A block farther down the cobblestoned street stood a marble statue, half again life size, of a nude, bearded man. The Getty Museum, twenty minutes from West Hills, had a marvelous collection of ancient statuary; the couple of times Frank dragged her there on one of his cultural-literacy jags, Nicole had admired the cool white elegance of the stone.

This statue was neither cool nor white nor elegant. It had been painted to look as lifelike as possible, down to eyeballs, nipples, and pubic hair. It was, in Nicole’s opinion, one of the tackiest things she’d ever seen. Hadn’t they run a Saudi sheik out of Beverly Hills for painting the statues on the grounds of his mansion like this?

Seeing her astonished stare, a woman in a grimy linen tunic mistook its meaning. She pointed to the marble penis – also half again life size – and said, “I wish my husband got that hard. How about you, dearie?” The woman didn’t wait or seem to expect an answer. She bustled on down the street, chortling at her own bawdy wit.

The statue had to be just as bad a joke as the one the woman had made. Nicole wondered if some civic-minded person would come along and sandblast the paint off the marble to make it decently pure again.

Then, as she rounded a corner, she came on the next one. This was of a woman, mostly and graphically nude. It had been painted with the same loving attention to detail and the same total lack of taste as the male statue.

If that physique represented Carnuntum’s ideal of beauty, Umma’s body was on the skinny side by local standards. At least half of the old wheeze, You can’t be too thin or too rich, didn’t apply here. Somehow, Nicole suspected the other half was still in force.

Distracted by the statue, she almost jumped out of her skin as a nightmare of teeth and glaring eyeballs lunged out of a shop almost into her face. Just as her scattered wits identified the thing as a dog, a stout iron chain brought it up short. Nicole’s yelp of alarm was lost in its yelp of surprise.

A roar from the shop reduced them both to silence: “Hercules! Blast you to Hades, you fornicating thing!”

The owner of the voice burst into the street, armed with a stout stick and a glare as red-eyed and wild as the dog’s had been. The glare reduced the dog to a whimpering puddle, but the owner never seemed to notice. The stick slashed the dog across the nose; a foot armed with a hobnailed sandal booted it in the ribs. The dog whined piteously and slunk back into the shop, chain rattling behind it.

The shopkeeper tucked the stick in his belt and shook his head. “Damn, Mistress Umma, I’m sorry for that. You know why I got the miserable beast – three break-ins in six months, and the last time the bastards got as far as the cash box before I drove them off. But even with the sign, the blasted dog’s scared off half my customers.” He tilted his head toward the wall, where a neatly painted inscription read, cave canem: Beware the dog.

Nicole was still shaking with reaction and a surprising, unexpected surge of anger. “I don’t care if you do have a sign,” she said. “If that dog had bitten me, I’d have sued.” The sentence came as naturally in Latin as it would have in English.

It had the same effect it would have had in English, too. The shopkeeper turned a chalky white, stuttered something she couldn’t make out, and scuttled back inside the shop. Thumps and anguished barks told her he was beating the dog again. Mean or not, no animal deserved that. But what could she do about it? There was no SPCA in this world. For the first time, Nicole really understood what the phrase “dog-eat-dog” meant.

As if the CAVE CANEM sign had flicked a switch in her head, Nicole found herself sharply aware of other signs and scribbles than the ones that announced a shopkeeper’s name and business. The Romans might not have spray paint, but they knew about graffiti. They wrote in chalk on dark walls and, more often, in charcoal on light ones.

MARCUS loves LYDIA, someone had scrawled in charcoal now faded. Nicole wondered if Marcus had done it, or if some of his friends were giving him a hard time. Either way, the graffito had a modern ring to it. Two doors farther down the street she found another, fresher, charcoal scrawl: balbus screwed lydia against this wall. Was he boasting? Was he teasing Marcus? Was he talking about a different Lydia?

Nicole didn’t usually wonder about things like that, questions she might never answer, things she’d likely never know. Somehow, here, now, time seemed more flexible.

Across the street, somebody had drawn an elaborate sketch of a man with a donkey’s head, hanging from a cross, with a normal man standing below, lifting up his hands. Scribbled under it she read, ALEXANDER WORSHIPPING HIS GOD.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nicole murmured in absent-minded English. It hit hard when it hit, as the painfully obvious can do, taking her straight back to Sunday school. So when was this, the age of Christians and lions? Someone here obviously didn’t think much of the Christians.

A scribble like that would have brought Sunday school down around everybody’s ears. No one here seemed to take the least notice of it. Maybe people agreed with it. Maybe it honestly didn’t matter to them. No wonder Julia had thought Nicole was acting strangely when she’d asked about the Christian calendar.

Just down the street from the shop with Alexander’s portrait on its wall stood an enormous building, by far the largest Nicole had seen in Carnuntum. City hall? she wondered. State capitol? Whatever it was, it was busy. People – all men, she noticed with a reflexive feminist sting – bustled in and out of several side entrances. Smoke poured from the slits of windows and out the doors as people came and went. In Los Angeles, she’d have been sure the place was on fire. In Carnuntum, where chimneys hadn’t been invented, smoke seemed ubiquitous and, for all she could tell, harmless.

Nicole walked along beside the building for what had to be 150 yards before she came to a corner. Around that she found what she’d been hoping for: the main entrance. It was even more floridly ornate than she’d started to expect. An inscription ran above it in the spiky and portentous Roman capitals, proclaiming that Marcus Annius Libo, to celebrate assuming the consulship for the second time during the reign of the august Emperor Hadrian, had erected for the city of Carnuntum these… public baths.

Nicole laughed out loud. “That’s right!” she said, remembering the ruins again. Any town whose grandest building was a bathhouse was her kind of place. She wondered if it was as fancy on the inside as its white-marble, columned elegance suggested. On impulse, she started up the low stairs. She hadn’t bathed the day before, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d missed before that.

But, at the top of the stairway, a bored-looking attendant held up a hand to stop her. “Gents today,” he said. “Ladies yesterday, ladies tomorrow, gents today.” He sounded like a broken record.

“Oh. “ Nicole felt like an idiot. Hadn’t Julia said yesterday was a ladies’ day? So men and women alternated. How bloody inefficient. Couldn’t they have had separate sections? Alternating half-days? Coed facilities? What if someone needed a bath now and it was the wrong day? What was she supposed do then?

Damn it, her skin was crawling just thinking about two days without a hot shower, let alone an all-over bath.

She opened her mouth to say something of that, but shut it again. She wasn’t, at the moment, feeling quite up to fighting weight. As she turned on her heel, letting that be her whole expression of temper, she stopped short. Two women strolled out of the baths, laughing and chattering and jingling coins in little dyed-leather pouches. Nicole forgot the flutter in her belly and the ache in her head. She rounded on the doorman, porter, whatever he was, and jabbed an indignant finger in their direction. “What about them?”