Household Gods

The sound of it brought her up short. These men had just murdered one of her neighbors and gang-raped another in the middle of the street, and she was laughing with them? God, for a vial of poison to drop in their wine. And a dose for herself, for succumbing to the oldest disease in the world: falling into sympathy with the oppressor.

As had been happening once in a while as the afternoon wore on, somebody new swaggered through the door. He was a horrible sight, his tunic and trousers splashed with blood. None of it was his. He took a place at a table in the middle of the room, roared for wine – Nicole spitefully gave him the last of the one-as rotgut; he swilled it down without seeming to notice. Everybody wanted to know, by gestures and grunted words, how he’d come to be covered with gore. His answer was graphic, with much thrusting and slashing of the air. They laughed and pounded the tables. He stabbed a finger at his crotch and mimed the thrust and grind of a good fast rape.

They clapped and cheered. They gathered round him and pounded him on the back. Amid the gluey vowels and guttural consonants of their incomprehensible speech, Nicole understood clearly what they thought of him. He’d scored in their reckoning, and scored big.

And would anything change, really, in eighteen hundred years? Never mind the small scale of fraternity hazings and barroom gang rapes. The twentieth century had institutionalized slaughter, and turned rape into a science. Serbs massacred Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and drove women into rape camps. She’d be willing to bet they boasted of the horrors they’d committed, and sat around in bars and cheered one another on.

But, in one respect, things had changed. Once the Serbs had had their fun, they’d done their best to hide it from the world. They buried in mass graves the people they’d slaughtered, and denied that the rape camps had ever existed.

These Germans didn’t think like that. Not in the least. They saw nothing shameful in what they did; felt no need to hide it from the world. They had every right, they seemed to believe, to rob and rape, murder and pillage.

They were terrible people. And they were proud of it. They were completely, unreachably alien.

All too soon and all too completely, the wine ran out. Nicole poured the last dregs into a cup, served it to a German who wouldn’t have cared if she’d given him vinegar, and stood empty-handed and beginning, all over again, to be afraid.

But the German with the topknot, the one who’d given her the aureus, patted her on the head again as if she’d been a favorite dog, and said, “No one hurts you here today. I say this – I, Swemblas.” He struck a pose, with a lift of his head that told her the topknot and the Roman armor meant something. He was a man of substance, a chieftain maybe, or someone who had ambitions to be.

“I’m glad,” she said to him. Then, after a pause and a moment’s thought: “I’d be even gladder if you granted the same immunity to everyone in Carnuntum.”

Swemblas laughed. “Ho! Ho, little woman, you make good jokes! Carnuntum is ours now. We will enjoy it. You Romans are too weak to stop us. If you were not, we would not be here.”

He was honest, she granted him that. You have what we want, and we’re strong enough to take it away from you. So we damn well will.

The twentieth century had spilled more blood than this small-time butcher ever dreamt of, working toward proving that greed and violence were not to be tolerated in an enlightened world. Here in the second century, greed and violence were the virtues of the hour. And who was she to tell them otherwise?

One of the Germans sat where he could see at an angle out the door. He pointed, laughed, and said something in his own language that made his friends echo his laughter.

“What’s funny?” Nicole asked Swemblas, emboldened by the knowledge of his name and by the promise he’d made her.

He actually condescended to explain. “We are many drunken Germans, and here is also a drunken Roman.”

And there he came, staggering along the street. Nicole saw the stagger first, before anything else. Her lip curled in anger and contempt. Carnuntum had fallen, and this idiot could think of nothing better to do about it than soak himself in wine.

Then he lifted his head, and she gasped in recognition. It was Gaius Calidius Severus. He’d never get drunk at such a time. He’d gone off to fight; there was no way he’d come back sloshed, even to drown his sorrow at defeat.

“He’s not drunk,” she said suddenly. “He’s hurt.” She ran out past the staring Germans, caring only that none of them tried to stop her.

Her lover’s son had lost his sword. When he turned his head to stare blankly at her, the left side of his face and his beard were crusted with dried blood. Her eye followed the track of it to an enormous lump above and in front of his ear.