The Lady Out of Time

10 - Games

She couldn’t erase any of it from her mind. Not the sight of the blades slicing through and leaving riven flesh, not the sound of agonized moans and panicked shouts as the men tore each other apart, and not the faint, sickening warmth of the blood that splattered across her thin tunic dress. It was too late to wish that she hadn’t asked Agrippa to bring her here, and she wasn’t too proud to admit to herself that he had warned her, even if he had been patronizing about it. She was the one who had chosen to come despite that - the only one she could blame was herself.

But coming to terms with that didn’t make it any easier to forget. And while it was better than if he had been laughing at her, the watchful stare Agrippa had fixed on her made her feel even more agitated.

“What’s the point of it?” she asked once they were both settled back inside the carriage. “Why would anyone…”

But she knew the answer. Any Classical Roman Studies course made it only too clear. Gladiatorial fights were about entertaining the poor and keeping them distracted from their miserable lives while the wealthy led lavish, shameless lifestyles. She’d learned that much in her Latin classes.

Even though she had trailed off mid-sentence and was now looking out the narrow window of the carriage, the general answered her anyway in a curiously solemn but soft voice.

“Public events are political games,” he said. “It’s better that you don’t want any part in things like this.”

Julia guessed that he was only being this sympathetic and consoling because he thought she was a child. She wondered how much less he would respect her if he knew the truth, that she was supposed to be a hardened adult. Hell, she could feel her own respect for herself falling swiftly at how terribly she had handled herself, but then again, was it really childish to have a visceral reaction to senseless violence?

“Tell me about the politics,” she said, still staring out the gap and watching the glimpses of passersby flickering past. Anything to get her mind off the memory of blood and screams. Besides, the more she knew about this place and time, the better. Tactics and strategy...or something like that. Her head throbbed.

“The Aemelii family hosted and sponsored this event,” he replied. “No entry fees. Every man, woman, or child who wanted to attend did so, and every nobleman specially invited to enjoy the week long festivities and eat out of the generous hand of the Aemelii.”

“Why?”

“The consul elections are in two months,” he answered, and she looked back at him to find a wry, grim smile on his handsome face. “All of this, tens of thousands of denarii, all for the sake of winning the public over.”

“With games,” she clarified. “And killing.”

“They wouldn’t be satisfied without either.”

She didn’t know whether to be more disgusted at the society that bred such blood thirst, at the wealthy who championed and sponsored that blood thirst, or at the rest of the Roman people who fell for it and the games that their overlords played. Sickening. It was exactly like being back at home, except presidential candidates didn’t host public massacres to accrue votes. Well, not like this, anyway.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said suddenly. She didn’t want to go back to the villa. She wanted to replace these red-splashed memories with something else, something that she could look back on and enjoy even after she made it back home.

...back home?

A flash of a buried memory surged up inside her, and she sat up straight with a jolt and wide eyes as her last moments in the real world - her native time - flooded her consciousness.

She had been visiting Rome, she remembered that much. And she had been visiting a building, a historic one - the Pantheon. But she hadn’t simply taken a step forward and been transported; she had...fallen. No, she’d been pushed into a column upon which she’d cracked her head -!

Yes! Now she remembered! She hadn’t forgotten the horrid bump, but for some reason, the events leading up to it had been little more than an irrelevant blur. But no, it hadn’t been irrelevant -

“I want to go to the Pantheon. Take me there, I want to see it.”

Agrippa didn’t answer right away. He stared at her for a long moment with his dark brow knitted in silent confusion.

She must have given something away, she realized too late. Her reaction - if she behaved any more suspiciously, he was sure to do something like force the carriage to stop and interrogate her. She was already on thin ice after letting it slip that she had been kidnapped by slave traders; she couldn’t let him get any closer to the truth. He would think she was crazy, and if he didn’t outright lock her up, he might at least keep her cooped up in the villa forever. That couldn’t happen. And she didn’t have enough time or patience to concoct an elaborate excuse, either.

“I’ve heard so much about it,” she half-lied. It counted if it was in the real world, right? “I want to see it for myself. I heard the gods actually live there. Maybe they’ll come down and I’ll see one of them myself.”

For a few seconds, his expression remained unchanged. But Julia continued to hold his gaze with a fearless, open expression (the one she used often on judges) until finally his gaze softened and his mouth twitched in the shape of a marginal smirk.

“The Pantheon,” he repeated. “I’m letting you choose any place in Rome to go, and you want to see the Pantheon.”

“I do. You know of it, right?”

He snorted.

“Know of it? I built it.”

* * * * *

He hadn’t been lying. While he hadn’t contributed to the physical labor, he had supervised the construction of the Pantheon from start to finish as the sole architect. Julia had remembered that among his numerous accomplishments, he had also been an architect, but she hadn’t known that he had been personally responsible for designing that one in particular.

And God, it was even more gorgeous in its full glory than it had ever been in photographs, or when she had waited outside for three hours to tour it in her native time.

The carriage came to a stop, and Julia extracted her face away from where she had all but tried to squeeze it through the window for a better look at the temple they approached. She didn’t even wait for the driver or for Agrippa to open the door for her; she shoved it open and jumped out herself, ignoring the fact that she had nearly twisted her ankle doing just that three days ago.

But before she could stride off toward the building, a hard, warm grip on her shoulder drew her back and spun her around. She found herself staring up into Agrippa’s eyes.

He looked worried. Very worried, as if he had just pulled her out of a fire or something dramatic - what was wrong? While she appreciated a little horseplay from time to time with strong, good looking men, Agrippa’s misplaced concern only made her impatient to get away. She tugged at his wrist, but he held her firm and shook his head.

“This isn’t the Colosseum,” he said, his voice dropping to a low rumble. His eyes flitted about at the others meandering through the area around them for a second before returning to hold her gaze. “People are watching here. Important ones. You need to walk behind me.”

“Why?”

“You’re a slave,” he said simply. “It’s a capital crime for one to walk ahead of his master...or hers.”

“Since when do you care -”

“Since it could get you killed, Julia, because these people care even if I don't. Stay behind me for now. I can’t protect you if -”

“I don’t care,” she announced. “I really don’t.”

With that, she wriggled out from under his hand with a coy smile and glided away - but glancing out of the corner of her eye to see what he would do about her disobedience. She almost laughed aloud when she heard him heave a sigh, and she had only taken a few steps forward when she felt him draw up next to her.

And just like that, shoulder to shoulder, he walked alongside her toward the steps of the Pantheon. She cast him a sidelong glance, which he caught with a frown.

“Violating Roman law is not a joke,” he admonished her in a careful murmur as someone passed by them with two slaves in tow. They all gave him a quick bow, which he answered with a nod. “Keep this up, and something terrible will happen to you the moment you slip away from me.”

She was almost grinning now, eyes sparkling as they flickered up and down his figure. She returned her attention to the steps, just in time to plant her foot on the first one with a little toss of her head. The breeze pulled her hair back over her shoulder, making it flit against Agrippa’s toga.

“I guess you’ll have to keep both your eyes on me,” she said, voice full of knowing mischief, and she had the satisfaction of feeling his disbelieving stare on the side of her head.

Once she reached the threshold, she paused and closed her eyes. It was here, she remembered. She had been about to enter...and right before it happened, she had been shoved to the side. The column - she looked up and squeezed past Agrippa, who had also stopped next to her with a curious frown. She knew he was watching, but she couldn’t stop. Maybe this was her way home, and in less than a minute she would be waking up in modern day Rome from a fever dream that would feel like it had lasted for weeks…

But as she ran her hands up and down the carved column, searching every inch of th stone with her fingertips for anything out of the ordinary, she began to lose hope. A button, an indentation, a chip, anything - anything at all, she begged. She circled around the column once, twice, three times, poring over even the base of the pillar and the ground around it. She couldn’t reach much higher than six feet even when she strained on the tips of her toes, but she stepped back and tried to inspect what she could anyway with her head tilted back.

Her heart sank on the last attempt when she failed to find anything of note. She looked around once, hoping that she had been transported back without her noticing, but all she saw around her were the same intact columns and steps that she had climbed to get here.

And Agrippa. He was watching her with narrowed eyes, and there was no way he had missed the crushing disappointment that must be shadowing her face right now. Maybe she should have hidden it better.

But all Julia could think was how close she had thought she was. Home. She missed - she missed it. She missed working, she missed buying things, she missed being able to walk free without following behind a ‘master’ in a primitive world that laughed at the notion of a woman ever being equal to a man.

She missed coffee. She missed paper. She even missed her parents even though they were both gone already to premature graves. She should have changed out their flowers one last time at their cemetery plots before jumping on the first plane to Rome, but how could she have known something like this would ever happen to her?

For the first time, the realization that all of this was real settled on her shoulders like a massive boulder, and she almost collapsed to her knees. This wasn’t a dream or a hallucination. This wasn’t a game or an elaborate plank with an End button.

This was real. And she was trapped.

* * * * *

It felt like he was always doing this, Agrippa thought to himself as they rolled home in the carriage. Watching her, that is. Whether she did nothing or something, whenever she said a strange thing or was silent too long, he felt like he was always watching.

And no matter how he looked at it, she became stranger every day. What she had done today at the Pantheon was the most peculiar thing she had done yet, and it had something to do with why she was hiding her truths from him. Why she was keeping so many secrets and why she knew so much more than she should.

He would find out. He had to.

She was staring blankly out the window like a dead thing, and he was afraid to call out to her lest she crumble and break like cracked stone. There was no way he could demand that she speak now and reveal everything she had kept from him. Not without hurting her, he suspected.

He didn’t want that. She was a good girl. Smart. Too smart, but even so. Surely there was something he could do…

Yes. Yes, there was. He leaned back in his seat and reminded himself to order an investigation into the column that she had spent so much time snooping around as if she were looking for a secret message engraved on the stone. She hadn’t found it judging by her reaction after, but maybe she had just missed it. Maybe he would see something she hadn’t.

Later, he promised himself, and clenched his fists over his thighs.