Watching him watch the pretty women, Nicole decided she didn’t mind the way he did it. She could hardly have asked him not to pay attention to them; that was what they were there for, and he was a healthy male with all his hormones in working order… as she had good reason to know. What mattered was that he didn’t give the impression that he would sooner have been with one of them than with his real companion, as so many men would have done. Frank had stared up at an awful lot of movie screens as if he’d forgotten she was there beside him, and not just toward the end, either. And what had he gone for when he was ready to dump Nicole? Ms. Blond Hollywood Bimbo, what else?
She surprised herself, not with the virulence of the thought, but with the coolness of it. Frank Perrin was centuries unborn and half the world away. The edge was off her bitterness. She was too busy surviving in this world to waste energy on a marriage that had been dead long before Frank walked out the door.
Calidius Severus for sure was better-looking than Frank, though Frank smelled a whole lot better. He was also just as attentive to the swordfights as to the women in their skimpy draperies. He leaned forward on the bench, muttering under his breath at this bobble or that wobble. “If I’d used a sword like that,” he told Nicole in a pause between acts, “I’d be twenty-five years dead. “
The swordplay was as obviously choreographed as a bar fight in a Western. Like a Western, it wasn’t meant to be realistic. But she could hardly explain that to Calidius Severus. She settled for the glaringly obvious instead. “It’s only make-believe,” she said.
He muttered and scowled and shifted on the bench, but little by little he subsided. He was almost too reasonable a man to be real. Nicole tried to imagine him in a Stetson and carrying a six-shooter, sauntering into a saloon in time-honored movie-cowboy fashion. It was amazingly easy, though his looks tended more toward the Mexican sidekick than the tall lanky cowhand.
Not very many movie Westerns were as extravagantly gory as this Roman equivalent. Still, despite the copious blood, the killings were obviously faked. She’d believed Calidius Severus when he said there wouldn’t be any excessive realism in the mime, but she couldn’t help the small sigh of relief that, after all, the actors would get up to strut the stage another day.
When Paris and Helen leaped gleefully between the sheets — in this case, a blanket as gaudy as their costumes — that looked choreographed, too. But, as enthusiastic as it was, Nicole wondered if, after all, it was faked. The audience didn’t seem to think it was, or else was delighted to buy into that particular illusion. Men and women both cheered on the performers. The imagination could do a lot with a pair of heads, a strategically arranged blanket, and a set of highly suggestive gyrations.
There was a collective groan when the gyrations ended, and with it the scene. In the next, with neither sex nor swordplay to engross them, the audience indulged in a spate of restlessness. Paris struggled nobly against it, crying overwritten defiance at the Greeks who threatened to come and take Helen back from Troy. But even his trained voice couldn’t overwhelm the shout from a few rows behind Nicole that pretty obviously wasn’t in the script: “Is there a physician in the amphitheater?”
Along with most of the other people right around her, she turned to stare. A man with a seriously worried expression held up a woman who seemed to have fainted. Her eyes were closed and her body limp; her head lolled on the man’s shoulder. Even if she’d been awake, she would have looked sick: her face was flushed, and a distinctive, spotty rash mottled one cheek. It looked to Nicole like measles. She was just old enough to have had them herself before her parents got around to getting her vaccinated — she still felt the sting of the unfairness, and the magnitude of her luck that she’d had no worse than a face and body covered with blotches, and a week in bed being fed whatever she asked for. She’d only learned later how many dangerous side effects measles could have.
She didn’t ever remember being so sick she passed out; mostly she’d been covered with spots and distressingly itchy. This woman had it a lot worse.
Someone was edging and sidling his way down from higher up. “Move aside, if you please. I’m a physician. Excuse me, sir. Madam. If you don’t mind.” She recognized the voice as much as the face and the walk, with its brisk politeness and its underlying air of impatience with the bulk of the human race. Dexter the physician had taken a day off; but, like doctors in every place and time, he wasn’t going to get that much of a break.
The man on the other side of the woman moved over to give Dexter room to sit beside her. It didn’t look like altruism. It looked like getting out of range of contagion.
Dexter ignored the man’s cowardice. He took the woman’s pulse, felt her forehead, and bent close to examine the rash. Nicole turned back to the show, which had indulged itself in another swordfight, but she kept being drawn to the sick woman and the physician. Each time she looked, Dexter looked unhappier.
He murmured something to the sick woman’s companion, too low for Nicole to hear. She didn’t have long to be frustrated. As soon as Dexter had bent over the woman again, the man cried, “The pestilence! What kind of quack are you, anyway? Can’t you even tell when someone’s had too much sun?”
Any doctor Nicole had known in Indiana or California would have blown sky-high if he’d been screamed at like that — either blown sky-high or called in a slander lawyer. Dexter only bowed his head in humility — which Nicole found incredible — or else in the kind of arrogance that didn’t care what the world thought. “May you be right,” he said. “May I be wrong. Take her home. Make her comfortable. Her fate now is in the hands of the gods.”
The woman’s companion glowered at the doctor, but didn’t fling any further abuse. He hefted her up with a grunt, staggering under the dead weight, and maneuvered between the benches to the aisle. People scrambled back out of the way. Nicole was just about to think of offering something, a hand, Calidius Severus’ hand, whatever could help, when a man a row or two down did it for her.
Maybe he was a relative. The woman’s companion seemed to know him, at least. Between them, they supported her in a kind of fireman’s carry and carried her down and apparently out of the amphitheater. She went like a gust of wind through dry California scrub, fanning a spark into wildfire. “Pestilence,” people whispered. Then louder: “Pestilence!”
The show ended not long after the woman’s departure. Applause was sparse, abstracted. The actors tried to drum it up, strutting and gesticulating on the stage. One, who’d played a comic villain, favored the amphitheater with an obscene gesture and a flash of his bony behind.
Nobody but Nicole seemed to take any notice. Some of the audience kept glancing toward the place where the woman had been sitting, uneasily, as if something dark might be lurking there still. Others craned their necks, peering at anyone who might be inclined to keel over.
Titus Calidius Severus’ sigh had a wintry sound to it, though it was still only August. “So,” he said. “It’s come here after all. I was hoping it wouldn’t. From everything I’ve heard, it’s been bad — very bad — in Italy and Greece.”
“It looked like the — “ Nicole broke off. The Latin she’d been gifted with when Liber and Libera sent her to Carnuntum had no word for measles. No word, she’d learned, meant no thing. But measles, even before there was a shot for it, had been a common childhood disease. You were sick, and maybe there were side effects, but you didn’t usually die of them. That had been true, her mother had said, for as long as anyone remembered. How could there be no word for the disease in Rome?
No. That was the wrong question. If the Romans didn’t have a word for it, what did that mean? That it wasn’t a common childhood disease here and now? If that was the case… For the first time, Nicole felt a stab of fear. Sometime not too long before she left TV behind for good, she’d watched a show — on the Discovery Channel? A E? PBS? — about the European expansion. It might have been much less easy for the sun never to set on the British Empire if the Native Americans and the Polynesians had had any resistance to smallpox or measles. The British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, brought their diseases as well as their trade goods and their guns. As often as not, the bacteria and viruses did the conquering, and the Europeans took over what was left. Native populations had, the documentary said, died like flies.