by Judith Tarr
He led her down a street not too much different from the one Nicole herself lived on, to a combination house and shop that differed from her own only in having a narrow porch supported by half a dozen undistinguished columns. They weren’t even well made; in fact, they looked as if they’d been hacked out of limestone with a blunt chisel. They reminded her irresistibly of the sort of house one found in tackier parts of L.A., cheap pop-up housing designed for people with large pretensions and relatively small bank accounts: plastic marble and gold-painted faucets, and indications of cut corners in closets and under sinks. The plastic cracked inside of a year, and the paint flaked off the faucets, but they got their point across.
Brigomarus sounded just like the owner of one of those as he declared, “Ila and Marcus Flavius Probus, now — they have a proper Roman facade.”
It was a sore temptation, but she didn’t laugh in his face. She might as well have been living in a trailer park for all the status she could claim, and he was making sure she knew it. She didn’t say what she was thinking, either, which was that after meeting the inhabitants, she’d expected a noble villa, and not this cheap excuse for a house. At least Umma’s tavern was honestly downscale.
She looked him in the eye, and was gratified when he looked away. “Take me in to Mother,” she said with something that might, just possibly, have been taken for gentleness.
He obeyed her, somewhat to her surprise, and without quibbling, either. Had she shocked him with her display of backbone? She hoped so.
The nobly named Marcus Flavius Probus, she saw as Brigomarus led her past the ill-made pillars, was nothing more or less than a woodworker. In West Hills he’d have been much admired: handcrafted this, that, and the other was all the rage. In Carnuntum he was an artisan, which set him considerably below the patrician he liked to pretend to be.
She didn’t like him any better for it, at all, but it was an honest pleasure to walk into a room that smelled of clean new wood, fresh lumber and sawdust, and the sweet subtle odor of wax that was rubbed into the finished article. She took the first voluntary deep breath she’d taken in Carnuntum, and let it out again.
Umma’s brother-in-law crouched in a patch of sunlight, dressed in a tunic like anybody else, no toga in sight. He was pounding a peg into the end of a table leg. The table itself waited for the leg, leaning against a wall nearby.
She watched him with some interest. Roman carpentry, she’d noticed, used lots of pegs and very few nails. Nails here were made one by one, by hand, and were ridiculously expensive.
As she stood watching and breathing the scent of sawdust, another odor crept in under it. It wasn’t just the reek of the city. It was closer, and subtly fouler: a sickroom odor that had raised her hackles even before she was conscious of its existence. She denied it even as she once more breathed shallowly to avoid it — a mixture of full chamberpot and sour sweat.
Brigomarus asked the question that Nicole probably should have: “How is she?”
“About the same,” Flavius Probus answered. He didn’t quite look at Nicole, or acknowledge her, but he said, “So she decided to come, did she?”
Brigomarus nodded. Nicole rode over anything he would have said. “Yes, I’m here, and I’m quite capable of speaking for myself.”
Umma’s brother-in-law snapped erect, as if he’d been slapped. Then Nicole saw the pompous ass who’d acted as if the tavern wasn’t good enough for him, and heard him, too. “I am not accustomed to being addressed in that particular tone, least of all by a woman.”
Nicole didn’t laugh, though she was sorely tempted. “Aren’t you?” she said. “Then maybe it’s time you learned. There’s this thing called politeness. Have you ever heard of it?”
Even after his earlier encounter with her, he obviously hadn’t expected quite that degree of independence. Brigomarus, who’d seen rather more of her, sighed and shrugged. “She’s like that these days,” he said. “Short of hauling her out and horsewhipping her, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it.” He paused, shook his head, went on in a slightly different tone. “Still. Mother asked to see her, and she’s not likely to get another chance.”
Flavius Probus nodded curtly, again without acknowledging Nicole, and bent again to his table leg. His work was meticulous, his hands deft and skilled, as if the pretentious idiot who lived in his head bore no relation to the craftsman in his hands.
They’d been dismissed. Nicole might have made an issue of it, but Brigomarus was headed toward the stairs. She almost didn’t follow. Even needling Flavius Probus was preferable to paying a last visit to someone else’s mother. But the sooner she got it over with, the sooner she was out of there and back in the tavern that, for better or worse, she’d come to think of as home.
The stairway was less rickety than the one she used every day. Marcus Flavius Probus kept it in good repair. The hallway at the top, however, was just like the one in her house, narrow and malodorous and nearly pitch-dark. Aside from its porch and its wretched columns, this building was no fancier than her own.
Brigomarus turned into the first door on the right-hand side of the hall, the one that corresponded with Nicole’s in the tavern. The master bedroom, then? Interesting, she thought, that the old woman had it. Though not at all surprising.
While she paused in the hallway, letting her eyes adjust to the brighter light within, she heard Brigomarus say, “Here she is, Mother. She came after all, as you asked.” His voice had the odd, uncomfortable gentleness that people often put on in front of the sick.
The sickroom reek was stronger here. Nicole nearly gagged on it as she stepped into the bedroom. Umma’s sister was perched on a stool by the bed on which her mother lay. Ila favored Nicole with a venomous look and a sarcastic, “So good of you to join us.”
It was going to be a united front, Nicole could see. Some part of her knew she should make some effort to smooth things over — but to do that, she’d have to undo Julia’s manumission. And that wasn’t possible.
She settled for a long, cold glare at Ila, and a silence that, she hoped, said more than words. Then she forgot Umma’s sister. The woman huddled in the bed, the woman who’d given birth to Umma, the woman who Nicole thought was an ancestor of her own, looked more nearly dead than alive. Atpomara’s skin clung like parchment to her bones; the fever had boiled most of the water from her flesh. Along her forehead and cheek, the rash that marked the pestilence was red as a burn.
But, whereas Julius Rufus had died almost at once when the fever exploded in him, Umma’s mother still clung to life, still had some part of her wits about her. She stretched a clawlike finger toward Nicole. Her eyes bored into — bored through — the woman who inhabited her daughter’s body. “You are the cuckoo’s egg.” Her voice was a dry rasp. “Cuckoo’s egg,” she repeated.
“Ungrateful daughter, ungrateful sister,” Ila hissed from beside her.
Nicole hardly heard. She stared at the woman who had given birth to the body she now inhabited. What did Atpomara mean? Just that Nicole was ungrateful, as Ila said? Or could she somehow sense that a stranger’s spirit now dwelt in Umma’s body? Were the fever and perhaps the approach of death letting her own spirit roam wider than it might have otherwise?
“Have a care, cuckoo’s egg,” Atpomara said. “If you and your own eggs fall, if the shells break before you hatch — “ She had to stop; a paroxysm of coughing wracked her.
“Her wits are wandering,” Brigomarus murmured to Ila, who nodded. Neither of them spoke to Nicole.
She didn’t mind. She didn’t want to speak to them, either. She didn’t want to be here at all. She hoped Brigomarus was right: she hoped Atpomara’s wits were wandering. If they weren’t, the dying woman’s words made sense — disturbing sense.
Almost since the day she’d come to Carnuntum, Nicole had believed Umma was a distant ancestor of hers. If Umma died of the pestilence, and if Lucius and Aurelia — one of them, at least, also an ancestor, difficult as it was to believe of so young a ch
ild — also died of the pestilence… where did that leave Nicole Gunther of Indianapolis, who would marry Frank Perrin and live to regret it?
Nowhere?
Umma’s mother seemed to gather herself. Her hand rose again, finger stabbing at Nicole. “Go back,” she rasped. “I am done. Go back.” Did she mean, Go back to the tavern? Did she mean, Go back to Los Angeles and the end of the second millennium?
It was like a blow in the solar plexus. Nicole actually gasped. Go back? Back to Los Angeles? God; if only she knew the way. The past she’d dreamt of, wished for so desperately, prayed for till she found herself in it, was nothing like what she had imagined. It was crammed full of ignorance and drudgery, filth, superstition, disease and brutality and more sheer blatant sexism than she’d ever thought possible. In California, she’d been oh so sure that her glass was half empty. Now she saw, with painful clarity, that it had been more, much more, than half full.
But she was not in California. She was in Carnuntum, with only a tiny splash of water — and polluted water, at that — in the bottom of her glass.
“Why are you still standing there?” Ila snapped at her. “Didn’t you hear Mother? She doesn’t want you here anymore. I never wanted you here.”
Nicole looked at this woman, this stranger who was her own, if distant, kin. She saw nothing there that she could relate to. And from the look and sound of it, this wasn’t new hostility. It was much older than Nicole’s presence here, and than Nicole’s freeing of a slave. Umma hadn’t received any better treatment than Nicole was getting, nor ever had.
“Sweetheart, “ Nicole said for both of them, “the sooner I leave your sour face behind, the happier I’ll be. “
She’d guessed right about Ila: the woman could dish it out wholesale, but she couldn’t take it. The splutters were utterly gratifying. They followed her all the way out of the room and down the stairs.
And there stood the other half of the act, even less witty than his wife. “Good riddance,” he growled to the table leg that he was fitting to its table. Nicole started to flip him off, but she hadn’t ever seen the one-fingered peace sign here. She replaced it with the two-fingered gesture a muleteer had given an oxcart driver in front of the tavern a day or two before.
Flavius Probus staggered back as if she’d struck him a physical blow. “Don’t you put the evil eye on me,” he gasped. “Don’t you dare!”
He was white as a sheet. He really did believe she could do it. It wasn’t nice of her at all, and it might blow up in her face later as family quarrels had a way of doing, but she didn’t care. It felt good to scare the spit out of that pompous ass and his bitch of a wife.
She was smiling as she turned back toward the tavern. Brigomarus hadn’t followed. None of them had. Were they all that superstitious? Or were they just as glad to be shut of her as she was of them?
She walked slowly, with frequent glances about her. Ila and her husband lived in one of the mazes that made Carnuntum a warren between the main streets of its grid. Nicole had paid close attention to the route Brigomarus took once he left the grid, or thought she had. But when she should have been turning back onto one of those main streets for an easy walk home, she found herself in a twisting alley instead.
The alley was deserted except for a skinny young man in a threadbare tunic of no color in particular. He had a lump of charcoal in his hand, and was scribbling on a wall with it. At the sound of her step, he whipped about. His face was as thin as the rest of him, set with a pair of enormous eyes. They fixed on her, and held her rooted.
In Los Angeles, a meeting with a tagger could be dangerous. In Carnuntum…
The young man flung down the charcoal and bolted as if the whole nation of barbarians were on his tail. She’d never seen anybody run so fast.
He was scared right out of his wits. Nicole couldn’t imagine why. If the penalties for writing graffiti were that severe, surely there wouldn’t be any graffiti — and the walls of Carnuntum were covered with scribbles and scrawls and amateur art.
She moved closer to see what he’d written that was so dangerous. I am the resurrection and the life, she read. He who believes in me, even if he should die, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me shall not die, not ever. The simple Latin lacked the flavor of the English Bible she knew, but that text was unmistakable. Even if it hadn’t been, the young man had drawn a cross on one side of the passage and on the other a two-stroke fish like those she’d seen in gold plastic mounted on car bumpers.
Nicole frowned. The message seemed perfectly harmless — until she remembered what people in Carnuntum thought of Christians. That young man had taken his life in his hands to scribble the graffito. If she’d recognized him, if she’d raised a hue and cry here, or given his name to the town council…
If she’d done that, maybe fat Faustinianus, at some future beast show, would have announced the just and proper execution of So-and-So, convicted of the heinous crime of Christianity. Lions? It was always lions in the Sunday-school stories. From what she’d seen with Calidius Severus, bears or wolves would do as well.
She left the alleyway a little too quickly, as if someone could guess that she too, in the spirit, was born and raised a Christian. Foolish fear; a Christian in the world she came from was as solid a citizen as a pagan here.
Still, she was glad to leave that wall behind, and gladder yet to find that the alley opened onto a street, which opened onto one of the long, straight main avenues. That one, she recognized. She was deeply relieved to see no sign of the young Christian with the extraordinary turn of speed.
Titus Calidius Severus was in the tavern, eating walnuts, and now and then tossing bits of shell at Lucius, who thought it was great sport. He had a cup of wine in front of him, from which he’d clearly been sipping. “How’s your mother?” he and Julia asked in the same breath.
She’s not my mother! Nicole knew better than to say. She mustered a sigh, and an expression that, if not devastated, was at least grave. “She’s got it, no question. Maybe she’ll get better. Maybe — “ She shrugged.
Calidius Severus nodded in evident sympathy. “Don’t say it. That way you won’t have words of evil omen on your conscience if — “ He didn’t say it, either.
“Get me a cup of the one-as, would you, Julia?” Nicole sat at the table with the fuller and dyer. He set a hand on her shoulder, reassuringly, just for a moment, then let it drop. She was more comforted than she might have expected, and surprised, because she hadn’t expected to need comfort. When Julia brought the wine, she emptied half the cup in a long, dizzying swallow.
Her trouble wasn’t what they had to be thinking. She felt nothing for the loss of a mother she’d never known, who’d never been hers. Atpomara was a horrible old woman, rude and high-handed, with not a jot of compassion in her. Nicole hated her guts.
The wine didn’t dim the thing that bothered her. She couldn’t forget what Atpomara had said. She couldn’t make herself believe the woman had been out of her head from fever, either, however much she wanted to believe just that.
And there wasn’t a single person she could talk to, whom she trusted enough to share even part of her secret. Titus Calidius Severus would reckon her mad. Or, worse — he might believe her. He’d think her possessed by a demon. Who knew what he might do then? He was a reasonable man, as men went here. But in a situation that went beyond reason, he’d turn on her. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t.
In part to break the silence, in part to turn her mind aside from fretting to no useful purpose, she mentioned the Christian she’d surprised. It was stupid, maybe, but it did turn the conversation onto a new track.
“I’ve seen those scrawls,” Julia said. “I didn’t know what the words say, but I’ve seen the fish and the cross. There’ve been more of them lately than there used to be.”
“There have, haven’t there?” Titus Calidius Severus said. “I can read the words. Bunch of cursed nonsense, if you ask me. The Jews go on and on about only having
one god, so how can that god have a son, especially a son who’s a crucified rebel? If you ask me, too many people don’t think these things through. Even the Jews can’t buy this one.”
Nicole had never considered herself religious; if anything, she’d been an agnostic. But this was not just the faith but the culture she’d been raised in, and here was this urine-reeking man with his hands dyed blue to the elbows, dissecting it as if it were just another crazy cult. The nerve he’d struck was almost as painful as the one in her sore tooth.
“If it’s all nonsense,” she asked him tightly, “why are there more Christian slogans on the walls these days? Doesn’t that sound as if more and more people are believing what the Christians say?” She knew it; she had eighteen hundred years of hindsight. Not one of which she could safely claim — but that, for the moment, was beside the point.
“Maybe more people are believing in it,” the fuller and dyer answered, “but maybe they aren’t. Times are hard, with the pestilence and with the war against the Germans off to the west of here. The world’s not a very nice place right now. When things go bad in this world, it’s only natural for people to worry more about the next one. And if that Christian nonsense were true, it’d be easier to have a happy afterlife as a Christian than any other way I can think of. No wonder light-minded folks drift that way.”
So there, Nicole thought. The annoying thing was that, as he had a way of doing, Calidius Severus made a lot of sense. His own Mithraism, for instance, seemed to be for men only, and especially for soldiers. From what the men at Fabia Ursa’s funeral had said, Isis-worship was a women’s cult. Would Christianity triumph for no better reason than that it was the religion of the lowest common denominator, the network television of its day?
Whatever the reason, she knew Christianity had triumphed — would triumph. Did Calidius’ argument mean it had triumphed in part because more hard times were ahead for the Roman Empire? If they were, how soon? Not for the first time, she caught herself wishing she’d paid a lot more attention to history. If she had, she might know more about the world and times in which she was living.
