No, she told herself. I’d have handled it the same way if she were free and working for me. Maybe that was true. She thought it was true. She devoutly hoped it was.

She shivered, though the room was warm enough. Every word she spoke to Julia, every gesture she made, couldn’t be a normal human interaction. Not as long as Julia was her property. Everything she did, as long as she knew that, was a political act.

As soon as Nicole knew how it was done, if it could be done, she’d have to free Julia. She couldn’t go on living like this, owning another human being, treating her like an object. Pretending Julia was a hired servant didn’t cut it. The truth remained, insurmountable.

Should she free the rest of the slaves, too? For of course there had to be more. Lots of people had to have them, if Umma, who wasn’t particularly wealthy or powerful, could own one. But Nicole couldn’t start right this instant. She didn’t know enough – and reality, in the person of Ofanius Valens, intervened. He fumbled in the pouch he wore attached to his belt. “An as for the bread,” he said, and slapped a copper coin about the size of a quarter on the table in front of him. “An as for the oil.” He brought out another copper coin.

Nicole was glad he knew what everything cost, because God knew she didn’t. “Two asses for the nuts and onions. “ Two more of the copper coins. “And two asses for the wine. Here, I’ll give you a dupondius, because I’m running out of asses.” This coin was bigger and brighter, yellowish instead of dirty-penny brown. It couldn’t have been gold, not if it was worth only two of the copper ones. Brass, maybe? Julia, watching him count up the bill, nodded at the amount. Nicole breathed a faint sigh of relief. She wasn’t being ripped off, then.

“Here,” Ofanius Valens said with a wink, “I’ve got one lonely as left in my purse. If I give it to Julia, you will let her spend it on herself?”

For an instant, Nicole didn’t understand why he’d asked her that. Julia was an adult, wasn’t she? Then realization smote. Legally speaking, Julia wasn’t an adult. Probably, she wasn’t even a person. Which had to mean that, technically, that as belonged to her owner. Before Julia could accept it, Nicole had to assent. “Yes,” she said, trying not to let anger at the system show. “Yes, of course.”

Ofanius Valens nodded and smiled. He hadn’t intended her to refuse, nor given her much room to do it, either, by the signs. Nicole might have lousy taste in men, but she could read them perfectly well – too well, maybe, if you asked any one of a number of male lawyers whom she’d shown up in front of a judge. Men didn’t like to know how transparent they were.

“Thank you very much, Mistress,” Julia said. If Ofanius Valens had expected Nicole to say yes, she probably had, too. Her gratitude had a hint of calculation in it, the calculation of the extremely disadvantaged. If she didn’t grovel enough, she might be thinking, then maybe next time she wouldn’t be allowed to keep the money she got. Children could think like that. So could employees. But there was an edge to it, a hint of ugliness. More than anyone else, a slave had to keep her mistress sweet, or who could say what might happen? If a slave wasn’t considered human, how could she have human rights?

Women still got treated like that in the twentieth-century world – some even in the United States. People in the Third World lived like that. But not like this. Not quite.

And what, Nicole wondered, did this slave really think of her mistress? What was going on, deep down, when she bent her head and said the words she judged it best to say? Nicole shivered. The likely answer wasn’t comfortable. In fact, it was scary.

Ofanius Valens couldn’t know, any more than anyone else in this world and time, what Nicole was thinking – or even that Nicole was there; that it wasn’t Umma standing by him, waiting for him to get up and go on his way. He obliged with a cheerful air, oblivious to any undercurrents. “Tomorrow, then, Umma,” he said. “Then maybe I’ll order something different. Wouldn’t that be a jolt?”

He went off whistling and laughing to himself at what was evidently a great joke. Well, Nicole thought a trifle wryly, there was a rarity: a man who knew how much a creature of habit he was.

She shook her head and forgot about him – until tomorrow. Julia was still standing there, the coin clenched in her fist as if she feared her mistress would take it away after all. Nicole tried to reassure her with a smile. “What will you do with your as, Julia?” she asked. She hoped she didn’t sound too patronizing, or too much like an adult talking, uncomfortably, to a child.

Julia didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with the tone, or, if she did, it was a wrongness she was used to. She answered readily enough: “When things slow down this afternoon, Mistress, if you’ll let me, I’ll go over to the baths – it’s a ladies’ day today – and get clean. Is that all right? I’ll work hard all morning, I promise, so I won’t put you to any trouble. Please? “

A grown woman shouldn’t have to beg like that. Nicole’s anger at Julia’s condition heated up again. She should not have to ask permission for every little thing, as if she were a small child.

There was nothing Nicole could do, not right this instant, except give Julia what little she had to give, which was her permission. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s all right.”

Julia smiled in pure happiness. Considering how rank she was, it had to be excruciating to have to be herself, and smell herself. Nicole wasn’t quite willing to admit that she was surprised. She’d let herself think nobody minded smelling bad – but if that was the case, why did the Romans have baths at all? Lord knew the ruins she’d seen here on her honeymoon were the biggest building in town.

Now she was here, in the time when Roman baths were whole and in use, and she’d passed a milestone. She’d survived her first customer. That was worth a pause, and a gathering of forces. If one had come in for his breakfast, another couldn’t be far behind.

Another customer did come, a few minutes after the first; and two more after that, and then a whole flood of them. Most were men, all hungry or thirsty or both – hungrier in the morning, thirsty as the day went on, hungry again toward evening. Without a clock, Nicole couldn’t know how many hours were passing. She was too busy most of the time to care.

What with one thing and another, talking fast and ducking faster and calling on Julia to do the honors whenever she was caught up short, she survived the rest of the day. By the time the sun went down, she was wondering if she would go down, too: down for the count. In spite of Julia’s promise that things would slow down in the afternoon, Nicole was hopping every moment of the day.

The first crisis came early, when someone bought two cups of wine, some bread, and a piece of smoked pork. Nicole hadn’t even noticed that the tavern boasted smoked pork; Julia used a forked pole to get it down from a hook in the ceiling. The hook was secured in a beam next to a hole through which smoke from the cookfires – or some of it, at least – escaped. As the smoke dribbled out the hole, it happened to preserve the meat. Nicole watched the middle-aged man happily devour the pork – ham, she supposed she should call it – and tried not to think about the carcinogens he must be ingesting with it.

“That’ll be a sestertius altogether,” Julia said. She’d been giving out all the prices this morning, readily enough but with a glance at Nicole each time as if she expected Nicole to do it instead.

After he’d fished in his belt pouch for what seemed like a very long time, the man confessed that he didn’t have enough small copper and brass coins to make up the value of a large – silver-dollar-sized – brass sestertius. His expression was sour. “I’m going to have to give you a denarius, curse it. Jupiter! I hate paying out silver for trifles, when I know cursed well I’ll get back nothing but base metal. Say whatever you like, but you know as well as I do, three bloody brass sesterces don’t come near being worth three-quarters of a silver denarius.”