The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  I was reminded once again that Abigail had no family other than the large scholarly one she was part of at St. Sunniva, where she had found a place after leaving her foster family at age seventeen. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with them, she had once told me. They were nice and all, but she had felt like a visitor the whole time she lived there. Sometimes those things worked out well, and sometimes they didn’t. That was true of any social contract, I remembered thinking at the time.

  Abigail was still eying me defiantly.

  “Does everyone feel this way?” I asked the group. My hand had started to throb, I noticed. Hopefully the wine had helped disinfect the cut.

  It was unanimously agreed that we would stay as long as it took to figure out who had ordered the sacking of Secundus’s shop—Scaurus, the town’s top garum maker, or Nigidius, the landlord.

  During our conversation, Secundus had been standing by silently. I imagined that for him it was like watching a soap opera in another language, with the characters arguing over intangible things. He nodded as Helen explained our decision and said something back, a cascade of swift sounds rolling off his tongue. I wondered if that was how we sounded to him. With a small bow, he went into the shop. We heard the sound of the jars being rearranged on a shelf. At least something had survived the intruder’s wrath.

  “What did he say?” I asked Helen.

  “He would like to know who did it, if only to spit at the man’s feet—or, better yet, to have a curse tablet made.”

  “Wow, how does that work?” I asked.

  Xavier replied before Helen could. “You write down the name of the person you want to curse, the details of whatever nasty thing you’d like to have happen to them, and what you promise to your god of choice or underworld spirit in exchange. Then you drive a nail into the tablet, right into the name of the person you’ve cursed, and take it to a tomb or temple.”

  “Yikes,” I said.

  “And if your wish comes true, you bring your offering as promised. It’s all very quid pro quo. Oh, here’s Faustilla. I’ve asked her if she has a poultice or salve that might help your hand, Julia.”

  Faustilla tut-tutted over the swelling index finger of my right hand. She pulled me into the back room and sat me down on a stool, Helen trailing along to translate and Abigail to hold the lamp. As Faustilla rummaged among the small jars and vessels, finally choosing one that held a pea soup yellow powder, Sabina came in from the curtained area to see what the commotion was about. Under her grandmother’s supervision, she was given the task of sprinkling water into the powder to moisten it.

  When the mixture had turned into a goopy yellow paste that met with Faustilla’s approval, the old woman sloshed some vinegar on my hand, then dabbed on a liberal amount of the mixture. That being done, she turned and gave Abigail a frank stare. After a moment she asked Helen a question.

  Abigail’s mouth popped open. Helen’s eyes crinkled a bit, but she translated for me. “Faustilla wants to know if Abigail’s recently been sick and if that’s why her hair is so short.”

  “You better explain we’re leaving for Rome soon,” I said, forestalling Abigail’s answer.

  “Roma,” said the old woman, recognizing the word, and then began a long monologue.

  Helen translated while Faustilla continued to work on my hand. “She’d like to see Rome one day. Her son—her firstborn, her pride and joy—went there to seek his fortune and a wife… She’s not sure exactly what he’s doing, but no doubt something important. He is busy and does not have much time to arrange for a letter to be written and sent to his mother. She is blessed that the gods gave her a younger son to take care of her.”

  It struck me that Faustilla didn’t exactly treat her younger son like she appreciated him.

  As Celer waddled in from the garden and made himself comfortable by my feet, Faustilla added something, her voice rising and falling. Abigail’s cheeks were getting pinker by the minute.

  “She is lamenting the fact that Secundus doesn’t have a son of his own. She has been urging him to take a new wife, but he won’t listen. Your daughter—she means Abigail—she wants to know if she’s unattached. If so, she and her son might make a good match.”

  “Well, now. Let me mull that over for a bit,” I said, then, at Abigail’s outraged stare, relented. “Tell her…tell her that Abigail has a betrothed back home.”

  “I do,” Abigail said, loudly. “His name is Dave and he is a graduate student in the Athletics Department. Well, he’s not my betrothed exactly—we’ve only been seeing each other for three months—why are we even talking about this?”

  Faustilla seemed disappointed as Helen relayed my words. She wrapped a strip of cloth around my hand and tied a knot, perhaps more firmly than necessary. She made a remark. Abigail snorted and Helen smiled.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “That your children—Abigail and Kamal—don’t look very much alike.”

  “Don’t look very much—what’s she insinuating? Tell her that Abigail takes after me—my hair was a bit lighter when I was younger—and Kamal takes after Nate.” I added, “What happened to Sabina’s mother?” It was something I’d been wondering about.

  “Sabina told me that she died a few years back,” Abigail explained.

  “How did it happen?”

  The only answer was a noncommittal shrug. It was quite possible that the family didn’t even know what had caused her illness.

  Poor Sabina, I thought, rubbing Celer’s furry head with my good hand as Faustilla went on what can only be described as a tirade, Helen translating. “It would be wise of her son to heed the gods’ warnings, with the break-in to the shop and the increasing tremors… She remembers the earthquake of a generation ago—the buildings danced like embers in a bonfire and the angry gods made tiles rain down from rooftops. She thinks another big one is coming. The fountain down the block has gone almost dry, like something underneath the very stones of Pompeii has been angered.”

  “She’s right of course,” said Xavier, who had wandered in. He reached into the cloth purse hanging on his belt to pay Faustilla for her efforts, but the offer was waved away. An unexpected bit of graciousness on Faustilla’s part. The second one. We had learned that the additional room Xavier had rented for the night belonged to her and Sabina. They would make do with the back room; I had spotted blankets and pillows on the floor in the curtained-off area, next to where Secundus had been sleeping. Xavier was compensating them, but I still appreciated the gesture.

  Once upstairs, we left the men in Xavier’s room—the chief and Kamal would sleep on the floor (a rather tight fit)—and went into the adjoining one, carrying a lamp.

  “I don’t mind sleeping on the floor,” Abigail said.

  Envying her younger bones, I lowered myself onto one of the two beds. The mattress was stuffed with straw and it smelled of it, too. It was a step up from sleeping on the floor, both literally and figuratively, but just.

  Tired as I was, my impressions of the town (not to mention my throbbing hand, though Faustilla’s yellow paste seemed to be helping) kept me from dozing off immediately. What a thriving, alive place Pompeii was—an intricate social web of family, hospitality, entrepreneurship, hard work. And yet a leisurely pace of life was on display everywhere, people engaged in conversation, gossip, and discussion on corners, in cafés and taverns, in the baths, by their front doors.

  Helen worked with words, Xavier with numbers and symbols, and I—I was a people person, which is why my job suited me. Students, postdocs, and professors came knocking on my office door every day (or, more likely, e-mailed or called me), and if I could, I solved their problems and sent them away happy. If I couldn’t, I offered a sympathetic ear, a shoulder to cry on, or served as a venting board or a focus for their anger. It was all part of the job. I’d always felt that there were as many personalities in St. Sunniva as there were people. I rather felt that way about Pompeii, too.

  “Helen?” I whispered. Ab
igail was already asleep, judging by the sound of her breathing. “Are you awake?”

  “I am, Julia, what is it?”

  “If we don’t manage to meet up with Dr. May, I’ve decided what I’d like to be.”

  “What?”

  “A barmaid.”

  “Why a barmaid?”

  “I’m a people person. People could come into my tavern and tell me their problems and I’d serve them wine and try to make them feel better.”

  “Hmm. I’m not sure it would turn out to be all that you imagine. And History might not let you do it, anyway.” She paused. “You and Chief Kirkland have a lot in common, you know.”

  “We do not,” I protested. “I can’t make him out at all. Sometimes he’s very pleasant to me, other times he’s reserved, and sometimes he’s downright obnoxious.”

  “I meant his job has to do with working with people and their problems, too.”

  We both snickered at the thought of the tall and outdoorsy chief spending his days doling out stew and wine from behind a tavern bar. Helen added in a more thoughtful tone, “It’s complicated for him, you know. He blames himself for what happened to us. I think his interest in the crime at Secundus’s shop stems from a need to keep his mind busy. His real concern is getting us home safely and finding out who sent us here.”

  “Well, he doesn’t have to blame himself for me being here—I wanted to come along. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who might have done this,” I added.

  “Have you?” Helen said, and then paused as a yawn overtook her. I heard her turn on her side, toward the wall. She mumbled, “See? You two do have a lot in common.”

  A sunny day dawned, sending a strip of brightness and the din of neighborhood activity into the room. I woke up groggy, already hoping that the others would be willing to adopt the local custom of a midday siesta. All this early rising was getting to me.

  Judging from their steady breathing, Helen and Abigail were sounder sleepers than I was. I quietly opened the door and stepped outside onto the terrace. Unwinding the strip of cloth Faustilla had wrapped around my hand, I checked the cut. It was hard to tell if it looked any better because I couldn’t see past the yellow. It throbbed a little less, I decided, wrapping my hand back up.

  Secundus had reopened his shop, I saw as I headed down the stairs, though most of the shelves gaped empty. Sabina was manning the counter. Faustilla, who was much kinder now that we were paying lodgers, nodded a grudging good morning and handed me my share of the breakfast, which I assumed Xavier had paid for on his way out. He’d slipped a note under the door to let us know that he and Nate had left before dawn to pay the twin patron visits with Secundus: one to Nigidius, whose villa was the grand one with the floor mosaic of the chained dog in the entryway, and the second to Scaurus.

  I ate the porridge in the garden, then spent some time looking at Faustilla’s herbs, trying to identify them all, until Abigail, Kamal, and Helen joined me. I greeted them with an idea that I had been brooding over. “I suppose it’s unrealistic to suggest that we obtain all necessary materials and build a STEWie from scratch here, but wouldn’t History be on our side for that?”

  Kamal shook his head. “Materials are only half the problem. We need a computer. Figuring out how to jump from one place to another, that’s a calculation that’s—what’s the expression?—hair-raisingly complex. Say that we wanted to jump from this spot here”—he pointed to a row of mint plants—“to the same spot in modern Pompeii, the tourist town. It seems like we could just keep standing still as we traveled forward in time. But this spot on the Earth constantly moves. The Earth rotates once a day. The continents are drifting, with Europe and North America moving apart at the rate of, what, four centimeters per year? The Earth itself is moving in its orbit around the sun… Not to mention that the sun is traveling around the galactic center, carrying the whole solar system with it.”

  Helen took up the explanation. “Also, the ground level typically rises as one moves forward in time due to the layers of trash and other detritus added by people and by nature. That would especially be true near a volcano like Mount Vesuvius. Layers upon layers of ash and rock will be deposited by the imminent and subsequent eruptions. Which means that Secundus’s Pompeii lies below the modern ground level. You have to go down to get to the excavated parts.”

  “Not to mention all the funky things going on with the Julian and the Gregorian calendars, skipped days, leap years, lack of year zero, and so on, making calculations even trickier,” Abigail said.

  “In short,” Kamal concluded, “let’s just say there is a reason we needed whiz professors like Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas to get STEWie operational in the first place.”

  “Just thought I’d ask,” I said.

  Kamal wandered over to the crudely drawn painting on the garden wall, with its eternally blooming flowers, birds chirping on a tree, and bubbling fountain, and studied it for a moment.

  “Kamal, isn’t there something you and Abigail need to do?” Helen called out to him. “The money that we owe the bakery?”

  “We tried yesterday, Professor, we really did.” Abigail said. “History wouldn’t let us pay them back.”

  “Well, try again today.”

  “I hope we’re not doomed to spend the rest of our lives here. It might be okay if we could move around freely, but as it is—” Abigail didn’t finish her sentence. She opened her palm, revealing the two-sided ivory comb that Sabina had used on my hair. “When Sabina heard we were leaving, she gave me this.”

  Abigail’s Latin was sketchy and halting, but I could easily picture the conversation. Sabina would be eager and excited for her new friend who was going to Rome, wonder shining in her eyes, dark and hauntingly deep, so like her father’s. The girl had heard many implausible-sounding things about Rome, Abigail told us, including that there were armies of giants there and more people than there were fish in the sea.

  “Faustilla has invited some guy she’s decided is the perfect match for Sabina to stop by tomorrow,” Abigail said abruptly. “Apparently it’s all pretty much settled. Sabina doesn’t know anything about him, other than that he’s an apprentice in a pottery shop. Weird, isn’t it? I mean, she’s only, what, thirteen?”

  I sighed and tried to put a positive spin on things. “Many arranged marriages work out very well. It’s an old tradition.”

  Kamal had lost interest in the wall painting. “My parents have an arranged marriage,” he informed us.

  “How did that turn out?” I asked.

  He gave a shrug, the usual reaction people had to personal questions about their parents. “Fine, I guess.”

  “Sabina is just about the age Anne-Marie was when she got married. I suppose that turned out all right,” Abigail allowed. “At least until Antoine was guillotined,” she added.

  Anne-Marie was Madame Lavoisier, Abigail’s thesis topic.

  “Speaking of Faustilla and arranged marriages, Abigail, have you noticed her interest in you?” Kamal asked.

  “I have.” She whipped around to face me. “Julia, promise me you won’t marry me off if we have to stay here. Not to Secundus or anyone else.”

  “Faustilla didn’t seem too discouraged when you mentioned Dave. But don’t worry.” I patted her shoulder. “I won’t marry you off. Nor you, Kamal.”

  Kamal snorted and Helen said, “Let’s just do our best to meet up with Dr. May in Rome,” ending the conversation.

  Nate and Xavier returned from Nigidius’s villa looking glum. They hadn’t been able to get past the front door. It wasn’t that they weren’t allowed in, History’s hand had stopped them. It had taken some explaining to Secundus, who was a bit baffled by how quickly they had changed their minds. They would try again later in the day.

  I asked about Scaurus as we all filed into the room where Helen and Abigail and I had slept.

  After waiting on a bench outside the gaudy villa with the other callers, they had been led into a large atrium open to the sky, its floor a
mosaic with garum jars proclaiming “Best fish sauce.” (Advertising or bragging? It wasn’t that different from what many modern companies might do.) Beyond the atrium was a colonnaded garden with a fishpond, and that was about all they saw of the house. Scaurus himself had turned out to be a toga-clad, large-nosed, heavyset man with a booming voice that carried across the villa. He had sat in a high-backed chair, playing the part of a royal. The overseer, Thraex, had stood by his right hand the whole time, and, on his left, a lavishly decorated strongbox had held unseen valuables.

  “Did he seem like the type of person who would order his overseer to trash Secundus’s shop?” I asked.

  “He didn’t seem like he wasn’t the type,” Nate answered.

  Xavier said thoughtfully, “Secundus told me a bit about Thraex, Scaurus’s overseer. He has plans for the future. He aims to run a shop that sells his master’s garum, just like Abascantus and Agathopus—two freedmen who were previously slaves of Scaurus. Scaurus likes to free his slaves after a certain period of service, to encourage loyalty in the current crop and to impress others with his wealth and generosity.”

  I tried another avenue, remembering a conversation I’d had with the chief about the crime that had stranded us here. “What’s Scaurus’s character flaw?”

  Nate didn’t even take a moment to think about it. “Pride. He seems to want to display to the world everything he owns, all his accomplishments. Really, who keeps a slave on one side and a strongbox on the other when receiving clients?”

  Xavier mentioned a piece of gossip he’d overheard on the bench outside the villa—the garum maker hadn’t been the same since the death of his son. It was rumored that he was channeling all his energy into his business. The son, Aulus, had done his father proud—he had been an elected official of Pompeii and, upon his death, the town had built an equestrian statue of him in the Forum. I didn’t remember seeing it, but I put it on my Pompeii to-do list.