by Judith Tarr
Marcus Aurelius knew it, too; his eyes glinted as he set the sack in front of Nicole. “The Empire cannot compensate you,” he said. “I, however, as a citizen of the Empire, can offer you, privately and personally, some small recompense for your misfortune.”
And you can do it without setting a precedent that you and your successors are bound to follow, Nicole thought. No, no flies on the Roman Emperor, not a one. But, having ruled against her, he could have sent her home with nothing. She’d fully expected that; been braced for it, even tried to formulate some kind of argument that wouldn’t make her look either greedy or presumptuous.
She thanked him automatically, with her eyes on the sack. It was very small. Give her a few denarii, pack her off, rest content that she had no further recourse — how easy for him to do. Easy, and cheap.
It wasn’t exactly fine etiquette, but she untied the string that closed the mouth of the sack. If Marcus Aurelius imagined he could shut her up with a handful of silver…
She shook the sack out on the table. It had hardly any heft to it at all. If it was empty — if this was some kind of bitter joke -
It was a damned good thing she’d kept her mouth shut before she saw what the aide had brought her. These weren’t a few token denarii. They were aurei — all gold, brilliant in the lamplight. Ten of them. She counted, very carefully; picked them up and tipped them into her palm. They gleamed there, more wealth than Umma had ever held in her hand at one time.
Marcus Aurelius didn’t frown at her rudeness. Maybe he even understood it. “I understand that no money can punish your violator, or undo what he did to you. But what money can do, I hope this money will do. The gods grant it be so.”
It was a great deal of money. Two hundred fifty denarii — more than half the price of a slave. A thousand sesterces. Four thousand asses. It was like an incantation, an invocation of prosperity. More than a month’s business — not profit, business — at the tavern. The rough equivalent, in second-century purchasing power, of the price of a Lexus.
Nicole had expected less, and would have settled for it. But the lawyer in her frowned at the ten aurei and reflected that, in terms of pain and suffering, she should have got more. He probably had it, too. If the deep-pockets rule applied, whose pockets — or moneybags — were deeper than those of the Emperor of the Romans? The rest of her knew that wasn’t realistic. Money went a whole lot further here than in West Hills. Nor, by the law of the Empire, had Marcus Aurelius been obligated to give her any compensation at all. It was the action of a good man, a man who gave not because he had to, but because he felt that it was right.
Carefully, she said, “What money can do, I think this money will do. Thank you, sir. You are very generous.” She’d said things like that more times than she could count. Far more often than not, she was conscious of the hypocrisy even as the words passed her lips. This time, she meant it from the bottom of her heart. How strange, in a world not just conspicuously but dreadfully worse than the one she’d been born to, to find at the head of the Roman Empire a man head and shoulders and torso above any of the rulers or statesmen of the late twentieth century. Mediocrities in expensive suits, every last one of them.
“I shall give you torchbearers to escort you back to your house,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Any town, even one so much smaller than Rome as this, may prove dangerous to an honest woman walking alone in darkness. Having suffered one calamity, you ought not to fear another.”
“Thank you again for your thoughtfulness,” Nicole said.
To her astonishment, she saw she’d embarrassed him. “Some take pride in claiming credit for service,” he said. “Some will not claim it aloud, but still secretly regard those whom they help as being in their debt. I try, as I believe all should try, to do one right thing after another, as naturally as a vine passes from yielding one summer’s grapes to those of the next.”
If another man had said such a thing, he would have sounded like a pompous ass. Marcus Aurelius brought it out as if it were, or should be, simple truth.
Nicole smiled. Now, finally, she understood what he was. It was more than a word. It was a whole manner of being. “The Romans are lucky,” she said, “to have a philosopher for an emperor.”
He surprised her again, this time by shaking his head. “A general at the helm, a Trajan or a Vespasian, would serve us better now,” he replied. “But I am what we have, and I can but do my best.” He rose from the table, and called for servants. They came quickly, torches at the ready, crackling and trailing a stream of fire. He handed her into their care, with a grace and a courtesy that were in keeping with all the rest of him. The last she saw of him, he was standing by the table in the light of those many lamps, his shoulders bowed a little, borne down by the weight of his office. It was late by second-century standards, but he looked as if he had a long night ahead of him still.
Outside in the darkness, the torches seemed dismayingly feeble, casting only a dim, flickering light at the feet of their bearers. The moon, which hung in the southeast on this clear late-August night, gave more and better light, but anything at all might have lurked in the moonshadows. A bright red star — Mars? — glowed a little above the moon. Even brighter was Jupiter, splendid and yellow-white below the moon, not far above the eastern horizon. Was that Saturn between them? Nicole would have known once, when it was a family pastime to spot the planets and call out names of the constellations. She hadn’t done it since — Indianapolis? A long time. Night skies in Los Angeles were drowned in light, and she was too busy, most of the time, to notice.
This was the first time that she’d had to navigate Carnuntum by night. It was a dangerous pastime if you were too poor to afford guards and torch-bearers. In the dark, in the absence of either streetlights or signs, she almost lost herself in the twisting ways of the city. Nothing looked the same as it did in daylight. Her steps grew slower and slower. The torchbearers began to mutter behind their hands, rude remarks in Latin and in another, unfamiliar language. Greek? It was much too mellifluous to be German.
At last, to her relief, she found the fountain near the tavern. From there, she had no trouble finding her way home. At the door, though she was suddenly, desperately tired, she paused to thank the Emperor’s servants. They were polite to her because Marcus Aurelius had been, but they plainly couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.
Dim lamplight flickered through the slats of the shutters on the front windows. How nice of Julia, Nicole thought, to leave a lamp burning, so that Nicole wouldn’t have to fumble her way in the dark.
She opened the door and slipped through it into the familiar, slightly funky interior of the tavern. Julia was sitting on a stool beside the lamp. She looked ready to fall over.
“For heaven’s sake,” Nicole said, “what did you wait up for me for? Go to bed before you fall asleep where you sit.”
Julia shook her head stubbornly, though a yawn caught her and held her hostage in the middle. “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” she said. “I know Marcus Aurelius is supposed to be a good man, but he is the Emperor. He can do whatever he wants. I was afraid of what he might do when you had the nerve to ask him to pay you back for what that legionary did, as if it were his fault. “
“He wouldn’t admit to that,” Nicole said. “We had quite an argument about it, as a matter of fact. He wouldn’t admit it was his fault or his government’s fault.” Even though she thought she understood why Marcus Aurelius reasoned as he did, anything less than complete success irked her.
It impressed the hell out of Julia. “You… argued with the Roman Emperor, Mistress?” she said incredulously.
“I sure did,” Nicole answered, “and even though he wouldn’t admit that he and his government were at fault, he gave me this.” She tossed the little leather sack down in front of the freedwoman. Julia stared at it dubiously, as Nicole must have done when the Emperor gave it to her. “Go ahead, open it.”
Julia did as told. Her gasp was altogether satisfac
tory. She spilled the aurei out on the tabletop. Nicole watched her closely as she put them back into the sack one by one, and made sure all ten were in there when she returned it. That was a lot of money — temptation even for the most honest employee.
“By the gods,” Julia said, softly and reverently, though Nicole thought she revered the cash more than the gods. “He wouldn’t have given you this much if he’d gone to bed with you himself.”
“I didn’t go see him to go to bed with him,” Nicole said with rather more sharpness than was strictly necessary.
“But if he’d wanted to — “ Everything was very straightforward in Julia’s mind. Nicole had seen that time and again. She’d also seen that trying to change Julia’s mind was like pounding your head against a rock: your head would break long before the rock did. This time, she didn’t even try. “Let’s get some sleep,” she said. “Everything turned out as well as it could.”
“I’ll say!” Julia exclaimed. “Almost makes me wish — “
Nicole’s expression brought her up short. As clearly as if it were happening again, Nicole could feel the Roman soldier forcing himself onto her, ramming deep, driving home a lot more than simple physical pain. What it did to her spirit… “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nicole said harshly. “Be glad of that.”
Somebody in the Bible — Jacob? — had seen God face to face, and his life was preserved. After that, he’d become a great man among the Hebrews. Nicole didn’t remember all the details; she hadn’t been to Sunday school in a long, long time. But she’d seen Marcus Aurelius face to face, and not only was her life preserved, she’d come away with ten aurei. That was enough to make her a celebrity in the neighborhood, if not in all of Carnuntum.
She would much rather not have been raped. But since she had been, she would much rather Julia hadn’t said anything about the compensation Marcus Aurelius had given her. Asking Julia not to gossip, though, was like asking a rooster not to crow when the sun came up. You could ask, but it wasn’t likely to do you much good.
As the word spread, she gained customers. Fortunately she had food and drink to sell them; local farmers, those the Marcomanni and Quadi hadn’t killed or kidnapped, started coming back into Carnuntum. And the army had its own supply train with it, and some of the flour and sausage and wine went to the people in the city. Part of that was Marcus Aurelius’ care for the people over whom he ruled. Part, Nicole suspected, would have happened anyhow. Where money and food came together, those with the one couldn’t fail to get their hands on the other.
One consequence of her attack of chutzpah saddened Nicole: Antonina stopped speaking to her. She didn’t know what had caused the estrangement, but she could make a fair guess. If Antonina too had asked for compensation, but been turned down, that would do it. Nicole would have been the first to admit that Antonina had suffered worse than she had herself — but, as a lawyer, she knew only too well that how you phrased your claim often mattered more than what had actually happened to you.
Before long, thanks to all the legionaries in town, the tavern was doing at least as much business as it had before the pestilence and the Germans. A lot of the customers, of course, were the Roman soldiers who had come up to Carnuntum with Marcus Aurelius.
They gave her the creeps. Every so often, one or another of them would ask either her or Julia, “What’s the matter, sweetheart? Don’t you feel like being friendly?” Sometimes Julia did. Though she did her best to stay discreet about it, she was probably doing more business than she ever had before.
But the mere words sweetheart and friendly, spoken together or separately, were enough to freeze Nicole where she stood. Every time she heard them from a legionary, she would stop cold. Her eyes would ache with the effort of peering at a face that was interchangeable with any number of other black-bearded, big-nosed, olive-skinned faces. Was this the man who’d flung her down on her back in the alley and violated her with such efficiency, even aplomb?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell. Maybe the Roman who’d raped her had died five minutes later, killed by a spear in the gut. Maybe, on the other hand, he was sitting on a stool in the tavern this very moment, drinking a cup of cheap wine, eating bread and oil, and watching her backside. Maybe he was laughing, knowing she couldn’t have recognized him in his armor and helmet. And maybe he was thinking, That’s the piece of ass I had the day we took this little rat hole of a city. Not bad, for provincial meat. Maybe I’ll have me another taste.
One night after closing time, as she and Julia were finishing the last of the cleanup, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She told Julia what she went through with every legionary who talked the way they seemed to make a point of talking. Julia paused in scrubbing down the last of the tables. “I do understand why you’re worried about it,” she said, “but I wouldn’t be, if I were you. What happens when an army takes a city isn’t likely to happen again once the city’s safe and settled.”
That made sense, as did most of what Julia said. She’d seen it with the Germans here. And even in the twentieth-century United States, act of war went into a lot of contracts and insurance policies alongside act of God as a justification for nonperformance.
Nicole said, “The top part of my mind understands what you’re saying. It even thinks you’re right. But down underneath — “ She shuddered. “Every time I see a legionary, I want to go somewhere and hide — or else I want to kill him. Sometimes both at once.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Julia answered. “But you can’t do that, you know. You have to go on with your life as best you can.”
“I suppose so,” Nicole said with a sigh. Again, Julia’s advice was brisk and rational. If Nicole followed it, she’d be better off than if she ignored it. But, as she’d said, what the Roman soldier had done to her went down far below the part of her mind where rationality lived. A man had treated her as if she were nothing but a piece of meat with a handy hole. There was nothing reasonable or logical about her reaction to it.
She glanced behind the counter, toward the plaque of Liber and Libera. There sat the god and goddess, just as they had for so long on her nightstand back in West Hills. They weren’t any more active than they’d been then, either, or any more helpful. They just… sat there.
What more do you want from me? she demanded silently. What more can you want from me? Do you want me to die here? Is that what you’re waiting for?
The god and goddess were as uncommunicative as ever. It wasn’t, now, that they didn’t hear her, as when she’d had that other, now broken plaque, or that all the lines were busy. It was subtly different. They heard her, but, for whatever reason, they were choosing not to listen.
She trudged up to bed, and lay there in the light of the lamp she kept lit, now, all night long. The shutters were closed and tightly barred. It wasn’t likely any man would come creeping in through the window, but she just felt more comfortable knowing that he’d have to break down the shutters if he tried it.
She lay in bed, and she kept up her barrage of prayer, pleading, whatever one wanted to call it. Wasn’t enough enough? She’d worked her fingers to the bone, she’d been hungry, she’d slowly poisoned herself every time she ate or drank, she’d been sick and almost died; she’d gone through anything but painless dentistry and almost wished she’d been dead. She’d seen the city sacked, she’d seen cruelty to animals and cruelty to slaves and cruelty to women that was so automatic, people didn’t even know they were being cruel. She’d been raped. And still she was trapped here.
And what did she have to put on the good side of the ledger? Titus Calidius Severus — yes, certainly. But the pestilence had killed him. And Marcus Aurelius. She’d never regret that she’d been able to meet him. There’d never been a man like him before, nor ever would be again.
She would have done anything this side of being raped again, to escape Carnuntum for California. Even that… Would she? Could she go through that, if it brought her home?
Yes. She cou
ld. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, the worst thing she could imagine. But if that was the price of her escape from the second century — she would pay it.
Marcus Aurelius proved to be a rare politician in yet another way: he kept his promises. As soon as he had Carnuntum in some sort of order, he took his army across the Danube to bring the war home to the Quadi and Marcomanni. Nicole stood on the riverbank with most of the rest of the population of the city, and cheered as the Roman flotilla crossed over to enemy territory. People all around her marveled over and over at the great size and magnificence of the force. She held her tongue. Maybe she’d seen The Longest Day too many times on late-night TV. To her eyes, the flotilla was neither large nor imposing. It seemed no more than a collection of barges and rafts, and rowboats that reminded her of oversized racing shells.
And when they were gone, when fires began to burn on the northern bank of the Danube, she felt more alone than ever. Some of her — a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged — rejoiced that the Germans were getting what was coming to them. But she wished Marcus Aurelius had stayed in Carnuntum. She wouldn’t have found it easy to get another audience with him, but the lure of intelligent conversation, even in the second century, had a powerful appeal.
And she felt less safe with the Roman Emperor out of the city. Though he and his army were gone, Carnuntum remained full of legionaries: garrison troops, reinforcements passing through on their way to the northern bank of the Danube, wounded men coming back from the other side of the river to recuperate. Medical care here was better than it was with the army in the field. Nicole pitied the soldiers in the forests, stalked by Germans who knew the land far better than they did, and no help for them if they were wounded but the roughest of field surgery.
“Those whoresons’ll go hungry, that they will,” a veteran said as he eased himself down onto a stool in the tavern. He’d come in with the help of a walking stick, limping on a bandaged leg. “We hit ‘em as their grain was starting to get ripe, and we’ve taken a lot of it, and burned whatever we didn’t take.”
