Household Gods

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.

Setting it down in writing made her angry all over again. “Bastard,” she muttered under her breath. “Fucking bastard.” She’d welcomed him as a rescuer, and what did she get for it? Thrown down in the dirt. God, if she could make him pay personally for every stroke he’d driven home, she’d do it. But if he didn’t have to pay, somebody would. She’d make damned certain of that.

When she stepped away from the desk, the Emperor’s aide waved her over to where he sat at a table piled with neatly labeled scrolls. “Let’s see what you’ve done,” he said, not quite as if he were talking to a six-year-old child, but close enough. Without a word, she passed him the closely written sheets.

Like every other literate Roman Nicole had seen, he mumbled the words to himself as he read. His eyes swept back and forth a couple of times before those expressive eyebrows of his made another leap, this one higher than either of the other two. After a bit, he paused and stared at Nicole. Then he went back to his mumbling.

“This is astonishing,” he said when he was finally done. “If I had not seen you write it with my own eyes, Mistress, ah, Umma” — he had to check the papyrus for her name, though she’d given it to him; obviously he was one of those people for whom nothing was real till it was written down — “I would not have believed it. Why, this might almost be a brief prepared by a gentleman of the legal profession. Astonishing,” he said again.

He’d intended his words as high praise. But it wasn’t high enough to suit Nicole. “What do you mean, almost?” she demanded.

“Well,” he replied, glad of a chance to get sniffy again, “of course you do not cite the relevant laws and imperial decrees, nor the opinions of the leading jurisconsults, but the reasoning is nonetheless very clear and forceful.”

“Ah, “ Nicole said. Damn. She wasn’t a trained lawyer here; she didn’t have the citations at her fingertips, nor know where to find them.

She could learn. She was sure of that. She’d learned in the United States, and things were undoubtedly simpler here. But where would she find the time? Most days, at least before the Germans came, she’d had trouble finding time to use the chamberpot. Even if by a miracle she could squeeze a spare hour out of the day, where would she find someone to train her, or books from which to study? The next book of any sort she saw here would be the first.

She’d missed a few words of the aide’s reply. He condescended, superciliously, to repeat himself: “I will be certain this comes to the Emperor’s attention. It may intrigue him. Let me see.” He glanced again at the statement. “Yes, you have described your place of residence most precisely. Should anything further be required of you, you will be summoned.”

That sounded altogether too much like, Don’t call us: we’ll call you. “What if I’m not summoned?” Nicole asked.

“The choice is the Emperor’s,” the aide replied. “As I say, I will bring this to his notice. Past that, the matter is in his hands. Who could be above the Emperor, to compel him to change his mind?”

“The law could. Justice could,” Nicole said. That was certainly true in the U.S.A., where no one was above the law. Did it also hold in the Roman Empire? If it did, did it hold for Marcus Aurelius?

Maybe not, by the way his administrative assistant’s jaw dropped. But the man didn’t tell her she was crazy, either. “What a — sophisticated attitude for a tavernkeeper to hold.” His nod had a certain finality to it, an air of dismissal.

Nicole didn’t bother to argue. There was a limit to how far anyone could push a bureaucrat. She’d tested his limits and then some. It was the best she could do; the rest was in the hands of the gods.

Julia was waiting at the tavern, fairly dancing with eagerness. She barely let Nicole get in through the door before she started in. “Did you see him? Did you?” She might have been talking about a god, or a god’s first cousin.

Nicole almost hated to disappoint her. “No, I didn’t. I had to leave a petition with an aide. We’ll see if anything comes of it.” It had better, she thought. If Marcus Aurelius ignored her case, how much trouble would picketing the town-council building cause? Plenty, she would imagine. She almost smiled at the prospect.

“I hope something does come of it,” Julia said. “I think it will, I really do. He is supposed to be a good man.”

“We’ll see,” Nicole said. She wasn’t as sure of Marcus Aurelius’ goodness as Julia was. He was the Roman Emperor, after all. She’d taken time to find out what exactly that meant. He wasn’t a king, not exactly, and it wasn’t necessarily hereditary, though it could be. What Marcus Aurelius was, was the chief political figure in a vast, ancient, and sometimes terribly corrupt empire.

Nicole had precious little use for politicians — which, considering the state of politics in late-twentieth-century America, was hardly surprising. As far as she was concerned, the higher a politician rose, the more lies he had to tell to get there, and the more likely he’d tell even bigger lies once he got to the top.

Julia didn’t share Nicole’s worries, or her cynicism either. She was already off on another subject. “While you were out,” she said, “a crier came by. There’ll be grain in the city in a day or two.”

That caught Nicole’s attention. “Oh! That is good news.” Bread, real bread. Cakes. Buns and rolls and… She stopped before she got carried away. “I hope the price isn’t too outrageous. Though they probably wouldn’t dare to try too much gouging, not with the Emperor right here to see it.”

Before Julia could answer, an odd, rhythmic clanking brought them both to the windows and the open door. This wasn’t the sharp clash and clang of swordplay. It was duller, steadier. Down the street toward the eastern gate marched a somber procession of Marcomanni and Quadi — Nicole never had learned to tell the tribes apart — chained together in gangs of ten. Many, many gangs often. Roman soldiers herded them onward, some with knotted whips, others with drawn swords.

“They’re on their way to the slave markets,” Julia said with vindictive satisfaction. “I hope they all get worked to death in the mines.”

But Nicole was watching the legionaries, not the Germans. Was one of them the man who’d violated her with such callous — practiced? — efficiency? Of itself, her left hand rose to her neck. She’d felt a Roman blade there. Had she given the legionary any trouble, she had no doubt that blade would have drunk her life. In the capture of a city, what was one body more or less?

Her gaze might have gone fearfully from one Roman soldier to another, but more people were watching the Quadi and Marcomanni. Passersby on the sidewalk jeered the captured barbarians. One of the locals almost echoed Julia: “A short life and a merry one, boys, grubbing for iron or lead!” He laughed, loud and long.

The Germans ignored him. They must have heard a hundred such jeers as they marched through the city. Their heads were down, that had been carried with such casual arrogance. Their broad shoulders were bent, their feet shuffling, not even a hint of their old swagger.

A shriek of raw rage split the afternoon. Nicole jumped half out of her skin. “That’s Antonina!” Julia exclaimed. She sprinted for the doorway, with Nicole in close pursuit.

Nicole got there just in time to watch Antonina burst from her own door, dodge a legionary with a move Michael Jordan would have envied, and smash an enormous pot over the head of one of the Germans. Shards flew like shrapnel. The German staggered. Blood poured down his face. Nicole marveled that he didn’t fall over dead.

“Mithras, lady, what was that for?” bellowed the legionary Antonina had evaded.

“What do you think?” she shot back. “The day the town fell, he and a gang of his cousins raped me right here in the street.” She tried to kick the prisoner in the crotch, but he twisted away; her foot caught him in the hipbone. She followed him down the street, kicking him and cursing as vilely as she knew how. The guards laughed and clapped and cheered her on.

Nicole was astonished at the bolt of jealousy that pierced her. Antonina had at least a measure of revenge for what had happened to her. She had closure. When she finally left off trying to maim the barbarian who’d raped her, she walked back toward her house with her shoulders straight and her head high. She had, at last, put the nightmare behind her.

And what have I got? Nicole’s laughter had a bitter edge. Closure? She laughed again. How was she supposed to avenge herself on the Roman legionary who’d forced himself on her and into her? She couldn’t identify him five minutes after he shot his seed into her. She’d never recognize him now. He was — a man. That had been an advantage in the United States. It wasn’t just an advantage here. It was everything.

Her gaze flicked to Liber and Libera, sitting serenely in their plaque behind the bar. They’d given her exactly what she’d thought she wanted. What a cruel gift it had turned out to be.

And now they would not send her home. Maybe they were busy. Maybe they just didn’t care. Maybe they were laughing at her, just as Frank must have done when he started his affair with Dawn.

She looked back toward Antonina’s house. Her sour-tempered neighbor was getting on with things — and she couldn’t. That would take a miracle. She’d already had one; that must be her quota. It was more than most people ever got.

At last, the parade ended. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Marcomanni and Quadi had shambled past her doorway. Nicole kept an eye out for Antonina, in case she emerged to smash more crockery over the head of an astonished German, but that door stayed shut, and Antonina stayed within.

As the last straggling prisoner shuffled out of sight, pricked on by a sword in his backside, Julia stretched and wriggled and sighed. “It’s so good to be back inside the empire again.”

“Why?” Nicole asked bleakly. “Do you feel so much safer with the heroic legionaries to protect you?”

Julia nodded automatically. Then memory struck: she bit her lip.

Nicole didn’t tax her with it. Nicole’s problem was Nicole’s own. She did her best to get on with the rest of the day, to do what she would normally have done: look after the tavern, rustle up meals, make sure the three of them were fed. Once the grain came in, if the price was low enough, she could open the tavern again. That would be good. That would take her mind off — things.

Sometimes, for a few minutes at a stretch, she actually managed to forget. Then something — a shadow, a voice in the street, the clank of armor as a soldier strutted past — would bring back memory: reeling, falling, scale mail pressed to her body, hard hand ripping at her drawers. Then she would start to shake. Almost, she wished he’d cut her throat when he was done. Then she wouldn’t have to relive it, over and over again.

The sun sank in the northwest, throwing a long shaft of sunlight into the tavern’s doorway. The interior brightened then, as much as it ever could. But her gloom was pitch-black. No mere sunlight could begin to pierce it.

Shadows in the doorway made her look up; made her tense, too, involuntarily, braced for fight or flight. Even in silhouette, she could tell that the men she saw were strangers: they wore togas, as few of her customers ever had. “Mistress Umma, the tavernkeeper?” one of them asked in Latin more elegant than that commonly spoken in Carnuntum.

“Yes,” she said after a pause. Then: “Who are you?”

He didn’t deign to answer that. He stood just on the threshold, though it meant he had to raise his voice slightly to converse with Nicole by the bar. There was no way, his attitude said, he was going farther in. Even as far as he’d gone, he’d need a good, long stint in the baths to wash off the stink of commoner.

That rankled. And never mind that Nicole had felt remarkably much like it when she first came to Carnuntum. He wasn’t too savory, either, by American standards. Not without soap or deodorant.

He sniffed loudly. In that Latin equivalent of an Oxford accent, he declaimed — said was too mild a word: “The Emperor has received your plea. I am instructed to invite you to supper with him, to discuss the matter.”

He didn’t ask if she’d come. That would have given her too much choice in the matter.

Just for that, she was tempted to be too busy. But the Emperor wasn’t necessarily responsible for the rudeness of his staff — and he was the Emperor. If she tried to play power games with him, she would lose. She didn’t have the faintest hope of winning.

“Yes, of course I’ll come,” Nicole said. Her own words sounded harsh and unlovely in her ears, like raw down-home Indiana next to the most mellifluous Oxbridge.

Julia was staring as if her eyes would fall out of her head. Nicole wondered if there was a single thought behind them, or any emotion but awe.

She didn’t have time for awe. “Wait here while I change my tunic,” she said.

Marcus Aurelius’ messengers looked, just then, as flummoxed as Julia. Nicole smiled at them, nodded, and went serenely upstairs. Not till she was out of their sight did she leap into a run, rip into the bedroom, tear off her ratty old tunic with the grease-stains on the front, and pull on her best one. If she could have showered and done her hair, she would have. She made what order she could with fingers and comb, which wasn’t much, and stopped to breathe. No matter what she did, the Roman Emperor was going to know what kind of life she led. Her best tunic probably wouldn’t be good enough for a slave in his household.

So let him see, and let him ponder it if he could. She was an honest businesswoman, a solid if by no means wealthy citizen. She had just as much right as anyone else, to justice under the law.

She firmed her chin and squared her shoulders and marched back downstairs. A sneaking niggle of doubt evaporated: the Emperor’s messengers were still there, arms folded, feet tapping, all too obviously displeased by what they must regard as her insolence.

Too bad for them. “Let’s go,” she said briskly.

As they walked toward the town-council building, the aide who’d done the talking kept right on doing it. “The Emperor would have you know that he means no insult by supping with you seated rather than reclining. It is his own usual practice: one of his many austerities.”

Nicole raised an eyebrow. “Really? Thank you, then. I’m glad to know what to expect.”

She was, in fact, relieved. She’d never eaten while lying down, and she hadn’t the faintest idea how to do it without slopping dinner all over herself. Certainly nobody in her social circle did any such thing. It must be the height of high fashion.

Stolid legionaries stood guard outside the town hall. They might have been the same who’d stood there this morning, or they might not. There was no way to tell. In the manner of sentries even in her own time, they kept their eyes fixed straight again as Nicole passed through the gate. Her gaze flicked from one side to the other. Was one of them the man who had assaulted her? How would she ever know?

She’d never look at a Roman legionary in armor again without wondering, Is that it? Is he the one?

For that matter, how many of them had done to other women in Carnuntum what that one had done to her? Had any other victims come forward? Would women in this time actually do any such thing?

All this time, Nicole had lived in this world, and still she didn’t know the most basic things: how people thought, how they felt, how they reacted to trauma. She was in a country so foreign that she just barely began to understand a small part of it, and even of that she wasn’t completely certain.

Her reflections brought her down one passage and then another, till she found herself in a largeish room that faced west. The last of the sun, with the help of several lamps much larger and more ornate than her own, lit the chamber amazingly well, even without electricity. Even so, she couldn’t see much of what was in it against the glare: only that there was a man standing by one of the windows, a black outline against the sunset light.

One of her guides had pushed in ahead of her — officiously, she thought. “Sir,” he said, “here is the woman.”

“Of course,” said the shadow by the window. The aide backed out of the room, as smooth as if on wheels, and ushered Nicole in with a sharp flick of the hand.

She found her heart was beating hard and her palms were clammy. What in the world was she supposed to do or say in front of the Emperor of the Romans? What if she committed some hideous faux pas? What would he do then? Throw her out on her ear? Fling her into jail? Shout “Off with her head!”?

The shadow moved away from the window, coming clearer little by little, till finally she had a good view of his face. That reassured her, a little. He looked both older and tireder than he did on his coins. And he looked more like a college professor — a philosopher, as Titus Calidius Severus would have said; she had to put down the stab of loss at the memory, as sharp now as it had ever been, and there was no time for it here, dammit -

Oh, damn, she thought, groping for the train of her reflection. More like a college professor than a politician. Yes. Maybe that was a good sign.

He peered at her — no eyeglasses or contacts here. “You would be the tavernkeeper Umma?”

“Yes, sir,” Nicole answered, using the same form of address as the aide had. If that wasn’t fancy enough to suit the Emperor, no doubt he’d let her know.

But he only said, “Come in, then, and we shall go from eggs to apples, as the proverb puts it.” His Latin was even more astringently pure than that spoken by his servitors. When Nicole spoke, she often dropped a final m or s. as someone speaking casual English might say workin’ for working. Everybody in Carnuntum talked that way. Marcus Aurelius didn’t. In his mouth, every verb form, every noun ending, was perfectly distinct.

“Thank you, sir,” she said to him in her rough country accent, and went where he beckoned her, to a beautiful wooden table with an inlaid top, set near enough to the window to catch the light, but not so near as to dazzle the eyes. She took the chair that had been set on the far side. An army of guards didn’t leap out of the walls to haul her off to the dungeon. Boldly, she ventured to add, “And thank you for hearing my petition.”

Marcus Aurelius smiled as he took the chair across from her. “You are welcome,” he replied. “That petition is one of the most intriguing documents to have come before me in some time. Had Alexander not seen you write it with his own eyes, he would have thought it the work of someone of much higher station in life. Most intriguing.”

“All I did was set out what happened to me and what I’d like you to do about it,” Nicole said. There was no way she wanted Marcus Aurelius to ask too many questions about how she’d learned to write like that. She had no good answers for him, and nothing he was likely to believe.

He wasn’t going to let it go. She should have known he wouldn’t. “The reasoning is as forceful and direct as if a skilled advocate had composed it. I do not agree with all your conclusions, not by any means, but you argue them well.”

“Thank you, sir.” Nicole was saved by the dinner bell, in a manner of speaking: just then a servant — or more likely a slave — brought in a jar of wine and the first course. It did include eggs, eggs hard-boiled and seasoned with olive oil and pepper. They rested on lettuce also oiled and peppered — and vinegared as well. It could have been a salad from a trendy bistro in L.A., where the cuisine was nouvelle and the decor minimalist.

“If you were expecting some sybaritic feast, I fear you will be disappointed,” Marcus Aurelius said, almost as if in true apology. “My tastes are far from ornate.”

“This is wonderful.” Nicole had to work not to talk with her mouth full. “We didn’t have much of anything to eat while the Marcomanni and Quadi held Carnuntum.”

“A sufficiency of material needs is good. An excess is bad,” Marcus Aurelius said. His tone had changed, taken on almost a singsong note, as if he were declaiming on a stage. “These eggs come from the same orifice as a hen’s droppings. Wine is but the juice of a bunch of grapes, my purple toga dyed with the blood of a shellfish. None of these things deserves any affection beyond the ordinary.”

That sounded very noble — till Nicole looked down at her own best tunic, of shabby linen streakily dyed with woad. Marcus Aurelius might choose austerity, but he had a choice. When Nicole went hungry, there’d been nothing voluntary about it. She hadn’t had any choice when the legionary raped her, either.

She pointed out that last, not too sarcastically, she hoped. Evidently not. Marcus Aurelius nodded. “I understand as much,” he said. “Your petition made it very plain. If you could identify the soldier who violated you, he would be liable to severe punishment. The legions exist to protect the Roman commonwealth, not to pain and distress those living under that commonwealth.”

“I certainly hope so,” Nicole said. “That’s why the government should be liable for what he did to me.”

Before Marcus Aurelius could answer, the servant brought in a new jar of wine and a heavy silver platter piled with pieces of chicken roasted with garlic and herbs. Not even the Roman Emperor had heard of a fork: Marcus Aurelius ate with his fingers, as Nicole did herself. He was neater than she was, and more obviously practiced. “The food pleases you?” he inquired.

“Very much, thank you,” Nicole answered, “even if it is only dead flesh.”

He started slightly, and stared. She wondered if she’d get into trouble for having the nerve to put a sardonic twist on what he said. To hell with it, she thought, and instructed herself to stop worrying. She never would have got an audience with the Emperor if she hadn’t had a fat dose of chutzpah.

“Anything would taste good now,” she added. “As I said, we haven’t had much to eat since the Germans came.”

To her astonishment, Marcus Aurelius lowered his eyes as if in shame. “You may justly reproach me for that,” he said. “Had I been able to best the barbarians before they broke into Carnuntum, I would gladly have done so. But I had neither the strength nor the ability to prevent them.”

That he felt he deserved blame for his failure was perfectly, even painfully, obvious. That he was also very, very able was just as obvious. In the late twentieth century, such a politician would have been a prodigy of nature — and very likely would have found it impossible to get elected to office.

But nobody had elected Marcus Aurelius to anything. He was Emperor of the Romans. He held that office for life. Rulers of that sort were out of fashion in her time, and with good reason. Without the need to keep the people happy enough to keep on voting for them, rulers could do whatever they pleased. Even if they bought votes and forced their election, in the end they fell, and often bloodily.

And yet, without the need to pander to the electorate, rulers might also be as good as they chose. They didn’t have to slip and slither and slide around every issue, to make sure the voters kept on voting them back into office. Nor did they have to back off from unpopular positions, if those positions were right, for fear of being voted out. They could do whatever needed doing, and do it to the best of their ability.

As Nicole listened to the man across the table, she understood something altogether new about accountability. Not all freedom was license, and not all power was corrupt. This Emperor of the Romans, whose rank and office were as undemocratic as they could possibly be, made even the best American politician seem an unprincipled hack.

While they sat silent, each lost in reflection, the slave brought in bread and honey. Nicole took the first, fabulously sweet bite, and had all she could do to keep from wolfing down the rest. “This is wonderful honey!” she said.

Marcus Aurelius smiled. “I’m glad you enjoy it. It is from Mount Hymettus, in the Athenian land.”

Nicole realized she was supposed to be impressed, though he was obviously trying to make little of it. She was certainly impressed with the flavor, whatever the origin. Of course the Emperor would have only the best.

After the bread came apples, just as he’d promised at the beginning of the meal: apples sliced and candied in more of that wonderful honey. When she’d licked her fingers clean, Nicole felt replete for the first time in longer than she liked to think. She savored it. She’d known so little bodily well-being lately; it was delicious just to sit there and feel that sense of fullness.

The servant cleared away the remains of the dinner. The sun had gone down, leaving only fading twilight beyond the windows. More lamps glowed in the chamber than Nicole had ever seen in one room. Even so, they did not, could not, banish darkness as electricity did. They pushed it back a bit, that was all. Every time Marcus Aurelius moved, fresh shadows stole out and sheltered themselves in the lines of his face. He looked older than he had in the daylight, a tired, fiftyish man who’d had too little sleep and too much stress for much too long.

He made a steeple of his fingertips and studied her over it, homing in at last on the purpose of the meeting. “I am curious as to the logic by which you reached the conclusion that the Roman government is in some way responsible for the vicious and lewd act of one soldier.”

Now he got down to it. This wasn’t a courtroom; it felt more like settling out of court. But she was working — playing — with the law again even so. Parts of her that had felt dead, closed off, since she’d come to Carnuntum awoke to sudden and vibrant life. Rain in the desert, she thought, awakening seeds in the dry earth, a bloom of flowers after years of drought.

Oh, she had missed it, if she was waxing rhapsodic about its return. She pursed her lips and folded her hands and got down to business. “It seems plain enough to me,” she said. “If a soldier isn’t the agent of the government that employs him, what is he?”

“A collection of the atoms that make up a man,” Marcus Aurelius replied. “A product of the divine fire, living according to nature.”

“That’s philosophy,” Nicole said. “I thought we were talking about law.”

“There is a connection between the two, you must admit, for good law can spring only from a sound grounding in that which is ethically proper. Would you not agree?”

He sounded like a book, with his rounded sentences and his careful ordering of ideas. But they were fuzzy, muddy ideas compared to the crisp architecture of the law.

All theory and no practice, she thought. He wasn’t the first such thinker she’d seen, or even the tenth. With a faint sigh of exasperation, she said, “Isn’t that irrelevant for the moment? We’re talking about what the law is, not what it should be.”

Marcus Aurelius startled her with a disarmingly boyish grin. “Oh, indeed, Alexander did not err when he sent you to me,” he said. “You have a great natural aptitude for a profession of which you must hitherto have been altogether ignorant.”

Nicole drew breath to object to that, but a belated attack of sense kept her silent. There was no way she could explain how she really knew about the law. Let him think her a prodigy, if it got her what she wanted.

She hadn’t diverted him from his line of thought, either. He veered right back to it with a quiet obstinacy that would have served him well on the tenure track at a university. “A soldier, like any other man,” he said, “is obliged to live according to that which is ethically right.”

Nicole pounced with a cry of glee. “Ha! How can you say that a soldier is doing what is ethically right, when he rapes a woman he’s supposed to defend?”

“I do not. I never have,” Marcus Aurelius replied. “I do, however, dispute your claim of agency applying to my government.”

My government. Maybe he didn’t even notice he was reminding Nicole of who he was. It was literally true. The government was his. He owned it. No one in the United States could say such a thing, not and be believed. That was not a phrase she would ever have heard in the United States. “You still haven’t answered my question,” she said. Marcus Aurelius smiled again, perhaps at her stubborn presumption. “If he’s not an agent, what is he? What can he be? If a soldier doesn’t belong to a government, what is he?”

Nothing, was the answer she expected. But Marcus Aurelius said, quite seriously, “A brigand.” Once again she realized, as Dorothy had after the tornado, that she wasn’t in Kansas — or Indiana, or California — anymore.

“I suppose that may be true,” she said, “but it hasn’t got anything to do with what we’re talking about here.”

“I should be hard pressed to disagree with you. “ The Emperor inclined his head with studied courtesy. “By all means continue your argument; perhaps you may persuade me.”

He meant it. Nicole had long experience in the ways of judges and juries, and he was telling the truth. If she could persuade him, he’d give her what she wanted.

This was an honestly, incontestably good man. He wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t playing a part. He was a little on the imperial side for her democratic tastes, but of his goodness she had no doubts whatever. Nor was he doing it to gain himself a jump in the polls. He did it because of what he was; because, for him, there was no rational alternative.

Nicole had to stop to get her wits together. Genuine goodness in a politician was profoundly disconcerting.

She took refuge in the security of legal reasoning. “Your soldier was under orders to recapture Carnuntum from the Marcomanni and the Quadi, was he not? He was your agent — one of your agents — in that, am I correct?”

He nodded and smiled, as pleased as if she’d been his own protegee. “I believe I see the argument you’re framing,” he said. “Go on.”

“If that soldier was your agent when he was doing the things he was supposed to do, how can he stop being your agent when he commits a crime against me?” Nicole demanded. “He wouldn’t have been in Carnuntum in the first place if he hadn’t been acting on your behalf.”

“Yes, I thought this was the port toward which you would be sailing,” Marcus Aurelius replied happily. “But let me ask a question in return. If I send a man from Rome to Carthage to buy grain, I am liable if he should cheat on the transaction, not so?”

“Of course you are,” Nicole said.

“You take a broader view of the concept of agency than the jurisconsults are in the habit of doing, but never mind that,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Let me ask you another — you do understand the concept of what is termed a hypothetical question?”

“Yes,” Nicole said. Part of her, the quick, unthinking part, was irked that he needed to ask. But Umma the tavernkeeper by the banks of the Danube — would she have understood the concept?

Marcus Aurelius, in his turn, seemed surprised Nicole did understand. His eyebrows rose. He paused as if to marshal his thoughts — as if he needed to delete a whole section of argumentation she’d just rendered unnecessary. “Very well,” he said at last. “Suppose, then, that my agent, while in Carthage to buy grain, violated a woman. Would I be liable then!^;”

“You certainly wouldn’t be liable in a criminal sense,” Nicole said, “but if he wouldn’t have gone to Carthage except at your order, you might have some civil liability.” That at least was the way of it where she came from, particularly in front of a sympathetic jury.

But Marcus Aurelius shook his head. “He is responsible for his own actions then, and solely responsible for them. No man learned in the law would dispute this for a moment; please believe me when I tell you as much.”

She did believe him. She had to. He wouldn’t lie; it wasn’t in him.

So why was his concept of agency so much narrower than hers? It did fit a pattern she was seeing: that everything to do with government was much more limited here than in the United States.

What exactly did the government of the Roman Empire do? All she’d ever seen it do till the Marcomanni and Quadi took Carnuntum was feed one condemned criminal to the lions. Obviously, Marcus Aurelius commanded the legions. She supposed the imperial government kept up the roads; the guide had said something about that, all the way back on her honeymoon in Petronell. Past that…

Education? If you wanted any, you bought it yourself. Welfare? If you couldn’t work, either your family took care of you or you starved. Health care? Health care here was a cruel joke to begin with. The environment? The Romans didn’t care. They would have exploited it worse than they did, if only they’d known how.

The worst of it was, in context it made sense. Even in good times here, people walked one step from starvation. There was just barely enough to keep them going, let alone to give to the government in the form of taxes and service fees. She’d never thought of an active government as a luxury only a rich country could afford, but she’d never had her nose rubbed in poverty like this before, either.

Neither had she stopped to think about the effect the Roman government’s inherent limits would have on the law. By the standards she was used to, the government didn’t and couldn’t do much. Moreover, if it was that limited, then so were its obligations to its citizens. Quid pro quo was good Latin, and perfectly logical. If you didn’t have much to do with the government, the government wouldn’t have much to do with you.

And that left her with precious little by way of a case. Roman law simply didn’t see liability in the same way American law did. It couldn’t. There wasn’t the structure to support it.

Like a boxer sparring for time after taking one on the chin, she said, “But if you send your man to Carthage to buy grain, you don’t give him the tools he needs to commit forcible rape.” The edge of that sword against her neck had been sharper than any of the razors she’d used to shave herself.

“Possibly not,’’ Marcus Aurelius said, “although I suppose he might use a stylus to threaten rather than to write on wax in a tablet.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Nicole said, “but that’s reaching.”

“Perhaps it is.” The Emperor yielded the point without rancor. “But I did not give the miscreant legionary his tools to enable him to violate women. I gave them to him to drive the invaders from the Roman Empire. Having regained Pannonia, I aim to go on and conquer the Germans in their gloomy forests, that this menace may never again threaten us.”

He sighed. If he was a born soldier, Nicole was a born Indy-car driver.

But he was doing what he thought he had to do to make the world a better place, and doing it as best he knew how. Nicole couldn’t help but admire him, even when he was ruling against her.

Would he succeed in his goal? She didn’t know. All she knew was that, sooner or later, the Roman Empire would fall. She didn’t know when, or exactly how. She hoped, just then, that it didn’t fall on this man’s watch. If there was any fairness in the world, he deserved to win his war and hold back the darkness a while longer.

He said — and he said it with some regret, too, “I am going to deny your petition for damages from my government for the attack upon you.”

Nicole drew breath to ask if she could appeal that, but stopped, feeling foolish. If the Emperor refused her, who could overrule him? There was no Supreme Court here, no check or balance to the Emperor’s power. To her amazement, she wasn’t angry at this man, this good and — yes — wise ruler. She didn’t feel cheated. He was playing the game by the rules he understood, and playing it as fairly as he knew how.

“I still think you’re wrong,” she said, “but what can I do? I can’t make you agree with me, any more than I could make your soldier” — she was too stubborn to stop calling him that — “stop doing what he did.”

Marcus Aurelius held up a hand. “I have ruled that the Roman Empire owes you no compensation for what you suffered at this unknown legionary’s wicked hands. That ruling shall stand. Whether you deserve compensation for the wrong you have suffered may perhaps be another question. Alexander!” For the first time that evening, the Emperor raised his voice. It made Nicole start a little. He was soft-spoken by nature and inclination, but she knew, just then, that he had taught himself to be heard across a battlefield.

The man who hurried into the room was none other than the secretary who had been so surprised at Nicole’s petition that he’d actually accepted it. He ignored Nicole completely. Marcus Aurelius beckoned him close and murmured something to him, all but whispering in his ear. Nicole tried her best to eavesdrop, but they were both too skilled at keeping private conversations private.

Alexander glanced at Nicole. His mouth was thin with distaste. “Sir, are you sure?”

That, Nicole heard perfectly clearly. She obviously was meant to. Interesting, she thought: Marcus Aurelius’ subordinates respected him, that was evident, but they also felt free to talk back to him.

“Yes, yes,” said the Emperor of the Romans with the slightest well-bred hint of impatience. “I am most certainly sure.” In Sheldon Rosenthal’s fondest dreams, he was perhaps a quarter as suave as Marcus Aurelius.

With a sigh, Alexander left the chamber. While he was gone, Nicole didn’t know what to say, so she settled for saying nothing. The Emperor seemed lost in thought — meditating on the cares of empire, she supposed.

In a little while, Alexander came back with a small leather sack, which he handed without ceremony to Marcus Aurelius. He left shaking his head. The Emperor, his every movement said, was doing something Alexander could not possibly approve of.

Marcus Aurelius knew it, too; his eyes glinted as he set the sack in front of Nicole. “The Empire cannot compensate you,” he said. “I, however, as a citizen of the Empire, can offer you, privately and personally, some small recompense for your misfortune.”

And you can do it without setting a precedent that you and your successors are bound to follow, Nicole thought. No, no flies on the Roman Emperor, not a one. But, having ruled against her, he could have sent her home with nothing. She’d fully expected that; been braced for it, even tried to formulate some kind of argument that wouldn’t make her look either greedy or presumptuous.

She thanked him automatically, with her eyes on the sack. It was very small. Give her a few denarii, pack her off, rest content that she had no further recourse — how easy for him to do. Easy, and cheap.

It wasn’t exactly fine etiquette, but she untied the string that closed the mouth of the sack. If Marcus Aurelius imagined he could shut her up with a handful of silver…

She shook the sack out on the table. It had hardly any heft to it at all. If it was empty — if this was some kind of bitter joke -

It was a damned good thing she’d kept her mouth shut before she saw what the aide had brought her. These weren’t a few token denarii. They were aurei — all gold, brilliant in the lamplight. Ten of them. She counted, very carefully; picked them up and tipped them into her palm. They gleamed there, more wealth than Umma had ever held in her hand at one time.

Marcus Aurelius didn’t frown at her rudeness. Maybe he even understood it. “I understand that no money can punish your violator, or undo what he did to you. But what money can do, I hope this money will do. The gods grant it be so.”

It was a great deal of money. Two hundred fifty denarii — more than half the price of a slave. A thousand sesterces. Four thousand asses. It was like an incantation, an invocation of prosperity. More than a month’s business — not profit, business — at the tavern. The rough equivalent, in second-century purchasing power, of the price of a Lexus.

Nicole had expected less, and would have settled for it. But the lawyer in her frowned at the ten aurei and reflected that, in terms of pain and suffering, she should have got more. He probably had it, too. If the deep-pockets rule applied, whose pockets — or moneybags — were deeper than those of the Emperor of the Romans? The rest of her knew that wasn’t realistic. Money went a whole lot further here than in West Hills. Nor, by the law of the Empire, had Marcus Aurelius been obligated to give her any compensation at all. It was the action of a good man, a man who gave not because he had to, but because he felt that it was right.

Carefully, she said, “What money can do, I think this money will do. Thank you, sir. You are very generous.” She’d said things like that more times than she could count. Far more often than not, she was conscious of the hypocrisy even as the words passed her lips. This time, she meant it from the bottom of her heart. How strange, in a world not just conspicuously but dreadfully worse than the one she’d been born to, to find at the head of the Roman Empire a man head and shoulders and torso above any of the rulers or statesmen of the late twentieth century. Mediocrities in expensive suits, every last one of them.

“I shall give you torchbearers to escort you back to your house,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Any town, even one so much smaller than Rome as this, may prove dangerous to an honest woman walking alone in darkness. Having suffered one calamity, you ought not to fear another.”

“Thank you again for your thoughtfulness,” Nicole said.

To her astonishment, she saw she’d embarrassed him. “Some take pride in claiming credit for service,” he said. “Some will not claim it aloud, but still secretly regard those whom they help as being in their debt. I try, as I believe all should try, to do one right thing after another, as naturally as a vine passes from yielding one summer’s grapes to those of the next.”

If another man had said such a thing, he would have sounded like a pompous ass. Marcus Aurelius brought it out as if it were, or should be, simple truth.

Nicole smiled. Now, finally, she understood what he was. It was more than a word. It was a whole manner of being. “The Romans are lucky,” she said, “to have a philosopher for an emperor.”

He surprised her again, this time by shaking his head. “A general at the helm, a Trajan or a Vespasian, would serve us better now,” he replied. “But I am what we have, and I can but do my best.” He rose from the table, and called for servants. They came quickly, torches at the ready, crackling and trailing a stream of fire. He handed her into their care, with a grace and a courtesy that were in keeping with all the rest of him. The last she saw of him, he was standing by the table in the light of those many lamps, his shoulders bowed a little, borne down by the weight of his office. It was late by second-century standards, but he looked as if he had a long night ahead of him still.

Outside in the darkness, the torches seemed dismayingly feeble, casting only a dim, flickering light at the feet of their bearers. The moon, which hung in the southeast on this clear late-August night, gave more and better light, but anything at all might have lurked in the moonshadows. A bright red star — Mars? — glowed a little above the moon. Even brighter was Jupiter, splendid and yellow-white below the moon, not far above the eastern horizon. Was that Saturn between them? Nicole would have known once, when it was a family pastime to spot the planets and call out names of the constellations. She hadn’t done it since — Indianapolis? A long time. Night skies in Los Angeles were drowned in light, and she was too busy, most of the time, to notice.

This was the first time that she’d had to navigate Carnuntum by night. It was a dangerous pastime if you were too poor to afford guards and torch-bearers. In the dark, in the absence of either streetlights or signs, she almost lost herself in the twisting ways of the city. Nothing looked the same as it did in daylight. Her steps grew slower and slower. The torchbearers began to mutter behind their hands, rude remarks in Latin and in another, unfamiliar language. Greek? It was much too mellifluous to be German.

At last, to her relief, she found the fountain near the tavern. From there, she had no trouble finding her way home. At the door, though she was suddenly, desperately tired, she paused to thank the Emperor’s servants. They were polite to her because Marcus Aurelius had been, but they plainly couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

Dim lamplight flickered through the slats of the shutters on the front windows. How nice of Julia, Nicole thought, to leave a lamp burning, so that Nicole wouldn’t have to fumble her way in the dark.

She opened the door and slipped through it into the familiar, slightly funky interior of the tavern. Julia was sitting on a stool beside the lamp. She looked ready to fall over.

“For heaven’s sake,” Nicole said, “what did you wait up for me for? Go to bed before you fall asleep where you sit.”

Julia shook her head stubbornly, though a yawn caught her and held her hostage in the middle. “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” she said. “I know Marcus Aurelius is supposed to be a good man, but he is the Emperor. He can do whatever he wants. I was afraid of what he might do when you had the nerve to ask him to pay you back for what that legionary did, as if it were his fault. “

“He wouldn’t admit to that,” Nicole said. “We had quite an argument about it, as a matter of fact. He wouldn’t admit it was his fault or his government’s fault.” Even though she thought she understood why Marcus Aurelius reasoned as he did, anything less than complete success irked her.

It impressed the hell out of Julia. “You… argued with the Roman Emperor, Mistress?” she said incredulously.

“I sure did,” Nicole answered, “and even though he wouldn’t admit that he and his government were at fault, he gave me this.” She tossed the little leather sack down in front of the freedwoman. Julia stared at it dubiously, as Nicole must have done when the Emperor gave it to her. “Go ahead, open it.”

Julia did as told. Her gasp was altogether satisfactory. She spilled the aurei out on the tabletop. Nicole watched her closely as she put them back into the sack one by one, and made sure all ten were in there when she returned it. That was a lot of money — temptation even for the most honest employee.

“By the gods,” Julia said, softly and reverently, though Nicole thought she revered the cash more than the gods. “He wouldn’t have given you this much if he’d gone to bed with you himself.”

“I didn’t go see him to go to bed with him,” Nicole said with rather more sharpness than was strictly necessary.

“But if he’d wanted to — “ Everything was very straightforward in Julia’s mind. Nicole had seen that time and again. She’d also seen that trying to change Julia’s mind was like pounding your head against a rock: your head would break long before the rock did. This time, she didn’t even try. “Let’s get some sleep,” she said. “Everything turned out as well as it could.”

“I’ll say!” Julia exclaimed. “Almost makes me wish — “

Nicole’s expression brought her up short. As clearly as if it were happening again, Nicole could feel the Roman soldier forcing himself onto her, ramming deep, driving home a lot more than simple physical pain. What it did to her spirit… “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nicole said harshly. “Be glad of that.”

Somebody in the Bible — Jacob? — had seen God face to face, and his life was preserved. After that, he’d become a great man among the Hebrews. Nicole didn’t remember all the details; she hadn’t been to Sunday school in a long, long time. But she’d seen Marcus Aurelius face to face, and not only was her life preserved, she’d come away with ten aurei. That was enough to make her a celebrity in the neighborhood, if not in all of Carnuntum.

She would much rather not have been raped. But since she had been, she would much rather Julia hadn’t said anything about the compensation Marcus Aurelius had given her. Asking Julia not to gossip, though, was like asking a rooster not to crow when the sun came up. You could ask, but it wasn’t likely to do you much good.

As the word spread, she gained customers. Fortunately she had food and drink to sell them; local farmers, those the Marcomanni and Quadi hadn’t killed or kidnapped, started coming back into Carnuntum. And the army had its own supply train with it, and some of the flour and sausage and wine went to the people in the city. Part of that was Marcus Aurelius’ care for the people over whom he ruled. Part, Nicole suspected, would have happened anyhow. Where money and food came together, those with the one couldn’t fail to get their hands on the other.

One consequence of her attack of chutzpah saddened Nicole: Antonina stopped speaking to her. She didn’t know what had caused the estrangement, but she could make a fair guess. If Antonina too had asked for compensation, but been turned down, that would do it. Nicole would have been the first to admit that Antonina had suffered worse than she had herself — but, as a lawyer, she knew only too well that how you phrased your claim often mattered more than what had actually happened to you.

Before long, thanks to all the legionaries in town, the tavern was doing at least as much business as it had before the pestilence and the Germans. A lot of the customers, of course, were the Roman soldiers who had come up to Carnuntum with Marcus Aurelius.

They gave her the creeps. Every so often, one or another of them would ask either her or Julia, “What’s the matter, sweetheart? Don’t you feel like being friendly?” Sometimes Julia did. Though she did her best to stay discreet about it, she was probably doing more business than she ever had before.

But the mere words sweetheart and friendly, spoken together or separately, were enough to freeze Nicole where she stood. Every time she heard them from a legionary, she would stop cold. Her eyes would ache with the effort of peering at a face that was interchangeable with any number of other black-bearded, big-nosed, olive-skinned faces. Was this the man who’d flung her down on her back in the alley and violated her with such efficiency, even aplomb?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell. Maybe the Roman who’d raped her had died five minutes later, killed by a spear in the gut. Maybe, on the other hand, he was sitting on a stool in the tavern this very moment, drinking a cup of cheap wine, eating bread and oil, and watching her backside. Maybe he was laughing, knowing she couldn’t have recognized him in his armor and helmet. And maybe he was thinking, That’s the piece of ass I had the day we took this little rat hole of a city. Not bad, for provincial meat. Maybe I’ll have me another taste.

One night after closing time, as she and Julia were finishing the last of the cleanup, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She told Julia what she went through with every legionary who talked the way they seemed to make a point of talking. Julia paused in scrubbing down the last of the tables. “I do understand why you’re worried about it,” she said, “but I wouldn’t be, if I were you. What happens when an army takes a city isn’t likely to happen again once the city’s safe and settled.”

That made sense, as did most of what Julia said. She’d seen it with the Germans here. And even in the twentieth-century United States, act of war went into a lot of contracts and insurance policies alongside act of God as a justification for nonperformance.

Nicole said, “The top part of my mind understands what you’re saying. It even thinks you’re right. But down underneath — “ She shuddered. “Every time I see a legionary, I want to go somewhere and hide — or else I want to kill him. Sometimes both at once.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Julia answered. “But you can’t do that, you know. You have to go on with your life as best you can.”

“I suppose so,” Nicole said with a sigh. Again, Julia’s advice was brisk and rational. If Nicole followed it, she’d be better off than if she ignored it. But, as she’d said, what the Roman soldier had done to her went down far below the part of her mind where rationality lived. A man had treated her as if she were nothing but a piece of meat with a handy hole. There was nothing reasonable or logical about her reaction to it.

She glanced behind the counter, toward the plaque of Liber and Libera. There sat the god and goddess, just as they had for so long on her nightstand back in West Hills. They weren’t any more active than they’d been then, either, or any more helpful. They just… sat there.

What more do you want from me? she demanded silently. What more can you want from me? Do you want me to die here? Is that what you’re waiting for?

The god and goddess were as uncommunicative as ever. It wasn’t, now, that they didn’t hear her, as when she’d had that other, now broken plaque, or that all the lines were busy. It was subtly different. They heard her, but, for whatever reason, they were choosing not to listen.

She trudged up to bed, and lay there in the light of the lamp she kept lit, now, all night long. The shutters were closed and tightly barred. It wasn’t likely any man would come creeping in through the window, but she just felt more comfortable knowing that he’d have to break down the shutters if he tried it.

She lay in bed, and she kept up her barrage of prayer, pleading, whatever one wanted to call it. Wasn’t enough enough? She’d worked her fingers to the bone, she’d been hungry, she’d slowly poisoned herself every time she ate or drank, she’d been sick and almost died; she’d gone through anything but painless dentistry and almost wished she’d been dead. She’d seen the city sacked, she’d seen cruelty to animals and cruelty to slaves and cruelty to women that was so automatic, people didn’t even know they were being cruel. She’d been raped. And still she was trapped here.

And what did she have to put on the good side of the ledger? Titus Calidius Severus — yes, certainly. But the pestilence had killed him. And Marcus Aurelius. She’d never regret that she’d been able to meet him. There’d never been a man like him before, nor ever would be again.

She would have done anything this side of being raped again, to escape Carnuntum for California. Even that… Would she? Could she go through that, if it brought her home?

Yes. She could. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, the worst thing she could imagine. But if that was the price of her escape from the second century — she would pay it.

Marcus Aurelius proved to be a rare politician in yet another way: he kept his promises. As soon as he had Carnuntum in some sort of order, he took his army across the Danube to bring the war home to the Quadi and Marcomanni. Nicole stood on the riverbank with most of the rest of the population of the city, and cheered as the Roman flotilla crossed over to enemy territory. People all around her marveled over and over at the great size and magnificence of the force. She held her tongue. Maybe she’d seen The Longest Day too many times on late-night TV. To her eyes, the flotilla was neither large nor imposing. It seemed no more than a collection of barges and rafts, and rowboats that reminded her of oversized racing shells.

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.

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, except get drunk or get screwed. She wasn’t in the mood to invite a hangover. The other… her whole body tightened, and her stomach clenched. If she tried very hard, she could remember that last, tender night with Titus Calidius Severus. But no matter how hard she tried to cling to it, the Roman legionary’s hard hands and mocking voice ran over it and drowned it.

Julia had given up on her. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Why don’t you do that, too? And hope — or pray to Liber and Libera, since you’ve become so fond of them — that you’ll feel better in the morning.” She turned away from Nicole and headed for the stairs. “Good night,” she said over her shoulder.

That was as blunt, and as close to outright rude, as the freedwoman had ever dared be. It demonstrated rather forcibly how far Nicole had strayed from anything resembling decent manners.

She didn’t care. She had perfectly good reason for being unreasonable. If Julia couldn’t see that, then too bad for Julia.

As soon as Nicole had shaped the thought, she knew a stab — small but distinct — of guilt. Julia had been her best friend and ally in this whole ugly world. She didn’t deserve to be treated this way. “Then she should try harder to understand how I feel,” Nicole said to the air.

Nicole knew she should go up after Julia, and if not apologize, then at least try to smooth things over. But Julia was long gone.

Tomorrow would be soon enough. She’d wake again in Carnuntum as she always had. She’d do something to make it up to her freedwoman — something small but telling. She didn’t know what. She couldn’t, once she’d made herself think like a civilized adult, think much past the moment, or past the burden of this whole awful age.

She sniffled loudly, and blew her nose on her fingers. No Kleenex, no handkerchief. She grimaced and wiped her fingers on the rammed-earth floor, which at least had the virtue of being newly swept. She rubbed her hand on her tunic. A smear of dirt stained the faded wool. She brushed ineffectually at it. It was a losing battle. Every bit of it was the same: futile and hopeless.

She thrust herself to her feet, went over to the bar, opened the lid of one of the winejars and stared down into it. Plenty of wine in Carnuntum these days, with so many legionaries in town. The rich, fruity scent filled her nostrils. Even through the heaviness of tears, she grew a little dizzy with the fumes.

When she first came to Carnuntum, the very smell of wine gave her the horrors. Now she saw in it only oblivion, and blessed numbness.

And in the morning she’d wake up with a headache, and the world would still be too much with her, and what would she do after that? Drink another jar of wine? Her father had taken that road; she knew where it led. But now she understood why he’d done it. She even came close to forgiving — a thing she’d never imagined she’d do.

She reached for the dipper. Instead of pouring the wine into a cup, she poured out a puddle in front of Liber and Libera. She let the last dribble of wine spill down the faces of the god and goddess — side by side, coequal, and maddeningly indifferent.

If you don’t bet, you can’t win. Who had said that? She heard it in her father’s voice, a voice she’d spent most of her life trying to forget. Imagining things, she thought. And if she saw, or imagined she saw, a sparkle in Liber’s limestone eyes, and in Libera’s, surely it was but lamplight catching the wetness of the wine. There was no hope. There was no winning this game of gods and shifting time. The die, as the Romans liked to say, was cast. She couldn’t go back. What she did now in front of the votive plaque, she did by force of habit, nothing more.

She dropped the dipper back in the winejar and covered it with the wooden lid. She blew out all the lamps but one, which she carried with her up the narrow rickety stairs.

Julia was already snoring. She had a clear conscience, or else she had no conscience at all. Or maybe she was just dead-tired from having worked sunup to sundown.

Nicole wasn’t much better off herself. She went on stumbling feet into the bedchamber, set the lamp on a stool by the bed, and closed the door behind her and barred it. It wouldn’t stop an intruder who really wanted in, but it would slow him down a little. That was as much as she could hope for in this world.

She lay down on the hard, lumpy, uncomfortable bed and blew out the lamp. Her nightly prayer was worn thin with use, the same plea as always, word for ineffectual word. She should give up on it. But she was too stubborn.

If you don’t bet. you can’t win. Was that her father’s voice? Or another? Or even… two others? Or was it nothing but her imagination? She’d prayed this prayer for so long, and been ignored so completely. The god and goddess couldn’t be turning toward her at last. Of course not. She was bound here forever, condemned to this primitive hell, for her great sin, the sin of hating the world she was born to.

On the votive plaque, Libera’s limestone eyes turned to meet Liber’s. The goddess’ naked stone shoulders lifted in a shrug. The god’s hands rose in a gesture that meant much the same. If there had been anyone in the tavern, he would have heard a pair of small, exasperated sighs. Mortals, Libera’s shrug said. And Liber’s gesture agreed: Give them what they want, and watch them discover they never wanted it in the first place. They were really too busy in this age of the world, to trouble themselves with this refugee from that dull and sterile age still so far in the future. Why on earth was she so desperate to go back there? There, she’d merely existed. Here, she’d lived. She’d known love and pain, sickness and war, danger and excitement and all the other things that made life worth living. How could she abandon them for a world in which nothing ever really happened?

Still, there was no doubt about it. She honestly wanted to go back. Now that Liber and Libera had turned their attention on this petitioner, every prayer she’d sent, every plea she’d raised, ran itself through their awareness. She’d been storming heaven, crying out to them to let her go.

She hadn’t framed her prayers in the proper form. Some gods were particular about such things. But if Liber and Libera had been of that disposition, they would never have granted Nicole’s first petition. Neither were her offerings of precisely the right sort. Still, they were offerings, and sincerely meant. No divinity could fail to be aware of that.

Once more the limestone gazes met. Liber’s expression was wry. Libera’s was exasperated. Well; if this foolish woman thinks she can change her mind yet again, she’ll just have to live with it.

They nodded in complete agreement. For a moment, they basked in its glow, well and divinely content to have solved this niggling problem. A house spider, weaving its disorderly web on the ceiling above the plaque, froze for a moment at the brief flare of light. A moth started toward it, but it faded too quickly. The moth fluttered off aimlessly, its tiny spark of awareness barely impinging on the god and goddess’ own. The tavern was dark again, and utterly still.

When Nicole lay down, she had feared she’d never fall asleep. But once she was as comfortable in that bed as she could be, she spiraled irresistibly down into the deeps of sleep. Worry faded, hopelessness sank out of sight. Dreams rose up around her, strange and yet familiar. A stair going down, a stair going up, round and round and round and…