“That one?” The stonecutter considered. “Ten
Distracted by pain and fogged by wine and poppy juice as she was, Nicole remained astonished. The limestone from which he’d carved the plaque was surely cheap, but he couldn’t set much value on his own labor — either that, or he’d turned out the piece much faster than she would have thought possible. On the other hand, he wasn’t inclined to haggle, and she’d been too badly battered to bargain as hard as she would have otherwise. She paid him eight
Julia greeted her with a cry of dismay. “Mistress! You’ve got blood all over your tunic.”
Nicole looked down at herself. She hadn’t even noticed. No wonder the stonecutter had looked at her so oddly. He must have thought her husband had belted her a good one — and she was buying off the gods of wine to soften him up the next time he polished off a jar or two or three.
At least she knew a cure for blood on wool. “Cold water,” she said, “that’s what it needs. And wine.”
“Wine?” Julia frowned. “Wine doesn’t do a thing for bloodstains.”
“The wine is for me,” Nicole said. She sat at a table near the bar — nearly falling the last inch or two onto the bench — and uncovered the plaque so that Julia could see it. “I’ll give Liber and Libera a little, too.”
Julia seemed excited all out of proportion to the occasion. It must have been a slow day for Julia, upstairs as well as down. “Let me see!” she said eagerly. She didn’t wait for Nicole to finish making her way through the stools and benches and tables. She negotiated the course with more agility than Nicole could have managed just then, and peered at the low relief. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. We could use a god or two to watch over us. ‘
The thought was both delicious and — to her amazement — sad. Julia had been to the baths today, and found a clean tunic somewhere, too. She smelled as good as anyone in Carnuntum could. She was warm, standing next to Nicole, and solid, and somehow comforting. Julia, however unwitting, had been absolutely invaluable in showing Nicole how to cope with this world she’d found herself in. They weren’t friends, not exactly; friends were equals. Employer and employee? Somewhat more than that. Allies. Comrades in arms.
Nicole was going to miss Julia. The thought was so astonishing that she almost forgot to keep it to herself. The thudding ache in her jaw saved her. She must have clenched her teeth; she was struck with a sudden, piercing stab of pain. “Wine,” she said again, tightly. Julia gasped a little, as if she’d clean forgotten, and ran to fetch a cup.
Terentianus had told Nicole to rinse her mouth with it. He hadn’t told her it would feel as if she’d drunk gasoline and then thrown in a lighted match. She whimpered. Her eyes filled with tears of pain. Nevertheless, she gulped the stuff down. The second swallow wasn’t quite so bad. The damage was done; pain had gone into overload.
When the cup was almost empty, Nicole wet her forefinger with the dregs and smeared a little on Liber’s mouth, and a little on Libera’s.
Julia shook her head and smiled. “I never saw anybody give them a drink quite that way, Mistress. But I’ll bet they like it.”
“I hope they do,” Nicole said. She hadn’t been thinking before she did it, she’d just done what seemed appropriate. She was lucky. If she’d crossed herself backward, everyone in church would have known she was no Catholic. Here, what she’d done wasn’t wrong, just different. The cult of Liber and Libera, it seemed, didn’t have as many rules as the Christianity in which she’d grown up.
The Christianity they had here — did it have rules, aside from terrorist graffiti and apocalyptic mania? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And if she did happen to learn the answer, she had every intention of doing it from the twentieth century.
She drank a lot of wine that day. With each cup, she gave the stone god and goddess their share. If the wound got infected after all that, then the germs that did the job would be cutting through the alcohol bath in wetsuit and swim fins.
She drank a double cup, one of the cups she kept for her thirstiest customers, before she went upstairs to bed. Maybe, just maybe, it would dull the pain enough to let her sleep. She was in a fog as it was, drifting as if underwater, bouncing gently off walls and furniture. But the heart of the fog was a red and throbbing pain.
Sleep was as elusive as she’d feared. She couldn’t even toss and turn: it hurt too much. She lay as still as she could on the thin, lumpy mattress, and did her best to ignore the tiny stabs and stings of the vermin that inhabited it. She’d brought the plaque up with her, and propped it on the chest of drawers where she could see it from the bed.
She couldn’t tell if she was getting through. The wine couldn’t do what the fever had done, blur the boundaries between the waking world and the world the gods inhabited. All it did was dull her reflexes and slow her mind, and drop her at last into a sodden sleep.
She drifted off in a dream of electric lights and chlorinated water, automobiles and stereos, antibiotics and, oh God, anesthetics, telephones and television, supermarkets and refrigerators, soap and insecticides and inner- spring mattresses. And — yes, yes indeed — equality under the law, whatever it might be in actual practice. If the gods were kind, if she’d worked the — magic? — rightly, she’d wake in a deliciously soft, heavenly clean bed in the century that was, after all she’d done to escape it, the one and only century for her.
She woke, yes. On a rough and scratchy, redolent and verminous mattress, in a century long before the one in which she was born, in the Roman city of Carnuntum.
16
It was a bitter waking, but Nicole had no intention of giving up. She’d storm heaven if she had to. Every night, with wine and impassioned prayer, she called on the god and goddess. She smeared their lips with wine, she left a cup of wine in front of their plaque, she drank more wine than she rightly should have. She was sincere. She was devoted. She wanted, above anything in this world, to go home.
And every morning, as surely as the sun rose over the eastward wall of Carnuntum, she woke in Umma’s bed, in Umma’s body. The gods were ignoring her, or else, as she began to fear, actively refusing to grant her prayer.
They’d brought her here. They could damned well send her home again.
Julia approved of this sudden access of piety. “We’re sure to have better luck around here now,” she said. Julia had two mottoes:
That much Nicole had given her: her freedom. Umma, when she came back to this body, if she came back to it — small dark difficult thought, there, quickly suppressed — couldn’t legally undo what Nicole had done. It was a good thing, a decent gift to leave behind.
Nicole wasn’t ever tempted to stay. The one real friend she’d had here, Titus Calidius Severus, was dead. Lucius was Umma’s child, not her own, though yes, she’d miss him. Julia, too, and young Gaius, and one or two others. She was fond of them as she might have been of people she met on a long vacation, but with the sense, always, that this was their world and not hers; that whatever happened here, it was temporary. She wasn’t going to live out her days here.
Liber and Libera were silent, though their plaque was smeared with wine and the cup in front of it had been filled and refilled and filled again. Nicole, in the beginning of despair, prayed to the God she’d grown up with, the God whose followers in second-century Carnuntum seemed so much like twentieth-century extremists. He gave her no more answer than the Roman deities had. He was angry at her, she was sure, for having other gods before Him. Or maybe the Christians here and now were shouting so loud, they drowned her out.
She hadn’t wanted anything or wished for anything so strongly or with such concentrated determination since
