Household Gods

5

Nicole woke earlier than she’d intended. The lamp had gone out. It was pitch-black outside, though the moon had climbed over the roof of the house, the shop, whatever it was, next door and sent a thin strip of wan gray light through the bedroom window. She hadn’t bothered to shutter it: this was the second floor; what could get in?

She noticed the light only peripherally, in that it helped her find the chamberpot. The one advantage of having the damned thing right there under the bed was that she didn’t need to race down the hall to the bathroom. That was as well, for she didn’t think she would have made it. The next couple of minutes were among the most urgently unpleasant she’d known for as long as she could remember.

“Stomach flu!” she groaned when the worst of it was over. What awful luck!

It was even more awful than she’d thought at first. There wasn’t any toilet paper. She used one of the rags from the drawer in the chest, and threw it into the chamberpot afterwards. And regretted instantly and powerfully that it wasn’t a toilet after all. A toilet you could flush. A pot just sat there, stinking. She lay back down with another groan. Even without the stink, she didn’t think she’d have gone back to sleep again in a hurry. She could tell she wasn’t done yet. A herd of buffalo with iron hooves was stampeding through her guts.

Just as she finished the second bout — almost as bad as the first, and no promise more wasn’t coming — somebody knocked on her door. “What is it?” she said weakly, amazed she’d remembered to use Latin. If it wasn’t the end of the world, she had no intention of getting up for it.

It was worse than the end of the world. “Mistress,” Julia said through the door, “Aurelia is puking something fierce, and Lucius has the trots.” She sounded as if she was afraid she’d be killed for bringing the bad news.

Who knew? Maybe in Carnuntum, a slave would be. “I’m coming,” Nicole groaned. She got out of bed and stood swaying. These were, in effect, her kids. If her guess was right, they really were her relatives. They were her responsibility, that was certain. Single mother then, she thought in weary disgust. Single mother now. She hadn’t figured on that when she came back to Carnuntum.

She unbarred the door. Julia was standing in the hallway holding a wan and flickering lamp. She looked like a ghost with her sleep-disheveled hair and her pale face.

Her voice was real enough, shakily stern — almost smug. It reeked of I told you so. “Mistress, it really wasn’t very wise of you to give them water to drink all day. You know perfectly well — “ She paused to inhale, which must have given her a good whiff of the chamberpot. “Oh, dear, Mistress — you’ve got it, too!”

“Yes, I’ve got it, too,” Nicole said. “Happy day.” A piece of limerick ran through her head: Her rumblings abdominal were simply phenomenal. And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth? Any minute now, dogs would start barking at the noises her insides were making.

But that had nothing to do with anything. She was on mommy duty now. “Come on,” she said as brusquely as her queasy innards would allow. “Take me to the kids.”

As they walked down the hall, Julia picked up where she’d left off. “Drinking water all the time isn’t healthy,” she insisted. “I did try to tell you, but you didn’t want to hear, Mistress, even though everybody knows it.”

A lot of what everybody knows was nonsense. That had been so in Los Angeles, and was bound to be so in Carnuntum. Still, Nicole thought, what if the water really was bad, the way it was in Mexico? She hadn’t had any trouble drinking it in Petronell or Vienna on her honeymoon.

Her mouth twisted. That was the twentieth century, not the second. Evidently chlorine had something going for it after all.

But wine? Her frown deepened. People here drank like fish. If they weren’t alcoholics, it wasn’t from lack of trying.

There was no way she was taking that route herself. She’d watched her father crawl into a bottle and pull the stopper in after him. She’d never touched a drop of alcohol, and she was damned if she was going to start now.

Her belly tied itself in a knot and yanked hard. She gasped and doubled up. God! She hadn’t felt this bad since she went into labor with Justin. Whatever this was, it was nasty.

This time, it let her go. She straightened and made it the rest of the way down the hall, where Julia was waiting beside one of the curtained doorways. Her nose told her it was the right place. It smelled even worse in there than in her bedroom: between the two of them, Lucius and Aurelia had been sick from both ends.

Nicole took the lamp from Julia. Its flame was low. “Go fetch another one,” she said. “This one’s almost out of oil.”

Julia didn’t seem to mind the errand. The air would be fresher where she’d been sent, that was certain. “Yes, Mistress,” she said with suspicious good cheer.

As Nicole listened to her thump her way downstairs, it struck her that she hadn’t even bothered to say please. She’d treated Julia like a… like a slave again.

No time to waste in feeling guilty. Both children were groaning, a sound she knew too well. At the same time, the lamp guttered and went out. There was no moonlight on this side of the house, no way to see anything. She tracked the kids by their moans and their heavy breathing, and a little catch that must have been a sob. She barked a shin against the hard side of a bed, swallowed a curse — damn, that hurt! — and bent to feel for a forehead. She found one, and another next to it. Hot. Hers was probably hot, too, not that she had time to care. Kids first.

The lamp Julia brought was marginally brighter than the one Nicole had left by the door after it burned out. It still shed about as much light as a nightlight back in West Hills.

Julia set it down on a stool and stepped back against the wall and waited.

That was what guards did in Frank’s pet old movies. The gesture must mean the same here as there. It was Nicole’s show. She looked around a little desperately. So now what?

In West Hills, she had known what to do. Here — Here, her own toothache, which hadn’t gone away, which as far as she could tell would never go away, had already taught her Latin didn’t have a word for Tylenol. It didn’t have a word for aspirin, either. By unpleasant but perfect logic, no word meant nothing.

Back in West Hills, she wouldn’t have thought of giving aspirin to kids with fever anyhow, because of the small but real risk of Reye’s syndrome. Back in West Hills, she’d had other, better choices. Her mother, who hadn’t, and who hadn’t known about Reye’s syndrome, either, had given Nicole aspirin plenty of times. Nothing bad had happened. Nicole would have given it to Lucius and Aurelia — and taken some herself — without a qualm, if only she’d had any.

Julia stirred, probably deciding Nicole wasn’t thinking straight because she was sick. “Shall I get the willow-bark decoction, Mistress?” she asked.

Oh, joy, Nicole thought. A folk remedy. In West Hills, she’d have laughed it off. In Carnuntum, without any other useful choice, she grasped at it almost eagerly. It might not do any good, but it might not hurt, either. Folk remedies weren’t supposed to kill, were they?

Julia was waiting for her to say something. “Yes,” she said more impatiently than she’d meant. “Yes, go on, go get it — please,” she added a bit belatedly.

Julia seemed almost relieved to be snapped at, though the politeness of the last word made her eyes roll briefly before she darted back down the stairs.

The children might be sick, but they weren’t too sick to make a whole range of revolted noises. “Willow bark!” said Lucius, who seemed the livelier of the two. “Ick! Ick ick ick!”

“Be quiet,” Nicole said to him. No, snapped at him. She was too blasted sick herself to be nice about it. Somewhat to her surprise, he shut up, though he kept making horrible faces.

Julia came back none too soon with a bottle and a tiny cup. The stuff she poured out looked horrid and smelled worse, but Nicole held her nose and gulped it down regardless. Its taste was even worse than its smell — gaggingly, throat-wrenchingly bitter.

The kids were staring at her as if she’d done something ridiculously brave. Taking medicine, it seemed, was no more popular in Carnuntum than it had been in California. That might have been funny, had she felt less like dying.

She’d expected the stuff to be nasty. It was. It was also familiar, which she hadn’t expected. When she’d had a sore throat, her mother had made her gargle with a couple of aspirins dissolved in warm water. God, she’d hated that! This taste wasn’t far from it.

Nicole made the kids take the decoction anyway. If it tasted like aspirin, maybe it had something like aspirin in it. Hadn’t she heard or read somewhere that aspirin came from some folk remedy or other? Maybe it came from this one.

“Julia, you’re feeling all right,” Nicole said tiredly, “and I’m not.” Even in the dim lamplight, she saw how smug Julia looked. She lacked the energy to call her on it. “Would you take care of the chamberpots in here and in my room, please?”

“Yes, Mistress,” Julia said. Her method of taking care of a pot was to pick it up, carry it to the window, and dump it out on the ground below. She went back to Nicole’s bedroom and did the same thing with the one in there, or so the second wet splat declared.

The words were shocked right out of Nicole’s head. If there’d been any to be found, they would have come out in a shriek. No toilets was one thing. No sewers — but Rome had sewers! She’d seen a documentary. Where were Carnuntum’s sewers? Didn’t these people know anything about sanitation?

No wonder flies buzzed in through her window. And no wonder at all that Carnuntum smelled the way it did — and the water wasn’t fit to drink.

The willow-bark decoction made her feel better — not a lot better, but some. And the kids’ foreheads were cooler. They’d stopped groaning and subsided into a fretful doze. She hugged them and, after a little hesitation, kissed them. They didn’t object. She felt strange: half like a babysitter, taking care of children not her own; half like a mother. If these had really been her own -

She didn’t know any Latin lullabies. On sudden inspiration, and because she couldn’t think of anything else, she hummed “Rockabye Baby.” Even without the English words, maybe the tune would do the trick. Apparently it did. First Aurelia’s breathing, then Lucius’, slowed and deepened into the cadence of sleep.

“That’s a nice song, Mistress,” Julia whispered as they tiptoed out of the children’s room. “Has it got words?”

“If it does, I don’t know them,” Nicole answered, with a small stab of guilt at the lie — or maybe it was her gut clenching again. “I’m going to go back to sleep now myself, or try. If I do, you’ll be on your own for a while in the morning. I hope you can — “

“I understand,” Julia said. “I’ve managed before. Rest if you can, Mistress.”

Lumpy mattress. Scratchy blanket. Leftover stink from the dregs in the pot. Nicole didn’t care. Her belly wasn’t churning so hard. Next to that, nothing else counted. She yawned, stretched, wiggled… slept.

When Nicole woke up, daylight was streaming in through the window. She still didn’t feel good, not even close, but, after she used the chamberpot a little less explosively than she had in the nighttime, the buffaloes decided to end their stampede through her insides and head off somewhere to graze.

There was nowhere to dump the chamberpot except out the window. “Sewers,” she muttered. “This town needs sewers.” She gritted her teeth and dumped the pot as Julia had the night before.

She dressed quickly in a fresh loincloth and tunic, and looked at herself in the mirror in the makeup kit. She looked like a chimney sweep. Most of the smoke that hadn’t gone through the hole in the roof the day before had clung to her.

She washed her face with water from the terra sigillata pitcher, careful now not to get any water in her mouth, the way she would have been in a shower south of the border.

The water was bad, no arguing with that — or with the reek that lingered around the emptied chamberpot. So what was she supposed to drink? Wine? She could water it, she supposed — wouldn’t the alcohol kill germs as easily as it slaughtered brain cells? She’d get a lower dose then, too. Maybe she could work out a formula as to how little wine she could get away with before the water went toxic.

She still didn’t like it. She liked even less that the kids had to drink the stuff in any proportion. Maybe she could talk them into drinking milk after all, and never mind the Marcomanni and the Quadi, whoever they were.

She studied her newly washed face in the mirror. Not a chimney sweep, not anymore. Now she just looked like hell. “That,” she said to nobody in particular, “is why God made makeup.”

Women here, she’d observed, powdered and painted themselves as heavily as a geisha in full regalia — and into much the same dead-white mask. The makeup Umma had used was less finely ground than the pricey Clinique that Nicole had held onto even when money got tight, as her one by-God extravagance. Its texture and color made her think, rather disjointedly, of quite another white powder, one that had been distressingly common in L.A. Rome might lack flush toilets and bathroom tissue — but it was also blessedly free of cocaine.

It was free of powderpuff and makeup brushes, too. She smoothed the powder on as best she could with a bit of rag — no cotton balls, either. Who’d have thought there’d be a world without cotton balls? Or swabs? Or -

Or eyebrow pencils, or lipsticks. Her finger had to do for both, and the rag growing grubbier with each step in the ritual. No cold cream, either, to remove mistakes or clean her fingers. If she could figure out how all those things were made, she’d be willing to bet there’d be a market for them.

It was enough, for the time being, that she’d armored her face against the world. She’d understated the effect — probably people would think she was trying for a little too much of the natural look — but she still looked, to her own eyes, clownish and overdone. “Tammy Faye Does Carnuntum,” she said to her reflection. A smile, she noticed, cracked the paint just a little. No wonder geishas never seemed to wear an expression, just the blank white mask.

It did what it was supposed to do, at least. It kept the world from guessing how lousy she felt.

“Cash box,” she reminded herself, and scooped up that and the key before she headed out the door. She didn’t go straight downstairs, but paused at the curtain to the children’s room. No sound came from inside. She peered in. Enough of the early light seeped through their shuttered window to show them both still sleeping. Their faces were quiet, neither flushed nor pale. Aurelia had taken all the covers, but Lucius didn’t seem to mind. He slept on his stomach with his black hair all in a tousle. He looked nothing at all like either of Nicole’s in the way he slept, but the soft baby-cheeks, the nub of nose, caught at her throat.

That was why children looked the way they did, wasn’t it? So their mothers wouldn’t throw them out before they could walk. Not just their mothers, either. Whoever found herself in charge of them.

Aurelia stirred and kicked off the covers. Nicole froze, but neither child woke. Aurelia was clutching a cloth doll the way Kimberley would have hung onto Scratchy the bobcat. Other toys lay on the floor: another doll or two, a toy cart, a wooden sword.

Nicole frowned at the sword. No children of hers were going to play with war toys — even if they weren’t, strictly speaking, her children.

Her frown changed, darkened. Lucius’ father had been a soldier, from what she’d heard. Titus Calidius Severus was a veteran, too; he’d made that plain. Several of her other customers, from snatches of overheard conversation, also must have served in the legions. A legion had been based around here — she remembered that from her honeymoon day trip to Petronell. Hadn’t Rome had a Vietnam, then? Didn’t they understand what a horror war was?

She shook herself, shrugged. War was far enough away from this here and this now, that there was no point in worrying about it. She slipped backward as quietly as she could, let the door-curtain fall back into place, and trudged down to her work. She was her own boss, after all. Nobody else was going to do it for her. No secretarial pool, no janitorial staff. Just herself — and Julia.

Julia had the tavern open already, the fires going, everything in order and ready to start the day. She greeted Nicole almost too brightly, though her words were solicitous enough: “Good morning, Mistress! How are you doing now? Are you well?”

Nicole caught herself wondering just how smug Julia felt. She quashed the thought and answered as civilly as she could manage, which wasn’t very, without coffee and with none in sight for the next however many hundred years. “I’m all right. I may even live.”

Julia smiled one of her wide halfwit smiles. “Oh, Mistress! The last couple of days, you’ve had such a funny way of putting things.”

Nicole’s heart thudded. God — what if Julia had guessed — what in the world was she going to -

But Julia’s smile had turned conspiratorial. “And here you put your paint on, and you didn’t even bother with it yesterday.”

“Right,” Nicole said a little too quickly. “Yes, that’s right. I didn’t need it yesterday. Today — “

Julia nodded, woman to woman now instead of slave to mistress. “I know just what you mean. There’s nothing like a nice coating of white lead to keep people from guessing you aren’t right underneath it.” She stopped. Her voice rose in surprise. “Mistress! Where are you going?”

Nicole was already halfway up the stairs. “To wash it off! “ she flung back. My God, she thought, over and over. My God! Had she swallowed any? Had any gone up her nose?

My God. Even the makeup was poisonous. And hadn’t she thought it looked a little like cocaine? It was worse than cocaine — a more certain, a more deadly killer than cocaine had ever been. Had she got any in her eyes? Could the blood vessels in her eyes absorb it? God, what was she supposed to do? She didn’t know a thing about lead poisoning, except that it was bad — and she was a prime candidate for it.

At the top of the stairs, she almost bowled over Lucius, who obviously had felt well enough to get out of bed. “Mother!” he called as she rushed past him. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

She didn’t answer. She dived into her bedroom, slammed and barred the door, and leaped on the washbasin. No facecloth, no towel, but rags — rags! She yanked a fistful out of the drawer and dunked them, and scrubbed at her face, over and over, till the skin stung and burned. Every time she splashed herself with water, she made herself blow out through her mouth and nose, to keep from getting any more of the lead into her system. Once she had it all off, or hoped to heaven she did, she took the little pot of makeup over to the window and dumped it out, as she had with the chamberpot not long before. This time, she watched the cloud of white powder drift down to the ground. No one was passing below, to be startled by the small deadly snow. Nothing moved but the flies, seething in the noisome mess that, she could see, lined every house-wall. There’d be a few million fewer, she thought, thanks to her latest contribution.

She was calm again — or calm enough, at least, to face the world. She took a deep breath and braved the stairs again.

Lucius and Aurelia were both down below and both eating breakfast: a little bit of bread without oil, and something in a cup that was probably watered wine. Nicole couldn’t find the energy to make an issue of it.

Julia, of course, wasn’t about to leave well enough alone. “Why did you get rid of your makeup, Mistress?” she asked. “You looked nice with it on.”

Nicole caught herself wondering if Julia was a little slow in the head — or if it was a game slaves played, to ask questions that sounded wide-eyed innocent but were calculated to catch a person in the raw.

If that was a game, Nicole could play one of her own. “Can I get face powder that doesn’t have lead in it?” she asked. And held her breath, hoping she hadn’t come too close to sounding like the foreigner she was.

Julia didn’t seem to find the question that far out of the ordinary. Maybe she was slow; or maybe slaves learned to expect any kind of oddity from their masters. She frowned, as if in thought. “Some people use white flour, but I don’t like it myself — you don’t either, much, do you? No matter how tight you close it up, sooner or later it gets bugs in it. That never happens with white lead.”

“I should hope not!” Nicole said. “Lead’s poisonous.”

“Oh, it can’t be, Mistress.” Julia sounded absolutely sure of herself. “If it were, they wouldn’t use it for water pipes.”

Nicole started to say They do? but stopped before the question was out of her mouth. They did, and she didn’t need Julia’s word for it. The Latin for lead was plumbum. She and Julia had said it close to a dozen times between them. What was a plumber but somebody who messed around with plumbum? It was a lead-pipe cinch that was how plumbers had got their name.

What she did say was, “They shouldn’t.”

“Mistress,” Julia said in a tone that reminded Nicole rather too strongly of her mother trying to be very, very patient with her father when he came home — because he’d said or done something right out of line, but if she called him on it too soon or too strongly, he’d take a swing at her, “Mistress, really, haven’t you been complaining an awful lot, the past day or two?” And about things like wine and water that made you nice and sick, too, Nicole could almost hear her thinking, and look where that got you. “What are they supposed to use for pipes, Mistress? Clay breaks too easy, and wood rots.”

“Copper — “ Nicole began.

“And how expensive would that be?” Julia asked. Impossibly so, her tone said. “Besides, copper’s no good for you. Cook vegetables in copper and you’ll see the verdigris right away, and taste it, too.” She made a face. “And it’ll sicken your stomach faster than drinking water will. That’s why they put lead on the inside of copper kettles, for goodness’ sake.”

“It is?” Nicole said faintly. “They do?”

Yesterday morning, she’d looked around the restaurant with delight. Now she looked again, with growing horror. Some of her cooking pots were lead-lined? Her eye fell on a jar of olive oil, which was made of glazed pottery. What was in the glaze? Every so often, the TV news would report that batches of stoneware from China or someplace were being banned from the USA because their glazes had too much lead. The amphorae of wine under the counter were glazed, too, all but the one that held the cheapest local stuff. You couldn’t even put lead foil over the corks on wine bottles anymore, not in California you couldn’t.

God knew, this wasn’t California. This wasn’t anyplace fit or healthy for human occupation, from the looks of it.

What about the terra sigillata pitcher and bowl in her room? How was she going to know? How could she find out?

God. God, God, God. What was that book she’d seen in a used bookstore once, with the day-glo pink cover? Future Shock, that was it. So what was this? Past shock? Culture shock? Pure unadulterated shock? Nothing here was safe. Everything could poison you. Every little taken-for-granted thing.

Julia was happily oblivious to Nicole’s confusion. She seemed to think they were still playing some kind of game, a game of wits maybe, a test of her cultural literacy. Or was it literacy, if it had nothing to do with reading?

Julia spoke again as the voice of sweet reason, as if that were the role she’d decided she was cast in. “Besides, Mistress, if lead were poisonous, we’d all be dead, wouldn’t we?” She laughed at the absurdity of the notion, the same way people in the twentieth century had laughed at the notion that DDT might hurt the environment.

Lead poisoning was insidious, Nicole knew that. It took a long time to build up. But she couldn’t explain that here, even if there were words to express it. Julia wouldn’t listen, any more than people had listened about DDT, or fluorocarbons, or the hole in the ozone layer.

Julia seemed to have decided the game was over; that it was time to go back to work. Her tone had changed, and even the way she held herself. She was the slave again, carefully submissive; no more arguments, no thinly veiled rebukes. “What would you like for breakfast, Mistress?” she asked.

Nicole wasn’t pleased to note how glad she was that Julia had gone back to being servile again. “Bread and watered wine, same as the children,” she said — and that was a capitulation, too, but she couldn’t see any way out of it. Except possibly one. “The one-as wine,” she added, “nothing fancy.” That was the one that came in the unglazed amphora. If it was bad wine, so much the better. Then maybe she could keep from growing too fond of it.

Even if it didn’t have lead — she hoped it didn’t have lead — it still had alcohol in it. The odor rising from the (unglazed, thank God) cup made her shiver. She could all but hear her father downstairs yelling at her mother, while she lay in bed with the covers pulled up over her head and tried not to listen. She had to will herself to sip.

Diluted, the wine tasted like watery, half-spoiled grape juice. It had a tang to it, a sharpness and a kind of dizziness in back of it, that had to be the alcohol. She’d never tried any before, to know. She’d refused.

Her heart was thumping again, as it had when she discovered her face was armored in lead. She’d thought, somehow, that the first taste would do it: would hit her hard enough to make her stagger. Apparently, that wasn’t how it worked. She sipped again, deeper, and again, till the cup was empty.

Did she feel anything? Was there anything to feel? Maybe she was a tiny bit more detached from the world than she had been before. Maybe she wasn’t. She’d been in varying degrees of fog since she woke up in Carnuntum — and for certain sure she was detached; she was a complete stranger to this whole world and time.

Julia was watching her, nodding sagely, as if she could see an effect Nicole couldn’t feel. “That will do you good, Mistress,” she said.

“I doubt it,” Nicole said. Her belly was rumbling again, knots and snarls that were more nerves than sickness. The wine hadn’t made it worse, at least. She was grateful for that.

Medicine. She could think of it as medicine. Even her mother had had a stash of medicinal brandy, that her father had never managed to find.

Julia’s voice broke in on her thoughts, as so often before: as if it were a kind of lifeline, an anchor to this world. “Are you feeling well enough to go out and buy things today, Mistress, or will you send me? “

Nicole focused abruptly and too sharply, though the edges of things still wavered just a little. Julia was watching her alertly, with a look she’d seen on a dog hoping for a portion of the humans’ dinner. So was this a new game, then? A gambit to get hold of some money, to do God knew what with it?

Nonsense, Nicole thought. Julia could get at the till either way, whether she stayed to mind the tavern or went out shopping. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the house.

If that was it, too bad. Nicole hadn’t gone out since she got here, either. Her insides still felt very uncertain; and even though Imodium looked like a Latin word, it surely wasn’t, or she’d have found a bottle of it by now. Maybe if she could get out, breathe relatively fresh air, see more of Carnuntum than she could from window or doorway, she’d forget her indisposition for long enough to make it go away.

“I’ll go,” she said. Julia’s face fell, but she didn’t argue. After all, her expression said, she wasn’t the boss. Nicole did her best to sound brisk. “Let’s see — what do we need?”

Julia visibly swallowed her disappointment to focus on the duties at hand. “That amphora of Falernian in there” — she pointed to the bar — “will last the day out, I think, but not tomorrow. And we’re out of scallions and raisins, and we could use some more mutton.”

“I’ll get some fish, too, if I see any worth buying,” Nicole said. She had to say something, if she expected people to think she was staying on top of things.

“All right, Mistress.” Julia sounded vaguely dubious, but then she nodded. She’d dropped her facade of submission again, Nicole noticed. It seemed to go up when Nicole was giving orders, but to go down when they were working together — as if a slave could think for herself, sometimes, if her mistress gave the signal. Had Nicole been giving the right signals after all?

Maybe it was all those years of dealing with secretaries — pardon, administrative assistants — and paralegals. They hadn’t been much more than slave labor either, not at the pay they got and with the workload they carried.

Julia had gone right on talking, in a tone that reminded Nicole almost poignantly of a paralegal invited to voice an opinion on a case: “Fish spoils fast, so there’s always that risk, but we can eat it ourselves tonight if no one else does. And people will probably order it. You were doing some interesting things with it yesterday when they brought it in for you to cook. Word will get around.”

“I suppose so,” Nicole said, though she wondered how. No TV, no radio, no telephones, no e-mail. How did people find out what was going on in the world, or even in Carnuntum?

She wasn’t going to find out by staying cooped up here. Under Julia’s eye, she unlocked the cash box and chose a selection of coins, picking them out with care, as if she knew to the as how much she was leaving behind. Julia’s glance didn’t flicker; her brow didn’t wrinkle. Nicole drew in a breath of relief, and escaped out the door.

She turned left more or less at random. She’d gone several steps before she realized: she didn’t know where to buy any of the things on her mental list. Nothing in sight looked like a supermarket, or even like the corner grocery stores the supermarkets had forced out of business. A vague memory of her honeymoon brought to mind tiny shops, boucheries and boulangeries and something with a horse’s head out front that she’d found very pretty till she learned it was a horsemeat butcher. She didn’t see anything like that, either.

A voice called out behind her. She stopped and turned, expecting it to be Julia, calling out that she’d gone the wrong way. But it was someone from the next house down, a little bony bird of a woman with an extraordinary crown of curled and frizzed hair, waving and calling, “Umma! Oh, Umma! Good morning!”

Nicole almost didn’t respond. But the woman was looking straight at her, looking so delighted that Nicole wondered if Umma and she were long-lost sisters. She raised her hand and waved back, trying to put a little enthusiasm in it, so as not to seem suspicious.

“Off to market then?” the woman asked. “And isn’t it a lovely morning? Do come over later, will you please, dear? It’s been ages since we had a good gossip!”

Nicole hoped her expression didn’t betray what she felt, which was a kind of horror. Neighbors in West Hills didn’t lean out of upstairs windows — if they had any — and yodel at passersby. This neighbor obviously thought she was a friend, too. Or else she really was a relative.

“Later,” Nicole managed to say. “Yes, I’ll come over later.” In about ten years. She put on a bright company smile, and wished she had a watch to glance at significantly. “Well. I’m off, then. Good morning.”

“Good morning!” the stranger caroled, and mercifully ducked back inside.

She hadn’t said Nicole was going in the wrong direction, either. Nicole decided to take that as an omen. She strode on out, feeling better already, though she had to be careful where she stepped; and she kept a wary eye on the windows above. Some of her original sense of adventure was coming back. She felt like a brave explorer — Montezuma’s Revenge and all.

Pigeons strutted in the streets of Carnuntum, arrogant and brainless and half tame, just as they did in Los Angeles. Life here was riskier for them, however. A fellow tossed a fine-meshed net over a couple, scooped them up before they could let out more than one startled coo, and ran back inside his house, shouting, “I’ve got supper for today, Claudia!”

Nicole wouldn’t have wanted to eat them. Living in Los Angeles, she’d come to despise the automobile for the pollution it caused, even while she worshipped at its shrine. No cars in Carnuntum. But that didn’t mean no pollution, as she’d thought it would. The streets were packed deep with ox droppings, horse droppings, donkey droppings. The pigeons mined them for any number of treasures: seeds, insects, the unmistakable and nauseating pale wriggle of a worm.

One good look at what they were pulling out of the heaps of ordure, and Nicole knew she wouldn’t touch one of those birds if a waiter from Le Bistro brought it.

She’d hated the air she’d had to breathe in the San Fernando Valley, back in the twentieth century: thick, stinking, and the color of filthy old chinos. It had stung her eyes and caught at her lungs with every breath she took. The air in Carnuntum stank worse than the air in the Valley ever had. It was clogged with smoke. It stung her eyes and caught at her lungs with every breath she took.

It was also full of flies. Every time someone walked past, they rose in buzzing clouds from the dung that beasts of burden had left behind, and from the occasional dog turds in the street. At least, Nicole hoped that was what those were. Some of them seemed on the large side for that.

The flies didn’t all go back to their suppers, either. Some decided to take the long way home, pausing to snack on passing animals or, better yet, people. Slapping while walking looked to be as automatic as breathing.

It wasn’t so easy or mindless for Nicole, or apparently so effective, either. In the first few minutes after she’d left the restaurant, she took at least three powerfully annoying bites. These weren’t little itching mosquitoes, either, like the ones that had made the summer evenings miserable in Indiana. These were horseflies — B-52s, people had called them when she was little. Their bites stabbed like a red-hot needle.

Slapping, cursing, wishing in vain for a vat of Woodsman’s Fly Repellent, she turned off her own street onto a larger one. A block or two down, that one ran into a bigger one yet, one big enough to boast a cobblestoned paving. At the intersection sat a fountain from which water splashed lethargically into a stone tank. Women stood around chatting and filling jugs from the tank.

They can’t use all that for cooking or washing, Nicole thought. They must drink some of it. She shuddered, wondering how often it made them sick. And that was just the water itself, without help from lead pipes and lead-glazed jars. She shuddered again. If the galloping trots didn’t get you, lead poisoning would.

A block farther down the cobblestoned street stood a marble statue, half again life size, of a nude, bearded man. The Getty Museum, twenty minutes from West Hills, had a marvelous collection of ancient statuary; the couple of times Frank dragged her there on one of his cultural-literacy jags, Nicole had admired the cool white elegance of the stone.

This statue was neither cool nor white nor elegant. It had been painted to look as lifelike as possible, down to eyeballs, nipples, and pubic hair. It was, in Nicole’s opinion, one of the tackiest things she’d ever seen. Hadn’t they run a Saudi sheik out of Beverly Hills for painting the statues on the grounds of his mansion like this?

Seeing her astonished stare, a woman in a grimy linen tunic mistook its meaning. She pointed to the marble penis — also half again life size — and said, “I wish my husband got that hard. How about you, dearie?” The woman didn’t wait or seem to expect an answer. She bustled on down the street, chortling at her own bawdy wit.

The statue had to be just as bad a joke as the one the woman had made. Nicole wondered if some civic-minded person would come along and sandblast the paint off the marble to make it decently pure again.

Then, as she rounded a corner, she came on the next one. This was of a woman, mostly and graphically nude. It had been painted with the same loving attention to detail and the same total lack of taste as the male statue.

If that physique represented Carnuntum’s ideal of beauty, Umma’s body was on the skinny side by local standards. At least half of the old wheeze, You can’t be too thin or too rich, didn’t apply here. Somehow, Nicole suspected the other half was still in force.

Distracted by the statue, she almost jumped out of her skin as a nightmare of teeth and glaring eyeballs lunged out of a shop almost into her face. Just as her scattered wits identified the thing as a dog, a stout iron chain brought it up short. Nicole’s yelp of alarm was lost in its yelp of surprise.

A roar from the shop reduced them both to silence: “Hercules! Blast you to Hades, you fornicating thing!”

The owner of the voice burst into the street, armed with a stout stick and a glare as red-eyed and wild as the dog’s had been. The glare reduced the dog to a whimpering puddle, but the owner never seemed to notice. The stick slashed the dog across the nose; a foot armed with a hobnailed sandal booted it in the ribs. The dog whined piteously and slunk back into the shop, chain rattling behind it.

The shopkeeper tucked the stick in his belt and shook his head. “Damn, Mistress Umma, I’m sorry for that. You know why I got the miserable beast — three break-ins in six months, and the last time the bastards got as far as the cash box before I drove them off. But even with the sign, the blasted dog’s scared off half my customers.” He tilted his head toward the wall, where a neatly painted inscription read, cave canem: Beware the dog.

Nicole was still shaking with reaction and a surprising, unexpected surge of anger. “I don’t care if you do have a sign,” she said. “If that dog had bitten me, I’d have sued.” The sentence came as naturally in Latin as it would have in English.

It had the same effect it would have had in English, too. The shopkeeper turned a chalky white, stuttered something she couldn’t make out, and scuttled back inside the shop. Thumps and anguished barks told her he was beating the dog again. Mean or not, no animal deserved that. But what could she do about it? There was no SPCA in this world. For the first time, Nicole really understood what the phrase “dog-eat-dog” meant.

As if the CAVE CANEM sign had flicked a switch in her head, Nicole found herself sharply aware of other signs and scribbles than the ones that announced a shopkeeper’s name and business. The Romans might not have spray paint, but they knew about graffiti. They wrote in chalk on dark walls and, more often, in charcoal on light ones.

MARCUS loves LYDIA, someone had scrawled in charcoal now faded. Nicole wondered if Marcus had done it, or if some of his friends were giving him a hard time. Either way, the graffito had a modern ring to it. Two doors farther down the street she found another, fresher, charcoal scrawl: balbus screwed lydia against this wall. Was he boasting? Was he teasing Marcus? Was he talking about a different Lydia?

Nicole didn’t usually wonder about things like that, questions she might never answer, things she’d likely never know. Somehow, here, now, time seemed more flexible.

Across the street, somebody had drawn an elaborate sketch of a man with a donkey’s head, hanging from a cross, with a normal man standing below, lifting up his hands. Scribbled under it she read, ALEXANDER WORSHIPPING HIS GOD.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nicole murmured in absent-minded English. It hit hard when it hit, as the painfully obvious can do, taking her straight back to Sunday school. So when was this, the age of Christians and lions? Someone here obviously didn’t think much of the Christians.

A scribble like that would have brought Sunday school down around everybody’s ears. No one here seemed to take the least notice of it. Maybe people agreed with it. Maybe it honestly didn’t matter to them. No wonder Julia had thought Nicole was acting strangely when she’d asked about the Christian calendar.

Just down the street from the shop with Alexander’s portrait on its wall stood an enormous building, by far the largest Nicole had seen in Carnuntum. City hall? she wondered. State capitol? Whatever it was, it was busy. People — all men, she noticed with a reflexive feminist sting — bustled in and out of several side entrances. Smoke poured from the slits of windows and out the doors as people came and went. In Los Angeles, she’d have been sure the place was on fire. In Carnuntum, where chimneys hadn’t been invented, smoke seemed ubiquitous and, for all she could tell, harmless.

Nicole walked along beside the building for what had to be 150 yards before she came to a corner. Around that she found what she’d been hoping for: the main entrance. It was even more floridly ornate than she’d started to expect. An inscription ran above it in the spiky and portentous Roman capitals, proclaiming that Marcus Annius Libo, to celebrate assuming the consulship for the second time during the reign of the august Emperor Hadrian, had erected for the city of Carnuntum these… public baths.

Nicole laughed out loud. “That’s right!” she said, remembering the ruins again. Any town whose grandest building was a bathhouse was her kind of place. She wondered if it was as fancy on the inside as its white-marble, columned elegance suggested. On impulse, she started up the low stairs. She hadn’t bathed the day before, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d missed before that.

But, at the top of the stairway, a bored-looking attendant held up a hand to stop her. “Gents today,” he said. “Ladies yesterday, ladies tomorrow, gents today.” He sounded like a broken record.

“Oh. “ Nicole felt like an idiot. Hadn’t Julia said yesterday was a ladies’ day? So men and women alternated. How bloody inefficient. Couldn’t they have had separate sections? Alternating half-days? Coed facilities? What if someone needed a bath now and it was the wrong day? What was she supposed do then?

Damn it, her skin was crawling just thinking about two days without a hot shower, let alone an all-over bath.

She opened her mouth to say something of that, but shut it again. She wasn’t, at the moment, feeling quite up to fighting weight. As she turned on her heel, letting that be her whole expression of temper, she stopped short. Two women strolled out of the baths, laughing and chattering and jingling coins in little dyed-leather pouches. Nicole forgot the flutter in her belly and the ache in her head. She rounded on the doorman, porter, whatever he was, and jabbed an indignant finger in their direction. “What about them?”

The attendant sneered. She’d seen that look back in L.A., once or twice, when her clothes weren’t fancy enough to suit a maitre d’. “They didn’t go in to bathe, lady,” he said.

Nicole snapped her mouth shut on a retort, and looked again at the women. Even for women in Carnuntum, they were heavily made up. Their faces looked like the masks she’d seen hanging over the stage in every theater she’d been in. And every inch of it, she had no doubt, the same deadly white lead that she’d thrown out the window this morning. Their tunics seemed made of gauze, wafting in whatever breeze happened to blow, and leaving exactly nothing to the imagination. Their pubes, she couldn’t help but notice, were shaved as — she blushed inside herself, and snarled at herself for it — as her own was. Their nipples appeared to be rouged or painted. The scent that wafted from them was so strong she nearly gagged. Rosewater and musk and something oddly… culinary? Was that cinnamon? Even as strong as it was, its sweetness was welcome amid the smoke and stench of the city.

It was also, she realized, advertising.

“Oh!” she said again before she could catch herself. She wasn’t supposed to feel what she was feeling, which was all the indignation of the Midwestern matron at being brought face to face with a pair of hookers. Umma was a respectable woman; no one had indicated otherwise. And yet these two prostitutes sashayed past her in their waft of perfume and their flutter of inadequate draperies, acting as if they had just as much right to promote their business as she did hers.

So what was she supposed to feel? As a feminist, she should deplore the reduction of her fellow women to mere commercial sex toys — and be dismayed to realize that the so-called oldest profession probably was that ancient. As a liberal, she should approve the lack of hypocrisy of a culture that allowed the same freedom from persecution to hookers as to Johns.

It was the good old liberal feminist’s dilemma, as insoluble now as it had ever been. The two contrary notions jangled together uneasily in her mind as she hurried down the stairs.

Just past the baths lay a large open square with colonnades on all four sides. Rows of stalls filled it and spread out under the colonnades. It reminded Nicole of the Farmers’ Market in Los Angeles, only more so. Nothing had a price tag. Buyers and sellers haggled with loud shouts and frantic gesticulations. Some of them grinned, enjoying the game. Others tackled it with grim determination, as if dickering were a matter of life or death.

Nicole could understand the grim ones a fair bit better than the grinning ones, just then. Her head was aching again, and not just with the aftermath of the trots. She’d been in supermarkets bigger than this. Hell, she’d been to the Mall of America.

In the Mall of America, she knew the rules. What to expect, what to look for, where the maps were if she couldn’t find her way. Here there was nothing to guide her. No nice little map on a pillar with a pink dot labeled, “You Are Here.” Nothing but a churning mass of people and things. Far too many of those things were alive. No shrink-wrap or cold cases here. Dinner came on the hoof or just recently killed, with head and feet still on.

Nicole took a deep breath that didn’t steady her quite so much as she’d have liked it to, and set out around the edge of the cobblestoned square. She’d look things over, she told herself, before she tried to buy anything.

She’d got about halfway round when a man called out to her: “Hello, Mistress Umma! Look at the lovely raisins I’ve got for you today.”

As far as Nicole was concerned, raisins were raisins. These could have come straight out of a red SunMaid box. She looked down her nose at them, as if they were a legal brief she intended to tear to pieces. She’d learned to do that in Mexico, and found there that she liked it. A little of the thrill started to come back through cranky stomach and culture shock. She let it build up. She was going to need it, if she expected to get out of here with any cash left over.

Focus, then. Forget the bellyache, the headache, the overtaxed brain. Think of it as an exercise, like moot court in law school: up all night and running on caffeine, briefcase full of illegible notes and brain full of irrelevant data, but everything coming to one single, all-important point.

Raisins. Never act as if you really want what you intend to buy, she’d learned south of the border. That was easy enough now. She never had cared much for raisins. But Julia had said the restaurant needed them. Therefore, the restaurant was going to get them.

“Go on, taste a few,” the seller — dealer? huckster? — urged her. “You’ll see how fine they are.”

She took one, examined it on all sides, ate it. She shrugged. “Yes, it’s a raisin. How much?”

“Eight sesterces for a modius,” he answered, not quite promptly.

A modius was a lot; the image that sprang into her mind at the sound of the word was of a jar that had to hold a couple of gallons’ worth. The idea of getting that many raisins for a few brass coins was mind-boggling. Still, the dealer had hesitated the least little bit before he replied. Maybe that didn’t mean anything. Maybe it did. “And what did you charge me for them last time?” she asked in her best cross-examination voice.

It wasn’t quite Where were you on the night of the fourth? but it did the job. The raisin-seller winced. “All right, six sesterces,” he said sullenly. “That’s not any higher than Antonius is charging — you don’t need to go trotting over to him the way you did the last couple of times.”

“Oh, you think I should?” she said as if that were a brilliant idea, and shifted as if to turn away from the stall.

“Don’t you move!” the raisin-seller shrilled at her. “I just heard him sell a modius of rabbit droppings to Junia Marcella for seven and an as. What makes you think he’ll give you any better deal?”

Nicole shrugged again. The shrug was the buyer’s best weapon in these Third-World markets — except that this wasn’t the Third World, was it? It was a completely different world altogether. “I suppose I believe you, “ she said. “This time.”

He beamed. “Good!” he said. “Good!” Then he waited. She fumbled in her purse and counted out the six sesterces, but he wouldn’t take them. “Not yet, not yet! Where’s your basket? Didn’t you bring anything to put them in?”

Of course I didn’t! Nicole started to say, but stopped herself in time. Everywhere she looked, people were carrying baskets and bags, bundles and parcels. No plastic bags — that, she didn’t miss at all. But no paper, either. Nothing that resembled it.

No wonder Umma hadn’t had any books on the chest of drawers or by her bed. How did the Romans run their empire without paper? Nicole wished she knew how to make it. It would be like getting in on the ground floor of Microsoft.

Unfortunately, she didn’t. And, even if she had, she wouldn’t have had time to do it while the raisin-seller waited. She had to stand watching and feeling foolish while he borrowed a modius-sized pot from the bean-dealer next door, filled it full of raisins, then poured the raisins into a big pile on a grimy linen sheet and tied it around them with what looked like a leather bootlace. He charged her an as for the packaging, too, and sounded as if he had every right in the world to do it. She gave him the little copper coin without a murmur.

She wandered on down the line of stalls, finding in them a bewildering variety of things in no discernible order: fruit next to sandals next to bolts of cloth next to the kind of beads and bangles she’d expect to see on the street in San Francisco.

When she came to a butcher’s stall, she wondered if she’d ever eat meat again. No neat, clean packages wrapped in polyethylene film here. Some of the meat lay on platters. Some — she peered, doubting her eyes — was nailed to boards. All of it was crawling with flies. Once in a while, the butcher swiped halfheartedly at them, but they came back in buzzing swarms.

What was it some friend of Frank’s had said after spending a semester in Africa? All about picturesque markets and the African equivalent of hot-dog stands: kabob-sellers. “They’re called fly kabobs,” Frank’s friend had said. Nicole had thought he was exaggerating.

Not anymore, she didn’t.

There was blood everywhere — literally. As Nicole moved closer, drawn as much by revulsion as by curiosity, she realized the butcher was hawking it. “Pig’s blood for blood sausages! Three asses for a sextarius!” He held up a small pot, about the size of a one-cup measure in West Hills. “One more as buys you the gut to case it in.”

His eye caught Nicole’s. Before she could back away, he put down the pot and scooped up a wriggling, pink-and-gray mass that had to be pig intestines, and thrust them in her face. They stank of pig, and of the pig’s last meal. Garbage, from the smell of it, and other things even less savory.

She recoiled. Her stomach, which had forgotten its complaints, abruptly remembered them. She swallowed bile. It burned going down, and made her voice even tighter than it would have been to start with. “I don’t want pig guts,” she said through clenched teeth. “I want a leg of mutton.”

He never even blinked. “I’ve got a nice one with the hide still on,” he said. “You can get it tanned with the wool, if you want, or do the shearing and spin yourself some nice thread.” He reached under his counter and rummaged, muttering to himself. With a grunt that sounded excessively satisfied, he pulled something out from below and slammed it down in front of her. “Here you go,” he said.

She stared at it. It was a sheep’s leg. No doubt about it. It had been hacked right off the body, hide and all. She gulped down a new rush of bile. The leg was bloody at the top, with the pink knob of bone showing through. The hoof was still on it. It wasn’t a particularly clean hoof, either.

The butcher grinned at her. “It’ll go about twelve pounds, I’d say. How does twenty-five sesterces sound? Buy it for that, and I’ll throw in the head for another, mm, seven. Brain, tongue, eyeballs — all sorts of good things in a sheep’s head.” He pointed. There it was, nailed to a board, staring at Nicole with idiot fixity.

The mouth hung open. A big fly walked across the sheep’s tongue. It paused to nibble on some dainty or other, washed its face fastidiously, walked on. Nicole watched in sick fascination. Another fly buzzed down beside the first one. Calmly and without any fuss, the second climbed on top of the first. They began to mate.

“No, not the head.” Her voice came from far away; she was trying not to lose her breakfast. Good God, how did any Romans ever live to grow up? “I’ll give you fifteen sesterces for the leg.”

They ended up splitting the difference. By the butcher’s smirk, she knew he’d ripped her off, but she didn’t care. She only wanted to get away. Magnanimously, the butcher tied a strip of rawhide around the leg of mutton above the hoof and looped it into a carrying handle. Even more magnanimously, he didn’t charge her for it.

By the time she found two men and a woman selling scallions within twenty feet of one another, she’d recovered… somewhat. She wasn’t quite compos mentis enough to do any haggling of her own, but an inspiration saved her the effort: she let them do it for her. She went to the first, got his price, went on to the next for a better offer, challenged the third to top it. By the time she was done, she’d got the green onions for next to nothing. She left the three vegetable dealers shouting and shaking their fists at one another. The woman’s curses were most inventive. The smaller, thinner man had, surprisingly, the most impressive voice.

She decided to get out of there before they started a riot. She tucked the bunch of onions into the top of her bundle of raisins, got a grip on the leg of mutton, and beat a prudent retreat.

There were lots of fishmongers in the market, what with Carnuntum lying on the bank of the Danube. Nicole went from stall to stall in search of the one that smelled least bad. It wasn’t easy. The fish peered up at her with dead, unblinking eyes: bream and pike and trout and carp that looked amazingly like ornamental koi except for their dull gray scales.

She couldn’t move fast, not weighted down as she was. While she strolled, she let the gossip from other strolling shoppers wash over her. She’d done that every so often at Topanga Plaza, too; people-listening could be as interesting as people-watching. A lot of the stories could have come from her time as readily as this one: So-and-so had found her husband in bed with her friend (Nicole’s lips tightened), one partner was supposed to have cheated the other in a real-estate deal, Such-and-such had got his brother-in-law drunk and buggered him.

But there were differences. When a boy of six or seven started crying and wouldn’t stop, his mother whacked him on the bottom, hard. He kept crying. His mother whacked him again and bellowed, “Shut up!”

He shut up. In Topanga Plaza, that would have been a minor scandal, with people rushing to the child’s defense. Nicole might have done it here, if she’d been a little closer and a lot less loaded down.

Nobody else even offered to try. Nobody seemed to want to. Quite the opposite, in fact. Three different people congratulated the mother. “That’ll teach him discipline,” growled a grizzled fellow who carried himself like a Marine. Heads bobbed in agreement.

Nicole gaped. So it wasn’t just Umma abusing Lucius and Aurelia. Everybody abused children, and expected everybody else to abuse them, too. That was… appalling, that was it. That was the word she wanted.

The little Roman boy’s filthy face and snot-dripping nose struck Nicole with a powerful memory of Kimberley and Justin as she’d seen them last, clean and sweet-smelling and tucked up in bed. Nobody had ever laid a hand on them in anger; not Nicole, and no, not Frank, either. Frank had never been abusive. Absent, yes; abusive, no. Dawn? Who could say? Stepmothers were wicked by definition. There wasn’t a fairy tale that didn’t say so — and some of those were pretty horrifying.

Everything was suddenly horrifying. Even the bit of gossip she heard, one woman to another, cool and matter-of-fact as if it were nothing out of the ordinary: “Just got news my husband’s brother died down in Aquileia.”

“Ahh,” her friend said, sounding just as calm about it. “That’s too bad. What was he doing down in Italy, anyway?”

“Didn’t you know Junius? I thought you did. He was a muleteer.”

“I never met him, though you’ve told me about him before. What happened to him? Did the Marcomanni get him?”

“No, he didn’t have any trouble with the barbarians. Anyhow, they got driven out of Aquileia — was it year before last? I forget. No, it was this pestilence that’s going through Italy. It’s very bad, they say. The gods grant it doesn’t come here.” At that, for the first time, the woman sounded less than nonchalant. This wasn’t gossip. This was honest fear.

Wonderful, Nicole thought. An epidemic. Of what, flu? She remembered only too vividly the sound of Kimberley losing her corn dog in the backseat of the Honda.

She also, after a moment and with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air, remembered another kind of epidemic, one much deadlier, that people might speak of with the same fear she heard in the women’s voices. She’d known three people who’d died of AIDS. Two gay men, and a woman friend from law school, who hadn’t known till too late that the man she’d had a brief affair with was bisexual.

Resolutely, she shut that out of her mind. It would happen on the other side of the world, eighteen hundred years or so from now. There was nothing she could do about it. Nor, frankly, could she do anything about this “pestilence” that had taken a life hundreds of miles from here. This wasn’t the twentieth century. People couldn’t travel that far that fast. What had they said about the Ebola virus? If it hadn’t been for air travel, it might never have left Africa.

No air travel here. Of that she was absolutely sure.

What she could do now, and what she was going to do, was buy fish. She bought some trout that didn’t look too flyblown: she’d already seen they were popular in Carnuntum. She bought some bream, too, partly in the spirit of experiment, partly because a couple of them were so fresh they still quivered a little. The fish were cheaper than the meat. In Los Angeles, it would have been the other way round.

The fishmongers strung their catch on the leather thong that the butcher had given her to help carry the leg of mutton. Nicole felt like a comic-page fisherman who’d hooked a sheep along with the rest of his catch. She was glad by then of the wool that still wrapped the mutton: it let her sling the thing over her shoulder with the fish dangling, and carry it a little less awkwardly than if she let the whole lot hang. With the meat and fish balanced on her shoulder and the bundle of raisins and onions under her arm, she paused to run through her mental shopping list.

A stall nearby reminded her of one item that she couldn’t get out of. “Wine,” she said reluctantly to herself. The dealer in the stall she’d seen first wasn’t the only one with wine to sell. They were all ready, no, eager, to sell it to her. Every one of them wanted her to taste his particular brand, too, “To be sure it’s the genuine article,” one said in a voice as fruity as his wine. She couldn’t get out of it, but neither could she tell one wine from the next, except that they were all darker and sweeter than the cheap stuff she’d drunk with breakfast.

Of course she wasn’t about to admit that. She remembered how she’d seen people in restaurants and on TV, sniffing and making portentous faces and tasting tiny bits from crystal goblets. Here she was given a whacking big ladle — God knew where that had been or how many people had put lips to it before her — and invited to taste, taste!

She tasted, for what that was worth, and settled to the inevitable haggle. Meat and fish might be cheap here compared to L.A., but wine cost the living earth.

She didn’t have nearly the luck beating them down that she’d had with the scallion-sellers. “Mistress Umma, it’s real Falernian,” said one who recognized the body she was wearing. “That means it has to come all the way from the middle of Italy on muleback, so you can’t wonder that it’s not cheap. I can’t go any lower, or I lose money.” Something about his tone, the mixture of patience and exasperation, overcame her court-trained skepticism. He was telling the truth as he saw it.

Nicole hadn’t had to worry about transportation costs, except at the office when she had to decide whether to throw something in the mail or FedEx it. No trucks here, she reminded herself. No trains, either. She wondered how long the wine had taken to get here, and what problems it had had along the way.

Once she’d bought an amphora, she had a transportation problem of her own: how to get home with a big clay jug, some dead fish, a leg of mutton, a makeshift sack of raisins, and, for good measure, the green onions. She wished she’d brought Julia after all, even if that meant bringing the children, too, and closing the tavern while everybody was gone. For that matter, she wished she had one of the pack mules that had brought the Falernian wine from Italy.

While she tried to figure out how not to have to make more than one trip — and kept coming up with the answer, No way, Jose — someone at her elbow spoke in a dry voice: “Want me to give you a hand with some of that?”

She whirled. There stood Titus Calidius Severus, one eyebrow raised in an expression of sardonic amusement. All he carried were half a dozen dead thrushes, their scrawny yellow legs bound together with twine. How could he want to eat them? she thought in faint disgust. They’re too cute to eat.

But that wasn’t what he’d asked her. “Thank you, Calidius,” she said with as much grace as she had to offer, and a good bit of relief. “I’d love a hand.”

His mouth tightened. She’d said something wrong, and she didn’t even know what. Nor did he say anything that might give her a hint. He simply picked up the amphora and the raisins, leaving her with meat, fish, and scallions, and strode off through the market. Nicole followed, not least because she was sure he knew how to get back. She wasn’t at all sure she did.

As they were leaving the market square, four men tramped past them. They weren’t Romans; they were speaking a guttural language Nicole didn’t understand. It reminded her somehow of the German she’d heard on her honeymoon. She didn’t think it was — didn’t think it could possibly be — the same language, but she couldn’t have proved it, not with only a dozen or so words of German to call her own.

Even if the men had been speaking Latin, she would have tagged them for foreigners. They were taller, thicker through the chest, and ruddier than most of the locals. They let their beards and hair grow longer than the Romans did, and — Nicole’s nose wrinkled — used rancid butter for hair oil.

They wore the first trousers she’d seen in Carnuntum — baggy woolen ones, tied tight at the ankles — and short tunics over them. Each of them wore a long sword on his left hip.

They stared around the square as if they owned it, or perhaps as if they planned on robbing it. People stared at them, too, in fear and alarm, and muttered behind their hands. Nicole had seen exactly the same reaction in Topanga Plaza when a pack of gangbangers walked into the Wherehouse or Foot Locker.

“Mithras curse the Quadi and Marcomanni both to the infernal depths,” Calidius Severus growled. He was eyeing the strangers as a cop might eye gangbangers at the mall. He’d made it plain he was a veteran. Had he fought these Quadi or Marcomanni? Maybe he had, from the bitterness in his tone. “Miserable barbarians have their nerve, coming into town to buy this and that when they invaded the Empire three years ago not far west of here.”

“Invaded?” Nicole said, and then, hastily, “Yes, of course.” Odd bits of gossip began to fit together like pieces of evidence. The Marcomanni had conquered Aquileia in Italy, and been driven back from it. She didn’t know where in Italy Aquileia was, but nowhere in Italy was particularly close to the Danube. She shivered a little, though the day was fine and mild. “It must have been quite an invasion.”

“That it was.” To her relief, Calidius didn’t notice the odd phrasing; he was intent on his own thoughts. “Some officers I’ve talked with — educated fellows, you know — say it was the worst since the Cimbri and Teutones came down on us, and that was — what? — almost three hundred years ago”

Longer than the United States has been a country, Nicole thought, and shivered again. On her honeymoon, she’d caught glimpses of the sense of history that filled Europe but was so conspicuously absent from America. She hadn’t expected to find that sense in second-century Carnuntum. After all, this was ancient history, wasn’t it? Not so ancient, evidently, that it didn’t have history of its own. She hadn’t gone back to the beginning of time, as she’d sometimes felt — never more urgently than when her belly griped her. She was stuck somewhere in the middle.

She stayed close to Titus Calidius Severus. He hadn’t been afraid of the Marcomanni or Quadi or whoever they were. He’d been angry at them. From the way he stamped resolutely ahead, he was still angry. But that anger might not all have been aimed at the men he called barbarians: after a while, he said, “Umma, if you tell me what you think I’ve done wrong, I may decide to be sorry for it. If it’s something I ought to be sorry for.”

Nicole couldn’t quite suppress the twitch of a smile at his careful phrasing. He could have been a lawyer, with that kind of mind. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong,” she said.

She was glad he was in front of her, so he couldn’t see her wince. Something she hadn’t expected to deal with when she traveled in time: the past life of the body she wore. People made assumptions about her. They expected things of her, things she was supposed to do or think or say, because Umma had always done or thought or said them. Sometimes, as with Lucius and Aurelia, it came in handy. Sometimes…

The fuller and dyer stopped and looked back at her then. Fortunately, she’d managed to pull her face straight. Calidius was nothing if not forthright: “Then why didn’t you want me to come over last night?”

“Because I didn’t feel like it,” she answered, not angrily but without any hesitation, either. If he made a habit of coming on by whenever he felt like a roll in the hay, he was going to have to get himself some new habits.

He grunted. “All right. Can’t expect a woman to know her own mind from one day to the next, I guess.” Before she had a chance to bridle at that, he redeemed himself, at least in part, by adding, “Women likely say the same about men. I’ve known enough who’d give you cause to, anyhow.”

If he was in the habit of mocking everyone impartially, she could deal with that. All the cops she’d ever known, in Indiana and California alike, were the most cynical people on the face of the earth. Maybe soldiers were the same way. Because of that, and because she felt, for a moment, as if she could almost like him, she said, “Besides, it wouldn’t have mattered either way. I was sick last night.”

“Belly, I’ll bet.” Calidius grunted again, apparently a noise that indicated his brains were working. “Julia told me you and the kids were drinking water all day yesterday. What got into you, Umma? One of your new ideas? Water’s handy if you haven’t got anything else, but if you do, forget it. Kids all right?”

“Not too bad, “ Nicole answered. The amphora of Falernian he was carrying for her was glazed. God only knew what was in the glaze, but she could make a pretty fair guess that lead was part of it. But he wouldn’t believe lead was poisonous. Even if he did, so what? If lead killed you, it killed you a little bit at a time. Drinking the water, she’d discovered, was liable to be lethal in a hurry.

“That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad they’re all right. They’re pretty fair kids, they are.”

His stock jumped several points in Nicole’s book. She’d gone out only a couple of times after Frank broke up with her. She might have done it more often if so many men, on learning she had children, hadn’t reacted as if they were a dangerous and possibly contagious disease. I still don’t want to go to bed with him. she thought. She didn’t want to go to bed with anyone.

She started down the street away from the market, back toward the tavern, but Titus Calidius Severus held up a hand. “Wait. You still haven’t told me what you’re angry at.”

Nicole gritted her teeth. He was losing points again, and fast. “I did tell you, Calidius: I’m not angry at you. I will be, though, if you keep pushing at me like this.”

“There — you did it again,” he said.

And there it was again: the prickle of alarm. What have I done? What’s wrong?

Thank God, finally — he went on in a growing heat, spelling it out in terms even a time-traveler from West Hills could understand: “How can I help thinking you’re mad at me when you haven’t called me by my praenomen since day before yesterday? If you can’t be that familiar with someone who knows you’ve got a little mole halfway down from your navel, what in Ahriman’s name is a praenomen good for? “

Nicole bit her tongue. Good God! He knew her body — no, knew this body — better than she did. How had she managed to miss a mole in that spot?

Because, she told herself with tight-drawn patience, she’d been too busy overdosing on her new reality — and freaking at the shaved parts south of the mole. But if she did start calling him Titus, would he take it as a signal and assume she was open for business again? She’d been formally polite, and he’d taken it for displeasure. If she didn’t go back to the intimate use, he’d be convinced she really was mad at him. Except she wasn’t. Except probably she was, because he was a man and she was a woman and it was all too clear that relations between the sexes were no easier to figure here than they’d been in Los Angeles.

She couldn’t take all day making up her mind, not with him standing there studying her. Finally, with an exhalation that wasn’t quite a sigh, she said, “I’m sorry, Titus. I just haven’t been myself the last couple of days.” And you don’t know how true that is. But, instead of the truth, she opted for the simple, the rational, and the practical: “Too much to do, not enough time to do it.”

“Well, that’s so twelve months a year, and an extra day on leap year,” Calidius answered. He too hesitated, as if looking for something else — he couldn’t remember what — that needed saying. Then, as if he’d found it, he grinned. “And I won’t chuck you under the chin anymore, either. I really didn’t know you didn’t like it.”

He was trying. She could say that much for him. Of course, he had an ulterior motive. What male didn’t, in whatever century she found herself in? Nicole nodded, but said simply, “Let’s get on back.”

Titus Calidius Severus started walking. She followed again, with one pause to set down the leg of lamb and scratch her head. No Head and Shoulders, she thought with more sadness than she’d ever expected to feel. No Selsun Blue. No Denorex. Still, there was a bright side. No idiotic commercials for them, either.

They passed the two graffiti about Lydia, in reverse order this time. Pointing to the one and then, a bit farther along, to the other, Nicole said, “Put those two together and they’re pretty funny.”

“I think so, too, but I’ll bet you Marcus doesn’t,” Calidius said wryly. He walked on a couple of paces, then stopped so abruptly, Nicole almost ran into him. “You read them.” He sounded almost accusing.

Uh-oh. “Yes, I read them.” If Nicole stayed cool, kept it light, maybe he wouldn’t fuss about it.

No such luck. “All these years I’ve known you, and I never knew you had your letters.” When he frowned, his face looked absolutely forbidding. “Mithras, I can think of plenty of times when you’ve had me read things for you.”

“I’ve been studying lately,” Nicole said. It was weak, but it was the only explanation she could come up with on the spur of the moment. “Not knowing how always seemed such a lack.”

Muscle by muscle, he relaxed; he’d gone as tense facing her as he might have before a battle. “Well, I’ve heard you say that before,” he allowed. Thank you. Umma. Nicole thought. Calidius went on, “But why didn’t you tell me you wanted to learn? I’d have helped.”

“For one thing, I wanted to surprise you,” she said: again, the path of least resistance.

“You did it, all right,” he said, and chuckled. “And now that you can read a little, you’ll think you can read everything. Isn’t that just like a woman?”

He’d been doing so well for himself. Now he’d pressed the wrong button — no, he hadn’t just pressed it. He’d stomped on it. “I can read anything,” she said in the frosty voice she used to reserve for asking Frank why the check was late. Titus Calidius Severus started to say something. She overrode him. “And I’ll show you.”

And she did. She read every sign, every graffito, every inscription between marcus loves lydia and her restaurant and Calidius’ shop across the street from it. She didn’t stumble once. She made no mistakes. After she’d read the sign above his door, she added, sweetly, “And thank you very much for carrying the wine and the raisins all this way… Titus.”

His sour expression proved she’d done that just right. He looked as if he wished he’d been born without a praenomen, let alone been so rash as to make a big deal of it. But under that, and rapidly swelling through it, he looked astonished. “How did you do that? I don’t think I ever heard anyone read that way, not even men who called themselves philosophers. You didn’t mumble the words at all to see what they were. You just… read them straight out. That’s amazing. How do you do it?”

Nicole’s astonishment couldn’t have been much less than his, though she tried to keep it buried underneath her courtroom mask — the one with the faint, superior smile and the slightly lifted eyebrow. She’d gone to a public school in Indianapolis that was no better than it had to be, and then to a medium-good university. That had landed her a job at a medium-good law firm in Los Angeles, which had not even been a medium-good job by the time it was done with her.

Here… Here, if what Calidius was saying was right, simply being able to read without moving her lips set her above the local equivalent of a Ph.D. He had to be exaggerating. He knew more about it than she did, didn’t he? Anybody who’d grown up here knew more about it than she did.

And if it was true, if literacy was as rudimentary as that, it didn’t promise much for the rest of civilization, either. This wasn’t what she’d expected when she’d wished herself to Carnuntum.

She needed to think. There was never time to think. That was just as true here, since she’d wakened in Umma’s bed, as it had been when she went to sleep in West Hills.

Calidius was still waiting for an answer. Simplest, again, seemed best: “I don’t know how I learned to read like this. It’s how I taught myself, that’s all.”

“Amazing,” he repeated, and stabbed the amphora’s pointed tip down into the dirt of the street, as he’d done with the empties he used for urinals outside his shop. He set down the raisins beside the jar and, still shaking his head, carried the songbirds back toward his door. On his way he stopped at one of the jars and pissed in it, as unself-conscious as any of the other men who paused there. Seeing that Nicole’s gaze had followed him, he grinned and let his tunic fall. “My own private stock, from my own privates.”

She didn’t know why she smiled. It was a godawful joke. Face it, she told herself. Face the way things are. The way things were was plain. He took it utterly for granted that a man would piss in a pot in a public place. There was nothing either shameful or prurient about male nudity here — that was obvious. Female nudity…

Best not get into that. So: nothing shameful. Even noticing that he wasn’t circumcised, or calling to mind that no one else she’d seen pissing in front of his shop was, either. Like the doors that swung on pegs rather than hinges, it wasn’t any better or worse than what she’d known before. It was just different.

Titus Calidius Severus went inside his shop, leaving Nicole to look after herself. He hadn’t even said good-bye. She didn’t know why that should matter, but it did.