by Judith Tarr
The legionary’s left hand closed, painfully hard, on her breast. She wasn’t really alarmed, not yet. She stiffened and tried to pull her head away, with a protest all ready to burst out as soon as her mouth was free. But he followed her, prolonging the kiss, driving his tongue deep into her mouth, grinding against her teeth.
She bit down hard. He yelped and recoiled. She slapped his hand away. “That’s enough!” she said sharply.
He laughed again, not pleasantly at all. There was blood on his lips. He licked it away, wincing: his tongue must have hurt like hell. His words were thicker than they’d been before, and his tone had a nasty edge. “Now, now. That’s not nice. Not nice at all.”
“Look,” Nicole said, doing her best to ignore the stab of fear. “I didn’t mean to tease you. But just because I was glad — I am glad — to see my city back in Roman hands, doesn’t mean — “
She should have listened to her fear. She should have shut up, twisted loose, and run like hell. All that, she realized afterwards, when it was much too late.
The legionary listened to her just long enough to realize she wasn’t going to give him what he wanted. She was still explaining, in logical, lawyerlike, twentieth-century fashion, how a kiss didn’t necessarily imply anything more, when he shut her up for good and all: he kicked her feet out from under her and threw her to the ground.
She landed exactly as he wanted her to land. Afterwards — that word again — she decided that throwing people to the ground would be an important skill for a soldier to acquire in an age when fighting was face to face, up close and personal. In the middle of it, she had time for one startled squawk before he flung himself down on top of her.
By chance or by design — she strongly suspected the latter but could not have proved it in a court of law — one of his elbows caught her in the pit of her stomach. For the next minute or so, she had not a chance in the world of using the self-defense techniques she’d learned in another life. By the time she could think about anything but the agonizing struggle for air, he’d poised himself between her legs, yanked down her drawers, and driven deep into her.
It hurt. She hadn’t wanted him, and she was dry. He didn’t care. He didn’t care in the slightest. That was the worst part, worse even than the pain — and yes, it hurt like hell. In and out, up and down, his weight on her, the scales of his cuirass digging into her belly and breasts, crushing her, making it even harder for her to breathe.
When at last she did manage to suck in a quarter of a breath, she thrashed and writhed, arching her back, twisting and struggling, anything to get him off her. He grunted. It was, to her horror, a grunt of pleasure. “That’s more like it, sweetheart, ‘ he said. “Don’t just lie there — do something.”
She did something, all right. She hit him. Every part of him she could reach was covered in iron. Her fists throbbed with the pain of it, and he never even felt it. He pounded away on top of her, not caring that she didn’t want him on her or in her, not caring that he hurt her. Not caring at all.
There above her was the nose she’d kissed only a couple of moments before. She snapped at it. He jerked his head back — he’d stayed alert, damn him. Something caressed the side of her neck: the edge of his sword. It felt cold and very sharp.
“You don’t want to do that, sweetheart,” he said between thrusts: a word, a thrust; another word or two; another thrust. “It’s not friendly, you know what I mean? ‘
She knew. She hated him; she hated herself, for knowing it — and worse, for giving way to it. She lay still. It was small comfort that he wanted her active; that if she lay like one of the fish she’d thrown out the window this morning, he’d get less pleasure out of her. He didn’t stop or even slow down. Another dozen breaths, and he grunted again, shuddered, rammed home. She felt the hot gush deep inside her, in her most secret place.
He lay on top of her for a stretching moment, stiff as the armor he was cased in. Then, as suddenly as he’d forced himself into her, he jerked out — one last, small stab of pain, like insult on top of injury — and got smoothly to his feet. He was an athlete, of course he was, with an athlete’s grace and an athlete’s arrogant strength.
He straightened his pleated military kilt — no inconvenience of underwear in that uniform — and looked down at Nicole. His face was as impenetrable as ever: black beard, iron cheekpieces, gleam of eyes under the visor. “So long, sweetheart,” he said. “That was fun.” And then, as if she’d never interrupted him, he ran on up the alley, lifting again his ringing shout: “The Emperor!”
She lay where he’d left her till he was long out of sight. She would have lain there till Rome fell, but the flies were buzzing, tickling her lips and her eyelids. She slapped at them, hard enough to sting, and lurched to her feet. Every part of her hurt: the back of her head, her haunches, her solar plexus, her chest and belly where his armor had crushed and pinched. And worst of all, she hurt where he’d violated her, a throbbing, burning ache, as if he’d scraped the skin raw. She stood as she’d stood the night she lost her virginity, as if she’d been riding a horse all day and half the night. But that had been an almost welcome pain, a pain she’d bargained for and wore like a badge of pride. There was no pride in this. And the pain — that had been an ache or two, some chafing, and a tendency to walk spraddle-legged. This was pain.
“He raped me,” she said. She said it in English. Latin wasn’t enough, not for this. “The bastard just — went ahead — and raped me.” As if to mock her with incontrovertible proof, semen dribbled down the inside of her thigh, wet and sticky-slimy. Her drawers were tangled around one ankle. She yanked them up. She tried to think. Her thoughts kept scattering. Her memories kept fragmenting, coalescing in a single spot — the end of his nose, the grind of his pelvis against hers — then shattering again. And again. Think. She had to think.
All around her, battle was raging. She heard the sounds of it both nearby and farther away, like an iron foundry in a lower level of hell. Another stalwart defender of civilization was going to come charging down the alley, she could bet on it. Would he care that he was getting somebody else’s sloppy seconds? Would he even take time to notice?
Walking was hard. She wasn’t built bowlegged. But walking normally rubbed tissues outraged beyond endurance. She was probably bleeding. She didn’t stop to investigate.
She made her way up the alley, back past the stinking piles of ordure, to the German who’d fallen in front of her. He was dead now, though his blood still soaked into the dirt. In the street beyond him, live Marcomanni and Quadi still fought the Romans.
Nicole shrank back against the wall. Romans, barbarians — God forbid anyone see her. Was one of them the son of a bitch who’d violated her? She couldn’t tell. They were all crowded together in a knot. They all wore the same clothes, carried the same gear. Uniform — that was what it was, uniform dress, uniform looks and fighting style. Wasn’t that the point? Look alike, fight alike, kill alike. Rape alike, too. And never mind if the victim was friend or enemy.
The Romans drove the Germans back, away from the city wall and toward the center of town. Nicole waited till they were some distance down the street, too far to grab her if she moved fast enough. She scuttled around the corner and dived through the door of the tavern.
“Hello, Mother!” a voice called, startling her near out of her skin. It was, of course, Lucius, safe, sound, and smiling, watching the fighting through the window as if it had been a TV screen. He’d probably been doing it, the little wretch, since about thirty seconds after Nicole went outside to look for him. If he’d come in half a minute earlier…
Spilled milk. Nicole thought. She slammed and barred the door. “When Julia comes back, let her in,” she said. “Otherwise, leave the door barred. Don’t you go outside again. Do you hear me?”
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But her black scowl made up for any deficiencies in his verbal comprehension. He gulped and nodded. He actually, for a moment, looked obedient.
That didn’t last long, to be sure. “Why is the back of your tunic all dirty?” he asked as Nicole gritted her teeth to tackle the stairs. She didn’t answer. He didn’t pursue it, either, to her relief.
She made it to her room after what seemed an age. As soon as she was inside, with the door bolted behind her, she ripped off her drawers and hurled them away. She wet a rag in the terra sigillata pitcher, soaked it till it ran with water. Then she scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed at her thigh and between her legs. Evidence for forensics didn’t matter, not here. No matter how many times she washed herself, she didn’t feel clean. She doubted she’d ever feel clean again.
She was still scrubbing, whimpering with the pain, when the door opened below. It had better be Julia. Because if it wasn’t, Lucius — and Nicole, too, to be honest about it — was in big trouble. She hurled the rag after the drawers and bolted downstairs.
It was Julia, of course, looking lazy and sated and altogether content with the world. “Hello, Mistress,” she said brightly. “Have you seen? The legions are back! Now we’ll all go back to…” Her voice ran down. Her eyes narrowed. For the first time she seemed actually to see Nicole. “By the gods, what happened to you? “
“The legions are back,” Nicole said. Her voice was flat, dead. “You didn’t need to tell me. I… met a legionary.”
Julia had lived in this world a lot longer than Nicole had, and had seen a lot more of it, too. Her eyes went wide: that almost bovine expression of hers, one of the intractable relics of her slave days, which concealed a great deal of her intelligence. “He didn’t,” she said, but her tone belied the words.
“Yes, he did,” Nicole said. “All this time, the Marcomanni and the Quadi didn’t, and the first cursed Roman legionary I saw… did. Let’s hear it for the defenders of civilization.” Tears dripped down her cheeks. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d started to cry.
“He did what, Mother?” Lucius asked, butting in between them, innocently curious.
“Never mind,” Nicole and Julia said together.
Then there was a silence. Lucius looked from one to the other of them, obviously thought about asking again, equally obviously decided it wasn’t the wisest thing to do. Nicole went on standing at the foot of the stairs, with her eyes leaking tears.
Julia crossed the tavern in a few swift strides, and folded her arms around Nicole. Nicole shrank inside them. She was comforted, she was supposed to be comforted.
She never wanted to be touched by another human being again.
Julia petted her as if she’d been a child or an animal. “There, Mistress,” she said. “There. That’s a terrible thing to happen to a woman.”
“Isn’t it?” Nicole said, still in a voice a thousand miles — a thousand lightyears — from her own. “I don’t even know who he was. I couldn’t pick him out from any other soldier. He was just — a man in a helmet. A son of a whore in a helmet.”
“Even if you can’t pick the wretch out of a crowd, you ought to complain to the Emperor,” Julia said. “He’s supposed to care that things like that don’t happen.”
“The Emperor?” Nicole would never have thought of that, not even close. She hadn’t thought there was anything she could do, except be a victim — the universal lot of women in this time and place. But to go right up to the Emperor and tell him what had been done to her — She tried to imagine going up to the President of the United States, past his wall of press corps, White House staff, Secret Service…
Here she was, diehard product of a democratic nation, and she had a better chance, if Julia was right, of walking up to the Roman Emperor and getting him to listen to her, than she did with her own elected President.
Still. Julia knew this world. She hadn’t been wrong about it yet. If she thought Marcus Aurelius himself might listen to a tavernkeeper from the fringe of his empire, then maybe, just maybe, he would.
With the coming of purpose, fear and shock ebbed. Anger and outrage were swift to take their place. “The Emperor,” Nicole repeated, grimly now. “Yes, I’ll take my case to the Emperor.”
20
Marcus Aurelius entered the city the day the German hordes broke and fled. He took up residence in the town-council building near the market square. Nicole wondered just how complicated it would be to get an audience with him. Less complicated, probably, than it would have been to get in to see the President, or Julia wouldn’t have suggested it, but even kings of minor countries had hordes of flunkies to keep the great unwashed away from their majesty. The more minor the country, in fact, the greater the hordes seemed to be.
By that token, since Rome was the greatest empire in the world, it should be a relatively simple matter to see its Emperor. Nicole approached the town hall with a bold face and a fluttering heart — and found that she was not the first nor yet the last to come in search of the imperial ear. People were going in and coming out, nearly all men, most in armor or in togas but a few in tunics. She worked her way into the stream, passing the armored guards who decorated the door just like guards in a Hollywood epic, and working her way inside.
There the stream divided, some going here, some going there. She had no idea where to begin.
She chose a direction more or less at random, and started down a hallway. A man stepped out of a door, so suddenly she started, and barred her way. He wasn’t a guard, and he wasn’t in armor. He wore a toga, a surprisingly white affair with a narrow and somehow pretentious crimson stripe. “And what may be your purpose here?” he inquired in Latin almost painful in its purity.
She’d prepared a speech for just such an eventuality: short, pithy, but comprehensive. The functionary heard her out with an arched brow and a supercilious expression. “And what evidence have you that the alleged assault in fact occurred?” he asked when she’d come to the end of it.
Nicole drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t all that inconsiderable. “Would you like to see the knot in my head? The bruises on my chest? The ones on my backside? Do you want to see what forcible sexual intercourse does to a woman’s private parts?”
The aide’s eyebrows leaped. “Thank you, no,” he said with a flicker of disgust. Maybe he wouldn’t care to view a woman’s private parts under any circumstances. He went on with the same chilly precision as before: “If you would care to present me with a written statement of your claim, so it may be examined before being put to the Emperor, who is, after all, you will understand, a busy man…”
His voice trailed away. His smile was small and smug. His meaning was abundantly clear. Just blow yourself off, lady. What were the odds that a tavernkeeper would be able to give him a written statement, or have enough money to hire someone to do a proper job of it?
Nicole favored him with a sweetly carnivorous smile. No matter what the odds, he’d bet and lost. He just didn’t know it yet. “May I borrow pen and ink and papyrus?” she asked in dulcet tones.
His eyebrows climbed again. “You wish to prepare this written statement yourself?”
Nicole nodded. He pursed his lips. This I’ve got to see — he didn’t shout it, but he didn’t need to.
He clapped his hands. A younger man in a toga without a stripe appeared as if conjured out of the air. He received the order without expression, and disappeared as abruptly as he’d appeared, to return a moment later with the articles Nicole had asked for.
Marcus Aurelius’ aide nodded to Nicole. “Go ahead. Use that desk there, if you like. Take all the time you need.” Sure as hell, there it was again — This I’ve got to see.
“Thank you,” Nicole said pointedly. She went to stand behind the desk — it was small and high, almost like a lectern — and set to work. The aide watched her for a while, long enough to see that she really was writing. Then he shrugged a tiny shrug and turned away to obstruct the next foolish innocent who ventured into his lair.
She laid out her statement like any other legal brief she’d ever drafted: first the facts, then their implications. What is civilization wor
th when the Marcomanni and Quadi held Carnuntum for months without molesting me in any way, but I was brutally raped by the first Roman legionary I saw during the reconquest of the city? She said not a word about what the Germans had done to poor Antonina. That wasn’t how the game was played.
Finally, she came to the important part: what she wanted the presiding authority — here a Roman Emperor, not a Superior Court judge — to do about the issue at hand. Unfortunately, I cannot positively identify the soldier who violated me. If I could, I would ask for him to be punished to the limit of the law. and for me to receive compensation both from him and from the government of the Roman Empire, under whose agency he acted. I still deserve the latter compensation, for as an agent of the government of the empire he grossly abused the authority entrusted to him, and used it to commit this outrageous crime against me.
Setting it down in writing made her angry all over again. “Bastard,” she muttered under her breath. “Fucking bastard.” She’d welcomed him as a rescuer, and what did she get for it? Thrown down in the dirt. God, if she could make him pay personally for every stroke he’d driven home, she’d do it. But if he didn’t have to pay, somebody would. She’d make damned certain of that.
When she stepped away from the desk, the Emperor’s aide waved her over to where he sat at a table piled with neatly labeled scrolls. “Let’s see what you’ve done,” he said, not quite as if he were talking to a six-year-old child, but close enough. Without a word, she passed him the closely written sheets.
Like every other literate Roman Nicole had seen, he mumbled the words to himself as he read. His eyes swept back and forth a couple of times before those expressive eyebrows of his made another leap, this one higher than either of the other two. After a bit, he paused and stared at Nicole. Then he went back to his mumbling.
