Everything was suddenly horrifying. Even the bit of gossip she heard, one woman to another, cool and matter-of-fact as if it were nothing out of the ordinary: “Just got news my husband’s brother died down in Aquileia.”
“Ahh,” her friend said, sounding just as calm about it. “That’s too bad. What was he doing down in Italy, anyway?”
“Didn’t you know Junius? I thought you did. He was a muleteer.”
“I never met him, though you’ve told me about him before. What happened to him? Did the Marcomanni get him?”
“No, he didn’t have any trouble with the barbarians. Anyhow, they got driven out of Aquileia – was it year before last? I forget. No, it was this pestilence that’s going through Italy. It’s very bad, they say. The gods grant it doesn’t come here.” At that, for the first time, the woman sounded less than nonchalant. This wasn’t gossip. This was honest fear.
Wonderful, Nicole thought. An epidemic. Of what, flu? She remembered only too vividly the sound of Kimberley losing her corn dog in the backseat of the Honda.
She also, after a moment and with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air, remembered another kind of epidemic, one much deadlier, that people might speak of with the same fear she heard in the women’s voices. She’d known three people who’d died of AIDS. Two gay men, and a woman friend from law school, who hadn’t known till too late that the man she’d had a brief affair with was bisexual.
Resolutely, she shut that out of her mind. It would happen on the other side of the world, eighteen hundred years or so from now. There was nothing she could do about it. Nor, frankly, could she do anything about this “pestilence” that had taken a life hundreds of miles from here. This wasn’t the twentieth century. People couldn’t travel that far that fast. What had they said about the Ebola virus? If it hadn’t been for air travel, it might never have left Africa.
No air travel here. Of that she was absolutely sure.
What she could do now, and what she was going to do, was buy fish. She bought some trout that didn’t look too flyblown: she’d already seen they were popular in Carnuntum. She bought some bream, too, partly in the spirit of experiment, partly because a couple of them were so fresh they still quivered a little. The fish were cheaper than the meat. In Los Angeles, it would have been the other way round.
The fishmongers strung their catch on the leather thong that the butcher had given her to help carry the leg of mutton. Nicole felt like a comic-page fisherman who’d hooked a sheep along with the rest of his catch. She was glad by then of the wool that still wrapped the mutton: it let her sling the thing over her shoulder with the fish dangling, and carry it a little less awkwardly than if she let the whole lot hang. With the meat and fish balanced on her shoulder and the bundle of raisins and onions under her arm, she paused to run through her mental shopping list.
A stall nearby reminded her of one item that she couldn’t get out of. “Wine,” she said reluctantly to herself. The dealer in the stall she’d seen first wasn’t the only one with wine to sell. They were all ready, no, eager, to sell it to her. Every one of them wanted her to taste his particular brand, too, “To be sure it’s the genuine article,” one said in a voice as fruity as his wine. She couldn’t get out of it, but neither could she tell one wine from the next, except that they were all darker and sweeter than the cheap stuff she’d drunk with breakfast.
Of course she wasn’t about to admit that. She remembered how she’d seen people in restaurants and on TV, sniffing and making portentous faces and tasting tiny bits from crystal goblets. Here she was given a whacking big ladle – God knew where that had been or how many people had put lips to it before her – and invited to taste, taste!
She tasted, for what that was worth, and settled to the inevitable haggle. Meat and fish might be cheap here compared to L.A., but wine cost the living earth.
She didn’t have nearly the luck beating them down that she’d had with the scallion-sellers. “Mistress Umma, it’s real Falernian,” said one who recognized the body she was wearing. “That means it has to come all the way from the middle of Italy on muleback, so you can’t wonder that it’s not cheap. I can’t go any lower, or I lose money.” Something about his tone, the mixture of patience and exasperation, overcame her court-trained skepticism. He was telling the truth as he saw it.
Nicole hadn’t had to worry about transportation costs, except at the office when she had to decide whether to throw something in the mail or FedEx it. No trucks here, she reminded herself. No trains, either. She wondered how long the wine had taken to get here, and what problems it had had along the way.
Once she’d bought an amphora, she had a transportation problem of her own: how to get home with a big clay jug, some dead fish, a leg of mutton, a makeshift sack of raisins, and, for good measure, the green onions. She wished she’d brought Julia after all, even if that meant bringing the children, too, and closing the tavern while everybody was gone. For that matter, she wished she had one of the pack mules that had brought the Falernian wine from Italy.
While she tried to figure out how not to have to make more than one trip – and kept coming up with the answer, No way, Jose – someone at her elbow spoke in a dry voice: “Want me to give you a hand with some of that?”
She whirled. There stood Titus Calidius Severus, one eyebrow raised in an expression of sardonic amusement. All he carried were half a dozen dead thrushes, their scrawny yellow legs bound together with twine. How could he want to eat them? she thought in faint disgust. They’re too cute to eat.
But that wasn’t what he’d asked her. “Thank you, Calidius,” she said with as much grace as she had to offer, and a good bit of relief. “I’d love a hand.”
His mouth tightened. She’d said something wrong, and she didn’t even know what. Nor did he say anything that might give her a hint. He simply picked up the amphora and the raisins, leaving her with meat, fish, and scallions, and strode off through the market. Nicole followed, not least because she was sure he knew how to get back. She wasn’t at all sure she did.
As they were leaving the market square, four men tramped past them. They weren’t Romans; they were speaking a guttural language Nicole didn’t understand. It reminded her somehow of the German she’d heard on her honeymoon. She didn’t think it was – didn’t think it could possibly be – the same language, but she couldn’t have proved it, not with only a dozen or so words of German to call her own.
Even if the men had been speaking Latin, she would have tagged them for foreigners. They were taller, thicker through the chest, and ruddier than most of the locals. They let their beards and hair grow longer than the Romans did, and – Nicole’s nose wrinkled – used rancid butter for hair oil.
They wore the first trousers she’d seen in Carnuntum – baggy woolen ones, tied tight at the ankles – and short tunics over them. Each of them wore a long sword on his left hip.
They stared around the square as if they owned it, or perhaps as if they planned on robbing it. People stared at them, too, in fear and alarm, and muttered behind their hands. Nicole had seen exactly the same reaction in Topanga Plaza when a pack of gangbangers walked into the Wherehouse or Foot Locker.
“Mithras curse the Quadi and Marcomanni both to the infernal depths,” Calidius Severus growled. He was eyeing the strangers as a cop might eye gangbangers at the mall. He’d made it plain he was a veteran. Had he fought these Quadi or Marcomanni? Maybe he had, from the bitterness in his tone. “Miserable barbarians have their nerve, coming into town to buy this and that when they invaded the Empire three years ago not far west of here.”