Household Gods

18

Little by little, the folk of Carnuntum learned to live with the occupation of their city. They drank water, though sometimes it made them sick, or beer or bad local wine in place of the better vintages that could not come up from the south. When the olive oil ran out — which took a while, because, in contrast to the wine, the Germans had no interest in helping to consume it — they made do with butter. They complained about it, too, loud, long, and rarely with any inventiveness. Nicole liked butter quite a bit, as long as it was fresh. But without refrigeration, it went rancid much faster than oil.

Gaius Calidius Severus despised the stuff. “The smell stays in my mustache,” he complained, “and I have to live with it all day long.”

Compared to rancid piss, rancid butter didn’t seem that bad to Nicole, but she didn’t tax him with it. She was too fond of him. He’d done a great deal for her, and he was a hell of a good kid. Very soon now, he was going to be a very nice young man.

Little by little, she and Julia left off splashing themselves with eau de pissoir. The Marcomanni and Quadi still sometimes casually walked off with things without bothering to pay for them, but the excesses of the sack didn’t go on for long. It gradually dawned on the Germans that, having overrun Carnuntum, they would get the most out of it if it ran as near normally as possible.

One day, a man who happened to be selling apples in the market square said to Nicole, “Umma, have you heard? My cousin Avitianus, the one with the farm out past the amphitheater — you know, the one who’s got the six girls and just the one boy and that one’s addled in the head? Well, the Germans took two of his sheep and wouldn’t pay him, which is nothing at all new, you know, but you know what he did?”

Nicole hadn’t the faintest. She opened her eyes wide and looked expectant.

“He complained to the chiefs, that’s what!” the man said. “Imagine that.”

Nicole could imagine. She didn’t like the picture she was getting. “That was brave, but it can’t have been very smart.”

“Well, that’s Avitianus, you know?” The apple-seller sighed. “They gave him a kick in the arse and sent him on his way. That Avitianus, he’s got bigger balls than a he-goat, but he’s got to use his thumbs to count them.”

“And so much for justice, too,” Nicole said.

“Only justice a poor man ever knows is what he gets hit over the head with,” the man replied. “The Germans’ll hit you over the head with a sword. Before they came, the rich bastards would hit you over the head with a lawyer. The sword hurts more, but the lawyers took more.”

She stared at him. Even in ancient Rome, people made snide jokes about attorneys? “If it weren’t for lawyers, we’d all be after each other with swords all the time,” she said with a touch of asperity.

“Well, maybe,“ the apple-seller said. “But maybe we’d leave each other alone more, too, if we had swords instead of lawyers.”

“Tell it to the Germans,” Nicole said, bending his own words back against him. He grunted, shrugged, and finally, grudgingly, nodded.

“Those are nice ones,” Julia said when Nicole brought the apples back. “You must have bought them before they were picked over. “

“I suppose I did,” Nicole answered. The apples didn’t look that nice to her. They were on the smallish side compared with what she’d been able to buy in the supermarket. Produce here was wildly inconsistent; some apples would have a firm texture and a delicious, complex sweetness as good as anything she could have hoped for back in L.A., while others from the same orchard wouldn’t be worth eating.

While she stared at them, inspiration struck. She rummaged through the spices in back of the bar till she found a quill of cinnamon. Spices, she’d discovered, traveled more than most things: they were valuable, didn’t take up much room, and didn’t spoil. She ground up part of the quill in a mortar and pestle. The sweet pungent fragrance made her nostrils twitch. It smelled of autumn in Indiana, and a bakery on a rainy day, and apple pie on the table at Thanksgiving. It was wonderful, and it made her throat go tight and her eyes sting. Julia saved her from bawling into the mortar. “What are you going to do with that, Mistress?” she asked.

“I’m going to make some baked apples,” Nicole answered.

Julia’s eyes went wide. “I’ve never heard of anyone eating apples any way but raw.”

“Well, you’ll learn something, then,” Nicole said.

They weren’t perfect. Had they been, they would have been sweetened with sugar instead of honey, and they would have been swimming in cream. But Julia and Lucius didn’t have to know there was anything missing. They devoured theirs in what seemed like two bites apiece, and loudly demanded more. Nicole savored hers, the taste on her tongue and the aroma in her nose. It filled the whole tavern, and for a little while drove away the stink of Carnuntum. “You could make a fortune with those,” Julia said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

“No,” Nicole said. “Too easy to figure out what I did. Besides, where can I get more cinnamon once this is gone?”

Julia made a face. “You’re right about that — it won’t be easy. There’s probably not any left in the city, and no merchants in their right minds are going to come this way, not with the Germans running wild through Pannonia. By the gods, no merchants who are out of their minds would come this way, either.”

Nicole and Lucius laughed, Nicole with a little incredulity; serious, literal-minded Julia almost never said anything witty. Still, Nicole sobered quickly: the joke cut too close to the truth. She said, “Nobody much will come this way, except for the farmers close to town. The market square is half empty.”

“We didn’t have a famine in spite of the pestilence,” Julia said. “If we don’t have a famine in spite of the pestilence and the Germans, the gods will truly be looking out for us.”

Lucius said, “If the gods are truly looking out for us, why did they let the pestilence happen? Why did they let the Marcomanni and Quadi conquer Carnuntum in the first place?”

“Why? Why, because… because…” Julia floundered. She scratched her head. In scratching, she found something, which she squashed between two fingernails. That still gave Nicole the horrors. She kept on fighting the battle against lice, though now she knew it was a losing battle. Julia turned to her. “Mistress, why do you suppose the gods did let those terrible things happen, if they are looking out for us?”

Nicole swallowed a sigh. Such was the lot of mothers everywhere: to be expected to answer the unanswerable. “I don’t know why the gods do anything,’ she said. “I don’t think anyone does. You can believe, but how can you know? No one has ever questioned a god, that I know of.“ Maybe no one ever had, but Nicole certainly wanted to. She’d have given a lot to ask some good, hard questions of Liber and Libera — and better yet, to actually get answers. Why on earth did you send me back here? Why on earth won’t you send me home to California? She’d done everything she knew how to do to get the attention of the god and goddess. She’d prayed, and nobody could doubt her prayer was sincere. She’d given enough wine to swim in if they’d been so inclined. But they weren’t listening to her.

She hadn’t given up her search for the actual plaque, the one that had brought her back here. Once it was safe to go out again, and while she had errands to run — trips to market, women’s day at the baths — she took time to hunt. She hadn’t seen anything closer to it than the one she’d bought from the stonecutter near the market, but she hadn’t given up. Nor did she intend to, not till she’d scoured every street and poked into every shop.

Looking for something in Carnuntum, she’d discovered, was nothing like shopping in L.A. or Indianapolis, not if you wanted to be thorough, as she emphatically did. She couldn’t let her fingers do the walking; she had to do it with her feet. It wasn’t just that there were no phones here. There were no phone books, nowhere she could check under STONECUTTERS to see if she’d found them all. There wasn’t a Chamber of Commerce from which she might have got a list of such artisans, either. If she wanted to hunt them down, she had to do it herself.

“In all my spare time,” she muttered, which would have been funny if only it were funny. She’d thought she was busy in Los Angeles. Work here in Carnuntum never seemed to get done. If she couldn’t find the plaque, if she couldn’t escape the second century… Had she seen her own gravestone when she came to Petronell on her honeymoon? She didn’t remember seeing any inscribed to a woman named Umma, but that proved nothing. She could as easily say it proved Umma had never existed, and all this was a dream.

In which case, Nicole had taken to dreaming historical epics.

A week or two after Nicole invented baked apples, the tavern ran low on grain. When Nicole went to the market square in search of more, she found none for sale: no wheat, no barley. She’d never seen rye or oats. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked a man who was selling plums at a preposterous price.

“Tighten your belt,” he answered.

She hissed at his total lack of sympathy, and went searching elsewhere.

As she’d recalled, a miller or two had shops between the market and her tavern. One of them sold her a little barley flour at five times what it should have cost. The other shook his head and said, “Sorry, but I haven’t a kernel to spare. I’m hanging on to every grain in every jar to keep myself and my kin alive. Hard word to give you, I know, but that’s how it is.” Nor would he give way, even when Nicole pleaded for something, anything, a handful would do. “My wife’s having a baby,” he said. “I’ve got to keep her strength up.”

Nicole left the miller’s shop in a state of considerable aggravation. Before she could make it out into the street, a gang of Germans swaggered down the sidewalk, arm in arm and giving way to no one. She had to flatten herself against the wall to keep them from walking right through her. They laughed to see her cringe. They were big and ruddy-cheeked and healthy. They hadn’t missed any meals lately, and didn’t look likely to, either. Whatever grain there was or had been in Carnuntum, it was in their hands now. And the Romans? They plainly didn’t give a damn about the Romans.

She waited till they were well past before going on her own way. As she walked, she found her eyes following a flock of pigeons in the street. Their brainless strut wasn’t a whole lot different from that of the mighty conquerors. If this lot learned to carry swords, the rest of the birds would be in trouble. And how, she wondered, would they taste roasted, or stewed, maybe, with the few herbs she had left, and some of that awful local wine? They hadn’t changed a bit, to be sure. Their habits were just as disgusting as they’d ever been. Even as she watched, one of them pecked at an ox turd in the street. Her stomach turned over. But as it did that, it growled. Pigeons were meat. Her stomach knew it, regardless of what her brain might have to say.

Julia exclaimed in dismay when she brought home so little in the way of grain. “Mistress, what will we do?”

“Tighten our belts,” Nicole replied, as the man with the plums had done with her. It was no answer, and yet the only one possible.

No, not quite the only one possible. “I think we’ll close down for a while,” she said, “just worry about feeding ourselves, till more food comes into the city. And… I think I’ll send Lucius out tomorrow, to bring us back as many snails as he can catch.”

How many calories in a snail? How many other people, children and adults alike, had gone out hunting snails? How long before Carnuntum had not a snail left in it, and people still hungry? Those were all good, relevant questions. She had answers for none of them — yet. What she did have was the bad feeling she would not only get answers, they wouldn’t be anything either easy or comfortable to deal with.

For a while, at least, they’d manage. The next day, Lucius went out hunting and returned with a good-sized basket full of snails. The tavern smelled of garlic and fried molluscs the rest of the day. Nicole, Lucius, and Julia all ate till they were full, and there were still live snails left in the basket for tomorrow.

A German came in while they were eating. He grimaced at what was to Nicole the wonderful odor of garlic, and turned the color of a bream’s belly when he found out what she and the others were eating. He literally fled the tavern, a hand clapped to his mouth.

Nicole laughed for a long while after he was gone. The others followed suit, but they were a little puzzled. She had to stop, wipe away the tears of mirth, and try to explain. “Isn’t it strange? Murdering people for fun doesn’t bother these bastards. Violating women doesn’t faze them. Robbing people doesn’t trouble them in the slightest. But snails with garlic? That makes them turn up their toes.”

“If we’d known it, we could have splashed ourselves with garlic juice instead of sour piss, “ Julia said seriously — she still wasn’t quite inclined to laugh at a German. “We would have liked it better, and the Germans still would have left us alone.”

“They might have left us alone,” Nicole said. “What we did worked. That’s good enough.” She patted her belly, which felt wonderfully full. “And a big mess of snails is good enough — or better than good enough — too, no matter what a cursed barbarian thinks.”

Julia nodded. So did Lucius. It took Nicole a moment to realize what she’d just said. Cursed barbarian? If that wasn’t the precise local equivalent of damn nigger or stinking wetback, what was it? She looked up at the soot-smeared ceiling. She was horrified, but she was also a little amused — that wasn’t like the old Nicole at all, at all. Of all the things the second century had done to her, slinging casual ethnic slurs was one of the last she’d expected.

Neither of the others saw anything at all unusual or reprehensible in it. Lucius packed away the last snail from the bowl, sat back, and belched luxuriously. Nicole frowned, but she held her tongue — still more evidence of the new, far from improved version. “I’ll catch more snails tomorrow, Mother,” Lucius said.

“Good.” Nicole ruffled his hair. He ducked his head, but not too much, and put up with it better than she might have expected. She patted her belly again. It came down to a simple choice, she thought. She could worry about whether her belly was full, or she could worry that she was improperly denigrating the magnificent achievements of the Quadi and Marcomanni and, as far as she could tell, the Lombards.

It took leisure to be politically correct, and to see all sides of the question.

Leisure — and a well-stocked larder. And no good and sufficient and very immediate reason to blame the ethnic group of choice for the gnawing in her middle.

Snails grew scarce, as she’d known they would. Pigeons proved tasty, though she cooked the meat right off the bones to make sure it was safe to eat. After a while, they got harder to catch: the survivors turned streetwise. The sight of a human within a stone’s throw sent them skyward in a whirring racket of wings.

There was always fish in the market, no matter how hard the times were. The Germans didn’t mind if the locals went out in their little boats with nets or hooks and lines. But, when it was almost the only food available, fish became expensive. Nicole regretted every frivolous as she’d spent since she entered Umma’s body — to say nothing of the coins Umma had spent before Nicole came to Carnuntum.

That aureus Swemblas gave her had seemed a huge sum of money, like a thousand-dollar bill. And, like a thousand-dollar bill when no other cash was coming in, it melted away, an as here, a dupondius there, a couple of sesterces somewhere else.

Nicole found herself in a cruel dilemma: if she sold the food she managed to find, she earned money with which to buy more food, but she couldn’t eat what she sold. If, on the other hand, she ate the little food she managed to lay hold of, she stopped being hungry for a while, but money flowed out of the cash box as inexorably as sand running through an hourglass.

The uneasy compromise that she settled on left the three of them both hungrier and closer to broke than she wanted them to be. Her drawers fit more loosely than they had when she first woke in Umma’s body, even more loosely than they had when she was recovering from the pestilence. Her belly growled at her all the time.

She’d known hunger before. In Indiana and California, she’d spent enough time on diets that hadn’t done much but fray her temper, nibbling carrot sticks when her stomach was yelling for a banana split. But all the hunger she’d endured had been voluntary. Whenever she’d wanted to, or whenever she couldn’t stand it anymore, relief had been no farther away than the nearest bacon double cheeseburger or package of Twinkies or Milky Way bar — anything guaranteed to leap six weeks of Lean Cuisine at a single bound.

Not here. Not now. That mournful litany played yet again in her mind, as it had — how many times? — since she’d come to Carnuntum. This hunger was not consensual. It was forced on her, as much as the Germans had forced themselves on poor Antonina. She’d never thought there could be a connection between hunger and rape, but there it was.

That wasn’t the only unpleasant connection she found. One day, after she came back to the tavern with a couple of trout and a little cheese for which she’d paid more than she could really afford, she put the money she hadn’t spent back in the cash box. By then, she knew to the as how much was supposed to be in there; as hard as times were, she paid much closer attention than she had when they were easier.

She frowned. The box held a few sesterces more than it should have. Till she came back, there hadn’t been any food to eat, let alone to sell to anybody else. Her eye fell on Julia. Julia was scrubbing tables, mostly for something to do; business was too bad to keep her occupied with much else, and there was no flour for bread. She looked the same as she always did, thinner of course, but she was still what yahoos in Indiana would have called a nice piece of ass. Nicole sucked in a breath, and let it out in a spate of words: “Julia! I’ve told you not to — “

Julia wasn’t to be cowed this time, even by Nicole at the start of a rampage. “No, Mistress. We need the money. If we can’t find some way to pay for food, pretty soon I’ll be too skinny for anyone to want me at all. And,” she added after a brief pause, “one of them even knew what he was doing. It wasn’t too bad. He’s the one who paid me double — because, he said, I was worth it.”

She didn’t blush while she said it, or apologize for having a mind of her own. Julia had changed, too. She wasn’t the childlike creature Nicole had first met, who had ducked her head and lowered her eyes and done as she was told.

Nicole found that her fists were clenched. They ached. Carefully, with some effort, she unclenched them. She made herself think, and see what Julia had already seen before her. The big brass coins would help — a great deal. There was no way Nicole could deny it. If it came to a choice between selling oneself and starving… there was another set of choices she’d never imagined herself having to make.

“We should be glad,” Julia said, “that some people still have money to spend on something besides food.”

Disposable income, Nicole thought. She bit down hard on laughter she might not have been able to quell, and said the thing she had to say: “Thanks for sharing what you made instead of keeping it for yourself.”

Julia did look down then, and shrugged as if in embarrassment. “You weren’t bad to me when you owned me. You never kept me hungry, the way some people do with their slaves. Then you went and set me free. That hasn’t been as scary as I thought, especially since you’ve let me stay on here, and earn my keep honestly. I could have had to go out and sell my body just to stay alive. Instead I got to do it when I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it now. I wanted to help.”

That hasn’t been as scary as I thought. Nicole had never heard freedom more faintly praised. And yet, the rest of it was just as honestly put, and it was, in its way, the most genuine expression of gratitude Nicole could ever have asked for. She couldn’t find anything more eloquent to say than, “All right, Julia. Thank you. Just — thank you.”

Julia shrugged and went back to scouring tables. Nicole groped for something more to say, but there wasn’t anything that would work. She went back to the cash box instead, and paused before she shut and locked it, staring down at the brassy gleam of the coins. Her mind was running of itself through everything those extra sesterces would buy, and all the ways she could make them stretch.

Pragmatism. It wasn’t a pretty word, or a laudable trait, but here, in this time and place, it meant survival.

As a lean and hungry spring swung into a parched summer, Nicole had time, once in a while, to wonder about the war between the Romans and the Germans — Marcomanni, Quadi, she never had learned how to tell the two apart. There was no easy way to get an answer. Even before the invasion, events at a town as close as Vindobona reached Carnuntum slowly and often in garbled fashion, if they arrived at all. When the war had been fought farther west, it was like noise in a distant room of the house — there, but difficult to understand.

Now the war had rolled right over Carnuntum — and it was still hard to interpret. Every so often, Germans would come through town with loot obviously gathered somewhere farther south in Pannonia. Other Germans passed through on the way south, heading toward the fighting — or maybe just toward chances to murder and rape and plunder.

Were they winning the war? If they were, did that mean they’d go down into Italy and sack Rome the way they’d sacked Carnuntum? Was this the fall of the Roman Empire? Was now the time when everything went to hell? For far from the first time, Nicole wished she knew more ancient history. Had Liber and Libera thought they were doing her a favor, dropping her right in the middle of the great collapse?

She spent a few anxious days worrying about that in the odd moments when she wasn’t worrying about being hungry. Then, to her own surprise, she found an answer. No news had come in, and she still knew next to nothing of the history of the Roman Empire — but there was one thing she did know.

The Heidentor wasn’t there. That was the key. When she’d done the budget tour of Petronell on her honeymoon, the guide had droned on and on, nearly putting her to sleep; but one part of his spiel she did remember. He’d said, quite distinctly, that the gate was Roman work. Therefore, the Roman Empire couldn’t be gone from Carnuntum for good. Sooner or later, Roman power would return here. The Heidentor would go up to mark it.

Was it sooner? Or was it later? Would the Romans take Carnuntum back from the Quadi and Marcomanni next month, next year, or ten years from now? That might not make any difference in the building of the Heidentor, but it would make a hell of a lot of difference in Nicole’s life. If the Germans were still in Carnuntum ten years from now, she was damned sure she wouldn’t be.

About the middle of August, she began to feel something that might have been hope. More Germans began coming back through Carnuntum, and fewer of them were carrying booty. Some were wounded: they were bandaged, or they limped, or they were missing a limb. They didn’t volunteer information, and nobody seemed inclined to ask.

For a little while, life in Carnuntum had been — acceptable was too strong a word. It had been somewhere within shouting distance of bearable. People had been hungry, but they hadn’t been — too — afraid to go through the city to see what they might find. The Marcomanni and Quadi remained arrogant, but, while they might steal, they seldom committed worse outrages.

Now, when things didn’t seem to be going so well for the Germans farther south, the situation in Carnuntum turned nasty again. People whispered of robbery and rape. They hinted of even worse.

And one morning, as Nicole made her way to market, she turned a corner and stumbled over a corpse. There wasn’t much doubt the man was dead. Drunks didn’t lie in that boneless stillness, in a clotted pool of blood. Nor would a drunk have worn a ragged tunic rent with crisp, new, two-inch slashes. Those weren’t knife wounds. Those had been made by a sword. Blood had darkened the tunic almost to black; its original color, as near as she could see, had been blue.

Until she came to Carnuntum, Nicole hadn’t realized how much blood a man’s body held: one more lesson she would sooner not have learned. Flies congregated in a buzzing cloud. One walked leisurely along a gash that laid open the corpse’s cheek, exposing the teeth in a ghastly grin.

Nicole shuddered convulsively and gulped hard. She would not — she would not — vomit all over the street. She wheeled blindly and ran, not caring what anyone thought, wanting only to be back in the safety of her own four walls.

When she’d shut herself inside them and barred the door, and never mind that it was broad daylight, Nicole dropped down to the nearest stool and hugged herself till she stopped shivering and trying to gag. She ignored Julia’s wide-eyed stare and Lucius’ startled, “Mother! What happened? What —?” She made herself think, and think clearly.

The man couldn’t have been dead for long. If she’d turned that corner a few minutes earlier, would someone else have gasped in horror at discovering her dead body there? Wrong place at the wrong time, she thought. That could have been the epitaph for most of the senseless slayings in Los Angeles.

It might be her own epitaph, for the matter of that. No one had ever been in a wronger place, or in a wronger time.

But wherever and whenever she was, and however right or wrong that was, she had to live. She had to leave the tavern in search of food, but that wasn’t all she had to go out for. If it had been, she would have stayed at home and sent Julia in her place. No; she had to go out to look for the plaque of Liber and Libera, the one and only plaque that had brought her to Carnuntum. That was no errand she could pass on to Julia. No matter what it cost her to set foot outside that door each day, for the plaque, she did it.

For all her hunting, she never found it. She still gave Liber and Libera their daily libation of wine, when she had any, on the principle that it couldn’t hurt and might help.

And one day, when she’d come home with a bag of mealy apples and a string of little bony fish, and no votive image, she found the plaque on the bar, broken in half and shedding bits on the scrubbed surface. Julia stood over it with exactly the same look of guilt and horror and welling tears as Kimberley might have had if she’d spilled her milk all over the living-room carpet.

This wasn’t just spilled milk. Nicole sucked in a breath. She had no idea what she was going to say. She wasn’t going to scream. She promised herself that.

Julia spoke before Nicole could begin, a rapid rush of words. “Mistress, I’m sorry, so sorry, I picked it up to dust it, and it slipped out of my hand, and it broke. I’ll pay you for it, get you a new one. Just take it out of my wages.”

While she babbled on, Nicole had calmed down considerably. She picked up the two largest pieces and weighed them in her hands. Liber stared blandly at her out of one, Libera out of the other. If they were dismayed to be so abruptly separated, they weren’t about to show it.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said to Julia, and she meant it. “It’s not as if it were any great relic. It wasn’t even working very well — the god and goddess weren’t doing much for us, were they?”

“I don’t know,” Julia said. She’d calmed down, too, with the quickness of a child or a slave, now she knew she wasn’t in trouble for breaking her mistress’ plaque. “Things could be better for us, but they could be a lot worse, too. Remember Antonina.”

“I’m not likely to forget Antonina,” Nicole said, a little coldly. She held onto the coldness. It kept her calm. “Things have been getting uglier lately. I think it’s time to splash ourselves again with Calidius Severus’ perfume.”

Julia made a face. “Oh, do we have to? I’ll never get any extra sesterces for the cash box if we do.”

“Would you rather the Germans took it without paying for it?”

“No!” Julia said, as if by reflex. Then, as thought caught up with instinct: “I don’t want to give the Germans anything.”

“Of course you don’t,“ Nicole said. “If you don’t want to give it to them, they have no business taking it.”

Julia thought about that, long and visibly hard. Then she nodded. “Nobody has any business taking it, if I say no.”

Nicole’s smile was so wide and so rusty, it actually hurt. Maybe after all, in spite of everything, she was managing to do a little consciousness-raising.

Brigomarus came to visit a day or two later, as he made a habit of doing. He stopped inside the door, sniffed and grimaced. “You’re visiting the dyer’s shop again,” he said. Nicole wondered if he meant to sound quite so accusatory.

“The time seemed ripe,” she answered calmly.

Umma’s brother spat in disgust. “Ripe’s the word, and no mistake.”

“That’s bad,” Nicole said. “Very bad.”

He grinned at her. “You started it.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

They smiled at one another. Somehow, over the weeks and months, they’d become, maybe not friends, but definitely not adversaries. They got along. They could laugh together. It wasn’t bad, as sibling relationships went.

Nicole’s smile died first. “So,” Brigomarus said, “tell me what got you going this time.”

She told him bluntly about the murdered man in the street. Brigomarus nodded, all laughter gone. “From what I’m hearing, he wasn’t the only one. In fact, I came here to warn you to stay inside as much as you can for a while. But you seem to be a step ahead of me.”

“Maybe not,” Nicole said. “What have you heard?”

“Not a whole lot,” he answered somberly, “but none of it’s good. The Germans are screaming at me — they’re screaming at everybody. More shields, more arrowheads, more blades, more spearpoints, more everything.”

“And I bet they want it all by yesterday, too,” Nicole said.

“By yest — “ Brigomarus had to pause and work that one out. However tired a joke it was in English, it must have been new in Latin. He regarded her in dawning admiration. “That’s just when they want it, by the gods. You’ve had a way of coming out with things lately, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Nicole said with a shrug that wasn’t nearly as innocent as it looked. “Have I?” Before Umma’s brother could dig her in any deeper, she hurried them both back to the subject at hand: “What else do you know? How badly is the war going for them? Do they talk about it?”

“Not in any language a civilized man can understand. They grunt and bark like a herd of hungry pigs. But even when they’re babbling among themselves, the names of towns don’t change that much. The past few days, they’ve been talking about Savaria and Scarabantia — and those aren’t that far down the road from Carnuntum. If the Emperor is coming this way, he’ll be here before too long.”

The Emperor. Nicole had hardly given a thought to him since she came to Carnuntum. His words didn’t dominate TV, radio, the papers, and the newsmagazines, as an American President’s did. There were no media for the Roman Emperor to dominate. If it hadn’t been for his coins, she wouldn’t even have known what he looked like, or what his name was. Marcus, Marcus Aurelius. According to the coins, he was a middle-aged man with a beaky nose, a receding chin a beard couldn’t quite hide, and curly hair that looked as if it needed brushing.

All of which told her exactly nothing. People didn’t talk about him at all, or seem to think about him much, either. Brigo certainly didn’t sound awed at the prospect of an imperial visit. “Is he coming himself,” she asked, “or is it just some general leading the army in his name?”

“From what I’ve heard, he’s leading his own army,” Brigomarus said. “He took the field himself farther west, I know that. Whether he’ll beat the cursed Marcomanni and Quadi and come this far — there’s no way anyone can know that.”

“I hope he does,” Nicole said fervently.

Brigomarus rolled his eyes. “Oh, by the gods, don’t we all,” he said. “I can’t think of anybody in Carnuntum who’s done well under the Germans. Except…”

When he didn’t go on, Nicole thumped him on the arm. “Come on — who?”

“The undertakers,” he answered promptly — and hastily threw up a hand.

“Don’t throw that cup at me! They got more work than they deserved during the pestilence. The Germans gave them even more. They’re getting cursed rich.”

“Maybe they are,” Nicole said, “but I don’t expect they’ll cry too hard when the Germans go.”

She wouldn’t be sorry to see them go, either — preferably out on their ears. She wouldn’t be sorry, if she was perfectly honest with herself, to see the lot of them killed. She’d been pretty young when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. When she thought about it, she realized how much the Vietnam War had colored her attitude toward war in general. She’d thought the Gulf War a waste of money and men, fought mostly over oil — never mind the rhetoric about democracy and freedom. But now, from the middle of a war, she didn’t just remember how rapturously the people of Kuwait had welcomed the soldiers who drove out the Iraqis. She understood right down to the bone why the Kuwaitis had been so overjoyed. She was ready — more than ready — to plant a big fat kiss on the first Roman legionary who came tramping up the street. And if there was blood on his sword, all the better.

Brigomarus slapped the bar in front of her, startling her back into herself. “You seem to have things here pretty much in hand. How are you fixed for food?”

“Not too bad,” she said, which was only a slight exaggeration. “We’re hungry, but we aren’t — quite — starving. And you, Brigo? If you need help, we can spare a little. “ She couldn’t, not really, but neither was she — quite — on the edge.

Umma’s brother shook his head. “No, thank you, we don’t need anything. I’m hungrier than I ever wanted to be, but I’m not dying of it.”

She drew a breath and nodded. She was relieved, there was no point in denying it. Every scrap she didn’t share was that much more for Lucius and Julia and herself. “We’ll just keep our heads down and hang on, and wait till the Emperor comes.”

Till the Emperor comes. It sounded like a fairy tale she might have read to Kimberley, not one of the real, old, grim ones, but one of the sugar-coated, saccharine-overloaded, sweetness-and-light fables that were deemed safe for impressionable young children. But there was nothing either sweet or harmless about Carnuntum. The little blue birds would have gone into somebody’s pot, and the pretty butterflies been trampled underfoot by a horde of marching Germans. It would take more than a pastel prince to rescue Carnuntum. It would take an emperor.

Nicole hoped, a little crazily, that he didn’t try to buy himself any new clothes. “I hope he comes soon,” she said.

“So do I,” Brigomarus answered. “So does everybody — except the Quadi and the Marcomanni. And they’re the ones with the most to say about when he gets here, or if he gets here at all.”

More and more Germans in filthy bandages prowled the streets of Carnuntum. Fewer and fewer peasants brought in produce from the villages and farms around the city. Carnuntum might have been the only place where they could get money for it, but Carnuntum was also the place where they were most likely to be robbed and killed. They didn’t need any sort of cost/benefit analysis to draw the appropriate conclusion. They stayed away. And Carnuntum went hungry.

One who did dare the market square brought news of a battle outside Scarabantia. “Who won?” Nicole demanded in the middle of trying to haggle down the price of his prunes.

He wasn’t inclined to haggle. Intellectually, Nicole understood that: if she didn’t feel like paying his price, some other hungry citizen would. It infuriated her even so. He had a lot of damn nerve, lining the pockets he didn’t wear with profits made from hunger. He also wasn’t inclined to answer her question in a hurry. He reminded her of a farmer from downstate Indiana, sparing of words and suspicious of everybody he hadn’t known since he was four years old.

“Who won?” she repeated, wishing she could appeal to a judge to get an answer out of the reluctant witness.

“Cursed lot of dead on both sides,” he answered at last, which made her want to feed him all his prunes at once — if she couldn’t loosen up one end, she’d damned well loosen up the other. Then, grudgingly, he let drop a kernel of information: “Romans are still coming north.”

Nicole let out a long sigh of relief. “Why don’t you sound happier about it?” she asked. “There aren’t any Germans around to hear you.” Even as she spoke, she looked about to make sure she was right: the age-old glance of the occupied, checking to see that the occupiers were busy elsewhere.

The farmer shrugged. “I’m making good money these days. And the Marcomanni and Quadi haven’t got the faintest notion what taxes are: haven’t had to pay ‘em an as on my land or my crop. You can bet it won’t be like that when the usual pack of clerks is back in the saddle.”

That he was surely right didn’t make his attitude any more appealing. Nicole had to remind herself she wasn’t likely to improve his outlook by tearing him limb from limb, strictly rhetorically of course. Nor was she inclined to call a German to do it for her. And she needed those prunes. Reluctantly, she shelled out ten times what she reckoned they were worth, raked them into her sack, and left him to his prosperity.

Hunger had long since taken Lucius past the point where he turned up his nose at anything even vaguely resembling food. He would have gobbled all the prunes if Nicole had given him even half a chance. She snatched the bag out of his greedy fingers and stowed it safe behind her. “Oh, no, you don’t! Julia and I get to have some, too. Do you want to spend the whole night squatting over a pot because you made a pig of yourself?”

Lucius scowled and stamped his foot. “I don’t care. I want to eat. I’m all empty inside!”

“We all are,” Nicole said. Not that he cared: he was a child. To children, nothing mattered but the moment. She tried to console him, at least a little. “Maybe we won’t be hungry much longer. The man who sold me the prunes said the Romans won a battle outside of Scarabantia.”

“Outside Scarabantia?” Julia echoed. “That isn’t very far away at all. The Emperor could be here in just a few days.” Her face had been bright with hope, but all at once it fell. “I hope the Germans don’t try to stand siege here. They might hold off the legions for weeks, maybe even months.”

“Siege?” That hadn’t occurred to Nicole. She wished it hadn’t occurred to Julia, either: now they both had something to gnaw their empty bellies over. “God, I hope not, too.” She tried to look on the bright side, if there was such a thing: “We didn’t keep out the Marcomanni and Quadi for very long. Maybe they won’t be able to hold off the legions, either.”

“I hope you’re right.” But Julia didn’t sound convinced. “We didn’t have much of a garrison here, and the Germans took us half by surprise. The legions won’t be so lucky. The Germans will be expecting them — and there are an awful lot of Germans in Carnuntum.”

That made a depressing amount of sense. Nicole stared blankly at Lucius’ outstretched hand, blinked, doled out a handful of prunes. He might be greedy about the whole bag, but he’d learned how to eat his prize once he won it: piece by piece, savoring it, making it last. When he’d got the last scrap of flavor out of the first one, he spat the pit on the floor and said, “If it is a siege, the barbarians will keep all the food for themselves. We’ll starve.”

“You aren’t supposed to understand that much this young,” Nicole said. He shrugged, already halfway through his second prune. She provided the answer he wasn’t about to. In this world, yes, he had to understand that much. Otherwise he wouldn’t survive. She was the one who was lacking here. Her capacity for estimating man’s inhumanity to man had proved time and again that it wasn’t up to, or down to, dealing with the second century. Of course the Germans would lay hold of all the food they could — hadn’t they done it already? Of course they would treat the people of Carnuntum, the people who actually belonged in the city, as expendable. Yes, it made perfect sense. The Serbs in Bosnia wouldn’t have needed it spelled out for them.

Nicole glanced at the spot behind the bar where, once, the plaque of Liber and Libera had stood. Don’t you see? she said in her mind. I’m too… civilized to live in this time. Even if the plaque had still been there, she wouldn’t have got any response. She was bitterly certain of that. She’d made her bed. It was hard and lumpy and uncomfortable, with scratchy blankets and vermin uncounted. She had to lie in it. The god and goddess weren’t listening.

She took a prune out of the bag and popped it into her mouth. It was sweet and good. She had to make the best of things here. She chewed the flesh off the pit, and very carefully, too; and not only because she wanted to savor the taste. The last thing she wanted was to bite down too hard and break another tooth. That would mean, sooner or later, another visit to Terentianus. One of those was enough to last her two lifetimes, and then some.

Food was scarce, but at least, as people were inclined to remark, there was plenty of water. That wasn’t always the case in a siege, Nicole had gathered.

She was just on her way out the door, amphora in hand, headed for the fountain two blocks over, when she nearly collided with Brigomarus. He was in a fair hurry, and he had something tucked under his arm. “What’s that?” Nicole wanted to know, once they’d stopped laughing at the comedy of errors: each leaping back with a little shriek, then doing the “Which way do I go next?” dance till they both stopped and stared at each other.

“What’s this?” Brigomarus brought the cloth-wrapped oblong out from under his arm, grunting a bit: it was heavy for its size. “It’s a present for you.”

“Really? For me?” Nicole couldn’t clap her hands: they were full of amphora. “Show me!”

He obligingly let slip the wrapping and held it for her to see.

She felt the handles of the amphora slipping through her fingers. She felt them, but she couldn’t do a thing about it. The amphora struck the rammed-earth floor and went instantly from pot to potsherds. She didn’t care. She didn’t care at all.

“By the gods, it’s not such a big thing as that,” Brigomarus said, more than a little taken aback. “I happened to notice you’d lost the other one you had up here, and so I thought I’d — “

Nicole hardly heard him. ‘‘Where did you get that?’’ she whispered.

“This?” Brigomarus shrugged. “Stonecutter named… what was his name? Celer, that was it. Pestilence got him, poor fellow. I bought it… oh, must have been toward the end of spring last year, I guess. So when I saw you didn’t have yours up anymore, then Julia told me what happened to it, I thought I’d bring you this one to take its — “

He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Nicole threw her arms around him, being very, very careful of the plaque, and kissed him soundly. There was nothing sisterly about it. When she let him go, he was red from the neck of his tunic all the way up to his hairline. She didn’t care about that, either. With great delicacy, she took the plaque of Liber and Libera from him.

It was the plaque. She recognized it instantly. The carving was sharper and crisper than it had been when the limestone slab sat on her night-stand. Of course it would be. The plaque was much younger than it had been then.

When had Brigomarus bought it? Toward the end of spring last year, he’d said. She didn’t know — she didn’t have any way to discover — exactly when he’d bought it, exactly when Celer had finished it, but she would have bet it was right about the time when she’d taken up residence in Umma’s body. No wonder she hadn’t been able to find it till now. Brigo had had it all along. Had the gods intended that? Had they cared enough to hide it, effectively, in plain sight?

“It’s — perfect!” she said. “Absolutely perfect.”

“I’m glad you think so.” Brigomarus still sounded bewildered. Nicole didn’t blame him. But there was no way she was going to enlighten him. She was only half crazy.

“I don’t just think so. I know so.” Nicole hoped she did. To be wrong now, to be disappointed again… She didn’t want to think about that. If this plaque, the very same, the self-same one that had brought her here, couldn’t get her back to West Hills, nothing could. If nothing could… No. She wasn’t thinking about that.

Brigomarus coughed a time or two. Nicole’s stomach clenched — legacy of the pestilence. But no, it was just a catch in his throat, or maybe a touch of a cold. “There’s another reason I came, too,” he said, “and look, I almost forgot. I heard it from a German who came in screaming for a shield. The Emperor and the army are on their way. They’ll be here any day. The barbarians are yelling at the top of their lungs for something, anything to help them drive the Romans back.”

“Are they?” Nicole was listening with only half an ear. Her eyes kept coming back to the stone faces of the god and goddess. Those carven lips had kissed her palm in promise. Those bland and heedless faces had turned on her, and smiled, and granted her prayer.

It was as if she couldn’t keep two purposes in mind at once. Either she was surviving in this world, devoting every scrap of her attention to it, or she was concentrating totally on getting out of it. Now that she had the key — please, god and goddess, let it be the key — there was no room in her for anything else.

Those lips had kissed her palm well over a year ago, as Umma’s body reckoned time. What had happened to her body? How long had it been there? Had Umma been struggling to survive there as Nicole struggled to survive here? Ye gods, a Roman woman who couldn’t even read, trying to cope with all the complexities of life in Los Angeles — two minutes of that and they’d lock her away. Nicole had survived because life was simpler here, if orders of magnitude harder. The things she needed to cope with, she’d at least dimly heard of. What could Umma have made of the automobile, the telephone, the microwave oven?

Or — and maybe worse — what if Umma hadn’t been there at all? What if there was nobody home? Would Nicole leap forward in time, only to find that there was nothing there, no body to move into? What if she was — if she was -

She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t. She caressed the votive plaque with fingers that shook a little. She had to try. No matter what waited for her, it had to be better than what faced her here.

Brigomarus left, still baffled that his sister should be so delighted with his present and hardly seem interested at all in the news he’d brought. There was no way he could understand that the votive plaque was the best, the greatest news she’d ever wanted.

Nicole set it where the other one had been. She found a little wine — dregs, to be honest — in the bottom of one of the jars set into the bar, and offered it to the god and goddess. Then and only then did she get around to picking up the pieces of the broken amphora, finding another one, and going out and lugging back water.

Julia had been across the street in the fuller and dyer’s shop when Brigomarus came by. She was back by the time Nicole brought in the jar of water. Nicole didn’t ask what, if anything, Julia had been doing with Gaius Calidius Severus. It was none of her business.

The freedwoman was leaning on the bar, chin in hands, contemplating the plaque. When Nicole came in she rolled an eye at her and asked, “Where’d you get that, Mistress?”

“Brigo brought it,” Nicole answered. “Didn’t he tell you? He said you told him how the other one got broken.”

“Oh,” Julia said with a hunch of the shoulders. “Well. I forgot about that.” Had she? Nicole wondered. And wondered something else, too: something that was really rather reprehensible. Oh, surely not. Julia sold herself to strangers, but when it came to people she knew, she tended to either keep a roster of regulars or, as with young Calidius Severus, give it away for free. No, she was just remembering that she’d broken the first plaque, and indulging in a bit of guilt.

She came out of it soon enough. “That was nice of him,” she said. She tilted her head and squinted. “If you don’t mind me saying so, I think it’s a nicer carving job than the one we had before.”

“I think so, too,” Nicole said. And if she didn’t mean quite the same by that as Julia did, then Julia didn’t need to know it.

That night before she went to sleep, she begged Liber and Libera to send her back to California, back to the twentieth century. She was reaching them — she was. The way seemed open, as it hadn’t before. She drifted off with a smile on her face.

She woke… in Carnuntum.