The Far Time Incident (26 page)

“The men’s side is closed for renovation,” Xavier explained, “so Chief Kirkland, Kamal, and I will go down to the Forum Baths. Here, you’ll need to give a tip as you go in. Do what others do and try to blend in.”

“I’ve been on a few of these runs before,” Helen said. “As has Abigail.”

“I was addressing Julia.”

Back at the tomb I had asked him if he thought our group would draw undue attention to itself.

“You mean because we have a spectrum of faces and skin tones among us—the ladies on the light side and Kamal and our campus security chief on the dark side?” Xavier had said, misinterpreting my meaning. I had merely thought that splitting up into smaller groups might make it easier for us to move about town.

“Don’t like that term,” Nate had muttered.

“Did you say something, Chief Kirkland?” Xavier asked.

“Don’t like that term.”

“Skin tone?”

“The dark side. It makes it seem like I’m on the wrong side of the law and that rankles the law enforcement officer in me.”

“I agree,” said Helen, possibly to spite Xavier. “After all, the word
light
denotes brightness, radiance, buoyancy.
Dark
, on the other hand, is often used as a synonym for gloomy, sinister, evil, which really is not—”

Xavier raised both hands in defeat. “All right, all right. What I was going to say is that skin color doesn’t determine social status here. Yes, there are numerous slaves in villas, on farms, in shops, some even owned by the town itself. But they come from all over the empire, and are in their position because of family circumstance, war, trade, piracy—Gauls are said to be good herdsmen, Britons excellent for physical labor, Greeks for teaching and secretarial positions, Egyptians for amorous purposes.”

“Really?” said Kamal, straightening his posture and slicking his hair back.

“Probably not in the way you think. If freed, like Faustilla and her sons were when their master died,” Xavier went on, “a former slave can run a business and own slaves himself. Not to mention that the town is full of merchants and sailors and traders from all over the Mediterranean. By the way,” he added, “I’ve put about the story that Julia is my niece, the security chief her husband, and that you two, Abigail and Kamal, are their children.”

“I had them quite young apparently,” I commented. “In elementary school, in fact. I’m only—what?—seven or eight years older than Kamal.”

“I’m maybe thirteen years older, so that’s a bit better,” said Nate.

“And did you think to include me, Xavier?” Helen asked.

“You’re the maiden aunt on Julia’s side of the family.”

That ended
that
conversation.

Helen wordlessly accepted a handful of coins from Xavier. The men continued downhill in the direction of the Forum Baths
and we turned into a somewhat seedy-looking side street. The outer wall of the baths, which was painted reddish orange up to head height, had no windows for us to peek into. “This must be the entrance,” Helen said of a door that stood open. Moist air wafted out from within.

We stepped inside and let our eyes adjust to the darkness. A long, narrow passageway led around a corner. We followed it to a room at whose door sat a remarkably old woman. Helen poured coins into the woman’s leathery hand and she handed us three towels from a table and muttered something listlessly. “Bathrooms through the changing room and out into the palaestra and to the right,” Helen translated. “We must stand out as being from out of town.”

In the changing room, niches in the wall held folded piles of clothes below a vaulted, richly decorated ceiling. Two women stood by a bench, chatting as they disrobed. A squarish pool with stone sides took up the fourth wall, by the entrance. Lamps twinkled all around. We left our towels on a bench, then went through a door that looked like it had been put in as an afterthought, and through a colonnaded walkway into what Helen explained was the palaestra, a grassy area where men would be getting their exercise if their side of the baths was open.

“In there, I think.” Helen pointed.

The bathroom. Communal, but luckily empty. There was a large U-shaped bench of wood on stone, with regularly spaced, keyhole-shaped seats in it. In front, beyond where the feet would go when sitting down, water ran through the room in a shallow channel. There were sponges on sticks next to each of the holes. “Roman toilet paper,” Helen explained.

Once we were back in the changing room, we wrapped ourselves in the towels, having left our clothes in a niche, and donned clogs with thick wooden soles, which stood stacked in one corner.
The towels, to someone spoiled by twenty-first-century luxuries, were not what you might describe as soft or plush.

Abigail glanced at the two women, who had moved over to the square pool, and whispered, “Helen, Julia.”

“What is it, Abigail?” I whispered back. The other guests looked over as if they were surprised by our whispering. Apparently it wasn’t the thing to do.

“I have a tattoo.”

Einstein’s famous equation,
E = mc
²
, decorated her right shoulder blade.

The women were still staring and I gave them a frank stare back, and said to Abigail, in a normal tone, “Well, cover it with a towel.”

We hung about a bit to let the two women go ahead of us, then, following their example, took a quick dip in the changing room pool—cold water—before stepping into the next, notably warmer room, where a masseuse and a hair plucker worked by lamplight, and finally into the hottest of the three rooms. This one had columned walls under a vaulted ceiling, a washbasin at one end, and a marble pool with steam rising from it at the other. Heat radiated from under hundreds of miniature floor tiles, explaining the need for the thick-soled clogs. The walls felt warm to the touch, too, as if a furnace in a nearby room was sending hot air circulating behind the walls and under the floor (the opposite of STEWie’s lab, it occurred to me). Above the birdbath-like washbasin, which was round and the size of a dining room table, was an opening in the ceiling. Sunlight streamed in and sparkled and danced on the water in the basin. Birds and garlands and other beautiful imagery decorated the walls.

“I’ve been wondering if Jacob did it,” Abigail said as we lowered ourselves into the pool, having left our clogs and towels on the double steps that ran alongside it. The water was
very
warm—the ancient equivalent of a hot tub—and smelled vaguely of massage oil and perfume. The two women we had followed in were deeply engaged in conversation but they occasionally sent a stare in our direction. Abigail moved a bit, her back to the tub wall, so they would not be able to see her tattoo.

“Are we doing something wrong?” I asked Helen after a few minutes of this.

She shook her head, her silver hair wet from the shoulders down. “Not necessarily. Staring—people watching, if you will—is the norm in most cultures. To our modern sensibilities it might seem rude, but really it’s nothing of the sort. Just ignore them. Now, what were you saying about Jacob Jacobson, Abigail?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Professor, I like Jacob a lot. His tweets can be quite funny, especially when he’s talking about his classmates. There was this story about a missing umbrella—never mind.” She went on, “But this is his first semester as a grad student. Kamal says Jacob is struggling in his classes, that he didn’t do too well in Ghost Zones in Time. Not only is he supposed to be studying hard in all his classes, he needs to find a research topic, right? Maybe he snapped after Kamal told him he had to redo the final project for Ghost Zones.”

Helen considered this as a hair-plucker-induced shriek echoed in from next door. “Most students who decide they don’t like graduate studies simply leave after the first semester or two. The ones I worry about are those who stick around for years, flailing in their research, never managing to get any concrete results or publish anything.”

I considered her words, leaning back against the side of the pool and feeling my sore leg muscles relax. Kamal, who was the teaching assistant for Ghost Zones, would, I thought, make a fine professor one day. Jacob and Abigail were at St. Sunniva on research assistantships. Would Abigail make a good professor
one day? It was an odd question to consider while I was sharing a hot tub with her. But I rather thought so, even if she was still working on finding a place for herself in the world. And Dr. Rojas’s new ginger-haired student? “Jacob might be struggling,” I said, “but he seems committed to sticking around. I’m optimistic that he—”

Splash
. A wave of warm water hit me in the face. A portly woman with several chins and a mole above one nostril had plonked down into the pool, sending water onto the floor and effectively ending our conversation. I guessed she was well-off by (a) the size of her person, (b) the size of her earrings, and (c) the way the bath attendant (or slave) hovered nearby after helping her into the pool. She dismissed the attendant, ran her eyes over the two women we’d followed in, who did not look as well-off and hadn’t been offered help by the attendants, then turned to us as if she considered us to be the more interesting choice. Haughty eyes contemplated us above sagging breasts for a moment, then she said something in Latin. Helen answered in the hesitant speech of someone who was used to reading, but not speaking, a language. I heard the word
Britannia
. As they chatted, Helen haltingly, the portly woman with gossipy interest, I noticed that she took pains to keep her head above the level of the water so as not to dampen her elaborately styled beehive or wash away the chalky powder that whitened her cheeks and whatever had been used to darken and extend her eyebrows. She reeked of rose-scented perfume; whether she and the other bathers wore copious amounts of perfume as a mark of vanity or to conceal body odor, I didn’t know, and it was probably better not to speculate.

I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, enjoying the luxury and pushing away the suspicion that the water in the pool didn’t get changed much. The truth of the matter was that grad students were at the bottom rung of the hierarchy at St. Sunniva.
This was true of most schools. The uninitiated often assumed that
under
graduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants—TAs and RAs—but weren’t really proper employees, and as such they weren’t entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits.

Still, all that was a far cry from sending people into a ghost zone. Besides, I rather suspected that Jacob Jacobson had found an outlet for graduate-school stress—his steady stream of tweets.

Someone had bypassed the safety calibrations and sent us into a ghost zone, that much was certain. But this wasn’t just
any
ghost zone. Which brought up the question, I thought, sitting back up and feeling the water stream down my neck and shoulders, of how that person had known that Xavier Mooney had purposefully relocated to Pompeii.

And what had pushed one of the four people on our list of suspects—Gabriel Rojas, Erika Baumgartner, Steven Little, Jacob Jacobson—to the point where they felt that the only way out was to send us on a one-way trip?

Feeling refreshed, if not completely clean, we headed back into the changing room wrapped in the towels. The baths were getting busier now and, among the dozen or so bathers and bath attendants, I saw a couple of familiar faces. Faustilla had just walked in, Sabina trailing behind her. The girl gave us an inviting smile—“Yoolia! Helena! Avi-gail!” Grandmother and girl, sweaty and dusty from putting the shop to rights, claimed an empty niche in the wall. As they took off their sandals, I noticed that Faustilla’s heels were cracked, her toenails stained and misshapen. It wasn’t only from old age. Sabina’s were like that as well.

As if sensing my gaze on her, Faustilla turned to look at us. Her glance rested lightly on me, then Helen—disinterestedly, for we were, after all, foreigners and not very rich ones at that—then finally on Abigail. Her eyes lingered on Abigail, who was lacing a sandal, for a long moment, a calculating look on the old woman’s face.

With a shrug I bent down to lace up my own sandals. I was in danger of becoming something of a people watcher myself. First I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Secundus’s proud face, and now I was having trouble ignoring Faustilla. “I get the feeling Faustilla doesn’t like us very much,” I commented, straightening back up.

Abigail was studying the intricate designs on the vaulted ceiling. “Sabina is nice, though, isn’t she?”

“It’s not that simple,” Helen replied. “We know very little about the complexities and nuances of Pompeii society. After years of being at somebody’s beck and call, Faustilla is now a freedwoman—can you imagine what that must be like? It’s customary for slaves to tack on the
praenomen
and
nomen
of their former master to their own name after being freed. This family didn’t.”

I probably wouldn’t have, either, I thought.

“I just wish she were a little nicer to Sabina,” said Abigail.

“I’m sure she has the girl’s best interests at heart. Practical skills, like Faustilla’s herb growing and ointment making, are essential if the girl is to marry and find a place in society. We can’t impose our twenty-first-century sensibilities on them without any regard for this time and place and their station in life.”

At Helen’s words, I resolved to be more understanding of Faustilla. As we headed out, I saw her dip one corner of the sleeve of her dress into the cold basin to scrub a stain off. Though it didn’t seem any less hygienic than rinsing soiled body parts, the deed struck me as particularly off-putting.