Terentianus had told Nicole to rinse her mouth with it. He hadn’t told her it would feel as if she’d drunk gasoline and then thrown in a lighted match. She whimpered. Her eyes filled with tears of pain. Nevertheless, she gulped the stuff down. The second swallow wasn’t quite so bad. The damage was done; pain had gone into overload.
When the cup was almost empty, Nicole wet her forefinger with the dregs and smeared a little on Liber’s mouth, and a little on Libera’s.
Julia shook her head and smiled. “I never saw anybody give them a drink quite that way, Mistress. But I’ll bet they like it.”
“I hope they do,” Nicole said. She hadn’t been thinking before she did it, she’d just done what seemed appropriate. She was lucky. If she’d crossed herself backward, everyone in church would have known she was no Catholic. Here, what she’d done wasn’t wrong, just different. The cult of Liber and Libera, it seemed, didn’t have as many rules as the Christianity in which she’d grown up.
The Christianity they had here — did it have rules, aside from terrorist graffiti and apocalyptic mania? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And if she did happen to learn the answer, she had every intention of doing it from the twentieth century.
She drank a lot of wine that day. With each cup, she gave the stone god and goddess their share. If the wound got infected after all that, then the germs that did the job would be cutting through the alcohol bath in wetsuit and swim fins.
She drank a double cup, one of the cups she kept for her thirstiest customers, before she went upstairs to bed. Maybe, just maybe, it would dull the pain enough to let her sleep. She was in a fog as it was, drifting as if underwater, bouncing gently off walls and furniture. But the heart of the fog was a red and throbbing pain.
Sleep was as elusive as she’d feared. She couldn’t even toss and turn: it hurt too much. She lay as still as she could on the thin, lumpy mattress, and did her best to ignore the tiny stabs and stings of the vermin that inhabited it. She’d brought the plaque up with her, and propped it on the chest of drawers where she could see it from the bed. Liber and Libera. she prayed, take me back to my own time. Take me back to my own world. I don’t belong here. I was wrong to pray as I prayed. Please, make it right. You granted one prayer of mine. Only grant this one. and I’ll never trouble you again.
She couldn’t tell if she was getting through. The wine couldn’t do what the fever had done, blur the boundaries between the waking world and the world the gods inhabited. All it did was dull her reflexes and slow her mind, and drop her at last into a sodden sleep.
She drifted off in a dream of electric lights and chlorinated water, automobiles and stereos, antibiotics and, oh God, anesthetics, telephones and television, supermarkets and refrigerators, soap and insecticides and inner-spring mattresses. And — yes, yes indeed — equality under the law, whatever it might be in actual practice. If the gods were kind, if she’d worked the — magic? — rightly, she’d wake in a deliciously soft, heavenly clean bed in the century that was, after all she’d done to escape it, the one and only century for her.
She woke, yes. On a rough and scratchy, redolent and verminous mattress, in a century long before the one in which she was born, in the Roman city of Carnuntum.
16
It was a bitter waking, but Nicole had no intention of giving up. She’d storm heaven if she had to. Every night, with wine and impassioned prayer, she called on the god and goddess. She smeared their lips with wine, she left a cup of wine in front of their plaque, she drank more wine than she rightly should have. She was sincere. She was devoted. She wanted, above anything in this world, to go home.
And every morning, as surely as the sun rose over the eastward wall of Carnuntum, she woke in Umma’s bed, in Umma’s body. The gods were ignoring her, or else, as she began to fear, actively refusing to grant her prayer.
They’d brought her here. They could damned well send her home again.
Julia approved of this sudden access of piety. “We’re sure to have better luck around here now,” she said. Julia had two mottoes: Never ask questions and Always look on the bright side. Manumission hadn’t done a thing to change either of them.
That much Nicole had given her: her freedom. Umma, when she came back to this body, if she came back to it — small dark difficult thought, there, quickly suppressed — couldn’t legally undo what Nicole had done. It was a good thing, a decent gift to leave behind.
Nicole wasn’t ever tempted to stay. The one real friend she’d had here, Titus Calidius Severus, was dead. Lucius was Umma’s child, not her own, though yes, she’d miss him. Julia, too, and young Gaius, and one or two others. She was fond of them as she might have been of people she met on a long vacation, but with the sense, always, that this was their world and not hers; that whatever happened here, it was temporary. She wasn’t going to live out her days here.
Liber and Libera were silent, though their plaque was smeared with wine and the cup in front of it had been filled and refilled and filled again. Nicole, in the beginning of despair, prayed to the God she’d grown up with, the God whose followers in second-century Carnuntum seemed so much like twentieth-century extremists. He gave her no more answer than the Roman deities had. He was angry at her, she was sure, for having other gods before Him. Or maybe the Christians here and now were shouting so loud, they drowned her out.
She hadn’t wanted anything or wished for anything so strongly or with such concentrated determination since — when? Since she passed the bar, at the very least. Even the prayer that had brought her here was a dim and halfhearted thing beside this.
I made it one way, she thought on waking up yet again on the hard narrow bed in the upstairs bedroom behind the tavern. There has to be a way for me to go back.
The legally trained part of her mind pointed out that there didn’t have to be any such thing: hadn’t she ever heard of a one-way ticket? The rest of her was damned if that was the case. Really, truly, literally damned.
Slowly, reluctantly, and almost unregarded, the hole in the back of her mouth healed. When it was finally gone, she found herself free of pain for the first time since she’d come to Carnuntum.
The difference it made was amazing. “I should have had that tooth pulled a long time ago,“ she said one day in the dead of winter, a long way still from spring.
“I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” Julia responded, looking up from the dough she was kneading. “They say it afterwards, yes, but before? You couldn’t get a one of them near the nice man with the forceps in his hand.”
Remembering the burly man holding her arms and the other one grabbing her legs, remembering the forceps in her mouth and the roots of the molar tearing out of her jawbone, Nicole shuddered. “You are right,” she conceded. “You are too right.”
That afternoon — a fine one, as winter days went, with the temperature probably in the high forties and the sun peering out between spatters of rain — some very unusual customers swaggered into the tavern. The room that had always seemed, if not spacious, then large enough to swing a cat in, was suddenly not much larger than a closet.
There were only three of them, though at first there seemed to be more: big men, burly, and ripe even by the standards of this age. They were Germans, no doubt about it, Marcomanni or Quadi, she couldn’t tell which. They ordered wine in Latin with a distinct accent, guttural but understandable.
“One-as, two-as, or Falernian for four asses?” she asked, warily but crisply. As had the tribesmen in the market square, they surveyed the place as if they owned it. If they drew their swords and demanded the cash box, she couldn’t do much but hand it over. Really, when she stopped to think, it was a wonder she hadn’t ever been robbed or mugged — crime here was low, though not nonexistent.