the same way. Because of that, and because she felt, for a moment, as if she could almost like him, she said, “Besides, it wouldn’t have mattered either way. I was sick last night.”
“Belly, I’ll bet.” Calidius grunted again, apparently a noise that indicated his brains were working. “Julia told me you and the kids were drinking water all day yesterday. What got into you, Umma? One of your new ideas? Water’s handy if you haven’t got anything else, but if you do, forget it. Kids all right?”
“Not too bad, “ Nicole answered. The amphora of Falernian he was carrying for her was glazed. God only knew what was in the glaze, but she could make a pretty fair guess that lead was part of it. But he wouldn’t believe lead was poisonous. Even if he did, so what? If lead killed you, it killed you a little bit at a time. Drinking the water, she’d discovered, was liable to be lethal in a hurry.
“That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad they’re all right. They’re pretty fair kids, they are.”
His stock jumped several points in Nicole’s book. She’d gone out only a couple of times after Frank broke up with her. She might have done it more often if so many men, on learning she had children, hadn’t reacted as if they were a dangerous and possibly contagious disease.
She started down the street away from the market, back toward the tavern, but Titus Calidius Severus held up a hand. “Wait. You still haven’t told me what you’re angry at.”
Nicole gritted her teeth. He was losing points again, and fast. “I did tell you, Calidius: I’m not angry at you. I will be, though, if you keep pushing at me like this.”
“There — you did it again,” he said.
And there it was again: the prickle of alarm.
Thank God, finally — he went on in a growing heat, spelling it out in terms even a time-traveler from West Hills could understand: “How can I help thinking you’re mad at me when you haven’t called me by my praenomen since day before yesterday? If you can’t be that familiar with someone who knows you’ve got a little mole halfway down from your navel, what in Ahriman’s name is a praenomen good for? “
Nicole bit her tongue. Good God! He knew her body — no, knew
Because, she told herself with tight-drawn patience, she’d been too busy overdosing on her new reality — and freaking at the shaved parts south of the mole. But if she did start calling him Titus, would he take it as a signal and assume she was open for business again? She’d been formally polite, and he’d taken it for displeasure. If she didn’t go back to the intimate use, he’d be convinced she really was mad at him. Except she wasn’t. Except probably she was, because he was a man and she was a woman and it was all too clear that relations between the sexes were no easier to figure here than they’d been in Los Angeles.
She couldn’t take all day making up her mind, not with him standing there studying her. Finally, with an exhalation that wasn’t quite a sigh, she said, “I’m sorry, Titus. I just haven’t been myself the last couple of days.”
“Well, that’s so twelve months a year, and an extra day on leap year,” Calidius answered. He too hesitated, as if looking for something else — he couldn’t remember what — that needed saying. Then, as if he’d found it, he grinned. “And I won’t chuck you under the chin anymore, either. I really didn’t know you didn’t like it.”
He was trying. She could say that much for him. Of course, he had an ulterior motive. What male didn’t, in whatever century she found herself in? Nicole nodded, but said simply, “Let’s get on back.”
Titus Calidius Severus started walking. She followed again, with one pause to set down the leg of lamb and scratch her head.
They passed the two graffiti about Lydia, in reverse order this time. Pointing to the one and then, a bit farther along, to the other, Nicole said, “Put those two together and they’re pretty funny.”
“I think so, too, but I’ll bet you Marcus doesn’t,” Calidius said wryly. He walked on a couple of paces, then stopped so abruptly, Nicole almost ran into him. “You read them.” He sounded almost accusing.
No such luck. “All these years I’ve known you, and I never knew you had your letters.” When he frowned, his face looked absolutely forbidding. “Mithras, I can think of plenty of times when you’ve had me read things for you.”
“I’ve been studying lately,” Nicole said. It was weak, but it was the only explanation she could come up with on the spur of the moment. “Not knowing how always seemed such a lack.”
Muscle by muscle, he relaxed; he’d gone as tense facing her as he might have before a battle. “Well, I’ve heard you say that before,” he allowed.
“For one thing, I wanted to surprise you,” she said: again, the path of least resistance.
“You did it, all right,” he said, and chuckled. “And now that you can read a little, you’ll think you can read everything. Isn’t that just like a woman?”
He’d been doing so well for himself. Now he’d pressed the wrong button — no, he hadn’t just pressed it. He’d stomped on it. “I
And she did. She read every sign, every graffito, every inscription between marcus loves lydia and her restaurant and Calidius’ shop across the street from it. She didn’t stumble once. She made no mistakes. After she’d read the sign above his door, she added, sweetly, “And thank you very much for carrying the wine and the raisins all this way… Titus.”
His sour expression proved she’d done that just right. He looked as if he wished he’d been born without a praenomen, let alone been so rash as to make a big deal of it. But under that, and rapidly swelling through it, he looked astonished. “How did you do that? I don’t think I ever heard anyone read that way, not even men who called themselves philosophers. You didn’t mumble the words at all to see what they were. You just… read them straight out. That’s amazing. How do you do it?”
Nicole’s astonishment couldn’t have been much less than his, though she tried to keep it buried underneath her courtroom mask — the one with the faint, superior smile and the slightly lifted eyebrow. She’d gone to a public school in Indianapolis that was no better than it had to be, and then to a medium-good university. That had landed her a job at a medium-good law firm in Los Angeles, which had not even been a medium-good job by the time it was done with her.
Here… Here, if what Calidius was saying was right, simply being able to read without moving her lips set her above the local equivalent of a Ph.D. He had to be exaggerating. He knew more about it than she did, didn’t he? Anybody who’d grown up here knew more about it than she did.
And if it was true, if literacy was as rudimentary as that, it didn’t promise much for the rest of civilization, either. This wasn’t what she’d expected when she’d wished herself to Carnuntum.
She needed to think. There was never time to think. That was just as true here, since she’d wakened in Umma’s bed, as it had been when she went to sleep in West Hills.
Calidius was still waiting for an answer. Simplest, again, seemed best: “I don’t know how I learned to read like this. It’s how I taught myself, that’s all.”
“Amazing,” he repeated, and stabbed the amphora’s pointed tip down into the dirt of the street, as he’d done with the empties he used for urinals outside his shop. He set down the raisins beside the jar and, still shaking his head, carried the songbirds back toward his door. On his way he stopped at one of the jars and pissed in it, as unself-conscious as any of the other men who paused there. Seeing that Nicole’s gaze had followed him, he grinned and let his tunic fall. “My own private stock, from my own privates.”
She didn’t know why she smiled. It was a godawful joke.
