Household Gods

“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.”