The Lady Out of Time

5 - Memories

There was something strange about her.

Agrippa paused in the middle of writing his missive, no longer able to ignore the persistent, recurring thought for the hundredth time since waking up just an hour ago. It was unthinkable that he could be so distracted from important duties - and yet here he was, furrowing his brow and diverting his attention from where it ought to be because of a singular distraction.

If he was this unwell, perhaps it was best to set aside writing the report for later. If not, he feared he would find careless mistakes curled into the inking on the parchment later. Paper was expensive, and while he was wealthy enough to never want for anything material in this world, he still respected the labor that went into its creation.

...And he needed a moment to right his thoughts about that slave girl he had met yesterday.

Julia, she had called herself, and with such fearlessness too. He had thought at first that it was a girlish impetuosity, a bravery born of ignorance and the misguided, childish belief that she was invincible - but then he had seen that look in her eyes. No child had ever looked at him with such a - dare he say it? dangerous light, assessing and cold and calculating. There were children who were wise beyond their years, but they were children nonetheless. Not so with her. He had only ever seen that glinting, knowing, dissecting expression before on fellow statesman who wielded decades of experience and guile.

And yet when he ignored that, she had the sweet face of a beautiful youth, fresh and charming and innocent. She had to be at least ten years his junior, more than that. A child, truly.

Except for those eyes. There was something different about her as if there was an entire other person hidden behind them, something that should have put him on edge and unsettled him deeply. But then again, strange things had never made him afraid. He looked straight on and confronted them, met them pound for pound in life as he did on the battlefield. It was one of his greatest strengths, the reason the emperor trusted him to carry his honor in his war campaigns.

There was something strange about Julia, true.

But that just intrigued him all the more.

"Annia!"

He strode out of his chambers, knowing that the woman was lurking nearby. She always was, even though her duties were supposed to keep her confined to the center of the villa so that she was always within reach of the other slaves should they need more direction. But she gave Agrippa little other reason to be dissatisfied: since she often imperiously delegated her responsibilities to her favorites, the household was always running smoothly.

Almost the way the other generals ran their armies. Agrippa looked down on such laziness and self-serving strategies, but she was the only daughter of the faithful man who had served both him and his father with unparalleled loyalty through the years.

"Yes, Master!"

She hurried over with a demure look and a linen cloth draped over her arm as if she had been working. He doubted it.

"Julia. Do you remember her?"

His question had been stoic and unpointed, but the flush that flooded the woman's face made it evident that she was recalling the incident from yesterday with only the deepest embarrassment. But of course. Agrippa had been treated to such a fine, uncultured, disgraceful performance yesterday near the cesspools. It was only right that Annia regard herself with shame for having stooped to crude violence against a fellow slave girl. Unseemly and far below her station to resort to such tactics.

"...I do, Master."

"I understand that she's a new addition to the household, so I'll be entrusting her to your express guidance in the coming days. She should be taught everything she needs to know about her serving duties in that time. Do you understand?"

The redness of the woman's cheeks drained away, and instead, a sly, smirking smile crept onto her thin mouth. A victorious, gloating expression that boded ill for Julia, no doubt.

"My guidance," she repeated. "Of course, Master. It will be done."

Agrippa gave her a long look. "Yes," he said. "So that she can attend to my needs. She will be my personal attendant."

The smirk disappeared as if it had been slapped off her face, and she gaped at him in undisguised horror and shock. "Your - personal slave?" she croaked. "The girl?"

He raised his eyebrow at her. She was Felix's beloved daughter, but Agrippa's generosity didn't extend to being questioned by such a sour, bitter woman who would never have been put in charge of the villa's slaves otherwise. Her competence and experience was only above average at best, shaped by three decades of servitude from birth - nothing that made Agrippa overlook her more pungent qualities.

She understood in an instant that she had overstepped. With a hasty, low bow of her head, she backed away in a demonstration of fawning submission until she disappeared from his sight around the corner.

He sighed. It was just his luck to be saddled with a peculiar slave too distracting for her own good. Or his. He could only hope that she would be at least a slight help to him once she was trained so that he could justify keeping her close without raising needless suspicion. Maybe his instincts were wrong; maybe she was just a too-clever girl accustomed to finding trouble.

Either way, he would find out so long as he kept an eye on her.

He returned to his study and resumed writing - but once again, just a few minutes later he found himself staring at the parchment while his quill hovered over it.

Julia. There was something else about her that was bothering him. Or was it? He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was demanding his attention so insistently, and he summoned up the memory of her angular face yet again…

He scoffed a moment later when he realized what it was. Her lively little face - it reminded him of someone in his boyhood years. Scribonia. They looked similar, didn’t they? The girl he had admired from his childhood well into his teenage years...and promised to Emperor Augustus as a wife. But of course she had been. An unparalleled beauty, scholarly and mature. Only the best for the emperor.

Yes, Julia looked like her, unless his memory was playing tricks on him. It had been ten years since he had last seen her after all. Certainly, Julia’s temperament didn’t resemble Scribonia’s in the slightest. Other than the almond shaped eyes, delicate features, and almost elfin-sharp jawline, physical characteristics only - there was nothing comparable between the two.

Agrippa’s eyes flickered up the wall.

But none of that mattered anymore, anyway. Scribonia was gone and had taken all evidence of her existence with her when she left. Only his memories of her remained, and even those were nearly gone, resurrected like embers only because of that strange girl Julia.

He shook his head and returned to his work.

* * * * *

“This looks like a wine press,” Julia remarked as she inspected the wood-and-metal prelum. “Seems simple enough. I feed the clothes through it, and it presses it flat between these two little wooden pins.” Actually more like a modern clothes press, she added inwardly. She moved the turnscrew on the side with a small, experimental push.

“Enough with the little comments,” Annia snapped a few feet away with her arms crossed over her chest. “Just learn!”

“Look, this is pretty self explanatory, so we can move on to something else more interesting…”

A slap on the back of the head made Julia whirl around and glare. This hag-b***h -

“Then stay incompetent!” the older woman hissed. “You won’t last a day. The general will send you to the whorehouse to spread your legs for the dirtiest, ugliest old men in all of Rome -”

Oh, right. Julia put aside the barrage of insults that would have made Annia cry and squinted at the reminder of her new upcoming duties. Hm...Yes. Staying by the handsome, muscular man’s side and helping him put on his clothes too, if the laundry list of responsibilities she’d been told about were all accurate. She had gotten particularly excited at the part about helping the master of the villa when he bathed as well - until she’d found out that was left to the closest male attendant.

Ugh. She had suffered all of these indignities already, couldn’t she get just one quick grope of a man’s firm buttocks to make up for all her trouble? Hell, even getting another glimpse of the general’s face would help settle her growing s****l frustration (why did she still have all the worst problems of a thirty year old woman even in this youthful body?).

But she didn’t see him for the rest of that day or the next, and her hours were spent learning how to properly pleat clothes, do the laundry - by hand! ugh! Where was the Maytag man when she needed him - and learn how to properly pin a toga over the shoulders.

And despite wanting to turn her nose up at how primitive everything was, Julia found herself watching with keen interest as the other slaves went about their business with deft movements. It was mind-boggling that civilization carried on even before the discovery of harnessable electricity, long before the era of smartphones and automobiles and all the other commodities she had taken for granted her whole life.

But this was still more advanced than the young Julia’s life on the island had been. She couldn’t remember all parts of it, but she remembered Pandateria and its quaintness like a dream slowly coaxed to memory. And it was becoming clearer by the day - though not quick enough to help her get accustomed to how things were done day-to-day in these ancient times. She was lucky enough that the native language came naturally to her thanks to young Julia - as well as her education in classical Latin, of course.

At evening’s end on the third day, she saw him: standing under one of the archways leading into the wide open atrium was Agrippa in his customary tunic and toga - but today, he also wore a vibrant purple cloak that draped over one shoulder and his arm all the way down to the ground.

She stopped what she was doing in an instant and turned her body to stare at him. Who knew a man could look so good in classical clothing? Maybe she should have gone to old plays or whatever more often.

“Get back to work!” Annia hissed next to her, apparently unaware of their silent company, but she ignored the woman and continued to watch Agrippa. “You stupid -”

Finally, the head slave realized that Julia was looking at something in particular rather than simply idling, and she scrambled to her feet when she noticed the general’s presence.

“Master!”

“What progress have you made?”

His voice was as smooth and deep as she remembered it, thought Julia. She opened her mouth to reply -

“She’s an abominably slow learner, Sire. I recommend a smarter slave girl, and one who isn’t so lazy -”

She rolled her eyes. Annia had such a big damn mouth. There had been someone in the firm just like her, always eager to gossip around the water cooler and complain about others to anyone who would listen.

“You have all the time in the world to train her. I trust that with your experience, you can teach one girl how to attend to her duties. I’ll be returning in three days to see for myself.”

Julia didn’t even bother trying to hide her smile when she heard the woman’s audible gulp. Oh, yes. This wasn’t half as bad as it could be…

* * * * *

And here he was yet again, thinking about Julia when he had important matters to attend to. Even during council meetings, his thoughts kept drifting back to her. Why? He was single-minded and focused at all times, never distracted - until that slave girl had appeared. Agrippa grimaced as one of the other statesmen continued to ramble on. This had never happened to him before.

...No. It had happened once before.

Scribonia.

But this wasn’t about her, he told himself as he straightened his back in the seat and tried to hone his attention on the speaker with sharp eyes. Scribonia was long gone, and besides Julia’s physical resemblance to her, there was no other similarity to dredge up those long-lost memories. Indeed, he had been watching her in secret as she trained under Annia and several other experienced slaves, taking in and committing to memory the sound of her voice, her strangely adult mannerisms, the alternately bullish and elegant temperament that she carried around like a luxurious shawl.

She hadn’t known he’d been watching, of course. He’d made sure of that. But surely she had to know the attention she attracted from the others, too: her wit was one thing, as acerbic as it was humorous, but there was a cunning intelligence to her that the others all regarded with both wariness and respect.

She was a new girl - she should have been at the very bottom of their unspoken hierarchy just like the other slaves who had been transported on the wagon with her not so long ago. But instead, with her knowing eyes and uncanny ability to grasp whatever circumstances she was in and turn it to her advantage, she commanded cautious respect from nearly everyone who crossed her path.

Even his.

She had an entirely different spirit, one of survival and cleverness and strength. No, she was nothing like Scribonia. The woman had possessed none of these qualities, or even if she had, not nearly enough of them.

If she had, perhaps she wouldn’t have been exiled to some remote country far from the emperor’s seat in Rome.

Agrippa frowned.