she’d expected nothing gentler, and probably something a great deal more harsh. Even in her depths of disgust for the male half of the species, Nicole couldn’t seem to match Umma for ferocity.

Sometime in the late afternoon — Nicole kept glancing at her left wrist, at a watch that wasn’t there — Titus Calidius Severus strode briskly into the restaurant with a pair of plump trout. “Hello, Umma,” he said cheerfully. “Thought I’d wait till things thinned out over here before I brought you these to fry.”

He smelled worse than the fish would have if he’d left them in the sun for three days. Nicole’s nose had tuned out most of the background stink of Carnuntum, but the fuller and dyer might have had a chamberpot spilled over his head. As she dipped the trout in an egg-and-flour batter she’d made up not long before, Nicole approached that by — she hoped — easy stages: “Do you have to have those jars out in front of your shop for — for men to — to piss in?”

“You’ve teased me about that often enough,” he said with a chuckle. She had, had she? Or Umma had. Nicole wasn’t teasing. Not in the least. He went on, “They’re not wagging their prongs at you, dear, even if it looks that way.” He reached across the counter and chucked her under the chin.

No one, not here, not anywhere, had ever done that to her. Even as a child, she hadn’t been the kind of little girl who invited such an insult. She certainly didn’t either invite or accept it as an adult. She slapped his hand down. To her utter fury, he only laughed and said, “Ai, pretty lady! I’ve had mates in the legion who weren’t as fierce as you.”

Nicole sucked in a breath, nearly choking on it. Her voice when it came was almost too tight to be audible. “Don’t you — ever — do that to me again. Or you won’t eat these fish, you’ll wear them.”

Somewhat to her surprise, he seemed to realize that she meant it. “All right,” he said willingly enough, if with a hint of puzzlement. “You never said you didn’t like it before — but what’s a woman if she can’t change her mind, eh?” He shrugged, grinned rather ruefully at himself, and went on more seriously, “Right. So. Pisspots. Don’t like them either, do you? Look at it this way. They’re neater than pissing against the wall — and I’d be out of work without them. There’s nothing like stale piss to get the grease out of wool so it’ll hold the dye. If rosewater would do the trick, I’d use it. But alas, pretty lady, it doesn’t.”

Nicole finished frying the trout in silence. She hadn’t thought whether Calidius Severus might actually need the urine he collected. She hadn’t wanted to think about it. Not to put too fine a point on it, she’d been too busy being grossed out.

She was supposed to be glad that this was a more natural, more organic world than the one she’d left: no plastics, no polyester, no coal-tar dyes. Urine was natural, all right; anyone who’d ever changed a baby knew that. But Carnuntum was rubbing her nose in the fact that natural and pleasant weren’t necessarily synonyms, no matter what the commercials for Quaker 100 % Natural said.

As Calidius began to eat his fish, he set a dupondim on the counter. Nicole started to give him back an as. He waved for her not to bother. “Call it a peace offering,” he said.

“All right,” she said after a pause. “A peace offering. Thank you.”

“These trout are good,” he said after he’d taken a bite or two. “I don’t think you ever did them quite like this before. Tasty.” He ate another mouthful. He used his fingers. They were a peculiar color, like nothing human: mottled blue and green and muddy brown, as if in dyeing cloth he had dyed his skin with it.

As for his table manners, nobody here had any better. Nicole had found spoons and a few knives in a pot by a stack of plates, but no forks. She wondered if Calidius had washed his hands before coming over with the fish. Then she wished she hadn’t. He said, “I don’t want you angry at me, you know.”

“I’m not angry,” she answered, more or less sincerely.

“Good.” He studied her. “Are you not-angry enough for me to come over tonight?” The meaning of that was unmistakable — and, as plainly, he expected her to say yes. Her face froze.

He saw. His own face stiffened in response. He stood up abruptly, grimaced, and shoved the plate at her. There was no meat left, only bones, neatly picked and pushed into a pile. Without a word, he stamped out of the restaurant.

Julia was gaping. So were all three of the remaining customers. Nicole sighed. So Umma and Calidius had been an item, had they? Why on earth the woman whose body Nicole was wearing would want a man who smelled like an outhouse was beyond her.

Whatever the reason for it, Julia obviously thought Umma and Titus Calidius Severus had had a good thing going. Well, to hell with what Julia thought. Nicole had come back here for herself, not to play bedwarmer to the piss merchant across the street.

She would have told Julia so, in no uncertain terms, but two more men and a woman came into the place just then, and set her to running about again. She stayed busy till sundown, which came late this time of year.

As soon as it began to get dark, business didn’t just fall off: it died. Nicole didn’t fully understand that till she lighted a lamp. Matches she didn’t have; she had to use a twist of straw from a basket by one of the cookfires, and light it from the fire. The oil-soaked wick sputtered and guttered before it came alive. The flame did next to nothing to push back the gathering gloom. Not for the first time, and very probably not for the last, she missed the daily magic of electric power.

The taberna was empty. So was the street. The children had come in not long before, devoured a supper of bread and cheese and a little of the smoked pork, and gone upstairs with Julia. They hadn’t insisted that she kiss them, though they’d stood in a line, slave and children alike, and said a polite good night. Nicole hadn’t tried to keep them downstairs, or tried to persuade them to eat a few vegetables with their bread and protein. She was too tired to fight that battle tonight. Tomorrow, she’d promised herself, on the children’s behalf. Even as she thought it she’d been struck with a memory of older guilt: Justin and his chicken nuggets and French fries, eating a meal that couldn’t possibly be good for him, because his mother was too tired to fix a proper dinner.

She missed him suddenly, so fiercely that for a moment she couldn’t breathe. She missed Kimberley. She missed the house in West Hills. She even -

No. She didn’t miss Frank. Not for one split second.

She took the lamp with her to the front door and stood in it, peering out. Good Lord, she thought: she hadn’t set foot outside all day. She looked across the street, then up and down. A few torches and lamps flickered, but only a few. Above the flat black line of roofs, a piercingly bright star — Venus? — hung in the western sky, at the edge of the skirts of twilight.

After work back in West Hills, she would have watched TV or read a magazine or put a CD on the stereo. No TV here, no magazines, no stereo or CDs.

Even if she’d had the energy for them, she’d have been too exhausted to bother. She pulled the solid weight of the door shut and barred it, then shuttered the windows. Picking up the feeble lamp again from where she’d set it on the table by the door, she retrieved the cash box and carried it upstairs. The stairs seemed steeper than ever in that bare hint of light, narrow and precipitous and ripe for a fall. But she managed them without even tripping, let alone breaking her neck.

The curtains were drawn in the other rooms. She ventured to look in. Two were empty, though one had a bed in it. The third was full of the sound of quiet breathing. Something large lay across the door. The rasp of a snore sent Nicole starting back, even as she realized what it was. Julia, sleeping on the floor, being a living obstacle to anything that tried to come in and get at the children. It was touching, in its way, though Nicole made a mental note to give Julia permission to sleep in one of the unused rooms. Whatever those were for. Guests? Storage? In the morning, or whenever she could, she’d have to look and see.

But not tonight. She was swaying on her feet. If Julia hadn’t been in the way, she might have gone in and tucked the children in as she would have done with Justin or Kimberley, but she wasn’t at all sure she could do it without waking the slave. Best to let them be.

In the room that she’d begun to think of as hers, she set the lamp on the chest and the cash box beside it. She had no energy at all for wrestling the heavy chest and hiding the box. What could happen to it, after all? The door was locked below, and she’d barred the door up here. She used the chamberpot — a luxury she’d had too little of in that long full day — and let herself sink down on the bed. Before she could even rise to blow out the lamp, she was deeply and soundly asleep.