by Judith Tarr
No matter how she scratched, no matter how she picked through the kids’ hair, she couldn’t keep up. Long before sunset, she understood why Umma hadn’t been able to keep the kids’ heads even halfway clean. She went on anyhow, with the kids getting more and more fractious every time, till she had to light a lamp to see the nits; then even the lamp wasn’t enough. The kids went up to bed in visible relief — there, they probably figured, they’d be safe from her pinching, prodding fingers.
She followed them not long after, tired to the bone. She thought seriously of stripping the bed — but there was still the mattress under the sheets. And the floor wasn’t clean either. Nothing short of a house fire was going to get rid of every louse in the place.
She undressed and washed up as best she could, missing toothpaste the most — her teeth felt as if they were coated in flannel. She rubbed them, and tried not to think of lice. The bed waited for her, deceptively tidy, as she’d made it in her innocence, just this morning. How many newly hatched baby lice would crawl onto her, once she lay down?
She couldn’t sleep propped up against the wall. For that matter, she couldn’t live if she went on like this. She’d been walking the edge of hysteria since Lucius found the louse in his hair. She had to stop. She had to stop now — or go straight screaming out of her mind.
Nicole hated nothing so much as a silly, screaming woman. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, two-inch roaches in the kitchen — no, she didn’t like them, but she could handle them. She’d never known anything but contempt for women who couldn’t handle the crawly things in life. What was a louse but another damned crawly thing?
But it was on her. It was laying eggs on her. It was -
“Enough,” she said, so harshly it made her throat ache. She took three deep breaths, each held a few seconds longer than the last. She made herself calm down. It wasn’t completely effective — she was still shaking, and her stomach was tied in a raw and painful knot — but it held her steady enough to lie on the bed. She couldn’t quite bring herself to pull the covers up over herself. She’d work up to that gradually. For now, just lie there. Just let the muscles relax one by one. Forget the worst blow this world had struck her. With everything else, untreated sickness, raw sewage in the street, rampant animal and child abuse, slavery — a few million lice were awesomely trivial. “It’s the small things that get you,” she mumbled. Sleep had seemed lightyears away, but, once she was horizontal, it crept inexorably up on her. It wasn’t just her body that was tired. Her mind was exhausted, wrung out and hung up to dry. Sleep was wonderful. Sleep was beautiful. Sleep would let her forget everything — even the myriad small live things that hatched and crawled and bred and died — but not soon enough — fight on her body.
Wine the next morning at breakfast seemed oddly welcome, not a poison to be drunk in slight preference to a different poison. Did it make her feel a little easier about the likelihood — no, the certainty — she was walking around with six-legged company? Maybe. Did it make her want to scratch a little less? Maybe. If it did, was that bad or good? For the life of her, Nicole didn’t know.
She had two cups with her bread. I’m thirsty, she told herself. When she finished the bread and that second cup of — after all — well-watered wine, she declared, “I’m going to the baths. Aurelia, you’re coming with me.” She sounded very loud and sure, even to herself.
“Oh, good!” Aurelia squealed with glee. No fights here, not like getting Kimberley into the tub. But this wasn’t just getting into the tub. This was an outing, which made it special.
Nicole wanted her to come for two very good and useful reasons. First and foremost was the chance to scrub Aurelia’s hair as well as she could, to get rid of as many lice and nits as possible. While she did that, she’d get an answer to a question that had occurred to her as soon as she remembered baths, ladies’ day, and the kids’ vermin: how would she go about taking care of that with Lucius? Could she bring a boy eight years old to the baths with her on a ladies’ day? Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. She’d have to see if she spotted any boys his size there today. If she couldn’t, could she ask Brigomarus, the brother she hadn’t met? Or would Titus Calidius Severus let Lucius go with him when he went to the baths? Did he go to the baths? The way he smelled, it was hard to tell.
Second, and not the least important of matters, either, Aurelia knew the ropes at the baths and Nicole didn’t. Nicole had learned how to run the tavern by watching Julia. Now she would learn how to take a Roman bath by watching… her daughter? She still didn’t think of Aurelia that way. How long did parents who adopted need to start thinking of their new children as if they were actual, blood relations? Aurelia, now — Aurelia was a blood relative, had come from this body, this blood and bone, these genes.
But Aurelia was not Nicole’s child in the spirit, where it mattered; not fully, not yet. Kimberley and Justin, who were… they were farther away than children had ever been from their mother; as far away as if she had died and not gone spiraling down through time. She hoped they were all right. She prayed they were all right, prayed to the deaf God in whom she’d almost given up believing and whom the Romans mocked, and prayed also to Liber and Libera. Let my children be all right. They’d listened to her once. Why not again?
She took a couple of asses out of the cash box, then scooped out a random handful of coins. Maybe she’d shop a little on the way home, or buy Aurelia a treat, or maybe there would be extras at the baths over and above the price of admission. Julia didn’t act surprised: Umma must have found some way to make those dupondii and sesterces disappear.
Poor Julia. She’d had to depend on the kindness of a customer or on Nicole’s generosity — on her owner’s generosity, a notion that still gave Nicole the cold grues — for even the small change that let her into the baths. She’d got a couple of dupondii while Nicole was out, but that wasn’t much, not set against the copper and brass and silver in the cash box.
My owner gets to take as much money as she wants, whenever she wants. That thought, or one like it, had to be echoing in Julia’s mind. How did everyone who owned a slave escape being murdered in her bed? It was evil, that was all. Just purely evil.
“Come on,” Nicole said to Aurelia. “Let’s go get clean.” That was cowardice, but she didn’t care. As long as she was in the baths, she wouldn’t have to look at Julia. She wouldn’t be reminded of the injustice she was still perpetrating.
Aurelia knew the way to the baths. Nicole thought she could have found them again by herself — not finding them would have been like mislaying an elephant — but letting the little girl scamper ahead and then catching up every fifty yards or so worked very well. Aurelia paid no attention whatever to the anatomically correct statues. Nicole shouldn’t have been surprised, not with men casually pissing in a jar right across the street from the tavern. Nonetheless, she was. It was all too different. She had to take it in a piece at a time, and pray she could put it together before she made a fatal mistake.
As men had the day before, women trooped up the steps and into the baths. The only men now in evidence around that enormous place were half a dozen burly types in ragged tunics, each of them bent under a load of wood that looked almost as enormous as the baths.
Off to one side of them marched a self-important little man who was obviously their boss. His tunic was not only fairly new bur dyed the rust brown of the one Nicole was coming to think of as her best dress. More important than that, however, the only wood he carried was a single, straight, peeled stick.
“Keep moving, you lazy bastards, keep moving!” he shouted. “Got to keep the fires fed, so we do, so we do. Ladies’ day today. Ladies want their water nice and hot, that they do. Ladies want lots of nice steam, too. Ladies want hot air going through the hypocausts, yes indeed. Can’t let their pretty little feet get cold, oh no.” What the workmen no doubt wanted was for the overbearing little twerp to shut up and let them do their job.
Suddenly, not ten feet from the little door th
ey were approaching — Nicole looked for but didn’t see an authorized personnel only sign — one of the workmen tripped and fell. The leather lashings of his bundle parted. Twigs and branches and hacked chunks of treetrunk spilled over the paving stones.
“You oaf! You cocksucking idiot! You dingleberry hanging off the ass of the city of Carnuntum!” The strawboss literally hopped with rage. Nicole had never seen anybody do that before. He kept right on cursing while he did it, too. Aurelia giggled. Nicole’s hands flew up to cover the child’s ears, but the fellow was yelling too loud for that to do any good.
Slowly, the workman shook himself free of lumber and climbed to his feet. Both knees and one elbow dripped blood on the cobbles. “I’m sorry,” he said in gutturally accented Latin. “I pick it up and — “
“Sorry!” the nasty little strawboss screamed. “Sorry? You think you’re sorry now? I’ll have ‘em sell you to the mines. That’ll make you sorry, by Jupiter’s great hairy balls!”
The workman quailed. Nicole didn’t fully understand the threat, but he did, and it terrified him. She did understand that he wasn’t just a workman. He was a slave. He would have to be, to get stuck with a job like the one he had. His abject manner said so as loudly as the threat to sell him.
And the boss’ stick wasn’t only for show. He swept it whistling up over his head, then down, again and again, beating the workman as cruelly — and, worse, as casually — as that man whom Nicole had seen whipping his poor overburdened donkey the morning she came to Carnuntum.
And the slave let him. He stood there and took it with the air of a man who knew he’d get worse later if he tried to do anything about it now.
Inside Nicole, something snapped. “Stop that!” she shouted at the strawboss. “You stop that this instant!”
“Ah, butt out, lady, “ he said, sounding barely even annoyed. “I ain’t gonna hurt him so bad he can’t work.” He hardly paused to talk to her, but kept right on whaling the slave. He was only doing his job, his manner said. No point in getting upset. If it was nasty — well, that was life, wasn’t it?
The guards at Auschwitz had been like that, Nicole had heard somewhere. Just doing their job. “Leave him alone,” she said. “You’ve got no business abusing him that way.”
“Who says I don’t?” the boss retorted. “I’m supposed to get work out of him, ain’t I? How’s he supposed to feed the fires if he’s out here picking up all this crap? His skull’s so thick, the only way to get anything in is to beat it in.” As if to prove his point, he laid into the slave again.
“Stop that!” Nicole’s voice held itself just on the edge of a scream.
“You don’t like the way I do my job, take it up with the town council. I’ll tell you, though, they like it fine.” The strawboss’ stick went right on flaying the poor man’s hide, rising and falling, rising and falling.
But the worst part was that the slave didn’t even bother to cower, except when the stick cut a little too close to an eye or an ear. By all the signs, he’d been through it before. While the blows rained down on his back, he gathered up his burden again and mended the lashings till they’d hold without snapping. While Nicole stood gasping for breath and coherence, he looked up and snarled, “Shut up, lady, why don’t you? You’re just making it worse.”
Where nothing else had, that stopped Nicole cold. She didn’t want to make trouble for the poor fellow. She wanted to save him from it. But she couldn’t, dammit. That was the worst thing she’d seen about slavery yet. An instant later, she shook her head. No. The worst thing about it was the way the slave himself accepted it.
Aurelia plucked at her tunic. “Mother, are we going to have a bath, or are we going to quarrel all day?” By the way she said it, she was ready for either, but would have preferred the bath, probably because it was more unusual.
Nicole drew a slow, careful breath. “All right.” As tight-lipped with fury as she’d been since — since Frank’s e-mail, she thought — she stalked past the strawboss, Aurelia skipping at her side. The look she gave the man should have scorched him to a cinder. He leered back, running his eyes over her as if were stripping her naked under her tunic.
Her back stiffened. He laughed, impervious to the heat of her glare. Testosterone: it gave a man all the tact and sensitivity of a rhinoceros.
He laid off the slave, at least, and let him make his way wincing and stumbling through the side door to the baths. Nicole was a little bit glad of that.
The attendants at the top of the stairs today were women. Nicole eyed them with horrified fascination. Were they slaves, too? If she’d grown up here, she’d know as automatically as she breathed. Since she hadn’t, she couldn’t tell. Things weren’t so cut-and-dried here as they had been in the South before the Civil War, where if you saw an African-American you knew she was a slave.
How did the Romans keep all their slaves from walking off and settling down two towns over as free men? She couldn’t for the life of her see. There were rules, obviously; but no one had bothered to give her a rulebook. It was like walking cold into a game of bridge, being handed a pack of cards, and told to play — without even knowing what trumps meant. And if she asked, or was too blatant about not knowing, all the other players would think she’d gone insane.
No time to worry about it, not now. She’d be here for the rest of her life. It hit her hard, thinking that — knowing it as surely as, say, Julia knew she was a slave. Right behind it came a stab of real pain, a pang of longing for Kimberley and Justin, so strong that she almost couldn’t go on.
She put it down. There was nothing she could do for them but pray. She’d done that. For the rest of it… sooner or later, she’d have to sit down, take a deep breath, and do some serious sorting out. For now, for this moment at least, she gave one of the women an as for herself and another for Aurelia, then walked into the baths. She was getting good, perhaps too good, at segueing in and out, alternating between near-horror at her situation and a somewhat desperate determination to cope with it. Coping was all she could do — unless she broke and ran screaming into the Danube.
Though the sun streamed in through many windows, her eyes needed a moment to adapt from the brighter light outside. As her vision cleared, she had to work hard not to burst into a torrent of helpless giggles. When, back in the twentieth century, she’d thought about the Romans at all, which wasn’t often, what came to mind was cool white marble, as at the Getty. She’d learned in the street that that wasn’t exactly accurate, but she hadn’t realized, till just now, how very far off the mark it was.
They had cool white marble here — had it and painted it. Or, even better, plastered it over, then painted it. Statues decorated the antechamber, every one of them painted in the same disturbingly lifelike and gaudy style as the ones at street corners. The plastered walls were painted with garden scenes, each individual flower or shrub rendered realistically in itself but without perspective, so that everything was on the same flat, oddly dreamlike plane. The ceiling, lost in lofty dimness, showed a glimmer that might have been gilding and probably was. And as if all that had not been enough, the floor under her foot was a riot of reds and greens and golds, browns and bronzes and blues, hundreds, maybe thousands of vividly glazed tiles arranged into a mosaic of hunters and hounds, stags and wild boar.
The room beyond that was unroofed, a courtyard open to the sky. Something about that, about the transition from enclosed space to outer air, the shape and placement of entry and courtyard, reminded Nicole of something, as if she’d seen them before. Of course: on her honeymoon in Carnuntum, she’d walked in the ruins of this place. She looked around, taking it all in, trying to keep it in memory so that she could come back here and know where she was.
The flowers in this courtyard weren’t painted on the wall. They were real, planted in orderly rows, the bushes near the walls trimmed with geometric severity. Women exercised in the middle of the yard, some with dumbbells, others tossing around what looked like green balloons. “Pig blad
ders! “ Aurelia was jumping up and down with delight. “Mother, may I? Pig bladders are so much fun!”
“Pig… bladders.” Nicole had already seen that the Romans used every part of the pig except the squeal. One more proof here. They had to paint or dye the bladders that interesting shade of green: it didn’t look like anything one would find inside of a pig.
Most of the women who were exercising had rounder, fleshier bodies than Umma’s — they were built more as Nicole had been back in twentieth-century California. They had to be exercising to lose weight, Nicole thought, as in a health club in that other world and time. She had a moment’s sensation almost of relief — at last, something that resembled the things she’d known before.
Then she overheard two women sitting on a bench, watching the show and offering commentary. One pointed to a woman who to Nicole’s eyes was somewhat on the beefy side. “What’s Pollia doing hefting those weights? Her figure’s perfect as it is. Her husband never complains about sticks and bones.”
Her friend, whom Nicole would have called nicely if not overly slim, sighed in clearly evident envy. “Doesn’t he now? Nor,” she added with a flash of malice, “her boyfriend either.”
“Do tell!” the first woman said. “So who is it now? Faustus still? Or is she creeping around in corners with that pretty young Silvius instead?”
“Why, both!” her friend declared.
They laughed together, rocking back and forth on the stone bench, clinging to each other as if they’d never heard a better joke. When they were under control again, the second woman said, “It’s chic, that’s why she does it. Run around, show off your nice breasts and your firm buttocks, let everybody admire your technique. What’s it to her how much meat and oil she needs to scarf up, to keep the weight on? Everybody knows she married old Aulus for his money — and his handsome slaves.”
Nicole moved past them before they could guess she was eavesdropping, taking a second, longer look at the women playing what looked like a cross between volleyball and soccer.