Her expression must have been alarming. The young woman started to babble again. “Mistress, are you ill? Have you lost your senses? You know we have to sell wine. If you don’t, nobody will come here. We’ll all go hungry.”

“I could serve – “ Nicole started to say coffee, only to discover that the Latin she’d acquired had no word for it. She used the English instead.

“Coffee?” The young woman’s accent did strange things to the vowels. “I don’t know what that is, Mistress. Where would you get it? How would you serve it?”

Nicole started to answer, but stopped. Blue Mountain coffee came from Jamaica, Kalossi Celebes from Indonesia, Kona from Hawaii, good old unexciting Yuban from Colombia. She didn’t know much about Roman history, but she was pretty sure those weren’t places the Romans had ever heard of.

Her employee seemed absolutely convinced she couldn’t make a go of a restaurant that didn’t serve wine. Nicole had no way of knowing whether she was right, not on her first morning in Carnuntum.

This was the only guide she had, the only hope of getting through without being labeled insane or worse. She’d seen it in movies, how the alien landed on earth with a head full of data but missing a few of the most important. He was always found out, and then he had to suffer. Did the Romans have police? Government agencies? Whatever they’d call the CIA?

She had to fit in, at least at first. She had to act normal, or people would ask too many questions, questions she couldn’t answer. “Very well,” she said grudgingly. “We’ll keep on serving wine. For now. But,” she went on, and that was firm, “I will drink water.”

The servant sighed deeply, the kind of sigh that said, You may be crazy, but you’re still the boss. “Yes, Mistress,” she said, meekly enough, and poured her a cup from a pitcher on the bar.

Because the cup was earthenware and not glass, Nicole couldn’t admire its crystal clarity as she would have liked. But when she sipped, she let out a sigh of pleasure. Now this was water, water as it ought to taste. What came out of the tap in Los Angeles was as full of chlorine as a swimming pool, and full of God only knew what all other chemicals. None of those pollutants here – just good, pure H₂O.

“See?” Nicole set down the empty cup. “This is what’s good for you.”

“Yes, Mistress.” The young woman sounded even more resigned, and even more dubious, than she had before.

A clatter from upstairs distracted them both from what might have been an uncomfortable pause. The servant smiled. “Here come the children, Mistress. They were sleepy today, weren’t they?”

“Weren’t they?” Nicole echoed. Her employee, fortunately, didn’t seem to notice how hollow her voice sounded. How in the world was she going to convince – how many? – children she’d never seen before that she was their mother? She had no idea what to do or say – no time to think, either, before they were on her.

IT went, thank God, better than she’d dared hope. It still wasn’t easy, not for her, but the kids, like the servant, seemed prepared to take her on faith. Why not? She looked like their mother. She sounded like their mother. Who else could she be?

By now she took in data as automatically, and almost as effortlessly, as she had when she was studying for the bar exam. As she had then, she shut out emotions that wouldn’t immediately serve her purposes, simply recorded them and filed them away to deal with later.

She had – Umma had – two children: a son named Lucius, who looked about eight years old, and a daughter called Aurelia, a couple of years younger. Aurelia reminded Nicole of Kimberley. It wasn’t just that they were near enough the same age, and it certainly wasn’t that they looked alike – Aurelia, naturally enough, looked like a smaller version of Umma. But the way she carried herself, the turn of her head when she looked at her mother, the prim little purse of her mouth, were all strikingly like Kimberley.

It struck Nicole rather strongly, if belatedly, that Umma might be one of her ancestors. The dream she’d had, the double spiral ladder of DNA, could have been the way she’d traveled here. Almost all of her great-grandparents had come to the United States from Austria. Carnuntum was – had been – would be – in Austria. Suppose their several-dozen-times great-grandparents had come from here, from this town?

What a chain of coincidences if it was true: that she should have honeymooned in Carnuntum, that she’d found the votive plaque, that it had become the constant occupant of her nightstand, even long after it stopped being a symbol of her marriage to Frank Perrin. And after that marriage had gone sour beyond all repair, when her job imploded on her and her whole life was falling apart, a prayer expressed as a wish had done the impossible, had brought her down through the long chain of genes into this one of all her myriad ancestors.

Another thought trod on the heels of the first. If Umma was her ancestor, then so was either Lucius or Aurelia – or, for that matter, so were both of them. She swallowed a sudden, nearly hysterical giggle. They were children, half her size. Hard to imagine that they’d grow up, have children of their own, and those would have children, and…

Right now, at this moment in the long skein of time, they were children, as real and unmistakable as Justin or Kimberley. They tore into breakfast as if, if they ate it fast enough, they’d grow into adulthood between the first bite and the last. She kept her mouth shut when they soaked their bread in olive oil and ate it greasy and dripping. They were growing children. They could get away with it.

At least, she thought, they aren’t swilling down cholesterol with the fat. Did people in the Roman Empire even know what cholesterol was?

The children’s table manners could have been better, but she kept quiet about those, too. For now. Lucius wolfed down every crumb of his bread, licked lips glistening with oil, and snapped to the young woman, “Julia! More bread.”

“Yes, young sir,” Julia said, and dropped her own breakfast to rise and do as he ordered. She smiled a-trifle sadly at Nicole. “Doesn’t he sound just like his father, Mistress? He tries so hard to be a little man – so good of him, and so well done, with your poor husband gone among the shades so young. We’ve need of a man about the house.”

Nicole reined in her first response, which was to demand to know what was so good about a man underfoot. So she was a widow, was she? Well, good for the late Mr. Umma, whatever his name had been. At least he’d had the courtesy to die instead of running off with the cute young thing next door.

Lucius snatched the bread that Julia brought him and sopped it in oil, without so much as a word or a glance. Nicole frowned. Table manners were one thing. Courtesy was another altogether. “Lucius,” she said sternly, “that was impolite. I didn’t hear you say ‘please’ to Julia. And what should you have said when she brought you your bread?”

Lucius looked at her as if she’d gone off her head. “What should I have said, Mother?”

He didn’t sound as if he was sassing her, though the words could hardly mean anything else. Nicole took a deep breath and counted to five before she answered. “What about ‘thank you’?”

Lucius’ straight black brows went up. “ ‘Thank you? To a slave?”

Nicole’s mouth was open. She shut it. She looked at Julia in a dawning horror. She couldn’t be a slave. Slaves were something out of -

Something out of old dead history. This was old dead history. This, right now, this world she was living in.

Julia didn’t even blink at what Lucius had called her, or at his tone. She sat back down in her place – a little apart from the others, Nicole saw as if for the first time, and on a lower stool, so that her head was a little below theirs. She kept it bowed even lower as she tucked into her own bread and oil and, with a sort of cautious defiance in the glance she shot at Nicole, her wine.