Back in California, Nicole had had an earthquake emergency kit, with blankets and food that would keep, and bottled water and a frying pan and matches and charcoal for the barbecue and a first-aid kit all stored in a plastic trash can and waiting for a disaster she hoped would never come. She wondered if she ought to start a war emergency kit here. And if she did, what would she put in it? So many things she’d taken for granted in California didn’t exist here. She could get together wine and salt fish and olive oil. That would be better than nothing – and if the war held off, she could always sell what was in the kit.
She shook her head. She was as twitchy as a cat on a freeway. The Germans and the legionaries had set everyone’s nerves on edge. Still – there were soldiers in the city where there hadn’t been any before. Someone else, someone who might have reason to know, was twitchy too. Maybe she’d get together that emergency kit after all.
The Marcomanni and the Quadi broke into Carnuntum on a misty spring morning. They used the mist to their advantage, for it kept anyone on the southern bank of the Danube from spying their boats till they were almost ashore.
Nicole was just putting the first loaves of the morning into the oven when the sound of horns throughout the city brought her bolt upright. The fierce brass bray put her in mind of the civil-defense sirens that had wailed on the last Friday of each month when she was a girl in Indiana. If this was a drill, it was awfully realistic. A commotion outside brought her running to the door. People were running up and down the street, shouting and screaming. She picked words out of the tumult: “Marcomanni! Quadi! Germans!” Then even those were lost in the general roar of alarm and dismay and fear.
A squad of legionaries streamed past, running east toward the nearest wall. The iron scales of their armor clattered against one another. They would have sounded much the same if they’d been wearing suits made of tin cans. Nicole wondered if any of them was carrying one of Brigomarus’ shields.
Julia tugged at Nicole’s tunic, urgent as a frightened child. “What can we do, Mistress? Where shall we go? How can we hide?”
Nicole took a deep breath. She’d have loved to cling to someone bigger and stronger, too, but there wasn’t anybody here to take on the job. “I can’t think of a thing to do that we aren’t doing already,” she said. “Let’s just sit tight.”
Julia was white around the edges, and her eyes were wild. She was coping better, at that, than anyone outside.
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, ran a fragment of what couldn’t have been a real poem, odds are you don’t understand the situation.
Julia, unfortunately, understood all too well. “If they get into the city, Mistress -“
She didn’t go on. Nor did she have to. Nicole had seen enough televised horror to have some idea of what could happen. She’d never in her wildest nightmares imagined that it might happen to her.
Suddenly, she began to laugh. Julia’s eyes opened even wider. Nicole took the freedwoman by the arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go across the street.” Julia plainly thought she was crazy, but equally plainly was not going to let Nicole out of her sight.
Gaius Calidius Severus was stropping a sword that must have belonged to his father. The edge had already taken on a sheen, striking against the dull gray-black of the blade. He looked up from his work in surprise. “Mistress Umma! Julia! What are you doing here?”
Julia didn’t have any answer for that. Nicole took a deep breath. As always, the fuller and dyer’s shop stank. This once, the ammoniacal reek was not only welcome, it was a blessed inspiration. “If the Germans get into Carnuntum, who knows what they’ll do?” she said. “Whatever it is, I don’t want them doing it to Julia and me.” She beckoned briskly. “Come here, Julia.”
Obedient as if she were still a slave, Julia followed Nicole to a wooden tub in which wool was soaking in stale piss. “Here, dip your arms in it up to the elbow. Splash yourself with it, too,” she said, matching action to words. “If any German wants something from us that we don’t feel like giving, he’ll need a strong stomach.”
Julia gaped. The laughter that burst out of her was half hysterical, but it was laughter. She kissed Nicole on the cheek; the corner of her mouth barely brushed the corner of Nicole’s. “Mistress, how did you ever think of anything so clever?” She plunged her arms into the vat with a good will, and with much less revulsion than Nicole had felt.
“That is clever,” Gaius Calidius Severus said, running a fingertip down the edge of the blade. He frowned, and went back to his stropping.
“Do you know what to do with that thing?” Nicole asked him.
“As much as my father and his friends taught me,” he replied calmly. “Better to use it on the Quadi and Marcomanni than to sit around here till they use their swords on me, don’t you think?” He left off stropping, tested it this time on his arm. It shaved a neat patch of soft black hair. He nodded, satisfied. Before Nicole realized what he was up to, he sprang to his feet and loped out of the shop. “Shut the door behind you when you leave, will you?” he called back over his shoulder.
By the time Nicole pulled the door closed, Gaius Calidius Severus was around the corner and out of sight. “How much chance do you think he has?” she asked Julia.
It wasn’t quite a rhetorical question, and Julia didn’t treat it as such. She shrugged. “Who knows? It’s in the gods’ hands.” Nicole looked down at her own hands, which still stank of sour piss. Julia went on, “If we can keep the barbarians outside the wall, we’ll be all right. If we can’t -“ She shrugged again.
That about summed it up, Nicole thought. She led Julia back across the street.
Lucius was sitting on the stoop, playing with the dice from his Saturnalia gift. As they came within smelling distance, he wrinkled his nose and made as if to push them back into the street. “What have you been doing, swimming in Gaius’ amphorae? You stink!”
“That’s the idea,” Julia said.
“You bet it is,” Nicole agreed. “Nobody messes with a -“ She wanted to say skunk, but Latin lacked the requisite word. She did the best she could:“ – with a polecat.”
“You smell worse than a polecat,” Lucius declared. He got up and ran off – fortunately inside and up the stairs, not out in the panicky streets. Nicole shrugged, sighed, and almost gagged. God, she smelled bad. “We’d better wash our hands,” she said to Julia, “or we’ll make our customers sick.”
“Sick of the way our food tastes, that’s for sure,” Julia said. That wasn’t quite what Nicole had meant, but it wasn’t wrong, either.
As it happened, they had only a handful of customers. The people who weren’t trying to hold the Marcomanni and the Quadi out of Carnuntum were staying close to home.
Nicole couldn’t blame them. She was doing the same thing, and trying to figure out how long the supplies in the tavern would last for her and Lucius and Julia if they couldn’t get any more. She hadn’t stored away the emergency kit – she’d kept putting it off. She swore at herself for not doing it as soon as she thought of it.
It was a tense, watchful day, punctuated by shouts and screams from the direction of the wall, which was only a couple of hundred yards away. Every so often, she or Julia or Lucius or sometimes all of them together would go out into the street and listen to the fighting.
Sometimes a cry would ring clearly through the general din: “Ladders!” or “Look out!” or “There they are!”
Once, a rattling crash startled Nicole half out of her skin. “What in the gods’ name was that?”
“Ladder full of Germans in armor going over, I hope,” Lucius answered.
Nicole hoped so, too. She was astonished to discover how much. She’d been a politically correct, enlightened woman, with a properly modern attitude toward war: A plague on both their houses. But now she was inside one of the houses. Amazing, how much difference that made.