by Judith Tarr
Julius Rufus beamed at her. “You think of your profit margin, I see. Good for you! If your arithmetic is weak, I’ll be happy to help you with your figuring, so that you — “
“My arithmetic is fine, thank you,” Nicole snapped. Her arithmetic, from what she’d seen, was a damn sight better than that of any local without a counting board in front of him. The Romans, naturally enough, used and thought in terms of Roman numerals, and Roman numerals were to arithmetic what cruel and unusual punishment was to jurisprudence.
The dicker that followed left Julius Rufus sweating. “Mistress Umma, do you want my children to starve?” he wailed at the midpoint.
“They won’t starve,“ she retorted. “They can drink the beer you don’t sell me. This isn’t something I have to have. It’s something I might want to have — if the price is right. This tavern’s done fine without beer for a long time. We can go right on doing fine without it, as long as it’s going to cost six times as much as it’s worth.”
“What a terrifying woman you are,“ Julius Rufus muttered.
Nicole smiled a smile that Frank had likened to a shark’s. “You say the sweetest things,” she said. He flinched as if she’d slapped him.
She ended up buying the beer at something less than half the price he’d quoted. She still had a scrap left of the papyrus on which she’d written out Julia’s letters of manumission; she got out the pen and ink and set down on the scrap the terms to which she and Julius Rufus had agreed. When it was written up as it should be, she shoved the papyrus across the bar at him. “Just sign this, if you would.”
“Sweet Isis the merciful!” he cried. He mumbled his slow way through the three-line contract, then scrawled something that might have said Julius Rufus below it. “There! Are you happy now?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Nicole said, and seized the papyrus and stowed it away in the box before he could think of grabbing it for himself. She turned to Julia. “Pour this nice man a cup of Falernian, if you please.” She was the soul of politeness now, even if she’d been a barracuda only moments before. Why not? Nothing wrong with being friendly after she’d got her way.
10
Well have good weather for the beast show,” Titus Calidius Severus said, as smug as if he’d ordered it especially for the occasion. “This sort of thing is a lot less fun in the rain and mud.”
“Yes,” Nicole said, barely remembering to answer him at all. She was excited out of all proportion to the occasion, almost quivering with eagerness at the chance to do something out of the ordinary. She’d even fixed herself up with a sitter: she’d promised Julia a couple of extra sesterces above her usual wages, to ride herd on things. Julia had agreed so readily, Nicole suspected she was plotting to earn a few more sesterces on the side — or on her back.
Nicole almost didn’t care. Or, no: she cared. But there wasn’t anything she could do about Julia once Julia was out of her sight. And she wanted — God, how she wanted — to get away for the day.
“This will be — “ she began, but stopped abruptly, before she said something she might regret.
Titus Calidius Severus wasn’t about to let her off that particular hook. “Be what?” he asked in all apparent innocence.
“Fun,” Nicole said after a pause. It wasn’t what she’d intended to say. But, while this would be the first time she’d gone outside the walls of Carnuntum, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Umma had done so. Nicole wasn’t about to blow her cover now. Not after all this time.
A clamoring throng of people streamed toward the southwestern gate of the city, all heading, as she was, for the amphitheater. They chattered as they went, sounding at least as excited as she felt. “Lions, I heard,” one said. “I heard tigers,” somebody else declared. People scoffed at that, to his evident disgust: he folded his arms and set his jaw and retreated into injured silence. “Bears,” a woman said behind him. “There are always bears.”
“Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!” Nicole was wearing sandals, not ruby slippers, and the road was neither yellow nor brick, but she kicked up her heels regardless.
Cahdius Severus didn’t seem to find anything too strange about her behavior, though his glance was more than a little amused. “I’m with everybody else except that one idiot,” he said: “I won’t believe they’ve got tigers till I see ‘em with my own eyes.”
Nicole blinked at the absolute literality of his comment. For an instant — a very brief instant — she felt a little of the old, sinking sensation, the awareness that went all the way to the bone, that no, indeed, she wasn’t in Kansas anymore; nor in West Hills, either. She felt more as if she’d fallen into a sword-and-sandal epic from late-night TV.
They jostled through the gate. In the sudden coolness beneath it, as people crowded together to pass the bottleneck, Nicole found herself pressed against Calidius Severus. She had to clutch at his shoulder or trip and fall. He caught her easily, as if he’d done it often before, and held her in a calm familiar grip.
She stiffened. He let go. Neither exchanged a glance. Nicole was still breathing hard as she emerged into the sunlight. It was painfully bright after the dimness of the gate. That was why she blinked so hard, she told herself; and she’d been pushed to go a fair bit faster than she wanted to, to keep up with the crowd. That was why her breath came so quick. Of course it was. She wasn’t feeling anything toward the man who walked decorously beside her.
The amphitheater stood not far outside the city’s walls, a couple of hundred yards, she reckoned, surrounded by a meadow of knee-high grass.
At the sight of it, Nicole stopped cold. She’d come this way before, and seen almost exactly the same view, on her honeymoon. Frank had stood beside her then, a good deal cleaner and a good deal sweeter-smelling than the man who was with her now.
The impact, the sense of deja vu, was much stronger than it had been inside the baths. She’d seen only the floor plan, so to speak, in a twentieth-century landscape of ruins and modern town. Here and now…
Even in the late twentieth century, the amphitheater had been clearly recognizable for what it was, with banks of earth leading down toward a central stage dug out well below ground level. Eighteen-hundred-odd years had changed remarkably little. In this much older time, retaining walls supported the banked earth, but they had a look of surprising age: well-seasoned timbers and stone much worn and overgrown with moss. Nicole on her honeymoon had been bored, jetlagged, and only vaguely interested in old dead things. In this old dead world that felt all too distinctly here-and-now, she knew a moment’s vertigo, a confusion of places and times. That was then — nearly two thousand years in the future. This was now, eighteen hundred years in her own past.
She must have looked alarming. “You all right, Umma?” Titus Calidius Severus asked in evident concern.
“Yes,” she said quickly, and as firmly as she could. She pulled herself together and made herself walk on. “Maybe a touch of the sun.”
He eyed her sidelong, but he didn’t call her on the lie. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You won’t end up all brown like a farm woman.”
In the twentieth century, leaving skin cancer out of the equation, tan was in — it showed you weren’t confined to a factory or an office all day long. Here, it was just the opposite: a pale face was a face that hadn’t been out sweating in the sun all day. But both meant the same thing: leisure to do whatever you liked, whenever you wanted to do it.
Nicole’s head had begun to ache, as it usually did when she’d had enough of here-and-there, now-and-then. She distracted herself as she had before, with the details of her surroundings. The countryside, like the amphitheater, hadn’t changed much — wouldn’t change much — in eighteen centuries. It was still meadows and grainfields and patches of woods, with an apple orchard or two for variety. One of the meadows, off to the east, was planted thickly with — stones?
Gravestones. It wasn’t a meadow; it was a cemetery.
She shivered slightly. To the Nico
le who had stood here — would stand here — eighteen centuries from now, all this country, and all these people, were dead. Long dead and gone to dust.
Her gaze swept south, toward what on her honeymoon had been Carnuntum’s largest and most imposing Roman monument. The locals called it the Heidentor, the Heathen Gate, a huge stone archway more than fifty feet tall. It had been partly ruined when she saw it. She wondered, as her eye searched for it, what it would look like intact.
It wasn’t there.
She stopped once more, gaping. The first emotion she felt was an absurd sense of outrage, as if she’d been cheated. Where in hell had the stupid thing gone? You couldn’t just pick up that much stone and drop it in your purse.
The answer came belatedly and with somewhat of a shock. The Heidentor hadn’t been built yet. When, in the United States, she’d thought about the Roman Empire at all — which hadn’t been any too bloody often — she’d envisioned its history as a single, compact entity. The Roman Empire. It was there, and then it was gone. There wasn’t any depth to it, or any development. It just was.
But that wasn’t actually the way things worked. There were lifetimes upon lifetimes’ worth of Roman Empire — and the lifetime in which the Heidentor went up hadn’t happened yet. She wondered how far in the future it lay. Would she live to see it built, or even begun? How long did something like that take to build?
“Come on,” Titus Calidius Severus said, loud in her ear, still determinedly amiable. “You keep stopping. Shall I dangle a parsnip in front of your face, the way the farmers do when their donkeys won’t go?”
Yet again, Nicole shook herself back into what passed for reality. “It’s a lot better than laying into me with a stick,” she said. “I’ve seen too much of that lately. I think it’s cruel. “
The fuller and dyer shrugged. “One way or another, you’ve got to get the work out of them. If they won’t go by themselves, you make ‘em. They’re just animals. It’s not like they feel things the way people do.”
Nicole was as certain animals did feel things the way people did as Calidius Severus evidently was that they didn’t. She opened her mouth to argue the point, but something else and more urgent pushed itself to the front of her mind. “People beat slaves, too, and they haven’t got any excuse at all for that.”
While they talked — she wouldn’t quite call it argued — they’d reached the entrance to the amphitheater. Titus Calidius Severus handed a sestertius to an attendant — a slave? He got no change back; admission was a dupondius apiece.
Only when that was done and they’d been waved through the gate did he respond to Nicole. As he had before, he said, “One way or another, you’ve got to get the work out of them.”
Nicole swallowed a sigh. She should have known what he’d say. How could she expect anything different? “I’d rather use the parsnip of freedom than the stick,” she said.
“The parsnip of freedom?” Calidius Severus grinned his crooked grin. “Now there’s a phrase to send men marching into battle!” His grin faded. “Some masters do that. For some slaves, it works. But one man’s not the same as another, same as one donkey’s not the same as another. Some are too stubborn to go forward unless you make ‘em do it.”
That held a hard core of common sense — if you believed there was nothing wrong with slavery. “If a free man won’t work, you can fire him and replace him with someone else who will,” Nicole said.
“Or more likely with someone else who won’t, either.” The fuller and dyer held up a hand before she could counter that. “Like I said before, it’s a nice day. We’re here at the beast show. Is this worth arguing about right now?”
That also was hard common sense, but Nicole didn’t like it any better for that. Her years in law school had left her convinced that anything was worth arguing about, any time she was in the mood to argue. But she was at the beast show, and she was curious about it; and she was also on a date. It was, in an odd way, both a first date and not. For her, yes; for Calidius Severus, no. “I guess it’ll keep,” she said, a little grudgingly.
“Good,” he answered with apparent relief. “For a while there, I figured they’d put us down on the floor, and the crowd could watch us go at it instead of the beasts.” He took a deep breath, shook his head, and held out his hand, offering it as if it had been a gift. His voice was brisk. “Come on.”
Nicole was getting just a small bit tired of take-charge masculinity; but not enough, yet, to kick at it. She let him take her hand — if nothing else, it made sure they weren’t separated in the jostle of the crowd — and lead her into the amphitheater.
It was larger than she remembered, or maybe it only seemed so because there were so many people in it. When there’d been no more than a handful of tired tourists and a guide droning on in three different languages, it hadn’t looked big enough to hold more than a few hundred. In fact, it held several thousand — maybe five, maybe ten; Nicole had never been much good at that kind of estimate. The seats on which they crowded together were backless wooden benches. Vendors ran up and down the aisles, singing out their wares: sweet rolls and sausages and wine. It wasn’t all that different, in looks and atmosphere, from a college football game.
Titus Calidius Severus pointed up along a row of benches. “Hurry up, Umma! There’s a couple of good ones, right on the aisle. Quick now, before someone else gets in ahead of us.” He suited action to words, flinging his backside down just ahead of another man who’d spotted the same seats at the same time. Nicole sat beside him with, she hoped, a little more decorum but no less dispatch. The man who’d been aiming for the seats, and his wife or lady friend, glowered at them but didn’t offer to fight over it.
Nicole took a deep breath of air that was, for a change, not particularly redolent, and made herself as comfortable as she could. She’d have been glad of a cushion like the one she’d carried to football games.
Some people nearby actually had cushions, or had thought ahead and brought a cloak or extra tunic to soften the seat. Next time, she thought. “How long before the show starts?” she asked.
“Shouldn’t be too much longer.” The fuller and dyer looked over his shoulder. She did the same, to see what he saw: rows of benches still open, and people shuffling into them, picking spots, calling to escorts and friends as they found good ones. “They’ll let it get fuller than this before they turn the first critters loose. Slowpokes always grumble when they miss the opening rounds.”
While Calidius Severus spoke, a vendor had been working his way toward them. Calidius Severus raised a brow at Nicole. “Want some wine?”
Nicole nodded with barely an instant’s hesitation. She was hesitating less and less over it now, and worrying less about it, too — which worried her in itself.
Calidius Severus ordered wine for them both, and paid for it, too, playing by rules as old, it seemed, as recorded time. The wine wasn’t even as good as her one-as special in the tavern, and the cup she had to drink it from was indifferently clean. The vendor stood hovering expectantly till she and Calidius Severus finished, then took back the cups — no disposable paper or styrofoam here. He filled them again for a pair of young men down the row, and handed them over without bothering even to wipe the rims. Nicole ducked her head and wiped surreptitiously at her mouth with the sleeve of her tunic. It wouldn’t even begin to do any good, but it did make her feel a little better.
Calidius Severus saw her do it, but he misunderstood why. “I know it’s not very good stuff,“ he said, “but you can’t expect much at a place like this.”
Nicole nodded. God knew, she’d had food and drink as bad as this wine or worse at games and concerts, and probably not much more sanitary, either.
As she opened her mouth to respond to him, a stir, a change in the crowd, drew her eye downward. A plump little man strutted out into the middle of the sand-strewn floor of the amphitheater. He turned this way and that, arms spread wide, inviting people to notice him. The crowd’s noise sank to a dull roar.
He lifted his head and sent a surprisingly deep and resonant voice ringing up through the levels. “Welcome to the beast show for today. ‘
Applause was his answer: shouting, cheering, clapping of hands. He turned all the way about, arms spread even wider than before, till the applause died to a few fugitive finger-snappings and a catcall or two. Then he went on, “As one half of our first event, we have a… lion!” The crowd roared at that, louder than any lion Nicole had ever heard of. The emcee — Nicole couldn’t think of him any other way — went on, “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, captured with incredible courage and risk in the jungles of distant Cilicia and brought to Carnuntum across land and sea for your entertainment and delight, the fiercest killer in all the world — the king of beasts!”
Nicole was glad she wasn’t drinking wine just then. If she had been, she would have snarfed it right out her nose. The tubby little Roman sounded exactly like every fast-talking pitchman she’d ever loathed on late-night TV. She couldn’t help it; she started to giggle.
Titus Calidius Severus didn’t giggle. It would have been unmanly. But he chuckled. “Faustinianus does lay it on with a trowel, doesn’t he?” he said.
It wasn’t particularly witty, but between wine and sun and the absurd little man with his oversized voice, Nicole laughed out loud.
From somewhere under the amphitheater, the lion let out a short, coughing roar. Nicole shut her mouth with a snap. God only knew how many millions of years of evolution were screaming at her, That noise means danger!
Calidius had fallen silent, too. His right hand snatched at something across his body, caught at air and stopped. “Mithras!” he said with a note of surprise. “I’ll be cursed if I wasn’t reaching for my sword.”
