She even thought, for a longish while, of finding someone to do the job tonight. But it was dark already, and rain was dripping off the eaves. From the sound of it, it was turning to sleet. No way she could venture out in that, nor was any dentist likely to want to try it, even if she’d had a way to get him over here without sending herself or one of her family out into the dark and the wet.
She had to get drunk before she could sleep that night. The wine didn’t make the pain go away, but it did shove it off to one side. As long as she didn’t have to stare it in the face, she could cope. Mostly. If she had another cup of the one-as wine. And another to chase that one down, because it tasted so godawful. Then a third, just because. And…
She woke long before sunrise. Her body was a perfect symmetry: a pounding headache exactly matched the toothache. She stumbled downstairs, lit a lamp with shaking hands, and drank another cup of wine. It tasted just as horrible as she’d expected. She poured another cup, but couldn’t bring herself to drink it. She nursed it instead, hunched miserably on a stool, until at long last a gray and leaden light filtered through the slats of the shutters.
Julia’s robust footfalls on the stairs beat a counterpoint to the pounding in her head and the throbbing in her mouth. She glowered at the freed-woman.
“Oh my,” Julia said. “It’s too bad the pestilence got Dexter. He was supposed to be very good at pulling teeth.”
Nicole wanted to knock Julia’s head off, and her bright, healthy voice with it, but she chose to focus instead on the words, and on the thoughts behind them. Focusing helped. “There’s that physician named Terentianus,” she said, “not far from the market square. I’ve gone by his place often enough.”
Julia shrugged. “I haven’t heard much about him, good or bad,“ she said. “If he’s still alive, you might as well try him. They’re all pretty much the same.”
That wasn’t true in L.A. It was sure to be an even greater lie in Carnuntum, which had no licensing arrangements of any sort. Here, if you hung out a sign and said you were a doctor, you were. Even the good doctors here were pathetically bad. The bad doctors were right out of the ballpark.
But Nicole didn’t have an awful lot of choice. Her tooth had grown worse as the morning went on. Her whole body ached in sympathy. “If he’s still breathing,” she said, “I’ll try him.”
He was in the shop — office didn’t quite seem to fit — that she’d seen so often: a skinny little man with a nose that looked even larger than it was, because the rest of him was so small. He greeted Nicole with a nearsighted scowl and an audible sigh as she told him her trouble. “Step out into the light and let me see,” he said.
Passersby veered off course and paused to gape while Terentianus positioned her in a convenient patch of sunlight — imagine; sunlight, and she was in too much pain to enjoy it — and peered into her mouth. “Yes,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Yes, yes. Bad, very bad. I’m afraid — yes, it will have to come out.”
“Why should you be afraid?” she snapped. “It’s not your tooth.”
He looked startled, but then he laughed. He had a remarkably pleasant and infectious laugh. “Oh!” he said. “Good, that’s very good. I’ll have to remember it.” Which meant, no doubt, that he’d be boring people with it for the next twenty years. After a brief pause, he added, “My fee is one denarius. Payable in advance.”
Nicole had had the forethought to bring a purse with her — no health insurance here. She laid four sesterces in his waiting hand. As they disappeared into the depths of his belt pouch, she said, “I don’t suppose anybody ever wants to pay you afterwards.”
“Not likely,” he agreed dolefully. Then he gave her a prescription that no twentieth-century dentist would have resorted to: “You see Resatus’ tavern there, across the street? Go on over. Drink three cups of wine, neat, as fast as you can. Then come back. I’ll give you a draught of poppy juice. As soon as that takes effect, I’ll pull the tooth.”
He wanted her as numb as she could get. She gave him credit for that.
The tavern was a somewhat larger place than her own, and somewhat more upscale: she paid two asses for her own one-as wine, and it was served in Samian ware. Resatus himself took her order, and gave her a good dose of sympathy with it. “Another one of Terentianus’ patients, are you?” he said. “Good luck to you, then.”
She thanked him with somewhat less than complete sincerity, and drank the wine down doggedly, cup after overpriced cup.
When she made her way to Terentianus’ shop, her feet wanted to go off in a different direction altogether. She’d never been drunk in the morning before. It was a peculiar sensation. All the shadows were pointing the wrong way. But then, being drunk itself was peculiar. Till she came to Carnuntum, she’d never known what it was like. She wished to the innumerable Roman gods that she didn’t have to do it at all.
Terentianus regarded her wobbly stance and bleary eyes with somber approval. He rummaged in a box under a table, and produced a small jar of murky blue glass. “Here. Drink this down. It won’t be long now till it’s over.”
Nicole didn’t know if she liked the sound of that. She took a deep breath, to steady herself, and nearly heaved up the wine she’d drunk; but it stayed put. She pulled out the stopper and saluted Terentianus: Bottoms up.
The stuff was thick and syrupy. It tasted of wine and, overpoweringly, of the poppyseeds on the egg bread her mother would buy every once in a while, when she could scrape up the extra cash for something tastier than Wonder or Langendorf. The memory kept her, somehow, from gagging on it. Terentianus waved her to a stool by the window. She drifted rather than walked to it, and sat when he told her to, because she couldn’t think of anything better to do. The poppy juice — opium, yes — struck her a stronger yet softer blow than the wine had. She felt sleepy and stupid and floaty. The pain backed away, never quite absent, but not quite present, either. The effect was a little like CoTylenol, and a little like being drunk out of her skull. Somewhere far away and yet very near, there was still pain, a great deal of it. But it didn’t touch her.
She yawned. The poppy juice, so full of sleep, reminded her that she’d slept hardly at all the night before.
She didn’t notice when Terentianus left the shop. She did notice when he came back with a pair of burly strangers. She stared at them in dreamy confusion. “Who are they?” she asked. Her tongue felt thick; the words sounded slurred. “Why are they here? Do they have toothaches, too?”
“They’re to hold you down, of course,” Terentianus said calmly. He gestured. One of the men got behind Nicole in one long stride. Before she could move, he seized her arms. The other squatted beside her and got a grip on her legs. She struggled feebly, but they were immovable. Altogether, the preparations seemed more conducive to rape than to dentistry.
If she’d been even slightly less gone in wine and the drug, she would have tried to fight her way out of there. But she was helpless. If the doctor was into raping his patients, there was not one thing she could do about it.
Terentianus loomed over her. He was fully and warmly clothed, and no sign of any erection, either. What he held was far worse. It looked like nothing so much as a large pair of needle-nosed pliers. “Open up,” he said. “The sooner it’s begun, the sooner it’s over.”
Nicole took a deep, steadying breath, and opened her mouth as wide as it would go. The dental forceps advanced inexorably, till her eyes crossed in trying to follow it. It wasn’t chrome-plated or shiny. It was plain gray-black iron, unrusted at least. She didn’t even want to know how unsanitary it was.
She clamped her eyes shut as it disappeared into her mouth. She could taste it, the cold, metallic taste of iron. It closed on the bad tooth: pressure, and the beginning of a twinge. Before she could jerk away, Terentianus’ left hand braced on her forehead, holding her steady. He grunted, gathering himself. He pulled.