Even if it didn’t have lead – she hoped it didn’t have lead – it still had alcohol in it. The odor rising from the (unglazed, thank God) cup made her shiver. She could all but hear her father downstairs yelling at her mother, while she lay in bed with the covers pulled up over her head and tried not to listen. She had to will herself to sip.
Diluted, the wine tasted like watery, half-spoiled grape juice. It had a tang to it, a sharpness and a kind of dizziness in back of it, that had to be the alcohol. She’d never tried any before, to know. She’d refused.
Her heart was thumping again, as it had when she discovered her face was armored in lead. She’d thought, somehow, that the first taste would do it: would hit her hard enough to make her stagger. Apparently, that wasn’t how it worked. She sipped again, deeper, and again, till the cup was empty.
Did she feel anything? Was there anything to feel? Maybe she was a tiny bit more detached from the world than she had been before. Maybe she wasn’t. She’d been in varying degrees of fog since she woke up in Carnuntum – and for certain sure she was detached; she was a complete stranger to this whole world and time.
Julia was watching her, nodding sagely, as if she could see an effect Nicole couldn’t feel. “That will do you good, Mistress,” she said.
“I doubt it,” Nicole said. Her belly was rumbling again, knots and snarls that were more nerves than sickness. The wine hadn’t made it worse, at least. She was grateful for that.
Medicine. She could think of it as medicine. Even her mother had had a stash of medicinal brandy, that her father had never managed to find.
Julia’s voice broke in on her thoughts, as so often before: as if it were a kind of lifeline, an anchor to this world. “Are you feeling well enough to go out and buy things today, Mistress, or will you send me? “
Nicole focused abruptly and too sharply, though the edges of things still wavered just a little. Julia was watching her alertly, with a look she’d seen on a dog hoping for a portion of the humans’ dinner. So was this a new game, then? A gambit to get hold of some money, to do God knew what with it?
Nonsense, Nicole thought. Julia could get at the till either way, whether she stayed to mind the tavern or went out shopping. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the house.
If that was it, too bad. Nicole hadn’t gone out since she got here, either. Her insides still felt very uncertain; and even though Imodium looked like a Latin word, it surely wasn’t, or she’d have found a bottle of it by now. Maybe if she could get out, breathe relatively fresh air, see more of Carnuntum than she could from window or doorway, she’d forget her indisposition for long enough to make it go away.
“I’ll go,” she said. Julia’s face fell, but she didn’t argue. After all, her expression said, she wasn’t the boss. Nicole did her best to sound brisk. “Let’s see – what do we need?”
Julia visibly swallowed her disappointment to focus on the duties at hand. “That amphora of Falernian in there” – she pointed to the bar – “will last the day out, I think, but not tomorrow. And we’re out of scallions and raisins, and we could use some more mutton.”
“I’ll get some fish, too, if I see any worth buying,” Nicole said. She had to say something, if she expected people to think she was staying on top of things.
“All right, Mistress.” Julia sounded vaguely dubious, but then she nodded. She’d dropped her facade of submission again, Nicole noticed. It seemed to go up when Nicole was giving orders, but to go down when they were working together – as if a slave could think for herself, sometimes, if her mistress gave the signal. Had Nicole been giving the right signals after all?
Maybe it was all those years of dealing with secretaries – pardon, administrative assistants – and paralegals. They hadn’t been much more than slave labor either, not at the pay they got and with the workload they carried.
Julia had gone right on talking, in a tone that reminded Nicole almost poignantly of a paralegal invited to voice an opinion on a case: “Fish spoils fast, so there’s always that risk, but we can eat it ourselves tonight if no one else does. And people will probably order it. You were doing some interesting things with it yesterday when they brought it in for you to cook. Word will get around.”
“I suppose so,” Nicole said, though she wondered how. No TV, no radio, no telephones, no e-mail. How did people find out what was going on in the world, or even in Carnuntum?
She wasn’t going to find out by staying cooped up here. Under Julia’s eye, she unlocked the cash box and chose a selection of coins, picking them out with care, as if she knew to the as how much she was leaving behind. Julia’s glance didn’t flicker; her brow didn’t wrinkle. Nicole drew in a breath of relief, and escaped out the door.
She turned left more or less at random. She’d gone several steps before she realized: she didn’t know where to buy any of the things on her mental list. Nothing in sight looked like a supermarket, or even like the corner grocery stores the supermarkets had forced out of business. A vague memory of her honeymoon brought to mind tiny shops, boucheries and boulangeries and something with a horse’s head out front that she’d found very pretty till she learned it was a horsemeat butcher. She didn’t see anything like that, either.
A voice called out behind her. She stopped and turned, expecting it to be Julia, calling out that she’d gone the wrong way. But it was someone from the next house down, a little bony bird of a woman with an extraordinary crown of curled and frizzed hair, waving and calling, “Umma! Oh, Umma! Good morning!”
Nicole almost didn’t respond. But the woman was looking straight at her, looking so delighted that Nicole wondered if Umma and she were long-lost sisters. She raised her hand and waved back, trying to put a little enthusiasm in it, so as not to seem suspicious.
“Off to market then?” the woman asked. “And isn’t it a lovely morning? Do come over later, will you please, dear? It’s been ages since we had a good gossip!”
Nicole hoped her expression didn’t betray what she felt, which was a kind of horror. Neighbors in West Hills didn’t lean out of upstairs windows – if they had any – and yodel at passersby. This neighbor obviously thought she was a friend, too. Or else she really was a relative.
“Later,” Nicole managed to say. “Yes, I’ll come over later.” In about ten years. She put on a bright company smile, and wished she had a watch to glance at significantly. “Well. I’m off, then. Good morning.”
“Good morning!” the stranger caroled, and mercifully ducked back inside.
She hadn’t said Nicole was going in the wrong direction, either. Nicole decided to take that as an omen. She strode on out, feeling better already, though she had to be careful where she stepped; and she kept a wary eye on the windows above. Some of her original sense of adventure was coming back. She felt like a brave explorer – Montezuma’s Revenge and all.
Pigeons strutted in the streets of Carnuntum, arrogant and brainless and half tame, just as they did in Los Angeles. Life here was riskier for them, however. A fellow tossed a fine-meshed net over a couple, scooped them up before they could let out more than one startled coo, and ran back inside his house, shouting, “I’ve got supper for today, Claudia!”
Nicole wouldn’t have wanted to eat them. Living in Los Angeles, she’d come to despise the automobile for the pollution it caused, even while she worshipped at its shrine. No cars in Carnuntum. But that didn’t mean no pollution, as she’d thought it would. The streets were packed deep with ox droppings, horse droppings, donkey droppings. The pigeons mined them for any number of treasures: seeds, insects, the unmistakable and nauseating pale wriggle of a worm.
One good look at what they were pulling out of the heaps of ordure, and Nicole knew she wouldn’t touch one of those birds if a waiter from Le Bistro brought it.