Household Gods

15

The next day, Titus Calidius Severus was laid in the cemetery outside the city’s walls. Nicole was still too weak to leave the tavern, let alone walk so far. Just crossing the street that morning to sit with Gaius Calidius Severus left her exhausted. But that much she could do, and that much she did. She was glad she had: the young dyer was all alone in the shop, sitting in the reek of ancient piss and the muddle of colors on the floor and walls and on the sides of the vats. He wasn’t doing anything, hadn’t tried to ease his sorrows with work. He was simply sitting there, on a bench by the wall, as she’d seen people wait in bus stations, with a kind of blank and bovine patience.

He brightened at the sight of her, jumped up with something of his old energy, took her arm as if she’d been an ancient grandmother, and helped her to the bench he’d just vacated. She breathed shallowly to keep from gagging; her stomach was delicate enough without adding the dyer’s effluvium to it. But he was so glad to see her, she couldn’t bring herself to turn and bolt back out into the relatively fresh air of the street.

When she’d caught what breath she could manage, she said, “I wanted — I should go to the cemetery with you. But — “

Gaius Calidius Severus patted her arm awkwardly. “No. No, don’t fret about it. You’ve got your boy and your freedwoman to take care of. And Father wouldn’t want you to put yourself in any more danger, not after you’ve come through this far. We’d need another funeral if you did. He’d hate that.”

Nicole swallowed. Her throat hurt. “Thank you,” she said when she could trust her voice. She felt as if she’d received absolution. But it needed a little more. After a moment she said, “You’re a lot like him, you know.”

Gaius Calidius Severus blushed and ducked his head. Was he remembering the times he’d gone upstairs with Julia? Maybe, maybe not. And, Nicole thought, his father would probably have done the exact same thing at his age. There wasn’t anything wrong with him that a decade and a few cold showers wouldn’t fix. “Now I thank you,” he said. “It’s better than I deserve, but thank you for saying it.” He paused, as if to nerve himself for what he meant to say next. “How are Julia and Lucius doing?”

Titus Calidius Severus would have put Umma’s son ahead of the freed-woman, but he hadn’t gone to bed with her, either. Again Nicole noted the difference without rising to it. The question was kindly meant. That was real concern — real friendship.

She answered him warmly then, and fully. “They’ll pull through, I think. Both of them. They’re almost to the point I was at yesterday when you found me. But Aurelia — “ She stopped to pull herself together. That ordeal would come the day after tomorrow. Even in the fall chill, it wouldn’t wait any longer. “They should be there, and I have to be there. Somehow.”

“They won’t be able to come. ‘ Gaius Calidius Severus spoke with some of his father’s authority. He was right, too; Nicole knew it. She wasn’t any more pleased by that than she’d been when Titus was too damnably right for his own good. “I’ll look after them, don’t worry about that. And as for you, “ he said, shaking a finger under her nose, “hire a sedan chair to take you to the graveyard and back. You should be strong enough by then to manage that. No one will think it’s ostentatious, not when you’ve just got over the pestilence, and not for your own daughter’s funeral.”

Nicole didn’t want to argue with him. She was too tired. She got out of there somehow, not too discourteously she hoped, and crawled back to the tavern and her two charges.

Titus Calidius Severus’ funeral procession rocked and wailed its way down the street that afternoon. Nicole watched it from her doorway, standing very still, holding to the doorpost when her knees started to buckle. There were a few people in the procession after all, and a whole quartet of hired mourners, and two flute players who vied with one another to see how far off key they could go and still be somewhere within shouting distance of a tune. Titus would have had something wry to say about that, and a smile to go with it, warm and a little crooked.

That wasn’t Titus on the bier, that still and shrouded shape. No. It wasn’t anyone she knew. Titus was still alive somewhere. Her skin could still remember the touch of his hands, the way his beard tickled when he kissed her, the sound of his voice in her ear, murmuring words that made her giggle even while they made love. Had she loved him with a grand passion? Hardly. But she’d liked him. She missed him, his dry wit, his comforting presence, even his habit of always being right, rather more than she missed taking him up to her bed on nights after men’s day at the baths.

She still didn’t have any tears. She gave him memory instead, and the strength she could spare to stand in the doorway till the last of the procession had rounded the corner and vanished. Then she turned, and walking slowly, making her way from table to bench to stool to bar, she made her way back up to the two of hers who were still alive, and the one who waited, wrapped in a blanket, for the undertaker’s assistants to come and take her away.

Nicole ended up taking Gaius Calidius Severus’ advice. The sedan chair was like a four-man stretcher with a seat. Riding in it was beastly uncomfortable, but it was far easier than walking — particularly as half the way was sloppy with mud. The sky was ugly as unwashed wool, heavy and gray and full of rain, but none was falling just then. If they were lucky, they’d get there and back again before the threat of rain became reality.

Gaius Calidius Severus had been right about what people would say, or not say, of Nicole’s resorting to a sedan chair. Ila said not a word as she walked along beside the litter. If Umma’s sister didn’t complain about something Nicole did, it wasn’t worth complaining about.

Ila probably had other things on her mind, at that. She was sneezing and coughing in a way that made Nicole’s stomach clench. Brigomarus wasn’t there; he was down with it, which explained why he hadn’t come to help Nicole as he’d promised. She’d been fool enough to hope he was just being censorious again, or that he’d found some new reason to be aggravated with her. His absence mattered more than she would have expected. He’d been a sort of constant in this world, as close to family as she could get, arguments and all. She didn’t want him hanging about playing Big Brother, but she didn’t want him dead, either.

Along with Ila came Sextus Longinius lulus, who hadn’t caught the pestilence in spite of everything; Ofanius Vaiens, who’d survived a milder bout than Nicole’s; and sharp-tongued Antonina and her husband, a mousy little man whose name Nicole never had learned. As funeral processions went in these days, it was a largeish gathering, and kindhearted. None of these people needed to be here; they all must be worn out with attending funerals. And still they’d come to see Aurelia to her rest.

Nicole had refused to hire mourners — another thing that Ila had declined to comment on; really, she had to be ill, if she kept quiet about that — but she had asked the undertaker to arrange for a priest. The one provided was a type that must be universal: thickset, florid, with a well-padded middle and an even more well-padded vocabulary. He mouthed platitudes about innocence plucked too soon, and flowers cut down before their prime, and the golden hope of a better world. She’d heard just about the same words, in just about the same plummy tone, on a Sunday-morning Gospel hour. All this man lacked was the shiny suit and the pompadour.

Nicole tuned him out as best she could. She’d asked for a priest, after all. She should have expected what she got. It wouldn’t have been any different in the twentieth century; it hadn’t been when her grandfather died. He’d been a determined non-churchgoer, but the family had been just as determined to give him a Christian sendoff. The priest they found hadn’t known the man at all, had given a eulogy so generic as to be ludicrous, and had referred throughout to the deceased, whose name was Richard Uphoff, as “our dearly departed Bob Upton.”

At least this man got Aurelia’s name right, if nothing else about her. Nicole fixed her eyes on the bier, on the small shrouded figure, seeming so much smaller in death. No larger, really, than Kimberley had been, the night before Nicole vanished out of that world and into this one. This dream turned nightmare, this life suddenly so full of death.

Nicole’s throat was aching-tight. She couldn’t cry. She wanted to scream. Someone else was, away across the cemetery: shrieking and wailing. It wasn’t the voice of a hired mourner; those had their own style, almost like a religious chant. This was too wild, too unrestrained.

That wasn’t the American way of death. Even in a world that had never heard of America, Nicole couldn’t bring herself to indulge in it. She sat in the sedan chair in silence while the undertaker’s assistants laid the body in the small, muddy hole that was all the grave Aurelia would get. Then she had to get out of the chair, and, though she tottered like an old woman, lay one of Julia’s good loaves and a jar of raisins and a jug of heavily watered wine in the grave. She’d wanted to bring Aurelia’s favorite honeyed cake, but she’d thought of it too late. There’d been no time to make one.

It was ridiculous to think the dead child could notice what was missing, or care; and yet it mattered very much. Too much, maybe. The wine was Falernian — that much Nicole could give her. Poor little Aurelia, who’d never had the chance to have much, at least had that to take into the grave with her.

As Nicole knelt by the grave, unable to muster the strength to rise, the skies at last gave up their burden of rain. “Even the heavens are weeping,” He said, proving the Romans were no more immune to sentiment than to the pestilence.

The gravediggers hadn’t been lazing on the grass on this of all days.

Even before Nicole was ready to stand up, they were standing over the grave, spades shouldered like rifles. So shoot me, Nicole thought bitterly. Somehow, she got to her feet, slipping a little on the muddy grass, and wrapped her cloak about herself. Stiffly, unsteadily, she half climbed, half fell back into the covered chair. “Take me home,” she said to the bearers. They hardly grunted as they lifted her. She’d never been other than lean, and now, with the sickness, she was skeletal. And they must be eager to get in out of the rain.

Gaius Calidius Severus was sitting in the tavern, holding the fort as he’d promised. He’d acquired reinforcements since she left: a vaguely familiar man of about his father’s age. They’d been drinking wine: there were cups in front of them. Maybe they’d put brass in the cash box, maybe not. Nicole wasn’t going to worry about it. Calidius Severus was doing her a favor by being here at all. Two cups of wine, or however many it turned out to be, was small enough price to pay.

He greeted Nicole with a smile that seemed just a little bit too glad. He was just a boy, after all, and she’d left him with a heavy responsibility. “Julia and Lucius are asleep, Mistress Umma,” he said. “They woke up for a while, and I gave them some gruel and a little bit of bread sopped in wine, and they even ate a bite each. But they’re still pretty weak. The least little thing flattens them.”

Nicole drew a faint sigh. She hadn’t known till she heard him, that she’d been expecting him to tell her they were worse; they were sinking, they’d soon be dead. But they were better. Notably so, if they were eating and drinking, however little they might be keeping down. “The least little thing flattens me,” she said, “and I was getting better days before they did.”

Gaius Calidius Severus nodded. His relief was still palpable. It made him seem to take refuge in a change of subject. “Mistress Umma, you know Gaius Attius Exoratus, don’t you? He came to call on me, and I asked him over here.”

Nicole remembered the face: he’d eaten and drunk in the tavern a few times, though he wasn’t a regular. She hadn’t remembered his name, if she’d ever heard it. But she could say “Of course I do,” and even sound as if she meant it.

Attius Exoratus nodded. “Aye, we know each other, lad.” His voice was a bass rumble, like falling rocks. “I’d have come anyhow, whether you chanced to be here or not.” He pinned Nicole with a hard stare under a bristle of brows. “It’s a cursed shame he’s gone, Umma. That’s all I’ve got to say. He was one of the good ones.”

Titus Calidius Severus, he meant; he had to mean. “That he was.” Nicole got herself some wine — dipping up a cup seemed so natural now, she didn’t even notice herself doing it half the time — and stood next to the two men. “That he was,” she repeated quietly.

“And young Calidius tells me you just put your daughter in the ground.” Gaius Attius Exoratus let out a long sigh. “Life’s hard. I’m sorry for that, too.”

“Thank you,” Nicole said. There seemed to be more that she should say, but she couldn’t imagine what.

He didn’t seem to find her response inadequate, at least. “We’ve all done too much mourning lately,” he said. Nicole nodded, unable to find words to respond to that. He went on, “I only came by to tell you, it did my heart good to see how happy you made my old mate. We fought side by side, you know, and mustered out within a couple of weeks of each other, then moved here from the legionary camp down the river.” He pointed east. “He was as happy a man as I ever saw, when this lad’s mother was alive. I was afraid he’d never be happy again after he lost her. But you took care of that. He’s not here anymore to thank you for it, so I reckoned somebody ought to.”

“He did let me know,” Nicole said. That was true for her, and had surely been true for Umma. Still, there was more that needed saying, and this time she managed to say it. “It’s very good of you to make sure it’s taken care of.”

“I know how these things should go,” Attius said.

Nicole nodded again. They sat, she stood leaning lightly against a table. She thought about sitting, but she wasn’t in the mood just yet.

Attius was looking at her. Staring, really. Giving her the eye, she thought. So: was he going to try hitting on her, now his old war buddy wasn’t in the way? She took a deep breath, to laugh in his face. She had no interest in anyone right now, new or old, and less than no interest in sex. The only thing even vaguely related to it that she cared for at the moment was lying down. Alone.

Gaius Attius Exoratus lowered his eyes, grunted, and got to his feet. “I’d better get on home,” he said. “My wife will be waiting for me.”

Nicole almost choked on the breath she’d been holding. Was he sending her a message? Or had he just been trying to remember her face, to keep his memory clearer? Maybe he did have the hots for her.

If he did, he wasn’t going to act on it. Wife, was it? “I hope she stays well,” Nicole said. “And you, too, Attius.”

“Thank you kindly,” he answered. He drained the cup of wine that Gaius Calidius Severus must have dipped for him, and set it down, and belched. Then, wrapping his cloak around him and pulling a fold of it over his graying hair, he went out into the rain.

“He’s a good fellow, Attius is,” Gaius Calidius Severus said after a judicious few moments. “My father liked him a lot.”

“I understand why,” Nicole said; and she did. “He was very nice.” She hesitated. Then she said, “And I want to thank you, too, for taking care of me and for taking care of all of us. For everything.”

She didn’t feel like going into any more detail than that. He understood what she meant; like his father, he wasn’t stupid. He coughed a time or two, maybe in embarrassment, maybe in something worse. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “It was easier when you didn’t wake up, but when you did — I guess that meant you were starting to get over it.”

“I think so,” Nicole said. “I wasn’t out of my head anymore after that.” She still felt as if the least puff of breeze would blow her away; she wouldn’t be all the way better for a long time yet. The tears that filled her eyes were partly tears of weakness, but only partly. “I wish your father had made it, too. I wish Aurelia had. I wish — “

“Everybody,” Gaius Calidius Severus said somberly. Nicole nodded. When he spoke again, he almost seemed surprised at himself, as if such large concerns were new to him: “I wonder what Carnuntum will be like after this. “

“Your father told me it was killing one in four, sometimes one in three, down in Italy,” Nicole said. “It’s not over yet, not here.”

“I know it’s not,” young Calidius Severus answered with a touch of impatience, and a touch — just a touch — of fear. “He told me the same thing.”

One in four, sometimes one in three. That wasn’t simply a disease. It was more like a nuclear war. Nicole tried to imagine a disaster on the same scale in the United States. Seventy-five or eighty million people dead in a few months — the country would fall apart. No doubt about it. The different parts of the Roman Empire weren’t so tightly connected as those of the U.S.A., but even so, this had to be a staggering blow.

As if to underline the thought, a funeral procession went by outside, not much bigger than Aurelia’s and even more miserable: the rain was coming down in sheets.

“Harvest wasn’t very good this year,” Gaius Calidius Severus mused, “even before the farmers started getting sick. That’s going to make things even harder.”

“I’ve heard people talking about that,” Nicole said. It hadn’t seemed particularly real at the time, but for some reason, now she understood. No farmers meant no one to bring in the harvest. No one to bring in the harvest meant no food in the market. And no food in the market meant…

Young Calidius Severus laughed. It sounded like a man whistling in the dark. “I hope there’s enough in the granaries to keep us fed till spring.”

“If there’s not,” Nicole said with a renewal of hope, “they’ll bring it in from somewhere else.” But as soon as she’d said it, she saw the hole in it. “If farmers elsewhere aren’t too badly hit by the pestilence, and they have any grain left over.”

Young Calidius Severus nodded. As if it were some kind of game, he found yet another hole, one that Nicole hadn’t thought of: “And if they can get the grain to us. “

No trucks, she reminded herself. No trains. Transportation by land was hideously expensive and even more hideously slow when everything went by muleback or oxcart; she saw that every time she bought a new amphora of Falernian. Mules and oxcarts couldn’t carry that much, either, not when you were talking about feeding thousands of people.

But Carnuntum lay by the Danube, and dumped raw sewage into the river every day — downstream, she admitted; she was always amazed when the Romans paid even the most basic attention to sanitary matters. Barges and boats plied it. If the pestilence hadn’t touched anybody farther west…

Before she made a fool of herself by speaking of it, her clouded memory brought her up short. The west wasn’t safe, either. Even if the pestilence hadn’t reached it, war had. What were the names of the people the Romans were fighting? “The Quadi and the Marcomanni,” she said, half to herself.

Gaius Calidius Severus looked as grim as his father had when he watched the German tribesmen swagger through the market square. “And the Lombards, too,” he said. He peered north past his own shop, toward the Danube, and looked grimmer yet. “I only hope they don’t come over the river here, too, once they’ve had word of all our losses. They’re like vultures, those barbarians. They love to flock around a carcass.”

Nicole shuddered at the image, and tugged at the neck of her tunic. Before she quite realized what she was doing, she’d spat onto her bosom.

He followed suit, turning aside the ill omen. “The pestilence has to be going through the legions in the camp east of here and at Vindobona, the same way it’s going through this city. The barbarians will know it, too. Curse them.”

“Maybe it’s going through them, too.” It was neither compassionate nor politically correct to wish an epidemic on people she didn’t know. But if it came to a choice between pestilence and war…

Not in my backyard, people in Los Angeles shouted when they didn’t want a jail or a housing project or a nuclear-power plant or anything else necessary but unpleasant built anywhere near them. Mean-spirited, Nicole had thought them. Selfish. Deficient in humane impulses.

To hell with humane impulses. Carnuntum was just barely making its way through a pestilence. Death was walking through the streets. Famine stared it in the face. There was only one horseman of the Apocalypse missing, and she’d be damned if she’d wish a war on the city as well. As trivial as they suddenly seemed, she shaped the words in her mind regardless. Not in my backyard. Please, God, not in my backyard.

“Maybe the barbarians are as bad off as we are,” Gaius Calidius Severus said. “Let’s hope they are. Let’s pray for it.” He levered himself to his feet, moving like a much older man. He had to be as worn out as she was. “Here, I’d better do some work. You take care of yourself, Mistress Umma, and don’t push yourself too hard. If you need help, call. I’ll come.” He pulled his hood up over his head, hunched his shoulders, and ducked out into the rain.

She watched him go. He detoured a bit, down the sidewalk to the stepping stones, to cross as dry as he could. He paused when he reached the narrow walk on the other side, as if to gather his forces, then strode on up it and into the shop. He and his father had lived above it in all apparent amity; no squabbles that Nicole had ever seen or heard. And now he was alone.

No wonder he’d paused. It was hard enough for her to go up those back stairs, knowing there’d be one fewer sleeper above, and praying that neither Julia nor — please God — Lucius had taken a sudden turn for the worse and died while she was fuddling about below. What it must be like to walk into those rooms, to know there was no one else there — she didn’t want to imagine it, and yet she couldn’t help herself.

She wanted to leap up, run, make sure Lucius and Julia were alive and recovering. The best she could do was a slow crawl, creeping like an old woman, taking each step with trembling care, and resting every few steps. She couldn’t even spare the energy for frustration. Patience, she willed herself. Patience. That should be her watchword for this whole, primitive, maddeningly slow-moving world.

All through the fall and winter, the pestilence lashed Carnuntum. Both Lucius and Julia recovered — ever so slowly, as Nicole did herself. Losing one in four in her household left her statistically average, as best she could tell. She would have given anything to escape that tyranny of numbers. Aurelia’s absence was an ache behind her breastbone.

She’d taken little enough direct notice of the child while she was alive; life had been too busy, her head too strained with the effort of living in a world so totally foreign. But Aurelia had been a part of the world in ways that Nicole hadn’t even noticed until she was gone. Waking up in the morning, beginning the day, marking its completion by the kids’ tramping down the stairs and demanding their breakfast — without coffee, it had become a waking ritual of its own. She’d become accustomed to Aurelia’s presence. She’d grown fond of the little dark-haired girl with the gap where one front tooth had been, who loved to go with Nicole to women’s day at the baths. Who’d got into Nicole’s makeup box once, and painted herself to look a perfect horror, and been so proud of her achievement that Nicole didn’t dare laugh at her. Who had fought with Lucius as only siblings could, and not always been the one to make up — she’d been the tougher-minded of the two, Nicole had often thought.

And now she was gone, and Nicole ached with the loss. Would she have ached any more for Kimberley or Justin? Had she, ever, since she came to Carnuntum?

Ah, but they were alive, somewhere in time — alive and, if there were gods, and if those gods had any mercy, well. She missed them still, in unexpected moments, or in the dark before dawn. But neither of them was dead. She missed them. She didn’t grieve for them, for the lives they’d never have, or the death that had taken them so ungodly soon.

Their safety on the other side of time was her anchor, the thing that made it possible for her to live in this world without them. She hadn’t known till too late that Lucius and Aurelia had been the counterweight. While she had those two in her care, she could tell herself she had a clear purpose here. With one of them gone… how could she hold? She had to; Lucius needed her, and Julia needed her, and even Gaius Calidius Severus seemed to rely on her presence across the street. And yet she could feel herself slipping. She had to hold on, but it grew harder rather than easier, the longer it went on.

Brigomarus pulled through, though so narrowly that he looked like a ghost of himself. Ila died — which Nicole had a great deal of difficulty pretending to be sorry for. Tabica and Pacatus never took sick at all.

Nicole heard that with almost resentful envy. She was glad they didn’t come to the tavern to flaunt the accident of their good health. Brigomarus came, more than once, never very cordially, but as he said, family was family. And maybe he wasn’t terribly fond of his sister and her stick of a husband, either. Umma, or Nicole in Umma’s body, might actually be preferable, day for day and scowl for scowl.

Some of her neighbors and customers came through the sickness better than Umma’s family had. The wet nurse had brought the pestilence into Sextus Longinius lulus’ house, but both he and his son escaped it. Sometimes he would bring the baby with him when he came over for a cup of wine or a bowl of whatever Nicole or Julia had on the menu. Longinius lulus the younger was a happy baby. He was always smiling or gurgling with laughter. He knew nothing of pestilence, or of death. For that, Nicole envied him.

Ofanius Valens, that cheerful little man, bounced back fast from his dose of the sickness. He came in nearly every day, bringing this dainty or that for Julia: figs candied in honey, cuts of ham that were more fat than meat. He was perfectly open as to his motive. “Got to put some flesh on you, sweetheart,” he said to Julia in Nicole’s hearing. “You’re nothing but skin and bones. I’m not too terribly fond of lying on a ladder.”

He was fattening her like a goose. Nicole wanted to get angry at him, and at Julia, too. She did manage a small flare of temper, but it died down as soon as it rose. It was the sickness, she told herself. It left behind a lassitude that was terribly slow to pass.

That was even true — to a degree. She had neither the energy nor the inclination for a truly towering outrage. And if she had — what could she do? Short of throwing Julia into her room and walling up the entrance, she didn’t see how she could keep the freedwoman from doing what she obviously wanted to do.

Lassitude or no, Nicole kept a weather eye on Lucius. If he so much as headed for the door, she pounced. “Have you got your heavy cloak on? Put the hood up, you’ll freeze. Go back and put on your socks!”

He put up with it better than she would ever have expected from a boy his age: for the first day or two he suffered without complaint, but on the third day, as she came swooping out of the upper reaches with an extra pair of socks in hand, he planted his feet and put on a ferocious scowl. “Mother! I’m not made of glass. I won’t break.”

“Maybe you won’t,” she fired back, “but you’re all I’ve got in this world. I’m going to look out for you, and that’s that.”

He rolled his eyes and shook his shoulders — less a shrug than a shedding of her suffocating concern — and ran off to play with the remnants of the old noisy gang of neighborhood boys. As children will, he was recovering much faster than an adult. He came in from playing earlier than he used to, and fell into bed without even token protest, but his appetite was voracious and he was gaining strength by the day.

“Mind you don’t get wet!” she called after him, “or I’ll give you something to remember it by.”

He didn’t even acknowledge the threat. Brat. He knew she wasn’t up to chasing after him and giving him the swat he deserved, either.

Nicole stood with the socks still in her hand, turning and twisting them in her fingers. The rough burn of knitted wool kept part of her mind in the world where it belonged, but the rest was wandering afield.

All I’ve got in this world. If Nicole was in fact descended from Umma, that was true in more ways than she could explain to Lucius. If something happened to him, if the chain broke, what would become of her? Would she disappear? Would it be as if she had never been? There was no way to tell, and no way she wanted to test it. She’d keep Lucius safe whether he wanted it or no, for her sake as well as his own.

The price of grain rose. It never got above a level she could afford, but it did rise enough that she had to charge more for bread. Customers grumbled. She lost a few, but they came back when they discovered that bread wasn’t any cheaper elsewhere. “It’s criminal,” one of them said, “but you still make the best loaf in Carnuntum.”

“You get what you pay for,” Nicole said — and was a little startled by the pause, the stare as he worked it out, and then the burst of laughter. Another twentieth-century cliche that people here had never heard before.

Even with people coming back for the best bread in Carnuntum, business was not what it had been in the summer. Part of that was the fault of the pestilence, but part, she realized, was the season. When she’d come into this world, spring was gliding into summer; the sun rose very early and set very late. Now that was reversing itself. Without the aid of watch or clock, she couldn’t be sure of the days’ length as winter drew near, but they seemed far shorter than in Los Angeles, and in Indianapolis, too. Eight hours of daylight? Nine at the most? Damned little, in a world lit only by fire.

But even that was deceptive, because it assumed the sun shed much light when it did deign to scurry above the horizon. What with rain and sleet and occasional snow and endless masses of dirty-gray clouds and fogs off the Danube that sometimes didn’t break up till nearly noon and sometimes didn’t break up at all, Carnuntum was shrouded in gloom.

The outer weather mirrored Nicole’s inner climate. With the coming of winter, she felt, as she hadn’t since the first days after she arrived, how very much she missed artificial light. No torch or oil-burning lamp could compare to a plain old forty-watt bulb. They barely lifted the skirts of the dark. They couldn’t ever drive it away.

She wanted it driven away. She needed it driven away. It pressed on her, weighing her down. She was always gloomy, always depressed. She couldn’t get herself moving in the morning; she went to bed as soon as the light was out of the sky. She snapped at people for no reason. Her mood was filthy, and filthier as the winter went on.

Sometime in December, a phrase came back to her from the part of herself that she’d shut away in the dark, her lightbulb-lit, daylight-bright twentieth-century self: seasonal affective disorder. If she didn’t have it, she sure as hell had its first cousin. Had Umma been the same way — was it her physiology responding to the lack of light? Or was it Nicole herself reacting more strongly because she wasn’t used to it?

Either way, she amazed herself with how much she could sleep. She might almost have been a hibernating animal. When slate-gray gloom turned black, she would wrap herself in her blankets, and not know another thing till black lightened again toward gloom. After a while even a bursting bladder couldn’t wake her; she slept straight through, woke and half-fell on the pot, and staggered downstairs to scrape out another day’s living.

As December advanced, Julia and Lucius started to get excited about something called the Saturnalia. With all that they said about it, Nicole understood how and why the English word came to be associated with revelry. It was a whole week’s festival, centered on the winter solstice; it celebrated the sun’s turn back toward the north. Sunreturn — inch by inch, day by day, creeping once again toward the long brilliant days and brief starlit nights of summer.

No wonder they made a festival out of it. Even the dim vague dream of honest daylight was enough to perk Nicole up, though the dirty-gray reality of the days dragged her down soon enough.

Then Lucius started dropping hints. “Did you see the game board old Furius Picatus has in his shop around the corner? It’s hollow, and it’s got a set of dice in the middle. Jupiter! The games I could play, if I had that.”

Why, Nicole thought, Saturnalia was like Christmas. People gave presents — and kids dropped hints. A game board and dice were preferable to the latest media tie-in, hands down, no questions asked. So — had Christmas presents begun in the tradition of the Saturnalia? Did they really go that far back?

She’d always loved Christmas, even when it was trendy to emulate Ebenezer Scrooge. Choosing and buying presents, hiding them, waiting to see the faces when they were unwrapped at last — she was like a little kid. “About the only time you ever were,” Frank had said to her after the divorce. At this distance, she could grant that maybe he was right. But better to be a kid once a year than never to be a kid at all.

Yes, even in a year that had brought so much shock, and so much death. This was a time for warmth, and for such light as there could be. She wouldn’t forget grief, or put the dead out of her mind completely, but she could give herself, at least for this season, entirely to the living.

She bought the board and dice for Lucius, bargaining Furius Picatus down to a price that was almost reasonable. Then she found a little greenish glass jar of rosewater for Julia, packaging that would have been the height of trendiness in Neiman-Marcus, and a pair of sandals for Brigomarus. She measured his feet from prints he left on the muddied tavern floor — pretty damn clever, if she thought so herself. For Gaius Calidius Severus she bought a belt of woven leather, very fine and fancy, with a gleaming brass buckle. She was vastly pleased with that, and with the price she’d got the leather-worker down to — her bargaining skills were honed by now to a wicked edge.

Two days before the first day of the festival, Gaius Calidius Severus came over for a cup of wine. He hadn’t been by for a day or two: busy, she’d supposed, with orders for gifts. He greeted her less brightly than usual, and stumbled as he sat down. Then, as she brought him his cup of two-as wine, he doubled up in a fit of sneezing and coughing. It looked — oh, God, it looked like the pestilence.

He straightened, wiping his eyes. Something in his face told her not to say anything. He drank his wine, made small talk that she forgot as soon as the words had gone through her head, and went back home, mumbling something about a dye lot that had to come out right then, and he hoped it was the right shade, too; it was for one of his pickier customers.

Nicole stood by the bar, watching him go. There was no one else in the tavern just then, only Julia kneading a batch of the best bread in Carnuntum. “It’s not fair,” Nicole said to her, bursting out with it before she even had time to think. “It’s not right. He took care of his father. He took care of us. The sickness passed him by. Now it’s been gone for months — and he’s got it. Why?”

Julia shrugged. She knew as well as Nicole did, there wasn’t any answer to that. After a bit, she said, “He didn’t seem too bad yet, did he?”

“No,” Nicole said, “not yet. But we know it gets worse. Don’t we?”

“Oh, yes.” Julia didn’t say anything more than that. She didn’t need to. Her cheekbones still showed sharp as wind-carved rock under her skin, with no padding of flesh to smooth their outline. She’d have been a knockout in certain parts of Beverly Hills, where you could never be too rich or too thin, but in Carnuntum Ofanius Valens was right: she was a creature in sore need of feeding up.

She finished kneading the lump of dough on the countertop, washed her hands in a bowl of water, and dried them on her tunic. Then, in a tone that said she’d made her decision and that was that, she said, “He took care of me when I was sick. I’m going over there to take care of him. I’ll be back in a bit.”

Nicole blinked, startled. Julia had never asserted herself this way before. Nicole should be welcoming it as a declaration of freedom. Instead, she found herself — annoyed? No, of course not. She was being practical, that was all. There was work to do here. “If he’s not that bad, he won’t need to be taken care of yet,” she said.

Julia looked at her. They were both speaking Latin, but they were not speaking the same language. As if to make that clear, the freedwoman said, “He’ll still enjoy it now. Later… who knows? He may never have another chance.” While Nicole was still groping for a reply, Julia walked calmly out of the tavern and down the sidewalk, toward the stepping stones.

Nicole opened her mouth to call out, but closed it again. Julia was a free woman, and an adult. Even if she was Nicole’s employee, her mind and her decisions were her own. As Nicole watched, she came up the walk on the far side of the muddy street and opened the door to the shop where Gaius Calidius Severus now worked alone. She closed the door after her. Nicole couldn’t see any more than that, but she didn’t need to. Her imagination worked perfectly well.

She’d never used sex to say thank you even to Frank, let alone to a neighbor who’d been nice to her. Most of the time, Julia’s freewheeling approach to such things made her want to pound her head against the top of the bar. This once, she resolved to say not a word.

Frank would have been amazed. She was the epitome of the Midwestern prude, he’d told her often enough. “Judge plenty, and be damned sure nobody judges you,” he’d said. She didn’t even remember what she’d replied. Something lame, she was sure.

Julia came back not too long after — an hour, maybe; maybe less. She wasn’t any more or less kempt than ever, but there was a flush on her cheeks that hadn’t been there before. It almost made her look like her old robust self.

Nicole didn’t ask, but Julia answered regardless. “Tomorrow might have been too late,“ she said, “but today — it was fine. “

That practically forced Nicole to say a word. She found one: “Good.” Julia shot her a quizzical glance. Nicole wondered why. Umma, surely, would have said the same thing. But Nicole had been in Umma’s body for more than six months now. Julia had got used to her odd, squeamish reactions to perfectly normal and acceptable things.

Good grief, thought Nicole. She’d done it. She’d surprised the by now unsurprisable Julia.

She nodded slowly, letting the moment stretch. “Good,” she said again. No one ought to be too predictable.

Saturnalia felt amazingly like Christmas. No one had ever heard of a Christmas tree, which was too bad; Nicole loved the glitter of the tree, and one would have looked — well, interesting over by the bar. But everything else was remarkably similar.

The resemblance extended all the way to getting a present from someone for whom she hadn’t bought one in return. Skinny, short-tempered Antonina presented her with a glazed pottery dog that was one of the ugliest things she’d ever seen — and that included her mother’s set of Staffordshire dogs. Even those were more appealing than this thing was.

“Thank you so much,” she said as warmly as she could. For all she knew, the damn critter was the height of swank in these parts. “Wait just one moment, would you? I have your present upstairs.”

She hurried up the stairs in a haze of desperation, with the rags of her smile still clinging to her face. Her bedroom offered little enough sanctuary. But — for a wonder, her eyes lit on just the thing. She snatched the terra sigillata bowl from the set on her chest of drawers, dusted it off hastily, and trotted back down the stairs. She was getting stronger at last: she didn’t even think about passing out from so much exertion. With as much of a flourish as she could muster, she presented the bowl to her neighbor.

Antonina made gratified noises much like the ones she’d used herself. She and Nicole drank wine together. Good cheer reigned, as much as it ever did around Antonina. After a suitable interval, she said as cordial a goodbye as Nicole had ever heard from her, and went on out the door, bowl in hand.

As soon as she was gone, Julia picked up the dog and made a ghastly face — almost as ghastly as the dog’s own. “By the gods, that’s a hideous little thing, isn’t it?”

“You think so, too?” said Nicole. “Well; one has to be polite. Maybe she thinks it’s the height of fashion.”

“Hardly!” said Julia, in a tone so like a Valley Girl that Nicole almost burst out laughing. But there would have been no explaining the distinctive intonations of “As if!” to a second-century Roman freedwoman in the valley of the Danube.

It was a relief, actually, to know that she might get rid of the ceramic tumor without offending local standards of good taste.

“I’ll bet somebody gave it to her, and she’s just getting rid of it to keep from spending any money on a decent present,” Julia said.

“Then we’re even,” Nicole said, “because I pulled that bowl off the dresser and dusted it off, and there it was.”

“It wasn’t a bad bowl,” Julia said. “But this…” She juggled the dog from hand to hand. It slipped; Nicole held her breath. But it didn’t fall. Julia plunked it down on the bar, right by the bowl of nuts.

“It doesn’t look half bad there,” Nicole observed.

“Maybe a customer will have a few too many and knock it on the floor,” said Julia.

“Maybe there’s treasure hidden inside it.”

Julia’s eyes gleamed. Then she laughed in disbelief. “No! Not if Antonina gave it to you. You can bet, if there’d been anything in there, she’d have winkled it out.”

“Dear old Antonina,” Nicole said with a theatrical sigh.

One way and another, the two of them spent a very pleasant half-hour dragging Antonina’s name through the mud. There was plenty of that outside, and not a little inside, either. No point in letting it go to waste.

When the dishfest wound down, Nicole filled a bowl of soup and a jar of wine, and took them across the street to Gaius Calidius Severus. He was in no condition to romp on the sheets with Julia now. The pestilence had him fully in its grip. If she could get a little nourishment into him, he might be able to fight the disease. There wasn’t much more she, or anyone else in Carnuntum, could do.

It was almost as chilly inside the shop as on the street. That was true in the tavern, too. Fires and braziers were all very well — when you stood right by them. If you didn’t, you froze your backside off. That probably had a lot to do with the death rate. People who might have recovered if they could have got warm, shivered and sank and died. Please, God, Nicole thought, don’t let that happen to Calidius Severus.

Even in winter, the fuller and dyer’s shop stank to high heaven. Nicole held her breath as she strode quickly through it and climbed the stairs to Gaius Calidius Severus’ bedroom. There she had to breathe or turn blue, drawing in a whiff of a completely different stink: the sickroom reek of slops and sour sweat that Nicole had first smelled in the room where Umma’s mother died, and then soon after in her own house.

Gaius Calidius Severus had kicked off most of the covers she’d tucked over him the last time she visited. He hadn’t, fortunately, kicked over the chamberpot by the bed. Nicole scooped it up and dumped it out the window. “There,” she muttered. “That’ll be better.”

The sound of her voice made him look in her direction. He wasn’t altogether out of his head with fever, as she had been. But he wasn’t quite connected to the real world, either. He proved it by asking, “What are you doing, Mother?”

“I’m just getting rid of what’s in the chamberpot,” Nicole answered. She didn’t say she was his mother, but neither did she say she wasn’t. If thinking his mother was taking care of him made him feel a tiny bit better, that was good; let him think it.

It didn’t seem to help a lot, if it helped at all. His expression changed; he began to wriggle, and then to thrash. She braced to leap, in case his fever had turned to convulsions, but as suddenly as he’d begun, he lay still. In a small voice full of shame, he said, “Mother, I’m afraid I’ve had an accident.”

Nicole’s nose would have told her as much: the stink in the room had worsened, even though the chamberpot was empty. “Don’t worry about it,” she said soothingly. “I’ll take care of it.” Did he think he was a little boy just learning to use the pot? Or did he know how old he was, but not who she was? It didn’t really matter. Either way, she had to clean him off, just as, last summer, he’d done for her.

In a way, it wasn’t too awfully different from changing Justin’s diaper after an especially messy load. In another, it was completely different. Gaius Calidius Severus was emphatically and rather impressively made like a man, not a boy. No wonder Julia likes him, Nicole thought through the slight vertigo of trying not to breathe. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she reassured him. “Everything will be all right.”

When he was as clean as he was going to be, and the remains tossed out the window with the rest, she let her hand rest for a moment against his cheek. As soon as she’d done it, she wished she hadn’t. She didn’t really want to know how high his fever was. But he let out a sigh and leaned very lightly against her palm. Maybe it was cool; maybe it comforted him. Either way, he seemed a little better, a little less troubled.

She spooned soup into him. When he’d taken all he was going to take, which was about a third of the bowl, she poured a cup of wine and held it to his lips. He coughed and spluttered. With a faint sigh, she dipped the spoon into that, too, and got it into him more successfully. One small swallow at a time, he did pretty well, all things considered: he took more than he had the last time, and much more than the time before that. It was progress. She’d take it.

Just as she was about to leave, when she thought he’d fallen asleep, he roused enough to speak. “Thank you, Mistress Umma.”

She turned in surprise. He still sounded like hell, but he knew who she was.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, more to be saying something than for any other reason. She knew how he felt: as if he had one whole foot and three toes of the other in the grave. She’d felt the same way herself not so long before.

“Terrible,” he answered, right on cue. He sounded it. He looked it. But he had recognized her, and that was a big step forward. He yawned. “Do you mind if I sleep?”

“Not even a little bit,” Nicole said warmly. That was good; oh, that was very good indeed. She’d slept, too, slept and slept, after she came out of her delirium. She’d awakened feeling lousy, but she’d been on the mend. Maybe he was, too.

She hated to leave him, but she had the tavern to run, and Julia was waiting. She broke the news as soon as she’d passed the door. Julia clapped her hands in delight. “Maybe we’ve turned the corner,” she said. “Maybe we’ve turned the corner at last.”

“Please,” Nicole said, not knowing Whom she was entreating, and not much caring, either, “let it be so.”

Gaius Calidius Severus lived. The first time he came across the street on his own, he looked like a tattered shadow of his usually vigorous self. But he was up and moving, and that was all that really mattered. Nicole gave him a plate of fried snails and a cup of Falernian, and wouldn’t take an as for any of it. “Your father knew how far he’d get, arguing with me,” she said when he tried to protest. “Are you going to give me trouble now?”

“No, Mistress Umma,” he said meekly. He ate obediently, and drank, with the little widening of the eyes everyone got at the first wonderful taste of Falernian.

Julia sauntered past his table, putting everything she had into it, which was quite a lot. He didn’t look up from the wine. Well, Nicole thought, he isn’t quite back to normal yet. A little while longer, and a little way to go. But he was well on track, and that was good enough.

New Year’s was celebrated not with horns and paper hats but with clay lamps stamped with the two-faced image of Janus. On the morning of the festival, Julia pulled a couple of them from the back of a shelf, dusted them, filled them with oil, and lit them.

“This year,” Nicole said, studying one of the images in the flicker of its flame, “I want to look ahead, not behind. Things will be better. They won’t get worse.”

“May it be so,” Julia said fervently. And after a moment: “The gods know, it would be hard for things to get much worse.”

Half an hour couldn’t have gone by before a funeral procession made its slow way down the muddy street toward Carnuntum’s southwestern gate, the gate that led to the graveyard. Nicole watched it for a moment, then deliberately turned her head. She’d already seen more death in half a year in Carnuntum than in her whole life in the United States. She didn’t want or need to be reminded of it again. Not today. Not when there was a future to look forward to, and a life to live.

Since the day he got up from his bed to savor snails and Falernian, Gaius Calidius Severus had come over every day at about the same time. He was back to paying for his own food and drink, which dropped him down to bread and oil and onions and two-as wine, but he professed himself happy with it.

Today Nicole served him with a flourish, and gave him a smile to go with it. Death doesn’t win every time, she thought.

Better and better: he took longer to eat than he might have, because his eye kept turning toward Julia. Nicole felt the smile stretch — not the least bit lessened by the small shock of realization. She was glad to see his tongue hanging out over her freedwoman again. It was another sign of his recovery — another sign of life, as it were.

That evening, she was presented with a different sign of life, and not a pleasant one, either. The tooth that had been hurting in a low-grade, steady way ever since she found herself in Umma’s body decided it had had enough. Between one heartbeat and the next, a demon picked up a hammer and started trying to drive a tenpenny nail into her lower jaw. It didn’t succeed on the first blow, or yet on the tenth. It was going to keep hammering away, it was clear, for as long as it took.

She’d been eating supper with Lucius and Julia. Julia was still in a daze, smiling dreamily — no doubt remembering her hour upstairs with Gaius Calidius Severus. Lucius, however, was alert, a little too much so. He left off babbling about his latest triumph with the game board, fixed her with a penetrating stare, and asked, “What’s the matter, Mother? You look awful.”

“Toothache,” Nicole said thickly. “Bad toothache.” She twisted her tongue back toward the throbbing tooth and prodded it as hard as she dared. The flesh there was hotter than it should have been, and felt puffy and loose. She nearly gagged at the taste. Without even thinking, she thrust fingers into her mouth and tried to twist the tooth a little, to make it more comfortable. That was a mistake. The demon gave up on hammering nails and resorted to railroad spikes. The tavern went dark for a moment — a darkness that had nothing to do with bad weather, three-o’clock sunset, or miserable excuses for lamps.

She sank down onto a stool. If one hadn’t been close by, she would have settled for the floor. She would have sunk down through that, if it made the pain go away. But of course the pain had no intention of doing any such thing. It had moved in, lock, stock, and railroad spike.

Her fingers had snapped back as soon as the pain hit the red zone. She stared down at them. The tip of her index finger was smeared with something thick, semiliquid, and grayish yellow. After a moment of pure blankness, she recognized it. “Pus,” she said, which could have been either Latin or English. Whichever language it was in, it was not good news. She had to struggle to go on in Latin: “I’ve got an abscess back there.”

Julia shuddered. “Oh, Mistress! That’s not good. No, not good at all. I’m afraid you’ll have to have it pulled. If you don’t, it will keep on festering, and as it festers it will spread. You’ll lose a whole lot of teeth. You could even die.”

“Right!” said Lucius with altogether too much relish. “All your teeth fall out, and it festers and festers, and you fall over dead.”

Nicole narrowly resisted the urge to smack him. “Thank you so much, both of you,” she said frostily — but not through clenched teeth. That would have hurt like hell.

The worst of it was, she knew Julia was right. She shuddered just as Julia had. Even in Los Angeles, an abscessed molar wouldn’t have been fun. But a dentist in Los Angeles would have had novocaine or a general anesthetic for the pulling, and pain pills for the aftermath. She would have had antibiotics to shrink the abscess, and sterile instruments and rubber gloves and a surgical mask to keep infection away.

A Roman dentist wouldn’t be a she. A Roman dentist wouldn’t have any of those things, either antisepsis or analgesics.

And it didn’t matter. Whatever a dentist could do to her, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what her own tooth was putting her through. She shuddered again at the thought of what she faced tomorrow, but living with this hammering pain would be far, far worse.

She even thought, for a longish while, of finding someone to do the job tonight. But it was dark already, and rain was dripping off the eaves. From the sound of it, it was turning to sleet. No way she could venture out in that, nor was any dentist likely to want to try it, even if she’d had a way to get him over here without sending herself or one of her family out into the dark and the wet.

She had to get drunk before she could sleep that night. The wine didn’t make the pain go away, but it did shove it off to one side. As long as she didn’t have to stare it in the face, she could cope. Mostly. If she had another cup of the one-as wine. And another to chase that one down, because it tasted so godawful. Then a third, just because. And…

She woke long before sunrise. Her body was a perfect symmetry: a pounding headache exactly matched the toothache. She stumbled downstairs, lit a lamp with shaking hands, and drank another cup of wine. It tasted just as horrible as she’d expected. She poured another cup, but couldn’t bring herself to drink it. She nursed it instead, hunched miserably on a stool, until at long last a gray and leaden light filtered through the slats of the shutters.

Julia’s robust footfalls on the stairs beat a counterpoint to the pounding in her head and the throbbing in her mouth. She glowered at the freed-woman.

“Oh my,” Julia said. “It’s too bad the pestilence got Dexter. He was supposed to be very good at pulling teeth.”

Nicole wanted to knock Julia’s head off, and her bright, healthy voice with it, but she chose to focus instead on the words, and on the thoughts behind them. Focusing helped. “There’s that physician named Terentianus,” she said, “not far from the market square. I’ve gone by his place often enough.”

Julia shrugged. “I haven’t heard much about him, good or bad,“ she said. “If he’s still alive, you might as well try him. They’re all pretty much the same.”

That wasn’t true in L.A. It was sure to be an even greater lie in Carnuntum, which had no licensing arrangements of any sort. Here, if you hung out a sign and said you were a doctor, you were. Even the good doctors here were pathetically bad. The bad doctors were right out of the ballpark.

But Nicole didn’t have an awful lot of choice. Her tooth had grown worse as the morning went on. Her whole body ached in sympathy. “If he’s still breathing,” she said, “I’ll try him.”

He was in the shop — office didn’t quite seem to fit — that she’d seen so often: a skinny little man with a nose that looked even larger than it was, because the rest of him was so small. He greeted Nicole with a nearsighted scowl and an audible sigh as she told him her trouble. “Step out into the light and let me see,” he said.

Passersby veered off course and paused to gape while Terentianus positioned her in a convenient patch of sunlight — imagine; sunlight, and she was in too much pain to enjoy it — and peered into her mouth. “Yes,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Yes, yes. Bad, very bad. I’m afraid — yes, it will have to come out.”

“Why should you be afraid?” she snapped. “It’s not your tooth.”

He looked startled, but then he laughed. He had a remarkably pleasant and infectious laugh. “Oh!” he said. “Good, that’s very good. I’ll have to remember it.” Which meant, no doubt, that he’d be boring people with it for the next twenty years. After a brief pause, he added, “My fee is one denarius. Payable in advance.”

Nicole had had the forethought to bring a purse with her — no health insurance here. She laid four sesterces in his waiting hand. As they disappeared into the depths of his belt pouch, she said, “I don’t suppose anybody ever wants to pay you afterwards.”

“Not likely,” he agreed dolefully. Then he gave her a prescription that no twentieth-century dentist would have resorted to: “You see Resatus’ tavern there, across the street? Go on over. Drink three cups of wine, neat, as fast as you can. Then come back. I’ll give you a draught of poppy juice. As soon as that takes effect, I’ll pull the tooth.”

He wanted her as numb as she could get. She gave him credit for that.

The tavern was a somewhat larger place than her own, and somewhat more upscale: she paid two asses for her own one-as wine, and it was served in Samian ware. Resatus himself took her order, and gave her a good dose of sympathy with it. “Another one of Terentianus’ patients, are you?” he said. “Good luck to you, then.”

She thanked him with somewhat less than complete sincerity, and drank the wine down doggedly, cup after overpriced cup.

When she made her way to Terentianus’ shop, her feet wanted to go off in a different direction altogether. She’d never been drunk in the morning before. It was a peculiar sensation. All the shadows were pointing the wrong way. But then, being drunk itself was peculiar. Till she came to Carnuntum, she’d never known what it was like. She wished to the innumerable Roman gods that she didn’t have to do it at all.

Terentianus regarded her wobbly stance and bleary eyes with somber approval. He rummaged in a box under a table, and produced a small jar of murky blue glass. “Here. Drink this down. It won’t be long now till it’s over.”

Nicole didn’t know if she liked the sound of that. She took a deep breath, to steady herself, and nearly heaved up the wine she’d drunk; but it stayed put. She pulled out the stopper and saluted Terentianus: Bottoms up.

The stuff was thick and syrupy. It tasted of wine and, overpoweringly, of the poppyseeds on the egg bread her mother would buy every once in a while, when she could scrape up the extra cash for something tastier than Wonder or Langendorf. The memory kept her, somehow, from gagging on it. Terentianus waved her to a stool by the window. She drifted rather than walked to it, and sat when he told her to, because she couldn’t think of anything better to do. The poppy juice — opium, yes — struck her a stronger yet softer blow than the wine had. She felt sleepy and stupid and floaty. The pain backed away, never quite absent, but not quite present, either. The effect was a little like CoTylenol, and a little like being drunk out of her skull. Somewhere far away and yet very near, there was still pain, a great deal of it. But it didn’t touch her.

She yawned. The poppy juice, so full of sleep, reminded her that she’d slept hardly at all the night before.

She didn’t notice when Terentianus left the shop. She did notice when he came back with a pair of burly strangers. She stared at them in dreamy confusion. “Who are they?” she asked. Her tongue felt thick; the words sounded slurred. “Why are they here? Do they have toothaches, too?”

“They’re to hold you down, of course,” Terentianus said calmly. He gestured. One of the men got behind Nicole in one long stride. Before she could move, he seized her arms. The other squatted beside her and got a grip on her legs. She struggled feebly, but they were immovable. Altogether, the preparations seemed more conducive to rape than to dentistry.

If she’d been even slightly less gone in wine and the drug, she would have tried to fight her way out of there. But she was helpless. If the doctor was into raping his patients, there was not one thing she could do about it.

Terentianus loomed over her. He was fully and warmly clothed, and no sign of any erection, either. What he held was far worse. It looked like nothing so much as a large pair of needle-nosed pliers. “Open up,” he said. “The sooner it’s begun, the sooner it’s over.”

Nicole took a deep, steadying breath, and opened her mouth as wide as it would go. The dental forceps advanced inexorably, till her eyes crossed in trying to follow it. It wasn’t chrome-plated or shiny. It was plain gray-black iron, unrusted at least. She didn’t even want to know how unsanitary it was.

She clamped her eyes shut as it disappeared into her mouth. She could taste it, the cold, metallic taste of iron. It closed on the bad tooth: pressure, and the beginning of a twinge. Before she could jerk away, Terentianus’ left hand braced on her forehead, holding her steady. He grunted, gathering himself. He pulled.

Pain. No, pain. No — PAIN!

No wonder he’d brought in hired muscle, she’d think later, when she had any room in her for thought. At that moment, all she wanted was to rip out his balls and stuff them down his throat. Or if that wasn’t enough, beat him to a bloody pulp. Then maybe — maybe — he’d feel a tenth of the pain he inflicted on her.

She tried to lunge to her feet and run like hell. Hands like iron bars held her down. One of the thugs grunted: she was fighting good and hard. Maybe she’d caught him somewhere that mattered.

Wine or no wine, poppy juice or no poppy juice, the pain drove her right out of her mind. She heard, far away, a bubbling, half-choked scream. That was her own voice. She didn’t even get the gift of unconsciousness. She was awake, aware, and hideously alert.

After an eternity of white-hot agony, she heard and felt a snap. Her eyes snapped open. Terentianus staggered back with something clenched in the forceps: the cartoon-simple shape of a tooth, with a horror-comic smear of pus and blood. Blood flooded Nicole’s mouth, thick and foul. She spat scarlet, barely missing the grinning bastard who held her legs.

Terentianus stood back, safely out of reach, and examined his prize. “Very nice,“ he said. “Very neat job, if I say so myself.” He fished around in a basket and handed Nicole a square of wool that must have been part of a tunic once, long ago. “Here you are. Keep it pressed to the wound until the bleeding stops. Rinse your mouth out with wine two or three times a day — it will heal better if you do. You might say a prayer or two to Aesculapius, see if it helps. It certainly couldn’t hurt.”

Nicole spat again, another bright splash of blood on the rammed-earth floor. The ape who’d held her arms not only let her go, he gave her a sympathetic pat on the back. “It’s not easy,” he said. “Terentianus did one of mine a couple of years ago, and it hurt like a red-hot poker.”

She stared blankly at him. Sympathy was the last thing she’d expected, and just about the last thing she wanted. She couldn’t bring herself to thank him. She nodded, which was the best she could do, and spat once more, and took the cloth from Terentianus. Her hand trembled uncontrollably. The pain had diminished a little, but it still lapped at every corner of her world. Wine and poppy juice had taken the edge off her toothache. Against the pain of this minor surgery, they were no better than a child’s sand-dike against a tidal wave.

Terentianus patted her shoulder lightly. “Sit there as long as you need to,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”

Good thing he didn’t charge by the hour, she thought. She was vaguely aware of him thanking his helpers, paying them an as apiece, and sending them on their way. The cloth turned more nearly red than gray. Little by little, the bleeding slowed. She should go, she thought. She should get back to the tavern. She stood up. Her head reeled. She sat down again, in a hurry.

A fat man stalked through the door, backed Terentianus up against a table, and let go with a litany of complaint about his hemorrhoids. “That cream you gave me didn’t do a bit of good,” he said indignantly.

Terentianus might be cornered, but he wasn’t cowed. “It’s the best I have, Pupianus,” he said. “The only other choice is the scalpel.”

“No, thank you!” the fat man said with the air of a man who knew what he wanted and, more to the point, what he didn’t. “I’m not letting anybody near me with a knife, and that’s flat.”

Terentianus shrugged. Pupianus balled up his fists and looked ready to challenge him to a round, but clearly thought better of it. With a loud snort and a stamp of his foot, he turned and stalked out.

Nicole knew exactly how he felt. If she hadn’t been ready to fall over with pain, she wouldn’t have let Terentianus near her with his forceps, either.

She wasn’t in pain any longer. She was in agony. The pain wouldn’t have gone away if she hadn’t had the tooth pulled. She could only pray that the agony would fade.

After a while, the length of which she was never exactly sure of, she found she could get to her feet and stay there. Terentianus had been watching her between patients: he had a damp cloth waiting, to wipe her face. It came away stained rusty red. “You were brave,” he told her.

“You bet I was,” she said thickly. The wine and the opium were still in her, making it very hard to care what she said. She pressed a hand to her throbbing jaw — which didn’t make it feel better, but kept it from feeling worse as she moved — and headed for the door. Terentianus didn’t try to stop her. He was probably glad to see the last of her.

As she made her slow, painful way back to the tavern, with every step sending a fresh twinge through the empty socket, she found some degree of distraction in the graffiti on the walls. There seemed to be a lot of them, and many of that lot seemed to be Christian. At first she thought her bleared eyes were playing tricks, but it was hard to mistake the two curved strokes of the fish, or a row of crosses with something biblical scrawled beneath. She found herself standing with her nose almost pressed to a wall full of such scribblings. The letters writhed and wriggled, but even so, they made a disturbing lot of sense. They were all about the Last Judgment, and they were downright ferocious. Their tone might have given even a Pentecostal preacher pause.

This wasn’t her Christianity. Hers, insofar as she had anything to do with it, was a lukewarm thing: Christmas, Easter, and a few rote prayers muttered out of habit. The one Christian she’d met here gave her the creeps, and these graffiti were worse. They didn’t make her think of Sunday quiet. They made her think of terrorists. Just like some of the more extreme Arab sects, these Christians wanted the next world so badly, they didn’t care what they did to this one.

She stood by the wall, hand pressed to her jaw, and stared blankly at a drawing of a man on a cross, with blood gushing from his numerous wounds. Some wag had added an enormous, equally effusive phallus. It was blasphemy, part of her said; but in this world, in this context, she couldn’t be as appalled as she should have been.

Particularly with reality staring her in the face. She hadn’t been one bit better than the wild-eyed fanatics who scrawled this graffito. Like them, she’d paid too little attention to this world and the things of this world. Just as with everything else in the country and the century she was born in, she’d taken decent medical care for granted. Then Fabia Ursa died; then the pestilence came; and now, on a far smaller but much more immediate scale, this cursed tooth had shown her, in detail, just how far medical science still had to go. Terentianus was perfectly competent by local standards, she was sure. He’d done what needed doing, done it as well and as fast as he could, and caused her as little pain as possible. He couldn’t help it that he knew nothing of antisepsis, next to nothing of analgesics, and nothing whatsoever of antibiotics.

Enough.

She had, at last, hit a wall. She’d been living from day to day, moment to moment, surviving, coping, even — sometimes — managing to enjoy this world she’d wished herself into. She’d been remarkably passive, when she stopped to think about it. A few doubts, some midnight regrets, a lot of culture shock and plain old all-American squeamishness — she’d had all of that. But she hadn’t ever really got up enough sheer force of feeling to wish herself away. It was all, however marginally, preferable to the life she’d left behind — even if she didn’t quite, ever, find the time or energy to change the things about the world she’d thought she’d change, back when she first arrived in Carnuntum. She could make herself think so, at any rate, if she tried hard enough.

It hadn’t really been real to her. That was the trouble. Even the deaths she’d seen — those people had been dead for eighteen centuries before she was even born. She’d felt them as she might have felt deaths in a book, with grief, yes, and real pain, but at a slight remove.

But one by one, blow by blow, they’d cracked through the shell that protected her. A good part of that was selfishness; she admitted it. Frank had said that of her before he walked out on her — one of his many pointed little gems of wisdom: “You don’t really care about anybody else. You say you do, you recite all the words, put on all the expressions. But when it comes right down to it, there’s nobody in your world but you. “

It was justice of a sort, then, that the last straw had been something that affected only her: an encounter with real, personal, private pain.

No matter where it came from, or how. She’d had enough. She’d learned her lesson. She was finished. With all her heart and soul, and with all her aching and abused flesh, she wished herself away. Back. Home to that other world, long and far removed from Carnuntum.

She squeezed her eyes tight and wished till her head pounded and her jaw screamed for mercy. Nothing.

Somewhere in delirium, while she was ill with the pestilence, she’d begged Liber and Libera to send her back to Los Angeles. She’d got a busy signal then, and then forgotten, till now. Till she knew beyond any doubt that she wanted out.

Well, she thought. When the line was busy, you hit the redial button, or put the phone on autodial, and kept on trying. And since this wasn’t exactly a line, and what she wanted was as close to magic as made no matter — what made this kind of magic work? Magic ring, phantom tollbooth, ruby slippers…

The plaque. She’d clean forgotten. The plaque she’d bought on her honeymoon and kept by her bed in West Hills. She’d focused on it, hadn’t she? She’d prayed to the gods whom she’d never have known if they hadn’t been depicted on that one piece of faux antiquity.

Or was it false? What if it was real? It seemed preposterous, but what if, somehow, the maker of the reproductions had made a mistake, and shipped the original with the copies? What if she’d been sold, not a reproduction, but an actual late-Roman votive plaque? What if that was the key?

In the fever of discovery, she almost forgot how much pain she was in. She pushed herself away from the wall she’d been leaning against all this time, and looked around with eyes that saw almost clearly. Somewhere along here, she seemed to remember, was a stonecutter’s shop.

Yes, there it was, right in the next block — as if it had been placed there specifically for her need. Samples of the stonecutter’s work were laid out along the front of the shop, propped against the wall. Some were headstones; he’d probably done a land-office business in those while the pestilence raged in Carnuntum. The sample stones were distinguished by gender: a soldier, a woman in a tunic. There were even partial inscriptions, stock phrases awaiting the insertion of a name.

And yes, he had a selection of votive plaques, dedicated to a wide variety of gods and goddesses. None of those on display was inscribed to Liber and Libera.

She quelled the sinking in her stomach. Maybe he had one inside. If not, he could make one. She didn’t have to drift passively through this life. She could take matters into her own hands: manufacture, or have manufactured, her own way home. If she couldn’t change this world, she might still escape it.

She went boldly into the dim space with its odors of stone dust and old sweat, and asked her question in a voice that wasn’t too mushy, she didn’t think. He’d been picking away at a bit of garland on a tombstone, but when she spoke he looked up a little sharply; saw what had to be a heroically swollen face; and blinked once before resorting to a bland expression. “What, Riper and — oh; Liber. Yes, Liber and Libera. There’s one right here — two, actually, now I stop to think. People are right fond of Liber and Libera, likely ‘cause they’re right fond of what they’re god and goddess of.” He winked at her as if he expected her to share the joke, and pulled a pair of plaques from among the many on the wall behind him. “Here you are. Take your pick.”

Neither one was the plaque, the one she’d bought on her honeymoon. One was larger, one was smaller, both were rather cruder work. She eyed them in disappointment. Didn’t magic need a solid link between her now and her then? Preferably the same link?

Still, she thought with robust twentieth-century skepticism, would it be necessary? If she was making her own future, then all that mattered should be that the plaque was like the one she’d used to bring herself here.

Or she could have one made. But, from the look of the shop, he was backed up for weeks; and she couldn’t wait. She wanted out now. “I like the smaller one better,” she said firmly. “What do you want for it?”

“That one?” The stonecutter considered. “Ten sesterces ought to do it.”

Distracted by pain and fogged by wine and poppy juice as she was, Nicole remained astonished. The limestone from which he’d carved the plaque was surely cheap, but he couldn’t set much value on his own labor — either that, or he’d turned out the piece much faster than she would have thought possible. On the other hand, he wasn’t inclined to haggle, and she’d been too badly battered to bargain as hard as she would have otherwise. She paid him eight sesterces and a couple of asses in lieu of a dupondius. got him to throw in a piece of sacking to wrap her purchase in, and carried it home with as much care as if it had been made of glass.

Julia greeted her with a cry of dismay. “Mistress! You’ve got blood all over your tunic.”

Nicole looked down at herself. She hadn’t even noticed. No wonder the stonecutter had looked at her so oddly. He must have thought her husband had belted her a good one — and she was buying off the gods of wine to soften him up the next time he polished off a jar or two or three.

At least she knew a cure for blood on wool. “Cold water,” she said, “that’s what it needs. And wine.”

“Wine?” Julia frowned. “Wine doesn’t do a thing for bloodstains.”

“The wine is for me,” Nicole said. She sat at a table near the bar — nearly falling the last inch or two onto the bench — and uncovered the plaque so that Julia could see it. “I’ll give Liber and Libera a little, too.”

Julia seemed excited all out of proportion to the occasion. It must have been a slow day for Julia, upstairs as well as down. “Let me see!” she said eagerly. She didn’t wait for Nicole to finish making her way through the stools and benches and tables. She negotiated the course with more agility than Nicole could have managed just then, and peered at the low relief. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. We could use a god or two to watch over us. ‘

If they watch over me as well as I’d like, Nicole thought, I won’t be here.

The thought was both delicious and — to her amazement — sad. Julia had been to the baths today, and found a clean tunic somewhere, too. She smelled as good as anyone in Carnuntum could. She was warm, standing next to Nicole, and solid, and somehow comforting. Julia, however unwitting, had been absolutely invaluable in showing Nicole how to cope with this world she’d found herself in. They weren’t friends, not exactly; friends were equals. Employer and employee? Somewhat more than that. Allies. Comrades in arms.

Nicole was going to miss Julia. The thought was so astonishing that she almost forgot to keep it to herself. The thudding ache in her jaw saved her. She must have clenched her teeth; she was struck with a sudden, piercing stab of pain. “Wine,” she said again, tightly. Julia gasped a little, as if she’d clean forgotten, and ran to fetch a cup.

Terentianus had told Nicole to rinse her mouth with it. He hadn’t told her it would feel as if she’d drunk gasoline and then thrown in a lighted match. She whimpered. Her eyes filled with tears of pain. Nevertheless, she gulped the stuff down. The second swallow wasn’t quite so bad. The damage was done; pain had gone into overload.

When the cup was almost empty, Nicole wet her forefinger with the dregs and smeared a little on Liber’s mouth, and a little on Libera’s.

Julia shook her head and smiled. “I never saw anybody give them a drink quite that way, Mistress. But I’ll bet they like it.”

“I hope they do,” Nicole said. She hadn’t been thinking before she did it, she’d just done what seemed appropriate. She was lucky. If she’d crossed herself backward, everyone in church would have known she was no Catholic. Here, what she’d done wasn’t wrong, just different. The cult of Liber and Libera, it seemed, didn’t have as many rules as the Christianity in which she’d grown up.

The Christianity they had here — did it have rules, aside from terrorist graffiti and apocalyptic mania? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And if she did happen to learn the answer, she had every intention of doing it from the twentieth century.

She drank a lot of wine that day. With each cup, she gave the stone god and goddess their share. If the wound got infected after all that, then the germs that did the job would be cutting through the alcohol bath in wetsuit and swim fins.

She drank a double cup, one of the cups she kept for her thirstiest customers, before she went upstairs to bed. Maybe, just maybe, it would dull the pain enough to let her sleep. She was in a fog as it was, drifting as if underwater, bouncing gently off walls and furniture. But the heart of the fog was a red and throbbing pain.

Sleep was as elusive as she’d feared. She couldn’t even toss and turn: it hurt too much. She lay as still as she could on the thin, lumpy mattress, and did her best to ignore the tiny stabs and stings of the vermin that inhabited it. She’d brought the plaque up with her, and propped it on the chest of drawers where she could see it from the bed. Liber and Libera. she prayed, take me back to my own time. Take me back to my own world. I don’t belong here. I was wrong to pray as I prayed. Please, make it right. You granted one prayer of mine. Only grant this one. and I’ll never trouble you again.

She couldn’t tell if she was getting through. The wine couldn’t do what the fever had done, blur the boundaries between the waking world and the world the gods inhabited. All it did was dull her reflexes and slow her mind, and drop her at last into a sodden sleep.

She drifted off in a dream of electric lights and chlorinated water, automobiles and stereos, antibiotics and, oh God, anesthetics, telephones and television, supermarkets and refrigerators, soap and insecticides and inner-spring mattresses. And — yes, yes indeed — equality under the law, whatever it might be in actual practice. If the gods were kind, if she’d worked the — magic? — rightly, she’d wake in a deliciously soft, heavenly clean bed in the century that was, after all she’d done to escape it, the one and only century for her.

She woke, yes. On a rough and scratchy, redolent and verminous mattress, in a century long before the one in which she was born, in the Roman city of Carnuntum.