by Judith Tarr
Nicole laughed for a long while after he was gone. The others followed suit, but they were a little puzzled. She had to stop, wipe away the tears of mirth, and try to explain. “Isn’t it strange? Murdering people for fun doesn’t bother these bastards. Violating women doesn’t faze them. Robbing people doesn’t trouble them in the slightest. But snails with garlic? That makes them turn up their toes.”
“If we’d known it, we could have splashed ourselves with garlic juice instead of sour piss, “ Julia said seriously — she still wasn’t quite inclined to laugh at a German. “We would have liked it better, and the Germans still would have left us alone.”
“They might have left us alone,” Nicole said. “What we did worked. That’s good enough.” She patted her belly, which felt wonderfully full. “And a big mess of snails is good enough — or better than good enough — too, no matter what a cursed barbarian thinks.”
Julia nodded. So did Lucius. It took Nicole a moment to realize what she’d just said. Cursed barbarian? If that wasn’t the precise local equivalent of damn nigger or stinking wetback, what was it? She looked up at the soot-smeared ceiling. She was horrified, but she was also a little amused — that wasn’t like the old Nicole at all, at all. Of all the things the second century had done to her, slinging casual ethnic slurs was one of the last she’d expected.
Neither of the others saw anything at all unusual or reprehensible in it. Lucius packed away the last snail from the bowl, sat back, and belched luxuriously. Nicole frowned, but she held her tongue — still more evidence of the new, far from improved version. “I’ll catch more snails tomorrow, Mother,” Lucius said.
“Good.” Nicole ruffled his hair. He ducked his head, but not too much, and put up with it better than she might have expected. She patted her belly again. It came down to a simple choice, she thought. She could worry about whether her belly was full, or she could worry that she was improperly denigrating the magnificent achievements of the Quadi and Marcomanni and, as far as she could tell, the Lombards.
It took leisure to be politically correct, and to see all sides of the question.
Leisure — and a well-stocked larder. And no good and sufficient and very immediate reason to blame the ethnic group of choice for the gnawing in her middle.
Snails grew scarce, as she’d known they would. Pigeons proved tasty, though she cooked the meat right off the bones to make sure it was safe to eat. After a while, they got harder to catch: the survivors turned streetwise. The sight of a human within a stone’s throw sent them skyward in a whirring racket of wings.
There was always fish in the market, no matter how hard the times were. The Germans didn’t mind if the locals went out in their little boats with nets or hooks and lines. But, when it was almost the only food available, fish became expensive. Nicole regretted every frivolous as she’d spent since she entered Umma’s body — to say nothing of the coins Umma had spent before Nicole came to Carnuntum.
That aureus Swemblas gave her had seemed a huge sum of money, like a thousand-dollar bill. And, like a thousand-dollar bill when no other cash was coming in, it melted away, an as here, a dupondius there, a couple of sesterces somewhere else.
Nicole found herself in a cruel dilemma: if she sold the food she managed to find, she earned money with which to buy more food, but she couldn’t eat what she sold. If, on the other hand, she ate the little food she managed to lay hold of, she stopped being hungry for a while, but money flowed out of the cash box as inexorably as sand running through an hourglass.
The uneasy compromise that she settled on left the three of them both hungrier and closer to broke than she wanted them to be. Her drawers fit more loosely than they had when she first woke in Umma’s body, even more loosely than they had when she was recovering from the pestilence. Her belly growled at her all the time.
She’d known hunger before. In Indiana and California, she’d spent enough time on diets that hadn’t done much but fray her temper, nibbling carrot sticks when her stomach was yelling for a banana split. But all the hunger she’d endured had been voluntary. Whenever she’d wanted to, or whenever she couldn’t stand it anymore, relief had been no farther away than the nearest bacon double cheeseburger or package of Twinkies or Milky Way bar — anything guaranteed to leap six weeks of Lean Cuisine at a single bound.
Not here. Not now. That mournful litany played yet again in her mind, as it had — how many times? — since she’d come to Carnuntum. This hunger was not consensual. It was forced on her, as much as the Germans had forced themselves on poor Antonina. She’d never thought there could be a connection between hunger and rape, but there it was.
That wasn’t the only unpleasant connection she found. One day, after she came back to the tavern with a couple of trout and a little cheese for which she’d paid more than she could really afford, she put the money she hadn’t spent back in the cash box. By then, she knew to the as how much was supposed to be in there; as hard as times were, she paid much closer attention than she had when they were easier.
She frowned. The box held a few sesterces more than it should have. Till she came back, there hadn’t been any food to eat, let alone to sell to anybody else. Her eye fell on Julia. Julia was scrubbing tables, mostly for something to do; business was too bad to keep her occupied with much else, and there was no flour for bread. She looked the same as she always did, thinner of course, but she was still what yahoos in Indiana would have called a nice piece of ass. Nicole sucked in a breath, and let it out in a spate of words: “Julia! I’ve told you not to — “
Julia wasn’t to be cowed this time, even by Nicole at the start of a rampage. “No, Mistress. We need the money. If we can’t find some way to pay for food, pretty soon I’ll be too skinny for anyone to want me at all. And,” she added after a brief pause, “one of them even knew what he was doing. It wasn’t too bad. He’s the one who paid me double — because, he said, I was worth it.”
She didn’t blush while she said it, or apologize for having a mind of her own. Julia had changed, too. She wasn’t the childlike creature Nicole had first met, who had ducked her head and lowered her eyes and done as she was told.
Nicole found that her fists were clenched. They ached. Carefully, with some effort, she unclenched them. She made herself think, and see what Julia had already seen before her. The big brass coins would help — a great deal. There was no way Nicole could deny it. If it came to a choice between selling oneself and starving… there was another set of choices she’d never imagined herself having to make.
“We should be glad,” Julia said, “that some people still have money to spend on something besides food.”
Disposable income, Nicole thought. She bit down hard on laughter she might not have been able to quell, and said the thing she had to say: “Thanks for sharing what you made instead of keeping it for yourself.”
Julia did look down then, and shrugged as if in embarrassment. “You weren’t bad to me when you owned me. You never kept me hungry, the way some people do with their slaves. Then you went and set me free. That hasn’t been as scary as I thought, especially since you’ve let me stay on here, and earn my keep honestly. I could have had to go out and sell my body just to stay alive. Instead I got to do it when I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it now. I wanted to help.”
That hasn’t been as scary as I thought. Nicole had never heard freedom more faintly praised. And yet, the rest of it was just as honestly put, and it was, in its way, the most genuine expression of gratitude Nicole could ever have asked for. She couldn’t find anything more eloquent to say than, “All right, Julia. Thank you. Just — thank you.”
Julia shrugged and went back to scouring tables. Nicole groped for something more to say, but there wasn’t anything that would work. She went back to the cash box instead, and paused before she shut and locked it, staring down at the brassy gleam of the coins. Her mind was running of itself through everything those extra sesterces would buy, and all the ways she could make them stretch
.
Pragmatism. It wasn’t a pretty word, or a laudable trait, but here, in this time and place, it meant survival.
As a lean and hungry spring swung into a parched summer, Nicole had time, once in a while, to wonder about the war between the Romans and the Germans — Marcomanni, Quadi, she never had learned how to tell the two apart. There was no easy way to get an answer. Even before the invasion, events at a town as close as Vindobona reached Carnuntum slowly and often in garbled fashion, if they arrived at all. When the war had been fought farther west, it was like noise in a distant room of the house — there, but difficult to understand.
Now the war had rolled right over Carnuntum — and it was still hard to interpret. Every so often, Germans would come through town with loot obviously gathered somewhere farther south in Pannonia. Other Germans passed through on the way south, heading toward the fighting — or maybe just toward chances to murder and rape and plunder.
Were they winning the war? If they were, did that mean they’d go down into Italy and sack Rome the way they’d sacked Carnuntum? Was this the fall of the Roman Empire? Was now the time when everything went to hell? For far from the first time, Nicole wished she knew more ancient history. Had Liber and Libera thought they were doing her a favor, dropping her right in the middle of the great collapse?
She spent a few anxious days worrying about that in the odd moments when she wasn’t worrying about being hungry. Then, to her own surprise, she found an answer. No news had come in, and she still knew next to nothing of the history of the Roman Empire — but there was one thing she did know.
The Heidentor wasn’t there. That was the key. When she’d done the budget tour of Petronell on her honeymoon, the guide had droned on and on, nearly putting her to sleep; but one part of his spiel she did remember. He’d said, quite distinctly, that the gate was Roman work. Therefore, the Roman Empire couldn’t be gone from Carnuntum for good. Sooner or later, Roman power would return here. The Heidentor would go up to mark it.
Was it sooner? Or was it later? Would the Romans take Carnuntum back from the Quadi and Marcomanni next month, next year, or ten years from now? That might not make any difference in the building of the Heidentor, but it would make a hell of a lot of difference in Nicole’s life. If the Germans were still in Carnuntum ten years from now, she was damned sure she wouldn’t be.
About the middle of August, she began to feel something that might have been hope. More Germans began coming back through Carnuntum, and fewer of them were carrying booty. Some were wounded: they were bandaged, or they limped, or they were missing a limb. They didn’t volunteer information, and nobody seemed inclined to ask.
For a little while, life in Carnuntum had been — acceptable was too strong a word. It had been somewhere within shouting distance of bearable. People had been hungry, but they hadn’t been — too — afraid to go through the city to see what they might find. The Marcomanni and Quadi remained arrogant, but, while they might steal, they seldom committed worse outrages.
Now, when things didn’t seem to be going so well for the Germans farther south, the situation in Carnuntum turned nasty again. People whispered of robbery and rape. They hinted of even worse.
And one morning, as Nicole made her way to market, she turned a corner and stumbled over a corpse. There wasn’t much doubt the man was dead. Drunks didn’t lie in that boneless stillness, in a clotted pool of blood. Nor would a drunk have worn a ragged tunic rent with crisp, new, two-inch slashes. Those weren’t knife wounds. Those had been made by a sword. Blood had darkened the tunic almost to black; its original color, as near as she could see, had been blue.
Until she came to Carnuntum, Nicole hadn’t realized how much blood a man’s body held: one more lesson she would sooner not have learned. Flies congregated in a buzzing cloud. One walked leisurely along a gash that laid open the corpse’s cheek, exposing the teeth in a ghastly grin.
Nicole shuddered convulsively and gulped hard. She would not — she would not — vomit all over the street. She wheeled blindly and ran, not caring what anyone thought, wanting only to be back in the safety of her own four walls.
When she’d shut herself inside them and barred the door, and never mind that it was broad daylight, Nicole dropped down to the nearest stool and hugged herself till she stopped shivering and trying to gag. She ignored Julia’s wide-eyed stare and Lucius’ startled, “Mother! What happened? What —?” She made herself think, and think clearly.
The man couldn’t have been dead for long. If she’d turned that corner a few minutes earlier, would someone else have gasped in horror at discovering her dead body there? Wrong place at the wrong time, she thought. That could have been the epitaph for most of the senseless slayings in Los Angeles.
It might be her own epitaph, for the matter of that. No one had ever been in a wronger place, or in a wronger time.
But wherever and whenever she was, and however right or wrong that was, she had to live. She had to leave the tavern in search of food, but that wasn’t all she had to go out for. If it had been, she would have stayed at home and sent Julia in her place. No; she had to go out to look for the plaque of Liber and Libera, the one and only plaque that had brought her to Carnuntum. That was no errand she could pass on to Julia. No matter what it cost her to set foot outside that door each day, for the plaque, she did it.
For all her hunting, she never found it. She still gave Liber and Libera their daily libation of wine, when she had any, on the principle that it couldn’t hurt and might help.
And one day, when she’d come home with a bag of mealy apples and a string of little bony fish, and no votive image, she found the plaque on the bar, broken in half and shedding bits on the scrubbed surface. Julia stood over it with exactly the same look of guilt and horror and welling tears as Kimberley might have had if she’d spilled her milk all over the living-room carpet.
This wasn’t just spilled milk. Nicole sucked in a breath. She had no idea what she was going to say. She wasn’t going to scream. She promised herself that.
Julia spoke before Nicole could begin, a rapid rush of words. “Mistress, I’m sorry, so sorry, I picked it up to dust it, and it slipped out of my hand, and it broke. I’ll pay you for it, get you a new one. Just take it out of my wages.”
While she babbled on, Nicole had calmed down considerably. She picked up the two largest pieces and weighed them in her hands. Liber stared blandly at her out of one, Libera out of the other. If they were dismayed to be so abruptly separated, they weren’t about to show it.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said to Julia, and she meant it. “It’s not as if it were any great relic. It wasn’t even working very well — the god and goddess weren’t doing much for us, were they?”
“I don’t know,” Julia said. She’d calmed down, too, with the quickness of a child or a slave, now she knew she wasn’t in trouble for breaking her mistress’ plaque. “Things could be better for us, but they could be a lot worse, too. Remember Antonina.”
“I’m not likely to forget Antonina,” Nicole said, a little coldly. She held onto the coldness. It kept her calm. “Things have been getting uglier lately. I think it’s time to splash ourselves again with Calidius Severus’ perfume.”
Julia made a face. “Oh, do we have to? I’ll never get any extra sesterces for the cash box if we do.”
“Would you rather the Germans took it without paying for it?”
“No!” Julia said, as if by reflex. Then, as thought caught up with instinct: “I don’t want to give the Germans anything.”
“Of course you don’t,“ Nicole said. “If you don’t want to give it to them, they have no business taking it.”
Julia thought about that, long and visibly hard. Then she nodded. “Nobody has any business taking it, if I say no.”
Nicole’s smile was so wide and so rusty, it actually hurt. Maybe after all, in spite of everything, she was managing to do a little consciousness-raising.
Brigomarus came to visit a da
y or two later, as he made a habit of doing. He stopped inside the door, sniffed and grimaced. “You’re visiting the dyer’s shop again,” he said. Nicole wondered if he meant to sound quite so accusatory.
“The time seemed ripe,” she answered calmly.
Umma’s brother spat in disgust. “Ripe’s the word, and no mistake.”
“That’s bad,” Nicole said. “Very bad.”
He grinned at her. “You started it.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
They smiled at one another. Somehow, over the weeks and months, they’d become, maybe not friends, but definitely not adversaries. They got along. They could laugh together. It wasn’t bad, as sibling relationships went.
Nicole’s smile died first. “So,” Brigomarus said, “tell me what got you going this time.”
She told him bluntly about the murdered man in the street. Brigomarus nodded, all laughter gone. “From what I’m hearing, he wasn’t the only one. In fact, I came here to warn you to stay inside as much as you can for a while. But you seem to be a step ahead of me.”
“Maybe not,” Nicole said. “What have you heard?”
“Not a whole lot,” he answered somberly, “but none of it’s good. The Germans are screaming at me — they’re screaming at everybody. More shields, more arrowheads, more blades, more spearpoints, more everything.”
“And I bet they want it all by yesterday, too,” Nicole said.
“By yest — “ Brigomarus had to pause and work that one out. However tired a joke it was in English, it must have been new in Latin. He regarded her in dawning admiration. “That’s just when they want it, by the gods. You’ve had a way of coming out with things lately, haven’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Nicole said with a shrug that wasn’t nearly as innocent as it looked. “Have I?” Before Umma’s brother could dig her in any deeper, she hurried them both back to the subject at hand: “What else do you know? How badly is the war going for them? Do they talk about it?”
“Not in any language a civilized man can understand. They grunt and bark like a herd of hungry pigs. But even when they’re babbling among themselves, the names of towns don’t change that much. The past few days, they’ve been talking about Savaria and Scarabantia — and those aren’t that far down the road from Carnuntum. If the Emperor is coming this way, he’ll be here before too long.”
