The clerk seemed to know it, or else it was the one hour a day when he cut his victims an inch of slack. “Very well. I’ll draw up the documents. You go, collect the money, and come back with your guardian. “
“My guardian?” Nicole said. That was the second time he’d used the term. So what was she, a minor child? Or did the word have another meaning?
“That would be your husband, of course,” the clerk said, unsurprised by what had to look to him like female imbecility, “but your husband is dead.
Let me see. “ The clerk frowned into space, mentally reviewing family connections he knew better than Nicole did. “He was his own man, not in anyone’s patria potestas, which means that you no longer come under the legal authority of any male in his family. Which returns responsibility to your own, birth family. Father’s dead. Brothers – you have a brother, yes? Britomartis – Brigomarus. We’ll need his signature, or failing this his witnessed mark, before the documents are legal and binding.”
“Why?” Nicole demanded. “I can sign for myself.”
The clerk laughed, a strikingly rich and full sound to have come from so pinched and small a mouth. “Why, Madam Umma, of course you can! You can write your name wherever you like, if you can write it at all. But if this transaction is to be legal, it must have a man’s name attached to it.”
“What?” Nicole veered between fury and horror. First, to have to ask Brigomarus to agree to Julia’s manumission, after what he’d said and implied when Nicole informed him of it – fat chance. And second, and worse, her own approval wasn’t enough – because she was a woman, she had no right or power to sign a legally binding contract. That – by God, that was positively medieval.
But this wasn’t even the Middle Ages yet, she didn’t think. It was a long and apparently unenlightened time before that.
And there was Julia, shocked out of her awe at the place and the proceedings, blurting out with a rather remarkable lack of circumspection, “Didn’t you know that, Mistress? Brigomarus knows it, I’m sure he does.”
“To the crows with Brigomarus,” Nicole snarled. “It’s outrageous. It’s unjust, it’s immoral, it’s unequal, it’s unfair, it’s absurd, it’s impossible.” Her voice had risen with every word. In fact, she was shouting. People were staring. She didn’t care. Was she any less a human being because she couldn’t piss in one of Calidius Severus’ amphorae?
The clerk was signally unimpressed by her vocabulary or her volume. “It’s the law,” he said primly.
“To the crows with the law, too,” Nicole snapped. Now there was a hell of a thing for a lawyer to say. And she didn’t care. She didn’t care one little bit. She got a grip on Julia’s arm, swiveled her about, and stalked off in high indignation.
8
Mistress!” Julia called from the street just outside the tavern, where she’d gone to peer at something or other outside. “Look at the sunset. Isn’t it beautiful? The sky is turning all those clouds to fire. I’ll bet you an as it will rain tomorrow.”
Nicole didn’t gamble, but she didn’t say so. Julia seemed unperturbed by the setback to her manumission. In fact, as they’d walked home, Nicole slamming her feet down furiously with every stride, Julia trotting along behind her, Julia had said, “Ah well. Isn’t that just like fate?”
Julia the slave might be a fatalist, but Nicole was damned if she’d sit around blathering about kismet or whatever else you wanted to call it. The idea that a man’s signature was required to make a document valid told her loud and clear where women stood in Carnuntum – and, no doubt, in the rest of the Roman Empire. In Los Angeles, at least the letter of the law had been on her side. There, hypocrisy had got her so frothing mad she’d wished herself centuries back in time to get away from it. Well – she’d succeeded. No hypocrisy here, oh no. Just pure naked oppression.
“Rain would be nice,” Julia was saying. “I heard the farmers saying in the market yesterday that it’s been too dry for too long – the crops are suffering. Much more drought and we’d be in trouble. You know what they say: dry summer, winter famine. Rain now would mean we eat well come winter.”
“I hope it’s a cursed flood,” Nicole said sullenly.
Julia pulled out the neckline of her tunic and spat down onto her bosom. Nicole stared at her. “What on earth did you do that for?”
“To turn aside the evil omen, of course,” the slave – still a slave – answered. “Drought’s bad, but floods are really and right-there bad.”
Spitting in your bosom was, Nicole supposed, like knocking on wood or crossing your fingers for luck. But in the twentieth century, most people who knocked on wood didn’t really believe it would do any good. Julia sounded as serious about averting the omen as Nicole’s grandmother had been when she made the sign of the cross.
Not a fair comparison. Nicole thought. Grandma was doing something religious. This is just superstition.
So? said the lawyerly part of her mind. Would you be so kind as to define the difference?
Welclass="underline" religion got higher ratings than superstition. But that, she admitted to both sides of herself, was a less than useful distinction.
She’d had two cups of wine with her supper. They combined with the undercurrent of burning outrage to make her discontented with the idea of trudging upstairs and falling asleep. She’d done that every night since she’d come to Carnuntum, and it looked to be what everybody did every night, without variation and without exception.
“Julia,” she said suddenly, “I want some fun tonight.”
“Why are you telling me, Mistress?” Julia asked. “Go across the street.” She pointed toward the shop and house of Titus Calidius Severus.
Nicole’s face grew hot. “That’s not what I meant!” she said a little too quickly. “I meant someplace… oh, someplace to go: to a play, or to listen to music, or to go out dancing.” Yes indeed: no TV, no movies, no radio, no stereo – she was starting to go stir-crazy. It wasn’t quite like living in a sensory-deprivation tank – some of her senses, especially smell, got a bigger workout here than they ever had back in the United States – but it wasn’t far removed, either. If she didn’t do something besides get up and get to work and get hit over the head with culture shock and collapse into sleep, she was going to scream.
“Mistress,” Julia said, “you know daytime is the time for things like that.” She shrugged. Nicole, even through her haze of fury, thought Julia might just have decided that her mistress was intermittently simpleminded and needed to be humored. “Of course,” Julia went on, “the daytime is when we’re busy, too. But there’ll be plays and beast shows in the amphitheater all summer long.”
“Beast shows,” Nicole said, distracted almost out of her mood. So what were those? A traveling zoo, maybe? That would make sense, with no planes or trains or automobiles, and not much chance to go much of anywhere. It stood to reason that enterprising types might think to bring the zoos to the people, rather than the other way around.
That didn’t help her immediate predicament. “What do I do now?” She sounded like a bored four-year-old, she knew that, but she couldn’t help it.
“I still don’t know why you’re mad at Calidius Severus” – Julia shrugged again, as if to say she wasn’t and wouldn’t be responsible for Nicole’s vagaries – “but since you are, there isn’t much else to do but get drunk.”
“No!” The answer was quick and sharp and automatic.
“Well,” Julia said, “it’s one way not to notice the time crawling by. It’s here” – she held up a hand – “and then it’s there, and you don’t care what happened in between.”
“No,” Nicole said again, remembering her father coming home plastered night after night. For the first time, she thought to wonder why he’d got drunk. Was he trying to blot out the time he spent in the factory every day? It wasn’t enough reason, but it was a reason. She’d never looked for a reason before; it had just been part of her life. She scratched her head, then wished she hadn’t – what was crawling through her hair?