The street was even fuller of Germans than before. Some were headed at a gallop for the wall, swords drawn, faces set in masks of ferocity. Some were falling back, retreating deeper into the city. Their swords were notched or bloodied or broken, and their masks had cracked. Beneath lay fear — the first fear she’d seen in anyone but a Roman since this war began.
The barbarians yelled back and forth, comers to goers, incomprehensibly. None took the slightest notice of Nicole, any more than they had of Julia. Who was probably, right at that moment, screwing her brains out. Nicole didn’t know whether to be jealous or annoyed. Annoyed, she decided: if Julia had waited a little longer before running over and hopping into bed with Gaius Calidius Severus, maybe Lucius wouldn’t have had the chance to sneak out the door.
“Lucius!” Nicole called again, but her voice was lost in the chaos. Maybe he really couldn’t hear her. And maybe, too, if she stayed out here on the sidewalk any longer, one of those Germans running past was going to take a swipe at her with his sword, just for the hell of it.
She ducked into the alley between her house and the house where Sextus Longinius lulus lived and Fabia Ursa had died. As soon as she did it, she wished she hadn’t; the stink of dumped chamberpots was appalling. Flies rose in buzzing clouds, furious to be disturbed in their feasting. She flailed her arms. Maybe one or two failed to land on her.
Just as she turned to try another route, a German loomed in the mouth of the alleyway. Nicole stopped cold.
The German looked at her in — surprise? With a sound like an ox lowing, he collapsed. Blood poured into the filthy dirt from a wound on the inside of his thigh. So much blood — how had he run all the way from the wall?
The flies didn’t care what he’d done or how. They swarmed toward the spreading pool, milling around its edges, sampling it to see if they liked it as well as yesterday’s slops. It would do, their manner said. It would definitely do.
Nicole couldn’t bring herself to step over the dying German. She turned and went farther up the alley, picking her way past the piles of filth. At the back of her house, the alleyway jogged to the left instead of cutting straight through to the next street. The houses and shops facing that one weren’t directly in back of hers and its neighbors, as they would have been in a Los Angeles subdivision. Nobody here had bothered to think that might be desirable.
Nicole couldn’t see what was going on in the next street, but she could hear it loud and clear. People were screaming in several languages, and clashing iron against iron. Lucius would reckon it a great show, the bloody- minded little rascal. God, if he got embroiled in that…
Footsteps pounded toward her from the other street, heavy steps, much too heavy for a child’s. Armor clanked. A shout rang out in Latin: “The Emperor!”
She sagged against the indifferently whitewashed stone of the wall — her own wall, the back wall of her house. Not a German bent on rapine and plunder. A Roman legionary, a soldier of civilization — such as it was — one of Carnunturn’s rescuers from its barbarous conquerors.
“The Emperor!” he shouted again, just as he rounded the corner. He and Nicole saw each other at the same instant. Had he been carrying a gun, she might have died. By the gasp that escaped him when he spied her, his first thought when he saw anyone not a legionary was
He skidded to a stop, heavy sandals scuffing up dust. His sword lowered. Nicole dared, at last, to breathe. She let it out as a word: “The Emperor!” And, as he stood still, staring at her, “Thank God you’re finally here!”
A moment too late, she realized that it should have been,
Then she did what she’d promised herself she would do with the first legionary she saw inside Carnuntum: she marched up to him and gave him a kiss. She’d had in mind a kiss on the cheek, but the soldier’s beard and the cheekpieces made that impractical. She kissed him on the end of the nose instead.
He laughed out loud. “Hello to you, too, sweetheart,” he said. “You can do better than that, I’ll wager.” He let the shield slip to the ground, wrapped his arms around her — sword still clenched in his right fist — and bent his mouth down to hers.
That kiss, crushed against scale mail and with a sword bumping her backside, was odds-on the most uncomfortable she’d ever had. She didn’t care. It was — damn, it was fun. Just like the basketball game years ago before she ever met Frank, when Indiana clawed from behind to beat Notre Dame with a shot at the buzzer. She’d let out a squeal and kissed not only her date but the guy who sat on the other side of her. They’d all laughed. It had been that kind of moment: dizzy, crazy, and oh so sweet with victory.
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
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.
