Household Gods (78 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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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 rathole 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 could. 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.”
“Serves 'em right,” Lucius said. In his biased opinion, legionaries were splendid creatures. He wore the wooden sword on his belt all the time now, and marched everywhere. Nicole was hard put to keep him from talking like a legionary, too, complete with the appalling vocabulary. She'd never told him what one of them had done to her. What point? He wouldn't understand.
“It certainly does serve the Germans right,” Julia said. All the Roman soldiers in the tavern nodded. Most of them had their eyes on Julia. She could have said the sun rose in the afternoon, and the legionaries' heads—among other things—
would have bobbed up and down.
Men,
Nicole thought scornfully.
Every so often, a soldier would pat Julia or Nicole on the bottom, or try to pull one of them down onto his lap. Sometimes Julia would let a legionary get away with it, sometimes she wouldn't. Nicole never did. She developed a whole range of ways to get the message across.
“Arr!”
a legionary roared when she spilled a bowl full of stewed parsnips and salt fish into his lap. He sprang to his feet and did an impromptu war dance. “That's hot! You did that on purpose, you miserable bitch.”
“You'd better believe I did, you stinking bastard,” Nicole snapped. “If your hands don't stay where they belong, your supper won't go where it belongs.”
He had a sword at his belt. If his hand dropped to the hilt, she didn't know what she'd do. Scream and duck, probably—what other choice did she have? Instead, he cocked a big, hard-knuckled fist. “I ought to beat the crap out of you for that, lady,” he growled, glaring from her to his dripping tunic and back again.
But one of the soldiers at another table said, “Oh, take it easy, Corvus. You grope a broad and she doesn't like it, shit like that's going to happen to you.”
“Shit is right,” the legionary with the Roman hands said. “Look at the mess she made of me.” He swiped at his tunic, but only managed to smear it worse.
He didn't get much sympathy from any of his cohorts. They laughed and jeered: “A little lower and to the left, Corvus! My, what a fine, artistic outfit you've got on!”
He spun on his heel and stamped out of the tavern. Nicole, freed of his attentions, made sure she didn't keep too close a watch on the wine bill for the soldier who'd told Corvus off. If he got a free cup, or two, or three, then so be it.
It's worth it,
she thought. Only afterwards did it occur to her that she'd fallen into a way of thinking she'd always deplored. She'd needed a man to protect her from another man. There wasn't any getting away from it—but neither did she have to accept it.
It was the way things were, here in Carnuntum.
Still, nobody tried to take her or Julia by force, not now. There was a line, and the Roman legionaries did keep to the polite side of it. What they reckoned polite, however, would have turned Navy fliers at a Tailhook convention into outraged feminists. Nicole never was sure they would stay on the polite side, either. That one bastard had gone from friendly smile to criminal assault in a few dizzying seconds. Any of these other legionaries was capable of the same thing, with just as little warning.
How would she ever be able to trust a man again? After what Frank had done to her, she hadn't had much use for men. Now … In the long run, killing any hope for that trust might have been the cruelest thing the rape had inflicted on her.
“They're swine, a lot of them,” Julia agreed—Julia was always happy to agree about the shortcomings of men, of a good many of which she was likely to have more intimate knowledge than did Nicole. “They're swine, sure as sure, but what can you do about it?”
“There ought to be laws,” Nicole said. In her time, there would be. They wouldn't be perfect. She'd had to come back here to discover that they would be pretty damned effective, all things considered.
“Laws?” Julia tossed her head just as she did when she turned down a proposition from a horny soldier. “Fat lot of good laws would do. Laws are for the rich. Laws are for men. Who makes laws? Rich men, that's who. You think they'll ever make them to help anybody else? Not likely.”
Nicole took a deep breath. She'd have liked, very much, to tell Julia of the change in attitude that would come when education spread widely among both men and women. But what was the use? How was education supposed to spread when every single book had to be laboriously copied out by hand?
Just another machine,
she would have thought if somebody at a party in Los Angeles had started going on and on about the printing press. In an age of desktop publishing and
home copy machines and the Internet, it seemed antiquated, obsolete.

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