Household Gods

9

Nicole stared at the place where Titus Calidius Severus had been. “Now why did he have to go and say something like that?” she muttered in English. His kiss hadn’t been revolting — on the contrary. That worried her more than if she’d wanted to gag at it. He’d been in the tavern, he and his son, long enough that she’d stopped noticing the reek of stale piss that followed them wherever they went. The rest…

She hadn’t been the least bit interested in sex, with Titus Calidius Severus or anyone else, since she came to Carnuntum. She’d felt anything but sexy herself. She was grubby all the time. She was lousy. She had a yeast infection that didn’t want to go away, which left her generally unenthusiastic about her private parts. She never got anywhere near enough sleep. It was hard enough to live in this body every hour of every day, without trying to warm up right good and proper, too.

And yet… It wasn’t that she wanted Calidius Severus. It was that she might have wanted him. Her mind and self might not remember him, but her body too clearly did. It had memories, it seemed, small yearnings, tinglings that woke when he looked at her or touched her or, as he had just now, kissed her.

With thoughts as disturbing as these, and leading in even more disturbing directions, she was almost pathetically glad to greet the dripping customer who blew in out of the rain and loudly demanded bread and honey and wine — so loudly, in fact, that he woke Julia.

She started bolt upright, eyes enormous with terror, a deer-in-the-headlights look if Nicole had ever seen one. Nicole could read her face as if it had been yesterday’s newspaper. Oh, gods — sleeping on the job. What would her mistress do to her? How would she talk her way out of it?

Then, as Nicole tried to watch and serve the customer at the same time, the truth dawned on her. Nicole — Umma — wasn’t her mistress anymore. Her relief was as strong as her fear had been, swept over it and drowned it, and let her stand reasonably straight and make her way over to the bar, where she dipped a cup of the two-as wine and brought it to the still dripping, faintly steaming customer.

After the man had paid and left, Nicole said, “Julia, if you doze off on me tomorrow, you will be in trouble.”

Julia grinned at her. “Oh, yes, I know that,” she said. She carefully did not include the title that she’d always put in before. No Mistress, not any longer. “Today was special, though. With the wine and the loving and all.” She stretched with a sinuous, sinful wriggle. Then she hiccuped, which made her laugh. She was full of herself, bubbling over with freedom — and, Nicole caught herself thinking, license. Nicole had known women like that. Girls, too, in high school. There, they were called sluts — even called themselves that, like a badge of pride.

Julia’s straightforward sluttiness — all right, earthiness — had always irked Nicole. Now it made her jealous. And that made her angry at herself, because she was jealous.

She covered both jealousy and anger with work. Of that there was always plenty and then some. She washed cups and washed cups and washed cups; she’d almost run out of clean ones. Julia ground flour to bake bread. She and Nicole took turns at the oven, keeping the fire even and gauging when the baking would be done. Time was when Nicole had thought the labor-saving devices in her kitchen in West Hills didn’t really save labor — that was just hype. She knew much better now.

And today was a slow day. Because of the rain, it looked as if the tavern would get by with one baking, two at the outside, instead of the usual four. It didn’t help the cash box much, but it made life easier for the staff — all two of them.

Maybe that was why, when Nicole went upstairs as gray day turned into black night, she was only tired, not exhausted. She lay down, but did not fall asleep as fast as she usually did — as fast as if someone had whacked her over the head with a club. The wine had worn off long ago. If she’d had a hangover, it had dissipated somewhere in between customers. So that was how to do it: get drunk in broad daylight and work it off. She’d have to remember that.

Except for the chirping of crickets, the buzzing of mosquitoes, and, somewhere far off, a dog that would not stop barking, it was eerily quiet behind her barred door. No distant racket of TVs and radios, no hiss of cars going past as was commonplace in L.A. even at three in the morning. Nothing. People were snug in their warm buggy beds, and would be till sunrise.

She was snug, too, snug but restive. She tossed and turned. Side to belly to back. Back to belly to side. Of itself — or so she thought till it got there — her hand slid between her legs and crept under her loincloth. It was the first time since she came to Carnuntum, the first interest she’d had in anything but falling flat on her face in bed and waking up however many hours later in some new state of misery or other: itching, griping, cursing dirt and vermin and discomfort.

It had been a long while. It was still strange to find herself smooth down there, except for the small itching scab where she’d cut herself shaving at the baths a day or two before. The difference aroused her. On the fantasy screen behind her eyes, where Mel Gibson and Adrian Paul had used to play out their little dramas, a completely new and different face took shape. It wasn’t, God forbid, Titus Calidius Severus, but it wasn’t not, either. He had a beard; bearded men had never fed her fantasies. He had warm dark eyes and a smile that had never known orthodontia. His shoulders were broad, the skin of his chest warm and shaved smooth: she could feel the faint catch of the stubble. He shaved below, too, around the noble loft of his organ — not huge, not as a man might imagine a woman would want, but a good size, a comfortable size, like the ones she’d seen on the gaudy statues in the market. She felt the shape and hardness of it, the heat that mounted as he smiled at her, smiled and smiled, and — wise man — said nothing at all.

Her hand quickened. Her breathing matched pace with it. Caught; paused. A little moan escaped her.

She relaxed all at once, let her body go limp. Oh, that was good; that was what she’d needed. And yet she shrugged as she often did afterwards, alone in the dark. It was good, but she knew better. The real thing could be as lonely as this, if he did what he wanted to do and then rolled off her, snoring before he hit the pillow. But when it was good, there was nothing like it. No, nothing in the world.

This would do. It had eased the worst of the tightness out of her, which was what she had wanted. She could sleep now.

As she drifted off, she felt one last, small stab of jealousy. Lucky Julia, who didn’t bother her head — or her body — with such frettings.

Nicole woke to total strangeness. For a terrible instant, she knew she’d been yanked out of time again, to who knew where. Then she recognized the familiar bed underneath her, the familiar itch and skitter of her personal vermin, and the familiar septic stink of Carnuntum. The strangeness was in the light. It was just sunup — and there was a sun to light the sky. The clouds that had lain so heavy on the town for so long had tattered and torn. When she got up and stumbled to the window to look out, she saw patches of pale blue amid the scudding gray. The air that washed her cheeks was damp still, and cool, but no rain fell. The rain had gone away.

She yawned and stretched, arching her back like a cat. A good hot shower and a Thorough delousing would have done her a great deal of good, but even without them she felt as good as she’d felt since she came to Carnuntum.

She was smiling as she went downstairs, a smile Julia returned — up before Nicole as usual, baking the morning bread. Freedom didn’t seem to have done much damage — yet — to her work ethic. She might even work harder, now she worked for wages: now she had a stake in working well.

They did their morning chores as they’d come to do, moving through and around each other like partners in a dance. There was a kind of pleasure in it, the pleasure of a pattern well executed. The first customers — a handful of morning regulars — came in with their usual greetings: a smile and a cheery wave, a rheumy scowl, a hungover wince, depending on the individual. They settled in their usual places with their usual breakfasts, wine and fresh bread for the most part. Some liked to banter with Nicole or Julia.

Nicole had just finished a long and lively exchange with a muleteer whose name she could never remember but whose face she couldn’t forget — he had a quite imposing wen at the corner of his left eye — when a half-dozen new customers came trooping in. All but one were strangers. That one, coming in behind but clearly a part of the group, as if he were herding it onward, was Umma’s brother Brigomarus. His expression mirrored the rest. The best word Nicole could find for it was thunderous.

Her bright mood darkened, and not slowly either. From the way Brigomarus acted toward the others, and the resemblance the women bore to him and to each other — and, for that matter, to Umma — she couldn’t exactly miss who they were. The two younger women had to be Umma’s sisters, and the older one, she of the steel-gray bun and steely stare, their mother. The men, in turn, had to be the sisters’ husbands. One was a great deal older than the woman whose elbow he supported. The other was thirty-five or so, and probably a few years older than his apparent wife.

Nicole had learned in her time in Carnuntum that clothes very definitely made the man here — or the woman. The rich never affected the local equivalent of torn jeans and ratty T-shirts, and the poor never tried to dress up like the rich, even if they could have afforded it. There were no designer knockoffs in discount outlets here. One could, quite easily, determine a person’s status by the type and quality of clothes he or she wore, and by the kind and quantity of jewelry, as well as by the intricacy of a woman’s hairstyle.

These women, these sisters of Umma the tavernkeeper, were a good cut above her with her combed-out-anyhow hair and her two good tunics. They wore soft wool dyed in amazingly off-key colors, and linen that might have made a decent summer power suit in Los Angeles; and they were hung everywhere, it seemed, with necklaces and armlets, rings and earrings. Not all or even most of it was gold, but enough of it was, particularly on the sister with the older man, that Nicole was left in no doubt as to their economic status. These were the local equivalent of prosperous businessmen and their wives. The older man was even tricked out in a toga — about as formal as a dinner jacket, and overwhelmingly so in the humble surroundings of a tavern.

Even the mother’s simplicity of hair and dress — a couple of layers of black tunic and a black cloak — was deceptive. Her one ornament was a ring on her finger where Nicole’s twentieth-century eye looked for a wedding ring, and it was gold.

Nicole was more than glad she’d drunk well-watered wine with breakfast, and eaten a good half-loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese. If she’d been as full of Falernian as she was at Julia’s manumission party, she’d have said exactly what she thought: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Slumming, I suppose?”

They did have the look, and no mistake. The younger man, a tall reedy fellow with the scars of old acne on his sparsely bearded cheeks, dusted off a bench with an air of great fastidiousness, and helped his mother-in-law to a seat thereon. She allowed him to assist her, but not without paying for it: “Not so solicitous, Pacatus, if you please. It makes you look like a legacy-hunter. Not, I suspect, that you aren’t eager to see me die and leave you my holdings, but it’s more polite to act as if it doesn’t matter.”

She had a voice like poisoned honey, which was probably what had brought her this far up in the world — widow of a well-to-do man, Nicole guessed, but that man hadn’t been Umma’s father, not by a long leap up the social ladder.

The old lady got herself settled with much clucking and fussing from all concerned; all but Nicole, who stayed right where she was, safe behind the bar. In the process she picked up names to attach to faces: Pacatus the younger son-in-law, Tabica his wife, Ila the older — and probably oldest — sister; she looked older than Umma. And, most overweeningly pompous of that whole pompous crew, Ila’s togaed husband, Marcus Flavius Probus. No one, not even his wife, called him by his praenomen. Nicole doubted Ila ever did, even in bed. He bore the full triune burden of his name, wherever and whenever he was.

While the in-laws catered to the old lady, whom Marcus Flavius Probus addressed as my dearest Atpomara, but everyone else called simply Mother, Brigomarus stood a little apart with arms folded, quietly but conspicuously removed from the fray. Nicole didn’t know that she liked him any better for it. He was the light of his mother’s eye, she could see that without half trying. Atpomara sneered at her sons-in-law and tyrannized over her daughters, but when she looked at her son her terrible old eyes went almost soft.

Queen bee, Nicole thought, and disliked the woman on sight.

One way and another, the tavern managed to empty of customers while Atpomara got herself settled. Either they knew something was up and were too polite to hang around and witness it, or people knew this family too well to want to be anywhere near it once it assembled in force. Even Julia, who wasn’t usually any kind of coward, muttered something about seeing if the kids were up to something upstairs, and left Nicole to face the music alone.

She had no doubt at all that that was what was coming. Six pairs of eyes followed Julia out of the room. If the men had been dogs, their tongues would have been hanging out. The women would have been bristling and snarling, of course, like bitches everywhere.

Oh, dear, Nicole thought. She really had taken a disliking to these relatives of Umma’s. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of close affection among them, either, not even enough to put up a pretense of squealing and cheek-kissing and oh-it’s-been-so-long. From the sisters’ expressions, they didn’t want to touch their poor relation for fear of catching a disease.

True, they were notably cleaner and better kempt than Nicole managed to be. By twentieth-century American standards they were still fairly ripe, and those elaborate hairstyles reminded Nicole rather forcibly of stories she’d heard her mother tell about the ratted and lacquered constructions of the Sixties, complete with urban legends of spiders and literal rats’ nests. She let herself dwell on that for a while, as she stood behind the bar and waited for someone to speak.

It took a long uncomfortable while, but Brigomarus didn’t disappoint her after all. “Good morning, Umma,” he said.

“Good morning,” she said civilly. “May I serve you anything? Wine? The bread’s fresh, and we have a nice raisin compote today.”

He glanced at the others. They were all affecting interest in matters far removed from this low and none too sanitary place. “No,” he said after a pause. “No, thank you. We won’t be staying long.”

“Really?” Nicole raised her eyebrows. “You’ve come for the company, then? That’s the only other reason to come to a tavern, isn’t it?”

“In… a manner of speaking,” he said. He was nicely uncomfortable. Or maybe his tunic was new and inclined to itch.

Nicole wasn’t going to give him any help at all. She folded her arms and waited him out. It had been a useful tactic in court. It did the job here. He blurted out what he maybe had been instructed to frame more tactfully, from the way Atpomara’s face clouded over. “Umma, what were you thinking? You know I forbade you to manumit that slave!”

“Julia, “ Nicole said with great care and attention to the woman’s name, “was my property. It was my decision, and my right, to set her free.”

“It was not,” Brigomarus said heatedly. She’d got him on the defensive, and he didn’t like it one bit. “You, in case you’ve forgotten, are a woman. A woman should not act without the approval of her male relatives. That’s the law. “

“It is also the law that a person of either sex may manumit a slave informally in the presence of a suitable number of witnesses. Male witnesses,” Nicole said pointedly. She reached under the bar where she’d stowed the box with the document in it, brought it out and laid it on the bar.

He made no move to pick it up, still less to read it. “You can’t do that,” he said.

“On the contrary,” said Nicole, “I already did.”

Evidently Atpomara decided that her son might be the light of her eye, but when it came to pitched battles, he needed stronger reinforcements. She shot a glare at the elder son-in-law that made him jerk forward as if stung. “What is done can be undone,” he said with blustering confidence. “Come, dear Umma, consider the path of reason, the light of good sense, the beauty of obedience to one’s blood and kin and kind. Was it not Homer who said, ‘Happy the man who loves his homeland’? Is not one’s family even more sacred? Should one not — “

Nicole had had plenty of practice in listening to pompous asses both on and off the judge’s bench, but her time in Carnuntum had worn her patience a little thinner than perhaps it should have been. She let him rattle on a while longer, till he came to something approximating a full stop. His words and theme were remarkably similar to twentieth-century political bombast, right down to the stump-thumping about Family Values.

When he paused for air, she said, “No.”

He gaped at her. He looked like a fish. “What — “

“No,” she repeated. “I doubt very much that Homer said any such thing.”

“Of course he did,” said Marcus Flavius Probus. And stood flat-footed, with all his fancy oratorical effects gone clean out of his head.

Good: she’d derailed him. Before he could scramble back on track, the other brother-in-law, Pacatus, opened his mouth to say something. Nicole ran right over him. “Does any of you have anything useful to say? I have a business to run, in case you haven’t noticed, and you’re keeping the customers out.”

The collective intake of breath was clearly audible. The sisters looked as if she’d grown three heads and started to bark. Umma apparently hadn’t been this outspoken, though from what Nicole knew of her, she’d had her share of problems with tact.

Atpomara confirmed it. She sniffed through her elegant nose and glared down it at the woman she thought was her daughter. Her severely declasse, increasingly embarrassing daughter. “Umma, my dear,” she said, “you were always headstrong and never particularly sensible, but this is remarkable even for you. Whatever possessed you to toss away four hundred denarii worth of highly useful slave? Whom, I may point out, your late lamented husband selected and purchased. Or is that why you did it? Have you found it so difficult to forgive a man the exercise of his natural impulses? “

“The man is dead,” Nicole said in a conspicuously reasonable tone. “He has nothing to do with why I chose to set Julia free.”

“Obviously,” the elder sister — Ila, yes — said, “nothing has anything to do with why you did it. It’s not as if you could afford to throw away that much money. Are you having an attack of remorse, the way the Christians are said to be prone to? Sometimes they give away everything before they believe they’re due to die.”

“She doesn’t look anywhere near dying yet,” the younger sister said with a sniff that tried and signally failed to be as haughty as her mother’s. “Mother, Ila, this is such a bore. Pacatus, take me home, do. I’ve a new perfume I’m dying to try, and I’ve been promised my necklace today, and my dressmaker will be waiting. You know how I hate to keep her waiting!”

Everybody ignored her, including her husband. Tabica, Nicole deduced, was a chronic whiner. She seemed the sort of person who would flaunt all her successes in her sister’s face, till it became habit so ingrained that she didn’t even know she did it.

Ila had more backbone, though her air of discontent was just as strong. She reminded Nicole of certain of the partners’ wives at her old law firm, in particular the ones who’d had ambitions — toward Hollywood, toward a profession, toward anything but being a trophy wife for a partner in a mediocre law firm. In Los Angeles there’d been a little scope for such women, jobs they could take, committees to lord it over, charities and benefits and the not-so-infrequent celebrity bash. Carnuntum had nothing to compare with that.

Ila didn’t whine. Ila exercised herself in rancor: “It’s not as if you were born to better things, Umma, though some of us have aspired to and even achieved them.” She slanted a glance at her mother, who sat in regal silence, letting her daughters make idiots of themselves. “Even so, a person of your status in the world should know better than to do a thing as ill-advised as this — and against the family’s wishes, too. Any foolish thing that you do, we bear the brunt of it.”

“Oh, do you?” Nicole inquired. “And how are you materially impaired by the freeing of my slave?”

Pacatus surprised her by rolling his eyes and whistling softly. “Oho! Been talking to some of your educated customers, have you? Which of them taught you those words?”

“Maybe I found them for myself,” Nicole said acidly. She folded her arms and tapped her foot. “Well? Do I get an answer? How does Julia’s manumission hurt you — aside from the blow to your pride?” To your little power trip, she wanted to say, but no words in Latin quite matched the idiom.

Nobody did answer, so she did it for them. “It doesn’t hurt you a bit, does it? It’s my financial loss, and my choice to take it.”

“And our burden when you fall into penury,” Atpomara said, “as you will do if you make any more such choices. What will you do next? Give this tavern to some passerby off the street, and go off to be a wandering philosopher?”

“If I do that,” said Nicole, “I suppose I’ll live off the charity of others. Not you. Believe me, I won’t come to you for one single as.”

“What an ungrateful little chit you are!” said Ila. “Is this how you address your mother?”

She’s not my mother, lady, Nicole wanted to say, but that would have been a very bad idea. She settled for a lift of the chin and a curl of the lip. “I’ll make it on my own. Just you wait and see.”

“But you can’t do that, “ said Brigomarus. “Unless…” A look of wild speculation came over his face. “Don’t tell me. You’re going to marry old Pisspot across the way.” He thumped his fist down on the table, too loud and sudden for Nicole to get a word in edgewise. “That’s it. That is emphatically it. I will not have it. I forbid it!”

“You may go right ahead and forbid it,” Nicole said with rising heat, “and I may go right ahead and do as I see fit. I am not your property, and I am not your child. I will not duck my head and do what you want, simply because it is you who wants it.” She turned on the sisters. “Or you.” And, last and fiercest, on Atpomara: “Or you. I am my own woman. I have my own life here, I make my own living, I decide for myself what I will do and not do. You have no say in it.”

Pacatus and Marcus Flavius Probus exchanged glances. “Poor woman,” said Pacatus.

“Hellebore,” said Marcus Flavius Probus, nodding ponderously.

Pacatus blinked but seemed to get the point, which was more than Nicole could claim. “Oh, yes, she’s off her head — or else she’s up to something with that dyer. What if he encouraged her to free the slave for some purpose of his own? Is he clever enough for that? He’ll have dyed his brains bright blue by now, I should think, with all the fumes from his work.”

Marcus Flavius Probus had no sense of humor, that was evident. He seized on the one thing that must have made sense to him, and worried at it like a dog on a bone. “She can’t marry that person. It’s beneath us all.”

“She is beneath us all,” Ila said.

Nicole stepped in before they could go on. She was quite coldly angry by now, the same anger she’d honed so well in dealing with Frank and his late-model bimbo. “You had better leave,” she said.

No one seemed to hear her. The brothers-in-law and Ila were too busy dissecting her mental state. Tabica was elaborately and tearfully bored. Brigomarus frothed and steamed. Atpomara sat in state, waiting for someone to notice her lofty silence.

Nicole hefted one of the heavy iron skillets near at hand, and let it fall with a ringing crash. That got their attention, one and all. She braced her hands on the bar and leaned across it, glaring at the lot of them. “Did you hear me? I asked you to leave.”

“You can’t do that,” Brigomarus said. It seemed to be a favorite refrain.

“This is my house,” Nicole said, shaping each word with care. “This is my business. This is my life. If you can do nothing better with or for it than play the petty tyrant, then I don’t want or need you. I’ve been getting by on my own so far. I’ll keep right on doing it, too.”

“How can you get by on your own?” Brigomarus demanded. “You’re a woman. You can’t do a single legal thing without my approval.”

“Would you like to bet on it?” Nicole asked him. She thumped a fist on the papyrus that still lay, unregarded, on the bar. “If there’s anything I know about the way the law works, it’s that there’s a way around everything. Sometimes it’s hard, often it’s twisted, but it is there. No law was ever written that didn’t have a loophole somewhere. And I,” she said, “will be sure to find it. “

“My, my,” murmured Ila. “Aren’t we cocky today? What’s got you going, sister dear? Your so-fragrant beloved?”

“I don’t need a man to get going, as you put it,” Nicole shot back, “least of all that one — though he’s worth ten of you. Now get out. I have work to do.”

She thought she’d have to eject them bodily — and wasn’t it ironic that she’d never needed a bouncer in all her time in the tavern, but now, with her putative family, she would dearly have loved to have one. Ila and Brigomarus seemed inclined to camp there till she broke down and let them run all over her.

They’d wait a good long time if so, and she wasn’t lying. She did have work to do. Lots of it. Which she would go ahead and do, starting with cleaning the area behind the bar, till they got fed up and left.

It wasn’t too hard to ignore them. They couldn’t or wouldn’t get at her with the bar between. Their bluster fell on deaf ears. Nobody was inclined to get physical — the one thing she’d been afraid of, because when it came right down to it, a woman was at a major disadvantage against three men.

Nobody came to her rescue, either. Julia was hiding upstairs with the kids. The Calidii Severi were safe in their shop, oblivious to the trouble she was in — and, she had no doubt, to the family’s interpretation of her relationship with Titus Calidius Severus. Her regular morning customers seemed to have conspired to stay away.

Well, and so be it. She’d been alone when Frank deserted her, and she’d handled that just fine. She could deal with a frustrated and clearly dysfunctional family — after all, it wasn’t her family.

As she’d expected, after a while they ran out of things to shout at her and started shouting at one another. When that palled without her taking notice, they gave up at last and left her, as Marcus Flavius Probus said, to her self-inflicted fate. The peace and quiet then were heavenly, and barely disrupted even by the stream of customers that came flooding in. Nicole greeted them with a wide and welcoming smile, and the first few got their orders at half price, just for being there and not being Umma’s relatives. By that time Julia had come out of hiding and gone to work, so quietly Nicole couldn’t find it in herself to ream the woman out with proper ferocity. She settled for a frown and a hard glance, which made Julia flinch rather more than was strictly necessary — slave reflexes, consciously suppressed as she remembered, yet again, that she was free.

Even after the rain stopped, the street in front of the tavern remained a wallow for several days. Lucius thought that was wonderful, and went out and coated himself in mud from head to foot. Nicole had been more affected by the relatives’ visit than she knew at the time; she had no patience left for muddy small boys. The first time he came in black to the eyes and slopping odorous bits on her freshly swept floor, she yelled at him. When that didn’t take the self-satisfied gleam out of his eye, she spanked him. She didn’t feel nearly so guilty about that now as she had the first time. It was, she told herself, like a rolled-up newspaper for a puppy: a nonthreatening but necessary form of discipline.

She poured a bucket of water over him, and then another one, and then felt like giving him another spanking, because that water didn’t flow at the turn of a tap. She or Julia had to lug it from a fountain. Two buckets’ worth of water didn’t make him anything close to clean, either.

It was, fortunately, a men’s day at the baths. In lieu of running Lucius through a car wash, that would have to do. She went next door to see if Sextus Longinius lulus would take him. The thought of sending Lucius out by himself didn’t appeal to her in the least. City upbringing, city paranoia: maybe it wasn’t necessary here, but then again maybe it was.

When she came in and paused to let her eyes adjust to the dimmer light, the tinker was tapping a dented pot back into shape on a form. He smiled at her. She smiled back. But when she explained what she’d come for, he shook his head. “No, Umma, sorry. Not today. I’m backed up for a week as it is.” She could see it, too: heaps and piles of broken or dented utensils, enough to fill the tiny space and spill out into the room behind. He wasn’t insensitive to her disappointment: he said, “I really am sorry. I wish I could, mind, a bath would be nice. But I can’t. Why don’t you try Calidius Severus across the street?”

“I guess I’ll do that,” she said with something less than enthusiasm. It was embarrassing to keep asking favors of the fuller and dyer. Still, she thought, they were friends even if they weren’t lovers — they were that, weren’t they? If a friend wouldn’t do you a favor, then who would?

She picked her way down the muddy sidewalk back to the tavern. Lucius, for a wonder, hadn’t gone anywhere. He was in the public room seeing how many stools he could pile on top of one another, while Julia rather irresponsibly ignored him. Nicole rescued number four just before it toppled onto a customer’s head, snagged Lucius, and dragged him out into the street.

Lucius didn’t look at all disconcerted by her speed or her vehemence. Adventures were all to the good, he seemed to think, and it was an adventure to get magnificently muddy and throw his mother into fits. Her dire threats about what would happen to him if he “accidentally” fell off the stepping stones into the mud would have got a restraining order slapped on her by any judge in the United States. That meant they were — barely — strong enough to make him notice them.

Titus Calidius Severus was pulling a soggy bolt of linen from a wooden tub when Nicole and Lucius walked into the shop. His arms were blue to the elbow. “Well, well,” he said, laughing as he took in Lucius’ grimy hide. “Have you decided to turn Nubian on us, you young rascal?”

“Maybe.” Lucius sounded as if he liked the idea. He pointed to the dye on Calidius’ forearms. “So what are you? A mighty warrior Celt?”

That didn’t mean anything to Nicole, but it made the fuller and dyer laugh louder. “Maybe I am,” he said. “Maybe I’ll chop off your head and hang it over my door there. What do you think of that?”

“Yes!” Lucius agreed with enthusiasm.

Violence. Nicole’s lip started to curl, until she remembered some of the dire threats she’d laid in Lucius before she trusted him on the stepping stones. That made her blush faintly, which didn’t help her mood a bit. “If you’re going to the baths today,” she said to Titus Calidius Severus, “would you be so kind as to take him with you and get him back to the color he’s supposed to be?” She didn’t call Calidius by his praenomen; that would have felt like using it to unfair advantage.

He nodded at once, with every appearance of goodwill. “It’s been a while since I took him, after all, hasn’t it? We could both use a good scrubbing.” He grinned at Lucius. Lucius grinned back. Calidius Severus’ expression changed slightly. “My, and aren’t you getting to be a handsome boy? Just as well your mother sends you with a chaperon. A good-looking boy in the baths by himself — that’s asking for trouble.”

Lucius shrugged and looked bored. Calidius Severus sighed a little. “Well. You’re young yet. That’s to the good, maybe.” To Nicole he said, “Don’t you worry, Umma. I’ll keep a steady eye on him and keep him safe, and bring him back as good as new.”

Nicole shivered deep down inside. She’d only been worried about Lucius alone in the streets. She hadn’t thought about what might happen in the baths. She should have, too. She’d seen what kind of place they were. If prostitutes came and went there on men’s days, if women gossiped about masseurs who provided extra services on the side, why wouldn’t men who went after boys — chkkenhawks. a gay friend of hers had called them — also prowl there? She looked at Titus Calidius Severus with a new respect. “Thank you very much, Titus,” she said, deliberately and carefully calling him by his praenomen.

He noticed. He smiled, nodded. He didn’t press his advantage. Was he really as sensible as that?

Yes, she thought. He was. Which put him several steps ahead of most of the men she’d known in Indiana and California, let alone Carnuntum.

“Come on, Lucius, let’s get you cleaned up,” he said. Lucius came without hesitation or backtalk. Calidius Severus’ tone was familiar to Nicole, though she needed a moment to place it. When she did, she snorted. In 1950s war movies that even sleazy cable stations didn’t show till three in the morning, the tough sergeant used precisely that tone with the green kid. It worked like a charm in the movies. Nicole had never imagined that it could work so well in reality.

Titus Calidius Severus called upstairs to Gaius to explain where he was going and why. His son came down yawning and chewing on a hunk of bread. He shoved the last of it into his mouth and settled without complaint to the work that his father had left — because the work, of course, would not go away.

Titus and Lucius and Nicole left him to it. After the reeking dimness of the shop, the open air was blinding bright and dizzyingly clean.

Lucius, whose young eyes adjusted fastest, tugged at Nicole’s arm and pointed across the street. “Look, Mother! Someone’s written something on our front wall.”

Sure enough, there was a large scrawl by the door. With both eyes on Lucius to keep him from diving back into the mud, Nicole had walked right by without noticing. Now that he’d pointed it out, she read it aloud, sounding out the spikily printed words: “Big beast show in the amphitheater on the thirteenth day before the Kalends of August.” She needed a moment to work out that that was July 20, and another to realize it was only a couple of days away.

“Ah, Caesar’s victory games,” Calidius Severus said, nodding. “They always put on a good show for those. They bring in beasts people don’t see every day, not just the same old boring bulls and bears.” Absurdly, Nicole thought of Wall Street, and wondered if Rome had, after all, had a stock market. The fuller and dyer went on, “Why, a few years ago, they even had a tiger. Do you remember what a mean-looking bastard he was?”

“Now that you remind me of it, yes,” Nicole said, to be safe. No way she was letting him know that her memory of Carnuntum stopped cold less than two months before.

“They may not be able to manage anything that fancy this time, not with that pestilence down in the south and the war tearing up everything off to the west, but it still should be one of the best shows of the year.” Titus Calidius Severus hesitated, then took the plunge: “Would you like to see it with me?”

A date, Nicole thought. I’ve just been asked out on a date. Who says this place hasn’t got any culture? The fuller and dyer’s voice didn’t have anything of and then you’ll put out for me in it, either. She’d heard more than enough of that since Frank walked out. She’d given up on men as a species then, after so many of them had proved that all a man wanted was one thing.

But Calidius Severus didn’t seem to want just that. There was no way to tell for sure, not yet, and she’d been burned so badly that she wasn’t going to believe it till she saw it — but she got the distinct feeling nonetheless that even if she kept on saying no to him, he wouldn’t stop being her friend.

That was the most refreshing discovery she’d made in years. She nodded in his expectant silence, and said, “Yes, I would like that. I’ll even pay Julia a little something extra to keep the kids from killing each other. “

“If you hadn’t set her free, you wouldn’t have to worry about that,” he said. But he shrugged, and let go a sudden and amazingly charming smile. When he smiled, snaggle teeth and all, he was almost handsome. No, Nicole thought; clean up his teeth, wash and deodorize him, and he’d cut a nice swath through the bored wives’ set in West Hills. Those Latin looks of his weren’t bad — weren’t bad at all.

Fortunately, he couldn’t read her mind, or she’d have been well and truly embarrassed. “Well,” he said, “she’s a freedwoman and that’s that. You make your arrangements with her, and I’ll be by sometime in the morning, to make sure we get good seats.”

Nicole nodded, but he didn’t give her time to say anything more before he turned to Lucius. “Meanwhile, you, let’s go get that mud off, and I’ll have a bath, too, while we’re at it. Won’t do me a bit of harm.”

“I should say not,” Lucius said with rudeness that would have won him a swat from Nicole if he’d been close enough. “I might be muddy, but you stink. “

Titus Calidius Severus didn’t seem offended. He certainly didn’t clobber the little brat. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a judicious air. “There’s enough shit mixed in with the mud to give stale piss a run for its money, don’t you think?” He ruffled the boy’s hair, though Lucius ducked and spluttered and protested. “And I don’t get piss up here, either.”

Nicole swallowed bile. She’d watched her fair share of animals dropping dung in the middle of the street — and pissing in it, too. Somehow, that hadn’t quite impressed itself on her in connection with Lucius. Mud, so far as she’d ever known it, was nothing but wet dirt. In Carnuntum, it was a lot more than that. It was wet, shitty dirt, full of tetanus and lockjaw — or were they the same thing? — and who knew what else. Christ, what was Lucius liable to come down with, now he’d had his wallow?

No doubt she’d find out, and quickly enough, too. For the time being, she focused on the thing that Calidius Severus’ gesture reminded her of, the most urgent thing. “Please, make sure you get rid of as many lice and nits as you can. Will you do that for me?”

“I’ll do my best,” Calidius said, scratching his own head vigorously, as if she’d put him in mind of the colonies thriving there. “Not that you can ever get rid of all of them, but it never hurts to put them down as much as you can.”

Nicole nodded tightly. Her jaw had set, grinding her teeth together — nothing she intended, and not much she could do about it, either. The broken tooth in back twinged worse than usual. She ignored it. Once or twice, after a trip to the baths and washing lots of bedding — to the dismay of Julia, who’d done most of the work — she’d thought she was rid of her lice, once even for three whole days. But they came back. They always came back. It didn’t matter how — whether she’d missed a few, whether a customer had brought a new batch into the tavern, whatever. There just was no getting rid of them.

Titus Calidius Severus and Lucius headed off for the baths. The boy walked easily beside the man, chattering at a great rate, more than he ever did with Nicole or Julia. They looked, she thought, like son and father.

That thought brought her up short for a moment, stopping her on a stepping stone before she recovered herself and went on across the street. Were they father and son? Calidius and Umma had not exactly had a platonic friendship before Nicole arrived to disrupt it.

She shook her head. No. In all the gossip she’d overheard or been regaled with, she’d never heard the slightest suggestion that Umma had been getting it on the side with her neighbor while her husband was still alive. And he hadn’t died that long ago, from things that Fabia Ursa had said: three or four years at most. Both Lucius and Aurelia were older than that.

Damn, what had the man’s name been? The clerk in the town hall had told her, but it had slipped right out of her head. So far she hadn’t needed it, but the way her luck ran, eventually she was going to. She just had to pray that the rest of her luck held, and someone said his name before she had to come up with it.

She glowered at the graffito on the tavern’s wall. If she took a brush to it, she’d probably get rid of the whitewash, too. She’d have to buy more whitewash, then, and paint over it. She glowered more darkly. Another couple of sesterces thrown away. Maybe she’d leave it up, at least until the beast shows were done. It might, she told herself, even draw a couple of customers into the tavern.

Aurelia erupted through the front door, spotted Nicole, and said, “Eep!” She ducked back in even faster than she’d come out. Nicole laughed. She knew what that meant. Aurelia had been all set to play in the mud, like her brother before her. Foiled, Nicole thought wickedly.

She went inside with more decorum. The warm rich smell of baking bread fought and almost overwhelmed the city stink. Julia was over at the counter, grinding flour for the next batch.

As Nicole went to spell her at the mill, a man’s voice spoke behind her. “Mistress Umma?”

Nicole turned, trying not to seem too startled. The newcomer was a dapper little man, and a total stranger. He knew her, however, or thought he did. Little by little, she was getting used to that. It didn’t drive her to panic much anymore, not the way it had at first.

Then again, maybe Umma hadn’t known him. He blinked and peered at her as if he might be a bit nearsighted. “My name is Julius Rufus,” he said. He was carrying a small wooden keg, which he set on one of the tables. “I hear you’ve been in the mood to try new things lately.”

Her heart leaped from a standstill into a pounding gallop. “What? What about it?” Damn — were people all over Carnuntum gossiping about the new and highly eccentric Umma? Old Umma used to be sharp, you bet, but lately she’s gone soft in the head. God — that could get dangerous. Somebody might even -

But Julius Rufus said, “I’ll tell you what about it,” and her heartbeat slowed to a fast canter. Safe, she was safe. This was a salesman, or she wasn’t a Hoosier of Hoosier born. As if to reassure her even further, he went on in a fast patter that had to be as old as the hills, “I know this tavern has always served nothing but wine — good wine, too, everybody agrees on that. Still and all, if you’ve taken it into your head to try things you haven’t tried before, how about this delicious barley brew here? It’s my very own, brewed up of the finest ingredients, according to an ancient recipe that’s come down through my family since the first Pyramid was a pup.”

Julia looked up from the quern. “The Marcomanni and Quadi drink beer because they don’t know any better,” she said flatly. “When they get smart, they buy wine from us Romans.”

Julius Rufus showed teeth as irregular as Calidius Severus’ in an insouciant grin. “Beer has been good enough for the Egyptians since time out of mind, and my beer has been good enough for a nice lot of people in Carnuntum for a good ten years now. There’s some very fine taverns go through a whole barrel of it before they’ve emptied their amphorae of wine.”

“Barrels,” Nicole murmured. Beer had alcohol in it, of course. But, if it came in barrels, it wouldn’t be full of lead. She fetched a clean cup and a dipper, and bore down on Julius Rufus and his sample cask. “Let me try some.”

Julia looked astonished. Julius Rufus looked delighted. He lifted the lid of his keg with a flourish. “Help yourself, Mistress Umma — and see for yourself that you’ll have no reason whatsoever to look down your nose at this fine product.”

When Nicole and Frank toured Austria on their honeymoon, Frank had drunk Austrian beer with conspicuous pleasure. Nicole, despite his urging, had stuck to mineral water. What she wouldn’t give to do that now…

She shook herself and focused on the task at hand. No help for it, and no escape, either. She dipped up a cupful, raised the cup to her lips, and sipped.

She had to work hard to hold her face straight. Wine, at least, was sweet. Frank had always said beer was an acquired taste. Nicole wondered why on earth anyone would want to acquire it. The stuff was bitter. It was sour. She could taste the alcohol in it. The only thing she could say for it was that it might make drunkenness more trouble than it was worth. If everyone reacted to beer the way she did, she might actually make some inroads against alcoholism in Carnuntum.

She made herself take another sip. It tasted no better than the first. “It’ll never take the place of wine,” she said.

“Told you so,” Julia said from behind the counter.

But Julius Rufus was undeterred. “I don’t intend it to take the place of wine,” he said. “I drink wine myself — in fact, if you’ll serve me a cup of your two-as there, I’ll be grateful.” He set a dupondius on the table by the keg. Nicole nodded to Julia, who poured out the wine for him.

He tossed it down, smacked his lips with stagey relish, and said, “Sure, wine’s good, and plenty of it. But the more choices you give your customers, the more customers you’re likely to get. Don’t you think so, Mistress Umma?”

He was good. If he’d lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, he would have sold a hell of a lot of encyclopedias or aluminum siding or whatever he was peddling, because sure as hell he would have been peddling something.

Even so, if Nicole had intended to say no, he would have been out the door before he got well warmed up to his pitch. Her mother had been death on door-to-door salesmen, and Nicole had continued the family tradition with telemarketers.

But she wasn’t going to turn this salesman down. If she could get in more choices that didn’t involve ingesting lead in toxic quantities — not to mention a choice that might not involve ingesting quite so much alcohol — then she might not be totally happy, but she’d be happier than she was now. She looked him in the eye and said, “How much do you want for each barrel, and how many cups can I get per barrel?”

Julius Rufus beamed at her. “You think of your profit margin, I see. Good for you! If your arithmetic is weak, I’ll be happy to help you with your figuring, so that you — “

“My arithmetic is fine, thank you,” Nicole snapped. Her arithmetic, from what she’d seen, was a damn sight better than that of any local without a counting board in front of him. The Romans, naturally enough, used and thought in terms of Roman numerals, and Roman numerals were to arithmetic what cruel and unusual punishment was to jurisprudence.

The dicker that followed left Julius Rufus sweating. “Mistress Umma, do you want my children to starve?” he wailed at the midpoint.

“They won’t starve,“ she retorted. “They can drink the beer you don’t sell me. This isn’t something I have to have. It’s something I might want to have — if the price is right. This tavern’s done fine without beer for a long time. We can go right on doing fine without it, as long as it’s going to cost six times as much as it’s worth.”

“What a terrifying woman you are,“ Julius Rufus muttered.

Nicole smiled a smile that Frank had likened to a shark’s. “You say the sweetest things,” she said. He flinched as if she’d slapped him.

She ended up buying the beer at something less than half the price he’d quoted. She still had a scrap left of the papyrus on which she’d written out Julia’s letters of manumission; she got out the pen and ink and set down on the scrap the terms to which she and Julius Rufus had agreed. When it was written up as it should be, she shoved the papyrus across the bar at him. “Just sign this, if you would.”

“Sweet Isis the merciful!” he cried. He mumbled his slow way through the three-line contract, then scrawled something that might have said Julius Rufus below it. “There! Are you happy now?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Nicole said, and seized the papyrus and stowed it away in the box before he could think of grabbing it for himself. She turned to Julia. “Pour this nice man a cup of Falernian, if you please.” She was the soul of politeness now, even if she’d been a barracuda only moments before. Why not? Nothing wrong with being friendly after she’d got her way.