travel that far that fast. What had they said about the Ebola virus? If it hadn’t been for air travel, it might never have left Africa.
No air travel here. Of that she was absolutely sure.
What she could do now, and what she was going to do, was buy fish. She bought some trout that didn’t look too flyblown: she’d already seen they were popular in Carnuntum. She bought some bream, too, partly in the spirit of experiment, partly because a couple of them were so fresh they still quivered a little. The fish were cheaper than the meat. In Los Angeles, it would have been the other way round.
The fishmongers strung their catch on the leather thong that the butcher had given her to help carry the leg of mutton. Nicole felt like a comic-page fisherman who’d hooked a sheep along with the rest of his catch. She was glad by then of the wool that still wrapped the mutton: it let her sling the thing over her shoulder with the fish dangling, and carry it a little less awkwardly than if she let the whole lot hang. With the meat and fish balanced on her shoulder and the bundle of raisins and onions under her arm, she paused to run through her mental shopping list.
A stall nearby reminded her of one item that she couldn’t get out of. “Wine,” she said reluctantly to herself. The dealer in the stall she’d seen first wasn’t the only one with wine to sell. They were all ready, no, eager, to sell it to her. Every one of them wanted her to taste his particular brand, too, “To be sure it’s the genuine article,” one said in a voice as fruity as his wine. She couldn’t get out of it, but neither could she tell one wine from the next, except that they were all darker and sweeter than the cheap stuff she’d drunk with breakfast.
Of course she wasn’t about to admit that. She remembered how she’d seen people in restaurants and on TV, sniffing and making portentous faces and tasting tiny bits from crystal goblets. Here she was given a whacking big ladle — God knew where that had been or how many people had put lips to it before her — and invited to taste, taste!
She tasted, for what that was worth, and settled to the inevitable haggle. Meat and fish might be cheap here compared to L.A., but wine cost the living earth.
She didn’t have nearly the luck beating them down that she’d had with the scallion-sellers. “Mistress Umma, it’s real Falernian,” said one who recognized the body she was wearing. “That means it has to come all the way from the middle of Italy on muleback, so you can’t wonder that it’s not cheap. I can’t go any lower, or I lose money.” Something about his tone, the mixture of patience and exasperation, overcame her court-trained skepticism. He was telling the truth as he saw it.
Nicole hadn’t had to worry about transportation costs, except at the office when she had to decide whether to throw something in the mail or FedEx it. No trucks here, she reminded herself. No trains, either. She wondered how long the wine had taken to get here, and what problems it had had along the way.
Once she’d bought an amphora, she had a transportation problem of her own: how to get home with a big clay jug, some dead fish, a leg of mutton, a makeshift sack of raisins, and, for good measure, the green onions. She wished she’d brought Julia after all, even if that meant bringing the children, too, and closing the tavern while everybody was gone. For that matter, she wished she had one of the pack mules that had brought the Falernian wine from Italy.
While she tried to figure out how not to have to make more than one trip — and kept coming up with the answer,
She whirled. There stood Titus Calidius Severus, one eyebrow raised in an expression of sardonic amusement. All he carried were half a dozen dead thrushes, their scrawny yellow legs bound together with twine.
But that wasn’t what he’d asked her. “Thank you, Calidius,” she said with as much grace as she had to offer, and a good bit of relief. “I’d love a hand.”
His mouth tightened. She’d said something wrong, and she didn’t even know what. Nor did he say anything that might give her a hint. He simply picked up the amphora and the raisins, leaving her with meat, fish, and scallions, and strode off through the market. Nicole followed, not least because she was sure he knew how to get back. She wasn’t at all sure she did.
As they were leaving the market square, four men tramped past them. They weren’t Romans; they were speaking a guttural language Nicole didn’t understand. It reminded her somehow of the German she’d heard on her honeymoon. She didn’t think it was — didn’t think it could possibly be — the same language, but she couldn’t have proved it, not with only a dozen or so words of German to call her own.
Even if the men had been speaking Latin, she would have tagged them for foreigners. They were taller, thicker through the chest, and ruddier than most of the locals. They let their beards and hair grow longer than the Romans did, and — Nicole’s nose wrinkled — used rancid butter for hair oil.
They wore the first trousers she’d seen in Carnuntum — baggy woolen ones, tied tight at the ankles — and short tunics over them. Each of them wore a long sword on his left hip.
They stared around the square as if they owned it, or perhaps as if they planned on robbing it. People stared at them, too, in fear and alarm, and muttered behind their hands. Nicole had seen exactly the same reaction in Topanga Plaza when a pack of gangbangers walked into the Wherehouse or Foot Locker.
“Mithras curse the Quadi and Marcomanni both to the infernal depths,” Calidius Severus growled. He was eyeing the strangers as a cop might eye gangbangers at the mall. He’d made it plain he was a veteran. Had he fought these Quadi or Marcomanni? Maybe he had, from the bitterness in his tone. “Miserable barbarians have their nerve, coming into town to buy this and that when they invaded the Empire three years ago not far west of here.”
“Invaded?” Nicole said, and then, hastily, “Yes, of course.” Odd bits of gossip began to fit together like pieces of evidence. The Marcomanni had conquered Aquileia in Italy, and been driven back from it. She didn’t know where in Italy Aquileia was, but nowhere in Italy was particularly close to the Danube. She shivered a little, though the day was fine and mild. “It must have been quite an invasion.”
“That it was.” To her relief, Calidius didn’t notice the odd phrasing; he was intent on his own thoughts. “Some officers I’ve talked with — educated fellows, you know — say it was the worst since the Cimbri and Teutones came down on us, and that was — what? — almost three hundred years ago”
She stayed close to Titus Calidius Severus. He hadn’t been afraid of the Marcomanni or Quadi or whoever they were. He’d been angry at them. From the way he stamped resolutely ahead, he was still angry. But that anger might not all have been aimed at the men he called barbarians: after a while, he said, “Umma, if you tell me what you think I’ve done wrong, I may decide to be sorry for it. If it’s something I ought to be sorry for.”
Nicole couldn’t quite suppress the twitch of a smile at his careful phrasing. He could have been a lawyer, with that kind of mind. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong,” she said.
She was glad he was in front of her, so he couldn’t see her wince. Something she hadn’t expected to deal with when she traveled in time: the past life of the body she wore. People made assumptions about her. They expected things of her, things she was supposed to do or think or say, because Umma had always done or thought or said them. Sometimes, as with Lucius and Aurelia, it came in handy. Sometimes…
The fuller and dyer stopped and looked back at her then. Fortunately, she’d managed to pull her face straight. Calidius was nothing if not forthright: “Then why didn’t you want me to come over last night?”
“Because I didn’t feel like it,” she answered, not angrily but without any hesitation, either. If he made a habit of coming on by whenever he felt like a roll in the hay, he was going to have to get himself some new habits.
He grunted. “All right. Can’t expect a woman to know her own mind from one day to the next, I guess.” Before she had a chance to bridle at that, he redeemed himself, at least in part, by adding, “Women likely say the same about men. I’ve known enough who’d give you cause to, anyhow.”
If he was in the habit of mocking everyone impartially, she could deal with that. All the cops she’d ever known, in Indiana and California alike, were the most cynical people on the face of the earth. Maybe soldiers were
