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…”
His voice trailed away. His smile was small and smug. His meaning was abundantly clear. Just blow yourself off, lady. What were the odds that a tavernkeeper would be able to give him a written statement, or have enough money to hire someone to do a proper job of it?
Nicole favored him with a sweetly carnivorous smile. No matter what the odds, he’d bet and lost. He just didn’t know it yet. “May I borrow pen and ink and papyrus?” she asked in dulcet tones.
His eyebrows climbed again. “You wish to prepare this written statement yourself?”
Nicole nodded. He pursed his lips. This I’ve got to see – he didn’t shout it, but he didn’t need to.
He clapped his hands. A younger man in a toga without a stripe appeared as if conjured out of the air. He received the order without expression, and disappeared as abruptly as he’d appeared, to return a moment later with the articles Nicole had asked for.
Marcus Aurelius’ aide nodded to Nicole. “Go ahead. Use that desk there, if you like. Take all the time you need.” Sure as hell, there it was again – This I’ve got to see.
“Thank you,” Nicole said pointedly. She went to stand behind the desk – it was small and high, almost like a lectern – and set to work. The aide watched her for a while, long enough to see that she really was writing. Then he shrugged a tiny shrug and turned away to obstruct the next foolish innocent who ventured into his lair.
She laid out her statement like any other legal brief she’d ever drafted: first the facts, then their implications. What is civilization worth when the Marcomanni and Quadi held Carnuntum for months without molesting me in any way, but I was brutally raped by the first Roman legionary I saw during the reconquest of the city? She said not a word about what the Germans had done to poor Antonina. That wasn’t how the game was played.
Finally, she came to the important part: what she wanted the presiding authority – here a Roman Emperor, not a Superior Court judge – to do about the issue at hand. Unfortunately, I cannot positively identify the soldier who violated me. If I could, I would ask for him to be punished to the limit of the law. and for me to receive compensation both from him and from the government of the Roman Empire, under whose agency he acted. I still deserve the latter compensation, for as an agent of the government of the empire he grossly abused the authority entrusted to him, and used it to commit this outrageous crime against me.