Julia looked up from the quern. “The Marcomanni and Quadi drink beer because they don’t know any better,” she said flatly. “When they get smart, they buy wine from us Romans.”
Julius Rufus showed teeth as irregular as Calidius Severus’ in an insouciant grin. “Beer has been good enough for the Egyptians since time out of mind, and my beer has been good enough for a nice lot of people in Carnuntum for a good ten years now. There’s some very fine taverns go through a whole barrel of it before they’ve emptied their amphorae of wine.”
“Barrels,” Nicole murmured. Beer had alcohol in it, of course. But, if it came in barrels, it wouldn’t be full of lead. She fetched a clean cup and a dipper, and bore down on Julius Rufus and his sample cask. “Let me try some.”
Julia looked astonished. Julius Rufus looked delighted. He lifted the lid of his keg with a flourish. “Help yourself, Mistress Umma — and see for yourself that you’ll have no reason whatsoever to look down your nose at this fine product.”
When Nicole and Frank toured Austria on their honeymoon, Frank had drunk Austrian beer with conspicuous pleasure. Nicole, despite his urging, had stuck to mineral water. What she wouldn’t give to do that now…
She shook herself and focused on the task at hand. No help for it, and no escape, either. She dipped up a cupful, raised the cup to her lips, and sipped.
She had to work hard to hold her face straight. Wine, at least, was sweet. Frank had always said beer was an acquired taste. Nicole wondered why on earth anyone would want to acquire it. The stuff was bitter. It was sour. She could taste the alcohol in it. The only thing she could say for it was that it might make drunkenness more trouble than it was worth. If everyone reacted to beer the way she did, she might actually make some inroads against alcoholism in Carnuntum.
She made herself take another sip. It tasted no better than the first. “It’ll never take the place of wine,” she said.
“Told you so,” Julia said from behind the counter.
But Julius Rufus was undeterred. “I don’t intend it to take the place of wine,” he said. “I drink wine myself — in fact, if you’ll serve me a cup of your two-as there, I’ll be grateful.” He set a dupondius on the table by the keg. Nicole nodded to Julia, who poured out the wine for him.
He tossed it down, smacked his lips with stagey relish, and said, “Sure, wine’s good, and plenty of it. But the more choices you give your customers, the more customers you’re likely to get. Don’t you think so, Mistress Umma?”
He was good. If he’d lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, he would have sold a hell of a lot of encyclopedias or aluminum siding or whatever he was peddling, because sure as hell he would have been peddling something.
Even so, if Nicole had intended to say no, he would have been out the door before he got well warmed up to his pitch. Her mother had been death on door-to-door salesmen, and Nicole had continued the family tradition with telemarketers.
But she wasn’t going to turn this salesman down. If she could get in more choices that didn’t involve ingesting lead in toxic quantities — not to mention a choice that might not involve ingesting quite so much alcohol — then she might not be totally happy, but she’d be happier than she was now. She looked him in the eye and said, “How much do you want for each barrel, and how many cups can I get per barrel?”
Julius Rufus beamed at her. “You think of your profit margin, I see. Good for you! If your arithmetic is weak, I’ll be happy to help you with your figuring, so that you — “
“My arithmetic is fine, thank you,” Nicole snapped. Her arithmetic, from what she’d seen, was a damn sight better than that of any local without a counting board in front of him. The Romans, naturally enough, used and thought in terms of Roman numerals, and Roman numerals were to arithmetic what cruel and unusual punishment was to jurisprudence.
The dicker that followed left Julius Rufus sweating. “Mistress Umma, do you want my children to starve?” he wailed at the midpoint.
“They won’t starve,“ she retorted. “They can drink the beer you don’t sell me. This isn’t something I have to have. It’s something I might want to have — if the price is right. This tavern’s done fine without beer for a long time. We can go right on doing fine without it, as long as it’s going to cost six times as much as it’s worth.”
“What a terrifying woman you are,“ Julius Rufus muttered.
Nicole smiled a smile that Frank had likened to a shark’s. “You say the sweetest things,” she said. He flinched as if she’d slapped him.
She ended up buying the beer at something less than half the price he’d quoted. She still had a scrap left of the papyrus on which she’d written out Julia’s letters of manumission; she got out the pen and ink and set down on the scrap the terms to which she and Julius Rufus had agreed. When it was written up as it should be, she shoved the papyrus across the bar at him. “Just sign this, if you would.”
“Sweet Isis the merciful!” he cried. He mumbled his slow way through the three-line contract, then scrawled something that might have said Julius Rufus below it. “There! Are you happy now?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Nicole said, and seized the papyrus and stowed it away in the box before he could think of grabbing it for himself. She turned to Julia. “Pour this nice man a cup of Falernian, if you please.” She was the soul of politeness now, even if she’d been a barracuda only moments before. Why not? Nothing wrong with being friendly after she’d got her way.
10
Well have good weather for the beast show,” Titus Calidius Severus said, as smug as if he’d ordered it especially for the occasion. “This sort of thing is a lot less fun in the rain and mud.”
“Yes,” Nicole said, barely remembering to answer him at all. She was excited out of all proportion to the occasion, almost quivering with eagerness at the chance to do something out of the ordinary. She’d even fixed herself up with a sitter: she’d promised Julia a couple of extra sesterces above her usual wages, to ride herd on things. Julia had agreed so readily, Nicole suspected she was plotting to earn a few more sesterces on the side — or on her back.
Nicole almost didn’t care. Or, no: she cared. But there wasn’t anything she could do about Julia once Julia was out of her sight. And she wanted — God, how she wanted — to get away for the day.
“This will be — “ she began, but stopped abruptly, before she said something she might regret.
Titus Calidius Severus wasn’t about to let her off that particular hook. “Be what?” he asked in all apparent innocence.
“Fun,” Nicole said after a pause. It wasn’t what she’d intended to say. But, while this would be the first time she’d gone outside the walls of Carnuntum, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Umma had done so. Nicole wasn’t about to blow her cover now. Not after all this time.
A clamoring throng of people streamed toward the southwestern gate of the city, all heading, as she was, for the amphitheater. They chattered as they went, sounding at least as excited as she felt. “Lions, I heard,” one said. “I heard tigers,” somebody else declared. People scoffed at that, to his evident disgust: he folded his arms and set his jaw and retreated into injured silence. “Bears,” a woman said behind him. “There are always bears.”