Household Gods

“Sweet Isis the merciful!” he cried. He mumbled his slow way through the three-line contract, then scrawled something that might have said Julius Rufus below it. “There! Are you happy now?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Nicole said, and seized the papyrus and stowed it away in the box before he could think of grabbing it for himself. She turned to Julia. “Pour this nice man a cup of Falernian, if you please.” She was the soul of politeness now, even if she’d been a barracuda only moments before. Why not? Nothing wrong with being friendly after she’d got her way.

10

Well have good weather for the beast show,” Titus Calidius Severus said, as smug as if he’d ordered it especially for the occasion. “This sort of thing is a lot less fun in the rain and mud.”

“Yes,” Nicole said, barely remembering to answer him at all. She was excited out of all proportion to the occasion, almost quivering with eagerness at the chance to do something out of the ordinary. She’d even fixed herself up with a sitter: she’d promised Julia a couple of extra sesterces above her usual wages, to ride herd on things. Julia had agreed so readily, Nicole suspected she was plotting to earn a few more sesterces on the side — or on her back.

Nicole almost didn’t care. Or, no: she cared. But there wasn’t anything she could do about Julia once Julia was out of her sight. And she wanted — God, how she wanted — to get away for the day.

“This will be — “ she began, but stopped abruptly, before she said something she might regret.

Titus Calidius Severus wasn’t about to let her off that particular hook. “Be what?” he asked in all apparent innocence.

“Fun,” Nicole said after a pause. It wasn’t what she’d intended to say. But, while this would be the first time she’d gone outside the walls of Carnuntum, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Umma had done so. Nicole wasn’t about to blow her cover now. Not after all this time.

A clamoring throng of people streamed toward the southwestern gate of the city, all heading, as she was, for the amphitheater. They chattered as they went, sounding at least as excited as she felt. “Lions, I heard,” one said. “I heard tigers,” somebody else declared. People scoffed at that, to his evident disgust: he folded his arms and set his jaw and retreated into injured silence. “Bears,” a woman said behind him. “There are always bears.”

“Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!” Nicole was wearing sandals, not ruby slippers, and the road was neither yellow nor brick, but she kicked up her heels regardless.

Cahdius Severus didn’t seem to find anything too strange about her behavior, though his glance was more than a little amused. “I’m with everybody else except that one idiot,” he said: “I won’t believe they’ve got tigers till I see ‘em with my own eyes.”

Nicole blinked at the absolute literality of his comment. For an instant — a very brief instant — she felt a little of the old, sinking sensation, the awareness that went all the way to the bone, that no, indeed, she wasn’t in Kansas anymore; nor in West Hills, either. She felt more as if she’d fallen into a sword-and-sandal epic from late- night TV.

They jostled through the gate. In the sudden coolness beneath it, as people crowded together to pass the bottleneck, Nicole found herself pressed against Calidius Severus. She had to clutch at his shoulder or trip and fall. He caught her easily, as if he’d done it often before, and held her in a calm familiar grip.

She stiffened. He let go. Neither exchanged a glance. Nicole was still breathing hard as she emerged into the sunlight. It was painfully bright after the dimness of the gate. That was why she blinked so hard, she told herself; and she’d been pushed to go a fair bit faster than she wanted to, to keep up with the crowd. That was why her breath came so quick. Of course it was. She wasn’t feeling anything toward the man who walked decorously beside her.

The amphitheater stood not far outside the city’s walls, a couple of hundred yards, she reckoned, surrounded by a meadow of knee-high grass.

At the sight of it, Nicole stopped cold. She’d come this way before, and seen almost exactly the same view, on her honeymoon. Frank had stood beside her then, a good deal cleaner and a good deal sweeter-smelling than the man who was with her now.

The impact, the sense of deja vu, was much stronger than it had been inside the baths. She’d seen only the floor plan, so to speak, in a twentieth-century landscape of ruins and modern town. Here and now…

Even in the late twentieth century, the amphitheater had been clearly recognizable for what it was, with banks of earth leading down toward a central stage dug out well below ground level. Eighteen-hundred-odd years had changed remarkably little. In this much older time, retaining walls supported the banked earth, but they had a look of surprising age: well-seasoned timbers and stone much worn and overgrown with moss. Nicole on her honeymoon had been bored, jetlagged, and only vaguely interested in old dead things. In this old dead world that felt all too distinctly here-and-now, she knew a moment’s vertigo, a confusion of places and times. That was then — nearly two thousand years in the future. This was now, eighteen hundred years in her own past.

She must have looked alarming. “You all right, Umma?” Titus Calidius Severus asked in evident concern.

“Yes,” she said quickly, and as firmly as she could. She pulled herself together and made herself walk on. “Maybe a touch of the sun.”

He eyed her sidelong, but he didn’t call her on the lie. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You won’t end up all brown like a farm woman.”

In the twentieth century, leaving skin cancer out of the equation, tan was in — it showed you weren’t confined to a factory or an office all day long. Here, it was just the opposite: a pale face was a face that hadn’t been out sweating in the sun all day. But both meant the same thing: leisure to do whatever you liked, whenever you wanted to do it.

Nicole’s head had begun to ache, as it usually did when she’d had enough of here-and-there, now-and-then. She distracted herself as she had before, with the details of her surroundings. The countryside, like the amphitheater, hadn’t changed much — wouldn’t change much — in eighteen centuries. It was still meadows and grainfields and patches of woods, with an apple orchard or two for variety. One of the meadows, off to the east, was planted thickly with — stones?

Gravestones. It wasn’t a meadow; it was a cemetery.

She shivered slightly. To the Nicole who had stood here — would stand here — eighteen centuries from now, all this country, and all these people, were dead. Long dead and gone to dust.

Her gaze swept south, toward what on her honeymoon had been Carnuntum’s largest and most imposing Roman monument. The locals called it the Heidentor, the Heathen Gate, a huge stone archway more than fifty feet tall. It had been partly ruined when she saw it. She wondered, as her eye searched for it, what it would look like intact.

It wasn’t there.

She stopped once more, gaping. The first emotion she felt was an absurd sense of outrage, as if she’d been cheated. Where in hell had the stupid thing gone? You couldn’t just pick up that much stone and drop it in your purse.

The answer came belatedly and with somewhat of a shock. The Heidentor hadn’t been built yet. When, in the United States, she’d thought about the Roman Empire at all — which hadn’t been any too bloody often — she’d envisioned its history as a single, compact entity. The Roman Empire. It was there, and then it was gone. There wasn’t any depth to it, or any development. It just was.

But that wasn’t actually the way things worked. There were lifetimes upon lifetimes’ worth of Roman Empire — and the lifetime in which the Heidentor went up hadn’t happened yet. She wondered how far in the future it lay. Would she live to see it built, or even begun? How long did something like that take to build?

“Come on,” Titus Calidius Severus said, loud in her ear, still determinedly amiable. “You keep stopping. Shall I dangle a parsnip in front of your face, the way the farmers do when their donkeys won’t go?”