“What if I do?” Nicole repeated. The young man wasn’t saying anything she hadn’t heard in church and in Sunday school. And yet, there, the world to come had been mentioned, but it hadn’t been at the heart of all her lessons. This world, and living one’s life in clean and godly fashion, had counted for more.
Living in the material world had been easy in the United States. Nicole hadn’t thought so at the time, but now she had a basis of comparison. Titus Calidius Severus had had a point, after all. When times were good, this world was easier to live in, and the next seemed distant, irrelevant.
Times weren’t good now, and they were getting worse. And if the young Christian eating bread and drinking wine in her tavern wasn’t a wild-eyed fanatic, Nicole didn’t know what he could possibly be. “Do not cleave to those who believe not, Umma, even if they be of your own flesh and blood, “ he said with quivering urgency. “Do not, I beg you in the name of the risen God. They go to torment eternal. This pestilence is the sword of God. When you are close to the sword, you are close to God. When you are surrounded by lions, you are close to God. Soon you will meet him face to face.”
“How about when you’re writing things on the wall?” Nicole inquired acidly. “Did you want to be surrounded by lions then? You should have stayed and let someone catch you.”
His head drooped. When it came up again, to her astonishment there were tears on his cheeks. “My body was weak,” he whispered. “My spirit was weak. Here and now, as I speak in life, I should yearn for death with a lover’s passion. I want to eat the bread of God, the flesh of Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, which is love undying. I pray to be found worthy of martyrdom. And so,” he said, leaning toward her, trembling again with the zeal of the proselyte, “should you.”
His voice, his manner, were compelling. He believed with his whole heart and soul that every word was the absolute truth. Gospel truth, she thought in a kind of dim alarm. And he was determined that Nicole should believe as he did, should take as little notice of this life as she could, the sooner and the better to get on with the next one.
He scared the hell out of her. If somebody gave him the keys to a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil, maybe he wouldn’t push the button when the time came – he had, after all, run from her. But maybe he would, too, if he nerved himself first. Even the possibility was terrifying.
Carefully, she said, “You owe me three asses.”
He looked so astonished, she almost laughed in his face. It took him several tries, and a fair bit of spluttering, before he could say, “You would put the coin of Caesar ahead of the salvation of your soul?”
“Don’t you fret about my soul,” she said. “That’s no one’s business but my own.”
The Christian’s astonishment changed in tone and intensity. Twentieth-century individualism hit people here hard… the way wine hits people who aren’t used to drinking, Nicole thought with experience she hadn’t had, or wanted, before she came to Carnuntum. She took a deep breath and drove the point home. “And, since my soul is still in my body, I need those three asses.”
Maybe the look in his eyes was pity and love. It seemed a lot more like outrage. He got up, dug in the leather pouch he wore on his belt, found three copper coins, and slammed them down on the tabletop. The tavern’s earthen floor didn’t help him much when it came to stamping noisily out, but he gave it his best shot. His back was as straight – and as stiff – as a redwood.
Julia came in from the market just after he’d flung himself out the door, carrying a jarful of raisins and a bunch of green onions. “What was bothering him?” she wanted to know.
Nicole shrugged as casually as she could manage. “Oh,” she said, “just another dissatisfied customer.”
Julia raised an eyebrow, but mercifully didn’t ask questions. Sometimes, Nicole reflected with a twinge of residual guilt, it wasn’t too inconvenient that Julia had been a slave. Slaves learned, better and faster than most, when it didn’t pay to be curious.
Lazy in the afterglow, Nicole sprawled next to and on Titus Calidius Severus. Her head lay on his chest, one arm stretched across his belly, one thigh draped over him so the rest of her leg lay between his. She was, emphatically, a satisfied customer.
“It’s good with you,” she said, and raised her hand to stroke his cheek. In the light of the one lamp on the chest of drawers, the arm’s shadow leaped and swooped.
His own free arm slid slowly along her flank, tracing the smooth, economical curves of Umma’s body. One corner of Nicole’s mouth twisted. In Los Angeles, this body would have been sleek. Here, it was skinny. Just one more example of you can’t win no matter how hard you try syndrome.
“You make me a happy man,” he said, and, as if to prove it, tilted her face up and kissed her. He wasn’t after a second round. He was just… enjoying himself. So, for that matter, was she. He was good in bed, and she didn’t think she was too bad there either; but more than that, they liked one another. They took pleasure in each other’s company.
Idly, she wondered why she’d been lucky enough to find a good lover when so little in the rest of Carnuntum had turned out to be any good at all. Polluted water, lead everywhere, slavery, brutality, sexism, appalling notions of medicine – and, in the middle of all that, as good a lover as any she’d ever known in the United States. She pondered Calidius’ shadowed face the way a D.A. pondered a piece of evidence that didn’t fit a pattern.
And then, after a moment, it did, or she thought it did. In their waterworks, in their pottery glazes, in their political and legal institutions, in what their doctors knew – in all those things and more, the Romans lacked eighteen hundred years of collective experience she’d taken for granted. She’d had no idea how much she’d taken it for granted, either, till she’d had her face rubbed in it.
But sex wasn’t something that tended to improve through collective experience. It was something everybody learned for herself or himself over the course of a lifetime. It might get more athletic, it might get more esoteric – she remembered some rather interesting nights when she was in law school, when she and a certain young man had worked their way through the greatest hits of the Kama Sutra – but when it came down to it, it could be just as good in plain vanilla as in the fanciest flavor you could imagine. Maybe that meant Alley Oop the caveman had been able to keep Mrs. Oop happy, too. For Mrs. Oop’s sake, Nicole hoped so.
She laughed a little. The exhalation stirred the hair on Calidius Severus’ chest. He raised an eyebrow. “What’s funny?”
“I think I’ve figured out why you’re so good,” she answered.
“And that’s funny?” He snorted. “You didn’t need to go and do any figuring for that. I could have told you: it’s the company I keep.”
Nobody had ever said anything remotely like that to her. Frank certainly hadn’t. Most of the men she’d dated since Frank had been too busy thinking about either themselves or their chances of getting laid to imagine saying such a thing. For a stretching instant, she wanted to cry. Then she wanted something else. She was amazed to discover how much she wanted it. Well, she thought, aphrodisiacs are where you find them.
Getting what else she wanted took considerable effort, but, in the end, it turned out to be effort well spent. She was, she thought, pretty well spent herself. So was Titus Calidius Severus. He peered up at her while she still sat astride him. “You can be my jockey any day,” he said.
She reached down to stroke his cheek again. Her hand lingered, savoring the crispness of his beard and the smoothness of the cheek above it, then paused. Almost of itself, it went to his forehead. “You’re warm,” she said in sudden sharp suspicion. No afterglow this time; alarm killed it even though he still nestled, shrinking, inside her.