Just Your Average Time Traveller

Indefinite.

"Flame boy! Wake up!"

I heard an urgent whisper calling me from the depths of sleep. The smell of hay around me was somewhat soothing, as I lay in a sleeping bag that had been shoved into my backpack. I wondered how on Earth I had got to sleep with an evil pig sizing me up for dinner. But now, I registered that Shnuckums was huddled peacefully in the corner of the shack. Looking up, I saw Cassia wide awake and wearing the same kind of white clothing and sandals. Her left hand was gripping my backpack, which she had taken from me in my sleep.

"Hey," I groaned. "Give it back!"

She didn't answer, she simply dug around in it and came out with my history textbook. Even in my half-asleep state, I recognised danger when I saw it. Even though I knew this must be some kind of dream, a voice inside me urged me to snatch it back anyway. I lunged for it and put it back in my backpack, taking that from her hands too.

"What was that? It had pictures...and letters I can't read..."

"Nothing," I snapped. The girl frowned at me but let the subject go.

"You smell," she told me matter of factly. "But you can't go to the baths. If anybody sees you they could tell Pompous Pompey..." She seemed to be talking more to herself than to me. Who was Pompous Pompey?

"We have a bathroom inside. It's the only private one owned by someone other than Caesar in Italy. Uncle was very specific that he did not want to bathe with others. It's small, but we aren't going anywhere with you like that."

"Your pig smells of mothballs and droppings. I just happened to share a room with him," I protested.

"What are mothballs?" she asked, frowning. I shook my head in a 'never mind' sort of way.

She took my wrist roughly without hesitating and led me towards the back doors of the massive villa. We entered the monstrous marble archway into the dimly lit and airy living room. There were sofas lining the room and a spotty marble table in the middle with statues of half naked gods in the corner. I never did get Roman art. Mosaics, sure. But men and women without clothes? Is that really considered art?

We walked through another archway and up a spiralling staircase that looked like glass. Cassia was moving so fast, her feet now bare and dainty and so small, that I had no time to dawdle on my lush and majestic surroundings. As we climbed, I tripped about five times, Cassia glaring at me as I stumbled.

Sorry, I thought, but I don't have feet that are twenty centimetres long. Unfortunately, mine are twenty inches.

As soon as I got upstairs, I was thrust into a long blue room with a swimming-pool-sized circular bath in the middle, with smaller baths branching off it. The room was both steamy and chilly. There were torches in little niches in the walls on one side of the room and fans lying by the sides of the pools on the other. There was only one question on my mind.

"Where do I start?"

Cassia rolled her eyes.

"You start at the warm end, move to the middle pool and then the cold end. There's olive oil on the sides and stridgels by the fires over there. Really. It's like you've never had a bath before. I can't say I'm surprised."

Before I could ask a) what I was meant to do with olive oil and b) what a stridgel was, she left. Feeling only a little less lost, I walked forward.

***

"You used too much olive oil. A common beginner's mistake," Cassia was telling me quite casually as we walked down another annoyingly narrow street. I was practically pressed up against her, and I was sort of proud of that because it meant I was doing a good job of keeping up. She didn't seem best pleased about it, though. I realised soon enough that olive oil was a sort of shampoo/shower gel and a stridgel was a metal thing you were meant to scrape it off with. Yeah, not happening. I was pretty sure the smell of olive oil was going to annoy me all day and wondered how these people managed.