by Judith Tarr
If the tavern was going to be closed for the morning, she needed a sign to say so — but there wasn’t any paper, no cardboard, nothing. Here was a world without scrap paper or Post-its, empty of anything handy to write with or on.
But people still did write, and wrote on things. Walls, for example. A piece of charcoal on the whitewashed wall in front of the house did as well as could be expected. It looked like a graffito but it said what she needed it to say, which was the important thing.
Julia watched in wide-eyed wonder. “Calidius Severus was right!” she said. “You don’t just know how to read, you know how to write, too. How did you ever learn that?”
Nicole started to answer, then caught herself. She’d told the fuller and dyer she’d studied on her own, but could she have studied so secretly her own slave didn’t know about it?
A lawyer learned when to talk fast — and when to say nothing. Julia was expecting something; Nicole gave her the barest minimum. “I managed,” she said, and let it go at that.
It seemed to work. Julia looked greatly impressed. Even better, she asked no more awkward questions. Her calm acceptance of the stranger things in life had to be a side effect of her slavery; an art of not seeing what she wasn’t supposed to see, and keeping quiet when silence was the safest course.
Not for much longer, Nicole thought with satisfaction — and the barest hint of guilty apprehension. Julia, free, might ask questions that Julia the slave had never dared to think of.
Then again, she might not. At the moment, she was full of Nicole’s hitherto unsuspected ability. She walked along beside Nicole as if she’d had a whole new world opened to her, pointing to this sign or that bit of graffiti, then listening in awed delight as Nicole read it off to her.
Nicole didn’t mind. It was a lot like going for a walk or a drive with Kimberley or Justin, when they played Read the Sign, Mommy, and tried to figure out what it said before she read it.
Remembering that made her throat tighten a bit. She put the memory aside, focused on this world she’d wished herself into, and worked herself up to enjoying the game. In Carnuntum, after all, you made your own fun, or you didn’t have any. You couldn’t turn the car radio on or dump the kids in front of the TV when you or they got bored. This was all there was: people, imagination, and, at the moment, bits of Latin scribbled on walls.
It was a men’s day at the baths. As Nicole and Julia walked by, clots of freshly bathed and barbered men whistled and called and made propositions that would have made a twentieth-century construction worker blush. One even flipped up his tunic to show what he was offering.
Nicole bristled. Julia slid eyes at the merchandise and sniffed. “I’ve seen better,” she said with a toss of her head — and a sway of the hips that made a whole row of yahoos moan in unison.
“Stop that,” Nicole hissed. “You’re encouraging them.”
“Of course I am,” Julia said, and giggled. “Why not?”
You made your own fun, or you didn’t have any. Nicole’s thought of a moment before rose up and bit her. These grunting pigs were committing blatant sexual harassment. Julia was having a grand time encouraging it. If she wasn’t harassed, in fact wasn’t bothered at all, was it harassment?
“What if they do more than just ogle you?” Nicole demanded. “What if one of them tries to rape you?”
“I’ll stick a knee in his balls,” Julia answered equably. “I’ve done that a time or two. Didn’t take much doing. Word gets around, you know. ‘That one’s tough,’ they say. ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ “
Nicole found that hard to believe. No way men were ever that reasonable. Before she could say so, one of the rougher-hewn types on the steps called out, “Hey, girls! Yeah, the two of you! Come up here to papa. I’ll make you think you died and went to Elysium.” As if that weren’t explicit enough, he grinned and pumped his pelvis, showing off a decent-sized erection under the grubby tunic.
Julia looked him up and down, good and long, tilting her hips and thrusting out her breasts till his tongue was hanging halfway to the ground. Her eye came to rest at last on the bulge under his tunic. Her lip curled. “Will you now?” she said in ripe scorn. “You and what legion?”
Nicole didn’t think that was very funny, but the whole crowd roared with laughter. The would-be superstud flushed crimson and slunk away — back to his wife and sixteen snotty-nosed children, Nicole rather devoutly hoped.
The market square was as loudly frenetic as it had been when Nicole went shopping. From everything she’d gathered, it was like that from sunup to sundown every day of the year. Not far beyond it lay the building where the town council met. Despite a fine display of fluted columns and an entrance-way cluttered with statuary, it wasn’t nearly so splendid as the baths — and it seemed to know it. As if embarrassed to be left behind, it tried to make up for its deficiencies with an excess of gaudy paint. One of the statues, a Venus, boasted a pair of gilded nipples. They looked like pasties in a Vegas strip joint. Bad taste, evidently, was a universal constant.
Nicole hadn’t quite figured out how Carnuntum’s city government worked. She knew there was a town council, and a pair of magistrates called duovirs above it. Both duovirs had to approve council measures, she thought; if one vetoed them, they didn’t become law.
Veto, she realized suddenly, working back and forth between English and Latin, meant I forbid. Chunks of this legal system lay embedded in the one she’d studied, maybe not so much in the law itself as in the language in which it was framed. It was an obvious discovery, she supposed — but she’d never thought of it before. It hit her with the force of a revelation, a piece of historical knowledge that she’d never have conceived to be remotely relevant… until she found herself in a place where Latin was a living, and lively, language.
How Carnuntum’s city government stacked up against that of the province of Pannonia, or against that of the Roman Empire as a whole, she didn’t know yet. Nor was she going to worry about it. She wasn’t going anywhere. She had time to learn.
She and Julia walked between the central pair of columns, past the striptease Venus and a statue of someone male, pinch-faced, and heroically proportioned — it looked as if someone had taken the head of a skinny little nerd and stuck it on the body of a Rambo clone.
Once past these monuments to kitsch, however, and once her eyes had adjusted to the dimness of a building without electric lights, she saw that she was in a more familiar place than any she’d found since she came to Carnuntum. There was no mistaking what kind of place this was. For a moment, she had a potent feeling of home — of standing in one of the interminable lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles office on Sherman Way.
What was it they used to write on the old maps? Here be Dragons, yes. Here, she thought, be Bureaucrats.
Oh, there were differences. The clerks wore tunics instead of suits; some of the snootier-looking ones even wore togas. They sat behind folding tables rather than desks, each flicking the beads of an abacus rather than the keys of a calculator — fingers flying, beads clicking, narrow-mouthed faces screwed up and sour.
None of the differences mattered. Bureaucrats were bureaucrats, it seemed, in every age of the world: bored, crabby, and studiedly insolent. As if to prove the point, one of them yawned in her face.
They were all men. The other differences hadn’t bothered her. This one did. A lot. This was exactly why she’d come — why she thought she’d come to Carnuntum — to get away from sexism, covert and overt, and find a world where men and women lived as equals. There was nothing she could do about it now. She could whine and carry on and get herself nowhere, or she could make the best of it — and do what she could to make things better.
When yawning in her face didn’t make her disappear, the clerk said, “May I help you?” With a faint but elaborately long-suffering sigh, he shoved to one side the sheet on which he’d been writing. It wasn’t paper; it was thicker and grainier, as if made from pressed leaves. A word came into he
r head: papyrus. A thought followed the word: No paper, but paperwork after all. A moment later, another thought: Damn.
She suppressed it all, even the mild but heartfelt curse, and said briskly, “Yes, you can help me.” She pointed at Julia. “I want to emancipate my slave.”
The clerk was the first person Nicole had said that to, who didn’t react in the slightest. “And you are…?” he said.
“My name is Umma,” Nicole answered — congratulating herself that she’d remembered.
“Oh,” the clerk said, as deadpan as ever. “Of course. The widow of Satellius Sodalis.” And a good thing he knew that, too, because Nicole hadn’t. Were Liber and Libera looking after her after all, making sure she didn’t stumble more often than she had to? “Now, then, since you’ve come here, I suppose you’ll want formal manumission, not just the informal sort you could get by emancipating her in front of a group of friends.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Nicole said, and then, with trained caution, “Remind me of the differences between formal and informal manumission.”
The clerk smiled. It was not at all a pleasant smile. It was, in fact, more of a leer. “Well,” he said. “Of course. One can’t expect a woman to know how the law works, now, can one?” It took all of Nicole’s years of legal training and dealing with good-ole-boy judges and sleazy lawyers to keep from braining him with his own bronze inkpot. He went on in blind complacency, reciting as if by rote, in just about the same tone she would have used for explaining torts to a four-year-old: “Formal manumission is more complicated, of course, and grants a slave higher status. It makes her free, and it makes her a Roman citizen. She’d still be your client, of course, and you, or rather your guardian, her patron. She won’t be able to hold office” — he smiled that nasty smile again, as if to show how unlikely that was in any case — “but her freeborn children, if she should have any, will be.”
Julia nodded as if she’d known that all along. Her expression was eager, but there was wariness underneath, like a dog that accepts a bone but looks for a kick to follow.
Nicole made herself ignore Julia and concentrate on what the clerk was saying. “And informal manumission?” she asked.
“As I said,” the clerk replied with a little sniff of scorn, “for that you needn’t have come here. She’d be free then, but not a Roman citizen. Junian Latin rights, we call it.” And anyone but an idiot or a woman, his expression said, would know as much. “When she dies, whatever property she’s acquired while she’s free reverts back to you.”
That didn’t seem like much of a choice to Nicole. “We’ll do it the formal way, “ she said.
“The other difference,” the clerk said, “is the twenty-denarius tax for formal manumission: five percent of her approximate value. “
Nicole winced. “That’s a lot of money.”
“One gets what one pays for,” the clerk said: a bureaucrat indeed, and no mistake. “For your twenty denarii you receive full and proper documentation.” He paused. His eyebrows rose slightly. “I gather you haven’t brought the proper fee? “
Nicole had an all but irresistible urge to ask if he took MasterCard or Visa. “No, I haven’t,” she said a little testily. No credit cards here, either — not even a bank, that she’d seen or heard of. And what would people write checks on? The walls?
Meanwhile, there was the issue of the fee, and the fact that twenty denarii would lighten the cash box by a significant degree. So Julia was worth about four hundred denarii. That was a lot of money. No wonder Julia hadn’t thought she could save it on her own — and no wonder Brigomarus had been so upset. Nicole was, in effect, giving away the family Mercedes.
The clerk was no kinder and certainly no pleasanter, but he seemed — for whatever reason — to have decided against the usual bureaucratic obstructionism. “Well then,” he said. “You can get the money, I suppose.”
Nicole nodded. She had practice in looking sincere — it was a lawyer’s stock in trade — but she wasn’t lying, either.
The clerk seemed to know it, or else it was the one hour a day when he cut his victims an inch of slack. “Very well. I’ll draw up the documents. You go, collect the money, and come back with your guardian. “
“My guardian?” Nicole said. That was the second time he’d used the term. So what was she, a minor child? Or did the word have another meaning?
“That would be your husband, of course,” the clerk said, unsurprised by what had to look to him like female imbecility, “but your husband is dead.
Let me see. “ The clerk frowned into space, mentally reviewing family connections he knew better than Nicole did. “He was his own man, not in anyone’s patria potestas, which means that you no longer come under the legal authority of any male in his family. Which returns responsibility to your own, birth family. Father’s dead. Brothers — you have a brother, yes? Britomartis — Brigomarus. We’ll need his signature, or failing this his witnessed mark, before the documents are legal and binding.”
“Why?” Nicole demanded. “I can sign for myself.”
The clerk laughed, a strikingly rich and full sound to have come from so pinched and small a mouth. “Why, Madam Umma, of course you can! You can write your name wherever you like, if you can write it at all. But if this transaction is to be legal, it must have a man’s name attached to it.”
“What?” Nicole veered between fury and horror. First, to have to ask Brigomarus to agree to Julia’s manumission, after what he’d said and implied when Nicole informed him of it — fat chance. And second, and worse, her own approval wasn’t enough — because she was a woman, she had no right or power to sign a legally binding contract. That — by God, that was positively medieval.
But this wasn’t even the Middle Ages yet, she didn’t think. It was a long and apparently unenlightened time before that.
And there was Julia, shocked out of her awe at the place and the proceedings, blurting out with a rather remarkable lack of circumspection, “Didn’t you know that, Mistress? Brigomarus knows it, I’m sure he does.”
“To the crows with Brigomarus,” Nicole snarled. “It’s outrageous. It’s unjust, it’s immoral, it’s unequal, it’s unfair, it’s absurd, it’s impossible.” Her voice had risen with every word. In fact, she was shouting. People were staring. She didn’t care. Was she any less a human being because she couldn’t piss in one of Calidius Severus’ amphorae?
The clerk was signally unimpressed by her vocabulary or her volume. “It’s the law,” he said primly.
“To the crows with the law, too,” Nicole snapped. Now there was a hell of a thing for a lawyer to say. And she didn’t care. She didn’t care one little bit. She got a grip on Julia’s arm, swiveled her about, and stalked off in high indignation.
8
Mistress!” Julia called from the street just outside the tavern, where she’d gone to peer at something or other outside. “Look at the sunset. Isn’t it beautiful? The sky is turning all those clouds to fire. I’ll bet you an as it will rain tomorrow.”
Nicole didn’t gamble, but she didn’t say so. Julia seemed unperturbed by the setback to her manumission. In fact, as they’d walked home, Nicole slamming her feet down furiously with every stride, Julia trotting along behind her, Julia had said, “Ah well. Isn’t that just like fate?”
Julia the slave might be a fatalist, but Nicole was damned if she’d sit around blathering about kismet or whatever else you wanted to call it. The idea that a man’s signature was required to make a document valid told her loud and clear where women stood in Carnuntum — and, no doubt, in the rest of the Roman Empire. In Los Angeles, at least the letter of the law had been on her side. There, hypocrisy had got her so frothing mad she’d wished herself centuries back in time to get away from it. Well — she’d succeeded. No hypocrisy here, oh no. Just pure naked oppression.
“Rain would be nice,” Julia was saying. “I heard the farmers saying in the market yesterday that it’s been too dry for too long — the crops are sufferi
ng. Much more drought and we’d be in trouble. You know what they say: dry summer, winter famine. Rain now would mean we eat well come winter.”
“I hope it’s a cursed flood,” Nicole said sullenly.
Julia pulled out the neckline of her tunic and spat down onto her bosom. Nicole stared at her. “What on earth did you do that for?”
“To turn aside the evil omen, of course,” the slave — still a slave — answered. “Drought’s bad, but floods are really and right-there bad.”
Spitting in your bosom was, Nicole supposed, like knocking on wood or crossing your fingers for luck. But in the twentieth century, most people who knocked on wood didn’t really believe it would do any good. Julia sounded as serious about averting the omen as Nicole’s grandmother had been when she made the sign of the cross.
Not a fair comparison. Nicole thought. Grandma was doing something religious. This is just superstition.
So? said the lawyerly part of her mind. Would you be so kind as to define the difference?
Well: religion got higher ratings than superstition. But that, she admitted to both sides of herself, was a less than useful distinction.
She’d had two cups of wine with her supper. They combined with the undercurrent of burning outrage to make her discontented with the idea of trudging upstairs and falling asleep. She’d done that every night since she’d come to Carnuntum, and it looked to be what everybody did every night, without variation and without exception.
“Julia,” she said suddenly, “I want some fun tonight.”
“Why are you telling me, Mistress?” Julia asked. “Go across the street.” She pointed toward the shop and house of Titus Calidius Severus.
Nicole’s face grew hot. “That’s not what I meant!” she said a little too quickly. “I meant someplace… oh, someplace to go: to a play, or to listen to music, or to go out dancing.” Yes indeed: no TV, no movies, no radio, no stereo — she was starting to go stir-crazy. It wasn’t quite like living in a sensory-deprivation tank — some of her senses, especially smell, got a bigger workout here than they ever had back in the United States — but it wasn’t far removed, either. If she didn’t do something besides get up and get to work and get hit over the head with culture shock and collapse into sleep, she was going to scream.