baggy trousers flapping against their legs, shouting back and forth in their guttural dialects. Nicole had picked up a few words — enough to be quite clear on what they were yelling about: “The Romans are coming! The Romans are coming!”
She dressed with a little more than her usual care, and went downstairs to a breakfast of cold fish. Julia and Lucius were not far behind her. She was interested to note that Julia was also a bit cleaner than usual, though Lucius was his disheveled small-boy self.
They didn’t open the tavern, or even unbar the door. “With any luck at all, this will be over soon,” Nicole said. She glanced at the image —
A prayer wasn’t supposed to be reproachful, but she didn’t care. They’d brought her here. They could live with the consequences.
In the beginning, the second battle for Carnuntum sounded very much like the first. The shouts from the walls were in German now and not in Latin, but the tones of anger, desperation, rage, even wild glee, were much the same.
But after a while, as the morning went on and the sun began to play hide-and-seek with the gathering clouds, a new sound brought Nicole bolt upright. It sounded like the beating of an enormous heart, deep and ponderously slow.
Lucius looked up excitedly from the board game he was playing with
Julia. “Battering ram! That’ll do it for the gate. Then — in come the legions. March! March! March!”
He marched himself all the way upstairs to fetch his sword, and all the way back down and around the room, leaping and spinning and stabbing with it, till Nicole ducked in and caught him and held him fast. He was hot and sweaty and breathing in gulps. And he’d forgotten completely how little use his wooden blade had been against the Germans.
Nicole’s grip slackened. He wriggled free, still panting, but he’d calmed down enough to sit on a bench conveniently near the door.
He didn’t go back to his game, which he’d been losing anyway. Quietly Julia stowed the pieces inside the board and put it away, and sat with folded hands, waiting with a slave’s patience for whatever was going to come.
The Romans kept knocking on the door to Carnuntum. A second ram joined the first, striking a counterpoint from another gate. With each crashing thud, Nicole thought surely it would break through.
But the gates had been built strong, nor did they care who tried to break them. They held for the whole of that day, until the pounding became as monotonous as a migraine, as relentless as the pulse of Nicole’s own heart in her ears.
Lucius alternated between playing legionary and waiting for the real legionaries to come marching down the street. At length, Nicole prevailed on him to go upstairs with Julia and, if not sleep, then at least get off her nerves.
She sat where she’d been for most of the day. If she’d had a stack of magazines to read, she’d have been too twitchy to bother with them. She contemplated a big job, a job that would keep her too busy to think, but even if she’d had tools to sand down and refinish the tables, she’d never get it done before dark. She’d have to ask Brigo next time he came by, whether she could borrow any — for that matter, whether he’d like to help. He’d might surprise her by agreeing to it.
Daylight faded, and the pounding went on. Nicole circled the room, coming to a halt in front of the votive plaque. Liber and Libera regarded her with serene complacency. “All right,” Nicole said to them, rather defiantly, in English. “Maybe you wanted me to see the Romans take back Carnuntum. Maybe I was supposed to see that, sometimes, the good guys win.” She glowered at them. “With all due respect, I’d sooner have taken that on faith, and gone home.”
The god and goddess didn’t move, or say a word. A little wear and tear aside, they looked just as they had when their plaque had stood on her nightstand in clean, quiet, safe West Hills. Nicole looked around at this filthy tavern in a barbarian-held town taken from an empire that reckoned itself civilized only because everything around it was so absolutely barbaric. She sighed deeply, turned her back on the heedless divinities, and trudged upstairs to bed.
She slept rather better than she’d expected, a deep, sodden sleep, though she’d drunk no wine the night before. She woke as she’d fallen asleep, to the sound of the rams battering away at the gates.
The last of the fish weren’t fit for human consumption. Nicole tossed them out the window. Julia, who was just coming down the stairs, exclaimed in dismay and ran to the window beside Nicole, but Nicole had done the job a little too well: they’d landed in a steaming pile of ox manure.
“Mistress!” Julia said. “They might still have been all right to eat. Now when are we going to get any more?”
“If you want them so much, you can go out there and bring them back,” Nicole said. Julia shot her a look — as close to defiance as she’d ever come — and startled Nicole by doing exactly as she was told.
Nicole watched her as she paused at the door, looking rapidly up and down the deserted street, and scuttled toward the fish. When she was within a few feet of them, her face screwed up in disgust. Nicole wasn’t surprised. The reek of them still clung to the bowl they’d lain in.
Julia came back without the fish, and with a crestfallen expression. She’d gone out to make a point; but Nicole, for once, had won it instead. They scraped together a breakfast of stale barley bread and boiled water, punishment fare, and settled for another day of siege.
Toward midday, one of the gates went crashing down. Screams and shouting and something else — a deep, rhythmic, profoundly arrogant sound — proclaimed the legions’ arrival in Carnuntum. They were singing, Nicole realized, in a strong, marching beat, to the braying of horns and the beating of drums.
Nicole looked at Julia and Lucius. Julia and Lucius looked back. Was her grin as wide and crazy as theirs were? They leaped up all at once and whooped. Julia grabbed Nicole’s hand and Lucius’. His free hand grabbed Nicole’s. They danced madly around the room, kicking into stools and tables, and not caring in the slightest.
When they’d danced themselves breathless, Nicole and Lucius flung themselves down to rest, but Julia had something else in mind. She dipped a rag in the dishwater barrel and scrubbed at her arms. “Now I don’t smell like a chamberpot anymore,” she said triumphantly.
Then, as if she’d gone completely out of her mind, she unbarred the door and ran out into the street, headed toward Gaius Calidius Severus’. She was damned lucky: the street was full of Germans running away from the wall. None of them stopped to grab a last taste of Roman flesh.
Nicole stared after her. Then, incredulously, she started to laugh. Julia always had been consistent about what constituted a celebration.
It wasn’t all bad, either. Nicole was sick of smelling like
When she looked up from what were still sadly inadequate ablutions — God, what she wouldn’t have given for a bar of soap — Lucius had disappeared, and his toy sword with him. She cursed, first in Latin, then, more satisfyingly, in English. He’d gone to watch the fighting, the little lunatic. He’d never in his life imagine that he could get caught in it. She could — and it scared the hell out of her.
She ran to the door and shouted his name. Nothing. She called again, louder. No sign of him. Why should there be? He had what the twentieth century had learned to call plausible deniability. “Oh, no, Mother, “ he would say, eyes wide and sincere. “I didn’t hear you. Everybody was yelling so loud.”
“I’ll warm his backside,” Nicole muttered. The idea didn’t give her the collywobbles, as it would have when she first came to Carnuntum. He’d proved himself immune to any lesser suggestion. He did not need to know just how vitally important his life was to her. He was, literally, her lifeline, the one assurance she had of her continued existence.
Without further pause for thought, Nicole ran out of the tavern. She barely remembered to shut the door behind her.
