wouldn’t pay him, which is nothing at all new, you know, but you know what he did?”
Nicole hadn’t the faintest. She opened her eyes wide and looked expectant.
“He complained to the chiefs, that’s what!” the man said. “Imagine that.”
Nicole could imagine. She didn’t like the picture she was getting. “That was brave, but it can’t have been very smart.”
“Well, that’s Avitianus, you know?” The apple-seller sighed. “They gave him a kick in the arse and sent him on his way. That Avitianus, he’s got bigger balls than a he-goat, but he’s got to use his thumbs to count them.”
“And so much for justice, too,” Nicole said.
“Only justice a poor man ever knows is what he gets hit over the head with,” the man replied. “The Germans’ll hit you over the head with a sword. Before they came, the rich bastards would hit you over the head with a lawyer. The sword hurts more, but the lawyers took more.”
She stared at him. Even in ancient Rome, people made snide jokes about attorneys? “If it weren’t for lawyers, we’d all be after each other with swords all the time,” she said with a touch of asperity.
“Well, maybe,“ the apple-seller said. “But maybe we’d leave each other alone more, too, if we had swords instead of lawyers.”
“Tell it to the Germans,” Nicole said, bending his own words back against him. He grunted, shrugged, and finally, grudgingly, nodded.
“Those are nice ones,” Julia said when Nicole brought the apples back. “You must have bought them before they were picked over. “
“I suppose I did,” Nicole answered. The apples didn’t look that nice to her. They were on the smallish side compared with what she’d been able to buy in the supermarket. Produce here was wildly inconsistent; some apples would have a firm texture and a delicious, complex sweetness as good as anything she could have hoped for back in L.A., while others from the same orchard wouldn’t be worth eating.
While she stared at them, inspiration struck. She rummaged through the spices in back of the bar till she found a quill of cinnamon. Spices, she’d discovered, traveled more than most things: they were valuable, didn’t take up much room, and didn’t spoil. She ground up part of the quill in a mortar and pestle. The sweet pungent fragrance made her nostrils twitch. It smelled of autumn in Indiana, and a bakery on a rainy day, and apple pie on the table at Thanksgiving. It was wonderful, and it made her throat go tight and her eyes sting. Julia saved her from bawling into the mortar. “What are you going to do with that, Mistress?” she asked.
“I’m going to make some baked apples,” Nicole answered.
Julia’s eyes went wide. “I’ve never heard of anyone eating apples any way but raw.”
“Well, you’ll learn something, then,” Nicole said.
They weren’t perfect. Had they been, they would have been sweetened with sugar instead of honey, and they would have been swimming in cream. But Julia and Lucius didn’t have to know there was anything missing. They devoured theirs in what seemed like two bites apiece, and loudly demanded more. Nicole savored hers, the taste on her tongue and the aroma in her nose. It filled the whole tavern, and for a little while drove away the stink of Carnuntum. “You could make a fortune with those,” Julia said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.
“No,” Nicole said. “Too easy to figure out what I did. Besides, where can I get more cinnamon once this is gone?”
Julia made a face. “You’re right about that — it won’t be easy. There’s probably not any left in the city, and no merchants in their right minds are going to come this way, not with the Germans running wild through Pannonia. By the gods, no merchants who are out of their minds would come this way, either.”
Nicole and Lucius laughed, Nicole with a little incredulity; serious, literal-minded Julia almost never said anything witty. Still, Nicole sobered quickly: the joke cut too close to the truth. She said, “Nobody much will come this way, except for the farmers close to town. The market square is half empty.”
“We didn’t have a famine in spite of the pestilence,” Julia said. “If we don’t have a famine in spite of the pestilence and the Germans, the gods will truly be looking out for us.”
Lucius said, “If the gods are truly looking out for us, why did they let the pestilence happen? Why did they let the Marcomanni and Quadi conquer Carnuntum in the first place?”
“Why? Why, because… because…” Julia floundered. She scratched her head. In scratching, she found something, which she squashed between two fingernails. That still gave Nicole the horrors. She kept on fighting the battle against lice, though now she knew it was a losing battle. Julia turned to her. “Mistress, why do you suppose the gods did let those terrible things happen, if they are looking out for us?”
Nicole swallowed a sigh. Such was the lot of mothers everywhere: to be expected to answer the unanswerable. “I don’t know why the gods do anything,’ she said. “I don’t think anyone does. You can
She hadn’t given up her search for the actual plaque, the one that had brought her back here. Once it was safe to go out again, and while she had errands to run — trips to market, women’s day at the baths — she took time to hunt. She hadn’t seen anything closer to it than the one she’d bought from the stonecutter near the market, but she hadn’t given up. Nor did she intend to, not till she’d scoured every street and poked into every shop.
Looking for something in Carnuntum, she’d discovered, was nothing like shopping in L.A. or Indianapolis, not if you wanted to be thorough, as she emphatically did. She couldn’t let her fingers do the walking; she had to do it with her feet. It wasn’t just that there were no phones here. There were no phone books, nowhere she could check under STONECUTTERS to see if she’d found them all. There wasn’t a Chamber of Commerce from which she might have got a list of such artisans, either. If she wanted to hunt them down, she had to do it herself.
“In all my spare time,” she muttered, which would have been funny if only it were funny. She’d thought she was busy in Los Angeles. Work here in Carnuntum never seemed to get done. If she couldn’t find the plaque, if she couldn’t escape the second century… Had she seen her own gravestone when she came to Petronell on her honeymoon? She didn’t remember seeing any inscribed to a woman named Umma, but that proved nothing. She could as easily say it proved Umma had never existed, and all this was a dream.
In which case, Nicole had taken to dreaming historical epics.
A week or two after Nicole invented baked apples, the tavern ran low on grain. When Nicole went to the market square in search of more, she found none for sale: no wheat, no barley. She’d never seen rye or oats. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked a man who was selling plums at a preposterous price.
“Tighten your belt,” he answered.
She hissed at his total lack of sympathy, and went searching elsewhere.
As she’d recalled, a miller or two had shops between the market and her tavern. One of them sold her a little barley flour at five times what it should have cost. The other shook his head and said, “Sorry, but I haven’t a kernel to spare. I’m hanging on to every grain in every jar to keep myself and my kin alive. Hard word to give you, I know, but that’s how it is.” Nor would he give way, even when Nicole pleaded for something, anything, a handful would do. “My wife’s having a baby,” he said. “I’ve got to keep her strength up.”
Nicole left the miller’s shop in a state of considerable aggravation. Before she could make it out into the street, a gang of Germans swaggered down the sidewalk, arm in arm and giving way to no one. She had to flatten herself against the wall to keep them from walking right through her. They laughed to see her cringe. They were big and ruddy-cheeked and healthy. They hadn’t missed any meals lately, and didn’t look likely to, either. Whatever grain there was or had been in Carnuntum, it was in their hands now. And the Romans? They plainly didn’t give a damn about the Romans.
She waited till they were well past before going on her own way. As she walked, she found her eyes following a flock of pigeons in the street. Their brainless strut wasn’t a whole lot different from that of the mighty conquerors. If this lot learned to carry swords, the rest of the birds would be in trouble. And how, she wondered, would they taste roasted, or stewed, maybe, with the few herbs she had left, and some of that awful local wine? They hadn’t changed a bit, to be sure. Their habits were just as disgusting as they’d ever been. Even as she watched, one of them pecked at an ox turd in the street. Her stomach turned over. But as it did that, it growled. Pigeons were meat.
