determined to enjoy the day, and particularly the person she was sharing the day with.
“Nice of you to give Julia time off tomorrow to come see a show,” Titus Calidius Severus remarked to Nicole.
“It’s only fair,” she answered. “Besides, we’ll get along better this way.”
Calidius Severus misunderstood her deliberately, and with a spark in his eye, too. “I like the way we get along just fine.” He’d been over the night before, fresh from the baths and smelling as sweet as anyone ever smelled here. Nicole, remembering one or two things they’d done together between dusk and dawn, stretched almost as Julia liked to, like a huge and sensuous cat. She liked it fine, too — and she was glad of it. Finally, she’d found something in Carnuntum that wasn’t painful, barbaric, or shocking.
Even if nobody got killed or maimed, she hadn’t expected to like the mime show. And yet she liked it very much indeed. It was called
If it had been on TV, she would have called it a comedy-drama. The audience laughed at the machinations of their deities, a level of irreverence that brought her up short. It was as if one of the networks had made a sitcom out of the Bible.
After a little while, however, she stopped fretting. Obviously no one expected to be struck by lightning, or found this levity anything but tight and proper. She settled back with a gusty sigh, and determined to enjoy the show.
The plot was thin, like the plot of a TV sitcom. As with a sitcom, she let it wash over her instead of analyzing it like a legal brief. The music — flutes and drums and horns — was loud and insistent. The costumes were gaudy: yellows and reds and greens of an intensity that no one ever saw in everyday clothes. If Rome had known day-glo colors, these actors would have used them. They had a distinct, almost fluorescent glow as they strutted and danced in the arena where, not so long ago, so many beasts and a single man had died. The women who played the goddesses and Helen of Troy took every opportunity to wear as little as possible. Whenever those opportunities arose, as they frequently did, the men in the audience roared their approval.
Titus Calidius Severus didn’t shout, but he was most attentive to the actresses jiggling and strutting across the ground where lions and wolves and bears had prowled not so long before.
Watching him watch the pretty women, Nicole decided she didn’t mind the way he did it. She could hardly have asked him not to pay attention to them; that was what they were there for, and he was a healthy male with all his hormones in working order… as she had good reason to know. What mattered was that he didn’t give the impression that he would sooner have been with one of them than with his real companion, as so many men would have done. Frank had stared up at an awful lot of movie screens as if he’d forgotten she was there beside him, and not just toward the end, either. And what had he gone for when he was ready to dump Nicole? Ms. Blond Hollywood Bimbo, what else?
She surprised herself, not with the virulence of the thought, but with the coolness of it. Frank Perrin was centuries unborn and half the world away. The edge was off her bitterness. She was too busy surviving in this world to waste energy on a marriage that had been dead long before Frank walked out the door.
Calidius Severus for sure was better-looking than Frank, though Frank smelled a whole lot better. He was also just as attentive to the swordfights as to the women in their skimpy draperies. He leaned forward on the bench, muttering under his breath at this bobble or that wobble. “If I’d used a sword like that,” he told Nicole in a pause between acts, “I’d be twenty-five years dead. “
The swordplay was as obviously choreographed as a bar fight in a Western. Like a Western, it wasn’t meant to be realistic. But she could hardly explain that to Calidius Severus. She settled for the glaringly obvious instead. “It’s only make-believe,” she said.
He muttered and scowled and shifted on the bench, but little by little he subsided. He was almost too reasonable a man to be real. Nicole tried to imagine him in a Stetson and carrying a six-shooter, sauntering into a saloon in time-honored movie-cowboy fashion. It was amazingly easy, though his looks tended more toward the Mexican sidekick than the tall lanky cowhand.
Not very many movie Westerns were as extravagantly gory as this Roman equivalent. Still, despite the copious blood, the killings were obviously faked. She’d believed Calidius Severus when he said there wouldn’t be any excessive realism in the mime, but she couldn’t help the small sigh of relief that, after all, the actors would get up to strut the stage another day.
When Paris and Helen leaped gleefully between the sheets — in this case, a blanket as gaudy as their costumes — that looked choreographed, too. But, as enthusiastic as it was, Nicole wondered if, after all, it was faked. The audience didn’t seem to think it was, or else was delighted to buy into that particular illusion. Men and women both cheered on the performers. The imagination could do a lot with a pair of heads, a strategically arranged blanket, and a set of highly suggestive gyrations.
There was a collective groan when the gyrations ended, and with it the scene. In the next, with neither sex nor swordplay to engross them, the audience indulged in a spate of restlessness. Paris struggled nobly against it, crying overwritten defiance at the Greeks who threatened to come and take Helen back from Troy. But even his trained voice couldn’t overwhelm the shout from a few rows behind Nicole that pretty obviously wasn’t in the script: “Is there a physician in the amphitheater?”
Along with most of the other people right around her, she turned to stare. A man with a seriously worried expression held up a woman who seemed to have fainted. Her eyes were closed and her body limp; her head lolled on the man’s shoulder. Even if she’d been awake, she would have looked sick: her face was flushed, and a distinctive, spotty rash mottled one cheek. It looked to Nicole like measles. She was just old enough to have had them herself before her parents got around to getting her vaccinated — she still felt the sting of the unfairness, and the magnitude of her luck that she’d had no worse than a face and body covered with blotches, and a week in bed being fed whatever she asked for. She’d only learned later how many dangerous side effects measles could have.
She didn’t ever remember being so sick she passed out; mostly she’d been covered with spots and distressingly itchy. This woman had it a lot worse.
Someone was edging and sidling his way down from higher up. “Move aside, if you please. I’m a physician. Excuse me, sir. Madam. If you don’t mind.” She recognized the voice as much as the face and the walk, with its brisk politeness and its underlying air of impatience with the bulk of the human race. Dexter the physician had taken a day off; but, like doctors in every place and time, he wasn’t going to get that much of a break.
The man on the other side of the woman moved over to give Dexter room to sit beside her. It didn’t look like altruism. It looked like getting out of range of contagion.
Dexter ignored the man’s cowardice. He took the woman’s pulse, felt her forehead, and bent close to examine the rash. Nicole turned back to the show, which had indulged itself in another swordfight, but she kept being drawn to the sick woman and the physician. Each time she looked, Dexter looked unhappier.
He murmured something to the sick woman’s companion, too low for Nicole to hear. She didn’t have long to be frustrated. As soon as Dexter had bent over the woman again, the man cried, “The pestilence! What kind of quack are you, anyway? Can’t you even tell when someone’s had too much sun?”
Any doctor Nicole had known in Indiana or California would have blown sky-high if he’d been screamed at like that — either blown sky-high or called in a slander lawyer. Dexter only bowed his head in humility — which Nicole found incredible — or else in the kind of arrogance that didn’t care what the world thought. “May you be right,” he said. “May I be wrong. Take her home. Make her comfortable. Her fate now is in the hands of the gods.”
The woman’s companion glowered at the doctor, but didn’t fling any further abuse. He hefted her up with a grunt, staggering under the dead weight, and maneuvered between the benches to the aisle. People scrambled back out of the way. Nicole was just about to think of offering something, a hand, Calidius Severus’ hand, whatever could help, when a man a row or two down did it for her.
Maybe he was a relative. The woman’s companion seemed to know him, at least. Between them, they supported her in a kind of fireman’s carry and carried her down and apparently out of the amphitheater. She went like a gust of wind through dry California scrub, fanning a spark into wildfire. “Pestilence,” people whispered. Then louder: “Pestilence!”
