There was nowhere to dump the chamberpot except out the window. “Sewers,” she muttered. “This town needs sewers.” She gritted her teeth and dumped the pot as Julia had the night before.

She dressed quickly in a fresh loincloth and tunic, and looked at herself in the mirror in the makeup kit. She looked like a chimney sweep. Most of the smoke that hadn’t gone through the hole in the roof the day before had clung to her.

She washed her face with water from the terra sigillata pitcher, careful now not to get any water in her mouth, the way she would have been in a shower south of the border.

The water was bad, no arguing with that – or with the reek that lingered around the emptied chamberpot. So what was she supposed to drink? Wine? She could water it, she supposed – wouldn’t the alcohol kill germs as easily as it slaughtered brain cells? She’d get a lower dose then, too. Maybe she could work out a formula as to how little wine she could get away with before the water went toxic.

She still didn’t like it. She liked even less that the kids had to drink the stuff in any proportion. Maybe she could talk them into drinking milk after all, and never mind the Marcomanni and the Quadi, whoever they were.

She studied her newly washed face in the mirror. Not a chimney sweep, not anymore. Now she just looked like hell. “That,” she said to nobody in particular, “is why God made makeup.”

Women here, she’d observed, powdered and painted themselves as heavily as a geisha in full regalia – and into much the same dead-white mask. The makeup Umma had used was less finely ground than the pricey Clinique that Nicole had held onto even when money got tight, as her one by-God extravagance. Its texture and color made her think, rather disjointedly, of quite another white powder, one that had been distressingly common in L.A. Rome might lack flush toilets and bathroom tissue – but it was also blessedly free of cocaine.

It was free of powderpuff and makeup brushes, too. She smoothed the powder on as best she could with a bit of rag – no cotton balls, either. Who’d have thought there’d be a world without cotton balls? Or swabs? Or -

Or eyebrow pencils, or lipsticks. Her finger had to do for both, and the rag growing grubbier with each step in the ritual. No cold cream, either, to remove mistakes or clean her fingers. If she could figure out how all those things were made, she’d be willing to bet there’d be a market for them.

It was enough, for the time being, that she’d armored her face against the world. She’d understated the effect – probably people would think she was trying for a little too much of the natural look – but she still looked, to her own eyes, clownish and overdone. “Tammy Faye Does Carnuntum,” she said to her reflection. A smile, she noticed, cracked the paint just a little. No wonder geishas never seemed to wear an expression, just the blank white mask.

It did what it was supposed to do, at least. It kept the world from guessing how lousy she felt.

“Cash box,” she reminded herself, and scooped up that and the key before she headed out the door. She didn’t go straight downstairs, but paused at the curtain to the children’s room. No sound came from inside. She peered in. Enough of the early light seeped through their shuttered window to show them both still sleeping. Their faces were quiet, neither flushed nor pale. Aurelia had taken all the covers, but Lucius didn’t seem to mind. He slept on his stomach with his black hair all in a tousle. He looked nothing at all like either of Nicole’s in the way he slept, but the soft baby-cheeks, the nub of nose, caught at her throat.

That was why children looked the way they did, wasn’t it? So their mothers wouldn’t throw them out before they could walk. Not just their mothers, either. Whoever found herself in charge of them.

Aurelia stirred and kicked off the covers. Nicole froze, but neither child woke. Aurelia was clutching a cloth doll the way Kimberley would have hung onto Scratchy the bobcat. Other toys lay on the floor: another doll or two, a toy cart, a wooden sword.

Nicole frowned at the sword. No children of hers were going to play with war toys – even if they weren’t, strictly speaking, her children.

Her frown changed, darkened. Lucius’ father had been a soldier, from what she’d heard. Titus Calidius Severus was a veteran, too; he’d made that plain. Several of her other customers, from snatches of overheard conversation, also must have served in the legions. A legion had been based around here – she remembered that from her honeymoon day trip to Petronell. Hadn’t Rome had a Vietnam, then? Didn’t they understand what a horror war was?

She shook herself, shrugged. War was far enough away from this here and this now, that there was no point in worrying about it. She slipped backward as quietly as she could, let the door-curtain fall back into place, and trudged down to her work. She was her own boss, after all. Nobody else was going to do it for her. No secretarial pool, no janitorial staff. Just herself – and Julia.

Julia had the tavern open already, the fires going, everything in order and ready to start the day. She greeted Nicole almost too brightly, though her words were solicitous enough: “Good morning, Mistress! How are you doing now? Are you well?”

Nicole caught herself wondering just how smug Julia felt. She quashed the thought and answered as civilly as she could manage, which wasn’t very, without coffee and with none in sight for the next however many hundred years. “I’m all right. I may even live.”

Julia smiled one of her wide halfwit smiles. “Oh, Mistress! The last couple of days, you’ve had such a funny way of putting things.”

Nicole’s heart thudded. God – what if Julia had guessed – what in the world was she going to -

But Julia’s smile had turned conspiratorial. “And here you put your paint on, and you didn’t even bother with it yesterday.”

“Right,” Nicole said a little too quickly. “Yes, that’s right. I didn’t need it yesterday. Today – “

Julia nodded, woman to woman now instead of slave to mistress. “I know just what you mean. There’s nothing like a nice coating of white lead to keep people from guessing you aren’t right underneath it.” She stopped. Her voice rose in surprise. “Mistress! Where are you going?”

Nicole was already halfway up the stairs. “To wash it off! “ she flung back. My God, she thought, over and over. My God! Had she swallowed any? Had any gone up her nose?

My God. Even the makeup was poisonous. And hadn’t she thought it looked a little like cocaine? It was worse than cocaine – a more certain, a more deadly killer than cocaine had ever been. Had she got any in her eyes? Could the blood vessels in her eyes absorb it? God, what was she supposed to do? She didn’t know a thing about lead poisoning, except that it was bad – and she was a prime candidate for it.

At the top of the stairs, she almost bowled over Lucius, who obviously had felt well enough to get out of bed. “Mother!” he called as she rushed past him. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

She didn’t answer. She dived into her bedroom, slammed and barred the door, and leaped on the washbasin. No facecloth, no towel, but rags – rags! She yanked a fistful out of the drawer and dunked them, and scrubbed at her face, over and over, till the skin stung and burned. Every time she splashed herself with water, she made herself blow out through her mouth and nose, to keep from getting any more of the lead into her system. Once she had it all off, or hoped to heaven she did, she took the little pot of makeup over to the window and dumped it out, as she had with the chamberpot not long before. This time, she watched the cloud of white powder drift down to the ground. No one was passing below, to be startled by the small deadly snow. Nothing moved but the flies, seething in the noisome mess that, she could see, lined every house-wall. There’d be a few million fewer, she thought, thanks to her latest contribution.