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.”
20
Marcus Aurelius entered the city the day the German hordes broke and fled. He took up residence in the town-council building near the market square. Nicole wondered just how complicated it would be to get an audience with him. Less complicated, probably, than it would have been to get in to see the President, or Julia wouldn’t have suggested it, but even kings of minor countries had hordes of flunkies to keep the great unwashed away from their majesty. The more minor the country, in fact, the greater the hordes seemed to be.
By that token, since Rome was the greatest empire in the world, it should be a relatively simple matter to see its Emperor. Nicole approached the town hall with a bold face and a fluttering heart — and found that she was not the first nor yet the last to come in search of the imperial ear. People were going in and coming out, nearly all men, most in armor or in togas but a few in tunics. She worked her way into the stream, passing the armored guards who decorated the door just like guards in a Hollywood epic, and working her way inside.
There the stream divided, some going here, some going there. She had no idea where to begin.
She chose a direction more or less at random, and started down a hallway. A man stepped out of a door, so suddenly she started, and barred her way. He wasn’t a guard, and he wasn’t in armor. He wore a toga, a surprisingly white affair with a narrow and somehow pretentious crimson stripe. “And what may be your purpose here?” he inquired in Latin almost painful in its purity.
She’d prepared a speech for just such an eventuality: short, pithy, but comprehensive. The functionary heard her out with an arched brow and a supercilious expression. “And what evidence have you that the alleged assault in fact occurred?” he asked when she’d come to the end of it.
Nicole drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t all that inconsiderable. “Would you like to see the knot in my head? The bruises on my chest? The ones on my backside? Do you want to see what forcible sexual intercourse does to a woman’s private parts?”
The aide’s eyebrows leaped. “Thank you, no,” he said with a flicker of disgust. Maybe he wouldn’t care to view a woman’s private parts under any circumstances. He went on with the same chilly precision as before: “If you would care to present me with a written statement of your claim, so it may be examined before being put to the Emperor, who is, after all, you will understand, a busy man…”