Household Gods

“He raped me,” she said. She said it in English. Latin wasn’t enough, not for this. “The bastard just – went ahead – and raped me.” As if to mock her with incontrovertible proof, semen dribbled down the inside of her thigh, wet and sticky-slimy. Her drawers were tangled around one ankle. She yanked them up. She tried to think. Her thoughts kept scattering. Her memories kept fragmenting, coalescing in a single spot – the end of his nose, the grind of his pelvis against hers – then shattering again. And again. Think. She had to think.

All around her, battle was raging. She heard the sounds of it both nearby and farther away, like an iron foundry in a lower level of hell. Another stalwart defender of civilization was going to come charging down the alley, she could bet on it. Would he care that he was getting somebody else’s sloppy seconds? Would he even take time to notice?

Walking was hard. She wasn’t built bowlegged. But walking normally rubbed tissues outraged beyond endurance. She was probably bleeding. She didn’t stop to investigate.

She made her way up the alley, back past the stinking piles of ordure, to the German who’d fallen in front of her. He was dead now, though his blood still soaked into the dirt. In the street beyond him, live Marcomanni and Quadi still fought the Romans.

Nicole shrank back against the wall. Romans, barbarians – God forbid anyone see her. Was one of them the son of a bitch who’d violated her? She couldn’t tell. They were all crowded together in a knot. They all wore the same clothes, carried the same gear. Uniform – that was what it was, uniform dress, uniform looks and fighting style. Wasn’t that the point? Look alike, fight alike, kill alike. Rape alike, too. And never mind if the victim was friend or enemy.

The Romans drove the Germans back, away from the city wall and toward the center of town. Nicole waited till they were some distance down the street, too far to grab her if she moved fast enough. She scuttled around the corner and dived through the door of the tavern.

“Hello, Mother!” a voice called, startling her near out of her skin. It was, of course, Lucius, safe, sound, and smiling, watching the fighting through the window as if it had been a TV screen. He’d probably been doing it, the little wretch, since about thirty seconds after Nicole went outside to look for him. If he’d come in half a minute earlier…

Spilled milk. Nicole thought. She slammed and barred the door. “When Julia comes back, let her in,” she said. “Otherwise, leave the door barred. Don’t you go outside again. Do you hear me?”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But her black scowl made up for any deficiencies in his verbal comprehension. He gulped and nodded. He actually, for a moment, looked obedient.

That didn’t last long, to be sure. “Why is the back of your tunic all dirty?” he asked as Nicole gritted her teeth to tackle the stairs. She didn’t answer. He didn’t pursue it, either, to her relief.

She made it to her room after what seemed an age. As soon as she was inside, with the door bolted behind her, she ripped off her drawers and hurled them away. She wet a rag in the terra sigillata pitcher, soaked it till it ran with water. Then she scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed at her thigh and between her legs. Evidence for forensics didn’t matter, not here. No matter how many times she washed herself, she didn’t feel clean. She doubted she’d ever feel clean again.

She was still scrubbing, whimpering with the pain, when the door opened below. It had better be Julia. Because if it wasn’t, Lucius – and Nicole, too, to be honest about it – was in big trouble. She hurled the rag after the drawers and bolted downstairs.

It was Julia, of course, looking lazy and sated and altogether content with the world. “Hello, Mistress,” she said brightly. “Have you seen? The legions are back! Now we’ll all go back to…” Her voice ran down. Her eyes narrowed. For the first time she seemed actually to see Nicole. “By the gods, what happened to you? “

“The legions are back,” Nicole said. Her voice was flat, dead. “You didn’t need to tell me. I… met a legionary.”

Julia had lived in this world a lot longer than Nicole had, and had seen a lot more of it, too. Her eyes went wide: that almost bovine expression of hers, one of the intractable relics of her slave days, which concealed a great deal of her intelligence. “He didn’t,” she said, but her tone belied the words.

“Yes, he did,” Nicole said. “All this time, the Marcomanni and the Quadi didn’t, and the first cursed Roman legionary I saw… did. Let’s hear it for the defenders of civilization.” Tears dripped down her cheeks. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d started to cry.

“He did what, Mother?” Lucius asked, butting in between them, innocently curious.

“Never mind,” Nicole and Julia said together.