Household Gods

12

The next day dawned bright and warm, by no means as common a thing in that part of the world as it was in California. Nicole had come to welcome sun through the newly opened shutters of a morning, instead of taking it for granted. But today, as she squinted in the bright light after the stuffy dimness of her bedroom, the smile died as soon as it was born. There was an empty place in the world, a vacancy where Fabia Ursa had been. She’d been a constant, almost daily presence in Nicole’s life, not drinking much, but eating like a teenager, packing it away somewhere in that bird-boned frame. Her voice had washed over Nicole while she went about the business of the tavern, a half-annoying, half-comforting rattle of gossip, opinions, hearsay, and cheerful nonsense. She’d always had something to say to the kids, and had looked after them when Nicole needed an extra hand, without complaint and without asking to be paid. Nicole had found ways: a bowl of stew or a chunk of bread with olive oil on the house, or a cup of wine for her husband if he happened by.

Now she was gone. The funeral was this morning, just late enough to let her open the tavern and yet again leave Julia to look after it while she went elsewhere. Julia didn’t object. She liked the sensation of being the owner of the place, Nicole thought; and if she was turning tricks for spending money, she could do it a whole lot more easily when Nicole was away.

Nicole didn’t want to think about that today. She didn’t want to think about death, either, but death wasn’t so easily evaded.

Most of the neighbors had turned out for the funeral procession. They seemed like a decent crowd as they gathered in the alley, waiting for the body to be carried out of the house, but there couldn’t have been more than a couple of dozen in all. Two women whom Nicole couldn’t immediately place by name or face took their places at the head of what would be a small, sad procession. They were hired mourners, she realized, in garments artistically rent and with hair almost too dramatically disarrayed. As two strapping undertaker’s assistants carried the body out of the house, wrapped in a linen shroud and laid on a wooden bier, the mourners began to keen. A pair of flute-players, one with a large instrument, one with a small, joined in just out of synch. The combined racket put Nicole in mind of scalded cats.

The procession wound its slow way out of the alley and into the broader street beyond. Nicole happened to be close to the front, not far in back of Sextus Longinius lulus, who walked behind the bier. He carried his son in his arms, the son for whose life his wife had given her own. He looked eerily calm. Shock, Nicole thought. It wasn’t real to him yet. Later, when it hit, he’d fall hard, but for now he was well in control of himself.

She debated disturbing him now or waiting till later. Later might not come; now was here. She said it, then, and hoped for the best: “Is there anything I can do?”

He shook his head. “Oh, no. The funeral club is paying for everything. I’ve put in my sesterces for years; now it’s my turn to get the use of them.”

“Oh,” Nicole said, feeling oddly foolish. “How — forethoughtful.” The funeral club sounded like the closest thing to life insurance she’d heard of since coming to Carnuntum. Not that she could imagine genuine life insurance in a world like this one. The premiums would have been murderous. If somebody as young and healthy as Fabia Ursa could die from a simple infection… If Fabia Ursa could die like that, nobody was safe. Nicole shivered, though the day was warm as days went in Carnuntum.

“We have the babies buried under the stairs,” Longinius lulus said in conversational tones. “If it weren’t for the pollution, I’d have put Fabia beside ‘em, but adults have to go outside the city wall.”

For a moment Nicole wondered how, except by its size, an adult’s body would produce pollution but a baby’s wouldn’t. Decay was decay, regardless of the scale.

It dawned on her belatedly that he had to mean religious, not environmental, pollution. As far as she could tell, all the Romans wanted to do with the environment was exploit it.

The funeral procession made its way through the city to the gate that led to the amphitheater. Once outside, however, it swung southeast toward the graveyard Nicole had seen on the day she went to the beast show. A woman stood waiting there, in a tunic that shone blinding white in the sun. A priestess, Nicole thought. Sexists or no, the Romans had female priests. The Catholic Church rather emphatically didn’t, nor did most of the other conservative Christian denominations. And what does that say? she thought.

“Isis,” a man said off to the side, dismissively. “Isis is a women’s god.”

“Well, and what do you expect?” said the man beside him. “It’s a woman we’re burying. If it had been a man, now, we’d be saying our prayers to a proper god.”

“Mithras,” the first man said. “Yes, there’s a god for men.” The way he said it, men were so far above women in the food chain that there just was no comparison.

“And no women allowed, either,” his friend said. “That’s a proper god for a soldier, that is.”

They sounded so smug, and so perfectly certain of their god’s superiority, that Nicole would have loved to tell both of them where to go, with detailed instructions on how to get there. But this was a funeral procession. All she could do was shoot a glare at the men, who took no notice whatsoever and steam in silence.

Rather belatedly, she recalled that Titus Calidius Severus followed Mithras. And what did that say about him? He was in the procession: not too far behind her, in fact, though he hadn’t intruded on what must have looked like a fiercely private grief. That was a degree of sensitivity she wouldn’t have granted most sensitive Nineties guys in L.A., let alone a Roman of the second century.

As her eye caught his, his own lit up, but he didn’t go so far as to smile. She couldn’t tell if he heard the two men talking. He must have. If so, he wasn’t passing judgment, or at least, not that she could see.

Maybe he didn’t want to. He was a veteran, she knew that. Should she give him the benefit of the doubt? She shrugged. Maybe.

The procession made its way into the cemetery. It had spread out along the road; now, as it passed among the stones, it formed into a straggling line.

The priestess waited for them. She hadn’t moved at all except for the wind tugging at her robes. Nicole wondered how, in a world bereft of bleach or detergent, she managed to keep them so blindingly white.

Nicole needed a little while before she could see past that white and shining shape to the darkness beside it. The priestess stood near the edge of a newly dug grave. The men who must have dug the grave sprawled on the grass not far away, passing a jar back and forth. Slaves or free? Nicole wondered.

No folding chairs here, and nowhere to sit but on a gravestone — which no one went so far as to try. The mourners stood around the grave, each seeming somehow to stand a little apart from the others. They’d seemed pathetically few in the city and on the road. Here they closed in and made a sizable crowd. Nicole had to slip between two taller neighbors to keep her eyes on the priestess.

The mourners had fallen silent. Nicole hadn’t realized how intensely irritating their shrieking and keening was until it stopped, and she luxuriated in silence. The undertaker’s assistants brought the bier down from their shoulders with a little too much evident relief. One’s bones cracked as he bent to lower body and bier into the grave. The body rocked slightly, shifting sideways. Nicole caught her breath. But the bier steadied; it sank down into the dark earth.

It hadn’t been real before, not really. Somehow that one bobble, that almost-fall, brought it home to Nicole. Fabia Ursa was dead.

The priestess hadn’t moved at all, or spoken a word, or seemed aware that any of them was there. Just as the body sank below the level of the ground, she raised her hands to the heavens. The voice that came out of her was strong, a little harsh, with a flatness in it that was vaguely familiar. So too were the words she spoke. “Queen Isis is she that is the mother of the nature of things, the mistress of all the elements, the initial progeny of the ages, highest of the divine powers, queen of departed spirits, first of the gods in heaven, the single manifestation of all the gods and goddesses.”

It was no prayer Nicole had ever heard before, but it had that odd, familiar feel. “The luminous summits of the sky, the wholesome breezes of the sea, and the lamented silences of the dead below, Isis controls at her will. Her sole divine power is adored throughout the world in many guises, with differing rites, and with differing names, but the Egyptians, preeminent in ancient lore and worshipping her with their special rites, give Mother Isis her truest name.”

Fabia Ursa’s baby began to cry. Sextus Longinius lulus passed him to the woman next to him, a nondescript woman of indeterminate age. She slid her arm out of one sleeve of her tunic and exposed a breast, thereby informing Nicole, and anyone else with eyes to see, who she was and what she was doing here. The baby’s cries subsided into gurgles.

Nicole, distracted by the baby and his nurse, had missed a few words of the priestess’ prayer, declamation, whatever she wanted to call it:“ — take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and cherish it. May Isis take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and comfort it. May Isis take the spirit of this woman who worshipped her and give it peace and rest and tranquility forever.”

“So may it be,” several of the people gathered around the grave said in unison. The hired mourners took up their racket again, wailing and beating their breasts. The musicians kept them company with a racket that certainly made Nicole sad — sad that she had to listen to such a ghastly imitation of music.

Fabia Honorata had carried a covered jar to the graveside. Now that Longinius lulus’ arms were free of the baby, she handed the jar to him. He took it as if he didn’t know quite what to do with it; then with a start he seemed to remember where he was. He was still in shock. He bent stiffly, and set the jar in the grave beside his wife’s shrouded body. “My dear wife,” he said with the same flatness Nicole had heard in the priestess, the flatness of rote, “I offer you food and drink to take with you on your journey from this world to the next.”

His voice was steady. But as he knelt beside the grave, looking down at the shape that lay within it, something in him crumpled. For a moment Nicole thought he would faint, or fling himself into the grave with Fabia Ursa’s body.

Of course he did no such thing. He straightened painfully, as if he were a very old man. As he turned his face again to the sun, Nicole saw tears streaming down his cheeks.

That, it seemed, was all there was to the funeral. As Longinius lulus stepped away from the grave, the two gravediggers woke from what had looked like a fairly complete stupor, picked up their spades, and ambled toward the grave. They didn’t pay attention to the rapidly dispersing group of people, nor did they show any notable concern for the solemnity of the occasion. Without a word, they dug spades into the pile of earth beside the grave and began to fill it in. Dirt thudded down onto the shrouded body of the woman who had been Umma’s friend, and whom Nicole had liked well enough.

Nicole suppressed a stab of guilt. Well enough was a cold thing when she stopped to think about it, but the fact was, Fabia Ursa had been a neighbor and an acquaintance. She had not, in Nicole’s mind, been a friend.

Whatever she had been, one thing was certain. “It’s not fair,” Nicole said to no one in particular. The others had turned away from the grave and headed toward the gate. They weren’t a procession anymore; they were a scattering of individuals and couples, who happened to be in the same place at the same time. Some even seemed to have forgotten what they’d come for: they were laughing and talking. Nicole wanted to grab the lot of them and shake them. “It’s not fair! She had too much to live for, to die like that.”

Somewhat to her surprise and rather to her dismay, the priestess of Isis heard her. “The gods do as they please,” she said with the hint of a frown. “Who are we to question their will?”

Shut up, don’t ask questions, and do as you’re told. That was what that meant, in the second century as in the twentieth. Nicole couldn’t buy it, not here. With any real concern for cleanliness, Fabia Ursa never would have contracted that infection in the first place. With a doctor who knew his ass from his elbow, she wouldn’t have died of it. This funeral wasn’t the will of the gods; it was no more and no less than ignorance.

She said so, injudiciously, but she was past caring for that. The priestess’ expression of shock was almost gratifying — it proved just how ignorant and downright criminally negligent people were in this world and time. “Aemilia is one of the best midwives in the city,” she said, “and as for Dexter, he studied medicine in Athens. Anything mortal men could have done to save your friend, they did. It was no human creature’s fault that she died.”

Nicole shut her mouth with a snap. If I’d had a shot of penicillin to give her, you’d be singing a different tune, she thought fiercely; but some remnant of common sense kept her from saying it aloud. She’d done enough damage as it was.

And still — how many people here in Carnuntum, here in the Roman Empire, here all over the world, died young, died in anguish, of injuries and illnesses from which they would easily have recovered in Los Angeles? How many babies died of childhood diseases against which they couldn’t be immunized, because no one knew how?

She didn’t know the exact answer, but she knew the general one: lots. She shivered. If you were in your thirties in Carnuntum, you couldn’t count on another thirty or forty or fifty years of healthy, active, productive life, as you could in L.A. or Indianapolis. You could wake up dead, for any reason at all. Then, the day after tomorrow, some wine-sodden lout of a gravedigger would be shoveling dirt over your corpse.

Maybe Julia had the right idea after all. In a world in which you didn’t know if you’d be alive next week, let alone next year, you really would want to grab hold of whatever pleasure came your way. Eat, drink and be merry. Tomorrow you may die. It had been a greeting-card joke in Indianapolis. Here, it was real. It was the truth.

Everybody else was gone from the cemetery. Even the priestess had disappeared, Nicole had no idea where. For all she knew, the woman had sunk back into the ground, to emerge again when a devotee of Isis came to be buried. The gravediggers had made substantial inroads on the pile of dirt. One of them belched; the other farted. They grinned at each other as if it had been a grand joke.

Nicole had some vague idea that there was a funeral feast — or a collation of some sort, if not quite on the scale of a banquet — at Longinius lulus’ house. Hadn’t Fabia Honorata said as much? Nicole should probably make an effort to go, put in an appearance, as she’d done at Frank’s faculty parties. She wasn’t any happier about this than about those uncomfortable and ultimately unprofitable gatherings.

In the end, she didn’t take the extra steps across the alley from the tavern. She went home instead, and took refuge in the smell of wine and beer and bread, the sight of people eating and drinking and being — yes — merry, and the sound of Julia’s voice calling out a greeting that actually sounded glad. Nicole didn’t flatter herself that it was joy to see her; now Julia would be wanting a break from running the place by herself. Not that she wasn’t competent to do it. She was, and highly so. But it was a lot of work for one pair of hands.

She was laughing as Nicole came in, exchanging banter with one of the regulars. At sight of her former mistress, however, she put on a somber expression, and even managed the gleam of a tear. “How sad,” she said. “Poor Fabia Ursa. Remember how she cried after her babies died? First one and then the other — that must have been so hard for her to bear.”

Nicole nodded without speaking. Hard wasn’t the word for it. How could any woman lose two babies in a row and stay sane, and still want to try again? And yet how could anyone lose two babies in a row and not want to keep trying? Fabia Ursa must have been torn in two, not wanting to lose another, but wanting desperately to have one, just one, that lived.

“And now she finally had one that seems healthy, pray the gods it stays so,” Julia said, unconsciously echoing Nicole’s thoughts, “and she dies herself. Where’s the sense in that?”

“I don’t know,” Nicole answered wearily. “I just don’t know. Maybe things happen for no reason at all. I don’t know that, either.”

“Then what’s the point of believing in gods?” Julia demanded. Nicole shrugged. Julia’s eyes had gone wide as they always did when she was thinking hard and not particularly conventionally, as if she needed to let more light into her brain.

Her eyes narrowed again, shutting off the ray of reason. She shook her head. “You have to believe in the gods. If you don’t, what’s the point to anything?”

Nicole shrugged again, heavily. At the moment, she wasn’t convinced anything had a point. “Pour me a cup of one-as wine, would you, please?” she said. Maybe it would take the edge off her gloom.

Only after Julia had filled the cup and handed it over, and Nicole had drunk it half down, did it strike her. She was using the wine as a drug again, as she had at the beast show. She was drinking to dull her senses. To forget her grief and the anger that went with it. In short, to take the edge off reality.

She had been on the way toward feeling better. Now she felt worse. She set the cup down with an effort that dismayed her. She steeled herself to do something, anything. Wait on one of the customers who’d begun to drum on the tables. Take the bread out of the oven. Check the seasoning in the stewpot.

She’d do all those things. But first, she picked up the cup again, and drained it.

“A good evening to you, Mistress Umma.” The last of the day’s customers ate a salted olive, spat the pit on the floor, and took the last swig from his cup of beer. He set a sestertius on the table and got to his feet. “I’d better head on home, before my wife sets the dog on me when I come through the door. She’s bound and determined that anybody who comes in after sundown must be a thief in the night.”

“Not quite so dark as that,” Nicole said. The sun was setting, and twilight lingered, though for a shorter time than it had at the height of summer. The man had an as coming in change, but he didn’t wait for it. He hurried out the door. Maybe he hadn’t been joking about his wife and the dog.

“I’ll light some lamps,” Julia said behind her.

“Why bother?” Nicole said. She was still tired, and her mood was still black in spite of liberal applications of wine. She’d have closed the tavern after the funeral that morning if she hadn’t needed the money. To Julia, she said, “We might as well shut down. We’re not going to bring in many more people at this hour of the day.”

“More like the first hour of the night,” Julia said. The Romans gave every day twelve hours and every night twelve, too. Daylight hours were long in summer, short in winter, nighttime the reverse. It wasn’t the system Nicole was used to, but it worked well enough, especially in the absence of clocks. The only problem came in the in-between hours, when nobody quite agreed on what time of day or night it was.

As Nicole was turning toward the stairs, someone called from the doorway: “Am I too late for a cup of wine?”

Had it been someone Nicole had never seen before, she would have said yes and sent him on his way. But it was Titus Calidius Severus. She almost frightened herself with how glad she was to see him. “Of course not,” she answered him. “Come in, come in. Julia, light a lamp after all.”

Julia nodded just a shade too eagerly. She lit a lamp and set it on the table at which Calidius Severus had chosen to sit. Then she yawned — theatrically? Nicole couldn’t tell. Julia said, “You’re right, I think. We’re not going to get many more tonight. By your leave, I’ll go on up to bed.”

That was more transparent than any of the glass Nicole had seen in Carnuntum. But ordering her freedwoman to stay down here with her would have been pretty transparent, too, to say nothing of insulting to Calidius Severus. Nicole had seen often enough that he wasn’t the sort who couldn’t hear no. She nodded to Julia without visible hesitation.

Calidius set a couple of sesterces on the table. “Let me have a cup of Falernian,’ he said, “and get one for yourself, too. Fellow came in this afternoon, paid me a debt he’s owed me most of a year. I’ve got a little money.” His chuckle was wry. “Who says the gods don’t work miracles every now and again?”

Nicole didn’t feel like having any more wine, but she didn’t see how she could turn down her friend, either — for friend he was, just as surely as Fabia Ursa had been no more than a cordial acquaintance. As she plied the dipper, the baby next door started to cry. She jerked her head toward the noise. “Sometimes the gods choose not to work miracles.”

“That’s so.” In the lamplight, the fuller and dyer’s frown was full of shadows. The baby kept on crying. Calidius Severus sighed. “Poor Longinius. He’s going to have a tough time now. He thought the sun rose and set on Fabia Ursa.”

“They were happy together.” Nicole carried the two cups of wine to the table, hooked a stool with her ankle, and sat opposite Calidius. She was peripherally aware of tables that still needed wiping, floor that could use a sweeping, and the last of the day’s stew baking onto the bottom of a pot. None of them mattered much, right at the moment.

Calidius Severus took the cup she pushed toward him and sipped. Cheap wine you chugged down as fast as you could, to get past the taste. Falernian you sipped if you could, savoring the rich sweetness. “Ah,” he said. “That’s the stuff.” He frowned. “You’re not drinking.”

She made herself raise the cup to her lips. The wine was sweet. If she didn’t think about lead, if she didn’t think about alcohol, she might even have said it was good. “It was hard losing Fabia Ursa,” she said at last. “That should never have happened.”

“Dexter’s a pretty fair doctor,” Titus Calidius Severus said. “He did everything he knew how to do.”

“But he didn’t know enough!” Nicole blazed at him as she hadn’t quite had the temerity to blaze at Isis’ priestess.

Still, she thought unwillingly, it wasn’t Dexter’s fault, not really. In an odd way, it was Nicole’s, for knowing what would be possible eighteen hundred years from now, and blaming the doctor because he didn’t. The fuller and dyer was right; Dexter had done everything he knew how to do.

“Talk to any honest doctor and he’ll tell you he doesn’t know as much as he’d like to.” Calidius Severus reached across the table and set his hand on Nicole’s. In a different tone of voice, he went on, “Who does?”

The lamp sputtered and flared, bringing out the dark stains that would never leave the fuller and dyer’s skin. Nicole smelled the hot olive oil inside the lamp. After a moment, she realized that was all she smelled. Calidius Severus had lost his usual summer-privy reek. “You’ve been to the baths!” she said.

“What if I have?” He shrugged with elaborate casualness. “If I pay a call on a lady, I don’t want her to think less of me because my work makes me smell like a pissoir.”

“Oh,” Nicole said. It was more of a gasp than a word. She didn’t know if she dared laugh. It wasn’t funny, not at all. And yet she hadn’t thought, not really, that he understood how bad he smelled. His nose must have accustomed itself to the reek, just as hers had got used to the stink of Carnuntum.

He was watching, waiting for her to speak. “That was very… thoughtful of you,” she said a little desperately — and with dawning awareness. She knew what he had in mind. She wasn’t surprised. What else, after all, did a man usually have on his mind?

What was surprising, and not exactly thrilling either, was the realization that she had it on her mind, too. She glowered down at the wine cup, as if the Falernian in there had betrayed her. But alcohol had very little to do with it. She was sober as a judge — more sober than a couple of judges she’d known. Some of it was fear of extinction hammered home by Fabia Ursa’s untimely death. More, she admitted, had to do with Calidius Severus’ patient pursuit of her. He hadn’t taken no for an answer, but he hadn’t made a nuisance of himself, either. But most of it was the loneliness and isolation she felt here. This, she’d thought, would be her ideal world, her best escape from the twentieth century: simple, idyllic, egalitarian, worth even abandoning her kids; after all, didn’t men do it all the time? It was none of those things — not even close. And now, to her deep dismay, she needed an escape from the escape.

If she could go back -

No. Not even for Kimberley and Justin. She loved them, a fierce, visceral love that had nothing to do with anything she’d done or not done. It hadn’t kept her from leaving them, and it wouldn’t bring her back. Not as long as she found life in that world unlivable. Even Dawn-the-bimbo was better for them than Nicole in the state she’d been in when she made her prayer to Liber and Libera. Nicole now, worn thin with the simple effort of survival in a world she’d never been prepared for and certainly never fit into, was even less able to be the kind of mother they needed. She couldn’t even make this world a better place, and she was living in it. All her grand plans, her ambitions to “invent” everything from the chimney to the cotton swab, had lost themselves somewhere, so completely she couldn’t even regret that they were gone. Every scrap of energy she had was devoted to staying alive, fed, and more or less sane.

All of that came together into a decision of sorts. “Let’s wait a little longer,” she said, “to make sure Julia’s gone to sleep.”

“Well, well,” Titus said in unguarded surprise. Then he laughed quietly. “Well, well.” He laughed again, more freely, with a brightness of joy in it that she found contagious. “However you like. I’ve been saying that all along.”

She sipped at the wine without answering. She’d made a choice, and it wasn’t easily revocable. She should have relaxed into it; been glad for the release, at long last, of tension. Instead, she was twitchier than ever. She was, in a manner of speaking, about to lose her virginity again — her first time in this body. First times were always strange. How much stranger this was, when her lover didn’t even know it was the first time. As far as he knew, this was the same woman he’d made love to — how many times before? Many, if Nicole was any judge.

After a while, her cup was empty. So was Calidius Severus’. It probably had been for a bit. He raised an eyebrow and smiled that lopsided smile of his. It had always appealed to her. Now it made her belly quiver.

She took a deep breath, and nodded. They rose from the table together. She took the lamp to light their way upstairs. No flicking switches here.

At the top of the stairs, she paused to listen. All she heard was a triple chorus of deep, regular breathing. She nodded to Calidius. He slanted her an approving look and headed down the hall toward her bedroom. His strides were long and confident. Why not? He knew the way.

The door shut with a slightly disturbing thud. Nicole resisted the urge to run back and fling it open. She set the lamp on the chest of drawers. By its dim, flickering light, she barred the door as quietly as she could. When she turned back to face the room, she saw two things. The first was what lay beside the lamp on the chest, that Nicole had certainly never put there: a twist of wool and a small wooden box. Nicole could well guess what it contained. Wool and pine resin, Julia had told her. Julia, it seemed, had decided to help Nicole in the best way she could.

The second thing Nicole saw was Calidius Severus standing by the bed. The light made him look younger, and really, not bad at all in his Latin way. Better than Frank Perrin had ever been, that much she could be sure of.

She bent abruptly and blew out the lamp. The room plunged into darkness. “Ahh, why did you go and do that?” Titus Calidius Severus said in a grumpy whisper. “I wanted to see you. Not to mention,” he added pragmatically, “I’m liable to break my fool neck going downstairs without a light.”

“Don’t worry,” Nicole said, with a bit of a snap in it. “We’ll manage. We’ll manage everything just fine.” She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Groping along the top of the chest of drawers, she found the wool and the little box. She couldn’t retreat to a bathroom, and didn’t want Calidius Severus watching while she put the twist in place. Maybe that was twentieth-century modesty, but she didn’t care. It was hers.

She squatted and did what was needful, working by feel. It wasn’t any worse than putting in a diaphragm in a hurry while Frank cooled his heels, and certain other parts of his anatomy, in the marital bed.

When she’d done as well as she could, she rose and groped across the room. She heard him breathing and shuffling around — undressing? Probably. Just short of where her skin told her he was, and the bed just past him, she yanked the tunic off over her head and let it fall to the floor. It was a defiant thing to do, even if he couldn’t see it. She slid down her drawers and stepped out of them, and shifted till she felt the bed’s edge against her knees. She lay back on that solid, invisible surface.

She felt Titus Calidius Severus lie beside her: a creak of the bedframe, a weight tugging at the mattress. His bare flesh was warm against hers. They’d have to be careful in what they did; the bed was narrow for two. Nicole, who slept, as Frank used to say, all over the place, sometimes thought the bed was narrow for one.

He slid an arm under her back. “It’s good to be here with you again,” he breathed in her ear. “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you a lot.”

She couldn’t say the same; it would be a lie. She settled for something that maybe was better. “Titus,” she said, clasping her arms around his neck.

“I love you, Umma,” he said as she drew him down.

It wasn’t as awkward as she’d feared it would be. The body remembered, and the mind wasn’t inexperienced, either. She let him lead, and followed as she could. It was much like living in this world. After a while, the dry tightness went out of it. She relaxed and flowed with it, took the release when it came, and was profoundly glad to have been given the gift.

Afterwards, they lay side by side on the narrow bed, body to body as they couldn’t help but be: one of them would fall out otherwise. Nicole looked up at the ceiling. She could make it out by now, by the starlight filtering in through the unshuttered window.

Titus Calidius Severus rested a hand on her hip. It was an easy touch, undemanding, and strikingly intimate. “Happy?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered, on the whole sincerely. Given the way the Romans took male domination as an article of faith, she’d wondered — too little too late — if he would climb on, get his jollies, and climb off again, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. If he had, she would never have let him see the inside of her bedroom again.

But he hadn’t. He’d taken the time and effort to make sure she enjoyed herself. He hadn’t made it seem like effort, either; he’d plainly been enjoying himself as he pleased her. Entertainment, she thought. If your options for pleasure were as limited as they were here, wasn’t it sensible to string out the ones you did have, to make them last as long as you could?

“Yes,” she said again, more firmly this time. “I’m happy.” In a way, taking Calidius Severus to bed had been like making love for the first time. He knew better than she did how her body — no, Umma’s body — responded; what it wanted, what made its synapses sing. That wouldn’t last, not with her living inside it, changing it, but this time at least it had been true.

Umma’s body was different from her own, sensitive in a place or two — the web of flesh between thumb and forefinger, the fold at the crook of the elbow — where she hadn’t been; less so in the earlobes, which was a pity. The shaving of the pubic hair, the naked skin where she’d been used to something quite different, changed the way she felt. She’d had to swallow giggles once, which she could never have explained without getting into trouble. Razor burn down there?

As for how it felt, scratchy bits aside — she couldn’t exactly tell. Better? Worse? She frowned. More precise, perhaps.

She moved a fraction closer to him, a conscious decision and one she didn’t intend to regret. “And you?” she asked. “Are you happy?”

She’d intended it for a rhetorical question. She had no doubt he’d liked what was going on while it was going on. And he answered, “Oh, yes,” but his voice held a trace of uncertainty that surprised her. After a moment, he went on, “Some of the things you did… you’ve never done before.”

If he hadn’t been lying there next to her, she would have kicked herself for stupidity. She hadn’t made love like Umma. She couldn’t make love like Umma; she didn’t know how Umma did it. She’d made love like Nicole, and Calidius Severus had noticed the difference. He could hardly have helped it. Anyone who thought all cats gray in the dark was a fool, and a blind fool to boot.

As soon as she’d worked her way through that, she felt like kicking herself again. Why would he think she was different now from the way she had been? What likelier explanation than that she’d learned the new ways from somebody else?

She didn’t want him thinking that. Now that she’d decided this relationship was worth having, she didn’t want it poisoned at what was, for her, the very beginning. As lightly as she could, she said, “You know how Julia likes to talk. Some of the things she was talking about sounded like fun. I thought I’d try them.”

He weighed that. Nicole could all but watch the pans of the balance wavering, swinging in his mind, now up, now down, now trembling in the middle. At last, he let out a short bark of laughter. “Julia likes to do more than talk. Never a dull moment there, if half of what Gaius says is true.”

Nicole was so glad he’d accepted the explanation, she almost forgave Julia for being — no bones about it — a slut. Almost. “One of the reasons I freed her was so she wouldn’t feel as if she had to prostitute herself to get a little spare cash, but I’m sure she still does it when I’m away.”

Beside her, the fuller and dyer shrugged. “What can you do? You’re not her mother. You’re not her owner anymore. A patron can do just so much with a client, and then it’s the client’s own lookout. Some people just like going to bed with somebody new every time. I never thought that was so great myself, but maybe I’m the odd one.”

“Yes, you are odd,” she said, sharp enough to surprise herself. “If you ask me, most men are like Julia. It’s women who are like you.”

“Yes, that’s probably so.” And he wasn’t even upset about being told he was like a woman. That took the edge off her temper, and made her feel more than a little foolish. He grunted, the noise he made when he was thinking. After a few breaths, he said, “Ah… Umma.”

“What is it?” Nicole said. Something in his tone told her he was changing the subject. And why did he sound hesitant again?

“Mm…” Yes, he was hesitant, but once he’d got into it, he went on in a rush: “No matter what Julia says, if you pull my foreskin back quite that hard, you’re liable to make a Jew out of me.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. She’d expected something philosophical, or something personal, but — she’d hurt him? “Oh.” Her voice came out much smaller than usual. “I’m sorry.” She was blushing, blessedly hidden in the darkness. In the time she came from, she’d never made love to an uncircumcised man. She’d been a little startled to find something extra down there, until she realized that no one here went through circumcision, except, as she’d supposed and he’d just confirmed, the Jews.

He set a kiss on her lips, light, almost too quick to catch. “It’s all right. No damage done. Everything still worked, didn’t it?” Just for a moment, he sounded disgustingly, smugly male. Before she could call him on it, he sat up, jostling her just a little. “I’d better get back across the street. Before I do, though — where’s that chamberpot?”

She fished around under the bed till her hand stumbled against it, pulled it out and handed it to him. He held it in one hand while he pissed standing

up. Nicole sighed, not too loud. That was a hell of a lot more convenient than squatting over the damn thing, as she had to do.

For all his grumbles about breaking his neck in the dark, he went down the stairs as sure and quiet as a cat. Nicole followed more slowly. She didn’t fall there, but she kicked a stool near the front door and hopped the rest of the way, hissing till the pain lost its red edge. Still standing half on one foot and all on the other, she unbarred the door. “Good night,” she said. Somehow that didn’t feel quite right. Something more was called for. “It was a good night, Titus. “

“I thought so,” he said — not so smug, this time, that she wanted to smack him. “I’m glad you did, too.” He gave her one more kiss, a light one, with no heat in it, but as much warmth as she could ever have wished for. “Good night, Umma.”

“Good night,” she repeated. She stayed in the doorway till he opened the door to his own house and went inside. Above his roof, the sky was full of stars.

“Well?” Julia asked the next morning. “Well?” She was practically hopping up and down with curiosity.

“Very well, thank you, Julia — and you?” Nicole said blandly. Unlike the freedwoman, she subscribed to the belief — or possibly labored under the delusion — that one of the things that made a private life private was not talking about it.

Julia stamped her foot in indignation. “Oh, come on, Mistress.” She still slipped and called Nicole that every so often; the habits of years didn’t disappear in a few weeks. She planted her hands on her hips. “You don’t think that wool got there in your room by itself, do you? Or the resin?”

“Maybe they walked,” Nicole answered, deadpan. Julia stared at her. Nicole stared levelly back. Julia began to laugh; she laughed and laughed, till she had to hug herself to stop. Some of the stale jokes of the twentieth century passed for fresh wit here.

Seeing her freedwoman break up made Nicole relent… a little. “Everything is just fine, Julia.”

“Well, that’s good,” Julia said after a pause in which she plainly perceived that she wasn’t going to find out any more. “It’s about time, if you ask me.”

Nicole had gathered some while since what Julia thought of her relations — or lack thereof — with Titus Calidius Severus. While Julia set about building up the fires for another day’s cooking and baking, Nicole went to the front door, unbarred it, and threw it open to show the tavern was ready for business.

Across the street, Titus Calidius Severus was just opening up, too, and setting out the amphorae that gave him the urine he needed for his work. “Good morning, Umma,” he called with a smile and a wave.

Nicole caught herself stiffening, searching for hidden meanings. Stupid, she cursed herself. She waved back — lightly, good; not too strained. “Good morning, Titus,” she said.

Behind her, Julia made a small, interested noise. Nicole realized she hadn’t greeted the fuller and dyer like that of a morning since she’d come to inhabit Umma’s body. This had the look and feel of a custom returned to after a hiatus.

Calidius Severus noticed, too. His smile broadened. He blew her a kiss. Julia made that interested noise again. Absurdly, Nicole felt herself blushing as if she’d been caught in flagrante delicto — a fine Latin phrase — rather than simply receiving a friendly greeting from the neighbor across the street.

She fought down the heat of memory, and blew the kiss back toward him. He grinned and bowed and went inside.

Nicole rounded on Julia. Julia had the sense to get very busy very fast.

Lucius and Aurelia put a merciful end to what was becoming an uncomfortable stretch of silence. Their noise and clatter drove the shadows out of the tavern. Their voices rang in it, demanding breakfast this instant. Julia was quick to shut them up. She ate with them, and Nicole after a short pause. She was hungrier than she’d expected. She realized, in the middle somewhere, that she’d used her bread to sop up all the olive oil in the little bowl Julia gave her. She didn’t remember having starred to do that, but it seemed a habit these days. It wasn’t making her fat. Some days, in fact, that oil was the only fat she got in her diet. Maybe her body had quietly told her she needed it.

Ofanius Valens was her first customer. He wasn’t a regular anymore, but he had started coming back now and then since Julia’s manumission party. Nicole brought him his bread and scallions and walnuts and a cup of the two-as wine. His usual, she thought, and remembered how terrified she’d been the first time she saw him. Now she knew what two or three dozen people liked to order, maybe more. It felt as easy, as natural as keeping track of the files in her computer.

Titus Calidius Severus came in at midmorning for a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. And thou, she thought facetiously, till she caught a whiff of him. His ammoniacal reek was back in force. Nicole let out a small, silent sigh. If he ever tried to get her to take him to bed when he smelled like that…

Surely he had better sense. If he didn’t, she’d teach him some, and fast. Not that she really thought he needed any education. He’d never even tried to kiss her when he smelled bad.

She realized she was standing over him, staring blindly at him. As she moved to busy herself somewhere else, he said between bites of Julia’s fresh and still-warm bread, “Fellow who came into the shop to pick up some wool I’d dyed for him told me there’s a troupe of actors coming in from Vindobona in a few days. Do you want to take in one of the mimes they put on? He said they were supposed to be pretty good — and if they’re not, we can always throw cabbages at them.”

Vindobona, Nicole had learned, was the name by which Vienna went these days. Although Vienna would go on to put Petronell in the shade, here-and-now Carnuntum was at least as important a city.

“Yes, I’d like that,” she said. Then the apprehension struck. She’d thought she’d like the beast show, too. Who knew what surprises might lurk in a seemingly innocent mime? “They’re not going to kill anybody, are they?”

Calidius Severus arched a brow, but he answered seriously enough. “I wouldn’t think so. Too expensive for a troupe outside of Rome or maybe Alexandria to butcher a slave when the show calls for somebody to die. The gore’ll just be pig’s blood in bladders, same as usual. But it’ll look real.”

She stood flatfooted. She was always taken aback when a cultural difference flew up and hit her in the face, but this time was worse, somehow. This man was her lover, and she was glad of it, too. He was genuinely thoughtful and considerate, out of bed and in it. Her kids — Umma’s kids, but one way and another she’d come to think of them as her own — thought the sun rose and set on him; there stood Lucius now, hanging on his every word. And the only thing he saw wrong with killing slaves in a show was that it was too expensive to be practical.

His attitude was standard here. Witness the beast show. Witness the execution that was its climax. Witness the gladiatorial shows — which she hadn’t, and for which she thanked God. In Carnuntum, life was cheap.

It shouldn’t have been surprising. She could still feel Fabia Ursa’s absence like the healed socket of a tooth; and Fabia Ursa had lost two babies before she died delivering a third. Maybe, since life was so easy to lose, it was that much easier to take. People lived surrounded by death, till death was commonplace.

Resolutely, she pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. She couldn’t afford to linger over every incidence of culture shock. She had to live in this world, regardless of what she thought of certain parts of it. And that meant recording the datum as Calidius had given it, a thing she needed to know to survive. She would deal with that. Later, if she had time — if she ever had time — she’d worry about other things.

All of which added up to the simple answer she gave him. “I’ll come to the mime,” she said.

He’d taken time to sip from his winecup while she woolgathered. Once he had her answer, he set down the cup. “Well, good,” he said. “I don’t quite know when they’re getting into town, but they should be worth an afternoon’s diversion when they do. Anything to make one day different from another.”

“Oh, yes,” Nicole said, this time without hesitation. Most people in Carnuntum didn’t come close to agreeing with her on the importance of life, but when it came to making life interesting, she agreed wholeheartedly with the rest of the population. Life might be precious, but it was also, without TV, the VCR, or even electric lights, rather massively tedious.

The players arrived none too soon, in Nicole’s estimation. Schedules weren’t set months in advance as they would have been in L.A. Entertainers came and went as weather and the roads allowed. In this case, a spell of good weather gave way to several days of pouring rain. When the clouds cleared away and the sun came boldly out, the players appeared in Carnuntum. Graffiti on the walls proclaimed their arrival, and one morning, as Nicole headed to market, she saw an outlandishly dressed person standing in front of a market stall, haggling with the vendor over the price of white lead. Nicole bit her tongue before she pointed out that the stuff was poisonous. She was learning, though it was taking her a while.

She did her marketing and went home with suitable dignity, but once she was there, she couldn’t resist telling Julia about the actor she’d seen. Julia clapped her hands and did a little dance. One of the regulars half-choked on his bit of sausage. Julia in her almost-new but still somewhat too tight tunic, dancing with glee, was a sight for hungry eyes.

Nicole suppressed the frown that thought engendered. “You like the mime shows? ‘ she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Julia said, and transparently remembered not to add the habitual Mistress.

“Well,” said Nicole. “Then we’ll have to see that you get a day off, won’t we?”

She’d made Julia a happy woman — but not so happy she forgot to be diligent in her duties. Quite the opposite. Julia with a break in sight was determined to be the best freed servant anyone ever had. She was a little too eager, if truth be told; but she didn’t ask Nicole to let her go to the show first. That wouldn’t have been proper. She conceded Nicole the right to opening day, and stayed behind uncomplaining. It would be her turn tomorrow. She’d made sure everybody in the tavern knew it, and cared about it, too.

The mime show was in the same place as the beast show had been, the amphitheater outside the city’s southern wall. There wasn’t really anywhere else in Carnuntum that could hold a crowd in comfort.

Nicole wasn’t exactly comfortable. The memory of the beast show was still too fresh. But she was determined to enjoy the day, and particularly the person she was sharing the day with.

“Nice of you to give Julia time off tomorrow to come see a show,” Titus Calidius Severus remarked to Nicole.

“It’s only fair,” she answered. “Besides, we’ll get along better this way.”

Calidius Severus misunderstood her deliberately, and with a spark in his eye, too. “I like the way we get along just fine.” He’d been over the night before, fresh from the baths and smelling as sweet as anyone ever smelled here. Nicole, remembering one or two things they’d done together between dusk and dawn, stretched almost as Julia liked to, like a huge and sensuous cat. She liked it fine, too — and she was glad of it. Finally, she’d found something in Carnuntum that wasn’t painful, barbaric, or shocking.

Even if nobody got killed or maimed, she hadn’t expected to like the mime show. And yet she liked it very much indeed. It was called The Judgment of Paris, which at first meant nothing to her but seemed perfectly familiar to the crowd. Paris, who came from Troy, not France, was trapped into judging a beauty contest among goddesses: Juno, Athena, and Venus.

If it had been on TV, she would have called it a comedy-drama. The audience laughed at the machinations of their deities, a level of irreverence that brought her up short. It was as if one of the networks had made a sitcom out of the Bible.

After a little while, however, she stopped fretting. Obviously no one expected to be struck by lightning, or found this levity anything but tight and proper. She settled back with a gusty sigh, and determined to enjoy the show.

The plot was thin, like the plot of a TV sitcom. As with a sitcom, she let it wash over her instead of analyzing it like a legal brief. The music — flutes and drums and horns — was loud and insistent. The costumes were gaudy: yellows and reds and greens of an intensity that no one ever saw in everyday clothes. If Rome had known day-glo colors, these actors would have used them. They had a distinct, almost fluorescent glow as they strutted and danced in the arena where, not so long ago, so many beasts and a single man had died. The women who played the goddesses and Helen of Troy took every opportunity to wear as little as possible. Whenever those opportunities arose, as they frequently did, the men in the audience roared their approval.

Sex sells, Nicole thought. It was as true for ancient Rome as for modern Hollywood.

Titus Calidius Severus didn’t shout, but he was most attentive to the actresses jiggling and strutting across the ground where lions and wolves and bears had prowled not so long before.

Watching him watch the pretty women, Nicole decided she didn’t mind the way he did it. She could hardly have asked him not to pay attention to them; that was what they were there for, and he was a healthy male with all his hormones in working order… as she had good reason to know. What mattered was that he didn’t give the impression that he would sooner have been with one of them than with his real companion, as so many men would have done. Frank had stared up at an awful lot of movie screens as if he’d forgotten she was there beside him, and not just toward the end, either. And what had he gone for when he was ready to dump Nicole? Ms. Blond Hollywood Bimbo, what else?

She surprised herself, not with the virulence of the thought, but with the coolness of it. Frank Perrin was centuries unborn and half the world away. The edge was off her bitterness. She was too busy surviving in this world to waste energy on a marriage that had been dead long before Frank walked out the door.

Calidius Severus for sure was better-looking than Frank, though Frank smelled a whole lot better. He was also just as attentive to the swordfights as to the women in their skimpy draperies. He leaned forward on the bench, muttering under his breath at this bobble or that wobble. “If I’d used a sword like that,” he told Nicole in a pause between acts, “I’d be twenty-five years dead. “

The swordplay was as obviously choreographed as a bar fight in a Western. Like a Western, it wasn’t meant to be realistic. But she could hardly explain that to Calidius Severus. She settled for the glaringly obvious instead. “It’s only make-believe,” she said.

He muttered and scowled and shifted on the bench, but little by little he subsided. He was almost too reasonable a man to be real. Nicole tried to imagine him in a Stetson and carrying a six-shooter, sauntering into a saloon in time-honored movie-cowboy fashion. It was amazingly easy, though his looks tended more toward the Mexican sidekick than the tall lanky cowhand.

Not very many movie Westerns were as extravagantly gory as this Roman equivalent. Still, despite the copious blood, the killings were obviously faked. She’d believed Calidius Severus when he said there wouldn’t be any excessive realism in the mime, but she couldn’t help the small sigh of relief that, after all, the actors would get up to strut the stage another day.

When Paris and Helen leaped gleefully between the sheets — in this case, a blanket as gaudy as their costumes — that looked choreographed, too. But, as enthusiastic as it was, Nicole wondered if, after all, it was faked. The audience didn’t seem to think it was, or else was delighted to buy into that particular illusion. Men and women both cheered on the performers. The imagination could do a lot with a pair of heads, a strategically arranged blanket, and a set of highly suggestive gyrations.

There was a collective groan when the gyrations ended, and with it the scene. In the next, with neither sex nor swordplay to engross them, the audience indulged in a spate of restlessness. Paris struggled nobly against it, crying overwritten defiance at the Greeks who threatened to come and take Helen back from Troy. But even his trained voice couldn’t overwhelm the shout from a few rows behind Nicole that pretty obviously wasn’t in the script: “Is there a physician in the amphitheater?”

Along with most of the other people right around her, she turned to stare. A man with a seriously worried expression held up a woman who seemed to have fainted. Her eyes were closed and her body limp; her head lolled on the man’s shoulder. Even if she’d been awake, she would have looked sick: her face was flushed, and a distinctive, spotty rash mottled one cheek. It looked to Nicole like measles. She was just old enough to have had them herself before her parents got around to getting her vaccinated — she still felt the sting of the unfairness, and the magnitude of her luck that she’d had no worse than a face and body covered with blotches, and a week in bed being fed whatever she asked for. She’d only learned later how many dangerous side effects measles could have.

She didn’t ever remember being so sick she passed out; mostly she’d been covered with spots and distressingly itchy. This woman had it a lot worse.

Someone was edging and sidling his way down from higher up. “Move aside, if you please. I’m a physician. Excuse me, sir. Madam. If you don’t mind.” She recognized the voice as much as the face and the walk, with its brisk politeness and its underlying air of impatience with the bulk of the human race. Dexter the physician had taken a day off; but, like doctors in every place and time, he wasn’t going to get that much of a break.

The man on the other side of the woman moved over to give Dexter room to sit beside her. It didn’t look like altruism. It looked like getting out of range of contagion.

Dexter ignored the man’s cowardice. He took the woman’s pulse, felt her forehead, and bent close to examine the rash. Nicole turned back to the show, which had indulged itself in another swordfight, but she kept being drawn to the sick woman and the physician. Each time she looked, Dexter looked unhappier.

He murmured something to the sick woman’s companion, too low for Nicole to hear. She didn’t have long to be frustrated. As soon as Dexter had bent over the woman again, the man cried, “The pestilence! What kind of quack are you, anyway? Can’t you even tell when someone’s had too much sun?”

Any doctor Nicole had known in Indiana or California would have blown sky-high if he’d been screamed at like that — either blown sky-high or called in a slander lawyer. Dexter only bowed his head in humility — which Nicole found incredible — or else in the kind of arrogance that didn’t care what the world thought. “May you be right,” he said. “May I be wrong. Take her home. Make her comfortable. Her fate now is in the hands of the gods.”

The woman’s companion glowered at the doctor, but didn’t fling any further abuse. He hefted her up with a grunt, staggering under the dead weight, and maneuvered between the benches to the aisle. People scrambled back out of the way. Nicole was just about to think of offering something, a hand, Calidius Severus’ hand, whatever could help, when a man a row or two down did it for her.

Maybe he was a relative. The woman’s companion seemed to know him, at least. Between them, they supported her in a kind of fireman’s carry and carried her down and apparently out of the amphitheater. She went like a gust of wind through dry California scrub, fanning a spark into wildfire. “Pestilence,” people whispered. Then louder: “Pestilence!”

The show ended not long after the woman’s departure. Applause was sparse, abstracted. The actors tried to drum it up, strutting and gesticulating on the stage. One, who’d played a comic villain, favored the amphitheater with an obscene gesture and a flash of his bony behind.

Nobody but Nicole seemed to take any notice. Some of the audience kept glancing toward the place where the woman had been sitting, uneasily, as if something dark might be lurking there still. Others craned their necks, peering at anyone who might be inclined to keel over.

Titus Calidius Severus’ sigh had a wintry sound to it, though it was still only August. “So,” he said. “It’s come here after all. I was hoping it wouldn’t. From everything I’ve heard, it’s been bad — very bad — in Italy and Greece.”

“It looked like the — “ Nicole broke off. The Latin she’d been gifted with when Liber and Libera sent her to Carnuntum had no word for measles. No word, she’d learned, meant no thing. But measles, even before there was a shot for it, had been a common childhood disease. You were sick, and maybe there were side effects, but you didn’t usually die of them. That had been true, her mother had said, for as long as anyone remembered. How could there be no word for the disease in Rome?

No. That was the wrong question. If the Romans didn’t have a word for it, what did that mean? That it wasn’t a common childhood disease here and now? If that was the case… For the first time, Nicole felt a stab of fear. Sometime not too long before she left TV behind for good, she’d watched a show — on the Discovery Channel? A E? PBS? — about the European expansion. It might have been much less easy for the sun never to set on the British Empire if the Native Americans and the Polynesians had had any resistance to smallpox or measles. The British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, brought their diseases as well as their trade goods and their guns. As often as not, the bacteria and viruses did the conquering, and the Europeans took over what was left. Native populations had, the documentary said, died like flies.

And here she was in a world that had no name for measles, and Calidius Severus was staring at her, obviously waiting for her to go on. “It looked like the what?” he asked. “I didn’t think anybody’d ever seen anything like this before. Do you know something I don’t?”

Sudden tears stung her eyes. The world blurred about her. I know so many things you don’t, Titus, she thought in a kind of grief. And what good did knowing them do? Knowing that there could be such a thing as a measles vaccine was a hell of a long way from knowing how to make one. She wasn’t like the hero in a time-travel movie. She didn’t come equipped with every scientific advance and the means to manufacture it. All she had was day-today, more or less random cultural knowledge, which could flip a light switch but couldn’t begin to explain what made it work.

What had Dexter told the sick woman’s companion? Take her home and make her comfortable? Nicole couldn’t have given better advice, not here. That was all anybody in second-century Carnuntum could do. It was all the physician had been able to do for Fabia Ursa. And Fabia Ursa was dead.

Calidius Severus was waiting, again, for her to answer. He always did that. She still wasn’t used to it — to having a man listen to her. God knew Frank never had. She hadn’t always listened to Frank, either, but then Frank was a bore.

She gave Calidius Severus an answer, though maybe not the answer he was looking for. “No, I don’t know anything special,” she said. All at once, to her own amazement, she hugged him fiercely. “I just want us to come through all right.”

“So do I,” he said. He didn’t sound overly convinced. “That’s as the gods will — one way or the other. Nothing much we can do. Maybe Dexter was wrong. Physicians don’t know everything, even if they like to pretend they do. Or maybe he was right, but there’ll be only the one case. It won’t be an epidemic.”

“Maybe,” Nicole said. She grasped at the straw as eagerly as he had, and with as little conviction. Maybe saying it would make it true.

Or maybe not.

They left the amphitheater in silence that extended well beyond the two of them, and walked back toward the city. On the way in, everyone had been lively, cheerful, chatting and calling back and forth. Now only a few people spoke, and that in low voices. The rest slid sidewise glances at them, peering to see if they looked sick.

For the first time, Nicole wished Liber and Libera had brought her body here as well as her soul, spirit, self, whatever it was. Her body was a pasty, doughy, only moderately attractive thing, but it had had measles. Umma’s hadn’t. As long as Nicole lived in this body, she was as susceptible as anyone else in Carnuntum.

When she’d wished herself here, she’d given up more than she’d ever imagined. Would she have to give up her life, too?

Until now she’d been coasting, living a long, generally not very pleasant dream. She’d been too busy just surviving, and too tired out from it, to think much past the moment. And, to be honest, she’d been too stubborn to admit that she’d made a mistake; that she’d been dead bone ignorant about the past. Maybe not any past — but this one certainly wasn’t anything like what she’d expected.

She didn’t want out. Not yet. She was stubborn enough for that. But she was beginning to think that she might be healthier, if not happier, back in West Hills.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she whispered, more to herself than to Titus Calidius Severus.

He nodded, a little too vigorously. “Maybe it won’t,” he said. He reached to take her hand just as she reached to take his. They clung to each other as they made their way through the clamor and stinks, the flies and smoke of Carnuntum.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she said again, in the street in front of the tavern. But she knew what crouched there in the dark, however loud she whistled. She gave it a name: “I’m scared.”

“So am I, “ Titus Calidius Severus said.