The Lady Out of Time

2 - Gifts

ISLAND OF PANDATERIA IN THE REPUBLIC OF ROME, 28 BC

"Julia!"

She didn't want to get up. It was so lovely and warm and peaceful - she could sleep in for one day, surely.

"Julia! The chickens have got out again!"

...Or not. With a sigh, Julia roused herself from the plain, hay-stuffed bed and kicked off the light linen cover with a lazy wheeling of her legs. As much as she loved sleep, she also loved eating, and losing a chicken meant fewer eggs for her mornings. She had to think about the greater good, the big picture. Maybe when she got back, she could sneak in a midday nap while Mother wasn't watching.

She hurried to wash her face and hands with water drawn from the well. Securing her means for breakfast was important, but so was looking fresh and beautiful for when she went around chasing the runaway chickens. She was on the cusp of seventeen, and there were handsome boys and men all around the beautiful, quaint island of Pandateria in need of youthful girlfriends (and wives!).

And in a tiny place like this, if a year passed and she was still without worthy prospects, she would have to settle for...

Julia grimaced at the thought of marrying the builder's haughty first son. He was handsome, and they were one of the most well-off families on Pandateria (they could make their own bathhouses!), but she had never seen much more than an empty pigheadedness inside his soul. She wanted someone to connect with, someone to look inside her and see her, someone who would serenade her under the moonlight and look at her with secret, longing eyes...

"Hey!"

She clapped her hands over her mouth, but it was too late. She hadn't meant to shout and scare off the brown-feathered hen, but she had been so lost in thought as she wandered over the rocks leading to the beach that it had come out before she even realized what she was doing.

Oh, this was fast turning into a goat turd of a day. On cue, she heard an angry bleating coming from the other side of the large boulders lining the slopes. Was that old man Marius's demonic billy goat that tried to bite off the buttock of every man, woman, and child that passed through its line of sight? Julia hastened to clamber down the slope and put as much distance between herself and the angry-sounding goat as quickly as possible.

"Heeere, baby. My delicious little breakfast fairy. Come here, Delia."

Julia clucked at the hen and tried to coax it over, but upon failing miserably, decided to start creeping toward it. Delia was a fast little chicken, and it had led her in a lightning-speed chase all the way down to the beach caves on the deserted bay. This place still gave her the creeps even if the miscreants on the island occasionally sneaked down here on certain nights to prove their bravery to each other, and she wanted to get out of here as soon as she had her little Breakfast Insurance in her hands again.

"Heeere, Delia. Oh, you -!"

Delia was off in a bobbing run again, somehow scampering over the rocks with superb agility to avoid the lapping waves and heading straight for the biggest cave. Julia picked up the hem of her dress and knotted it up at her knees as she stumbled after the hen; she was not about to get outwitted by a lame-legged little chicken even if did lay the best eggs in all of Pandateria -

"Mmph!"

Out of nowhere, a hand clapped over her mouth, rough and mean and too strong to fight. She kicked out, adrenaline surging through her skinny body and rousing a fighting spirit in her that she'd never felt before, but then she was being picked up and thrown over a shoulder with barely a grunt. A burly man with an ugly sneer and missing an eye, bald and fierce-looking. She tried to scream as she punched at him, but all that earned her was a slap to the face that had her eyes feeling like they were about to fall out of her head.

But she didn't stop. She didn't know who this man was, but either he wanted to r**e her or kill her and she would not go down without a fight. She could hear Delia clucking somewhere a few feet away as she clawed at the man, reaching back to try to gouge his eyes out and scratch his bare, horrifically scarred head. She was flailing so much that she was sure she ought to be drawing blood, and yet the man didn't slow down at all as he carried her off down the deserted beach toward a small ship manned by a few other men.

There were kids here. Three toddlers that she recognized, and a young boy who'd been beaten black and blue. They were all whimpering in pain and fear on the deck, surrounded by the men who hefted their rusted weapons with menacing growls.

"Quiet," Bald Scars growled at Julia after he threw her down on the deck. "Or I'll cut all your tongues out and then make you eat them."

Julia blanched and wrapped her arms around the toddlers. Oh gods, marauders, pirates - Pandateria had been safe from them for so long because it was such a small, insignificant island. Why had they come now? And these were Diana's kids as well as her nephew, and the boy was Felix's son. He must have struggled and earned all these wounds that way, and now they were all being taken off the island together. There was no one on this side of it to hear them shout, just Delia still clucking on the beach and old man Marius's goat bleating at the sky on top of the large boulder as if it were challenging Jupiter himself...

The ship pulled off with a groan to the sound of weeping children.

* * * * *

No sunlight filtered into the stone dungeons where Julia and a dozen other captives shivered and coughed. Whether it was night or day, no one knew except when one of their captors came in to drop off a pail of food scraps and muddy water every evening. When that happened, it was a mad free for all scramble for precious sustenance, and nobody cared about the thick wooden door that would slam shut again a few seconds later.

How long had it been? She and the other kidnapped children from the island had been separated upon reaching the shores of this place, and she didn't even know where 'this place' was. She had lived in Pandateria all her life, and her mother had always avoided talking about the mainland whenever she asked.

Maybe this was why: the mainland was filled with every kind of evil and filthy iniquity that she had never, ever known until she saw them happen before her. The beating of defenseless children in manacles, the weeping of girls as their jailors groped their bodies through dirty clothes. The one evil that they had been spared was being r***d, but that was only because the man primarily in charge of them all detested the idea of touching lowly slaves that way. Or rather, of allowing slaves to touch him. 

Slave. That was what Julia was now. How many weeks had she been trapped down here? And there were more and more men coming by every day, looking at all of the captives with greedy, cruel eyes.

She would never subject herself to that. She was a human being, she was a daughter. She had always been too headstrong for her own good, but surely the gods wouldn't fault her for fighting to the end to preserve her dignity. 

She would never.

Her weakened, tired legs tottered under her like twigs on the verge of snapping, but she rose to her feet anyway with a clanking of her manacles. She'd seen one of the other captives do this, one of the horrors she had witnessed in here as well. Never had she thought she would ever be pushed to this extent, but the idea of serving a man with greedy, nasty hands and a slobbering mouth and...

Never.

She braced herself before one of the walls, ignoring the silent stares of the other prisoners, and bashed her head against the stone.

She fell like a rock.

* * * * *

The first thing Julia was aware of when she awoke was that she was not comfortable.

Excuse her - hello? She paid excellent money to be comfortable at all times. She did this with money earned by making others uncomfortable, namely, terrible men who deserved to have all their assets stripped in brutal divorces.

The second thing she was aware of was that she could not feel her Crossfit abs. Hello? Houston, do you copy?

She scrambled to her feet in some smelly, dank room made of stone, grimacing at the mess she saw all around her. Who were these people all staring at her? Kids, adults, all wearing grimy clothes. And why the hell did her body feel so pathetically skinny?

Julia gasped in horror when she felt at her core and failed to find her perfect abdominal muscles. Fourteen straight years of rigorous nutritional care ever since her freshman year at Harvard, combined with eight years of Crossfit and triathlon training. Not to mention the ketogenic diet she had been on for the last two -

All replaced by a soft body devoid of strength that inflicted a traumatic recollection of her late teenage years when she hadn't even been doing her daily cardio yet. This was - unbearable. Unacceptable. This was almost as catastrophic as waking up to find that she was destitute and poor - or worse, disbarred.

And also, what was this thing wrapped around her head? Julia reached up, still acutely aware of how unfamiliar she felt in this foreign body, and unraveled clumsily wrapped linen bandages from around her forehead. She could feel a bump there right at the top of it, and she frowned before touching it with a gingerly prod -

The instant her fingertip made contact with the swollen lump, a tidal wave of foreign memories rushed into her head. The life of a different Julia, this one almost fifteen years younger in her late teenage years. Taken captive from her island home while chasing - chickens? What the hell? And this was -

Rome. The Republic of Rome, centuries before the modern age.

Julia reeled back and hit the wall, overtaken by the horrified realization that this was not her world. A dream, a hallucination, none of this could be real. She was Julia Williams, modern Superwoman, esteemed divorce attorney who could send shivers down the back of every unfaithful husband in the city of New York -

She was not going to do this. No. She needed to get out of here.

Her mind raced at just under the speed of panicked lightning, held steady only by sheer discipline and cold determination. She had a law firm to get back to, abused women to represent. She was going to get back to the twenty first century and put the fear of God into the hearts of judges and men and rival lawyers alike.

So how had she gotten here? She remembered hitting her head, that was right. So obviously, the way to get out of this alternate universe nightmare was to hit her head once more. Julia turned around with a decisive twirl, planted both hands on the wall, and smashed her forehead into the stone once more.

* * * * *

Thwack!

Julia started awake and gasped at the searing pain that lanced through her flesh. She scrambled back toward the wall and felt - stone. The same ones that she'd bashed her head against before in the hopes that it would catapult her back into sanity.

Thwack!

"Do that again, and I'll whip your corpse into strips so that you'll never find peace in the afterlife either," a woman snarled, and Julia looked up to find a harsh-faced hag standing over her with a leather whip.

Thwack!

"And if you survive, I'll just make you so miserable that you'll wish you were dead!"

Thwack!

Julia cowered against the wall, yelping in pain but fuming, too, at this inhumane treatment. How dare this woman -! If she had something to fight back with, she would have beaned the hag over the head with it and spat on her prone body. But as it was, she had to wait out the whipping and hope that this was all just some fevered dream...one that she would eventually wake up from.

But she didn't, even after three days of being kept under close scrutiny. As a slave, she was worth money to her captors, and they couldn't have their human capital making itself worthless. Julia gnashed her teeth every time they grabbed her and forcibly changed her bandages, feeling like nothing more than cattle with a price tag on its head.

This was unacceptable. She had rights, unalienable ones, and this - this was an atrocity against human nature. Unacceptable -

And yet nothing changed. She was in a strange place, primitive and ancient and so different from the world she knew. How would she ever get back home?

"Get over here!"

It was the hag again who stood over her with a cruel, savage sneer. But instead of whipping her, she dragged Julia by the hair out of the dungeons into bright daylight, ignoring every pained and angry cry. Not surprising, but it didn't mean that Julia wanted to smash her nose in any less. If she wasn't in this pathetically weak body, if she was in her thirty-two year old, gloriously athletic and fit body, she would have laid this woman out flat with a single hit.

But instead, what actually happened was that she was unceremoniously flung onto a waiting wagon, creaky and full of splinters. There were a dozen other huddled people in the wagon as well, all manacled and chained. Slaves, just like her, except they all looked terrified and helpless.

Julia was not terrified and helpless. She was strong. She was powerful. She was -

"Gifts for the general," the hag announced in her rough voice to the wagon driver. "He's won another great battle, and the Emperor rewards him with more slaves. Make sure they get there in one piece, neither of them are men to disappoint."

The c***k of a whip made Julia flinch despite herself, but it wasn't aimed at her this time: the horses neighed and took off at a trot, dragging behind it the creaking wagon full of slaves, and Julia.