She hadn’t said Nicole was going in the wrong direction, either. Nicole decided to take that as an omen. She strode on out, feeling better already, though she had to be careful where she stepped; and she kept a wary eye on the windows above. Some of her original sense of adventure was coming back. She felt like a brave explorer — Montezuma’s Revenge and all.
Pigeons strutted in the streets of Carnuntum, arrogant and brainless and half tame, just as they did in Los Angeles. Life here was riskier for them, however. A fellow tossed a fine-meshed net over a couple, scooped them up before they could let out more than one startled coo, and ran back inside his house, shouting, “I’ve got supper for today, Claudia!”
Nicole wouldn’t have wanted to eat them. Living in Los Angeles, she’d come to despise the automobile for the pollution it caused, even while she worshipped at its shrine. No cars in Carnuntum. But that didn’t mean no pollution, as she’d thought it would. The streets were packed deep with ox droppings, horse droppings, donkey droppings. The pigeons mined them for any number of treasures: seeds, insects, the unmistakable and nauseating pale wriggle of a worm.
One good look at what they were pulling out of the heaps of ordure, and Nicole knew she wouldn’t touch one of those birds if a waiter from Le Bistro brought it.
She’d hated the air she’d had to breathe in the San Fernando Valley, back in the twentieth century: thick, stinking, and the color of filthy old chinos. It had stung her eyes and caught at her lungs with every breath she took. The air in Carnuntum stank worse than the air in the Valley ever had. It was clogged with smoke. It stung her eyes and caught at her lungs with every breath she took.
It was also full of flies. Every time someone walked past, they rose in buzzing clouds from the dung that beasts of burden had left behind, and from the occasional dog turds in the street. At least, Nicole hoped that was what those were. Some of them seemed on the large side for that.
The flies didn’t all go back to their suppers, either. Some decided to take the long way home, pausing to snack on passing animals or, better yet, people. Slapping while walking looked to be as automatic as breathing.
It wasn’t so easy or mindless for Nicole, or apparently so effective, either. In the first few minutes after she’d left the restaurant, she took at least three powerfully annoying bites. These weren’t little itching mosquitoes, either, like the ones that had made the summer evenings miserable in Indiana. These were horseflies — B-52s, people had called them when she was little. Their bites stabbed like a red-hot needle.
Slapping, cursing, wishing in vain for a vat of Woodsman’s Fly Repellent, she turned off her own street onto a larger one. A block or two down, that one ran into a bigger one yet, one big enough to boast a cobblestoned paving. At the intersection sat a fountain from which water splashed lethargically into a stone tank. Women stood around chatting and filling jugs from the tank.
A block farther down the cobblestoned street stood a marble statue, half again life size, of a nude, bearded man. The Getty Museum, twenty minutes from West Hills, had a marvelous collection of ancient statuary; the couple of times Frank dragged her there on one of his cultural-literacy jags, Nicole had admired the cool white elegance of the stone.
This statue was neither cool nor white nor elegant. It had been painted to look as lifelike as possible, down to eyeballs, nipples, and pubic hair. It was, in Nicole’s opinion, one of the tackiest things she’d ever seen. Hadn’t they run a Saudi sheik out of Beverly Hills for painting the statues on the grounds of his mansion like this?
Seeing her astonished stare, a woman in a grimy linen tunic mistook its meaning. She pointed to the marble penis — also half again life size — and said, “I wish my husband got that hard. How about you, dearie?” The woman didn’t wait or seem to expect an answer. She bustled on down the street, chortling at her own bawdy wit.
The statue had to be just as bad a joke as the one the woman had made. Nicole wondered if some civic- minded person would come along and sandblast the paint off the marble to make it decently pure again.
Then, as she rounded a corner, she came on the next one. This was of a woman, mostly and graphically nude. It had been painted with the same loving attention to detail and the same total lack of taste as the male statue.
If that physique represented Carnuntum’s ideal of beauty, Umma’s body was on the skinny side by local standards. At least half of the old wheeze,
Distracted by the statue, she almost jumped out of her skin as a nightmare of teeth and glaring eyeballs lunged out of a shop almost into her face. Just as her scattered wits identified the thing as a dog, a stout iron chain brought it up short. Nicole’s yelp of alarm was lost in its yelp of surprise.
A roar from the shop reduced them both to silence: “Hercules! Blast you to Hades, you fornicating thing!”
The owner of the voice burst into the street, armed with a stout stick and a glare as red-eyed and wild as the dog’s had been. The glare reduced the dog to a whimpering puddle, but the owner never seemed to notice. The stick slashed the dog across the nose; a foot armed with a hobnailed sandal booted it in the ribs. The dog whined piteously and slunk back into the shop, chain rattling behind it.
The shopkeeper tucked the stick in his belt and shook his head. “Damn, Mistress Umma, I’m sorry for that. You know why I got the miserable beast — three break-ins in six months, and the last time the bastards got as far as the cash box before I drove them off. But even with the sign, the blasted dog’s scared off half my customers.” He tilted his head toward the wall, where a neatly painted inscription read, cave canem:
Nicole was still shaking with reaction and a surprising, unexpected surge of anger. “I don’t care if you do have a sign,” she said. “If that dog had bitten me, I’d have sued.” The sentence came as naturally in Latin as it would have in English.
It had the same effect it would have had in English, too. The shopkeeper turned a chalky white, stuttered something she couldn’t make out, and scuttled back inside the shop. Thumps and anguished barks told her he was beating the dog again. Mean or not, no animal deserved that. But what could she do about it? There was no SPCA in this world. For the first time, Nicole really understood what the phrase “dog-eat-dog” meant.
As if the CAVE CANEM sign had flicked a switch in her head, Nicole found herself sharply aware of other signs and scribbles than the ones that announced a shopkeeper’s name and business. The Romans might not have spray paint, but they knew about graffiti. They wrote in chalk on dark walls and, more often, in charcoal on light ones.
MARCUS loves LYDIA, someone had scrawled in charcoal now faded. Nicole wondered if Marcus had done it, or if some of his friends were giving him a hard time. Either way, the graffito had a modern ring to it. Two doors farther down the street she found another, fresher, charcoal scrawl: balbus screwed lydia against this wall. Was he boasting? Was he teasing Marcus? Was he talking about a different Lydia?
Nicole didn’t usually wonder about things like that, questions she might never answer, things she’d likely never know. Somehow, here, now, time seemed more flexible.
Across the street, somebody had drawn an elaborate sketch of a man with a donkey’s head, hanging from a cross, with a normal man standing below, lifting up his hands. Scribbled under it she read, ALEXANDER WORSHIPPING HIS GOD.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nicole murmured in absent-minded English. It hit hard when it hit, as the painfully obvious can do, taking her straight back to Sunday school. So when was this, the age of Christians and lions? Someone here obviously didn’t think much of the Christians.
A scribble like that would have brought Sunday school down around everybody’s ears. No one here seemed to take the least notice of it. Maybe people agreed with it. Maybe it honestly didn’t matter to them. No wonder Julia had thought Nicole was acting strangely when she’d asked about the Christian calendar.
Just down the street from the shop with Alexander’s portrait on its wall stood an enormous building, by far the largest Nicole had seen in Carnuntum.
