in charge of the
She burned her hand getting her own first batch of loaves out of the oven. She plunged it into the dishwater, which, if not cold, was at least cool. The only soothing thing she could find to put on the burn was olive oil. It seemed to help a little. She would never have used it back in West Hills, but this was Carnuntum. No Aloe-Heal here. Not even an aloe plant.
Freedom, at the moment, looked suspiciously like drudgery. She was too busy even to notice how busy she was.
There were compensations. The loaves she’d turned out weren’t quite perfect; she’d let the crust get browner and thicker than Julia had done. But they were damn good, she thought, for a first try. The customers certainly didn’t object. If they said anything at all, it was to demand another piece hacked off the loaf.
The rest of her cooking passed the test, too, though a couple of people noticed her style wasn’t the same as Umma’s. “Next time I bring you a sow’s womb,” a plump fellow said, “I’ll want it seethed in honey and vinegar, the way you usually do it, not just grilled with garlic. This wasn’t bad, but I like the other better.”
She nodded, gulping a little. She hadn’t known what to do with the odd-shaped lump of meat she’d been handed. For that matter, she hadn’t known what the odd-shaped lump of meat was. Now that she did, she wished she didn’t.
She struggled for objectivity, the same mental distance she’d cultivated in the courtroom or in dealing with clients who weren’t quite the kind of people she’d want in the same room with her kids. What the plump man had suggested didn’t actually sound too bad, though she wouldn’t have chosen that particular cut or recipe for sweet- and-sour pork.
Just as Nicole was taking the last batch of loaves out of the oven, Julia came back at last from the baths. The slave smelled much better than she had before, and her skin was several shades lighter, closer to the milky white that Nicole would have expected with her fair coloring and Germanic features. She still wasn’t as fresh as Nicole would have been coming out of the shower. That newly milky skin smelled potently of olive oil. That, Nicole realized, was one of the many rank perfumes that impregnated the tunic Julia still wore. Not only hadn’t she had it cleaned, Nicole didn’t think it ever had been cleaned, not in the months — maybe years — Julia had been wearing it.
Still, thought Nicole, the bath had been an improvement. Julia carried herself a little straighter, hunched her shoulders a little less. She examined the new-baked bread with a judicious eye. “A little underdone,” she judged, “but no one will complain about it.” She beamed at Nicole. “I hope it wasn’t too much trouble, Mistress. The bath was wonderful.”
She punctuated that with a happy wiggle that caught the eye of every male in the place. There all too obviously wasn’t anything between her body and the much-worn tunic. Equally obviously, she hadn’t been quite dry when she put the tunic back on after her bath. A wet T-shirt it wasn’t, but it left precious little to imagination.
Nicole couldn’t match Julia’s happy tone, not with the thoughts she was thinking. “All right,” she said a bit more roughly than she’d intended. “Get back to work.”
Julia obeyed her with evident contentment. From the way she was acting, she’d expected nothing gentler, and probably something a great deal more harsh. Even in her depths of disgust for the male half of the species, Nicole couldn’t seem to match Umma for ferocity.
Sometime in the late afternoon — Nicole kept glancing at her left wrist, at a watch that wasn’t there — Titus Calidius Severus strode briskly into the restaurant with a pair of plump trout. “Hello, Umma,” he said cheerfully. “Thought I’d wait till things thinned out over here before I brought you these to fry.”
He smelled worse than the fish would have if he’d left them in the sun for three days. Nicole’s nose had tuned out most of the background stink of Carnuntum, but the fuller and dyer might have had a chamberpot spilled over his head. As she dipped the trout in an egg-and-flour batter she’d made up not long before, Nicole approached that by — she hoped — easy stages: “Do you have to have those jars out in front of your shop for — for men to — to piss in?”
“You’ve teased me about that often enough,” he said with a chuckle. She had, had she? Or Umma had. Nicole wasn’t teasing. Not in the least. He went on, “They’re not wagging their prongs at you, dear, even if it looks that way.” He reached across the counter and chucked her under the chin.
No one, not here, not anywhere, had ever done that to her. Even as a child, she hadn’t been the kind of little girl who invited such an insult. She certainly didn’t either invite or accept it as an adult. She slapped his hand down. To her utter fury, he only laughed and said, “Ai, pretty lady! I’ve had mates in the legion who weren’t as fierce as you.”
Nicole sucked in a breath, nearly choking on it. Her voice when it came was almost too tight to be audible. “Don’t you — ever — do that to me again. Or you won’t eat these fish, you’ll wear them.”
Somewhat to her surprise, he seemed to realize that she meant it. “All right,” he said willingly enough, if with a hint of puzzlement. “You never said you didn’t like it before — but what’s a woman if she can’t change her mind, eh?” He shrugged, grinned rather ruefully at himself, and went on more seriously, “Right. So. Pisspots. Don’t like them either, do you? Look at it this way. They’re neater than pissing against the wall — and I’d be out of work without them. There’s nothing like stale piss to get the grease out of wool so it’ll hold the dye. If rosewater would do the trick, I’d use it. But alas, pretty lady, it doesn’t.”
Nicole finished frying the trout in silence. She hadn’t thought whether Calidius Severus might actually need the urine he collected. She hadn’t wanted to think about it. Not to put too fine a point on it, she’d been too busy being grossed out.
She was supposed to be glad that this was a more natural, more organic world than the one she’d left: no plastics, no polyester, no coal-tar dyes. Urine was natural, all right; anyone who’d ever changed a baby knew that. But Carnuntum was rubbing her nose in the fact that natural and pleasant weren’t necessarily synonyms, no matter what the commercials for Quaker 100 % Natural said.
As Calidius began to eat his fish, he set a
“All right,” she said after a pause. “A peace offering. Thank you.”
“These trout are good,” he said after he’d taken a bite or two. “I don’t think you ever did them quite like this before. Tasty.” He ate another mouthful. He used his fingers. They were a peculiar color, like nothing human: mottled blue and green and muddy brown, as if in dyeing cloth he had dyed his skin with it.
As for his table manners, nobody here had any better. Nicole had found spoons and a few knives in a pot by a stack of plates, but no forks. She wondered if Calidius had washed his hands before coming over with the fish. Then she wished she hadn’t. He said, “I don’t want you angry at me, you know.”
“I’m not angry,” she answered, more or less sincerely.
“Good.” He studied her. “Are you not-angry enough for me to come over tonight?” The meaning of that was unmistakable — and, as plainly, he expected her to say yes. Her face froze.
He saw. His own face stiffened in response. He stood up abruptly, grimaced, and shoved the plate at her. There was no meat left, only bones, neatly picked and pushed into a pile. Without a word, he stamped out of the restaurant.
Julia was gaping. So were all three of the remaining customers. Nicole sighed. So Umma and Calidius had been an item, had they? Why on earth the woman whose body Nicole was wearing would want a man who smelled like an outhouse was beyond her.
Whatever the reason for it, Julia obviously thought Umma and Titus Calidius Severus had had a good thing going. Well, to hell with what Julia thought. Nicole had come back here for herself, not to play bedwarmer to the piss merchant across the street.
She would have told Julia so, in no uncertain terms, but two more men and a woman came into the place just then, and set her to running about again. She stayed busy till sundown, which came late this time of year.
As soon as it began to get dark, business didn’t just fall off: it died. Nicole didn’t fully understand that till she lighted a lamp. Matches she didn’t have; she had to use a twist of straw from a basket by one of the cookfires, and
