by Judith Tarr
A squad of legionaries streamed past, running east toward the nearest wall. The iron scales of their armor clattered against one another. They would have sounded much the same if they’d been wearing suits made of tin cans. Nicole wondered if any of them was carrying one of Brigomarus’ shields.
Julia tugged at Nicole’s tunic, urgent as a frightened child. “What can we do, Mistress? Where shall we go? How can we hide?”
Nicole took a deep breath. She’d have loved to cling to someone bigger and stronger, too, but there wasn’t anybody here to take on the job. “I can’t think of a thing to do that we aren’t doing already,” she said. “Let’s just sit tight.”
Julia was white around the edges, and her eyes were wild. She was coping better, at that, than anyone outside.
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, ran a fragment of what couldn’t have been a real poem, odds are you don’t understand the situation.
Julia, unfortunately, understood all too well. “If they get into the city, Mistress — “
She didn’t go on. Nor did she have to. Nicole had seen enough televised horror to have some idea of what could happen. She’d never in her wildest nightmares imagined that it might happen to her.
Suddenly, she began to laugh. Julia’s eyes opened even wider. Nicole took the freedwoman by the arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go across the street.” Julia plainly thought she was crazy, but equally plainly was not going to let Nicole out of her sight.
Gaius Calidius Severus was stropping a sword that must have belonged to his father. The edge had already taken on a sheen, striking against the dull gray-black of the blade. He looked up from his work in surprise. “Mistress Umma! Julia! What are you doing here?”
Julia didn’t have any answer for that. Nicole took a deep breath. As always, the fuller and dyer’s shop stank. This once, the ammoniacal reek was not only welcome, it was a blessed inspiration. “If the Germans get into Carnuntum, who knows what they’ll do?” she said. “Whatever it is, I don’t want them doing it to Julia and me.” She beckoned briskly. “Come here, Julia.”
Obedient as if she were still a slave, Julia followed Nicole to a wooden tub in which wool was soaking in stale piss. “Here, dip your arms in it up to the elbow. Splash yourself with it, too,” she said, matching action to words. “If any German wants something from us that we don’t feel like giving, he’ll need a strong stomach.”
Julia gaped. The laughter that burst out of her was half hysterical, but it was laughter. She kissed Nicole on the cheek; the corner of her mouth barely brushed the corner of Nicole’s. “Mistress, how did you ever think of anything so clever?” She plunged her arms into the vat with a good will, and with much less revulsion than Nicole had felt.
“That is clever,” Gaius Calidius Severus said, running a fingertip down the edge of the blade. He frowned, and went back to his stropping.
“Do you know what to do with that thing?” Nicole asked him.
“As much as my father and his friends taught me,” he replied calmly. “Better to use it on the Quadi and Marcomanni than to sit around here till they use their swords on me, don’t you think?” He left off stropping, tested it this time on his arm. It shaved a neat patch of soft black hair. He nodded, satisfied. Before Nicole realized what he was up to, he sprang to his feet and loped out of the shop. “Shut the door behind you when you leave, will you?” he called back over his shoulder.
By the time Nicole pulled the door closed, Gaius Calidius Severus was around the corner and out of sight. “How much chance do you think he has?” she asked Julia.
It wasn’t quite a rhetorical question, and Julia didn’t treat it as such. She shrugged. “Who knows? It’s in the gods’ hands.” Nicole looked down at her own hands, which still stank of sour piss. Julia went on, “If we can keep the barbarians outside the wall, we’ll be all right. If we can’t — “ She shrugged again.
That about summed it up, Nicole thought. She led Julia back across the street.
Lucius was sitting on the stoop, playing with the dice from his Saturnalia gift. As they came within smelling distance, he wrinkled his nose and made as if to push them back into the street. “What have you been doing, swimming in Gaius’ amphorae? You stink!”
“That’s the idea,” Julia said.
“You bet it is,” Nicole agreed. “Nobody messes with a — “ She wanted to say skunk, but Latin lacked the requisite word. She did the best she could:“ — with a polecat.”
“You smell worse than a polecat,” Lucius declared. He got up and ran off — fortunately inside and up the stairs, not out in the panicky streets. Nicole shrugged, sighed, and almost gagged. God, she smelled bad. “We’d better wash our hands,” she said to Julia, “or we’ll make our customers sick.”
“Sick of the way our food tastes, that’s for sure,” Julia said. That wasn’t quite what Nicole had meant, but it wasn’t wrong, either.
As it happened, they had only a handful of customers. The people who weren’t trying to hold the Marcomanni and the Quadi out of Carnuntum were staying close to home.
Nicole couldn’t blame them. She was doing the same thing, and trying to figure out how long the supplies in the tavern would last for her and Lucius and Julia if they couldn’t get any more. She hadn’t stored away the emergency kit — she’d kept putting it off. She swore at herself for not doing it as soon as she thought of it.
It was a tense, watchful day, punctuated by shouts and screams from the direction of the wall, which was only a couple of hundred yards away. Every so often, she or Julia or Lucius or sometimes all of them together would go out into the street and listen to the fighting.
Sometimes a cry would ring clearly through the general din: “Ladders!” or “Look out!” or “There they are!”
Once, a rattling crash startled Nicole half out of her skin. “What in the gods’ name was that?”
“Ladder full of Germans in armor going over, I hope,” Lucius answered.
Nicole hoped so, too. She was astonished to discover how much. She’d been a politically correct, enlightened woman, with a properly modern attitude toward war: A plague on both their houses. But now she was inside one of the houses. Amazing, how much difference that made.
A little before noon, the quality of the noise from the wall changed: it grew both louder and more frantic. A moment later, a man in a torn and filthy tunic came running down the street, shrieking, “The Germans! The Germans are in Carnuntum!”
Nicole was very calm. Calmer than she’d ever thought she’d be. She stayed by the bar where she usually was when business was slow and the chores were done. It happened to be within easy reach of the shelf on which she kept the knives.
Not that she was sure she could use a knife on another human being, or, if she could, whether it would do anything much more than make an attacker angry, but she wanted the option. It made her feel better; and that, in the circumstances, mattered a great deal.
The shouting died down for a while. Then, rather abruptly, it came back in force. The tavern was empty; the last customer had gulped his wine, left half a loaf behind, and headed on home.
Nicole went to the door, shut it and barred it. She turned in the sudden gloom. “Julia, Lucius, shut the side windows,” she said. “We’ll leave the front ones halfway open.” Neither Julia nor Lucius argued with the order. As Julia closed the shutters on one side, she said, “There — now we can see out, but nobody can see in; it’s too dark. That’s clever — as clever as slathering piss on us to keep the barbarians away. You’re lucky, Mistress; you can be clever even when you’re scared to death.”
Not lucky, Nicole thought. Combat-trained in the streets of Los Angeles. And by an awful lot of war movies. Still, she felt a small quiver of pride, one of the very few she’d felt since she came to Carnuntum. Nothing she did might make the least difference, she knew that, but it felt good to do something — and to be admired for it, besides.
Would Umma have been as clev
er? It was hard to tell, from Julia’s reaction. And Lucius was too scared to notice much, and too busy hiding it to care if his mother was acting out of character again.
Iron clanged on iron, too close for comfort and getting closer fast. It sounded like kids at a construction site, playing let’s-make-the-biggest-racket with lengths of steel reinforcing rod. Which meant — she found that she was breathing too shallowly; she made herself draw a deeper breath — those were swords clashing on swords. And it wasn’t a game. It was real.
Caution would have kept her deep inside the tavern, even upstairs if she’d been truly sensible, but she found herself beside one of the front windows, peering cautiously around the shutter. Julia had done the same, and Lucius crept in under Nicole’s arm like a dog in need of a pat.
A Roman legionary turned at bay in front of the tavern. His helmet was gone, his curly dark hair a wild tangle. He was panting and cursing, both at once. Sweat cut channels of clean olive skin through the dust caked on his face. A big redheaded German hammered at him with a sword that looked twice the size of his short, thick-bladed gladius.
Even so, he was holding his own, even driving the German back with thrusts and stabs of his weapon. Then a second German, loping down the street, took in the situation with the blue flash of a glance, grinned, and hacked him down.
That’s not fair, Nicole thought. As if there were anything fair about the game these men were playing. All’s fair in love and war. Love she’d thought she knew. And this was war.
The big redhead’s sword swung up. It came down with a sound like a cleaver smacking a side of beef. Just like that.
The legionary screamed, a shrill wail like a woman’s, breaking into a wet gurgle. The German’s sword rose and fell, rose and fell.
The second German, who’d stood back to rest and watch, waded in after a while and joined in the butchery. The gray iron of their blades was red with blood. With every stroke, scarlet drops flew wide, spattering the walls and the street.
The redhead stopped first, looked down at the red glistening thing that just a few moments ago had been a man, and said clearly, “Dauths is ist.”
He’s dead, Nicole thought. That’s what it means.
The second German threw in a last, contemptuous blow, laughed — a weird, wild sound — and loped off down the street. The other followed at a trot.
Nicole didn’t want to look down. But she had to. She had to know. The Roman lay in a scarlet pool of blood. His head was almost severed from his body. His arms were hacked almost out of recognition; his armor was split and torn. His bare legs beneath the pleated military kilt were intact and almost unbloodied. And they twitched, grotesquely, as if he were still in some way alive.
No. Not with his head at that angle. He was dead, as the German had said. Very, very dead.
The contents of Nicole’s stomach stayed where they belonged. That surprised her a little. She was keeping it at a distance; closing it off in a small, tight compartment, and sitting firmly on the lid. Eventually she’d blow. But not now and, if she was lucky, not soon.
She could think clearly, therefore, and think through what this meant. Last year in the market square, she’d seen the Marcomanni and Quadi as gangbangers strutting around on enemy turf. If gangbangers killed a cop, the force hunted them down. But what if gangbangers killed off the whole force? That question wasn’t rhetorical, not here. And she was going to learn the answer to it.
After the first two Germans disappeared, others trotted down the street, swords in hand, moving like wolves on the hunt. Some of the blades were bloodied, some not. A few of the barbarians wore the same kind of armor as the legionaries — captured, maybe — and some wore chainmail. Not a few wore simple tunics and trousers, no armor at all except for the dubious protection of a leather vest. They all wore the same expression: fixed, intent, as if they were casing the place. But it was more immediate than that. They were looking for more Roman soldiers to kill.
Julia looked ready to climb into Nicole’s arms, if Lucius hadn’t already been there. “They have the city,” she whispered. Her face was white with fear. “If they have the soldiers’ camp down the river, too, the gods only know when we’ll be rescued. If we ever will. If — we don’t — “ Her voice trailed away.
Lucius hadn’t said a word since before the legionary fell. He slipped out from under Nicole’s arm and ran upstairs. Nicole started after him, but held herself back. If he needed to be alone, she’d let him. She’d go up in a little while and see if he was all right.
But he came down almost as soon as he’d gone up, clutching his wooden sword. Nicole had never liked or approved of it, but she’d never quite got round to taking it away from him. She held herself back now, with an effort that made her body shake. If he needed that comfort, she wouldn’t take it away from him.
He sat on a stool near the back of the tavern, with the sword in his lap. He sat there for a while, stroking the wooden blade.
Suddenly, violently, he flung it away. “It’s just a toy,” he said bitterly. “It can’t hurt a thing, except maybe a fly.”
Nicole walked over and put her arm around him. At first, he tried to shrug her away. Then he clung as he had at the window, and started to cry. The tears were as bitter as his words. She held him close and rocked him as she would have rocked Justin.
People were shouting in the distance, with a new note in it, a new urgency. It was a word, one single word. “Fire!”
For a heartbeat or two, idiotically, she listened for sirens. No fire engines here. God knew what they had; maybe nothing, though more open flames burned here than she’d ever seen in one place. And even if there was something, what could anybody do about it while the city was being sacked?
She glanced at Julia. The freedwoman had looked frightened before. Now she was stiff with terror. “Mistress,” she said in a small, tight voice, “if that gets any closer, we’ve got to run. I’d rather take my chances with the Germans than stay here and burn to death.”
“If the city’s burning,” Nicole said, “the Germans will be running, too.” Nicole took a deep breath, to steady herself, and nodded. “We’ll run if we have to. The shouting’s coming — yes, from the north, and the west, past the market square. The fire may not be able to go around an open space that big.”
“Maybe.” Julia cocked her head, listening. “Yes, north and west — I can hear it, too. I think you’re right. Please the gods, I hope you’re right!”
They sat in the gloom and waited. Nobody spoke. Lucius fidgeted for a while, then pulled his dice out of the pouch at his belt and squatted on the floor, playing a game of one hand against the other. The rattle of dice in the cup and the dull clatter as they rolled out on the floor struck counterpoint to the distant sounds of fighting and of terror.
Nicole sniffed. Did she smell smoke? Of course she smelled smoke. She always did in Carnuntum. No one ran screaming down the street, pursued by the lick of flames. What had Nicole heard once? Fire was fast, yes. Faster than anyone could imagine who hadn’t seen it.
More than once she tensed to jump up, grab whatever she could grab, and take her chances with the Germans. But some remnant of sense kept her where she was. As long as there was no sign of fire nearby, she was infinitely safer behind the barred door of the tavern than running in panic through the streets.
Julia had been sitting still in what might have passed for bovine calm except for the darting of her eyes. “I hope Gaius is all right,” she said suddenly. She spoke young Calidius Severus’ praenomen without self-consciousness. Why not? She’d gone upstairs with him both here and over the dyer’s shop. If that didn’t entitle her to call him by his first name, what did?
Once upon a time, Gaius’ father had complained that Nicole didn’t call him by his praenomen. She’d learned that courtesy, and a great deal more.
God, she missed that quiet, practical man with the infuriating habit of being right. His son was going to grow up just like him; she could see the signs.
&
nbsp; If, she thought, he lived through the war. If any of them did.
There’d been a long lull, a quiet space in which no one ran past, enemy or friend. Then a new wave of Germans poured in from what had to be a breach in the wall or a gate forced open. Most still carried swords, but they weren’t so wary now. They moved at walking pace, traveling in pairs and threes, gawking at the sights. If they’d had cameras, they would have been taking snapshots. They looked like tourists, not like men who expected to have to fight their way through the city.
It took Nicole a distressingly long time to understand what that meant. It was over. The Germans had won.
And to the victors went the spoils. One of the Germans pounded on a door a little way down the street from the tavern. A moment later, Nicole heard the barbarian let out a happy grunt, like a pig in a corncrib. A moment after that, a woman shrieked.
“That’s Antonina,” Julia said, her voice the barest thread of whisper.
“Let me go!” Antonina cried, fear and anger warring in her voice. “Let me — “ The sharp sound of flesh slapping against flesh cut off her words. She shrieked again, high and shrill. The German laughed. He didn’t seem to mind the noise at all.
He wasn’t alone, either. From the sound of it, there was a whole pack of them out there, yipping with glee and calling back and forth in their own language. The words weren’t comprehensible, but the tone was all too plain. So was the tone of Antonina’s scream.
Nicole didn’t move from her seat well back in the tavern. Her head shook of itself. They couldn’t, she thought in disbelief. They wouldn’t.
Stupid. Of course they could. And if they wouldn’t, why had she and Julia doused themselves with stale piss?
From where she sat, she could see through the front windows, at least to the middle of the street. As if he had known that, a great hulking brute of a German dragged Antonina into the frame of the windows and threw her down. Nicole watched in sick fascination, unable to move to her neighbor’s rescue, and unable to look away. The rest of the gang crowded in, overwhelming Antonina. She got in one good kick before they had her spread-eagled on her back.
