She stopped cold. Oh. God. Her father had done the same thing — the exact same thing — on his mornings after. She looked at her hand, appalled. “I’m sorry,” she started to say. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”
She never said it, because even while the words took shape on her tongue, she noticed something. It was quiet in the tavern. The kids had slunk off to do something usefuclass="underline" Lucius chopping nuts, Aurelia helping Julia grind flour for the next batch of bread. They weren’t sniveling or acting abused. They were simply… quiet. And they stayed quiet for a good while. Not forever, but long enough.
Nicole never did voice her apology. She didn’t like herself much for it, either.
Were peace and quiet worth an occasional whack? The people of Carnuntum certainly thought so. Nicole never had. She’d sworn when she was a little girl, after her father had left another set of bruises on her mother’s face — and her mother told people she’d walked into a door — that she’d never raise her hand in anger to anyone, adult or child. And here she’d broken that vow.
When in Rome…
She was breaking down, belief by belief, conviction by conviction. If the parents of Carnuntum had been transported as suddenly to Los Angeles as Nicole had to Carnuntum, every last one of them would have faced losing custody of their children. Most would have done jail time for child abuse. But here no one looked twice, even when a father was caught beating his son till the boy screamed for mercy.
From everything she’d read, that should have made the adults of Carnuntum — the grown-up survivors of abuse — a hateful pack of social misfits. And yet they weren’t. They were just people. Maybe they were cruder than people in Los Angeles, but there was no denying the resemblance. Human nature, whatever that was, hadn’t changed. People fell in and out of love, they quarreled and made up, they did business, they gossiped, they got drunk — as Nicole’s aching head too well knew — all as they might have done eighteen hundred years later on the other side of the Atlantic.
So what did that say about all the books she’d read and the television talk shows she’d watched, and all the theory she’d taken as gospel? The Romans had a theory that it was perfectly acceptable for one human being to buy and sell another. That theory, as far as she was concerned, was dead wrong, no matter how elaborately they justified it.
The next thought, the corollary, was amazingly hard to face. What if her own theories — her own assumptions — weren’t exactly right, either? What if they were all skewed somehow? So where did right end and wrong begin? Who could know, and how?
She clutched her head in her hands. It was pounding worse than ever, but not with the hangover, not any longer. Tough questions of law and ethics had done that to her, too, when she was in law school. She’d been glad to get out of those courses with a passing grade.
There wasn’t anybody standing over her now, demanding that she think about things that she plain didn’t want to think about. It didn’t make any difference. The thoughts were there. She could make them go away, but they kept coming back, mutating and changing, till they changed her, and made her into something different from what she’d been. Something, maybe, she didn’t want to be.
“Hurry up with my order there,” a customer said. He hadn’t given it much more than a minute or two before. Julia was scrambling as fast as she could to fill it.
And Nicole had had it up to here. If she wasn’t going to take any guff from Lucius and Aurelia, she sure as hell wasn’t about to let an obstreperous customer push her around, either. “Keep your drawers on,” she snapped. “You’ll get it when it’s ready.”
She held her breath. If he got up and stomped off the way Ofanius Valens had when she wouldn’t let him play doctor with Julia, then let him.
Instead, and to her amazement, he wilted. “I’m sorry, Umma,” he mumbled into his greasy beard. “As soon as you can, please.”
“That’s better,” Nicole said briskly. She couldn’t help a last stab of guilt. Without the hangover, she probably wouldn’t have barked so loud. But, she told herself, let’s face it: in Carnuntum as in Los Angeles, a healthy dose of assertiveness was not at all a bad thing.
Rain pattered down on the roof of the tavern. Every so often, raindrops slipped in through the smokeholes in the roof and hissed angrily as they dove into the cookfires. Some of them missed the fires and hit the floor. That would have been a raving nuisance on carpet or linoleum. On rammed earth, it was a little too interesting for words. Rammed earth was fine when it was dry. When it was wet, it was mud.
Nicole had never understood mud before, not really. She picked her way past the muddy spots and the damp and odorous customers to peer outside. It had been raining for three or four days now, a mild, steady summer rain of a sort Indianapolis knew well. She’d lost the habit of it in Los Angeles, had forgotten the look and smell and feel of it, the long gray damp days, the dripping nights, the mildew that grew everywhere. In Los Angeles, there were only two kinds of rain: not enough and too much.
As far as Nicole was concerned, a mild, steady summer rain was too much in Carnuntum. Raindrops plashed down on puddles in the street. Or so they had done that first lovely wet day. By now, day three or four — God, she’d lost count — the whole street was a vast, muddy puddle. Something that had been alive once upon a time, but not too recently, bobbed in the water. She had no desire to find out what it was.
An oxcart came trundling along, a little quieter than the usual run of them: the axle, though bare of oil, had plenty of water for lubricant. The cart wasn’t going very fast. Every time the weary-looking ox lifted a foot, it lifted a clinging ball of mud. A mucky wake trailed the cart’s thick wooden wheels. Mud clung to them as to the ox’s hooves, clogging them till they seemed likely to stick solid.
Mud, in fact, clung to everything. Keeping it out of the tavern was shoveling against the tide. Whenever a customer walked in and set a dripping cloak on the edge of a table, a muddy puddle formed beneath it. Julia pulled dry rushes from a sack behind the bar to sop up a little bit of the worst puddles.
Concrete house pads weren’t likely to happen for another eighteen hundred years, but carpets might have been of at least some help. It seemed the Romans had never thought of them. They were easy enough to describe, and easy enough to make, too.
Maybe Nicole should invent them — or would discover be the right word? Though not right away. For the time being, she was only thinking about it. Rammed earth was not the ideal surface on which to lay carpets. She might have to invent the hardwood floor first, or do something with tiles. Saltillo wasn’t all that different from Roman brick, come to think of it.
As Nicole stood in her doorway with the rain misting on her cheeks, Fabia Ursa’s husband, Sextus Longinius lulus, poked his head out next door, evidently to get a look at the rain, too. The tinker was a cheerful little man, as garrulous as his wife, but where she was thin and frail and delicately built, he had the quick-moving round body, full cheeks, and buck teeth of a chipmunk. He smiled at her. She reflexively smiled back. It was hard not to. Chip or Dale? she caught herself wondering.
His voice, at least, was a normal voice, not the high gabble of an animated chipmunk. “Lovely day,” he said, “if you’re a goose.”
“I’m sick of rain,” she said. Heavens, she sounded like a Californian — and after all these years of being hopelessly Midwestern, too.
He shook his head, but his smile didn’t fade. She was glad. She didn’t want him to think she was annoyed at him. He was a good-natured sort, and, from everything she’d seen and heard, was devoted to his wife. “We do need the rain,” he said, “but it could go away now and even the farmers wouldn’t complain.”