“I mean,” Julia said, sounding like a Latinate Valley girl, “I could get drunk all the time, but you wouldn’t like that, either, because then I wouldn’t be able to work.”
“No,” Nicole said, “I wouldn’t like that.” Considering how she felt about alcohol, there were few things she would have liked less. But this was one of them. She might have descended from lawyer to tavernkeeper, but by God, she hadn’t descended from lawyer to procurer. “You’re not going to prostitute yourself just to get a little spending money.”
“Mistress,” Julia said with an air of desperate patience. “It’s not just for the money. You don’t sleep by yourself every night. Or at least,” she added after a pause, “you didn’t till you quarreled with Calidius Severus the other day.” When Nicole didn’t erupt at that — Nicole was momentarily unable to think of anything to say — Julia went on, “Oh, Mistress! I know I’m a slave and you can do whatever you want and I can’t say a thing about it, but you’ve never been as bad as you’ve been in the past few days. If you’ve got it into your head that I’m suffering — how about the pain I feel when I don’t have any money to call my own?”
Her expression was piteous, but Nicole didn’t budge. Mothers of teenagers heard the same arguments in pretty much the same tone. It didn’t mean a thing, and she was not about to let it sway her. “You will not make money by selling yourself,” she said. Julia dropped her wounded-kitten pose and glared. Nicole glared right back.
The moment stretched. Nicole drew in a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time” — ever since her spirit came to Carnuntum, even if that was only two days — “and now I’m sure the time is right. I’m going to set you free.”
This time, she was sure Julia would fall on her neck in gratitude. She waited for it, expected it. But, as before, Julia seemed anything but glad to get such a gift. If anything, she looked upset. “But,” she said, “Mistress, what would I do if I was free?”
Nicole reminded herself again that this was a slave, and probably born a slave. The concept of freedom was alien to her. Therefore Nicole kept her voice light, encouraging. “What will you do? Why, anything you want to. You’ll be free.”
Julia eyed her warily. “Could I go on working here?”
“For wages, do you mean?” Nicole asked.
Julia nodded. She was still wary, with a hint of apprehension, but Nicole had noticed that if Julia got a thought in her head, she couldn’t help but pursue it to its logical conclusion. “Yes, Mistress. Or at least, some wages. Room and board and a little money for myself.”
Which was exactly what she got now — except for the money part, which had just evaporated. Julia was canny, Nicole thought. Behind that open face and simple, forthright manner lay a sharp intelligence.
Intelligence, maybe, but no ambition. Nicole was a little disappointed. “If that’s what you want to do,” Nicole said, “yes, I suppose so.”
Julia looked at her as if she’d gone around the bend again. “School? Mistress, what good would that do?”
Now that Nicole had rather expected. “It would give you more kinds of work to choose from,” she answered. “After all, you can’t read or write, can you?” Umma hadn’t been able to, so it was safe enough to assume that her slave couldn’t either.
Julia didn’t seem to feel the lack. She shrugged indifferently. “What if I could? There aren’t many jobs that need it. Clerk for the city, I suppose, or bookkeeper — but even if I could learn enough or fast enough, I wouldn’t want to be locked up all day making birdtracks on papyrus. Besides, those are men’s jobs. Who ever heard of a lady bookkeeper?” She laughed and shook her head, as if the notion were too absurd for words.
“The wine god and his wife?” Julia asked as if puzzled. “What about them, Mistress? They’re gods. They aren’t bookkeepers.”
“The — wine god and goddess?” Nicole felt as if she’d been slugged in the gut. What had she done to herself? Of all the deities she would have picked to help her…
But they had helped her, snickering at her ignorance, all too likely, but helping her nevertheless. And here she was, in the world they’d chosen for her, and she was damned if she knew what to do about it.
Maybe she was damned. Sunday school had included a long rant on sin and damnation, and a scenic tour of hell. Wine and drunkards had warranted a whole separate dissertation, along with fornicators, whom Nicole had thought of then, in her eight-year-old innocence, as people who had been put to work stoking the furnaces.
It wasn’t particularly warm in Carnuntum, but there was plenty of heat inside Nicole’s skull. It felt as if her brains were boiling. “Liber and Libera,” she managed to say. “Aren’t they — “ She softened what she’d been about to say: “Aren’t they also the gods of liberty?”
Julia thought about it briefly, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. Liberty from care — isn’t that what wine does? Frees your soul from worry, lets you forget for a while that life isn’t going the way you want it to?”
“Liberty — from care?” Again, Nicole’s echo was hesitant and filled with a dismay she tried to hide from Julia. That fit too well with what the god and goddess had done, her last night in West Hills. She’d been filled with care then. Liber and Libera had taken her out of it, had sent her back to their time, back to their town, where she’d thought — where they must have thought — she would be carefree.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Carefree? Wine, lice, slavery — and now sexism, too? Some freedom this was — all the new worries of this time and place, and a whole set of old ones from California, too. It was more than she could take.
She almost prayed to Liber and Libera to ship her back to California. But she wasn’t giving up yet, even for Kimberley and Justin. She’d asked for this. She had to make the best of it.
“Mistress?” Julia said. Nicole nodded to show she’d been paying attention, even if she hadn’t. “Mistress,” Julia said again, “I was thinking. If I work here as a freedwoman, not as a slave, I’ll be able to take men upstairs and keep all” — Nicole’s expression gave her pause, but she misinterpreted it — “all right, not all. But more of what they pay, for myself.”
“If you work here as my freedwoman,” Nicole said through clenched teeth, “you will not prostitute yourself.”
“But why not,” Julia asked, “if I’m free and if I want to?” She searched Nicole’s face as if she could find an answer there. “Mistress, I don’t understand.”
Nicole opened her mouth, then closed it again. Here was an issue she’d never imagined she’d have to face. If a woman wanted to go on selling herself, did another woman have the right to forbid it? She couldn’t face that, not on those terms. She sidestepped instead, as she had with Lucius and Aurelia: “Isn’t there anything else you’d rather do?”
Julia raised her hands and let them fall. “Mistress, you keep saying that, but what else can I do? I can cook some and bake some, so maybe I could work at another tavern, but it’s hard to find one that doesn’t already have its own slave — and slaves work for free. Remember that woman you wouldn’t hire last year because you owned me?”
Again, Nicole made herself nod.
“I’m good at something else, too,” she said, “or the men say I am. But I don’t want to do that for a living, either. I’d have to take on men I didn’t want at all, and I wouldn’t much care for that.’’
Nicole lowered her aching head into her hands. Had she really expected life here to be simple? In California, she’d always known how to react, what to think, what was right and what was wrong. In Carnuntum, there was no such thing as simplicity — not to her twentieth-century mind.
She settled on the one thing that was simple, the thing she had decided on. “Let’s do what we have to do to get you free,” she said, “and then we’ll worry about everything else. How does that sound?”
“All right, Mistress.” Even now, Julia sounded more dutiful than delighted. “Brigomarus won’t like it, I’ll bet.”
“Brig —?” Nicole needed a moment to recall the name of Umma’s brother — now, effectively, her brother.
