Seeing Sylvia Alumna was leading them there, Leigh knew they were walking into a slave auction. He would never be a slave, never serve a master and be beaten, abused. He craned his neck searching for Julie. Still subdued from her rough treatment at the barracks, she was a few steps behind, next to the weird Belgian kid, Emile.
A middle-aged man in a finely made toga climbed onto the platform, followed by a man carrying a long brass horn. At a signal, a man with the horn blew a long, wavering note that quieted the crowd—at least that part of the crowd nearest the stage.
The horn blower put aside his instrument and unrolled a short scroll. In a loud but clear voice he shouted, “Citizens! Pray give silence! By order of the Senate and First Citizen of the Republic of Latium, a party of newcomers will be offered for claims. The usual laws of Year Twenty-six of the First Citizen shall apply in all cases! Heed the words of the honorable quaestor, Publius Marcus!”
The herald said “quaestor,” but the Carleton people understood him to mean an official secretary or clerk.
A fair degree of calm came over the forum crowd. Leigh could see pairs of soldiers here and there, none close by. He doubted he could escape. If he bolted, citizens of the Republic around him would seize him before he got away.
Sylvia Alumna gestured to the first of the young Carleton survivors, François Martin. Haltingly, France climbed the stone steps. Publius Marcus waved him forward impatiently. France walked slowly forward, stopping between Marcus and the herald.
“Here we have a young man of sixteen years,” Marcus declaimed in a booming, theatrical voice. (How does he know my age? France wondered.) “Educated, literate, and intelligent, yet strong and healthy. Who wishes to claim him?”
France stood there feeling like a horse at a livestock auction. The people closest to the stage were obviously sizing him up. He wondered what the going rate for a slave was.
Two men in the crowd some yards apart disputed over him. As they were shouting at each other and not at the platform, France couldn’t quite follow what they were saying, but they didn’t seem to be bidding on him. It sounded more like they were arguing who had the greater need for a young man of his sort.
Publius Marcus held up both hands, halting the argument. “I award this youth to Antoninus Arius Falco, builder!”
No mention was made of money. Falco, a broad-shouldered man with just a fringe of gray hair and shaggy eyebrows, stomped up the steps to claim France.
In clipped words he said, “Come, boy. You will learn the builder’s trade.”
“I know nothing about building,” France protested.
“You have some wits, gods willing. You will learn. Come.”
When France found he couldn’t make his feet move, Falco and the herald took him by the arms and propelled him to the steps. Before France could say good-bye or anything else to his companions, he was marched off into the crowd.
Summoned by the quaestor, Hans limped on stage.
“Don’t let his lameness fool you!” Marcus said. “His injury will heal! This boy of seventeen is very well educated and has a wide knowledge of the world.”
Up in front of the curious crowd, Hans shifted from his good leg to his bad and back again. Like France, he didn’t understand how anyone here knew his age or his abilities.
In short order, the man who lost out on France claimed him. His name was Gaius Aemilius Piso, and he was a public scrivener—a maker and copier of books and documents.
“Have I no say in what becomes of me?” Hans managed to say. Publius Marcus acted as if he hadn’t heard him speak at all. Piso waited at the bottom of the steps for him. He hung a wooden docket around Hans’s neck.
“Can you read that?” he said. He was a tall man, stooped at the shoulders though he wasn’t very old.
Hans lifted the strip of wood and read aloud: “Piso’s Books and Documents. Fine Calligraphy, Best & Blackest Ink. By the Chiron Fountain, in the Street of the Paper-Makers.”
“That’s my address, in case you get lost.” Piso hitched up his patched toga and loped away, leaving Hans to catch up.
No one forced him to follow Piso. Hans watched the bent figure of Piso wind through the forum crowd. Hans called out, “Am I a slave now?” Piso kept going without answering.
In the meantime, Jenny Hopkins had gone up and was claimed by priestesses of the Temple of Ceres. They were three austere-looking women in dark, earthy gowns, with scarves on their heads. Again, no money was mentioned. The priestesses simply claimed Jenny as a new acolyte, and she was expected to go with them. Leader of the trio was Scipina, who looked to be in her early thirties. She had a dark complexion and black hair, but she did not appear to be of African ancestry, like Jenny. Scipina looked more East Indian.
“What if I don’t go with you?” Jenny said.
“Then you will be considered a barbarian and driven out of the city,” Scipina replied. In the Republic, if a person was not a citizen, he was a barbarian. As a barbarian, he had no protection, no rights, and could not be paid for work. He couldn’t even be a slave; slaves had certain rights under the laws of the Republic. Barbarians had none.
Now Jenny understood. The Carleton survivors were to be absorbed into the Republic. If they resisted, they would be cast out to suffer whatever fate awaited them—starvation, murder, rape, or all three.
Jenny stepped into the triangle of priestesses. She was taller than any of them by a full head.
“Forward, child of the goddess,” Scipina said. “Do not speak until we are once again in the sacred precinct of the temple.”
On and on the process went. Those that remained learned this platform was called the Locus Vindicatum, the Place of Claims, where newcomers to the Republic were turned over to any citizen willing to take them in. Linh Prudhomme was taken by a large family in need of a governess for their children. A bearded physician named Zosimus chose Emile Becquerel. Eleanor Quarrel, still strangely subdued, was taken in by a druggist living in the far northern district of the city. The younger children were parceled out to adoptive parents, though strangely, no care was taken to keep siblings together. Even odder, none of the children separated from their brother or sister made any fuss about it.
Leigh and Julie Morrison were held back to the end. At last, Leigh was called to the platform. Given his age and size, Leigh was promptly inducted into the army of the Republic. And who should be waiting for him at the foot of the steps but the same red-haired centurion who had so brutally forced Julie to undress. Leigh loudly protested he didn’t want to go into the legions and was solidly whacked with the centurion’s baton.
Seeing this, Julie didn’t wait to be called but stalked up on stage. Arms folded, she scowled at the crowd below. Some of them laughed at her belligerence.
Publius Marcus eyed her. “Just sixteen, citizens, but with the proud heart of Juno. Who will claim this one?”
Men in the audience made some crude suggestions. Julie was too slight for manual labor, too spoiled for housework, and not intellectual enough for brain work. At last, a woman called out, “She may have Juno’s heart, but the rest of her can serve Venus.”
Marcus shaded his eyes to see who spoke. “Do you claim her, Luxuria?”
The jeers faded. Most eyes turned to the woman Marcus called Luxuria. She was a fleshy, pale woman in her forties who wore an obvious wig of curly golden hair piled high on her head.
“I’ll take her.”
Men in the crowd cheered. Leigh, still smarting from the centurion’s blow, asked the soldier by his side why they did.
“Don’t you know? Luxuria runs one of the best brothels in the city,” he said.
Leigh jolted as if hit with a taser. “Julia!” he cried, “don’t go with her!”
Young men in the crowd between Leigh and his sister heard her name and repeated it, chanting, “Julia! Julia! Julia!” Julie couldn’t hear Leigh o
ver the uproar. She flounced down the steps to Luxuria, who waited for her.
“What do you do?” Julie said bluntly.
Luxuria took the girl’s chin in her hand. “I sell dreams,” she said. “So will you.”
Julie thought about smacking the woman’s hand away, but something in Luxuria’s expression stopped her. Far off in the crowd, Leigh’s anguished cries were drowned out by the noise of the forum.
Chapter 15
The house of Falco proved to be an airy, sunlit place, with high ceilings, wide open windows, smelling pleasantly of freshly cut wood. Half a dozen men and one woman were at work when Falco and France arrived. The woman was Mrs. Falco, called “Bacca,” though that seemed to be her nickname, not her real name. She was a plump woman with her graying hair drawn back in a tight bun. Her face was friendly, and she smiled when France was brought in.
“Who’s this?” said Bacca.
“New boy,” Falco replied. “What’s your name, by the way?”
France knew his name, but when it came time to say it, it came out “Gallus.”
Falco grunted approval. With Bacca following, he led France through the front room of the house outdoors to a courtyard. There, workmen were sharpening tools, sweeping up wood shavings, or hammering away on what looked like a pile of window shutters. Falco greeted his men with single syllables while Bacca introduced them. They were all older than France by a good many years—most were in their thirties—and one, Quercus, was at least sixty. France was sort of amused that one man’s name was Nero. He didn’t resemble the dissipated emperor of history, being lean and hard muscled from years of carpentry.
Lunch at the house of Falco was intimate. The workmen set up a trestle table on the shady side of the courtyard and brought a couple of benches out of the house. Bacca set out wicker platters of fruit, olives, and fat, flat loaves of bread. A tall clay pitcher held some amber liquid the men drank with great relish. France sipped some. It was apple cider, well fermented. He looked around for water. Not seeing any, he asked.
“Of course, a lad like you should drink water, not fiery stuff like these old men. They need it to keep their hearts going all afternoon!” said Bacca.
“Drink enough and it puts me to sleep,” Quercus said.
“Breathing puts you to sleep,” Nero declared. The men laughed, all except Falco. He grunted twice.
When the master was finished, the meal ended. The men drifted back to work. Bacca cleared the table. France got up, but Falco asked him to sit down again.
“You know reading?” France said he did. “Writing?” Of course, though France had no experience with Latium methods. He remembered something from school about Romans writing on wooden tablets covered in wax.
“Numbers?”
“I am good with numbers,” France said.
“Good.”
Falco went into the house and returned with a couple of tightly wound scrolls. He put these before France, who unrolled the top one carefully. It was a carefully drawn plan of a large house. Falco asked France to read the measurements written inside the room plans.
“‘Fourteen feet, eight digits,” he read. Something about that bothered France. Prompted to go on, he read other lines and numbers. As Falco rolled up the first plan, satisfied, it struck France what was wrong with what he had just seen.
The plans used Arabic numbers! Roman numerals were letters, of course: I, V, X, C, and so on. Falco’s plans were plainly labeled with familiar Arabic numbers: 14, 8, 76. It was a small discrepancy, but it had a big meaning.
Ever since the Carleton had lost communication and then gone aground, no one had any idea what was happening to them. All the crazy theories France’s fellow travelers advanced about time travel or the Bermuda Triangle were rubbish. They weren’t back in time. There was no Republic of Latium in ancient times to start with, and no one in the Roman Empire used Arabic numerals. France didn’t know as much history as Hans, but he knew Hindu-Arabic numbers didn’t reach Europe until the Middle Ages, centuries after the Roman Empire fell. They had not gone back in time. It was still 2055, and the Carleton people were being held against their will in some kind of weird, all-pervasive theme park. But where were they, and how could they get home?
Falco smacked him lightly on the side of the head. “Wake up,” he said. France had gotten lost in his speculations. His new master—but not his owner, he realized—wanted him to copy a set of house plans but increase the dimensions by a factor of four. Equipped with ancient drafting tools—a reed pen, a pot of oily black ink, an unmarked hardwood ruler, and a piece of old felt to blot excess ink, France set to work.
A couple miles away, Jenny sat nervously on a cold marble bench. The priestesses of Ceres had left her there, in the courtyard of the temple without any instruction. It was beautiful there, with well-tended plants and shrubs, and a high wall of honey-colored sandstone encircling the sacred precinct of the temple.
The temple itself, set back from the street on a path paved with chips of white quartz, was not as imposing as Jenny had imagined. She thought she was going to a severe, Parthenon-like place, as imposing as the facade of the British Museum, but she was wrong. The temple of Ceres was small but elegant, round instead of rectangular. There were columns all around of the simplest kind (Doric? Ionic? Jenny tried to remember her junior- year art history class), entwined with vines. A low white dome topped the temple. Along the top of the colonnade were fancy stone pots filled with lush, growing plants. Jenny wondered how the priestesses watered them way up there.
Suddenly she felt a curious tug, as if someone invisible had given her gown a gentle pull. She looked around, but no one was in sight. Then she heard a low, female voice call out, “Genera,” and Jenny knew that was her Latin name. She got up, unsure where to go. Something tugged at her again, only this time it felt more like her insides were being pulled, not just her clothes. Alarmed, Jenny waved her hands to ward off the unseen summons.
“Genera, come.”
The voice called her again. It seemed to come from within the temple. Jenny followed the path, ascended the few steps, and crossed the shaded patio to the open doors of the temple. She passed through an antechamber crowded with offerings—bundles of lilies and iris, baskets of fruit, even sheaves of cattails tied together like miniature sheaves of wheat. The antechamber was cool and dim, but beyond the sun shone down through an atrium in the temple dome. Someone was waiting for her there. Jenny entered into the presence of the goddess.
Under the dome was a fine, slightly larger than life-sized statue of a woman. A shaft of sunlight fell directly on the image of Ceres, who leaned lightly on a long staff topped by a garland of leaves. Her hair was done up in a long braid, which was then wrapped around her forehead like a crown. The statue was carved from some kind of smooth, pinkish stone, polished to a soft sheen. She was dressed in real clothing like a peasant woman, though the garments were made of fine, shimmering cloth.
It was a beautiful work of art, but it was only a statue, and whatever awe Jenny felt quickly gave way to annoyance. She didn’t believe in goddesses, especially stone ones that pretended to speak.
“I did speak,” said a warm, mature woman’s voice.
“It’s a nice trick,” Jenny replied loudly, looking around for the concealed priestess who was doing the talking. “But this is wasted on me.”
“You do not believe?”
“In gods and goddesses? Not bloody likely.”
Instantly a piercing pain lanced through her chest. Jenny’s heart felt as if she was impaled on a steel stake. She gasped and fell to her knees, hands clasped to her heart.
“It always takes force to convince unbelievers. Beauty and mystery are not enough. It takes pain, does it not?”
The pain was real enough. Jenny trembled from head to toe. Sweat ran in streams from her nose and chin.
“Stop . . . !” she wheezed.
> “A little longer, and you will believe,” said the voice.
Jenny fell on her side, hands clutching at her ravaged heart. Her vision shrank to a narrow tunnel. All she could see were the feet at the base of Ceres’s statue.
“Enough.”
The pain ended so suddenly, Jenny was unable to draw a breath.
“Stand, believer.”
From crushing pain, Jenny was filled with absolute well-being. Her vision cleared, and the terrible cramps in her chest were replaced with healing warmth. She practically leaped to her feet. The rush to her head was like winning a dozen gold medals and setting a dozen new world records.
“You are strong,” said the voice. “Go forth and use that strength in my service.”
Jenny gazed up at the benevolent face of the statue. “I-I will.”
Priestesses appeared behind her. They tried to take her by the arms, but Jenny would not let them. She backed away from the image of Ceres, never taking her eyes off it.
“You are accepted by the goddess,” said Scipina. “Come. I will instruct you in your duties.”
They passed outside. The formerly empty courtyard around the temple was now well populated with drably dressed workers, all women, busily pruning, watering, or cultivating the garden surrounding the temple. Scipina directed one of the gardeners to surrender her tool to Jenny. A lean, dark-haired woman of about forty handed over a pair of iron shears. Jenny stared. It wasn’t the tool that startled her. She quickly smothered her surprise. Taking the shears, she went where Scipina directed and began clipping off dried-up blossoms from an enormous bed of iris.
Jenny knew the woman who gave her the shears. She was the ship’s signals officer, Ms. Señales. She was supposed to be dead—Jenny saw her go down with the other officers when the Carleton sank, but there she was, alive and serving the great nature goddess. Though she and Jenny were only a handshake apart when the tool was passed, there was no recognition in Ms. Señales’s eyes. It was clear she had no idea who Jenny Hopkins was.
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