Household Gods

7

Nicole was surprisingly glad to see the street she’d come to think of as her own, and the tavern that technically was her own, even after the pleasure of a bath and a romp through the market and the rich indulgence of sticky buns. She’d even got the baker to throw in a basket with a broken handle, no good for displaying his wares but more than good enough for bringing a sampling home. She’d eaten one, too, and Aurelia had had two and was sulking slightly at being denied a third.

Aurelia scampered through the door ahead of her. She paused, licking sticky fingers and letting her eyes adjust. “Hello!” she sang out to the dark within. “I’m — “

She stopped. Her eyes made out shapes that came clearer the longer she stared.

“Oh, hello, Umma,” Ofanius Valens said. He was sitting on a stool. Julia was sitting on his lap. His right arm circled her waist. His left arm had hiked her tunic up to her knees so his hand could slide between her legs. Her tongue was doing something monstrously lewd to his ear.

Lucius rampaged up and down behind them, joyfully oblivious, or else so used to the sight that he didn’t even think it was worth noticing. He swept his toy sword hither and yon, leaping and stabbing the defenseless air. “Take that, you miserable barbarian! Ha!” He whooped and brandished the sword. “By Jupiter! Right in the guts!” What Julia was doing with Ofanius Valens didn’t bother Lucius.

It bothered Nicole. It bothered her a lot. “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

Aurelia ran right past the two of them, sparing a giggle that told Nicole she knew exactly what was going on, she thought it was mildly amusing, but it wasn’t half as interesting as the game her brother was playing. She sprang into that with a whoop and a cry, not even needing a toy sword to become a fearless warrior maiden. Still whooping, they rollicked and scrambled up the stairs.

Julia didn’t move from Ofanius Valens’ lap. His hand went right on rubbing and fondling. Nicole watched it move rhythmically up and down, up and down, raising and lowering her filthy tunic. “Now, now, don’t worry,” he said easily. “I wasn’t going to cheat you.” He tilted his head toward the table. “See, there’s your two sesterces, and Julia’llget her dupondius once we’ve gone upstairs, if she’s as lively as she usually is.”

“I’ll do my best,” Julia purred. The purr and the smile that followed were polished to a hard, clear — professional — gloss. Ofanius Valens’ hand pumped harder. She rocked with it, still smiling, with little, audible catches of breath that Nicole would have bet were as calculated as the rest.

They both took the whole thing completely for granted. Nicole didn’t. Julia had been pleased with herself yesterday: she’d made a couple oidupondii for herself. How had she made them? The usual way, she’d said. Was this the usual way? Prostituting herself? Umma must have — no, not looked the other way. Where Julia might get a dupondius for herself if the customer — if the John, mincing no words — liked her, Umma raked in two sesterces every time her slave walked up those stairs. That was good money: more than she took in for some meals. Of course, it also made her a small-time madam. Umma obviously hadn’t cared about that. Nicole did.

Every time she began to have the shaky beginnings of a feel for the way Carnuntum worked, something like this slapped her in the face. Julia was at Ofanius Valens’ ear again, flicking her tongue down the curve of it. “Stop that!” Nicole burst out, her voice thick with revulsion. Ofanius blinked at her through a visible haze of horniness. Julia blinked in the exact same way, through the exact same haze. They honestly, incontestably did not understand what Nicole’s problem was. “Stop that,” she repeated a little more quietly. “Julia, get off him.”

Julia did as she was told, automatically, like a child or a well-trained animal. The haze retreated, though enough of it lingered that she kept a hand on Ofanius Valens’ shoulder, kneading it absently as she frowned at Nicole. “What’s the matter, Mistress?” she asked in the tone that had become too familiar, that didn’t quite dare ask, What’s wrong with you? You’re acting weird again! “You see he’s already paid. Like he says, we weren’t going to steal from you. Or are you worried about yesterday? I put the two sesterces in the box each time, just like always. Didn’t you find them when you reckoned up the accounts?”

Nicole hadn’t known how to reckon up the accounts, or how much to look for, either. She couldn’t say so. She concentrated on the other thing, the more important thing. “Julia, look at me. “Julia was already doing that. Her expression made it clear that she knew it and was refraining from commenting on it. Nicole took a steadying breath and went on with the speech she’d prepared: “You don’t have to go to bed with him, Julia. You don’t ever have to go to bed with anybody for money again. That’s all done now.” She glared at Ofanius Valens. “Food is one thing. Wine is another.” It wasn’t anything she wanted, but it also didn’t seem to be anything in which she had a choice. Here… “This is something else altogether. It’s over, done, finished. Not in this place, ever again. Do you understand me?”

Ofanius Valens scratched his head. Nicole flinched inside for reasons that had nothing to do with the business at hand. He couldn’t possibly know about those reasons, or the flinch, either.

He seemed to decide, after a moment’s puzzlement, that argument would get him nowhere. Smart man, Nicole thought. Smarter than most twentieth-century males. He was still a male, however, and he wasn’t any happier than any other male who’d ever been born about being told no, he couldn’t have what he wanted. “I don’t know what you’re getting yourself in an uproar about, Umma. Whatever it is, I guess I’ll just take myself someplace else from now on.” He scooped up his two sesterces from the tabletop, dumped them in his belt pouch, and stalked past Nicole and out the door.

“And good riddance.” Nicole turned to Julia, a smile at the ready, to receive the slave’s thanks for freeing her from that sordid transaction.

Julia gave her no such thing. Julia, in fact, looked furious. Her nostrils flared. Her blue eyes glittered. She hissed, a sharp, furious sound.

Her words were an anticlimax, her tone studiedly mild, but her expression gave away how angry she was. “That wasn’t very nice, Mistress. Now he won’t come back.”

She doesn’t know anything about freedom. How can she? She’s never had it. Nicole chose her words with care, to soothe Julia’s temper and get her thinking rationally. “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “We don’t need his business, or business like his.” As she spoke, she advanced into the room, till she was close enough to lay a hand on Julia’s shoulder. It was stiff, set against her. “I told you: you’re never going to bed with another man for money. Never again — I promise.”

Julia’s eyes widened. It still wasn’t gratitude — it was somewhere between dismay and horror. Worse yet was the gleam of tears. “Mistress, why can’t I go to bed with men anymore? What did I do? Why are you so angry with me? Just tell me and I’ll fix it. You can beat me all you like, if that will make you feel better.”

Nicole’s head shook. Good Lord. Titus Calidius Severus had thought she was angry with him, too. That had been a misunderstanding. What was there to misunderstand here? “I’m not angry,” Nicole said, just as she had to Calidius Severus. “I don’t want you to have to suffer like that, that’s all.”

“Suffer, Mistress?” Julia tossed her head in amazement. “What is there to suffer? Ofanius Valens knows how to make a woman hot.” Her hips twitched a little; Nicole didn’t think she knew she was doing it. “And even the ones who aren’t very good usually give me something for myself afterwards, because I make them hot. Now that you’ve taken another of your strange new notions, how am I supposed to get any money of my own? That was all I had, Mistress: taking men upstairs. I liked taking men upstairs.”

Nicole stared. Julia stared back, for once not lowering her eyes in submission. She was shocked enough, and indignant enough, to show for once what must have been her real self. She wasn’t slow at all, or simple either. That was a mask she wore, like the hooker’s mask she’d put on for Ofanius Valens.

“Ofanius Valens gave you an as at breakfast the other day,” Nicole said. “You didn’t do anything for him then but wait on him and be pleasant to him.”

“Oh, yes, a whole as,” Julia said scornfully. “And that wasn’t just on account of breakfast, either. He was being nice to me so I’d be nice to him later.”

An as for a piece of ass, Nicole thought, but she didn’t say it — it only worked in English. What she did say was, “Sleeping with men for money is degrading.”

Julia shrugged, still sullen and not about to let Nicole forget it. “I’ve heard people say that,” she said. “Usually women who don’t have what it takes. They’re jealous, that’s all. Can’t get any fun, so don’t want anybody else to get any either.”

“Fun?” Nicole said incredulously. “You call it fun?”

Julia did a creditable bump-and-grind, with a wild, mirthless grin in it for Nicole. “Sure it is. What else is there in the world that’s anywhere near as much fun?”

She wasn’t just saying it to be obnoxious, Nicole realized. She meant it. In Los Angeles, there had been any number of things to do besides hop between the sheets. Anything from aerobics to pottery classes to nightclubs to fancy restaurants to biker bars to mall-crawling to… She stopped the mental recitation before it threw her into a funk. None of those things existed in Carnuntum. Nicole had been here only three days, scrambling every minute to keep afloat in a sea of totally new and strange details. She hadn’t had time to be bored. Julia had lived her whole life here, without television, without radio, without movies, without recorded music, without newspapers, books, magazines… without much of anything when it came to entertainment. Nicole remembered when she was a kid in Indiana, when a tornado would roar through, or a blizzard, and the power would go out, in rural areas sometimes for days or weeks; and nine months later the maternity wards in the hospitals would be doing a boomtown business. When there was nothing else to do, people just naturally turned to sex.

“I mean,” Julia said, sounding like a Latinate Valley girl, “I could get drunk all the time, but you wouldn’t like that, either, because then I wouldn’t be able to work.”

“No,” Nicole said, “I wouldn’t like that.” Considering how she felt about alcohol, there were few things she would have liked less. But this was one of them. She might have descended from lawyer to tavernkeeper, but by God, she hadn’t descended from lawyer to procurer. “You’re not going to prostitute yourself just to get a little spending money.”

“Mistress,” Julia said with an air of desperate patience. “It’s not just for the money. You don’t sleep by yourself every night. Or at least,” she added after a pause, “you didn’t till you quarreled with Calidius Severus the other day.” When Nicole didn’t erupt at that — Nicole was momentarily unable to think of anything to say — Julia went on, “Oh, Mistress! I know I’m a slave and you can do whatever you want and I can’t say a thing about it, but you’ve never been as bad as you’ve been in the past few days. If you’ve got it into your head that I’m suffering — how about the pain I feel when I don’t have any money to call my own?”

Her expression was piteous, but Nicole didn’t budge. Mothers of teenagers heard the same arguments in pretty much the same tone. It didn’t mean a thing, and she was not about to let it sway her. “You will not make money by selling yourself,” she said. Julia dropped her wounded-kitten pose and glared. Nicole glared right back.

The moment stretched. Nicole drew in a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time” — ever since her spirit came to Carnuntum, even if that was only two days — “and now I’m sure the time is right. I’m going to set you free.”

This time, she was sure Julia would fall on her neck in gratitude. She waited for it, expected it. But, as before, Julia seemed anything but glad to get such a gift. If anything, she looked upset. “But,” she said, “Mistress, what would I do if I was free?”

Nicole reminded herself again that this was a slave, and probably born a slave. The concept of freedom was alien to her. Therefore Nicole kept her voice light, encouraging. “What will you do? Why, anything you want to. You’ll be free.”

Julia eyed her warily. “Could I go on working here?”

“For wages, do you mean?” Nicole asked.

Julia nodded. She was still wary, with a hint of apprehension, but Nicole had noticed that if Julia got a thought in her head, she couldn’t help but pursue it to its logical conclusion. “Yes, Mistress. Or at least, some wages. Room and board and a little money for myself.”

Which was exactly what she got now — except for the money part, which had just evaporated. Julia was canny, Nicole thought. Behind that open face and simple, forthright manner lay a sharp intelligence.

Intelligence, maybe, but no ambition. Nicole was a little disappointed. “If that’s what you want to do,” Nicole said, “yes, I suppose so.” And God knows I need you to help me get through all the things I still don’t know. “Or you could go to school and — “

Julia looked at her as if she’d gone around the bend again. “School? Mistress, what good would that do?”

Now that Nicole had rather expected. “It would give you more kinds of work to choose from,” she answered. “After all, you can’t read or write, can you?” Umma hadn’t been able to, so it was safe enough to assume that her slave couldn’t either.

Julia didn’t seem to feel the lack. She shrugged indifferently. “What if I could? There aren’t many jobs that need it. Clerk for the city, I suppose, or bookkeeper — but even if I could learn enough or fast enough, I wouldn’t want to be locked up all day making birdtracks on papyrus. Besides, those are men’s jobs. Who ever heard of a lady bookkeeper?” She laughed and shook her head, as if the notion were too absurd for words.

Those are men’s jobs. Nicole heard the words with sick dismay. Who ever heard of a lady bookkeeper? She’d fled California not only for its sexism but for its hypocrisy. Camuntum was every bit as sexist — and not the least bit hypocritical about it. “What about Liber and Libera?” Nicole asked, a little hoarsely.

“The wine god and his wife?” Julia asked as if puzzled. “What about them, Mistress? They’re gods. They aren’t bookkeepers.”

“The — wine god and goddess?” Nicole felt as if she’d been slugged in the gut. What had she done to herself? Of all the deities she would have picked to help her…

But they had helped her, snickering at her ignorance, all too likely, but helping her nevertheless. And here she was, in the world they’d chosen for her, and she was damned if she knew what to do about it.

Maybe she was damned. Sunday school had included a long rant on sin and damnation, and a scenic tour of hell. Wine and drunkards had warranted a whole separate dissertation, along with fornicators, whom Nicole had thought of then, in her eight-year-old innocence, as people who had been put to work stoking the furnaces.

It wasn’t particularly warm in Carnuntum, but there was plenty of heat inside Nicole’s skull. It felt as if her brains were boiling. “Liber and Libera,” she managed to say. “Aren’t they — “ She softened what she’d been about to say: “Aren’t they also the gods of liberty?”

Julia thought about it briefly, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. Liberty from care — isn’t that what wine does? Frees your soul from worry, lets you forget for a while that life isn’t going the way you want it to?”

“Liberty — from care?” Again, Nicole’s echo was hesitant and filled with a dismay she tried to hide from Julia. That fit too well with what the god and goddess had done, her last night in West Hills. She’d been filled with care then. Liber and Libera had taken her out of it, had sent her back to their time, back to their town, where she’d thought — where they must have thought — she would be carefree.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Carefree? Wine, lice, slavery — and now sexism, too? Some freedom this was — all the new worries of this time and place, and a whole set of old ones from California, too. It was more than she could take.

She almost prayed to Liber and Libera to ship her back to California. But she wasn’t giving up yet, even for Kimberley and Justin. She’d asked for this. She had to make the best of it.

“Mistress?” Julia said. Nicole nodded to show she’d been paying attention, even if she hadn’t. “Mistress,” Julia said again, “I was thinking. If I work here as a freedwoman, not as a slave, I’ll be able to take men upstairs and keep all” — Nicole’s expression gave her pause, but she misinterpreted it — “all right, not all. But more of what they pay, for myself.”

“If you work here as my freedwoman,” Nicole said through clenched teeth, “you will not prostitute yourself.”

“But why not,” Julia asked, “if I’m free and if I want to?” She searched Nicole’s face as if she could find an answer there. “Mistress, I don’t understand.”

Nicole opened her mouth, then closed it again. Here was an issue she’d never imagined she’d have to face. If a woman wanted to go on selling herself, did another woman have the right to forbid it? She couldn’t face that, not on those terms. She sidestepped instead, as she had with Lucius and Aurelia: “Isn’t there anything else you’d rather do?”

Julia raised her hands and let them fall. “Mistress, you keep saying that, but what else can I do? I can cook some and bake some, so maybe I could work at another tavern, but it’s hard to find one that doesn’t already have its own slave — and slaves work for free. Remember that woman you wouldn’t hire last year because you owned me?”

Again, Nicole made herself nod. Because you owned me. Julia said it so calmly. She took it for granted. However unhappy she might be as a slave, she never blinked at slavery itself.

“I’m good at something else, too,” she said, “or the men say I am. But I don’t want to do that for a living, either. I’d have to take on men I didn’t want at all, and I wouldn’t much care for that.’’

Nicole lowered her aching head into her hands. Had she really expected life here to be simple? In California, she’d always known how to react, what to think, what was right and what was wrong. In Carnuntum, there was no such thing as simplicity — not to her twentieth-century mind.

She settled on the one thing that was simple, the thing she had decided on. “Let’s do what we have to do to get you free,” she said, “and then we’ll worry about everything else. How does that sound?”

“All right, Mistress.” Even now, Julia sounded more dutiful than delighted. “Brigomarus won’t like it, I’ll bet.”

“Brig —?” Nicole needed a moment to recall the name of Umma’s brother — now, effectively, her brother. “Don’t you worry about Brigomarus. Just leave him to me.”

“Yes, Mistress.” Julia still sounded dutiful. She sounded, Nicole supposed, very much the way a slave was supposed to sound. The contrast with Julia’s usual, freer manner was strong enough to bring Nicole up short, and to stab her with guilt — which was probably what Julia intended.

Slaves and children, Nicole thought. They’re powerless — but they can manipulate the ones in power, to get what they think they want. And hadn’t she done the same thing herself more times than she could count, growing up and going to school and working in a law firm that took equity so far and not an inch further?

Two afternoons later, Brigomarus breezed into the tavern. Luck was looking after Nicole again. She didn’t need to wonder who this casual type was who blew in as if he owned the place. Lucius, who’d been cracking walnuts, shouted “Uncle Brigo!” and tried to tackle him.

He swept the boy up, tipped him upside down, and bonked his head on a tabletop. Lucius squealed in delight. Brigomarus tipped him back upright and set him bouncing on his feet, and pulled a handful of candied figs from his belt pouch. Lucius snatched them as eagerly as if he hadn’t been eating as many walnuts as he dropped into the bowl, and danced around the room while Aurelia, who’d heard the uproar and come downstairs to see what was happening, fell on her uncle and held him hostage till he surrendered a second handful of figs.

“Greedy kids,” he said affectionately, planting himself on a stool and thumping the table with a fist. “Let me have some wine, would you, sister? I’d have been back sooner, but they’ve had us making shields from dawn to dusk. The war with the tribes across the river isn’t anywhere near over yet, you mark my words. “

Nicole dipped a cup of Falernian for him, figuring family deserved the best. Maybe Umma hadn’t been that generous: Brigomarus’ eyebrows rose and he smacked his lips. He downed the cup with as much pleasure as thirst.

She studied him while he drank. He looked like one of Umma’s relatives, sure enough. He was, she suspected, a younger brother, though not by much. He was a little fairer than Umma, his eyes hazel rather than brown, but they shared long faces and prominent noses and sharp cheekbones. His beard obscured the shape of his chin, but she supposed it was narrow and rather pointed, like her — Umma’s — own. He was rather good-looking, in a lean and hungry way. If she’d been her California self, she might not have wanted to know him; he looked hard and a little dangerous, though his ready smile and easy manner tended to conceal it.

Lucius pestered him, tugging at his arm, voice escalating into a whine: “Wrestle me, Uncle Brigo! Come on, let’s wrestle, come on, Uncle Brigo!”

“No,” Brigomarus said. Lucius kept at him, tugging harder, ignoring Brigomarus’ frown and reiterated, “No!” Brigomarus casually hauled off and smacked him upside the head, harder than Nicole had ever hit a child in her life. “Cut it out, kid,” he said. “I want to talk to your mother.”

Lucius rocked with the blow, but he didn’t start crying or screaming. “Oh, all right, Uncle Brigo,” he said, disappointed but evidently undamaged.

If he had started to cry, Nicole would have been on Brigomarus like a tiger. As it was, she wanted to yell at him anyhow. It was hard to hold herself back, to be sensible, to keep from giving herself away. Julia was inclined to take Nicole’s odd moments in stride. Somehow, Nicole didn’t think Brigomarus would be so accommodating.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked him, and hoped she sounded enough like his sister to pass muster.

Evidently she did. He answered a question with a question: “What’s this I hear about you wanting to set Julia free?”

Nicole’s heart jumped, but she held steady. “It’s true,“ she said. “I do.” She’d had time enough over the past couple of days to frame a response that, from what Julia had said, a person from here and now could legitimately have made: “I decided that I didn’t want her to have to sleep with customers to get a little spending money.” She kept wanting to say pocket change, but nobody in Carnuntum knew about pockets.

Brigomarus raised his eyebrows. “What? That never bothered you before.” He sucked on a front tooth, as if it helped him get his thoughts in order. “I hate to lose the money she cost, too — and if one of those customers knocked her up, the brat would bring a nice piece of change.” By his tone, he might have been trying to talk his sister out of a real-estate deal he thought foolish. Like Julia and everyone else Nicole had seen in this place, he had not the slightest sense that anything was wrong with or about slavery itself.

It drove Nicole crazy. The casual way in which Brigomarus spoke of selling a child for profit made her belly go tight and cold. “Setting Julia free is what I want to do,” she said with unshaken determination, “and I’m going to do it.”

Brigomarus scowled. “Listen, you know it’s not that simple.” He paused as if to control his temper, or maybe to come up with an argument a silly woman would understand. “Look, Umma, if you’re bound and determined, I don’t want to fight over it. Life is too short as it is. Let’s do it like this, if you’ve got your mind set on it.” He waited for Nicole’s emphatic nod, then went on, “Let her earn more money and keep more money, so she can pay back what she cost.”

Julia’s face fell. Nicole could make a pretty good guess what that meant: with what Julia could make, she’d never be able to pay for herself — unless she sold her body, and sold it and sold it… That was partly why Nicole shook her head even more violently than she’d nodded, but only partly. She could not stomach owning a slave for one more instant. And there was no way in hell she was going to compromise with the system by taking money from Julia in return for Julia’s freedom. “No,” Nicole said. “I’m going to emancipate her, and that’s that. “

“I say you’re not going to do anything of the sort.” Brigomarus sounded as revoltingly sure of himself as any senior partner at her old law firm.

“You may be my brother” — and then again, you may not — “but you’re not my master, so don’t treat me as if you think you are,” Nicole snapped. Brigomarus stared at her as if she, or rather Umma, had never spoken to him like that before. If Umma hadn’t, she’d probably wasted a lot of good chances. “She’s not your slave, she’s mine, and I’m going to do with her as I think best.”

“As you think best?” Brigomarus¹ eyebrows had climbed to his hairline in an expression of comic incredulity — but there was nothing comic about his tone. “And what does that have to do with it? You have a family, Umma, and you seem to have forgotten about it.”

“I haven’t forgotten!” Nicole said hotly — and honestly enough. She never forgot Kimberley or Justin, either, even in the deep throes of life in Carnuntum.

She knew what he meant, nevertheless, and couldn’t help a stab of guilt at the actual, if not technical, falsehood.

“Oh, you haven’t?” Brigomarus drawled. “Not that I’d blame you for wanting to forget dear Mother and our snotty sisters, after they’ve married up and you’ve stayed where we came from, and I know they never waste a chance to remind you of it, either. But even so, Umma, and even if you don’t care what this does to the rest of the family, I never imagined you, of all people, throwing away good money for no good reason.”

Nicole stiffened her back and lifted her chin. “I’m going to do what’s best for me and what’s best for Julia, and that’s all I’m worried about,” she said.

She’d shocked Brigomarus: she saw it in his eyes. And she’d shocked Julia, which shocked her in turn.

Well, she thought, if the second century isn’t ready for a little twentieth-century assertiveness — and only a little, because she’d soft-pedaled it as best she could — too damn bad.

Stiffly, Brigomarus said, “We’ll speak of this further when you’ve come to your senses. The gods grant it be soon.” He looked into his cup, saw he had a swallow of wine left, and gulped it down. Then he stalked out of the tavern, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. He hadn’t, Nicole noticed, said good-bye, even to the kids.

“Mistress — “ Julia looked and sounded deeply worried. “Mistress, are you really sure you want to quarrel with your family over me? A family’s the most important thing in the world. If you don’t have a family you’re on good terms with, who’s going to nurse you when you’re sick? Who’s going to take care of your children if you die? Who’s going to help you if you go into debt? If I had a family, I’d never get them angry at me.”

Nicole looked at Julia as if seeing her for the first time. She was all alone in the world. As a slave, she was more thoroughly isolated from everyone around her than anyone in the twentieth century could be. That, thought Nicole, no doubt made her look at family with a wistful longing only distantly connected to anything real. You needed to be in a family to know how horrible it could actually be.

Umma apparently knew. “Dear” Mother and a couple of upwardly mobile sisters, was it? Then they probably didn’t just drop in to visit, the way Brigomarus felt free to do; and that was a relief. It was enough of a tightrope walk to keep Umma’s image going in this tavern and in the neighborhood, without trying to fool Umma’s own mother into believing that Nicole was Umma.

So where was Umma? Back in West Hills trying desperately to cope? Floating somewhere in limbo? Or — with a jolt that made her gasp — dead? Dead and… gone?

For now, Nicole focused on a simpler problem. “Don’t you worry about it,” she said to Julia. “Everything’s going to be fine, and Brigomarus will figure out he’d be smart to keep his nose out of things that are none of his business.”

“How can you say they’re none of his business?” Nicole hadn’t pegged Julia as a worrier, but neither had she presented Julia with a problem that pertained directly to her. “You’re part of his family. They’ll all be up in arms when they hear what you want to do, mark my words.”

In the United States of the late twentieth century, family was a pallid thing — so pallid that Frank, damn him, could abandon his with hardly a backward glance, and abandon it without disapproval from anyone but Nicole. If anything, his colleagues were jealous he’d latched on to a new, young, sexy girlfriend. And Nicole herself, while she liked her sisters well enough, lived two thousand miles away from them and didn’t call as often as she should, let alone write. She’d hardly thought of them at all in the week before she came to Carnuntum, except to wish she could palm the kids off on them for a couple of days after she found out Josefina was heading for Ciudad Obregon.

On the whole, Nicole had liked things that way. She hadn’t cared for it when Frank bugged out, not even a little bit, but she’d enjoyed being free herself, ever since she’d got big enough to tell her mother no and make it stick. If she didn’t have to kill herself over money and her job, she liked responsibility, liked being, from day to day, the only one who really took care of the house, the kids, her life in general.

Julia sounded as if family disapproval in Carnuntum was like being shunned in an Amish community — Nicole had seen something on television about that, and been caught by the intensity of reaction to something that amounted to the silent treatment. Silence was lovely, she’d thought. So was being left alone. She could have used a lot of that when she was growing up, stuck sharing a bedroom with a sister she could barely stand the sight of, who’d grown up into a reasonably decent person but with whom Nicole had next to nothing in common.

It seemed Umma had about the same relationship with her sisters as Nicole had — but The Family meant far, far more.

Well. So it did. She d weathered infidelity, shed weathered divorce. She could weather family disapproval, too. She was her own person, first, last, and always.

She said so, loudly and emphatically. She had no real hope of raising Julia’s consciousness, but maybe, over time and with repetition, some of it would stick.

Right at the moment, Julia didn’t look enlightened. She looked horrified. Nicole was used to working hostile audiences; it was what a lawyer did for a living. But Julia had a look that warned her to go slow or she’d lose the case. She tried one more time, regardless: “I am my own person. You can be your own person. Family doesn’t have to dictate every breath you take. It isn’t even your family! I’m not worried about it. Why should you be?”

Julia’s chin was set, her face closed. She wrapped herself in a cloud of flour, slapping together another batch of bread for the evening crowd, immersing herself in work to keep from listening — or perhaps to keep from screaming at her mistress to shut up.

She visibly relaxed when Nicole dropped the subject. Nicole sighed. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” she murmured in English, and started, painfully, to laugh. Julia’s startled expression only made her laugh the harder.

Family you could escape, but even in West Hills it was sometimes hard to escape the neighbors. Not that, there, they dropped by and wanted to borrow a cup of oil and stay on for a chat; it was more like hard rock at three A.M. and dog poop in the front yard.

In Carnuntum, there wasn’t anything at three A.M. but maybe an early rooster crowing, but during the day plenty went on. The day after Brigomarus came to pull his sister into line, Nicole looked up from chopping scallions to find herself face to face with a vaguely familiar figure. It was the voice that jogged her memory, high and rather thin, with a touch of what people in Indiana used to call adenoids.

The owner of the voice, Nicole realized, was rather obviously pregnant. She didn’t seem to be blooming, but rather the Rosemary’s Baby type: wan and hollow-cheeked, but in this case irrepressibly cheerful. She held up a cup and said brightly, “Good morning, Umma! It’s been absolute days since I saw you. Here, look, I have an excuse. I’m out of oil and my dear woollyhead of a husband has gone off all day drumming up clients, and it’s such a long walk to the market.”

Nicole was no recent expert in cup-of-sugar diplomacy, but she’d seen plenty of it when she was growing up. If it wasn’t sugar, it was coffee, or maybe, in extremity, a cigarette: a transparent excuse to come by, camp in the kitchen, and chatter the morning away. Housewives did it to lighten the monotony, or to get out of washing the ceilings, or to drum up sympathy for this or that husbandly stunt.

In Carnuntum, apparently, the medium of exchange was olive oil. Nicole spared a half-instant to wonder if Umma actually gave away what she sold to regular customers, then shrugged and dipped the cupful. Her neighbor, as she’d expected, didn’t just thank her and leave, but perched on a stool near the counter where Nicole was working. It was a slow time of day, as she must have known and calculated. She looked as if she was a regular occupant of that same stool, easy and comfortable — surprisingly so for someone whose pregnancy didn’t seem to be treating her well.

“So,” she said. “How is everything, then? Do you believe what Valentia got up to with that traveling eye-doctor? Why, I hear her husband whipped her black and blue — then she made him feel so guilty he gave her a new necklace! Imagine that!”

Nicole hadn’t known she was tense till she felt the muscles of her back and shoulders relax. This was the easy kind of neighbor, then, the one who never let you get a word in edgewise. She didn’t appear to notice anything odd about Nicole, nor did she expect any answer to her rapid-fire questions — just rattled right on through them. There was something strangely soothing in the endless flow of her voice, names and events that were as alien to Nicole as the far side of the moon, but so many of them were familiar, too: this couple married, that one divorced (“And he tried to pretend her dowry was his own family money, can you believe that? Got slapped good and proper for that one, you can be sure!”), a third blessed with a son, “and about time, too, after six daughters — they had to expose the last four, they just couldn’t feed them.”

The woman sighed. Her face, for a moment, was almost somber. “Some people have children and don’t want them. Me, I want them and neither of my first two saw even one birthday.” Nicole heard her with grim astonishment. Things like that didn’t happen in California. No — they did, but rarely enough that they put you on the talk-show circuit with your anguish. Well, Nicole’s neighbor was on the talk-show circuit, too. She sighed and patted her belly. “This time, by Mother Isis, everything will be fine. It will.”

On and on it went. Somewhere in the middle, Julia came down from cleaning upstairs, greeting the visitor with a smile of honest pleasure and a delighted, “Fabia Ursa! How good to see you. You’re looking well.” Which gave Nicole a name and a respite, while they chattered at each other for a while — till Julia seemed to remember her status and excused herself to take the heap of soiled bedding and filthy clothes across the street to Titus Calidius Severus, who would trample them in a tub full of water and fuller’s earth. No washing machines or laundromats here. No Tide, either, worse luck.

Nicole realized as the morning went on that she liked Fabia Ursa. She also realized she couldn’t say that of anyone else she’d met in Carnuntum, even Lucius and Aurelia. It was odd, because back in the twentieth century she’d cordially despised the kaffeeklatsch queens, as she’d liked to call them. Fabia Ursa was a cheerful soul, happily married to a somewhat feckless but much beloved husband, whose foibles she was not shy about sharing. She had two slaves who did everything, as she professed, and had not much to do, it seemed, but trot about and discover who was doing what to whom. She did it with such relish, and with such a clear sense of vocation, that it was impossible to dislike, still less despise her.

Yes, Nicole liked Fabia Ursa. She was not so sure at all that she liked Titus Calidius Severus. Sometimes she did. Then he’d say something, or do something, to set her off again.

He waved to Nicole whenever they saw each other outside their front doors. She always answered politely, and she remembered to use his praenomen. Past calling him Titus, however, she gave him nothing he could take for encouragement.

Although Julia clucked like an unhappy mother hen, Nicole wasn’t altogether unhappy when the fuller and dyer stayed out of the restaurant for a few days after her trip to the market. She hoped that meant she’d made him stop and think. No one, she told herself fiercely — not Umma’s brother, not Umma’s lover, no one — was going to take her for granted here.

Despite that determination, her nerves twanged like a Nashville guitar string when, two or three days after she and Brigomarus had got nowhere, Calidius Severus walked in with a man about half his age who otherwise looked just like him — and, unfortunately, smelled just like him, too. They sat down together like an identical-twin act, exact same stoop, exact same turn of the head, even the same shift and hitch on their respective stools. Nicole, watching them, felt a small, distinct shock, a Why didn’t he tell me? shock, much the same as if she’d found a wedding ring on Calidius Severus’ finger. But he couldn’t be married, could he? No. Julia had said he was a widower.

She’d tangled herself in a brief knot, and he was speaking, ordering dinner with perfect and not perceptibly strained casualness. “Wine and bread and onions for both of us, Umma, “ he said, “and what else have you got that’s good?”

“Snails fried with garlic in olive oil?” she suggested. She’d been holding her breath, she discovered, but she’d had to let it out to play the polite proprietor. “I had Lucius bring me back a basketful of snails this morning.” And Lucius, no doubt, had had as much fun catching them as an eight-year-old boy could. An incongruous bit of English doggerel went reeling through her head: Snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.

“Those do sound good,” Titus Calidius Severus said. Nicole had to clamp down hard on a giggle. His son, whose name Nicole resigned herself yet again to having to pick up from conversation, licked his lips and nodded, smiling widely. The smile, at least, was different from his father’s. Titus Calidius Severus was much too sure of himself to indulge in such a goofy grin.

Nicole would sooner have done the snails in butter herself. They had butter in Carnuntum — had it and looked down their noses at it. It was their last resort when they couldn’t get olive oil. No accounting for taste. Nicole thought, the phrase forming in her mind in English and Latin at the same time. De gusttbus non disputandum.

“Two orders of snails,” she called to Julia. “I’ll get the rest.”

“All right, Mistress,” Julia said from behind the counter. She dropped the snails and chopped garlic into the fierce hiss of hot oil. A wonderful smell wafted out from the pan: oil, garlic, the fishy-sweet scent of snails. Butter would have smelled even better, in Nicole’s opinion, but she was, as far as she could tell, a minority of one. Olive oil was healthier, she consoled herself — until she remembered that the oil, like most of the wine in Carnuntum, was imported in glazed amphorae. She’d never imagined worrying about whether lead was more likely to be dangerous than cholesterol. She’d never imagined living in a place where nobody worried about either one.

Calidius Severus’ son kept watching Julia while she fried the snails. She’d glance at him every now and again, too, and preen a little. If that didn’t mean he’d gone upstairs with her a few times, Nicole would have been astonished.

As Nicole brought them the wine and bread and onions, Titus Calidius Severus whispered something to his son. The younger man frowned. “Is what my father says true?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” Nicole answered evenly, arranging food and drink, cups and bowls, on the table in front of them. “What does your father say?”

“That you aren’t letting Julia screw for money anymore,” he said.

She couldn’t say she was startled, though shocked was another matter. From everything she’d heard, Romans charged through the bushes instead of beating around them.

“Yes, it’s true,” Nicole said, in a tone that couldn’t mean anything but, Want to make something out of it?

Before his son could make anything out of it, Titus Calidius Severus said, “Why in Ahriman’s name would Ofanius Valens lie to me, Gaius? Why would he lie about something like that, anyhow? No money in it.” He glanced up at Nicole. His expression was honestly curious. “Why aren’t you letting her screw for money anymore?”

“I decided I would sooner have a little less money than be a part-time madam,” she replied as starchily as she knew how.

Gaius Calidius Severus still looked miffed. His father grunted the way he did when he was thinking about something that, in his opinion, bore thinking on. “All right, that’s not a bad answer,” he said at last. “It will likely do your soul good when judging time comes.”

Titus Calidius Severus looked to be on the point of saying something more, but just then Julia sashayed between Nicole and the table, accompanied by a powerful odor of garlic. She carried two dishes of snails and a pair of spoons, which she set down with a flourish. Nicole couldn’t help but notice that the movements showed off her full breasts in the slightly snug tunic, and the fine curve of her hips and buttocks as she turned and sauntered back to the cookfire. The two Calidii pried their eyes off her long enough to pry the snails out of their shells with the handles of the spoons. No doubt about it, when it came to a choice between food and sex, food had at best an even chance.

They ate with lip-smacking relish. They both, obviously, appreciated Nicole’s recipe, if not her social ideas.

Julia didn’t appreciate those, either. As she took her place again by the fire, she put in a bump and a wiggle that would have led to a vice-squad bust on any L.A. street. Gaius Calidius Severus had eaten a couple of snails — enough to take the edge off his hunger for food. The third one stopped halfway to his mouth, forgotten in the glory of the scenery. His eyes reminded Nicole pointedly of the sheep’s eyes she’d seen in the market.

His father watched, too, not without admiration. Men did that. A lot of the time, they didn’t even seem to know they were doing it. It was the way they were made, the kaffeeklatsch queens had said to one another, back in Indiana. Fabia Ursa said it, too, when she came round for a morning’s gossip. So what, Nicole wondered, might Umma have said if she’d caught her boyfriend ogling her slave? Something interesting, she hoped. Something memorable. Something better than Nicole’s tongue-tied silence.

Or maybe the fuller and dyer was checking Julia out for a different reason. Turning back to Nicole, he said, “Do I hear rightly that you’re thinking about manumitting her?”

“Yes, it’s true,” Nicole repeated in the same truculent tone as before. But curiosity got the better of her defiance; she couldn’t keep from asking, “Where did you hear that?”

His smile was on the crooked side, and matched his lopsided shrug. “Somebody who talked to somebody who talked to your brother — you know what gossip’s like. If I heard it straight, your brother isn’t any too happy about it, either.”

“No, he’s not.” Nicole tossed her head. “He’ll get over it — or if he doesn’t, too bad for him. It’s not his business; it’s mine.”

Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus stared at her with the same deeply shocked expression Julia had inflicted on her when she’d said that before. In damned near comic chorus, they echoed Julia word for word: “It’s family business.” And that, their tone said, should most certainly be that.

Not for me, Nicole thought stubbornly. Not now. and not while I’m alive to say so. “I’m not going to let that smother me,” she said aloud. “I’ll do what’s best for me and what’s best for Julia. If that’s not what the family wants — then too bad for the family. They can just learn to live with it.”

“Well,” said Calidius Severus after a long pause, clicking his tongue between his teeth. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. “ It was not, his expression said, how he would have looked at it. “Families can be a pain, no two ways about it. But you do hate to throw out the connections. You never can tell how things will go — only the gods know that. We mortals, well… it never hurts to have something to fall back on.”

Good, sound, sensible advice. Even if he did smell like an outhouse on a hot summer day, Titus Calidius Severus was a good and sensible man. But Nicole hadn’t got to Carnuntum by being sensible. “I’ll take my chances,” she said.

He shrugged again. “Hey, I’m not your family. You’re not stuck with me.” He smiled that crooked smile again, too, which did the oddest — just this side of annoying — things to her middle. “Like I’m telling you something you didn’t already know.”

Oh, she could read him perfectly well. You used to want me and now you don’t, and I can’t figure out why. That was what he meant. Still, he didn’t say it, not out loud. He didn’t sound angry, either, just perplexed. When you got down to it, that was a pretty… civilized way of going about things. It was a hell of a lot more civilized than the come-ons she’d suffered through in California. The guys who’d made those hadn’t even been to bed with her, and they were assuming rights she damned well didn’t want to give them. Calidius Severus had slept with her, or thought he had; and he was letting her decide just how to handle this thing between them.

Damn, she was starting to like him again. Worse; to sympathize with him. She wasn’t used to sympathizing with a man. Men were pains, every last one of them. Except — this one didn’t seem to be, nor did he seem to be pretending. He really was a decent sort. She should have hated him for it. Instead, she hated herself either for letting down the side so far as to actually like a member of the Y-chromosome set, or for being such a bitch that she couldn’t see a decent human being when he stood in front of her face.

He had to make it worse, too, when she wouldn’t rise to his bait. He shrugged one last time, reached into his belt pouch, didn’t push or lecture her, but just said, “I know what I owe you for everything but the snails. You don’t do those often enough for me to remember.”

“A dupondius a plate,” she said. It came out clear enough, after all, through a throat just a little tight.

Calidius Severus didn’t complain. No one else had, either. He paid the bill, then put down an extra as. “Give this to Lucius. The hunter deserves his reward.”

Gaius Calidius Severus set down anas, too. “Can Julia have it?” he asked, adding, “She did cook them up very nicely.”

Nicole looked at Titus Calidius Severus. The fuller and dyer pursed his lips and looked up at the sooty ceiling. He didn’t say anything. He very loudly didn’t say it. Watching him not saying it, watching his son thinking he’d been subtle and not given away what was really on his mind, or perhaps on his crotch, made Nicole want to laugh — or snarl.

All right. Titus Calidius Severus had given her one victory. She could give him this other, minor one. As she was expected to, she said, “Yes, Julia can have the as.”

Gaius Calidius Severus looked as if he would have clapped his hands and bounced up and down, if he hadn’t remembered his manly dignity. “Oh, good!” he said with another of his goofy grins.

His father pursed his lips again. This time, instead of looking at the ceiling, he glanced at Nicole. They shared a moment of silent amusement.

Yes, shared it. It felt… good. Dammit, it felt good.

Titus Calidius Severus ended it with ease that Nicole could envy. He got to his feet, moving briskly but comfortably, and said, “Come on, son. We’d better get back. No matter how much you wish it would, the work doesn’t do itself.” He nodded to Nicole. “See you soon.”

“All right,” she answered automatically, and a little more warmly than she’d expected.

Both women watched the Calidii Severi walk back across the street, the son a slighter, paler copy of the father. Nicole didn’t know what expression Julia wore, nor did she care to glance at her, to find out.

Julia came up beside her, a redolence composed of garlic and wool and unwashed body — the same as ever, but somehow more bearable than it had been just a few days ago. She picked up the copper coin the younger Calidius Severus had left for her. “I think Gaius is very nice,” she announced.

“Of course you do,” Nicole said. And caught herself too late. Her tone was snide, and worse than snide.

It didn’t offend Julia, or Julia didn’t admit to being offended. She nodded, that was all, and slipped the coin into her mouth till she could go up to her room. She accepted Nicole’s meanness as plain truth. Compared to that, Nicole would sooner have seen her offended.

Slaves accept such things, she thought. Free women rebel against them. But she didn’t say anything — which was a cowardly thing, and a sensible thing, and a thing she didn’t admire herself for; but she did it nevertheless. This place was getting under her skin. The next thing she knew, she’d be deciding to keep Julia a slave, because The Family objected to the waste of such valuable property. Giving herself to herself — what a horrible thing.

Nicole was comforted, a little. She still had most of her irony intact. She was safe enough — for now.

A woman left the tavern looking less happy than she might have. Julia said, “Tsk, tsk,” a sound that hadn’t changed much when Nicole dropped back in time.

“What’s wrong?” Nicole asked, a bit distracted: she was taking the latest batch of bread out of the oven.

“I’m afraid you might have offended your cousin Primigenia, Mistress,” Julia said, which, given the care slaves had to use when speaking, meant Nicole sure as blazes had offended Cousin Primigenia. Julia went on, “You treated her like you’d never set eyes on her before in your life.”

Nicole lifted out the last of the loaves and set it on the counter to cool — carefully, because the bread was hot and the action kept her from hitting the wall that she could see rushing toward her at freeway speed. With Brigomarus, she’d lucked out. With other people, she’d either been given enough clues to go on with, or she’d been able to cover for her ignorance — most often because of Julia.

Nicole slid a glance at the slave. Julia was wearing one of her blander expressions. Was she figuring things out? Had she kept quiet deliberately, to see what would happen?

Of course not. Nicole thought. How could she know Umma wasn’t Umma anymore? Nicole had been scrambling as fast as she could, as hard as she could, to keep up with things. She’d been doing well, she’d thought. Till now.

She had to say something. Julia was starting to shuffle her feet. She put on a kind of frantic nonchalance, straightening up, dusting her hands, making a show of inspecting the row of nicely browned loaves. “Well,” she said, “that’s done. As for Pnmigenia… I must have had too much on my mind. I swear I didn’t even see her. I’ll make it up to her next time, that’s all.”

That was only about half true. Nicole had seen Primigenia. The woman was a little hard to miss: she had the beginning of a harelip. A surgeon in the twentieth century would have repaired it while she was a baby. Here, she had to live with it. Nicole remembered thinking, What a shame. She’s not bad-looking otherwise.

At the moment, she hoped Julia hadn’t seen her looking. Or had taken her stare for abstraction, figuring the accounts, maybe, or making a mental shopping list for tomorrow’s trip to the market.

Julia didn’t appear to have seen, or else had decided to play the game by Nicole’s rules. In a way. “I hope she doesn’t take it too hard, “ she said. “Your brother’s angry at you as it is. You don’t want to get your whole family up in arms.”

“That’s the last thing I want.” Nicole paused. That was it; she’d had it. She had to say it, and never mind what Julia thought. “No, the next to last thing. The last thing I want is for people to think they can tell me what to do.”

Julia sighed. People had been telling her what to do since she was born. That thought, and the thought of a family row on the horizon, crystallized the timing of the decision Nicole had already made. “Come on, Julia. We’re going over to the town-council building and do what we have to do to set you free.”

“Right now?” Julia said. Nicole nodded. Julia still looked as if she didn’t believe it. “You’re going to close the place down and everything?”

“That’s right,” Nicole said with the crispness of a decision well and firmly made. It felt wonderful. “Fabia Ursa can keep an eye on the children while we’re gone.” Fabia Ursa was by now a fixture of Nicole’s morning routine. Nicole had learned in the course of her chatter that she and her husband owned the house-shop combination next door to Nicole’s, the one she’d seen across the alley the first morning she’d awakened in Carnuntum. They were brassworkers and tinkers: they made and repaired pots and pans. Or rather, the husband did; Fabia Ursa had the skill and the craft, she said, but with this baby coming after she’d lost two, she was taking things slower than usual. Hence her mornings in Umma’s tavern.

She’d just left a while before, in fact, saying that she needed to see to something in the shop. If Nicole strained, she could hear that clear, somewhat strident voice chattering to a customer as it chattered in her own ear every morning.

Lucius and Aurelia didn’t raise a ruckus about having Fabia Ursa watch them; they had someplace less familiar in which to get into mischief. Nicole overheard Aurelia reminding Lucius, quite seriously, “We do have to be a little bit careful. Fabia Ursa will wallop us if we’re naughty. “

Nicole stiffened — a reaction she had much too often in this world and time. What was she supposed to make of that? Should she tell Fabia Ursa not to hit them even if they misbehaved? Fabia Ursa was a gentle soul, as people went in Carnuntum, but she was completely unsentimental — and Nicole had heard her, more than once, approve of a woman who spanked her children. If Nicole tried to force her to lay off the kids, she’d smile, pat Nicole’s arm, and say kindly, “Oh, very well, dear, if you insist — but since I can’t possibly keep from hitting a child who’s being a brat, I can’t possibly look after your children for you, now, can I?”

It wasn’t easy, understanding these people. Worse: Nicole was starting to think they might have a point. Children were, as a species, better behaved here than she remembered them being in L.A. They said please and thank you. They called women ma’am. If they ran around yelling and being a pain in the ass, somebody smacked them, and that was that.

So. Should she tighten up herself? Even her own — well, Umma’s — children thought her soft. They were used to being smacked and brought up short. It hadn’t damaged them that she could see.

No. She shook her head. She couldn’t hit them; she just could not. It was too much like her father coming home drunk and slapping his wife around, or one of the kids if they were closer. Her hand, upraised to strike a blow, mutated into her father’s hand in her mind’s eye, and she froze.

She’d pretend she hadn’t heard. Better that than trying to explain everything to a pair of children who couldn’t imagine equating a well-earned slap or two with abuse.

If the tavern was going to be closed for the morning, she needed a sign to say so — but there wasn’t any paper, no cardboard, nothing. Here was a world without scrap paper or Post-its, empty of anything handy to write with or on.

But people still did write, and wrote on things. Walls, for example. A piece of charcoal on the whitewashed wall in front of the house did as well as could be expected. It looked like a graffito but it said what she needed it to say, which was the important thing.

Julia watched in wide-eyed wonder. “Calidius Severus was right!” she said. “You don’t just know how to read, you know how to write, too. How did you ever learn that?”

Nicole started to answer, then caught herself. She’d told the fuller and dyer she’d studied on her own, but could she have studied so secretly her own slave didn’t know about it?

A lawyer learned when to talk fast — and when to say nothing. Julia was expecting something; Nicole gave her the barest minimum. “I managed,” she said, and let it go at that.

It seemed to work. Julia looked greatly impressed. Even better, she asked no more awkward questions. Her calm acceptance of the stranger things in life had to be a side effect of her slavery; an art of not seeing what she wasn’t supposed to see, and keeping quiet when silence was the safest course.

Not for much longer, Nicole thought with satisfaction — and the barest hint of guilty apprehension. Julia, free, might ask questions that Julia the slave had never dared to think of.

Then again, she might not. At the moment, she was full of Nicole’s hitherto unsuspected ability. She walked along beside Nicole as if she’d had a whole new world opened to her, pointing to this sign or that bit of graffiti, then listening in awed delight as Nicole read it off to her.

Nicole didn’t mind. It was a lot like going for a walk or a drive with Kimberley or Justin, when they played Read the Sign, Mommy, and tried to figure out what it said before she read it.

Remembering that made her throat tighten a bit. She put the memory aside, focused on this world she’d wished herself into, and worked herself up to enjoying the game. In Carnuntum, after all, you made your own fun, or you didn’t have any. You couldn’t turn the car radio on or dump the kids in front of the TV when you or they got bored. This was all there was: people, imagination, and, at the moment, bits of Latin scribbled on walls.

It was a men’s day at the baths. As Nicole and Julia walked by, clots of freshly bathed and barbered men whistled and called and made propositions that would have made a twentieth-century construction worker blush. One even flipped up his tunic to show what he was offering.

Nicole bristled. Julia slid eyes at the merchandise and sniffed. “I’ve seen better,” she said with a toss of her head — and a sway of the hips that made a whole row of yahoos moan in unison.

“Stop that,” Nicole hissed. “You’re encouraging them.”

“Of course I am,” Julia said, and giggled. “Why not?”

You made your own fun, or you didn’t have any. Nicole’s thought of a moment before rose up and bit her. These grunting pigs were committing blatant sexual harassment. Julia was having a grand time encouraging it. If she wasn’t harassed, in fact wasn’t bothered at all, was it harassment?

“What if they do more than just ogle you?” Nicole demanded. “What if one of them tries to rape you?”

“I’ll stick a knee in his balls,” Julia answered equably. “I’ve done that a time or two. Didn’t take much doing. Word gets around, you know. ‘That one’s tough,’ they say. ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ “

Nicole found that hard to believe. No way men were ever that reasonable. Before she could say so, one of the rougher-hewn types on the steps called out, “Hey, girls! Yeah, the two of you! Come up here to papa. I’ll make you think you died and went to Elysium.” As if that weren’t explicit enough, he grinned and pumped his pelvis, showing off a decent-sized erection under the grubby tunic.

Julia looked him up and down, good and long, tilting her hips and thrusting out her breasts till his tongue was hanging halfway to the ground. Her eye came to rest at last on the bulge under his tunic. Her lip curled. “Will you now?” she said in ripe scorn. “You and what legion?”

Nicole didn’t think that was very funny, but the whole crowd roared with laughter. The would-be superstud flushed crimson and slunk away — back to his wife and sixteen snotty-nosed children, Nicole rather devoutly hoped.

The market square was as loudly frenetic as it had been when Nicole went shopping. From everything she’d gathered, it was like that from sunup to sundown every day of the year. Not far beyond it lay the building where the town council met. Despite a fine display of fluted columns and an entrance-way cluttered with statuary, it wasn’t nearly so splendid as the baths — and it seemed to know it. As if embarrassed to be left behind, it tried to make up for its deficiencies with an excess of gaudy paint. One of the statues, a Venus, boasted a pair of gilded nipples. They looked like pasties in a Vegas strip joint. Bad taste, evidently, was a universal constant.

Nicole hadn’t quite figured out how Carnuntum’s city government worked. She knew there was a town council, and a pair of magistrates called duovirs above it. Both duovirs had to approve council measures, she thought; if one vetoed them, they didn’t become law.

Veto, she realized suddenly, working back and forth between English and Latin, meant I forbid. Chunks of this legal system lay embedded in the one she’d studied, maybe not so much in the law itself as in the language in which it was framed. It was an obvious discovery, she supposed — but she’d never thought of it before. It hit her with the force of a revelation, a piece of historical knowledge that she’d never have conceived to be remotely relevant… until she found herself in a place where Latin was a living, and lively, language.

How Carnuntum’s city government stacked up against that of the province of Pannonia, or against that of the Roman Empire as a whole, she didn’t know yet. Nor was she going to worry about it. She wasn’t going anywhere. She had time to learn.

She and Julia walked between the central pair of columns, past the striptease Venus and a statue of someone male, pinch-faced, and heroically proportioned — it looked as if someone had taken the head of a skinny little nerd and stuck it on the body of a Rambo clone.

Once past these monuments to kitsch, however, and once her eyes had adjusted to the dimness of a building without electric lights, she saw that she was in a more familiar place than any she’d found since she came to Carnuntum. There was no mistaking what kind of place this was. For a moment, she had a potent feeling of home — of standing in one of the interminable lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles office on Sherman Way.

What was it they used to write on the old maps? Here be Dragons, yes. Here, she thought, be Bureaucrats.

Oh, there were differences. The clerks wore tunics instead of suits; some of the snootier-looking ones even wore togas. They sat behind folding tables rather than desks, each flicking the beads of an abacus rather than the keys of a calculator — fingers flying, beads clicking, narrow-mouthed faces screwed up and sour.

None of the differences mattered. Bureaucrats were bureaucrats, it seemed, in every age of the world: bored, crabby, and studiedly insolent. As if to prove the point, one of them yawned in her face.

They were all men. The other differences hadn’t bothered her. This one did. A lot. This was exactly why she’d come — why she thought she’d come to Carnuntum — to get away from sexism, covert and overt, and find a world where men and women lived as equals. There was nothing she could do about it now. She could whine and carry on and get herself nowhere, or she could make the best of it — and do what she could to make things better.

When yawning in her face didn’t make her disappear, the clerk said, “May I help you?” With a faint but elaborately long-suffering sigh, he shoved to one side the sheet on which he’d been writing. It wasn’t paper; it was thicker and grainier, as if made from pressed leaves. A word came into her head: papyrus. A thought followed the word: No paper, but paperwork after all. A moment later, another thought: Damn.

She suppressed it all, even the mild but heartfelt curse, and said briskly, “Yes, you can help me.” She pointed at Julia. “I want to emancipate my slave.”

The clerk was the first person Nicole had said that to, who didn’t react in the slightest. “And you are…?” he said.

“My name is Umma,” Nicole answered — congratulating herself that she’d remembered.

“Oh,” the clerk said, as deadpan as ever. “Of course. The widow of Satellius Sodalis.” And a good thing he knew that, too, because Nicole hadn’t. Were Liber and Libera looking after her after all, making sure she didn’t stumble more often than she had to? “Now, then, since you’ve come here, I suppose you’ll want formal manumission, not just the informal sort you could get by emancipating her in front of a group of friends.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Nicole said, and then, with trained caution, “Remind me of the differences between formal and informal manumission.”

The clerk smiled. It was not at all a pleasant smile. It was, in fact, more of a leer. “Well,” he said. “Of course. One can’t expect a woman to know how the law works, now, can one?” It took all of Nicole’s years of legal training and dealing with good-ole-boy judges and sleazy lawyers to keep from braining him with his own bronze inkpot. He went on in blind complacency, reciting as if by rote, in just about the same tone she would have used for explaining torts to a four-year-old: “Formal manumission is more complicated, of course, and grants a slave higher status. It makes her free, and it makes her a Roman citizen. She’d still be your client, of course, and you, or rather your guardian, her patron. She won’t be able to hold office” — he smiled that nasty smile again, as if to show how unlikely that was in any case — “but her freeborn children, if she should have any, will be.”

Julia nodded as if she’d known that all along. Her expression was eager, but there was wariness underneath, like a dog that accepts a bone but looks for a kick to follow.

Nicole made herself ignore Julia and concentrate on what the clerk was saying. “And informal manumission?” she asked.

“As I said,” the clerk replied with a little sniff of scorn, “for that you needn’t have come here. She’d be free then, but not a Roman citizen. Junian Latin rights, we call it.” And anyone but an idiot or a woman, his expression said, would know as much. “When she dies, whatever property she’s acquired while she’s free reverts back to you.”

That didn’t seem like much of a choice to Nicole. “We’ll do it the formal way, “ she said.

“The other difference,” the clerk said, “is the twenty-denarius tax for formal manumission: five percent of her approximate value. “

Nicole winced. “That’s a lot of money.”

“One gets what one pays for,” the clerk said: a bureaucrat indeed, and no mistake. “For your twenty denarii you receive full and proper documentation.” He paused. His eyebrows rose slightly. “I gather you haven’t brought the proper fee? “

Nicole had an all but irresistible urge to ask if he took MasterCard or Visa. “No, I haven’t,” she said a little testily. No credit cards here, either — not even a bank, that she’d seen or heard of. And what would people write checks on? The walls?

Meanwhile, there was the issue of the fee, and the fact that twenty denarii would lighten the cash box by a significant degree. So Julia was worth about four hundred denarii. That was a lot of money. No wonder Julia hadn’t thought she could save it on her own — and no wonder Brigomarus had been so upset. Nicole was, in effect, giving away the family Mercedes.

The clerk was no kinder and certainly no pleasanter, but he seemed — for whatever reason — to have decided against the usual bureaucratic obstructionism. “Well then,” he said. “You can get the money, I suppose.”

Nicole nodded. She had practice in looking sincere — it was a lawyer’s stock in trade — but she wasn’t lying, either.

The clerk seemed to know it, or else it was the one hour a day when he cut his victims an inch of slack. “Very well. I’ll draw up the documents. You go, collect the money, and come back with your guardian. “

“My guardian?” Nicole said. That was the second time he’d used the term. So what was she, a minor child? Or did the word have another meaning?

“That would be your husband, of course,” the clerk said, unsurprised by what had to look to him like female imbecility, “but your husband is dead.

Let me see. “ The clerk frowned into space, mentally reviewing family connections he knew better than Nicole did. “He was his own man, not in anyone’s patria potestas, which means that you no longer come under the legal authority of any male in his family. Which returns responsibility to your own, birth family. Father’s dead. Brothers — you have a brother, yes? Britomartis — Brigomarus. We’ll need his signature, or failing this his witnessed mark, before the documents are legal and binding.”

“Why?” Nicole demanded. “I can sign for myself.”

The clerk laughed, a strikingly rich and full sound to have come from so pinched and small a mouth. “Why, Madam Umma, of course you can! You can write your name wherever you like, if you can write it at all. But if this transaction is to be legal, it must have a man’s name attached to it.”

“What?” Nicole veered between fury and horror. First, to have to ask Brigomarus to agree to Julia’s manumission, after what he’d said and implied when Nicole informed him of it — fat chance. And second, and worse, her own approval wasn’t enough — because she was a woman, she had no right or power to sign a legally binding contract. That — by God, that was positively medieval.

But this wasn’t even the Middle Ages yet, she didn’t think. It was a long and apparently unenlightened time before that.

And there was Julia, shocked out of her awe at the place and the proceedings, blurting out with a rather remarkable lack of circumspection, “Didn’t you know that, Mistress? Brigomarus knows it, I’m sure he does.”

“To the crows with Brigomarus,” Nicole snarled. “It’s outrageous. It’s unjust, it’s immoral, it’s unequal, it’s unfair, it’s absurd, it’s impossible.” Her voice had risen with every word. In fact, she was shouting. People were staring. She didn’t care. Was she any less a human being because she couldn’t piss in one of Calidius Severus’ amphorae?

The clerk was signally unimpressed by her vocabulary or her volume. “It’s the law,” he said primly.

“To the crows with the law, too,” Nicole snapped. Now there was a hell of a thing for a lawyer to say. And she didn’t care. She didn’t care one little bit. She got a grip on Julia’s arm, swiveled her about, and stalked off in high indignation.