She was calm again – or calm enough, at least, to face the world. She took a deep breath and braved the stairs again.

Lucius and Aurelia were both down below and both eating breakfast: a little bit of bread without oil, and something in a cup that was probably watered wine. Nicole couldn’t find the energy to make an issue of it.

Julia, of course, wasn’t about to leave well enough alone. “Why did you get rid of your makeup, Mistress?” she asked. “You looked nice with it on.”

Nicole caught herself wondering if Julia was a little slow in the head – or if it was a game slaves played, to ask questions that sounded wide-eyed innocent but were calculated to catch a person in the raw.

If that was a game, Nicole could play one of her own. “Can I get face powder that doesn’t have lead in it?” she asked. And held her breath, hoping she hadn’t come too close to sounding like the foreigner she was.

Julia didn’t seem to find the question that far out of the ordinary. Maybe she was slow; or maybe slaves learned to expect any kind of oddity from their masters. She frowned, as if in thought. “Some people use white flour, but I don’t like it myself – you don’t either, much, do you? No matter how tight you close it up, sooner or later it gets bugs in it. That never happens with white lead.”

“I should hope not!” Nicole said. “Lead’s poisonous.”

“Oh, it can’t be, Mistress.” Julia sounded absolutely sure of herself. “If it were, they wouldn’t use it for water pipes.”

Nicole started to say They do? but stopped before the question was out of her mouth. They did, and she didn’t need Julia’s word for it. The Latin for lead was plumbum. She and Julia had said it close to a dozen times between them. What was a plumber but somebody who messed around with plumbum? It was a lead-pipe cinch that was how plumbers had got their name.

What she did say was, “They shouldn’t.”

“Mistress,” Julia said in a tone that reminded Nicole rather too strongly of her mother trying to be very, very patient with her father when he came home – because he’d said or done something right out of line, but if she called him on it too soon or too strongly, he’d take a swing at her, “Mistress, really, haven’t you been complaining an awful lot, the past day or two?” And about things like wine and water that made you nice and sick, too, Nicole could almost hear her thinking, and look where that got you. “What are they supposed to use for pipes, Mistress? Clay breaks too easy, and wood rots.”

“Copper – “ Nicole began.

“And how expensive would that be?” Julia asked. Impossibly so, her tone said. “Besides, copper’s no good for you. Cook vegetables in copper and you’ll see the verdigris right away, and taste it, too.” She made a face. “And it’ll sicken your stomach faster than drinking water will. That’s why they put lead on the inside of copper kettles, for goodness’ sake.”

“It is?” Nicole said faintly. “They do?”

Yesterday morning, she’d looked around the restaurant with delight. Now she looked again, with growing horror. Some of her cooking pots were lead-lined? Her eye fell on a jar of olive oil, which was made of glazed pottery. What was in the glaze? Every so often, the TV news would report that batches of stoneware from China or someplace were being banned from the USA because their glazes had too much lead. The amphorae of wine under the counter were glazed, too, all but the one that held the cheapest local stuff. You couldn’t even put lead foil over the corks on wine bottles anymore, not in California you couldn’t.

God knew, this wasn’t California. This wasn’t anyplace fit or healthy for human occupation, from the looks of it.

What about the terra sigillata pitcher and bowl in her room? How was she going to know? How could she find out?

God. God, God, God. What was that book she’d seen in a used bookstore once, with the day-glo pink cover? Future Shock, that was it. So what was this? Past shock? Culture shock? Pure unadulterated shock? Nothing here was safe. Everything could poison you. Every little taken-for-granted thing.

Julia was happily oblivious to Nicole’s confusion. She seemed to think they were still playing some kind of game, a game of wits maybe, a test of her cultural literacy. Or was it literacy, if it had nothing to do with reading?

Julia spoke again as the voice of sweet reason, as if that were the role she’d decided she was cast in. “Besides, Mistress, if lead were poisonous, we’d all be dead, wouldn’t we?” She laughed at the absurdity of the notion, the same way people in the twentieth century had laughed at the notion that DDT might hurt the environment.

Lead poisoning was insidious, Nicole knew that. It took a long time to build up. But she couldn’t explain that here, even if there were words to express it. Julia wouldn’t listen, any more than people had listened about DDT, or fluorocarbons, or the hole in the ozone layer.

Julia seemed to have decided the game was over; that it was time to go back to work. Her tone had changed, and even the way she held herself. She was the slave again, carefully submissive; no more arguments, no thinly veiled rebukes. “What would you like for breakfast, Mistress?” she asked.

Nicole wasn’t pleased to note how glad she was that Julia had gone back to being servile again. “Bread and watered wine, same as the children,” she said – and that was a capitulation, too, but she couldn’t see any way out of it. Except possibly one. “The one-as wine,” she added, “nothing fancy.” That was the one that came in the unglazed amphora. If it was bad wine, so much the better. Then maybe she could keep from growing too fond of it.

Even if it didn’t have lead – she hoped it didn’t have lead – it still had alcohol in it. The odor rising from the (unglazed, thank God) cup made her shiver. She could all but hear her father downstairs yelling at her mother, while she lay in bed with the covers pulled up over her head and tried not to listen. She had to will herself to sip.

Diluted, the wine tasted like watery, half-spoiled grape juice. It had a tang to it, a sharpness and a kind of dizziness in back of it, that had to be the alcohol. She’d never tried any before, to know. She’d refused.

Her heart was thumping again, as it had when she discovered her face was armored in lead. She’d thought, somehow, that the first taste would do it: would hit her hard enough to make her stagger. Apparently, that wasn’t how it worked. She sipped again, deeper, and again, till the cup was empty.

Did she feel anything? Was there anything to feel? Maybe she was a tiny bit more detached from the world than she had been before. Maybe she wasn’t. She’d been in varying degrees of fog since she woke up in Carnuntum – and for certain sure she was detached; she was a complete stranger to this whole world and time.

Julia was watching her, nodding sagely, as if she could see an effect Nicole couldn’t feel. “That will do you good, Mistress,” she said.

“I doubt it,” Nicole said. Her belly was rumbling again, knots and snarls that were more nerves than sickness. The wine hadn’t made it worse, at least. She was grateful for that.

Medicine. She could think of it as medicine. Even her mother had had a stash of medicinal brandy, that her father had never managed to find.

Julia’s voice broke in on her thoughts, as so often before: as if it were a kind of lifeline, an anchor to this world. “Are you feeling well enough to go out and buy things today, Mistress, or will you send me? “

Nicole focused abruptly and too sharply, though the edges of things still wavered just a little. Julia was watching her alertly, with a look she’d seen on a dog hoping for a portion of the humans’ dinner. So was this a new game, then? A gambit to get hold of some money, to do God knew what with it?