But not right now. Tomorrow. If Nicole remembered.
A little while later, Julia came trotting lightly down the stairs with Ofanius Valens right behind her. They weren’t blushing in the least, or hiding anything either. He looked as if he should have been puffing smugly on a cigarette – if the Romans had had tobacco, Nicole was sure, they’d all have smoked like the chimneys they also didn’t have. Julia’s face had a loose, sated look. Her eyes were smoky; her tunic was awry. She straightened it absently, with fingers that paused to stroke the curve of a breast, then wandered on down past the rounded belly. Nicole held her breath, wondering in shocked fascination if she would start stroking her crotch right then and there, but her hand slipped sidewise over a hip and away. She smiled at them all with impartial benevolence.
“So,” said Gaius Calidius Severus, “how do you like being a free woman?” That wasn’t what he was asking. It was as clear as if he’d come with subtitles: How would you like to do me for free, too?
Julia’s smile widened and blurred. “If it’s this good all the time,” she said equally blurrily, “I’m going to like it just fine.”
Everybody gave that a round of applause. Everybody, that is, but Nicole. Even tiddly, she wasn’t about to approve of Julia’s notion of the proper way to celebrate her manumission.
But, said the voice that had been speaking up in Nicole’s mind the past few days, if Julia was going to celebrate, what else could she do? There wasn’t a whole lot to do except get drunk and screw the customers.
Time was, and not so long ago either, when Nicole would have felt obligated to say something censorious – for everyone’s own good, of course. But there were just too many things to be censorious about. She’d hit overload. She couldn’t raise the proper degree of indignation, or the right amount of crusading zeal, either.
She put on a smile. Wet blanket, that was the term for what she’d been tempted to be. Today was simply not the day for that. Things were more than wet enough as it was.
“Seems it’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights,” she said. Only after the words were out of her mouth did she recall that that was a Biblical allusion. These people – her friends and neighbors and freedwoman – were pagans. It would mean nothing to them. And if it did – might it not tell them that she was a Christian? Christians were fair game here. She’d seen that much already.
Well, as to that, wasn’t she at least nominally pagan herself? She certainly hadn’t come here by invoking any Christian deity.
They wouldn’t know what she’d said. Of course they wouldn’t. She was being ridiculous.
Then Sextus Longinius lulus said, “That’s a Jewish myth, isn’t it? I’ve heard it from Jews, I think.”
“Where have you known Jews?” Nicole asked in surprise; Carnuntum was about as far removed from cosmopolitan Los Angeles as she could imagine.
It could have been a stupid question, or even a dangerous one, but he answered quite matter-of-factly: “A lot of coppersmiths are Jews. They’ll drink wine with you, sometimes, and talk shop, even if their silly religion doesn’t let ‘em eat your food. They don’t bother anybody, far as I can see.”
“Not like those crazy Christians,” Fabia Ursa said. She shivered a little. “You never know when those people are going to do something outrageous, when it’s not outright dangerous. If you ask me, they want to be killed.”
“They think they’ll go straight to their afterworld,” her husband said, as if reminding her of something that everyone knew. “Me, as long as this life’s all right, I won’t worry too much about the next one.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Gaius Calidius Severus, and did, draining his cup in a long gulp. When he came up for air he said, “You know what they do? They take babies, girl babies that they’re going to expose anyway, and sacrifice them and eat them.”
“I didn’t hear that,” his father said. “They bake bread in the shape of a baby, and call it their god, and eat that.”
“Crazy,” the others said, nodding and passing the winejar round. “Listen, didn’t you hear tell…?“
Nicole listened in a kind of stunned amazement. After a while, it dawned on her what their conversation reminded her of. In her own time, in her own country, people had talked the same way about Muslim suicide bombers in the Holy Land.
To the Calidii Severi, to Julia, to Ofanius Valens, and to Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Ursa, whatever Christians Carnuntum had – all the Christians in the Roman Empire, for that matter – were wild-eyed fanatics. Their whole purpose in life was to cause trouble, to make martyrs for their faith. They were, in a word, Terrorists.
So – was it true? Nobody had said any such thing in Sunday school. That was all holy Christian martyrs and wicked Romans and bloody-minded lions. Of course the Christians were right – they’d won in the end, hadn’t they? Nobody ever showed the other side of it. Just the Christians defending their one and true and only faith.
Nicole had been awfully young then, young enough that the world could seem so simple. The older she’d grown, the less things seemed to fit the pattern of her Sunday-school lessons. She shouldn’t be surprised to find this new truth, too: Christians as terrorists, Romans as solid citizens appalled at their extremism.
Or maybe that wasn’t the way it really was, either. Maybe these people here were ignorant, and blindly prejudiced. If they were, and if everyone had a side and no one was all right or all wrong, what did that say about the way the people Nicole had called friends and colleagues in Los Angeles thought about Muslims? Was there any real difference between an early Christian martyr and a car bomber?
Somehow, the fact that there were Jews here bemused her even more than the presence of Christians. This was, after all, the second century of the Christian era. There would have been Christians around here somewhere. Wouldn’t there? Bur Jews back then had had the Holy Land, or so she’d heard. What would they be doing in a remote backwater like Catnuntum?
Titus Calidius Severus spread a fistful of sesterces on the table. “Another round of Falernian,” he declared grandly; like everybody else in the tavern, he was flying high. Nicole scooped up the money, pausing to savor the feel of the coins: cool and round, sliding over one another with a soft clink. They were heavy compared to twentieth-century small change, solid and unmistakably there. When you had a sackful of Roman money, you knew it. No losing a fifty-dollar bill in your pocket here.
She made her way back to the bar to fill more cups. She had to use the dipper slowly and carefully, to keep from dribbling wine on the stone countertop. As long as she didn’t move too fast, she was just fine.
When she carried the cups back to the table, she had a couple of extras. She squinted at them, counted them, counted them again to be sure. Seven – that was the right number, wasn’t it? She looked up from the cups to count noses. Fabia Ursa, Sextus Longinius lulus, Ofanius Valens, Titus Calidius Severus – lord, these names were a mouthful. Didn’t anybody do names like Joe and Bob and Sue here?
Probably just as well they didn’t. She was letting her mind wander again, too. Four people. Five, counting herself. (Umma. Now that was a nice short name. Everybody should have a name like Umma.) Who was missing?
Julia, of course. And Gaius Calidius Severus.
Where they were, and what they were doing up there, required only one guess, especially since Ofanius Valens was staring at the stairway with a discontented expression. What was he thinking? Was he jealous? Or was he wondering if he’d left Julia dissatisfied?
Maybe he had, at that. Maybe, on the other hand, Julia was just setting out to get as much as she could today.