Nicole stared. Julia stared back, for once not lowering her eyes in submission. She was shocked enough, and indignant enough, to show for once what must have been her real self. She wasn’t slow at all, or simple either. That was a mask she wore, like the hooker’s mask she’d put on for Ofanius Valens.
“Ofanius Valens gave you an as at breakfast the other day,” Nicole said. “You didn’t do anything for him then but wait on him and be pleasant to him.”
“Oh, yes, a whole as,” Julia said scornfully. “And that wasn’t just on account of breakfast, either. He was being nice to me so I’d be nice to him later.”
An as for a piece of ass, Nicole thought, but she didn’t say it — it only worked in English. What she did say was, “Sleeping with men for money is degrading.”
Julia shrugged, still sullen and not about to let Nicole forget it. “I’ve heard people say that,” she said. “Usually women who don’t have what it takes. They’re jealous, that’s all. Can’t get any fun, so don’t want anybody else to get any either.”
“Fun?” Nicole said incredulously. “You call it fun?”
Julia did a creditable bump-and-grind, with a wild, mirthless grin in it for Nicole. “Sure it is. What else is there in the world that’s anywhere near as much fun?”
She wasn’t just saying it to be obnoxious, Nicole realized. She meant it. In Los Angeles, there had been any number of things to do besides hop between the sheets. Anything from aerobics to pottery classes to nightclubs to fancy restaurants to biker bars to mall-crawling to… She stopped the mental recitation before it threw her into a funk. None of those things existed in Carnuntum. Nicole had been here only three days, scrambling every minute to keep afloat in a sea of totally new and strange details. She hadn’t had time to be bored. Julia had lived her whole life here, without television, without radio, without movies, without recorded music, without newspapers, books, magazines… without much of anything when it came to entertainment. Nicole remembered when she was a kid in Indiana, when a tornado would roar through, or a blizzard, and the power would go out, in rural areas sometimes for days or weeks; and nine months later the maternity wards in the hospitals would be doing a boomtown business. When there was nothing else to do, people just naturally turned to sex.
“I mean,” Julia said, sounding like a Latinate Valley girl, “I could get drunk all the time, but you wouldn’t like that, either, because then I wouldn’t be able to work.”
“No,” Nicole said, “I wouldn’t like that.” Considering how she felt about alcohol, there were few things she would have liked less. But this was one of them. She might have descended from lawyer to tavernkeeper, but by God, she hadn’t descended from lawyer to procurer. “You’re not going to prostitute yourself just to get a little spending money.”
“Mistress,” Julia said with an air of desperate patience. “It’s not just for the money. You don’t sleep by yourself every night. Or at least,” she added after a pause, “you didn’t till you quarreled with Calidius Severus the other day.” When Nicole didn’t erupt at that — Nicole was momentarily unable to think of anything to say — Julia went on, “Oh, Mistress! I know I’m a slave and you can do whatever you want and I can’t say a thing about it, but you’ve never been as bad as you’ve been in the past few days. If you’ve got it into your head that I’m suffering — how about the pain I feel when I don’t have any money to call my own?”
Her expression was piteous, but Nicole didn’t budge. Mothers of teenagers heard the same arguments in pretty much the same tone. It didn’t mean a thing, and she was not about to let it sway her. “You will not make money by selling yourself,” she said. Julia dropped her wounded-kitten pose and glared. Nicole glared right back.
The moment stretched. Nicole drew in a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time” — ever since her spirit came to Carnuntum, even if that was only two days — “and now I’m sure the time is right. I’m going to set you free.”
This time, she was sure Julia would fall on her neck in gratitude. She waited for it, expected it. But, as before, Julia seemed anything but glad to get such a gift. If anything, she looked upset. “But,” she said, “Mistress, what would I do if I was free?”
Nicole reminded herself again that this was a slave, and probably born a slave. The concept of freedom was alien to her. Therefore Nicole kept her voice light, encouraging. “What will you do? Why, anything you want to. You’ll be free.”
Julia eyed her warily. “Could I go on working here?”
“For wages, do you mean?” Nicole asked.
Julia nodded. She was still wary, with a hint of apprehension, but Nicole had noticed that if Julia got a thought in her head, she couldn’t help but pursue it to its logical conclusion. “Yes, Mistress. Or at least, some wages. Room and board and a little money for myself.”
Which was exactly what she got now — except for the money part, which had just evaporated. Julia was canny, Nicole thought. Behind that open face and simple, forthright manner lay a sharp intelligence.
Intelligence, maybe, but no ambition. Nicole was a little disappointed. “If that’s what you want to do,” Nicole said, “yes, I suppose so.” And God knows I need you to help me get through all the things I still don’t know. “Or you could go to school and — “
Julia looked at her as if she’d gone around the bend again. “School? Mistress, what good would that do?”
Now that Nicole had rather expected. “It would give you more kinds of work to choose from,” she answered. “After all, you can’t read or write, can you?” Umma hadn’t been able to, so it was safe enough to assume that her slave couldn’t either.
Julia didn’t seem to feel the lack. She shrugged indifferently. “What if I could? There aren’t many jobs that need it. Clerk for the city, I suppose, or bookkeeper — but even if I could learn enough or fast enough, I wouldn’t want to be locked up all day making birdtracks on papyrus. Besides, those are men’s jobs. Who ever heard of a lady bookkeeper?” She laughed and shook her head, as if the notion were too absurd for words.
Those are men’s jobs. Nicole heard the words with sick dismay. Who ever heard of a lady bookkeeper? She’d fled California not only for its sexism but for its hypocrisy. Camuntum was every bit as sexist — and not the least bit hypocritical about it. “What about Liber and Libera?” Nicole asked, a little hoarsely.
“The wine god and his wife?” Julia asked as if puzzled. “What about them, Mistress? They’re gods. They aren’t bookkeepers.”
“The — wine god and goddess?” Nicole felt as if she’d been slugged in the gut. What had she done to herself? Of all the deities she would have picked to help her…
But they had helped her, snickering at her ignorance, all too likely, but helping her nevertheless. And here she was, in the world they’d chosen for her, and she was damned if she knew what to do about it.
Maybe she was damned. Sunday school had included a long rant on sin and damnation, and a scenic tour of hell. Wine and drunkards had warranted a whole separate dissertation, along with fornicators, whom Nicole had thought of then, in her eight-year-old innocence, as people who had been put to work stoking the furnaces.
It wasn’t particularly warm in Carnuntum, but there was plenty of heat inside Nicole’s skull. It felt as if her brains were boiling. “Liber and Libera,” she managed to say. “Aren’t they — “ She softened what she’d been about to say: “Aren’t they also the gods of liberty?”
Julia thought about it briefly, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. Liberty from care — isn’t that what wine does? Frees your soul from worry, lets you forget for a while that life isn’t going the way you want it to?”