Household Gods

6

She gritted her teeth, picked up the leg of mutton with its pendant fish, and lugged them into the odorous dimness of the tavern. The scent of wine and sweat, must and hot oil, garlic and herbs and unsubtle perfume, struck her like a wall. She clove her way through it.

Julia materialized out of it, imperturbably cheerful as ever, and fetched in the wine and the raisins and the scallions. As she came back in, Nicole asked her, “How are the children?”

“They haven’t been too bad, Mistress,” Julia answered, as willingly as always. If she’d been a babysitter in West Hills, Nicole thought, she’d have been booked from one end of the week to the other. “They’re using the pot more than they should, but I think they’re getting better. Are you all right?”

Nicole’s stomach rumbled alarmingly. She set her teeth and ignored it. “I’m not too bad, either.”

“You were lucky,” Julia said. “A lot of times, when people’s bellies gripe them like that, they keep on shitting and shitting till they die. That’s what happened to Calidius’ wife a few years ago, remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Nicole said. Of course she didn’t, but from now on she would. Titus Calidius Severus hadn’t been two-timing anybody when he came visiting her, then — no, when he came visiting Umma. A point in his favor. Did it balance off that rude remark he’d made about women? Not even close, Nicole thought. That was exactly the attitude that she’d fled in the twentieth century. She’d prayed for a place that was free of it. Liber, Libera — what were you thinking? Couldn’t you understand what I meant?

They didn’t blast her where she stood, but neither did they answer. She was left where she’d been before, face to face with a monumental wall of male chauvinist piggery.

And he’d seemed so decent, too. A pleasant man. A nice man, as her mother in Indiana might have said.

“There ain’t no such thing,” Nicole snarled to nobody in particular. Nobody answered, or even seemed to notice that she’d spoken.

Snarl though she might, fact was fact. And men, it seemed, were men. Nicole dug fingers into a sudden fierce itch in her scalp. Damn, it was getting worse. She needed a shower, shampoo — even a bath would do. All over. In hot water.

Tomorrow was ladies’ day in the baths. She’d live till then. Maybe.

Julia’s voice startled her out of her funk. “Business was good while you were gone, Mistress,” Julia said brightly, “and I got a couple of dupondii for myself. May I keep them?”

Had she slipped her hand in the till? Had she snaked out a good deal more than a couple of dupondii and claimed the smaller amount, hoping Nicole wouldn’t notice? Listening to her, looking at her, Nicole didn’t think so. Her tone was eloquent. She’d asked because she might get in real trouble if she kept the dupondii without asking, but she didn’t think Nicole could possibly say no.

Nicole couldn’t see any good reason to refuse. “Yes, go ahead. That’s more than you got from Ofanius Valens yesterday morning. How did you do it?”

“Usual way,” Julia said with a smile and a shrug. The smile had an odd edge to it, but nothing Nicole could lay a finger on. “Customers thought I was nice.”

“All right,” Nicole said. “Here, will you take the hide off this leg of mutton while I tend to the rest of the things I bought?”

“Of course, Mistress,” the slave replied.

I have to set her free as soon as I can, Nicole thought again. The Romans don’t have paper, right? So how bad can the paperwork be?

As Julia went to get a knife for the mutton, she said over her shoulder, “Oh — Mistress, I almost forgot. Your brother stopped by while you were gone to market. He said he’d come back another time.”

“Did he?” The words were entirely automatic — they didn’t have anything to do with any rational thought processes on Nicole’s part. Up till this moment, she hadn’t known she, or rather Umma, had a brother. Up till this moment, she’d never had a brother. Two sisters, yes; a brother, no. She supposed she had to make the best of it. “If that’s what he said,” she said, she hoped not too lamely, “that’s what he’ll probably do.”

Julia nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. Brigomarus is always very reliable.” Now Nicole not only had a brother, she knew what his name was. That helped. If only she’d be able to recognize him when he walked through the door…

Julia skinned the leg of mutton with nonchalant competence. Nicole was sure she couldn’t have done it half so neatly. She’d never had to try anything like that before — but she was going to have to learn. Another survival skill in this world without supermarkets, like pissing in a chamberpot and haggling in the market. Next time, she decided, I do it myself.

While Julia worked, Nicole checked the cash box, doing her best not to be too obvious about it. Julia saw her doing it even so. The slave went right on with her task. Even as an ordinary employee, she wouldn’t really have had any grounds for complaint. As a slave, she doubtless could land in very hot water if she got out of line.

Nicole didn’t like the small stab of relief — almost of approval — that accompanied the thought. It was the same less than laudable gut reaction and the same tardy pang of guilt that she’d felt when she saw a police car patrolling a Latino neighborhood while she was driving through it. She didn’t want to be glad the cops came down harder on poor minorities than on affluent whites — but just at that moment, she couldn’t help it. She was glad.

Lucius came running down the stairs, pulling a toy cart on the end of a leather thong. It squeaked almost as much as a real one. By the way he squealed laughter, he wasn’t at death’s door or anywhere close. All the same, Nicole asked, “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine, Mother, thanks,” the boy answered, as carelessly as if he hadn’t had the galloping trots in the middle of the night. Kids, Nicole thought, half in amazement, half in envy. Lucius was kind enough to add, “Aurelia’s fine, too.”

“That’s good,” Nicole said. Even so, she snagged him as he loped on by, and felt his forehead. Normal. He was grubby, too, but there wasn’t much she could do about that on short notice. “If you are feeling fine,” she said, “I have a job for you. Would you help me put the groceries away? Here, I got some raisins, and some scallions. Put them where they belong, will you please?”

As clever stratagems went — Nicole had no idea where either item belonged — it was about as successful as she might have expected. “Oh, Mother,” Lucius said with the indignation of a child in any country, in any time, faced with the adult insistence on doing something useful instead of running around making a nuisance of himself. Nicole armed herself for battle, but he amazed her: once he’d registered his complaint, he did as he was told. Maybe he was afraid he’d get whacked if he didn’t. Maybe he was just a good kid.

By what Nicole had seen here, anybody in Carnuntum would have loudly maintained that those last two notions had something in common. She didn’t care what anybody in Carnuntum would maintain. She didn’t believe it, not for a minute.

Lucius scratched his head. The gesture was as contagious as a yawn. Nicole gave in to the irresistible urge to scratch. Her scalp — no, Umma’s scalp: it wasn’t her fault — never stopped itching, any more than her tooth stopped aching or her heart stopped beating.

Lucius stopped suddenly and let out a very grown-up grunt of satisfaction. He reached up and squished something between the fingernail of one hand and the thumbnail of the other. Nicole’s stomach did a slow lurch that had nothing to do with the water she’d drunk the day before. “Lucius!” she said sharply. “What was that?”

He grinned. “Louse,” he said, wiping his hands on his tunic. He sounded insufferably pleased with himself. “I’ve been trying to catch the miserable thing all day. And look, I finally did.”

“Oh…” Nicole bit her tongue before she burst out in a flood of English swearwords. Latin still felt strange to her, like a made-up language; something she’d learned in school and recited by rote. She couldn’t cut loose in it. If she started screaming in English, people would think she’d gone round the bend. Did they burn witches here? No English, then. Latin wasn’t enough. She clamped down hard on the most satisfying option of all: a plain old wordless shriek.

Once, about a year before, Kimberley and Justin had come home from Josefina’s with head lice. That had been a nightmare: washing the kids’ hair with Nix, using the Step 2 rinse to help loosen the nits — the eggs — from the hair shafts, and washing everyone’s bedding and spraying the mattresses and the furniture with Rid to kill any nits the children might have shed.

She’d used enough chemicals to exterminate a couple of endangered species. That had been bad enough, but it hadn’t been the worst part: not even close. The worst part was going through Justin’s hair, and especially Kimberley’s, which was both longer and thicker, one strand at a time, looking for the nits the fine-toothed comb that came with the Nix hadn’t been able to free.

The only difference between her and a mother chimpanzee was that chimps had to worry about hair all over the bodies of their offspring, and she didn’t. From then on, she’d understood how and why searching for tiny details got to be known as nitpicking.

“Come over to the window here,” she told Lucius. He rolled his eyes but obeyed. She shifted him around till his head was in the light, and started going through his hair. He didn’t ask what she was doing, which meant he knew. “Oh…” Nicole muttered again, in lieu of anything stronger. Umma might have done this for him before, but she hadn’t done much of a job. His hair was full of telltale white specks. They were so small, they disappeared if you looked at them from the wrong side of the hair shafts, but they were there, all right. They were all too evidently there.

He yelped more than once as she yanked and tugged, pinching nits one by one, sliding her fingers along each laden hair till she could crush them. She wasn’t gentle. Her revulsion was too strong. Each time she crushed a nit, she wanted frantically to wash her hands.

She didn’t do that. What good would it do? She had no soap. Nothing but water.

Every time she thought she’d found the last of them, a dozen more turned up. And there — oh, God, there was a live one, pale and slow and small, like a piece of dandruff with legs. It scuttled away from her questing fingers. Lucius wiggled as she pursued it. “Hold still!” she snapped. Her tone froze him in place. She barely noticed, except that he’d stopped moving. “Got it!” she said, and squashed the thing with a horrid mixture of delight and revulsion. It expired with a faint, crisp pop.

Just as she was about to go on playing mommy ape, a pair of customers wandered in. Her grip on Lucius slackened as she turned to take care of the man and woman. He escaped before she could tighten her hold again, scampering gleefully past the customers into the freedom of the street.

She could hardly go after him, not with both customers settling noisily at a table and calling out their orders. She fed them wine from the middle-range jar, and bread that Julia must have made while she was out, and honey and nuts. They scratched at themselves as they ate and drank, casually and without shame, as if it were something everybody did all the time. Had people been doing that to excess the day before? Had they been doing it in the market square? There’d been so many things to see, so much to absorb, that she hadn’t noticed.

She’d notice now. Oh, Lord, wouldn’t she just?

Her fingers clawed at her own scalp. Something… squished under one of them. She wanted to scream again. She wanted to throw up. She had to stand there while the customers finished and paid her and left, her head throbbing with Excedrin Headache Number Six Hundred and Sixty-six, and one thought beating over and over. Lousy. Lousy. Lousy…

No Nix here. No Step 2. No Rid. She couldn’t have cared less now about what was in them. She just wished she had them. Oh, God, she wished she had them.

Back before Nix and the rest, people had killed lice and nits with kerosene. Some people still did, because it was cheap or because it was what they’d used before they came to the United States. Once a year or so, there’d be a news story about an immigrant child whose head caught fire while her mother was delousing her.

Kerosene seemed like ancient history to Nicole. Unfortunately for her here and now, it wasn’t ancient enough. The Latin vocabulary she’d acquired from wherever she’d acquired it didn’t even have a word for the stuff.

“Julia,” she said, “what do I do about these horrible lice?”

Even in her misery, she’d framed the question with a lawyer’s precision. As she’d hoped, Julia took her to be complaining about the ones she’d just found on Lucius and on herself — oh, Christ, and on herself — rather than about lice in general.

“They are annoying, aren’t they, Mistress?” the slave said with a sigh. Annoying was not the word — was not a tenth the word — Nicole would have used. Julia went on, “I don’t know what you can do except what you did: pick nits, comb hair, and wash it, too, I suppose, though nothing seems to do much good. Just about everybody has ‘em.”

Nothing seems to do much good. Just about everybody has ‘em. Nicole hated bugs of any sort. She could deal with them, but she hated them. The idea that she had bugs living on her would make her scalp crawl if it hadn’t been crawling already. She’d felt dirty before. Now she felt unclean. She’d never known what that meant before, or how much worse it was than merely being filthy.

“Lice carry disease,” she said. She knew she shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t get her anywhere. But she couldn’t stop herself.

Sure enough, Julia looked at her as if she’d gone around the bend again, and said what she’d expected, as predictable as a sitcom script: “I never heard that before. Bad air or evil spirits or getting your humors out of line some way, yes, but lice? Beg pardon for saying so, but you sure have been coming up with some funny ideas lately, Mistress.”

“Ha, “ Nicole said in a hollow voice. “Ha, ha.” Convincing Julia she was right wasn’t the most important thing in the world — and that was lucky, too, because she could tell at a glance she wasn’t going to convince Julia, any more than she’d convinced her lead was poisonous. Julia had that every-body-knows look on her face again, the one impenetrable to everything this side of a baseball bat.

And there it was again, the script according to Julia: “How could lice carry disease? Like I said, almost everybody has ‘em. If they carried disease, people would be sick all the time, wouldn’t they? And they aren’t. So lice can’t carry disease.” The slave hugged herself with glee. “Listen to me, Mistress! I’m reasoning like a philosopher.”

Nicole sighed and went back to grinding flour. Julia’s logic was as good as she thought it was — if all lice carried disease all the time. If some lice carried it some of the time, no. But how could Nicole show that? She couldn’t, not by mere assertion, which was all she had going for her here.

It didn’t matter anyhow. Lice weren’t bad only because they carried disease. They were bad because they were disgusting. They were bad because they were lice. And she had them in her hair. In her hair. Every time she itched, she scratched frantically. Sometimes she drew blood. Every once in a while, she squashed something. She wiped her hands on her tunic, again and again.

When she found half a moment, she yelled for Aurelia. The little girl fidgeted more under her hands than Lucius had. She was just as lousy as her brother. As she had with Lucius, Nicole plucked nit after nit from her hair, and killed a couple of live ones for good measure.

But she didn’t have time to do anything even close to a proper job, not with baking and cooking and dealing with customers. It wouldn’t have mattered even if she had had time, because the children’s bedding was sure to be full of nits — and probably full of lice, too. Julia’s, too. And her own. Dear God in heaven, her own too.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. Squish — a chitinous yielding under her fingernail. Got one. Five minutes later… Scratch, scratch, scratch.

No matter how she scratched, no matter how she picked through the kids’ hair, she couldn’t keep up. Long before sunset, she understood why Umma hadn’t been able to keep the kids’ heads even halfway clean. She went on anyhow, with the kids getting more and more fractious every time, till she had to light a lamp to see the nits; then even the lamp wasn’t enough. The kids went up to bed in visible relief — there, they probably figured, they’d be safe from her pinching, prodding fingers.

She followed them not long after, tired to the bone. She thought seriously of stripping the bed — but there was still the mattress under the sheets. And the floor wasn’t clean either. Nothing short of a house fire was going to get rid of every louse in the place.

She undressed and washed up as best she could, missing toothpaste the most — her teeth felt as if they were coated in flannel. She rubbed them, and tried not to think of lice. The bed waited for her, deceptively tidy, as she’d made it in her innocence, just this morning. How many newly hatched baby lice would crawl onto her, once she lay down?

She couldn’t sleep propped up against the wall. For that matter, she couldn’t live if she went on like this. She’d been walking the edge of hysteria since Lucius found the louse in his hair. She had to stop. She had to stop now — or go straight screaming out of her mind.

Nicole hated nothing so much as a silly, screaming woman. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, two-inch roaches in the kitchen — no, she didn’t like them, but she could handle them. She’d never known anything but contempt for women who couldn’t handle the crawly things in life. What was a louse but another damned crawly thing?

But it was on her. It was laying eggs on her. It was -

“Enough,” she said, so harshly it made her throat ache. She took three deep breaths, each held a few seconds longer than the last. She made herself calm down. It wasn’t completely effective — she was still shaking, and her stomach was tied in a raw and painful knot — but it held her steady enough to lie on the bed. She couldn’t quite bring herself to pull the covers up over herself. She’d work up to that gradually. For now, just lie there. Just let the muscles relax one by one. Forget the worst blow this world had struck her. With everything else, untreated sickness, raw sewage in the street, rampant animal and child abuse, slavery — a few million lice were awesomely trivial. “It’s the small things that get you,” she mumbled. Sleep had seemed lightyears away, but, once she was horizontal, it crept inexorably up on her. It wasn’t just her body that was tired. Her mind was exhausted, wrung out and hung up to dry. Sleep was wonderful. Sleep was beautiful. Sleep would let her forget everything — even the myriad small live things that hatched and crawled and bred and died — but not soon enough — fight on her body.

Wine the next morning at breakfast seemed oddly welcome, not a poison to be drunk in slight preference to a different poison. Did it make her feel a little easier about the likelihood — no, the certainty — she was walking around with six-legged company? Maybe. Did it make her want to scratch a little less? Maybe. If it did, was that bad or good? For the life of her, Nicole didn’t know.

She had two cups with her bread. I’m thirsty, she told herself. When she finished the bread and that second cup of — after all — well-watered wine, she declared, “I’m going to the baths. Aurelia, you’re coming with me.” She sounded very loud and sure, even to herself.

“Oh, good!” Aurelia squealed with glee. No fights here, not like getting Kimberley into the tub. But this wasn’t just getting into the tub. This was an outing, which made it special.

Nicole wanted her to come for two very good and useful reasons. First and foremost was the chance to scrub Aurelia’s hair as well as she could, to get rid of as many lice and nits as possible. While she did that, she’d get an answer to a question that had occurred to her as soon as she remembered baths, ladies’ day, and the kids’ vermin: how would she go about taking care of that with Lucius? Could she bring a boy eight years old to the baths with her on a ladies’ day? Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. She’d have to see if she spotted any boys his size there today. If she couldn’t, could she ask Brigomarus, the brother she hadn’t met? Or would Titus Calidius Severus let Lucius go with him when he went to the baths? Did he go to the baths? The way he smelled, it was hard to tell.

Second, and not the least important of matters, either, Aurelia knew the ropes at the baths and Nicole didn’t. Nicole had learned how to run the tavern by watching Julia. Now she would learn how to take a Roman bath by watching… her daughter? She still didn’t think of Aurelia that way. How long did parents who adopted need to start thinking of their new children as if they were actual, blood relations? Aurelia, now — Aurelia was a blood relative, had come from this body, this blood and bone, these genes.

But Aurelia was not Nicole’s child in the spirit, where it mattered; not fully, not yet. Kimberley and Justin, who were… they were farther away than children had ever been from their mother; as far away as if she had died and not gone spiraling down through time. She hoped they were all right. She prayed they were all right, prayed to the deaf God in whom she’d almost given up believing and whom the Romans mocked, and prayed also to Liber and Libera. Let my children be all right. They’d listened to her once. Why not again?

She took a couple of asses out of the cash box, then scooped out a random handful of coins. Maybe she’d shop a little on the way home, or buy Aurelia a treat, or maybe there would be extras at the baths over and above the price of admission. Julia didn’t act surprised: Umma must have found some way to make those dupondii and sesterces disappear.

Poor Julia. She’d had to depend on the kindness of a customer or on Nicole’s generosity — on her owner’s generosity, a notion that still gave Nicole the cold grues — for even the small change that let her into the baths. She’d got a couple of dupondii while Nicole was out, but that wasn’t much, not set against the copper and brass and silver in the cash box.

My owner gets to take as much money as she wants, whenever she wants. That thought, or one like it, had to be echoing in Julia’s mind. How did everyone who owned a slave escape being murdered in her bed? It was evil, that was all. Just purely evil.

“Come on,” Nicole said to Aurelia. “Let’s go get clean.” That was cowardice, but she didn’t care. As long as she was in the baths, she wouldn’t have to look at Julia. She wouldn’t be reminded of the injustice she was still perpetrating.

Aurelia knew the way to the baths. Nicole thought she could have found them again by herself — not finding them would have been like mislaying an elephant — but letting the little girl scamper ahead and then catching up every fifty yards or so worked very well. Aurelia paid no attention whatever to the anatomically correct statues. Nicole shouldn’t have been surprised, not with men casually pissing in a jar right across the street from the tavern. Nonetheless, she was. It was all too different. She had to take it in a piece at a time, and pray she could put it together before she made a fatal mistake.

As men had the day before, women trooped up the steps and into the baths. The only men now in evidence around that enormous place were half a dozen burly types in ragged tunics, each of them bent under a load of wood that looked almost as enormous as the baths.

Off to one side of them marched a self-important little man who was obviously their boss. His tunic was not only fairly new bur dyed the rust brown of the one Nicole was coming to think of as her best dress. More important than that, however, the only wood he carried was a single, straight, peeled stick.

“Keep moving, you lazy bastards, keep moving!” he shouted. “Got to keep the fires fed, so we do, so we do. Ladies’ day today. Ladies want their water nice and hot, that they do. Ladies want lots of nice steam, too. Ladies want hot air going through the hypocausts, yes indeed. Can’t let their pretty little feet get cold, oh no.” What the workmen no doubt wanted was for the overbearing little twerp to shut up and let them do their job.

Suddenly, not ten feet from the little door they were approaching — Nicole looked for but didn’t see an authorized personnel only sign — one of the workmen tripped and fell. The leather lashings of his bundle parted. Twigs and branches and hacked chunks of treetrunk spilled over the paving stones.

“You oaf! You cocksucking idiot! You dingleberry hanging off the ass of the city of Carnuntum!” The strawboss literally hopped with rage. Nicole had never seen anybody do that before. He kept right on cursing while he did it, too. Aurelia giggled. Nicole’s hands flew up to cover the child’s ears, but the fellow was yelling too loud for that to do any good.

Slowly, the workman shook himself free of lumber and climbed to his feet. Both knees and one elbow dripped blood on the cobbles. “I’m sorry,” he said in gutturally accented Latin. “I pick it up and — “

“Sorry!” the nasty little strawboss screamed. “Sorry? You think you’re sorry now? I’ll have ‘em sell you to the mines. That’ll make you sorry, by Jupiter’s great hairy balls!”

The workman quailed. Nicole didn’t fully understand the threat, but he did, and it terrified him. She did understand that he wasn’t just a workman. He was a slave. He would have to be, to get stuck with a job like the one he had. His abject manner said so as loudly as the threat to sell him.

And the boss’ stick wasn’t only for show. He swept it whistling up over his head, then down, again and again, beating the workman as cruelly — and, worse, as casually — as that man whom Nicole had seen whipping his poor overburdened donkey the morning she came to Carnuntum.

And the slave let him. He stood there and took it with the air of a man who knew he’d get worse later if he tried to do anything about it now.

Inside Nicole, something snapped. “Stop that!” she shouted at the strawboss. “You stop that this instant!”

“Ah, butt out, lady, “ he said, sounding barely even annoyed. “I ain’t gonna hurt him so bad he can’t work.” He hardly paused to talk to her, but kept right on whaling the slave. He was only doing his job, his manner said. No point in getting upset. If it was nasty — well, that was life, wasn’t it?

The guards at Auschwitz had been like that, Nicole had heard somewhere. Just doing their job. “Leave him alone,” she said. “You’ve got no business abusing him that way.”

“Who says I don’t?” the boss retorted. “I’m supposed to get work out of him, ain’t I? How’s he supposed to feed the fires if he’s out here picking up all this crap? His skull’s so thick, the only way to get anything in is to beat it in.” As if to prove his point, he laid into the slave again.

“Stop that!” Nicole’s voice held itself just on the edge of a scream.

“You don’t like the way I do my job, take it up with the town council. I’ll tell you, though, they like it fine.” The strawboss’ stick went right on flaying the poor man’s hide, rising and falling, rising and falling.

But the worst part was that the slave didn’t even bother to cower, except when the stick cut a little too close to an eye or an ear. By all the signs, he’d been through it before. While the blows rained down on his back, he gathered up his burden again and mended the lashings till they’d hold without snapping. While Nicole stood gasping for breath and coherence, he looked up and snarled, “Shut up, lady, why don’t you? You’re just making it worse.”

Where nothing else had, that stopped Nicole cold. She didn’t want to make trouble for the poor fellow. She wanted to save him from it. But she couldn’t, dammit. That was the worst thing she’d seen about slavery yet. An instant later, she shook her head. No. The worst thing about it was the way the slave himself accepted it.

Aurelia plucked at her tunic. “Mother, are we going to have a bath, or are we going to quarrel all day?” By the way she said it, she was ready for either, but would have preferred the bath, probably because it was more unusual.

Nicole drew a slow, careful breath. “All right.” As tight-lipped with fury as she’d been since — since Frank’s e-mail, she thought — she stalked past the strawboss, Aurelia skipping at her side. The look she gave the man should have scorched him to a cinder. He leered back, running his eyes over her as if were stripping her naked under her tunic.

Her back stiffened. He laughed, impervious to the heat of her glare. Testosterone: it gave a man all the tact and sensitivity of a rhinoceros.

He laid off the slave, at least, and let him make his way wincing and stumbling through the side door to the baths. Nicole was a little bit glad of that.

The attendants at the top of the stairs today were women. Nicole eyed them with horrified fascination. Were they slaves, too? If she’d grown up here, she’d know as automatically as she breathed. Since she hadn’t, she couldn’t tell. Things weren’t so cut-and-dried here as they had been in the South before the Civil War, where if you saw an African-American you knew she was a slave.

How did the Romans keep all their slaves from walking off and settling down two towns over as free men? She couldn’t for the life of her see. There were rules, obviously; but no one had bothered to give her a rulebook. It was like walking cold into a game of bridge, being handed a pack of cards, and told to play — without even knowing what trumps meant. And if she asked, or was too blatant about not knowing, all the other players would think she’d gone insane.

No time to worry about it, not now. She’d be here for the rest of her life. It hit her hard, thinking that — knowing it as surely as, say, Julia knew she was a slave. Right behind it came a stab of real pain, a pang of longing for Kimberley and Justin, so strong that she almost couldn’t go on.

She put it down. There was nothing she could do for them but pray. She’d done that. For the rest of it… sooner or later, she’d have to sit down, take a deep breath, and do some serious sorting out. For now, for this moment at least, she gave one of the women an as for herself and another for Aurelia, then walked into the baths. She was getting good, perhaps too good, at segueing in and out, alternating between near-horror at her situation and a somewhat desperate determination to cope with it. Coping was all she could do — unless she broke and ran screaming into the Danube.

Though the sun streamed in through many windows, her eyes needed a moment to adapt from the brighter light outside. As her vision cleared, she had to work hard not to burst into a torrent of helpless giggles. When, back in the twentieth century, she’d thought about the Romans at all, which wasn’t often, what came to mind was cool white marble, as at the Getty. She’d learned in the street that that wasn’t exactly accurate, but she hadn’t realized, till just now, how very far off the mark it was.

They had cool white marble here — had it and painted it. Or, even better, plastered it over, then painted it. Statues decorated the antechamber, every one of them painted in the same disturbingly lifelike and gaudy style as the ones at street corners. The plastered walls were painted with garden scenes, each individual flower or shrub rendered realistically in itself but without perspective, so that everything was on the same flat, oddly dreamlike plane. The ceiling, lost in lofty dimness, showed a glimmer that might have been gilding and probably was. And as if all that had not been enough, the floor under her foot was a riot of reds and greens and golds, browns and bronzes and blues, hundreds, maybe thousands of vividly glazed tiles arranged into a mosaic of hunters and hounds, stags and wild boar.

The room beyond that was unroofed, a courtyard open to the sky. Something about that, about the transition from enclosed space to outer air, the shape and placement of entry and courtyard, reminded Nicole of something, as if she’d seen them before. Of course: on her honeymoon in Carnuntum, she’d walked in the ruins of this place. She looked around, taking it all in, trying to keep it in memory so that she could come back here and know where she was.

The flowers in this courtyard weren’t painted on the wall. They were real, planted in orderly rows, the bushes near the walls trimmed with geometric severity. Women exercised in the middle of the yard, some with dumbbells, others tossing around what looked like green balloons. “Pig bladders! “ Aurelia was jumping up and down with delight. “Mother, may I? Pig bladders are so much fun!”

“Pig… bladders.” Nicole had already seen that the Romans used every part of the pig except the squeal. One more proof here. They had to paint or dye the bladders that interesting shade of green: it didn’t look like anything one would find inside of a pig.

Most of the women who were exercising had rounder, fleshier bodies than Umma’s — they were built more as Nicole had been back in twentieth-century California. They had to be exercising to lose weight, Nicole thought, as in a health club in that other world and time. She had a moment’s sensation almost of relief — at last, something that resembled the things she’d known before.

Then she overheard two women sitting on a bench, watching the show and offering commentary. One pointed to a woman who to Nicole’s eyes was somewhat on the beefy side. “What’s Pollia doing hefting those weights? Her figure’s perfect as it is. Her husband never complains about sticks and bones.”

Her friend, whom Nicole would have called nicely if not overly slim, sighed in clearly evident envy. “Doesn’t he now? Nor,” she added with a flash of malice, “her boyfriend either.”

“Do tell!” the first woman said. “So who is it now? Faustus still? Or is she creeping around in corners with that pretty young Silvius instead?”

“Why, both!” her friend declared.

They laughed together, rocking back and forth on the stone bench, clinging to each other as if they’d never heard a better joke. When they were under control again, the second woman said, “It’s chic, that’s why she does it. Run around, show off your nice breasts and your firm buttocks, let everybody admire your technique. What’s it to her how much meat and oil she needs to scarf up, to keep the weight on? Everybody knows she married old Aulus for his money — and his handsome slaves.”

Nicole moved past them before they could guess she was eavesdropping, taking a second, longer look at the women playing what looked like a cross between volleyball and soccer.

Their rings and earrings and bracelets were gold, most of them. They’re the rich ones, she realized with yet another shock to the tottering structure of her assumptions: the ones who can eat enough to put on weight, and who don’t do enough real work to take it off again. She thought of her own new body, and how she’d admired its slimness. A sigh — half rueful laugh — escaped her. Wasn’t that just like her luck? Thin was not In in Carnuntum. The body that had been on the chunky side in California would have been perfect here — and this one, which would have been a killer in the latest in short, tight, and Spandex, was too skinny by local standards. “You can’t win,” she said to herself.

Aurelia was tugging at her tunic again. “Mother! Mother, can I play?”

“No,” Nicole said absently. Then, with more focus: “No, there’s no one else your age playing. Come on inside.”

Aurelia didn’t protest too loudly. She was too excited by the whole adventure to quibble every detail of it. Nicole didn’t need to do anything clever to get her to lead the way. She aimed unerringly toward one of several doorways on the far side of the colonnade, into a room whose function was unmistakable. Two of the walls were bristling with pegs, some draped with items of clothing, others empty. While she stood just inside the doorway, letting her eyes adapt again from sunlight to indoor dimness, a woman slipped out of her tunic and drawers and hung them with her sandals on a peg. A clothed attendant sat on a stool nearby. She was probably supposed to be keeping an eye on things, but she looked half asleep.

Nicole hadn’t been nude in public since she’d escaped her last high-school p.e. class, for which she was heartily glad. No choice now — and the woman who’d just stripped off wasn’t anything special, either. Defiantly, she pulled her tunic off over her head and yanked down her loincloth. The roof didn’t fall in. The walls didn’t shake with laughter and jeers and cries of Skinny Minnie! and Hey, Horseface! No one took any notice of her at all.

Aurelia got out of her clothes in one fluid motion. She took it altogether for granted. When in Rome… Nicole thought, and grinned to herself. She wasn’t sure how amused she was, but the irony of the situation was hard to escape.

She looked down at herself. Sure enough, halfway between her belly button and the edge of her indifferently shaven bush was a nondescript brown mole. No doubt about it: Calidius Severus had seen this body naked — and paid attention to what he’d seen.

She sighed. Well, so had she, now. And isn’t it about time? Now everybody’s happy.

Once her eyes adapted, she saw the room was larger than she’d thought at first, and more crowded. A counter stood along the wall at the far end. A second attendant sat there, looking as bored as the first. When Nicole and Aurelia came up to her, she did as she’d done for the woman just ahead of them: she handed Nicole a small, cheap earthenware jar without a stopper and a bronze tool resembling a half-scale sickle.

What am I supposed to do with this? Nicole wondered. She looked around for the answer. Women sat naked on benches rubbing the stuff from the jars over themselves and then scraping it off with the sickle-like tools. She didn’t see any boys Lucius’ age, or any other age either. A soft murmur of conversation filled the room. A few women sat in pairs and threes, oiling and scraping one another, but most seemed to be there alone and comfortable with it.

While Nicole took it all in, Aurelia spotted an empty bench and dashed over to lay claim to it. “Come on, Mother!” she called. “You’re so slow today. Will you do me first, Mother, please? I want to go swim in the pool!”

Nicole picked her way past the benches full of preoccupied women. None of them looked up. Nobody stared or even seemed to notice her. She sat on the bench. Aurelia presented her narrow back and shoulders with an air of someone who knows very well what she is in for.

Nicole poured a little of the liquid from the jar into the cupped palm of her hand. It was olive oil, as she would have guessed by Julia’s odor fresh from the baths — not so good and, by the scent, not so fresh as what she used in the tavern, but unmistakably olive oil. This is going to get anybody clean?

One thing was certain: Aurelia had plenty of dirt on which to experiment. Nicole rubbed the oil over her. Aurelia was still at the age where she made a perfect figure one — all vertical lines, no curves whatever. But, though she was slim enough for her ribs to show, she wasn’t scrawny; her arms and legs had plenty of flesh on them.

“Mother!” she squeaked when Nicole began to scrape off the olive oil. “The strigil tickles!”

That gave Nicole the name of the tool she was awkwardly wielding. Amazing, how much dirt it took off with the oil. It wasn’t as good as soap would have been, but it wasn’t bad. And she only had to tell Aurelia to stop wiggling about half a dozen times.

After she’d finished with Umma’s daughter — her daughter now — she swallowed a twinge of revulsion and rubbed oil into her own skin, all over. It had a slimy, slippery feel, like cold cream gone bad, or rancid baby oil. Aurelia begged to help. Nicole handed her the strigil. “Here, you do my legs.” Aurelia was happy to oblige. She did as good a job as one might expect, but grew bored with it and wandered off, humming to herself. Nicole finished the rest, twisting awkwardly to do her back and buttocks. It was truly astonishing how well the oil lifted dirt. Her skin was a couple of shades lighter, and it hadn’t even seen water yet.

A man’s voice sent her into a purely reflexive jump-and-curl, one arm over her breasts, the other over her privates. The owner of the voice sauntered in beside and a little behind one of the women who’d been exercising in the courtyard, the one who looked astonishingly like Elizabeth Taylor and seemed to have about the same fondness for gold and outsized stones. No diamonds, Nicole was rather disappointed to note. The jewels were huge, but looked rough and barely polished; they ran heavily to garnets and amber.

The woman skinned her tunic over her rigidly curled and plaited head and strolled, unconcernedly naked, to a vacant bench. She lay on her belly and rested her head on her folded arms, sighing and wriggling her ample buttocks as if to get comfortable on the well-worn wood.

Her escort was a type Nicole would have recognized in L.A. He’d have been showing off his buff pecs on the beach and trying out for roles on Baywatch, back where Nicole came from. Here he seemed to have settled into the life of a kept studmuffin. He bent over his — mistress? that could be taken several different ways — and began to rub her back. She purred with pleasure. Nobody could miss the sound: it echoed through the room.

Was he a slave? Was he her slave? Did the baths provide a masseur if you paid extra? Nicole didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. Another one occurred to the lawyerly side of her, one that made her laugh to herself: how many masseurs figured in divorce actions in Carnuntum?

Aurelia was hopping up and down with impatience. “Mother! Are you asleep? I asked you. Shall we go on the hot plunge now, or the cool one?”

Nicole shook herself back into line. “The hot one,” she answered promptly. The man’s muscles hadn’t roused her a bit, but her insides went all soft and quivery at the thought of hot water.

She’d chosen right for Aurelia, too: the child clapped her hands and danced. She skipped ahead through one of two doorways at the far side of the stripping-off room. More women had been going through that doorway than through the other. So it wasn’t just Nicole’s twentieth-century sensibility. In a world in which hot water wasn’t simply to be had at the turning of a tap, people valued it all the more.

The hot plunge was a small swimming pool, although Nicole had never before gone into a pool with a mosaic of voluptuously naked women on the bottom. Their hair was green — sea nymphs? She sighed as she lowered herself into the water: the temperature was just what she would have wanted in her own tub.

Some of her pleasure died abruptly. This water hadn’t come from a nice safe heater in a corner of the laundry room. Slaves had hauled wood to feed the fires that heated the pool. There was human sweat in it, and human blood, too.

She couldn’t wallow in liberal guilt every time she made a new move.

This whole world looked to be a liberal’s nightmare. Too much of it would have been her nightmare if she’d known what it was really like.

Well, she hadn’t. And she was here, and she was staying here, and that was that. She shut off the corner of her mind that niggled her with guilt, and went back to reveling in the feel of hot water on her skin.

Aurelia had slid into the plunge a little way down. Now she came paddling up to Nicole, sleek as a fish. “Come here,” Nicole said. “We’re going to do your hair.”

Aurelia didn’t like getting ducked, not even slightly. She spluttered and squawked and wiggled, none of which did her any good. Nicole was all for empowering children, but not when they had heads full of lice and nits. She did the best job she could with hot water and no shampoo, and had to hope it would be enough.

When she’d finished tormenting Aurelia, she worked at her own hair and scalp with fingers and nails till she could feel the sting of water in scrapes and scratches. Maybe she’d managed to unload the current cargo of vermin. But even if she had, how long would that last? She’d have to boil all the bedding and all the clothes in her house to have a prayer of banishing them for good — and she had next to no chance that they’d stay banished, not with customers bringing in a whole new shipment five minutes after she’d killed off the last one.

She could get used to stuffing her underwear with rags several days a month, because the other women in Carnuntum had to do the same. She supposed she could get used to chamberpots, because everybody in Carnuntum used chamberpots. Could she get used to being lousy, because everybody in Carnuntum was lousy? Not — bloody — likely. She scrubbed at her scalp again.

A woman a few feet away from her stopped trying to rub dirt off an arm that was hardly more than skin wrapped around bones and started coughing: long, wet, racking coughs that made her ladder-thin body shudder and her face turn dusky purple. When at last she seemed able to pause for breath, Nicole saw flecks of reddish froth in her nostrils and the corners of her lips, as if she’d literally coughed up bits of lung.

Tuberculosis, Nicole thought with a frisson of horror. The horror that followed was too big for a frisson: the woman spat the bloody foam into the water, as casual as if there were no harm in it at all, and went back to trying to get clean.

Nicole stared transfixed at the swirling, turbid water. The foam had melted right into it. In her mind’s eye, she saw the bacilli floating there, spreading through the plunge, multiplying in that wonderful warm, wet medium. But the germs were too small for her physical eyes to see — for anyone to see. And there were no microscopes here. She remembered that from some class or other, history of science or some such: what a world-shaking discovery that had been. It was still centuries in the future.

And, because germs were too small for human eyes to see, no one in Carnuntum would believe they were there. Everything she’d seen in the city made her sure of that.

But that didn’t mean they weren’t there, or that she didn’t know they were there. She grabbed Aurelia, who was doing her best to imitate an otter. “Time to get out,” Nicole said firmly.

“Oh, Mother! Do you want to go to the sweating room already?” Aurelia sounded like every kid ever born, in any corner of the world.

It did her no good whatever. “Yes, that’s where we’re going,” Nicole said, though she hadn’t known it was till Aurelia mentioned it. All she’d known was that they were getting out of this pool, and they were doing it this instant.

Reluctantly, Aurelia did as she was told. Reluctantly, she led the way down a dim stone passageway to the sweating room, though Nicole wasn’t about to let her know she was doing that.

Outside the room, an attendant stood holding a tray. She held it out as Nicole came up. Haifa dozen leaf-shaped iron blades lay on the tray. “Razor?” she asked.

Nicole took a razor. She held it cautiously; in California, she’d used an electric shaver, not least because she kept slicing herself with blades. This wasn’t just a slicing tool; if you weren’t careful, you could kill somebody with it. Yourself, for instance.

Nevertheless, and in spite of her misgivings, she took it. She’d already seen that nobody in Carnuntum went around au naturel. If she wanted to blend in, she had to do what everybody else did.

And, having seen how bad the lice problem was, she thought she knew why women here shaved everything but their heads. It was a wonder they didn’t shave their heads, too. Maybe she should do that, and start a fashion?

She wasn’t feeling quite so radical just then. She had chances enough for mayhem as she shaved tender places she’d never tried shaving before with any razor at all, let alone one as potentially lethal as this. The razor was dull, too, and scraped and pulled, and altogether it was not a pleasant process.

Women might shave everywhere, and for good sanitary reasons, too, but Nicole had already seen that men didn’t even shave their faces. So what was fair about that? Not one thing, she thought with a familiar smolder of anger.

Hot air hissed and wheezed through pipes in the walls and floor of the sweating room. Nicole wasn’t the only woman shaving there; the sweat that poured from her helped soften the hair and made it easier for the razor not only to cut the hair but to slide across the skin. Nicole still cut herself three or four times, but she wasn’t the only one doing that, either. Small bloody nicks and muttered curses marked other victims of fashion and hygiene.

Aurelia, being small, was thoroughly baked before Nicole had started to brown. Just as Nicole scraped the last wiry black fuzz from her shin, Aurelia tugged at her free hand. “Let’s jump in the cold plunge now, Mother. I’m melting!” Sweating room… Cold plunge… Sauna, Nicole thought happily. She slid down into the cold pool with a sigh of bliss. Aurelia jumped in, splashing water everywhere. None of the women in the pool complained. Maybe they were willing to let kids be kids. Maybe, like Nicole, they felt too good to complain.

When the water started feeling chilly instead of wonderful, Nicole climbed out. Aurelia’s lips were blue, and her teeth chattered. Nicole looked around for a towel, but there didn’t seem to be one. The air of the baths at least was warmer than the water they’d been in. They dried as they walked down the hall back to the stripping-off room, and warmed up, too. Aurelia paused halfway down the hall. “I have to go to the latrine,” she said, and ducked through a doorway.

Nicole, and Umma, too, thank God — or gods — wasn’t one of those women who had to go every ten minutes, or she’d have been in bad shape by now; but her bladder was a little full, and she was curious as to what, if anything, Romans had besides chamberpots. She was envisioning a row of stalls, and in each a malodorous earthen pot, as she stepped from the dim passage into a slightly brighter and much wider space. It was larger than she’d expected, as big as the biggest public restroom she could remember from the twentieth century. It was public, too, no doubt about that. No stalls or partitions separated one hole from another on the long stone bench. You sat down and did what you did in front of everybody, and everybody did her business in front of you.

Nicole’s bladder clamped up tight and wouldn’t let go. Bashful bladder syndrome sounded like a joke, but it wasn’t. It was as real as this giant privy and the dozen or so women squatting and chattering and doing their business with no more trouble than the men had had pissing in Titus Calidius Severus’ urn.

Closing her eyes helped. So did the gurgle of flowing water beneath her: houses might not boast running water, but the baths and fountains did. The latrine even had the equivalent of toilet paper: a sponge on a stick in a jar of water. The water was murky. Nicole picked up the sponge with some misgivings, wondering who’d used it last. Nobody else seemed to wonder about that, or care.

The latrine wasn’t all it might have been, but it was bliss compared to squatting over an earthenware jar. In spite of the sweating room and the cold plunge, the baths weren’t all they might have been either; but again, compared to being filthy they were heaven.

Aurelia obviously agreed. “That was nice, Mother,” she said as they got back into their clothes, “even if you did scrub my hair too hard.”

Nicole nodded. “It was nice,” she said. She probably hadn’t got all of Aurelia’s nits, or her own, but she didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about going back to work, either, not after this lovely lazy morning. She sighed and squared her shoulders. “It was nice,” she repeated, “but we’ve got to go home.”