sword.”
“I suppose so,” he said, “but I don’t know. I expect I never will.”
He dipped his bread in olive oil and ate. Nicole still had plenty of grain and, if anything, an oversupply of oil for the tiny amount of business she was doing. She was out of wine: the Germans had made sure of that.
Being out of wine meant drinking water. She didn’t dare go over to the market square to find out if more wine was to be had, not yet. She didn’t think any would be, anyhow, not judging by all the drunken barbarians she’d seen. At her insistence, Julia boiled water in the biggest pots they had. “This is a silly business, Mistress,” the freedwoman insisted.
“Do it anyhow,” Nicole said. Being the boss gave her the privilege of being arbitrary. She’d long since seen that arguments and explanations based on what the twentieth century knew and the second century didn’t were worse than useless. “It can’t hurt anything, can it?”
“I suppose not.” Julia was still dubious, but did as she was told. When, after a day or two, nobody came down with the runs, she allowed as how it might not have been such a bad idea. That was the biggest concession Nicole had ever wrung from her.
More and more Germans came into Carnuntum. Some were celebrating the destruction of the legionary camp down the river. Some came to plunder and steal, though the pickings by now were thin. A lot simply passed through, on their way south toward other Roman towns and more Roman loot.
“All the Roman Empire will be ours,” Swemblas boasted one day. “Every bit of it.”
Nicole didn’t argue with him. She thought there’d been Roman Emperors after Marcus Aurelius, but she wasn’t sure enough of it to say so. Not to mention that disagreeing with one of the new German masters of Carnuntum was likely to prove hazardous to her health.
He didn’t stay long, in any case. A tavern without wine had far less appeal to him than one with it. “If you have no wine, what good are you?” he demanded.
“You and your friends drank all I had,” Nicole answered, not too sharply, she hoped. “How am I supposed to get more?”
“In the market, of course,” Swemblas said in a tone she knew all too well. Male arrogance and superiority, patronizing the silly little woman, and letting her know just what an idiot she was.
His astonishment was all the stronger for that, when Nicole laughed in his face. “Suppose I can go to the market without having a dozen of your friends pull me down and rape me, the way they did to my neighbor,” she said. Swemblas’ expression went from astonished to shocked, likely because she dared talk so directly about what he did for fun. “Suppose I can do that,” she said. “I’m not sure I can, but suppose. You people have drunk or stolen all the wine the merchants had on hand. Where are they going to get more?”
“It is not my problem,” Swemblas said. “It is for the merchants to do.”
“Good luck,” Nicole said serenely. “Now the war is here, and south of here, not off somewhere farther west.” Being vague let her conceal how ignorant she was of local geography. But then, a lot of people who’d been born and raised in Carnuntum knew little of Vindobona, twenty miles up the Danube, and less about any place farther away. “If you were a Roman wine merchant, would you want to come up to Carnuntum from Italy, knowing there were Germans in the way?”
“I am not a merchant. I am not a Roman. I do not want to be either,” Swemblas said with dignity. And without a further word, he strode out.
He’d entirely missed the point. Nicole sighed. She shouldn’t have expected anything different. Had the Germans been able to see anything from anyone else’s point of view, they wouldn’t have reckoned robbery and rape and murder to be fine sport, or applauded one another for them.
The next day, whether she wanted to or not, Nicole had to go to market. She was out of everything but grain and oil, and those were starting to run low.
Julia tried to talk her out of it. “Mistress,” she said, “the less you show yourself, the safer you’ll be.”
“Yes, but if I get to the market square now, I have a better chance of finding things before it’s picked clean,” Nicole answered. She wasn’t as bold as she sounded, but Julia didn’t call her on it. Julia was still shaking her head as Nicole went out the door.
There were Germans in the streets, swaggering about with a lordly air. In front of the shop where Nicole had bought her image of Liber and Libera, one of the conquerors picked up a votive plaque with an image of the naked Venus. He ran a hand over the limestone curves as if fondling a real woman.
Something about the incident stopped Nicole cold. It wasn’t the theft — that was common enough these days. It wasn’t the shopkeeper’s powerlessness, not really. And yet…
She couldn’t prove it. Nor was there any way to do so, unless she found the actual plaque, the one that had brought her here. Did it even exist yet? Would she have to wait another twenty or thirty years before it was made?
No, she thought with a shiver. She had to believe, for her own sanity, that the plaque had brought her back
She put the thought away for now; because she had an errand, and it was urgent. It wasn’t too terribly hard to distract herself: the city had changed since she last went out to market. Shops that had once been open were closed and shuttered, Germans came and went from houses that had belonged to solid Roman citizens, the few women who were out and about went warily as Nicole herself did, and probably with some kind of weapon concealed in their clothing. Nicole, whose chief weapon was her stink of ancient piss, was just as glad not to be armed. Her self-defense instructor had been blunt about it. “A knife or a gun may make you feel better when you carry it, but you’re just giving a mugger another weapon to use against you. Unless you can shoot or stab to kill or disable, and do it instantly, he’ll get hold of it and he’ll use it. And you’ll be worse off than you were before.”
Armed with a stink that kept even the locals from crowding in too close, Nicole passed the baths and came in sight of the open space of the market square. She stopped, and gasped.
The space was larger, much larger, than it had ever been before. It opened to the north and west, openness in shades of black, the charred ruins of the fire that she’d heard but not seen on the first day of the sack. Houses and shops and a handful of four- and five-story apartment buildings were flattened, burned to the ground.
Romans and Germans, their clothes and hides black with soot, sifted through the wreckage. Some of the Romans were probably trying to salvage what they could from the disaster. Many must have been thieves — as were all of the Germans.
When a Roman found something he was looking for, he slipped it into a pouch or hid it somewhere on his person, as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. When a German found a coin or a ring or anything of value, he held it up and crowed over it.
Nicole shook her head at the fortunes of war, and ventured into the market. Most of the largest stalls were empty, their keepers dead or robbed or simply lying low. The Germans helped themselves to whatever struck their fancy. She watched a barbarian walk away from a sausage-seller gnawing on a length of garlicky stuff he hadn’t paid for. Like the stonecutter, the merchant could only look unhappy. There wouldn’t be a revolt here, not while the Germans were large and strong and trained to fight, and the locals were smaller, weaker, and inclined to leave the fighting to professionals.
Nicole bought a length of sausage for herself. She didn’t have to haggle much to get a good price, rather to her surprise. “You’re only the third person today with money to spend,” the sausage-seller told her. “I’m happy to see any brass at all.”
With the sausage stowed away in her bag, she bought a sack of beans and a sack of peas, and filled another sack with lettuce and onions and cucumbers. That was as much as she could carry. There wasn’t any wine, as she’d fully expected.
Loaded down with her purchases but still trusting to her rape repellent, she left the market with relief. While
