Household Gods

8

Mistress!” Julia called from the street just outside the tavern, where she’d gone to peer at something or other outside. “Look at the sunset. Isn’t it beautiful? The sky is turning all those clouds to fire. I’ll bet you an as it will rain tomorrow.”

Nicole didn’t gamble, but she didn’t say so. Julia seemed unperturbed by the setback to her manumission. In fact, as they’d walked home, Nicole slamming her feet down furiously with every stride, Julia trotting along behind her, Julia had said, “Ah well. Isn’t that just like fate?”

Julia the slave might be a fatalist, but Nicole was damned if she’d sit around blathering about kismet or whatever else you wanted to call it. The idea that a man’s signature was required to make a document valid told her loud and clear where women stood in Carnuntum — and, no doubt, in the rest of the Roman Empire. In Los Angeles, at least the letter of the law had been on her side. There, hypocrisy had got her so frothing mad she’d wished herself centuries back in time to get away from it. Well — she’d succeeded. No hypocrisy here, oh no. Just pure naked oppression.

“Rain would be nice,” Julia was saying. “I heard the farmers saying in the market yesterday that it’s been too dry for too long — the crops are suffering. Much more drought and we’d be in trouble. You know what they say: dry summer, winter famine. Rain now would mean we eat well come winter.”

“I hope it’s a cursed flood,” Nicole said sullenly.

Julia pulled out the neckline of her tunic and spat down onto her bosom. Nicole stared at her. “What on earth did you do that for?”

“To turn aside the evil omen, of course,” the slave — still a slave — answered. “Drought’s bad, but floods are really and right-there bad.”

Spitting in your bosom was, Nicole supposed, like knocking on wood or crossing your fingers for luck. But in the twentieth century, most people who knocked on wood didn’t really believe it would do any good. Julia sounded as serious about averting the omen as Nicole’s grandmother had been when she made the sign of the cross.

Not a fair comparison. Nicole thought. Grandma was doing something religious. This is just superstition.

So? said the lawyerly part of her mind. Would you be so kind as to define the difference?

Well: religion got higher ratings than superstition. But that, she admitted to both sides of herself, was a less than useful distinction.

She’d had two cups of wine with her supper. They combined with the undercurrent of burning outrage to make her discontented with the idea of trudging upstairs and falling asleep. She’d done that every night since she’d come to Carnuntum, and it looked to be what everybody did every night, without variation and without exception.

“Julia,” she said suddenly, “I want some fun tonight.”

“Why are you telling me, Mistress?” Julia asked. “Go across the street.” She pointed toward the shop and house of Titus Calidius Severus.

Nicole’s face grew hot. “That’s not what I meant!” she said a little too quickly. “I meant someplace… oh, someplace to go: to a play, or to listen to music, or to go out dancing.” Yes indeed: no TV, no movies, no radio, no stereo — she was starting to go stir-crazy. It wasn’t quite like living in a sensory-deprivation tank — some of her senses, especially smell, got a bigger workout here than they ever had back in the United States — but it wasn’t far removed, either. If she didn’t do something besides get up and get to work and get hit over the head with culture shock and collapse into sleep, she was going to scream.

“Mistress,” Julia said, “you know daytime is the time for things like that.” She shrugged. Nicole, even through her haze of fury, thought Julia might just have decided that her mistress was intermittently simpleminded and needed to be humored. “Of course,” Julia went on, “the daytime is when we’re busy, too. But there’ll be plays and beast shows in the amphitheater all summer long.”

“Beast shows,” Nicole said, distracted almost out of her mood. So what were those? A traveling zoo, maybe? That would make sense, with no planes or trains or automobiles, and not much chance to go much of anywhere. It stood to reason that enterprising types might think to bring the zoos to the people, rather than the other way around.

That didn’t help her immediate predicament. “What do I do now?” She sounded like a bored four-year-old, she knew that, but she couldn’t help it.

“I still don’t know why you’re mad at Calidius Severus” — Julia shrugged again, as if to say she wasn’t and wouldn’t be responsible for Nicole’s vagaries — “but since you are, there isn’t much else to do but get drunk.”

“No!” The answer was quick and sharp and automatic.

“Well,” Julia said, “it’s one way not to notice the time crawling by. It’s here” — she held up a hand — “and then it’s there, and you don’t care what happened in between.”

“No,” Nicole said again, remembering her father coming home plastered night after night. For the first time, she thought to wonder why he’d got drunk. Was he trying to blot out the time he spent in the factory every day? It wasn’t enough reason, but it was a reason. She’d never looked for a reason before; it had just been part of her life. She scratched her head, then wished she hadn’t — what was crawling through her hair?

“You feel pretty good, too,” Julia went on, not really arguing with Nicole so much as reminding herself. “Oh, you may not feel so good the next morning, but who cares about the next morning? That’s then. This is now.” She looked longingly toward the long stone bar, as if to say she wouldn’t mind at all if she got drunk.

“No,” Nicole said once more, but she heard something in her voice she’d never expected to find there: hesitation. She’d smoked marijuana a few times, at Indiana and afterwards. She would have enjoyed it more, she thought, if it hadn’t felt as if she were lighting smudge pots in her lungs. What could be so different about alcohol? She’d been drinking wine — watered wine, but wine — with meals, and she hadn’t turned into a lush.

But your father did, said the stern voice in her mind. For the first time it sounded less authoritative than merely prim. Miss Priss, Frank had called her sometimes. At first it was affectionate, but later it gained an edge. Then he started adding, “You know, Nicole, people who preach like that usually do it because they’re afraid they’ll be tempted — and they’ll like it.” Not long after that, he was gone. Lady number two hadn’t ever been prim in her life, or sensible either.

Nicole couldn’t help it if she was congenitally sensible. Maybe that good sense was what she needed now, instead of blind abhorrence. Dad drank boilermakers, for heaven’s sake. A few cups of wine don’t even come close.

Do they?

“Can’t do it all the time,” Julia said, “but everybody needs to get drunk once in a while.”

Moderation in everything, including moderation. Nicole couldn’t remember where she’d heard that. She’d always thought it made good sense, but she’d never applied it to alcohol before. She’d been too busy running in the opposite direction — running away from the father figure, a therapist would say. So did it make sense now? God — gods — knew this wasn’t Los Angeles. Life here in Carnuntum was profoundly, sometimes unbearably, different.

Gods, yes. Liber and Libera had, somehow, granted her wish, her whine, her prayer. They’d brought her to Carnuntum. They were, as she had discovered to her dismay, god and goddess of wine. What would they think, what would they do, if they realized how she felt about their very own and most protected substance? Or had they known all along, and set her up for just this dilemma?

Hadn’t Christianity turned a lot of the old gods into devils? Right now, Nicole could see why. But she hadn’t felt anything bad in Liber or Libera, not in their faces on the plaque and not in the way they’d granted her prayer. So maybe it was a creeping evil — or maybe it was simple godlike benevolence. Be careful what you wish for, she’d heard said: you might get it.

She was, she knew, talking herself into something she would have rejected in horror a few days — or, heavens, was it weeks? — before. She had rejected wine, and what had that got her? A case of the runs that almost turned her inside out, and derision from everybody who heard about her drinking water.

“Well, maybe,” she heard herself say. “Maybe it’ll get the taste of that cursed clerk out of my mouth.” An excuse, an alibi — she knew as much. She also knew life was a bore, and an unpleasant bore at that.

Julia must have had a much more solid understanding of that than she did. The slave went over to the bar and filled two cups with wine, brought them back, and plunked one on the table in front of Nicole. Nicole stared at it. It was one of the cups she filled and washed and filled again all day long, brimful of the middle-grade wine. That was boldness on Julia’s part, mixed with prudence: not the cheap stuff if they were going to drink it neat, but not the expensive stuff either, since they were going to drink a lot.

Nicole reached out a hand that was gratifyingly steady and lifted the cup. With the same deep breath she’d have drawn just before she jumped into a lake of cold water, she touched it to her lips and sipped.

The wine wasn’t watered; they wanted it full strength, to get drunk the faster. It was almost as thick as syrup, and almost as sweet, too. But under that sweetness lay the half-medicinal, half-terrifying taste of alcohol.

Julia sighed and set down her own, emptied cup. “That’s so good,” she said. Her voice was low, throaty, sensuous. She might have been talking about something quite other than wine.

“Yes,” Nicole said, although she didn’t think it was particularly grand. Warmth filled her belly and spread slowly outward.

Julia tilted back her cup to catch the last of the wine, then rose to refill it. Politely, she picked up Nicole’s, too, only to set it down and give Nicole a look the dim lamplight only made more reproachful. “You haven’t finished yet, Mistress?” Beneath the words lay others: what are you waiting for?

What was Nicole waiting for? If she was going to do this, she wasn’t going to do it halfway. She gulped down the wine — dizzied, half staggered, nearly ready to gag on the fumes and the sweetness, but by damn she did it. She thrust the cup at Julia. Julia nodded approval, filled it up again, brought it back.

That one Nicole drained as fast as she could. “You haven’t finished yet, Julia?” she said, and laughed. It sounded too loud, as if she’d turned up the volume by mistake.

Julia laughed, too. Was she laughing because she thought it was funny, or because her owner had made a joke? Damn, Nicole thought. Her thoughts were turned up high, too. I don’t care. Tomorrow I’ll care. Not tonight. No. Not tonight.

A swallow or two later, or maybe it was three, Nicole touched the tip of her nose. It seemed to have gone numb. That was funny — not big-laugh funny, not giggle funny. Funny funny. I am getting drunk, she thought. It was wonderful. Marvelous. Fascinating.

And it was her turn to fill the cups. Getting up wasn’t bad, though the floor tilted underfoot. Walking straight was harder. Yes. Officer, she thought, I’m walking under the influence. She giggled.

So did Julia. If she found anything out of the ordinary in sitting down with her mistress and getting plastered, she didn’t let on. Nicole wondered how often she’d done it with Umma. As Nicole carried the wine back to the table, walking with great care so as not to spill it, she almost came right out and asked. She caught herself in the nick of time. Alcohol, she thought clearly and — all right, primly — makes you want to talk before you think. Such a clear thought, and so wise. She was proud of it.

If she hadn’t learned about talking jags from experience — if she hadn’t already had a good notion of them from memories of her father and from what she’d seen in the tavern — Julia would have taught her. The slave’s mouth ran and ran and ran.

Nicole had learned a long time ago that nodding every once in a while was enough to keep a drunk — in this case, Julia — going. Some of what the slave said was interesting in a lurid sort of way; Nicole found out more than she wanted to know about the intimate preferences of several of her regular customers. The one who liked his boys sweet and young, for example — the younger the better; and the one who’d buried or divorced three wives, not one of whom had ever given him an heir, because he couldn’t bring himself to enter them through the proper orifice; and…

And then Julia said, “Mistress, if Titus is even half as good as Gaius, you won’t find much finer anywhere you look. He’s probably better, too — I bet he wouldn’t be in such a hurry all the time. “ She sighed gustily. “And besides, Mistress, he’s crazy about you. And you’re angry at him. What did he do to get you in such an uproar? I never have been able to figure it out.”

Her calling the two Calidii Severi by their praenomens left Nicole confused for a moment, but not for any longer than that. One thing was interesting: If Julia wondered what Titus Calidius Severus was like in bed, he’d never put down a couple of sesterces and gone upstairs with her when Umma was out shopping and the kids had gone off to play somewhere. A point of sorts for the fuller and dyer. Though a point for what, in what game, Nicole wasn’t inclined to say.

Julia still waited expectantly for her answer. She chose her words with care. With all the wine she had in her, she, unlike Julia, couldn’t have spoken quickly if she’d wanted to. “It’s not any one thing,” she said. “It’s not any big thing, even. We just haven’t been getting along as well as we did before, that’s all.”

“It’s too bad,” Julia said. In the dim lamplight, Nicole was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “The children really like him, too.”

“Children or no children, if you think I’ll have anything to do with a man who smells like sour piss all the time, you can think again,” Nicole snapped — or rather, the wine did it, before she could stop herself.

That wasn’t the whole story. It wasn’t even most of the story. But the wine could have done much worse. It was a part of the story that would make sense to Julia, and apparently did. She nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve been fussy about things like that lately, haven’t you, Mistress? I’ve seen you throw out a couple of pieces of meat we could have served without having anybody complain, or not much, anyhow.”

“If it smells bad to me, it’ll smell bad to the cush — customers,” Nicole said. How wonderful: she’d got Julia to stop talking about Titus Calidius Severus. She laughed with the wonder of it.

When she looked at the lamp, she saw two side by side unless she screwed up her eyes and tilted her head just so. Getting up required a distinct effort of will. “I’m going to bed,” she announced with a grand flourish that nearly sent her over onto her backside — and did send her into a fit of the giggles. Two blurry Julias nodded vigorously and gulped down all the wine in their cups before they trotted along after her like obedient puppies.

Nicole had danced to the music of the wine — had she ever. And come morning, she paid the piper.

She’d felt worse her first night in Carnuntum, when her day of water-drinking caught up with her, but not by much. That had been concentrated misery, too: bowels in an uproar, but the rest of her not so bad. Now she hurt all over.

She sat up with excruciating slowness. If she moved one bit faster, her head would fall off. Just as she achieved a wobbly vertical, an oxcart with an ungreased axle squeaked and groaned down the street in front of the tavern. She held her head on her shoulders with both hands, and suppressed a groan that would have made it ache even worse. No wonder her father used to complain that her mother was scrambling the breakfast eggs too loudly. If she’d known then what she knew now, she’d never have laughed.

Her mouth tasted as if she’d been drinking from the chamberpot instead of a wine cup. What she wouldn’t have given for a bottle of Scope or a tube of Crest with toothbrush to match — and a dentist on call while she was at it. Her bad tooth ached worse than it ever had before.

So that’s what a hangover is, she thought. Every nerve ending turned up high. Every sensation more intense than usual. A lot more intense. A hell of a lot more intense.

Sunlight streamed in through the open window. She would have been willing to swear it was the same watery sunshine she’d always seen in Carnuntum, but her eyes blinked and watered and ached as if it had been the fierce glare of the Sahara. She yearned for sunglasses — one more lifesaving idea no one in Carnuntum had ever had.

When she first came to Carnuntum, she’d told herself — and believed — that the loss of material things didn’t matter. She’d traded them for genuine equality: a good enough bargain, all things considered. Since then, she’d learned just how far off the mark she’d been. She’d lost all the little things that made life easier, and got in return less equality than she’d ever imagined possible, and almost as much sheer aggravation as she’d seen in the twentieth century. That’s not a bargain, she thought nastily. That’s a consumer complaint.

So where did she go to file? Was there a consumer protection bureau for victims of unscrupulous gods?

Her guts rumbled. They were happier than they’d been that first night, but they weren’t dancing in the daisies, either. She was glad, once she’d used the chamberpot, to fling its reeking contents out the window.

An irate shout rose from the alley. A laugh shook itself out of her — and half killed her head, too. Damn, she thought, half in horrified embarrassment; but only half. Now there was a hazard of urban life no one in Los Angeles had to worry about.

On mornings when he was feeling the worse for wear, her father had dosed himself with aspirin and black coffee. No coffee here; she’d found that out the hard way. Would that willow-bark decoction make the rock drummer in her head stop his demented solo? What did the Romans do about hangovers — besides suffer, that is?

She got up: slowly, because her whole body ached, as if from a low-grade flu. When she looked in the polished bronze mirror in her makeup kit, she winced. Eyes like two pissholes in the snow, her mother had said of her father on mornings after he’d come reeling back late from another foray against the bottle. She’d been too young then to understand what that meant. Now here they were, staring back at her: two reddish-yellow holes in a flat white face.

She couldn’t just sit here wishing she were dead. There was money to earn: bread to bake, food to cook and serve, wine to ladle out into waiting cups. It didn’t, at the moment, seem any more appealing than sucking up to fat assholes of law partners. A couple of weeks in the tavern business had shown her all too clearly that, while a woman could make a living at it, she wasn’t going to retire to the Riviera any time soon.

The loss of a day’s proceeds would hurt.

Inspiration struck. She winced. Julia! Julia could run the tavern. She usually did anyway, more than Nicole hoped she knew.

No. Nicole winced again. That wouldn’t do, not for more than a few hours. Some things — the cash box, for example — had to stay under Nicole’s supervision. And it really took two to run the tavern properly; actually they could have used a third pair of hands, even with the kids’ intermittent help.

No real help for it. Running a tavern in any era was no easy nine-to-five. Sunup to sundown, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, no paid vacations — and no sick leave. She had to get herself out there and get to work. If she looked like grim death… she did, that was all. She’d had plenty of customers who looked the same way, and for the same reasons, too.

Julia was already downstairs, getting things ready for a new day. To Nicole’s guilty relief, Julia, who was normally resilient to the point of perkiness, looked as if she’d been ridden hard and put away wet, too.

“Hello, Mistress.” Julia managed a smile, but it was wan. “Now we remember why getting drunk all the time isn’t such a good idea.”

“What, you needed reminding?” Nicole said — not too loud; her own voice hurt her ears. Julia, she noticed, hadn’t opened the shutters. Nicole didn’t blame her one bit. The light creeping between the wooden slats already seemed bright enough to blind a person.

Another cart banged and rattled along the street outside. Nicole and Julia winced in unison. Aspirin, Nicole wished with all her heart. Coffee. Of course they didn’t materialize. She’d run fresh out of wishes when she wished herself back in time to Carnuntum. “What do we do about this?” she moaned… quietly.

“I ate some raw cabbage,” Julia said, “and I drank a little wine — not too much, by the gods!” Her sigh was mournful. “Hasn’t done much good yet.”

“Raw cabbage?” Nicole sighed just as Julia had, gustily. “I’ll try some, too — and a tiny bit of wine.” She held thumb and forefinger close together.

She wasn’t fond of raw cabbage to begin with. She was even less fond of it after she’d choked down a handful of leaves. Her stomach asked, loudly and pointedly, what the hell she thought she was doing to it. Maybe the idea behind this particular hangover cure was to make you feel miserable somewhere else, so you wouldn’t worry about your head falling off. If that was the case — she’d rather carry her head around under her arm than deal with a stomach in open revolt.

She also discovered that, if there was any one thing in the world wine didn’t go with, raw cabbage was it.

“Time to bite the bullet,” she muttered. There was no toilet to run to, and no sink either, just the open front door. She couldn’t even say the words in Latin; she had to resort to English. Latin knew nothing about bullets. Bite the ballista bolt didn’t cut it, somehow.

Life in the second century was nothing like what she’d expected. One by one, every idea she’d had, had turned out to be wrong. Still, she thought with a kind of desperate optimism, this was a world without bullets, without guns. It had to be safer, didn’t it? It had to be more secure than the world she’d left behind.

A few minutes after Nicole opened the door, the sun went behind a cloud — a nice, thick, rainy-looking cloud. Clouds like that had been a cause for universal groans in Indiana, but in California they were wonderfully welcome.

Here, too, after so long a drought — and after a hangover. She beamed at Julia. Julia beamed back.

That relief — and whatever she got from the cabbage and wine, which wasn’t much — didn’t last long. Lucius and Aurelia came downstairs and started raising hell. Probably they weren’t any noisier than usual, but no way was Nicole up for kid-noise on that scale.

Nicole told them several times to be quiet, which did as much good as she’d figured it would: zilch, zero, zip. Her head hurt. Her tooth throbbed in sledgehammer rhythm.

Aurelia stampeded past with Lucius in roaring pursuit. Nicole snagged first one and then the other, and laid a solid smack on each backside. “Shut up!” she yelled at them both. “Just — shut — up!”

She stopped cold. Oh. God. Her father had done the same thing — the exact same thing — on his mornings after. She looked at her hand, appalled. “I’m sorry,” she started to say. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

She never said it, because even while the words took shape on her tongue, she noticed something. It was quiet in the tavern. The kids had slunk off to do something useful: Lucius chopping nuts, Aurelia helping Julia grind flour for the next batch of bread. They weren’t sniveling or acting abused. They were simply… quiet. And they stayed quiet for a good while. Not forever, but long enough.

Nicole never did voice her apology. She didn’t like herself much for it, either.

Were peace and quiet worth an occasional whack? The people of Carnuntum certainly thought so. Nicole never had. She’d sworn when she was a little girl, after her father had left another set of bruises on her mother’s face — and her mother told people she’d walked into a door — that she’d never raise her hand in anger to anyone, adult or child. And here she’d broken that vow.

When in Rome…

She was breaking down, belief by belief, conviction by conviction. If the parents of Carnuntum had been transported as suddenly to Los Angeles as Nicole had to Carnuntum, every last one of them would have faced losing custody of their children. Most would have done jail time for child abuse. But here no one looked twice, even when a father was caught beating his son till the boy screamed for mercy.

From everything she’d read, that should have made the adults of Carnuntum — the grown-up survivors of abuse — a hateful pack of social misfits. And yet they weren’t. They were just people. Maybe they were cruder than people in Los Angeles, but there was no denying the resemblance. Human nature, whatever that was, hadn’t changed. People fell in and out of love, they quarreled and made up, they did business, they gossiped, they got drunk — as Nicole’s aching head too well knew — all as they might have done eighteen hundred years later on the other side of the Atlantic.

So what did that say about all the books she’d read and the television talk shows she’d watched, and all the theory she’d taken as gospel? The Romans had a theory that it was perfectly acceptable for one human being to buy and sell another. That theory, as far as she was concerned, was dead wrong, no matter how elaborately they justified it.

The next thought, the corollary, was amazingly hard to face. What if her own theories — her own assumptions — weren’t exactly right, either? What if they were all skewed somehow? So where did right end and wrong begin? Who could know, and how?

She clutched her head in her hands. It was pounding worse than ever, but not with the hangover, not any longer. Tough questions of law and ethics had done that to her, too, when she was in law school. She’d been glad to get out of those courses with a passing grade.

There wasn’t anybody standing over her now, demanding that she think about things that she plain didn’t want to think about. It didn’t make any difference. The thoughts were there. She could make them go away, but they kept coming back, mutating and changing, till they changed her, and made her into something different from what she’d been. Something, maybe, she didn’t want to be.

“Hurry up with my order there,” a customer said. He hadn’t given it much more than a minute or two before. Julia was scrambling as fast as she could to fill it.

And Nicole had had it up to here. If she wasn’t going to take any guff from Lucius and Aurelia, she sure as hell wasn’t about to let an obstreperous customer push her around, either. “Keep your drawers on,” she snapped. “You’ll get it when it’s ready.”

She held her breath. If he got up and stomped off the way Ofanius Valens had when she wouldn’t let him play doctor with Julia, then let him.

Instead, and to her amazement, he wilted. “I’m sorry, Umma,” he mumbled into his greasy beard. “As soon as you can, please.”

“That’s better,” Nicole said briskly. She couldn’t help a last stab of guilt. Without the hangover, she probably wouldn’t have barked so loud. But, she told herself, let’s face it: in Carnuntum as in Los Angeles, a healthy dose of assertiveness was not at all a bad thing.

Rain pattered down on the roof of the tavern. Every so often, raindrops slipped in through the smokeholes in the roof and hissed angrily as they dove into the cookfires. Some of them missed the fires and hit the floor. That would have been a raving nuisance on carpet or linoleum. On rammed earth, it was a little too interesting for words. Rammed earth was fine when it was dry. When it was wet, it was mud.

Nicole had never understood mud before, not really. She picked her way past the muddy spots and the damp and odorous customers to peer outside. It had been raining for three or four days now, a mild, steady summer rain of a sort Indianapolis knew well. She’d lost the habit of it in Los Angeles, had forgotten the look and smell and feel of it, the long gray damp days, the dripping nights, the mildew that grew everywhere. In Los Angeles, there were only two kinds of rain: not enough and too much.

As far as Nicole was concerned, a mild, steady summer rain was too much in Carnuntum. Raindrops plashed down on puddles in the street. Or so they had done that first lovely wet day. By now, day three or four — God, she’d lost count — the whole street was a vast, muddy puddle. Something that had been alive once upon a time, but not too recently, bobbed in the water. She had no desire to find out what it was.

An oxcart came trundling along, a little quieter than the usual run of them: the axle, though bare of oil, had plenty of water for lubricant. The cart wasn’t going very fast. Every time the weary-looking ox lifted a foot, it lifted a clinging ball of mud. A mucky wake trailed the cart’s thick wooden wheels. Mud clung to them as to the ox’s hooves, clogging them till they seemed likely to stick solid.

Mud, in fact, clung to everything. Keeping it out of the tavern was shoveling against the tide. Whenever a customer walked in and set a dripping cloak on the edge of a table, a muddy puddle formed beneath it. Julia pulled dry rushes from a sack behind the bar to sop up a little bit of the worst puddles.

Concrete house pads weren’t likely to happen for another eighteen hundred years, but carpets might have been of at least some help. It seemed the Romans had never thought of them. They were easy enough to describe, and easy enough to make, too.

Maybe Nicole should invent them — or would discover be the right word? Though not right away. For the time being, she was only thinking about it. Rammed earth was not the ideal surface on which to lay carpets. She might have to invent the hardwood floor first, or do something with tiles. Saltillo wasn’t all that different from Roman brick, come to think of it.

As Nicole stood in her doorway with the rain misting on her cheeks, Fabia Ursa’s husband, Sextus Longinius lulus, poked his head out next door, evidently to get a look at the rain, too. The tinker was a cheerful little man, as garrulous as his wife, but where she was thin and frail and delicately built, he had the quick-moving round body, full cheeks, and buck teeth of a chipmunk. He smiled at her. She reflexively smiled back. It was hard not to. Chip or Dale? she caught herself wondering.

His voice, at least, was a normal voice, not the high gabble of an animated chipmunk. “Lovely day,” he said, “if you’re a goose.”

“I’m sick of rain,” she said. Heavens, she sounded like a Californian — and after all these years of being hopelessly Midwestern, too.

He shook his head, but his smile didn’t fade. She was glad. She didn’t want him to think she was annoyed at him. He was a good-natured sort, and, from everything she’d seen and heard, was devoted to his wife. “We do need the rain,” he said, “but it could go away now and even the farmers wouldn’t complain.”

“I certainly wouldn’t,” Nicole said with deep feeling. She paused. Well: so say it. Soonest started, soonest over, “Can you and Fabia come over for a little while?”

He seemed delighted at the invitation, though he couldn’t possibly know what it was for. “Why, of course! We’ll be right there.”

Nicole nodded with a faint and she hoped inaudible sigh of relief. “Good. Good, then. I’m going to fetch the Calidii, too.”

“Are you?” Longinius lulus laid a finger on the side of his nose. Probably he imagined that he looked sly. “Ah! I know what’s going on. Fabia doesn’t count for that, you know. She’s only a woman.”

Nicole wanted to wither him with a glare, but restrained herself. He might only be reminding her of how the law worked. She liked him; she’d give him the benefit of the doubt. This time.

“Fabia will come anyhow,” he said. “Liven up the day, and all that. She’s been a bit crabby lately, with the baby.”

Nicole could imagine. Late pregnancy, as she knew too well, was hell. She nodded and waved to Sextus Longinius, who popped back into his house to fetch his wife. Nicole walked down the narrow, muddy stone sidewalk, thankful, and not for the first time, that the street boasted a sidewalk at all; some didn’t. Like a mountain goat jumping from crag to crag, she crossed the street on the stepping stones. The sidewalk on the other side was even narrower. A patch of mud had oozed onto it from the overloaded street. She slipped and slid and almost fell into the morass; flailed wildly and caught herself up against the damp wall. She clung there for a moment, breathing hard, more with stress than with exertion. An involuntary swim in the odorous, ordurous mud of Carnuntum was not her idea of a good time.

Titus Calidius Severus hadn’t set the amphorae in front of his shop today. Maybe he thought the product he’d get would be too diluted to do him any good; probably he feared the jars would float away. A nice little river ran just about where he liked to thrust the pointy ends of the jars.

Nicole opened the door a little too quickly for her stomach’s peace of mind. A monumental stink assaulted her and almost knocked her off her feet.

Through streaming eyes and gagging coughs, she managed to discern Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus near the end of a row of wooden tubs, doing the double-double routine with something thick, dark, and cottony-looking. It was, she realized, some kind of wool, and the substance they were sloshing it around in was stale piss. When they straightened up to greet her, the stuff ran down their hands and arms and dripped from their fingertips onto the floor. They didn’t bother with rushes; they let the piss make its own noxious mud.

“Good morning, Umma,” Titus Calidius Severus said. If the stench bothered him — if he even noticed it — he didn’t show it. “Haven’t seen you in here for a couple of weeks. What can I do for you today?”

Did he sound hopeful? Maybe he did. Nicole ignored his tone just as he ignored the smell. Business, she thought. Stick to business. “Can you and your son come over to the tavern for a little while?” she asked.

Titus looked at Gaius. They knew what was going on, too. This wasn’t like Los Angeles, where people could live next door to each other for years without bothering to learn each other’s names. Here, everyone knew what everyone else was thinking.

“Who else have you got?” the fuller and dyer asked.

“Sextus Longinius lulus and his wife,” Nicole answered.

“Fabia Ursa doesn’t count,” Calidius Severus said, just as Sextus Longinius had. But maybe Calidius Severus had learned something from the past week or two of dealing with the stranger in Umma’s body. He held up his hand before she could snap at him, and said hastily, “Don’t blame me, Umma! It’s how the law works. You’ll still have three men as witnesses, which ought to do you well enough. Of course it would be even better if Brigomarus were acting for you, but — “

“No,” Nicole said sharply. “This is my business, and he’s too stubborn to see it. I’ll take care of it. She’s my slave, not his.”

“Now who’s the stubborn one? “ Titus Calidius Severus chuckled. So did his son. Nicole didn’t see the joke, herself. She waited till they finished their male bonding or whatever it was. It happened soon enough, and the fuller and dyer sobered. He said slowly, “I’m not sure this is the wisest thing, and I’m not easy about it in my mind, either, if you want the honest truth. But you’re clearly set on it, and you’re the one I’ve got to live with day to day. You’ll settle it with your family, or you won’t — that’s between you and them. Personally, I hope you do. Meanwhile,” he said with an air of decision, “we’ll do what you ask. Gaius, run upstairs and get our cloaks, would you? It’s still coming down out there.”

Gaius wasted no time in obeying. He had to be as hungry for entertainment as Sextus Longinius was.

He and his father threw the cloaks on over their tunics and pulled up the hoods. Nicole hadn’t seen any umbrellas in Carnuntum. A parasol, yes, shielding the face of an obviously wealthy woman from the sun in the market square one day, but no umbrellas. Maybe I could discover those, too, she thought. She was developing a whole list of potentially profitable “inventions,” any one of which would make life a fair bit easier.

Picture it now, she thought: a nice little operation, eight or ten or a dozen employees — all free men and women, of course — chatting happily as they made umbrellas. It was a bit too much like a Worker’s Paradise ad, but then again, why not? They’d make a good living, collect benefits — another thing to invent, right there — and she… she’d get rich. Or well-to-do, at least. Latin might even come up with a new word, a word for yuppie, luppa?

What were Roman patent laws like? Were there any? Could somebody who owned slaves set them to making umbrellas eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, undercut her, and drive her out of business? What were Roman bankruptcy laws like?

She shook her head and suppressed a wry smile. From rich to down and out in five seconds flat. The Calidii Severi hadn’t even noticed. She turned on her heel with a touch more dispatch than strictly necessary. “Let’s go,” she said.

Gaius slipped on the same stretch of muddy sidewalk that had almost sent her into the much muddier street. His father caught him, whirled him around and wrestled him up against the wall, so convincing that Nicole was briefly alarmed. But they were both laughing, pushing each other like rowdy boys, all the way down the wall and over the stepping stones. Why neither of them splashed into the muck, Nicole couldn’t imagine.

Pointedly, Nicole said, “If the law needs grown men and not little boys, maybe you two should go back home. I’ll look for someone else.”

“By Jupiter!” Titus Calidius Severus cried in mock dudgeon. “Methinks I’ve been offended.” He lunged at Nicole, as if to knock her off the stone block on which she stood. She leaped by pure instinct to the next one, and from there to the safety of the sidewalk. The fuller and dyer followed, grinning like a blasted idiot.

Nicole planted fists on hips and glared. “That wasn’t funny!”

“Oh yes it was,” said Calidius Severus. Not even Nicole’s deadliest scowl could wipe the grin off his face.

The tavern was a welcome refuge, stuffy air, odor of mildew, and all. Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Ursa were there already, drinking wine and eating bread and salted onions. Nicole flinched to see a pregnant woman swilling down wine — just as she flinched at so many other things in Carnuntum. As with all the rest of them, there wasn’t a thing she could reasonably expect to do about it.

Unreasonably, of course, she could tell Fabia Ursa she ought to be drinking milk instead. And Fabia Ursa would stick out her tongue and look revolted, just as Lucius and Aurelia and Julia had done on the first morning after Nicole found herself in Carnuntum. Life was too short.

For that matter, who could guess what diseases lurked in the milk here? Pasteurization was as unheard of as aspirin or carpets.

Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus pushed past her, not exactly rudely, and settled themselves at the table with the others, calling for wine. “The Falernian,” Calidius Severus senior said. “Why not? This is an occasion.” When Julia brought it, they lifted their cups in salute.

Her eyes went wide. Odds were, nobody had ever done that for her before — who would, for a slave? Her fair skin showed a blush as bright as a sunset, rising from the neckline of the tunic all the way to her hairline.

Gaius Calidius Severus watched as Nicole did, most attentively. If he’d been any more attentive, he would have thrown her down on the floor then and there.

Nicole coughed, rather more sharply than she’d intended, and said, “I think we all know why I asked you to come here. I wanted to set Julia free the formal way, but my brother has made it plain he won’t sign the document, and my signature by itself isn’t good enough. “ And to one damned warm climate with that clerk in the town hall, too, she thought. “So I’ll set her free the informal way, among friends.” She held out her hand. “Come here, Julia.”

Julia came, walking slowly, as if in a formal procession — or as if she didn’t quite believe it all was real. Nicole set a hand on her shoulder. It was stiff, held still by a clear effort of will. “Friends,” Nicole said, “it is my wish that this woman should no longer be a slave, but should now and forever after be a freedwoman. You are witnesses to the fact that I am manumitting her in this way, and that I no longer claim her as a slave.”

“I’ve heard lawyers in togas who didn’t talk that fancy,” Titus Calidius Severus said admiringly. Nicole looked at him in surprise and sudden, completely unaffected delight. He could have searched for a long time before he found a compliment that suited her better.

She was, she discovered, smiling widely and more warmly than she could remember doing, ever, in Carnuntum. She had to reel herself in, to remember the rest of what she’d planned. She went around behind the bar and rummaged in the box she’d found there. “I’ve written the manumission right here on papyrus: one copy for Julia and one for myself. If you please, you two Calidii and you, Longinius lulus, should sign them as witnesses.”

Julia’s eyes and mouth were wide open. “Mistress! I didn’t know you’d done that.”

“Well, I did,” Nicole said robustly, “and you don’t have to call me Mistress anymore, either. You’re free now, just as I said you would be.”

She’d printed out the manumissions in block capitals, that being the universal style in Carnuntum. The reed pen she’d bought with the papyrus sheets worked about as well as a fountain pen, except she had to re-ink it every line or two. She’d spelled the Latin by ear and by guess, but she’d seen from signs and graffiti that she wasn’t alone in her uncertainty.

Titus Calidius Severus mumbled to himself as he read one copy. “Not bad. Not bad at all. Nice and clear, nothing too pretty, no flowers of rhetoric, but it gets the job done. I’ve seen lots worse.” He seemed to be surprised, too — probably because no one expected a woman to show even basic literacy, let alone a decent writing style.

Gaius Calidius Severus agreed with Nicole’s impatience. “Come on, Father, leave off. This is no time for literary criticism. “

Titus Calidius Severus shot his son a narrow glance, but he didn’t seem inclined to pull rank. “No, it’s not, is it? Umma, where’s the pen and ink?” Nicole brought them to him. He signed his name on each sheet of papyrus, and his son followed suit. Both of them wrote with great labor and effort, tongues stuck out, as if they were a pair of second-graders. Nicole couldn’t have proved they weren’t, either, not by their handwriting. Which of them had the more painful scrawl was hard to judge, but neither would be entering a calligraphy contest any time soon.

Sextus Longinius lulus couldn’t write at all. He made his mark instead, a sprawling Roman numeral six — VI — for Sextus. The Calidii Severi witnessed it. There didn’t appear to be any stigma attached to his illiteracy, no patronizing looks or one-syllable explanations. Some people wrote. Most didn’t. That was the way the world was.

Once the documents were signed, witnessed, and duly executed, Nicole handed one copy of the manumission to Julia. “Here you are,” she said. “I don’t think we can get much more official than this, not without Brigomarus. Head up, now, and eyes front. You’re a free woman.”

Everybody clapped and cheered as if at a play. Julia clutched her sheet of papyrus in stiff fingers. She looked glad — oh yes, very glad indeed. But apprehensive, too, if not outright terrified.

Maybe she had a point, at that. She’d been dubious about the idea from the beginning; had done her best to impress on Nicole that freedom wasn’t a purely abstract thing. It meant changes, profound ones, in her status, in her position, in her mode of living. Suddenly, she wasn’t property anymore. She was her own person, with rights and privileges, but with responsibilities too. Slaves had none of those things, nor anything else but what their masters gave them.

Nicole might have been tempted to drop the whole thing, to let Julia go on as before, bound but safe. But she couldn’t bear the thought of owning another human being. She knew — she’d known for a while now — she was going through the manumission at least as much for herself as for Julia.

“Now we celebrate! “ Gaius Calidius Severus declared. “Wine all around, on me!”

Everyone cheered again. Through the last of the noise, Titus Calidius Severus said with a degree of indulgence, “Look at the kid spending my money. I’ll have to buy the next round, I suppose.”

“No,” Nicole said firmly, squelching them both. “The first round is on me.” She filled six cups from the amphora of Falernian — yes, even for herself. She might drink the cheap stuff for meals and the middle grade the one time she set out to get seriously drunk, but this called for the heavy artillery. To hell with the unleaded, she thought. One cup of premium in the tank won’t hurt.

It was definitely sweeter and stronger than the wine she was used to. Everybody sipped slowly, with suitably appreciative noises, just like a wine tasting at Spago.

Because she’d served the good stuff on the house, Gaius Calidius Severus bought a round of Falernian, too. Left to himself, Nicole suspected, he would have been more likely to order the two-as wine.

Just as Julia fetched the cups for Gaius Calidius Severus’ round, Ofanius Valens squelched in from the rainy outdoors. He hadn’t shown his face in the tavern since Nicole had pried Julia off his lap.

Well, Nicole thought, if he did have to show up, now was a good time for it. Teach him a lesson, and a good one, too.

Sure enough, he looked at the gathering by the bar, with a particularly keen glance at Julia, and asked, “What’s going on?”

“We’re celebrating,” said Julia. “I’m free.” She sounded more cheerful about the idea, now she had a cup of Falernian in her.

Ofanius Valens smiled with apparently unfeigned pleasure. “Now that’s worth celebrating,” he said. Nicole smiled back at him, a little smugly, until he added, “You cost me the same old two sesterces the last time.”

Nicole waited for Julia to throw something at him or pick up a stool and brain him with it, supposing he had any brains north of his crotch. But Julia’s laugh was loud and obviously genuine. The men in the tavern laughed, too, but they were men. What else could you expect from them? Only when Nicole heard Fabia Ursa giggling did she realize the joke wasn’t out of line here. Local community standards.

No matter what the local community thought, she didn’t like it.

“Next round is mine,” Ofanius Valens said, fitting himself into the party as if he had every right to do it.

“You’re going to be a couple of cups short, Ofanius,” Titus Calidius Severus said. They straightened out who owed how much wine to whom, with resigned amusement that showed they’d done such things many times before. Drunks, Nicole supposed, had plenty of practice in getting drunk.

She wasn’t as scornful as she had been, not with that drunken night with Julia under her own belt. In its own way, it had been fun — while it lasted. The next morning… The less she thought about the next morning, the better.

Sextus Longinius was not to be left out of the party. He bought the next round. Nicole wished he hadn’t, not with a baby on the way and him as far from rich as she was. But there wasn’t any way to tell him so without bruising his pride. A person had to be able to hold his head up in front of his friends and neighbors — as much here as in Los Angeles, or Indianapolis for that matter.

All the rounds included Nicole — they wouldn’t have been rounds if they hadn’t. She had to empty her cup each time, too, or people would wonder what was the matter with her. Their conversation, which hadn’t been particularly genteel to begin with, turned loud and silly. She turned loud and silly.

She wasn’t drunk. She was sure she wasn’t. She’d been drunk before. Drunk was when she couldn’t stand up without wanting to fall over. Now, although her feet didn’t quite want to do as she told them, she walked well enough. She said clever things, witty things: people laughed, didn’t they?

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been the life of the party. Had she ever been? Her memory was fogged a bit — time travel did that to a person, even without a few cups of Falernian — but as far as she could recall, mostly at parties she’d either circulated rapidly and got out as fast as possible, or found a corner to hide in while too many other guests got sloshed or stoned.

None of them had been as witty as she was being. She didn’t remember laughing this hard or feeling so much like someone who belonged, either. Now there was irony: she had to go back eighteen hundred years and halfway around the world to find people who accepted her as one of them.

Hardly anybody came in to distract from the celebration. She understood perfectly. She was amazed at how well she understood. Who would want to go wandering around on a wet, sloppy day? You couldn’t stay dry in a car, not here, not now. You couldn’t stay dry anywhere, unless you stayed indoors.

“You look happy, Umma,” Titus Calidius Severus said to her in the warm haze of the wine, “happier than you have in a while. I’m glad. ‘

Of course you are — you want to go to bed with me. But the thought lacked the sour edge it had had before. If she looked at him through the lens of better acquaintance — and several cups of wine — the fuller and dyer didn’t seem so bad. No — he wouldn’t have seemed so bad at all if he hadn’t smelled like a public toilet, and not a well-maintained one, either.

Gaius Calidius Severus pulled his hood up over his head and headed for the door. The rain hissed down outside. He ducked a runnel of water off the roof, sloshed to the edge of the sidewalk, and lifted his tunic. Through the sound of the rain, the sound of piss hitting flooded street was tiny but distinct.

When he came back in, he was grinning. “Running water, as good as the baths,” he said. Everybody laughed.

Or was it everybody? Nicole had missed a couple of voices. “Where’s Julia? ‘ she asked. She couldn’t have mislaid her, now, could she?

Fabia Ursa giggled in between sips of wine. Fetal alcohol syndrome, Nicole thought fuzzily. The thought, for a mercy, blurred and faded before it touched her tongue. “Didn’t you see her go upstairs with Ofanius?” Fabia Ursa asked. She seemed to think it wonderfully funny. “I wonder if that really is for free. The first time, maybe, but not many after that, I’ll bet. Julia will be minding her asses now.”

A pun lurked in there somewhere, but it needed to be in English to work. Nicole’s warm, happy mood went suddenly cold. Lucius and Aurelia were upstairs playing — and shame on Nicole for not thinking about them till just now. Were Julia and Ofanius Valens going at it right next door to them?

Someone pushed a cup into her hand. It was full and all but slopping over. She gripped it like a lifeline, raised it to her lips and drank deep. The wine flowed through her in the now familiar sensation, warm as an open fire. Central heating, she thought with a return of her antic mood. That was the wine, oh yes: making her forget cold things and sad things, grim things and bad things. So the kids were having a primal experience up there. It couldn’t be anything they hadn’t heard before — not the way Umma had been pimping Julia. They must have grown up to the sounds of flesh on flesh, thumps and moans and whatever other sound effects were in vogue in this age of the world.

She had to have another talk with Julia, yes. It might be normal behavior here, but it wasn’t nice behavior. Julia was a free woman now. She had to learn about nice.

But not right now. Tomorrow. If Nicole remembered.

A little while later, Julia came trotting lightly down the stairs with Ofanius Valens right behind her. They weren’t blushing in the least, or hiding anything either. He looked as if he should have been puffing smugly on a cigarette — if the Romans had had tobacco, Nicole was sure, they’d all have smoked like the chimneys they also didn’t have. Julia’s face had a loose, sated look. Her eyes were smoky; her tunic was awry. She straightened it absently, with fingers that paused to stroke the curve of a breast, then wandered on down past the rounded belly. Nicole held her breath, wondering in shocked fascination if she would start stroking her crotch right then and there, but her hand slipped sidewise over a hip and away. She smiled at them all with impartial benevolence.

“So,” said Gaius Calidius Severus, “how do you like being a free woman?” That wasn’t what he was asking. It was as clear as if he’d come with subtitles: How would you like to do me for free, too?

Julia’s smile widened and blurred. “If it’s this good all the time,” she said equally blurrily, “I’m going to like it just fine.”

Everybody gave that a round of applause. Everybody, that is, but Nicole. Even tiddly, she wasn’t about to approve of Julia’s notion of the proper way to celebrate her manumission.

But, said the voice that had been speaking up in Nicole’s mind the past few days, if Julia was going to celebrate, what else could she do? There wasn’t a whole lot to do except get drunk and screw the customers.

Time was, and not so long ago either, when Nicole would have felt obligated to say something censorious — for everyone’s own good, of course. But there were just too many things to be censorious about. She’d hit overload. She couldn’t raise the proper degree of indignation, or the right amount of crusading zeal, either.

She put on a smile. Wet blanket, that was the term for what she’d been tempted to be. Today was simply not the day for that. Things were more than wet enough as it was.

“Seems it’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights,” she said. Only after the words were out of her mouth did she recall that that was a Biblical allusion. These people — her friends and neighbors and freedwoman — were pagans. It would mean nothing to them. And if it did — might it not tell them that she was a Christian? Christians were fair game here. She’d seen that much already.

Well, as to that, wasn’t she at least nominally pagan herself? She certainly hadn’t come here by invoking any Christian deity.

They wouldn’t know what she’d said. Of course they wouldn’t. She was being ridiculous.

Then Sextus Longinius lulus said, “That’s a Jewish myth, isn’t it? I’ve heard it from Jews, I think.”

“Where have you known Jews?” Nicole asked in surprise; Carnuntum was about as far removed from cosmopolitan Los Angeles as she could imagine.

It could have been a stupid question, or even a dangerous one, but he answered quite matter-of-factly: “A lot of coppersmiths are Jews. They’ll drink wine with you, sometimes, and talk shop, even if their silly religion doesn’t let ‘em eat your food. They don’t bother anybody, far as I can see.”

“Not like those crazy Christians,” Fabia Ursa said. She shivered a little. “You never know when those people are going to do something outrageous, when it’s not outright dangerous. If you ask me, they want to be killed.”

“They think they’ll go straight to their afterworld,” her husband said, as if reminding her of something that everyone knew. “Me, as long as this life’s all right, I won’t worry too much about the next one.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Gaius Calidius Severus, and did, draining his cup in a long gulp. When he came up for air he said, “You know what they do? They take babies, girl babies that they’re going to expose anyway, and sacrifice them and eat them.”

“I didn’t hear that,” his father said. “They bake bread in the shape of a baby, and call it their god, and eat that.”

“Crazy,” the others said, nodding and passing the winejar round. “Listen, didn’t you hear tell…?“

Nicole listened in a kind of stunned amazement. After a while, it dawned on her what their conversation reminded her of. In her own time, in her own country, people had talked the same way about Muslim suicide bombers in the Holy Land.

To the Calidii Severi, to Julia, to Ofanius Valens, and to Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Ursa, whatever Christians Carnuntum had — all the Christians in the Roman Empire, for that matter — were wild-eyed fanatics. Their whole purpose in life was to cause trouble, to make martyrs for their faith. They were, in a word, Terrorists.

So — was it true? Nobody had said any such thing in Sunday school. That was all holy Christian martyrs and wicked Romans and bloody-minded lions. Of course the Christians were right — they’d won in the end, hadn’t they? Nobody ever showed the other side of it. Just the Christians defending their one and true and only faith.

Nicole had been awfully young then, young enough that the world could seem so simple. The older she’d grown, the less things seemed to fit the pattern of her Sunday-school lessons. She shouldn’t be surprised to find this new truth, too: Christians as terrorists, Romans as solid citizens appalled at their extremism.

Or maybe that wasn’t the way it really was, either. Maybe these people here were ignorant, and blindly prejudiced. If they were, and if everyone had a side and no one was all right or all wrong, what did that say about the way the people Nicole had called friends and colleagues in Los Angeles thought about Muslims? Was there any real difference between an early Christian martyr and a car bomber?

Somehow, the fact that there were Jews here bemused her even more than the presence of Christians. This was, after all, the second century of the Christian era. There would have been Christians around here somewhere. Wouldn’t there? Bur Jews back then had had the Holy Land, or so she’d heard. What would they be doing in a remote backwater like Catnuntum?

Titus Calidius Severus spread a fistful of sesterces on the table. “Another round of Falernian,” he declared grandly; like everybody else in the tavern, he was flying high. Nicole scooped up the money, pausing to savor the feel of the coins: cool and round, sliding over one another with a soft clink. They were heavy compared to twentieth-century small change, solid and unmistakably there. When you had a sackful of Roman money, you knew it. No losing a fifty-dollar bill in your pocket here.

She made her way back to the bar to fill more cups. She had to use the dipper slowly and carefully, to keep from dribbling wine on the stone countertop. As long as she didn’t move too fast, she was just fine.

When she carried the cups back to the table, she had a couple of extras. She squinted at them, counted them, counted them again to be sure. Seven — that was the right number, wasn’t it? She looked up from the cups to count noses. Fabia Ursa, Sextus Longinius lulus, Ofanius Valens, Titus Calidius Severus — lord, these names were a mouthful. Didn’t anybody do names like Joe and Bob and Sue here?

Probably just as well they didn’t. She was letting her mind wander again, too. Four people. Five, counting herself. (Umma. Now that was a nice short name. Everybody should have a name like Umma.) Who was missing?

Julia, of course. And Gaius Calidius Severus.

Where they were, and what they were doing up there, required only one guess, especially since Ofanius Valens was staring at the stairway with a discontented expression. What was he thinking? Was he jealous? Or was he wondering if he’d left Julia dissatisfied?

Maybe he had, at that. Maybe, on the other hand, Julia was just setting out to get as much as she could today.

Fabia Ursa spoke Nicole’s thought aloud, as if she’d caught it floating in the rain- and wine-soaked air. “She’ll sleep sound tonight, I’m sure,” she said with a small giggle that ended in a hiccup. Under the tight-stretched fabric of her tunic, the baby kicked as if in protest. She laughed with a catch in it, as if the baby had caught a rib, and rubbed her belly. “It will be a while before I can sleep that way again — what with the baby between us now, and, if Mother Isis is kind, it will wake me up in the night, and keep me running from sunup to sunup.”

Nicole had heard Fabia Ursa mention Isis before; but she’d known the name even before that. She’d read a book once with the goddess’ name in the title. Isis, the book had said, was a goddess in Egypt. Carnuntum and Egypt were a long way apart. The Romans might have had only those hideous, squeaking carts to haul goods and people, but ideas seemed to travel on wings.

Fabia Ursa and Sextus Longinius lulus had retreated into a private and connubial world. She was simpering, he was smiling sappily. They gazed fondly into each other’s eyes. He had taken her hand; she rested the other on the swell of her belly. He didn’t seem too dismayed to be denied his wife’s embraces. Probably getting it from one of their slaves, Nicole thought sourly.

While the tinker and his wife shared their little moment and the other two men engrossed themselves in the latest round of Falernian, Julia and Gaius Calidius Severus came bounding down the stairs. They looked indecently pleased with themselves.

Yes, that was the word. Indecent. Nicole fixed Julia with a jaundiced stare. No matter how much wine she’d taken on board, she could not bring herself to approve of Julia’s conduct. Julia wasn’t a slave any longer. She wasn’t property — and she wasn’t a sex object. Women weren’t supposed to think of themselves as nothing but receptacles for men to fill. They certainly weren’t supposed to have as good a time doing it as Julia was. It was not dignified.

Julia aimed in a straight line for her cup of wine, drained it in one long gulp, dropped to a stool and laid her head on the table and fell sound asleep.

They all regarded her in varying degrees of amusement — Nicole’s the least, the men’s the most, and Fabia Ursa’s somewhere in the middle. “I take it back,” said the tinker’s wife. “She’ll sleep sound right now.”

Everyone laughed but Nicole. Julia never even stirred.

Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Ursa took their leave not long after. Nicole couldn’t tell which was holding which up. If she’d had to guess, she’d have said the tinker’s wife was propping up her husband.

As if their departure had been a signal, Ofanius Valens wandered off as well. Nicole caught the glance he shot at Julia as he passed her: a strange expression, almost but not quite unreadable, composed of lust and affection, amusement and resentment. She could imagine what he was thinking. I wasn’t enough for you, was I? Well, next time we’ll see what you think!

Not, thought Nicole with sodden determination, that he was going to get a next time. She’d have that talk with Julia. Tomorrow. After the hangover that was coming. Yes.

Gaius Calidius Severus had been sipping his wine slowly, as if waiting for Ofanius Valens to leave first. It was a kind of possessiveness, Nicole supposed. This is my territory, it said. If he’d been a dog, he’d probably have lifted his leg at a spot between Ofanius Valens and Julia.

Once his rival was gone, he seemed to decide that Julia didn’t need further staking out. He finished off his wine, pulled his cloak up over his head, and headed for the door. Just as he passed it, his father called out, “Don’t fall into a vat of piss till I get back! I won’t be but a minute.” Gaius laughed and ducked out into the rain.

Which left Julia, sound asleep, and Nicole, too wide awake, and Titus Calidius Severus. As if to punctuate the moment, Julia let out a snore that was almost a bleat. Nicole wished she would wake up. Upstairs she heard the voices, not too loud, of Lucius and Aurelia playing. The children were being very good, extraordinarily good. Nicole wished they would have a fight and come down to tattle on each other. She didn’t want to be alone, or as close to alone as made no difference, with Titus Calidius Severus.

He wanted to be alone with her. He’d made sure he would be, staying behind after everyone else had left. It was just as much a statement as the timing of his son’s departure.

Nicole looked around for a blunt instrument in case he got out of hand. She didn’t have to look far. The Romans didn’t have soft plastics. Everything they made was pottery or metal or wood. She had only to choose her weapon.

But the fuller and dyer didn’t look as if he planned to do anything too reprehensible. He sat on the stool, peering from his empty cup to Nicole and back again. “I miss you, Umma,” he said. “I still haven’t figured out what I did to get you upset with me, but I miss you. I want you to know that.”

“I do know,” she said. She wasn’t just saying it to fill the silence. His approach, if it was an approach, was honestly civilized — more civilized than anything she’d got in Los Angeles after Frank dumped her. Frank hadn’t exactly been the soul of gentility, either, come to that. She hadn’t known a man could be.

This man was civilized enough to make her feel downright guilty. Till Nicole muscled herself, thanks to Liber and Libera, into Umma’s body, Calidius Severus and Umma had had what they probably thought was a good solid relationship. So what did that make her? A homewrecker?

She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help being Nicole and not Umma; being a twentieth-century lawyer and not a second-century tavernkeeper.

He was waiting for her to go on. That was civilized, too: a kind of instinctive politeness, a courtesy so well trained as to be automatic. She sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “The past few weeks… everything’s been so confused. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

“You haven’t been yourself,” Calidius Severus agreed. It wasn’t the first time Nicole had heard that in Carnuntum. The people who said it didn’t know how right they were — and Lord, was she glad of that. The fuller and dyer shrugged and got to his feet. “Well, I won’t trouble you anymore about it now. I thought there might be something you wanted to say that you didn’t want to say in front of people, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s nothing like that,” she said in dull embarrassment. “I told you it was nothing like that when we were walking back from the market square.”

In three quick steps, and before she quite realized it, he was standing beside her. She suppressed the flinch, she hoped, before he could have seen it. She hadn’t known he could move so fast, or with such unexpected strength.

But he didn’t touch her. He didn’t do that. “What is it, then?” he demanded. His voice was as firmly under control as his body was, and as rigid with tension.

He must have realized that he wasn’t going to get an answer. He shrugged again — he had a whole repertoire of shrugs, a shrug for every occasion — and leaned forward. Before she could pull away, before she was even sure of what he was going to do, he kissed her. It was gentle, no force; just the brush of his lips, with a faint tickle of beard and mustache. “Take care of yourself, Umma,” he said. “I do love you, you know.” Before she could find words to reply, he was gone.