Household Gods

16

It was a bitter waking, but Nicole had no intention of giving up. She’d storm heaven if she had to. Every night, with wine and impassioned prayer, she called on the god and goddess. She smeared their lips with wine, she left a cup of wine in front of their plaque, she drank more wine than she rightly should have. She was sincere. She was devoted. She wanted, above anything in this world, to go home.

And every morning, as surely as the sun rose over the eastward wall of Carnuntum, she woke in Umma’s bed, in Umma’s body. The gods were ignoring her, or else, as she began to fear, actively refusing to grant her prayer.

They’d brought her here. They could damned well send her home again.

Julia approved of this sudden access of piety. “We’re sure to have better luck around here now,” she said. Julia had two mottoes: Never ask questions and Always look on the bright side. Manumission hadn’t done a thing to change either of them.

That much Nicole had given her: her freedom. Umma, when she came back to this body, if she came back to it — small dark difficult thought, there, quickly suppressed — couldn’t legally undo what Nicole had done. It was a good thing, a decent gift to leave behind.

Nicole wasn’t ever tempted to stay. The one real friend she’d had here, Titus Calidius Severus, was dead. Lucius was Umma’s child, not her own, though yes, she’d miss him. Julia, too, and young Gaius, and one or two others. She was fond of them as she might have been of people she met on a long vacation, but with the sense, always, that this was their world and not hers; that whatever happened here, it was temporary. She wasn’t going to live out her days here.

Liber and Libera were silent, though their plaque was smeared with wine and the cup in front of it had been filled and refilled and filled again. Nicole, in the beginning of despair, prayed to the God she’d grown up with, the God whose followers in second-century Carnuntum seemed so much like twentieth-century extremists. He gave her no more answer than the Roman deities had. He was angry at her, she was sure, for having other gods before Him. Or maybe the Christians here and now were shouting so loud, they drowned her out.

She hadn’t wanted anything or wished for anything so strongly or with such concentrated determination since — when? Since she passed the bar, at the very least. Even the prayer that had brought her here was a dim and halfhearted thing beside this.

I made it one way, she thought on waking up yet again on the hard narrow bed in the upstairs bedroom behind the tavern. There has to be a way for me to go back.

The legally trained part of her mind pointed out that there didn’t have to be any such thing: hadn’t she ever heard of a one-way ticket? The rest of her was damned if that was the case. Really, truly, literally damned.

Slowly, reluctantly, and almost unregarded, the hole in the back of her mouth healed. When it was finally gone, she found herself free of pain for the first time since she’d come to Carnuntum.

The difference it made was amazing. “I should have had that tooth pulled a long time ago,“ she said one day in the dead of winter, a long way still from spring.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” Julia responded, looking up from the dough she was kneading. “They say it afterwards, yes, but before? You couldn’t get a one of them near the nice man with the forceps in his hand.”

Remembering the burly man holding her arms and the other one grabbing her legs, remembering the forceps in her mouth and the roots of the molar tearing out of her jawbone, Nicole shuddered. “You are right,” she conceded. “You are too right.”

That afternoon — a fine one, as winter days went, with the temperature probably in the high forties and the sun peering out between spatters of rain — some very unusual customers swaggered into the tavern. The room that had always seemed, if not spacious, then large enough to swing a cat in, was suddenly not much larger than a closet.

There were only three of them, though at first there seemed to be more: big men, burly, and ripe even by the standards of this age. They were Germans, no doubt about it, Marcomanni or Quadi, she couldn’t tell which. They ordered wine in Latin with a distinct accent, guttural but understandable.

“One-as, two-as, or Falernian for four asses?” she asked, warily but crisply. As had the tribesmen in the market square, they surveyed the place as if they owned it. If they drew their swords and demanded the cash box, she couldn’t do much but hand it over. Really, when she stopped to think, it was a wonder she hadn’t ever been robbed or mugged — crime here was low, though not nonexistent.

Nor was she about to become a statistic now. One of the Germans set a shiny silver denarius on the bar. “Falernian,” he said. The others nodded, tripling the order. “And you will give us bread and raisins and smoked pork to eat with it.” That was an order, and in more ways than one.

Nicole kept her temper. She nodded curtly, bringing to bear the skills she’d acquired perforce, for dealing with obnoxious customers. They’d given her money instead of simply taking what they wanted — that went a long way toward easing her temper.

She looked around for Julia, but the freedwoman had made herself scarce. If these bruisers from beyond the Danube wanted a little ripe woman with their smoked pork, they weren’t going to get it. Nicole was somewhat annoyed: she’d have welcomed backup, and some help filling plates and cups and bowls. But Julia had made it clear when she was manumitted that while she’d cheerfully sell her body, she wasn’t about to sell it to just anyone.

And if they took a fancy to a skinny black-haired piece with a missing tooth?

Not likely, Nicole thought grimly. Nor were they eyeing her in that particular way. They emptied their bowls and licked them clean, and ordered another round of Falernian, with another denarius to pay for it.

“Wine,” one of them said in reverent tones. “Wine is… good.” The others nodded as if he’d said something profound.

Nicole set a sestertius on the bar as change. The man pushed it back. “No. Give us more bread and meat and raisins. Tell us when we need to give you more money for it.”

Nicole nodded again, more warmth in the gesture now — the professional warmth any businessperson offered to big spenders. “Would you like some olive oil to go with your bread?”

They all made faces at her, the same sort of faces Lucius and poor Aurelia had made when she suggested they drink milk. “Olive oil is not good,” said the one who’d declared that wine was. “Have you butter?”

If only, Nicole thought, with a fleeting memory of cold, sweet butter on fresh crusty bread from the bakery near the law offices. She overrode it with the reality she was condemned to. “No, I have no butter. People here like olive oil better.”

She resisted the temptation to tell them to rub the bread in their hair if it was butter they wanted — they were downright rancid with it; she had to hold her breath when she came close. It might offend them. Even worse, they might do it.

The three Germans sighed in unison. “We will eat the bread bare, then,” said the spokesman, whose Latin seemed to be best.

Before long, they laid down another denarius for still more wine and bread and meat. All three coins, unquestionably, were Roman. Nicole held up the third one. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you get so much of my country’s money?”

They smiled. They looked, just then, like the beasts in the amphitheater when they had spotted prey. The one who did most of the talking said, “We have been in the Roman Empire before.” He turned and spoke to his friends in their own language. Nicole caught the word Roman again. He had to be translating the remark. They all laughed.

She didn’t like that laughter. Like the smiles, it seemed… carnivorous. Had these Germans been part of the war farther west? Had they come into the Roman Empire as invaders, robbers, looters? Was that how they’d got their hands on Roman coins?

They were behaving themselves now. Whatever might be happening farther west, things were peaceful in Carnuntum. Nicole couldn’t turn on the evening news and watch the latest videotape of Romans and Germans fighting… wherever they were fighting. Wolf Blitzer was eighteen hundred years away. Without daily reminders, the war felt unreal.

Best change the subject. “Has the pestilence been very bad on your side of the river?”

They talked among themselves for a while, low and somehow urgent, though they were smiling and acting casual. Then the spokesman said, “No, the sickness has not among us been too bad. We have had some among us take ill and die, but not many.”

“I wonder why that is,” Nicole said. At first, it was just another polite phrase. Once it was out of her mouth, however, she really did wonder. She asked, “You don’t live in cities on the other side of the river, do you?”

The two who hadn’t said much — at least one of whom, she suspected, had little or no Latin — conferred with the spokesman again, and shook their heads. He did the talking, as before: “Oh, no. So many people all in one place? Who could imagine that on our side of the river?”

Nicole had all she could do not to laugh in his face. Carnuntum was a real city, no doubt of that. It might have held fifty thousand people, maybe even seventy-five, before the pestilence cut the population by at least a third. What would this solemn German have made of Los Angeles, with three and a half million people in the city, nine million in the county, fourteen or fifteen million in the metropolitan area? For that matter, what would a Roman have made of Los Angeles?

Los Angeles had been horrifying enough for somebody from Indianapolis, which was no small city itself. You could drop Carnuntum into Eagle Creek Park and still have room to run your dog.

“So many people all in one place is not good,” the German said. His friends nodded. So did Nicole, though perhaps not for the same reason. With people more thinly scattered on the northern bank of the Danube, the pestilence wouldn’t have had such a large reservoir in which to flourish. But then the German said, “So many good things all in one place is very fine and wonderful.”

His friends nodded again, in a way Nicole didn’t like. It wasn’t so much admiring as covetous.

At long last, they seemed to have filled up on wine and bread and meat — she’d begun to wonder if each of them had a black hole where his stomach should be. They got up from their stools, belched in an ascending chorus, and swaggered out as they’d swaggered in.

Nicole breathed a sigh of relief. She’d made a good day’s living from them, but she’d been braced for them to start breaking up the place if they had much more to drink. They’d had a look she knew too well: elevated, but not actually drunk. Her father had come home from the bar that way sometimes. If he stayed away from the kitchen cabinet, he wasn’t too bad; he’d go into the den and sit in front of the TV till he fell asleep. But if he went to pull a bottle out of the cabinet, that meant trouble.

The Germans hadn’t been gone five minutes when Julia trotted downstairs and applied herself to making a new batch of bread. “Nice of you to join me,” Nicole said with a sardonic edge.

Julia bent over the bread-bowl, her hair falling forward, hiding her face. Her voice was subdued, as it had been when she was still a slave, and very seldom since. “I’m sorry, Mistress. I couldn’t be in the same room with those — those barbarians. They’re nothing but trouble. If you remember — that pack of Quadi, last year…”

She didn’t go on. Nicole wondered if she was being challenged, if Julia was testing her memory.

Of course not. That was trauma, that set to Julia’s shoulders, and that tension in her fingers. Nicole could easily imagine what kind. “It’s all right,” she said. “I remember.” Which of course was a lie, but not if she’d been Umma.

Julia lifted her head. Her face was as tight as her shoulders, but it eased a little as she looked at Nicole. “I’m glad they didn’t bother you,” she said.

“So am I,” Nicole said. “I could have grabbed a knife, I suppose, and fought them off, or tried to. They might have been too surprised to go for their swords. Or I could have yelled, and all the neighbors would have come running.”

“Like last time?” Julia shook herself hard, and went back to working flour and water and yeast together. “Maybe they’d even have got to you before — “ She stopped. She bent over the dough, attacking it as if it had been a broad and greasy German face. In a very little while, she’d pounded it to a pulp.

Nicole stood where Julia’s words had left her. Rape was too familiar a thing in Los Angeles, too; but no neighbors would have come running to the rescue. People didn’t get involved. The most they did, if they did anything at all, was call 911. Or grab a camcorder and go for the media gold. Nevertheless, that was a world she understood. She wanted it back. That night before she went to bed, she prayed to Liber and Libera as she had done for the past however many nights, till the prayer was worn to habit, and the words were turned to ritual. Please, god and goddess. Take me home.

Slowly and reluctantly, winter gave way to spring. After the last snow fell, a hard and driving rain moved in like insult on top of injury. Snow over mud was bearable; the mud froze, and you could cross the street without choking on dust or sinking in muck. To be sure, if it rained, or if there was a thaw and then a freeze, the snow froze into ice, and you slipped and slid and cursed and tried not to fall down and break an elbow or your tailbone. But then snow had a way of falling and making the ice passable again.

Spring rain melted the snow and with it the mud beneath. Every unpaved road in Carnuntum turned into black bean soup. Cold, glutinous, congealed black bean soup, ankle-deep and as apt to suck your boot off as to turn suddenly treacherous and send you skidding into a knot of passersby.

The tag end of winter was a lean time. The storerooms were nearly empty of grain. There were no fresh vegetables to be had, and not much meat on the market that wasn’t salted, smoked, or cured. Nicole didn’t even want to think how much sodium was in each portion that she served out to customers or to her family. There was fish, at least, fresh as well as salt. Fresh fish kept better in this weather, and she bought more of it. Her basic fish fry — olive oil, with crumbs from yesterday’s bread — was rather a popular item. She only wished she’d had some tartar sauce to put on it, or some chips to go with it. Nobody here had ever heard of the potato, though an experiment with onion rings didn’t turn out too badly.

Every time she went to the market, she saw more Germans: big fair men with, now and then, a big fair woman striding robustly alongside. They seemed on their best behavior, but everyone watched them warily. Some of the veterans of the legion that had its encampment a few miles downstream took to wearing swords, which they hadn’t done before.

One men’s day at the baths, Nicole was amazed to see several Marcomanni or Quadi — she still couldn’t tell one tribe from another — coming down the stairs. They looked mightily contented. She wondered how they bathed on their side of the Danube. To her way of thinking, the baths left something to be desired, but her basis of comparison was a hot shower and soap. Compared to a plunge into an icy stream or a half-frozen lake, the Roman baths had to seem like heaven.

A detachment of Roman soldiers in their fancy armor came over from the legionary camp and began patrolling the walls and streets of Carnuntum. Every so often, one or two of them would drop into the tavern.

One day when spring was well advanced, a pair of legionaries came rattling and jangling in just as Nicole finished pouring a round of wine for a tableful of Germans. The air was always vaguely tense when the Germans were in the tavern, but Nicole had learned to ignore the tension.

She couldn’t ignore this. The legionaries didn’t say a word except to order the one-as wine. The Germans, drinking Falernian and paying for it in silver as they always did, went on with their low growl of conversation. Neither side acknowledged the other.

Nobody else spoke, or moved much either. Julia, who hadn’t been able to make herself scarce this time, took refuge in scouring plates and cups and bowls. Lucius helped her, or tried; he kept dropping things. The two or three ordinary customers, trapped in the back and unable to escape without running the gauntlet between the soldiers and the barbarians, nursed whatever they were eating and drinking, and did their best to seem inconspicuous.

The Germans finished their wine, belched — a little louder than usual, maybe — and left. A few minutes later, the legionaries did the same.

As soon as the soldiers were out the door, a long sigh ran through the room. Nicole hadn’t known she was holding her breath till she let it out.

“Phew!” Ofanius Valens said for them all. “Another cup of the two-as for me, Umma. That could have been ugly.”

“It was ugly,” Nicole said.

“It could have been uglier,” he said. He took the cup Nicole had filled for him, thanked her, and drank deep.

Nicole was tempted to keep him company. She’d had precious few brawls in the tavern, and nothing worse than a pair of young idiots going at each other with fists and getting pitched into the street. The Calidii Severi, father and son, had played bouncers that day, she remembered. It still hurt to think of Titus, how he was dead and would never walk through that door again.

She remembered, too, how surprised she’d been, not by the fight, but by the fact that it was the first that had escalated that far. She’d come to Carnuntum convinced that drinking equaled drunkenness and that was that. And drunkenness, she’d been just as sure, had meant a fight — her father sending her mother to the ER yet again, where she’d lie as always, claiming she’d run into a door or fallen down the stairs.

In fact, neither of those assumptions had turned out to be universally or even generally true. Most of her customers drank without getting drunk. Of the ones who did go over the edge, more got friendly or talky or sleepy than got belligerent. She’d made a point of sending the nasty drunks on their way, and making it clear that they weren’t to come back. They’d mostly stayed away, too. “Plenty of other places to get a load of wine,” as one of them had informed her before she booted him out.

She’d been running a tavern in small-town Indiana. And the L.A. gang scene had come to town. “If those barbarians had gone at it with those legionaries,” she said, “it wouldn’t have been a tavern brawl. It would have been a war.”

Ofanius Valens finished off his cup of wine and held it up for another. When Nicole had brought it, and scooped up the dupondius he set on the table, he said, “Yes, it would have been a war. It might have started a fire here to match the one that’s been burning farther west.”

Nicole needed a moment to realize that, whereas she’d been using a figure of speech, Ofanius Valens had meant his words literally. “You don’t really think so, do you?” she said. “We’ve stayed at peace all this time. Why should it all blow up in our faces now?”

“We’ve been at peace, and the gods know I’m glad of it, too,” Ofanius Valens said. “But the gods also know I’ve never seen so many Quadi and Marcomanni in town as I have the past month or so. We’d always get a few: they’d cross the river to buy things in the market or drink in the taverns or just to stare at our fancy buildings. The barbarians couldn’t build a bathhouse like ours in a thousand years.”

“Now, though,” Julia said, “now they look like dogs in front of a butcher’s stall.”

A lean and hungry look, Nicole thought. She’d thought it before, about the Romans in this city, with their thin dark faces — and hadn’t Shakespeare written it about a Roman, now that she stopped to think? But it fit these Germans just as well, in a different way.

She’d thought — she’d been sure — she was getting away from war when she fell back through time. She’d thought — she’d been sure of — all sorts of things when she came to Carnuntum. Very few of them had turned out to be true, or anything close to it. She’d hated the late twentieth century while she was living in it. From the perspective of the second century, it looked like the earthly paradise.

Perspective, she thought, is a wonderful thing.

“We have the wall,” she said. And had she ever stopped to think why Carnuntum had a wall? Very basic principle of legal theory: laws existed to prevent people from doing things to harm other people. A wall wasn’t just there to look pretty and provide a nice high place for lovers to walk on fine summer evenings. It was there for a reason: to keep out nasty neighbors.

Everybody here knew that. They knew something else, too — even the children. “We have the wall,” Lucius agreed, “and the legion.” He slapped the hilt of his toy sword. It was thrust in his belt at the precise angle at which the Roman soldiers wore their real ones.

“That’s not a whole legion,” Ofanius Valens said gloomily, “and what there is of it won’t be enough. They’ll defend their camp first and worry about us afterwards. I’d do the same in their sandals.”

“What I want to know,” Julia said with unaccustomed sharpness, “is why the barbarians won’t leave us alone. We haven’t done them any harm.”

My God, Nicole thought, even here and now, the small and the weak came out with the same cry of protest as they had all through the blood-spattered twentieth century. And yet this was the Roman Empire. It was by no means small, and she’d never heard it was weak. “Don’t the Germans know they’re like a dog fighting an elephant?” she demanded.

Ofanius Valens laughed, but the sound was bitter. “They know they’ve had a fine time plundering Roman provinces and then scurrying back across the river into their forest. Now we’re weak from the pestilence — easy pickings, they’ll be thinking.”

“We drove them out of Aquileia.” Nicole remembered that from her very first, panicky trip to the market square. She still didn’t know exactly where Aquileia was, but what did that matter?

Ofanius nodded. “So we did. And I’d be happier if they’d never got down that far.”

“Maybe everything will come out all right here,” Julia said, reaching for Nicole’s optimism — which Nicole was almost ready to call naivete. “Maybe it will, if the gods stay kind.”

“Here’s hoping it does. “ Ofanius Valens lifted his cup, peered into it, and seemed astonished to find it empty. “Have to do something about that,” he said, and fumbled a couple of asses out of the pouch he wore on his belt. Nicole took the cup and filled it yet again.

“Thank you, Umma,” he said when she set it on the table in front of him. He lifted it once more, wobbling a tiny bit — he’d had three cups, after all. “Here’s to peace, prosperity, and the Germans staying on their side of the river.”

Back in California, Nicole had had an earthquake emergency kit, with blankets and food that would keep, and bottled water and a frying pan and matches and charcoal for the barbecue and a first-aid kit all stored in a plastic trash can and waiting for a disaster she hoped would never come. She wondered if she ought to start a war emergency kit here. And if she did, what would she put in it? So many things she’d taken for granted in California didn’t exist here. She could get together wine and salt fish and olive oil. That would be better than nothing — and if the war held off, she could always sell what was in the kit.

She shook her head. She was as twitchy as a cat on a freeway. The Germans and the legionaries had set everyone’s nerves on edge. Still — there were soldiers in the city where there hadn’t been any before. Someone else, someone who might have reason to know, was twitchy too. Maybe she’d get together that emergency kit after all.

The Marcomanni and the Quadi broke into Carnuntum on a misty spring morning. They used the mist to their advantage, for it kept anyone on the southern bank of the Danube from spying their boats till they were almost ashore.

Nicole was just putting the first loaves of the morning into the oven when the sound of horns throughout the city brought her bolt upright. The fierce brass bray put her in mind of the civil-defense sirens that had wailed on the last Friday of each month when she was a girl in Indiana. If this was a drill, it was awfully realistic. A commotion outside brought her running to the door. People were running up and down the street, shouting and screaming. She picked words out of the tumult: “Marcomanni! Quadi! Germans!” Then even those were lost in the general roar of alarm and dismay and fear.

A squad of legionaries streamed past, running east toward the nearest wall. The iron scales of their armor clattered against one another. They would have sounded much the same if they’d been wearing suits made of tin cans. Nicole wondered if any of them was carrying one of Brigomarus’ shields.

Julia tugged at Nicole’s tunic, urgent as a frightened child. “What can we do, Mistress? Where shall we go? How can we hide?”

Nicole took a deep breath. She’d have loved to cling to someone bigger and stronger, too, but there wasn’t anybody here to take on the job. “I can’t think of a thing to do that we aren’t doing already,” she said. “Let’s just sit tight.”

Julia was white around the edges, and her eyes were wild. She was coping better, at that, than anyone outside.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, ran a fragment of what couldn’t have been a real poem, odds are you don’t understand the situation.

Julia, unfortunately, understood all too well. “If they get into the city, Mistress — “

She didn’t go on. Nor did she have to. Nicole had seen enough televised horror to have some idea of what could happen. She’d never in her wildest nightmares imagined that it might happen to her.

Suddenly, she began to laugh. Julia’s eyes opened even wider. Nicole took the freedwoman by the arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go across the street.” Julia plainly thought she was crazy, but equally plainly was not going to let Nicole out of her sight.

Gaius Calidius Severus was stropping a sword that must have belonged to his father. The edge had already taken on a sheen, striking against the dull gray-black of the blade. He looked up from his work in surprise. “Mistress Umma! Julia! What are you doing here?”

Julia didn’t have any answer for that. Nicole took a deep breath. As always, the fuller and dyer’s shop stank. This once, the ammoniacal reek was not only welcome, it was a blessed inspiration. “If the Germans get into Carnuntum, who knows what they’ll do?” she said. “Whatever it is, I don’t want them doing it to Julia and me.” She beckoned briskly. “Come here, Julia.”

Obedient as if she were still a slave, Julia followed Nicole to a wooden tub in which wool was soaking in stale piss. “Here, dip your arms in it up to the elbow. Splash yourself with it, too,” she said, matching action to words. “If any German wants something from us that we don’t feel like giving, he’ll need a strong stomach.”

Julia gaped. The laughter that burst out of her was half hysterical, but it was laughter. She kissed Nicole on the cheek; the corner of her mouth barely brushed the corner of Nicole’s. “Mistress, how did you ever think of anything so clever?” She plunged her arms into the vat with a good will, and with much less revulsion than Nicole had felt.

“That is clever,” Gaius Calidius Severus said, running a fingertip down the edge of the blade. He frowned, and went back to his stropping.

“Do you know what to do with that thing?” Nicole asked him.

“As much as my father and his friends taught me,” he replied calmly. “Better to use it on the Quadi and Marcomanni than to sit around here till they use their swords on me, don’t you think?” He left off stropping, tested it this time on his arm. It shaved a neat patch of soft black hair. He nodded, satisfied. Before Nicole realized what he was up to, he sprang to his feet and loped out of the shop. “Shut the door behind you when you leave, will you?” he called back over his shoulder.

By the time Nicole pulled the door closed, Gaius Calidius Severus was around the corner and out of sight. “How much chance do you think he has?” she asked Julia.

It wasn’t quite a rhetorical question, and Julia didn’t treat it as such. She shrugged. “Who knows? It’s in the gods’ hands.” Nicole looked down at her own hands, which still stank of sour piss. Julia went on, “If we can keep the barbarians outside the wall, we’ll be all right. If we can’t — “ She shrugged again.

That about summed it up, Nicole thought. She led Julia back across the street.

Lucius was sitting on the stoop, playing with the dice from his Saturnalia gift. As they came within smelling distance, he wrinkled his nose and made as if to push them back into the street. “What have you been doing, swimming in Gaius’ amphorae? You stink!”

“That’s the idea,” Julia said.

“You bet it is,” Nicole agreed. “Nobody messes with a — “ She wanted to say skunk, but Latin lacked the requisite word. She did the best she could:“ — with a polecat.”

“You smell worse than a polecat,” Lucius declared. He got up and ran off — fortunately inside and up the stairs, not out in the panicky streets. Nicole shrugged, sighed, and almost gagged. God, she smelled bad. “We’d better wash our hands,” she said to Julia, “or we’ll make our customers sick.”

“Sick of the way our food tastes, that’s for sure,” Julia said. That wasn’t quite what Nicole had meant, but it wasn’t wrong, either.

As it happened, they had only a handful of customers. The people who weren’t trying to hold the Marcomanni and the Quadi out of Carnuntum were staying close to home.

Nicole couldn’t blame them. She was doing the same thing, and trying to figure out how long the supplies in the tavern would last for her and Lucius and Julia if they couldn’t get any more. She hadn’t stored away the emergency kit — she’d kept putting it off. She swore at herself for not doing it as soon as she thought of it.

It was a tense, watchful day, punctuated by shouts and screams from the direction of the wall, which was only a couple of hundred yards away. Every so often, she or Julia or Lucius or sometimes all of them together would go out into the street and listen to the fighting.

Sometimes a cry would ring clearly through the general din: “Ladders!” or “Look out!” or “There they are!”

Once, a rattling crash startled Nicole half out of her skin. “What in the gods’ name was that?”

“Ladder full of Germans in armor going over, I hope,” Lucius answered.

Nicole hoped so, too. She was astonished to discover how much. She’d been a politically correct, enlightened woman, with a properly modern attitude toward war: A plague on both their houses. But now she was inside one of the houses. Amazing, how much difference that made.

A little before noon, the quality of the noise from the wall changed: it grew both louder and more frantic. A moment later, a man in a torn and filthy tunic came running down the street, shrieking, “The Germans! The Germans are in Carnuntum!”

Nicole was very calm. Calmer than she’d ever thought she’d be. She stayed by the bar where she usually was when business was slow and the chores were done. It happened to be within easy reach of the shelf on which she kept the knives.

Not that she was sure she could use a knife on another human being, or, if she could, whether it would do anything much more than make an attacker angry, but she wanted the option. It made her feel better; and that, in the circumstances, mattered a great deal.

The shouting died down for a while. Then, rather abruptly, it came back in force. The tavern was empty; the last customer had gulped his wine, left half a loaf behind, and headed on home.

Nicole went to the door, shut it and barred it. She turned in the sudden gloom. “Julia, Lucius, shut the side windows,” she said. “We’ll leave the front ones halfway open.” Neither Julia nor Lucius argued with the order. As Julia closed the shutters on one side, she said, “There — now we can see out, but nobody can see in; it’s too dark. That’s clever — as clever as slathering piss on us to keep the barbarians away. You’re lucky, Mistress; you can be clever even when you’re scared to death.”

Not lucky, Nicole thought. Combat-trained in the streets of Los Angeles. And by an awful lot of war movies. Still, she felt a small quiver of pride, one of the very few she’d felt since she came to Carnuntum. Nothing she did might make the least difference, she knew that, but it felt good to do something — and to be admired for it, besides.

Would Umma have been as clever? It was hard to tell, from Julia’s reaction. And Lucius was too scared to notice much, and too busy hiding it to care if his mother was acting out of character again.

Iron clanged on iron, too close for comfort and getting closer fast. It sounded like kids at a construction site, playing let’s-make-the-biggest-racket with lengths of steel reinforcing rod. Which meant — she found that she was breathing too shallowly; she made herself draw a deeper breath — those were swords clashing on swords. And it wasn’t a game. It was real.

Caution would have kept her deep inside the tavern, even upstairs if she’d been truly sensible, but she found herself beside one of the front windows, peering cautiously around the shutter. Julia had done the same, and Lucius crept in under Nicole’s arm like a dog in need of a pat.

A Roman legionary turned at bay in front of the tavern. His helmet was gone, his curly dark hair a wild tangle. He was panting and cursing, both at once. Sweat cut channels of clean olive skin through the dust caked on his face. A big redheaded German hammered at him with a sword that looked twice the size of his short, thick-bladed gladius.

Even so, he was holding his own, even driving the German back with thrusts and stabs of his weapon. Then a second German, loping down the street, took in the situation with the blue flash of a glance, grinned, and hacked him down.

That’s not fair, Nicole thought. As if there were anything fair about the game these men were playing. All’s fair in love and war. Love she’d thought she knew. And this was war.

The big redhead’s sword swung up. It came down with a sound like a cleaver smacking a side of beef. Just like that.

The legionary screamed, a shrill wail like a woman’s, breaking into a wet gurgle. The German’s sword rose and fell, rose and fell.

The second German, who’d stood back to rest and watch, waded in after a while and joined in the butchery. The gray iron of their blades was red with blood. With every stroke, scarlet drops flew wide, spattering the walls and the street.

The redhead stopped first, looked down at the red glistening thing that just a few moments ago had been a man, and said clearly, “Dauths is ist.”

He’s dead, Nicole thought. That’s what it means.

The second German threw in a last, contemptuous blow, laughed — a weird, wild sound — and loped off down the street. The other followed at a trot.

Nicole didn’t want to look down. But she had to. She had to know. The Roman lay in a scarlet pool of blood. His head was almost severed from his body. His arms were hacked almost out of recognition; his armor was split and torn. His bare legs beneath the pleated military kilt were intact and almost unbloodied. And they twitched, grotesquely, as if he were still in some way alive.

No. Not with his head at that angle. He was dead, as the German had said. Very, very dead.

The contents of Nicole’s stomach stayed where they belonged. That surprised her a little. She was keeping it at a distance; closing it off in a small, tight compartment, and sitting firmly on the lid. Eventually she’d blow. But not now and, if she was lucky, not soon.

She could think clearly, therefore, and think through what this meant. Last year in the market square, she’d seen the Marcomanni and Quadi as gangbangers strutting around on enemy turf. If gangbangers killed a cop, the force hunted them down. But what if gangbangers killed off the whole force? That question wasn’t rhetorical, not here. And she was going to learn the answer to it.

After the first two Germans disappeared, others trotted down the street, swords in hand, moving like wolves on the hunt. Some of the blades were bloodied, some not. A few of the barbarians wore the same kind of armor as the legionaries — captured, maybe — and some wore chainmail. Not a few wore simple tunics and trousers, no armor at all except for the dubious protection of a leather vest. They all wore the same expression: fixed, intent, as if they were casing the place. But it was more immediate than that. They were looking for more Roman soldiers to kill.

Julia looked ready to climb into Nicole’s arms, if Lucius hadn’t already been there. “They have the city,” she whispered. Her face was white with fear. “If they have the soldiers’ camp down the river, too, the gods only know when we’ll be rescued. If we ever will. If — we don’t — “ Her voice trailed away.

Lucius hadn’t said a word since before the legionary fell. He slipped out from under Nicole’s arm and ran upstairs. Nicole started after him, but held herself back. If he needed to be alone, she’d let him. She’d go up in a little while and see if he was all right.

But he came down almost as soon as he’d gone up, clutching his wooden sword. Nicole had never liked or approved of it, but she’d never quite got round to taking it away from him. She held herself back now, with an effort that made her body shake. If he needed that comfort, she wouldn’t take it away from him.

He sat on a stool near the back of the tavern, with the sword in his lap. He sat there for a while, stroking the wooden blade.

Suddenly, violently, he flung it away. “It’s just a toy,” he said bitterly. “It can’t hurt a thing, except maybe a fly.”

Nicole walked over and put her arm around him. At first, he tried to shrug her away. Then he clung as he had at the window, and started to cry. The tears were as bitter as his words. She held him close and rocked him as she would have rocked Justin.

People were shouting in the distance, with a new note in it, a new urgency. It was a word, one single word. “Fire!”

For a heartbeat or two, idiotically, she listened for sirens. No fire engines here. God knew what they had; maybe nothing, though more open flames burned here than she’d ever seen in one place. And even if there was something, what could anybody do about it while the city was being sacked?

She glanced at Julia. The freedwoman had looked frightened before. Now she was stiff with terror. “Mistress,” she said in a small, tight voice, “if that gets any closer, we’ve got to run. I’d rather take my chances with the Germans than stay here and burn to death.”

“If the city’s burning,” Nicole said, “the Germans will be running, too.” Nicole took a deep breath, to steady herself, and nodded. “We’ll run if we have to. The shouting’s coming — yes, from the north, and the west, past the market square. The fire may not be able to go around an open space that big.”

“Maybe.” Julia cocked her head, listening. “Yes, north and west — I can hear it, too. I think you’re right. Please the gods, I hope you’re right!”

They sat in the gloom and waited. Nobody spoke. Lucius fidgeted for a while, then pulled his dice out of the pouch at his belt and squatted on the floor, playing a game of one hand against the other. The rattle of dice in the cup and the dull clatter as they rolled out on the floor struck counterpoint to the distant sounds of fighting and of terror.

Nicole sniffed. Did she smell smoke? Of course she smelled smoke. She always did in Carnuntum. No one ran screaming down the street, pursued by the lick of flames. What had Nicole heard once? Fire was fast, yes. Faster than anyone could imagine who hadn’t seen it.

More than once she tensed to jump up, grab whatever she could grab, and take her chances with the Germans. But some remnant of sense kept her where she was. As long as there was no sign of fire nearby, she was infinitely safer behind the barred door of the tavern than running in panic through the streets.

Julia had been sitting still in what might have passed for bovine calm except for the darting of her eyes. “I hope Gaius is all right,” she said suddenly. She spoke young Calidius Severus’ praenomen without self-consciousness. Why not? She’d gone upstairs with him both here and over the dyer’s shop. If that didn’t entitle her to call him by his first name, what did?

Once upon a time, Gaius’ father had complained that Nicole didn’t call him by his praenomen. She’d learned that courtesy, and a great deal more.

God, she missed that quiet, practical man with the infuriating habit of being right. His son was going to grow up just like him; she could see the signs.

If, she thought, he lived through the war. If any of them did.

There’d been a long lull, a quiet space in which no one ran past, enemy or friend. Then a new wave of Germans poured in from what had to be a breach in the wall or a gate forced open. Most still carried swords, but they weren’t so wary now. They moved at walking pace, traveling in pairs and threes, gawking at the sights. If they’d had cameras, they would have been taking snapshots. They looked like tourists, not like men who expected to have to fight their way through the city.

It took Nicole a distressingly long time to understand what that meant. It was over. The Germans had won.

And to the victors went the spoils. One of the Germans pounded on a door a little way down the street from the tavern. A moment later, Nicole heard the barbarian let out a happy grunt, like a pig in a corncrib. A moment after that, a woman shrieked.

“That’s Antonina,” Julia said, her voice the barest thread of whisper.

“Let me go!” Antonina cried, fear and anger warring in her voice. “Let me — “ The sharp sound of flesh slapping against flesh cut off her words. She shrieked again, high and shrill. The German laughed. He didn’t seem to mind the noise at all.

He wasn’t alone, either. From the sound of it, there was a whole pack of them out there, yipping with glee and calling back and forth in their own language. The words weren’t comprehensible, but the tone was all too plain. So was the tone of Antonina’s scream.

Nicole didn’t move from her seat well back in the tavern. Her head shook of itself. They couldn’t, she thought in disbelief. They wouldn’t.

Stupid. Of course they could. And if they wouldn’t, why had she and Julia doused themselves with stale piss?

From where she sat, she could see through the front windows, at least to the middle of the street. As if he had known that, a great hulking brute of a German dragged Antonina into the frame of the windows and threw her down. Nicole watched in sick fascination, unable to move to her neighbor’s rescue, and unable to look away. The rest of the gang crowded in, overwhelming Antonina. She got in one good kick before they had her spread-eagled on her back.

The Germans were shouting and singing, convivial as a gang of frat boys in a campus bar. But, as could happen in a bar, their good cheer turned abruptly to anger. Antonina’s husband, that weedy little man whose name Nicole had never got around to learning, appeared from somewhere — the back of his house, maybe, or down the street — and sprang on them, flailing about him with a length of firewood. The barbarian who’d seized Antonina stepped back leisurely from a wild swing, lifted his sword with the same air of unhurried ease, and swept it around in a deadly blur. It slammed the side of the little man’s head with a noise like a Nolan Ryan fastball slamming into a watermelon. Blood sprayed, the same explosion of scarlet as Nicole had seen a while ago, when the legionary fell. As the legionary had done, Antonina’s husband dropped bonelessly to the ground. The only mercy, as far as Nicole could see, was that he never knew what hit him. Not like the legionary, who had seen his death coming at him in a sweep of bloodied steel.

Antonina screamed on a new note. The Germans holding her down laughed and cheered, not even slightly discommoded by her renewed struggles. The man who’d slain her husband strutted and preened. He was proud of himself. And the rest were proud of him. The one who held Antonina’s left arm set his knee on it for a moment and beckoned with his freed hand, as if to say, Here, you go first.

The killer grinned. He swaggered back toward the huddle of men and the lone, suddenly very quiet woman. He squatted between her legs and ripped off her drawers. The others laughed with a note of incredulity, and let out a spatter of exclamations. The way they pointed and stared, Nicole knew all too well what had set them off. Their women didn’t shave down there — and if they hadn’t known that women here did, then this was their first rape in Carnuntum. Right here, in front of Nicole. Who couldn’t move a muscle to intervene.

The German yanked down his breeches with a grunt, as if to say, Enough of that. Without further ado, he thrust his great red club between Antonina’s legs, and ground deep.

Nicole turned her face away. Even with her fingers in her ears, she couldn’t banish Antonina’s cries. They went on and on, as if she’d lost all control over her voice.

Even through that shrill keening, Nicole heard the second, deeper grunt as the barbarian hammered himself to climax and pulled free. He sounded like a pig, a big, self-satisfied boar.

That wasn’t the end of it. Not by a long, ugly shot. They took turns, every one, and a handful of others who happened by and stopped to join the fun. After a while, Antonina stopped screaming. Her mouth was open; her voice was gone. Several of the Germans took advantage of that, too, roaring with laughter as they spent themselves down her throat. Bite him, Nicole thought fiercely when the first one started. Bite it right off him. But Antonina didn’t. Maybe she was too far gone. For her sake, Nicole hoped so.

After Frank walked out, Nicole had taken self-defense classes. She’d learned all about what to do if a rapist accosted her.

Or so she’d thought. Knee him in the nuts and scream for the police, and he’d stagger off groaning and clutching at himself. Wouldn’t he?

Sure, and if he came back with a dozen burly bastards just like him, each one toting a sword, and they were the police — what then?

In California, liberated or not, she’d felt insecure without a man in the house. Even as miserable a specimen as Frank was still male, and therefore, somehow, a deterrent.

There wasn’t anyone here but Lucius. The fuller and dyer’s shop across the way was empty; Gaius Calidius Severus was God knew where. Julia was worse than useless. Her ripe body was incentive to rape even at the best of times. Now…

One of the Germans who’d just finished his round with Antonina came ambling toward the tavern, adjusting himself inside his trousers. He took his time about that. Go away, Nicole willed him. God damn you, go away!

If God heard, He wasn’t paying attention. The barbarian cupped his hands to shield his eyes from the sun, and peered into the gloom of the tavern. Nicole tried to shrink into invisibility. Lucius had already managed it so well she couldn’t see him unless she actively looked for him.

But Julia couldn’t bear to sit still any longer. She backed away from the window, pressing against the wall.

The German caught the movement. His eyes gleamed under his heavy brows. He drew back, only to turn and pound on the door.