Still Bath, still a spa, which was clear from the steamy air and the scent of perfumed oils. Not, however, the spa that I had paid twenty pounds to get into half an hour ago. This one had statues. Painted like shop mannequins. And I was in an alcove performing an act which isn’t usually done in the Thermae. At least, I hadn’t done it there.
But his mouth on me felt fantastic. I curled my fingers into his hair, urging him to continue. He looked up at me.
Oh, he was pretty! Dark eyed, red mouthed, short black hair. Was I actually doing this?
It felt like the person who was arching their spine and stifling a groan with the back of their hand was, in fact, me. Someone flicked a curtain aside, murmured an apology, and went away. And then I reached a climax, my friend released me, and I slid down the wall and sat down. I reached for him to return the favour, but he held me off and looked into my face.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name’s Marcus. When are you from?’
‘Last I looked - an hour ago - it was 2013,’ I said. ‘And you are from...?’
‘Dating got a bit miscellaneous with the Religious Wars,’ he told me. ‘Around a thousand years later than you, I think. What’s your name?’
‘Luke, at least, I think so. That’s who I was when I woke up. Before I fell down the rabbit hole.’
He looked puzzled. Alice in Wonderland hadn’t survived, then.
‘Are we still in England?’
‘Yes, if you were in Bath, then you are still in Bath. As was I. Except it was a huge heap of ruins, I was gleaning for metal, and I fell. When I woke I was here. I stripped and dived into the pool - it felt wonderful - and then, well, I managed. And so will you.’
‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have a lot to leave. Any idea how this happened, or whether it’s going to happen again?’
‘None,’ he admitted. ‘Science rather fell into disrepute with the Rise of the Androids.’
I could tell that there were going to be long conversations while I tried to sort out what had happened to history.
‘How could you tell that I came from another time?’ I asked him. He leaned close and nuzzled me again.
‘You smell of soap,’ he said dreamily, sniffing at the base of my neck. ‘Soap and cologne. Here all perfumes are oils and soap hasn’t been thought of yet. I apologise for grabbing you like that but the only reason for being in these alcoves is...’
‘No, no, don’t apologise,’ I assured him. ‘In fact, if you would like...’
He kissed me, which answered that question.
Bath, strangely, didn’t look very different. The cathedral wasn’t there, but the square around the Roman Baths was the same - lots of small shops, though they appeared to be in front of dwelling houses. Marcus clothed me in a short, woollen tunic, which itched like fury, and led me to one of them.
‘This is a caupona,’ he said. ‘A pub, in your time?’
It was an open air place, with huge terracotta pots at the front, sunk into the paving, and a line of cooking pots. The fish stew smelt very good. The blowsy woman with a ladle in her hand said ‘Very good fish stew, best in the city!’
Marcus led me away, up the stairs to an apartment.
I liked the furnishings. It had a broad couch, a couple of wooden tables, a few blankets and shelves containing oil lamps and dishes. It also had two chairs. He pressed me to sit down in one of them.
‘So how can we understand Latin? I never learned Latin,’ I protested.
‘And how can I understand you?’ he asked me. ‘You’re speaking your own version of English. We haven’t even deciphered the 21st century. Not enough data,’ he said sadly.
‘There ought to be loads of data, everyone texts, everyone emails, oh, I see, no electricity, no internet?’
‘For a couple of hundred years using those devices would get you burned at the stake,’ he said soberly. ‘By the time that was past, no one knew how to work them, and anyway they had all died. And there isn’t a lot of written material, mostly business contracts, that sort of thing. And some books. So I can tell you how a lease works and reference the leetle grey cells of Monsieur Poirot, but not a lot more. You’ll have to tell me all about it.’
‘And you’ll have to tell me how it all went so hideously wrong,’ I agreed. He grimaced.
‘So you’ll stay with me?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ I told him. ‘How are you making a living? In the baths?’
‘No,’ he protested. ‘That was just to start me off, while I worked out where and when I was. Now I’m a scribe, and you shall be a scribe too. ‘He took my hand. ‘With this ring,’ he said slipping a heavy iron ring on my finger, ‘I thee make a Roman Citizen. ‘With my body,’ he put my hand on his hip, reflecting the gesture, ‘I thee worship. And with these three sheets of vellum, two pens, ink pot and a ball of pumice, I thee endow.’
‘I do,’ I told him. ‘I’m starving. What can we eat?’
‘That’s why I steered you away from the fish stew,’ he said, grinning. ‘Bread and broth for the beginning. Shall we go and get some?’
My hand was still on his hip.
‘In a little while,’ I said.
I had never been so interested in everything in my life. As Lucius Octavius Aquila I managed to earn enough, writing letters for the illiterate, to buy a linen tunic to put under the itchy woollen one, and the broth stayed down when boiled for five minutes. Roman bread was excellent. My companion and fellow scribe, Marcus Flavius Aquila was delighted with my company and my love and we talked endlessly, comparing, informing, mapping ourselves across history. He had strange gaps in his knowledge. No cosmology at all. No interest in it, either. He knew the constellations, but by other names. An unhesitating belief in ghosts, demons and magic. An instinctive distrust of machines. I shared it. Machines hadn’t done my world a lot of good, and climate change had altered the planet almost beyond recognition.
Human nature hadn’t altered a lot, either. Despots, tyrants, massacres, genocide, religious wars that had ruined whole countries. Humans don’t seem to learn. I should have been sad, I was sad, but I was still fascinated. Wars fought on other planets entirely by robots. Populations herded like cattle and slaughtered for some religious difference. Libraries burned. Heresy trials. Didn’t we learn anything at all from history?
And when we got too miserable about the human condition, we would lie together with warmth and passion and remind ourselves that humans did, indeed, have some good qualities. Love, kindness, gentleness.
The problem I thought I would have with Rome - slavery - didn’t really impinge. Mostly because we were still in Britain, a province. There weren’t many slaves. There also wasn’t a lot of difference between slave and freeman. There was always the feeling that oppressing the natives might mean that the Iceni chariots, their bloodthirsty offended Queen on board, might scythe through the market crowd. And that was bad for business.
And there was something my dearest love wasn’t telling me. We had covered the usual points where relationships can sail blindly onto rocks. Sexual desire? We couldn’t get enough of each other. We had similar tastes in food, wine, entertainment and clothes. We went to the baths every day after we finished scribing, to pumice off the ink and get clean, and he never showed signs of looking for other company, never scratched the top of his head in token of a search. We both missed soap, books and distilled spirits. We sang together - Ferox and other Troggs tunes. No one else could play ‘The Sunshine of Your Love’ so feelingly on a lyre.
So what was it? Was there someone that he had left behind, for whom he was slowly pining to death? I had to find out.