And when they were gone, when fires began to burn on the northern bank of the Danube, she felt more alone than ever. Some of her – a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged – rejoiced that the Germans were getting what was coming to them. But she wished Marcus Aurelius had stayed in Carnuntum. She wouldn’t have found it easy to get another audience with him, but the lure of intelligent conversation, even in the second century, had a powerful appeal.
And she felt less safe with the Roman Emperor out of the city. Though he and his army were gone, Carnuntum remained full of legionaries: garrison troops, reinforcements passing through on their way to the northern bank of the Danube, wounded men coming back from the other side of the river to recuperate. Medical care here was better than it was with the army in the field. Nicole pitied the soldiers in the forests, stalked by Germans who knew the land far better than they did, and no help for them if they were wounded but the roughest of field surgery.
“Those whoresons’ll go hungry, that they will,” a veteran said as he eased himself down onto a stool in the tavern. He’d come in with the help of a walking stick, limping on a bandaged leg. “We hit ‘em as their grain was starting to get ripe, and we’ve taken a lot of it, and burned whatever we didn’t take.”
“Serves ‘em right,” Lucius said. In his biased opinion, legionaries were splendid creatures. He wore the wooden sword on his belt all the time now, and marched everywhere. Nicole was hard put to keep him from talking like a legionary, too, complete with the appalling vocabulary. She’d never told him what one of them had done to her. What point? He wouldn’t understand.
“It certainly does serve the Germans right,” Julia said. All the Roman soldiers in the tavern nodded. Most of them had their eyes on Julia. She could have said the sun rose in the afternoon, and the legionaries’ heads – among other things – would have bobbed up and down. Men, Nicole thought scornfully.
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.