Household Gods

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.

But next to a reed pen, it was a stunning advance in technology. And with technology came advances in thinking. The more people had access to books, the fewer were ignorant, and the less superstition there could be. And women could start making laws, or finding ways to assure that laws were made.

A better day was coming. In the time from which Nicole had chosen to flee, you could see its dawn on the horizon, bright enough to read a newspaper by. It was midnight here, darkest midnight. And there weren’t any newspapers to read, either. Nicole had never thought of USA Today as an instrument of liberation, but it was. In what it signified, in what it implied: a literate population that wanted, and expected, to be fed the news in bite-sized pieces.

And she was eighteen hundred years away from it, and she couldn’t go home. She had no one to blame for it but herself. She’d wished herself into this. No one else could wish her out.

The first tears caught her by surprise. Ever since she’d realized Carnuntum in the second century wasn’t what she thought it would be — wasn’t anything even close — she’d done her best to stay strong, to grit her teeth: even the one that had troubled her in this body, the one that had had to be pulled at such a cost in pain. She’d tried to roll with the punches, to keep from giving way to despair. Her best hadn’t been too bad, either. When she’d cried before, she’d always done it in the privacy of her bedchamber — her miserable, bare, stinking bedchamber.

Now, as if at last a dam had broken, more and more tears followed those first two, and she couldn’t seem to stop them. What would Julia think, watching her employer, her former owner, go to pieces right in front of her?

Julia, as far as Nicole could tell through tear-blurred vision, was astonished. “Mistress!” she said. “What on earth is the matter?”

“Everything,” Nicole answered, which was true, comprehensive, and absolutely useless.

Julia got up, came around the table, and laid a hand on Nicole’s shoulder. “Everybody feels that way now and again. You just have to get through the bad times and hope they’ll be better tomorrow.”

Again, that was good, sensible advice. Nicole knew as much. But she was, for the moment, something less than sensible. “No, it won’t!” she cried. “It’ll be just the same as it is today.” She could conceive of no stronger condemnation of Carnuntum than that.

“Well — “ Julia hesitated. “When things change, they usually get worse.”

“How could they get worse?” Nicole demanded. “What could be worse than — this?” The sweep of her hand took it all in: stinking tavern, stinking city, stinking world.

But Julia had a ready answer: “Things were just — the way they always had been, till last year. Then the pestilence came, and that was worse, and then the Marcomanni and Quadi, and that was worse yet, and then the legions drove them back across the river, and that was better for the city, yes, but it was worse for you, wasn’t it, on account of that one cursed soldier?”

She had to stop there, to draw a breath. Nicole fired back before she could go on: “Yes, and how many other bastards like him are there in the army that we’ll never, ever hear about, either because the women they raped are too ashamed to come forward, or because the legionaries killed them after they were done screwing them?”

“Bound to be some,” Julia agreed with chilling calm. “But that isn’t what you asked, is it, Mistress? You asked how things could be worse. I told you.”

Nicole shook her head so violently that the tears veered wide of their accustomed tracks. “That’s just how things have got worse already. Not how they could get worse than they already are.”

Julia blinked, then stared, then started to laugh. For sure she was amused, and a little taken aback. Maybe she was trying to jolly Nicole out of her gloom. “No wonder Marcus Aurelius listened to you when you complained about that legionary. You can split hairs just like a lawyer.”

But Nicole was not about to be jollied. “And a whole fat lot of good that does me, too,” she said.

“It got you ten aurei,” Julia pointed out.

“Getting raped got me ten aurei,” Nicole said with bitter, legalistic precision. “Believe me, I’d rather not have them. Besides,” she added even more bitterly, “who ever heard of a lady lawyer? Who ever heard of a lady anything in Carnuntum?”

Julia sighed. “Well, Mistress, it doesn’t look as if anything I can say will cheer you up. Do you want a jar or two of wine? Would that help?”

“No!” Nicole stamped her foot. If she’d been Kimberley, that sort of behavior would have earned her a time- out. If she’d been Lucius, it would have got her a whack on the fanny. Because she was an adult, she could do as she pleased — but nothing she could do here pleased her. There was nothing to do,