Hadn’t Christianity turned a lot of the old gods into devils? Right now, Nicole could see why. But she hadn’t felt anything bad in Liber or Libera, not in their faces on the plaque and not in the way they’d granted her prayer. So maybe it was a creeping evil — or maybe it was simple godlike benevolence. Be careful what you wish for, she’d heard said: you might get it.
She was, she knew, talking herself into something she would have rejected in horror a few days — or, heavens, was it weeks? — before. She had rejected wine, and what had that got her? A case of the runs that almost turned her inside out, and derision from everybody who heard about her drinking water.
“Well, maybe,” she heard herself say. “Maybe it’ll get the taste of that cursed clerk out of my mouth.” An excuse, an alibi — she knew as much. She also knew life was a bore, and an unpleasant bore at that.
Julia must have had a much more solid understanding of that than she did. The slave went over to the bar and filled two cups with wine, brought them back, and plunked one on the table in front of Nicole. Nicole stared at it. It was one of the cups she filled and washed and filled again all day long, brimful of the middle-grade wine. That was boldness on Julia’s part, mixed with prudence: not the cheap stuff if they were going to drink it neat, but not the expensive stuff either, since they were going to drink a lot.
Nicole reached out a hand that was gratifyingly steady and lifted the cup. With the same deep breath she’d have drawn just before she jumped into a lake of cold water, she touched it to her lips and sipped.
The wine wasn’t watered; they wanted it full strength, to get drunk the faster. It was almost as thick as syrup, and almost as sweet, too. But under that sweetness lay the half-medicinal, half-terrifying taste of alcohol.
Julia sighed and set down her own, emptied cup. “That’s so good,” she said. Her voice was low, throaty, sensuous. She might have been talking about something quite other than wine.
“Yes,” Nicole said, although she didn’t think it was particularly grand. Warmth filled her belly and spread slowly outward.
Julia tilted back her cup to catch the last of the wine, then rose to refill it. Politely, she picked up Nicole’s, too, only to set it down and give Nicole a look the dim lamplight only made more reproachful. “You haven’t finished yet, Mistress?” Beneath the words lay others: what are you waiting for?
What was Nicole waiting for? If she was going to do this, she wasn’t going to do it halfway. She gulped down the wine — dizzied, half staggered, nearly ready to gag on the fumes and the sweetness, but by damn she did it. She thrust the cup at Julia. Julia nodded approval, filled it up again, brought it back.
That one Nicole drained as fast as she could. “You haven’t finished yet, Julia?” she said, and laughed. It sounded too loud, as if she’d turned up the volume by mistake.
Julia laughed, too. Was she laughing because she thought it was funny, or because her owner had made a joke? Damn, Nicole thought. Her thoughts were turned up high, too. I don’t care. Tomorrow I’ll care. Not tonight. No. Not tonight.
A swallow or two later, or maybe it was three, Nicole touched the tip of her nose. It seemed to have gone numb. That was funny — not big-laugh funny, not giggle funny. Funny funny. I am getting drunk, she thought. It was wonderful. Marvelous. Fascinating.
And it was her turn to fill the cups. Getting up wasn’t bad, though the floor tilted underfoot. Walking straight was harder. Yes. Officer, she thought, I’m walking under the influence. She giggled.
So did Julia. If she found anything out of the ordinary in sitting down with her mistress and getting plastered, she didn’t let on. Nicole wondered how often she’d done it with Umma. As Nicole carried the wine back to the table, walking with great care so as not to spill it, she almost came right out and asked. She caught herself in the nick of time. Alcohol, she thought clearly and — all right, primly — makes you want to talk before you think. Such a clear thought, and so wise. She was proud of it.
If she hadn’t learned about talking jags from experience — if she hadn’t already had a good notion of them from memories of her father and from what she’d seen in the tavern — Julia would have taught her. The slave’s mouth ran and ran and ran.
Nicole had learned a long time ago that nodding every once in a while was enough to keep a drunk — in this case, Julia — going. Some of what the slave said was interesting in a lurid sort of way; Nicole found out more than she wanted to know about the intimate preferences of several of her regular customers. The one who liked his boys sweet and young, for example — the younger the better; and the one who’d buried or divorced three wives, not one of whom had ever given him an heir, because he couldn’t bring himself to enter them through the proper orifice; and…
And then Julia said, “Mistress, if Titus is even half as good as Gaius, you won’t find much finer anywhere you look. He’s probably better, too — I bet he wouldn’t be in such a hurry all the time. “ She sighed gustily. “And besides, Mistress, he’s crazy about you. And you’re angry at him. What did he do to get you in such an uproar? I never have been able to figure it out.”
Her calling the two Calidii Severi by their praenomens left Nicole confused for a moment, but not for any longer than that. One thing was interesting: If Julia wondered what Titus Calidius Severus was like in bed, he’d never put down a couple of sesterces and gone upstairs with her when Umma was out shopping and the kids had gone off to play somewhere. A point of sorts for the fuller and dyer. Though a point for what, in what game, Nicole wasn’t inclined to say.
Julia still waited expectantly for her answer. She chose her words with care. With all the wine she had in her, she, unlike Julia, couldn’t have spoken quickly if she’d wanted to. “It’s not any one thing,” she said. “It’s not any big thing, even. We just haven’t been getting along as well as we did before, that’s all.”
“It’s too bad,” Julia said. In the dim lamplight, Nicole was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “The children really like him, too.”
“Children or no children, if you think I’ll have anything to do with a man who smells like sour piss all the time, you can think again,” Nicole snapped — or rather, the wine did it, before she could stop herself.
That wasn’t the whole story. It wasn’t even most of the story. But the wine could have done much worse. It was a part of the story that would make sense to Julia, and apparently did. She nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve been fussy about things like that lately, haven’t you, Mistress? I’ve seen you throw out a couple of pieces of meat we could have served without having anybody complain, or not much, anyhow.”
“If it smells bad to me, it’ll smell bad to the cush — customers,” Nicole said. How wonderfuclass="underline" she’d got Julia to stop talking about Titus Calidius Severus. She laughed with the wonder of it.
When she looked at the lamp, she saw two side by side unless she screwed up her eyes and tilted her head just so. Getting up required a distinct effort of will. “I’m going to bed,” she announced with a grand flourish that nearly sent her over onto her backside — and did send her into a fit of the giggles. Two blurry Julias nodded vigorously and gulped down all the wine in their cups before they trotted along after her like obedient puppies.
Nicole had danced to the music of the wine — had she ever. And come morning, she paid the piper.
She’d felt worse her first night in Carnuntum, when her day of water-drinking caught up with her, but not by much. That had been concentrated misery, too: bowels in an uproar, but the rest of her not so bad. Now she hurt all over.