The Woman from Rome

She had never been meant to wield a blade. She had been meant for other things, instead.

There was a price hanging over Annetta Barbieri's head: a price to be paid in dowry and rank. Her house was in a nice section of Roma, but there were nicer; it had a lot of rooms, but there were larger mansions down the street. Her father was an official, but not a very important one; her brother had risen through the ranks of the military, only to die in some backwater during some minor skirmish. The family honor he'd built died with him.

Annetta was not merely a fortunate girl, taught etiquette and Latin and poetry…she was an Expectation, an Achievement in the making. Her family, as her father so often liked to say, was noble-born but only barely so, and in Rome your name mattered as much as your purse. So the last child of the Barbieri line was given a fine education—too fine for a girl, some said, what with the lessons in mathematics and grammar and classical art, things no self-respecting wife really needed to know—and told to ensnare a Good Name, be it by her sophistication or her change purse or the bits underneath her dress.

"If you marry well, the family name will continue on. We will matter more," her father said. "If you aren't important, you don't exist. You must let the world know you rule it, Annetta."

And pretty Annetta, with her blonde hair and pale blue eyes and tight-laced dresses…pretty Annetta failed every test.

Every test that counted, anyway. She did very well in her lessons, impressed every tutor. She read voraciously, sometimes a book a day, both the proper things assigned to her and the more scandalous texts she wheedled from the servants. When she turned twelve her gifts included jewels and gilded mirrors and fencing practice: she wore the first and broke the second and excelled in the last, regretting only that the rapier she swung wasn't real. She was smart and aloof and no man wanted her. She turned eighteen and there were no offers.

Her father's response was to heap more dresses onto her bed, string more jewels around her neck. "Impress them," he begged. "You have looks and money, make them want to be with you."

"Perhaps I could take a lesson with a courtesan," she mused. There was no intended disrespect; she had studied every other subject with a master, so why not do the same to learn feminine charm? Her father did not see the thought behind the idea.

"Slut," he roared. "Useless baggage! What do you care if you're a spinster at thirty two? What do you care if the family you were born into dies away? I have given you everything, child. If you throw away your heritage, what in God's Holy Name will you have left?"

("The problem with you is that you're a woman," her fencing tutor told her, inadvertently echoing the family priest, "but you want to do battle like a man. You have other weapons besides the sword. Why not use them to your advantage?"

Annetta grit her teeth and wished for a sharpened blade.)

-i-

Because she was an Expectation, albeit a failed one, Annetta Expected of everyone else in turn. When her fencing tutor failed to call her on sloppy moves, she accused him of deceit. When her servants dropped a vase or lost a favorite book, she turned on her icy stare full-blast. She wanted to meet her own obligations—true, they bored her, but that wasn't at all the point. Annetta had no raging ideals, no desire to throw off her father's yoke and live some other life. What other life? Should she become a courtesan and sell herself to greasy men? Should she cut her hair and bind her breasts, become the military legend her brother had never been? Why should she? What good would it serve? She would be poor, and hungry, and most of all a coward.

"Never turn your back on your target," her fencing instructor said. "The best fencers can almost read their opponent's mind."

Here was another Expectation: she could never simply be. Annetta accepted this, because she saw no reason not to, and she was fascinated the first time she cut her instructor's hand with a badly—or well—aimed parry. The thin red drizzle across his hand was something different.

You couldn't hide from scarring, Annetta decided that night. It didn't give you a choice but to live up to its challenge or else waste away.

-i-

Finally, at twenty, with her father so disgusted he couldn't look her in the face, there came an offer. Its maker was thirty-nine, and hairy, and very rich. The family priest found a line in the Bible which claimed that Jesus Our Lord Himself condemned any girl who refused to marry in accordance with her father's wishes. Annetta spent half a month flipping through her personal Bible in search of such a line, but never found one. The family priest, she thought, must have been working with a new edition.

Then there was no more time to spend and she accepted the offer. Her fiancé came from a powerful family, which lately had become less powerful—not the best choice, her father sighed, but what could they do? With the arrival of the Borgia things had become more difficult, more tightly wound. Disagreeing with the status quo could give you more than a black mark to your name.

Her fiancé wanted to get married quickly, and her father wanted his future secured, so Annetta was left with mere weeks to gather everything together. She would be a good wife, she thought as she packed away gowns and books. There was no attachment to her old life so strong that she could not give it up. She would bear healthy children, and she would educate them well, son and daughter both. She would rule her household as she had been taught to do all her life.

Annetta met with her intended two weeks before the wedding. She had asked for no huge ceremony, only a chance to meet the man she'd forever be a part of before she said her vows. So they spent a day sitting on a bench outside her estate, and she was curious, and he was shy, and he paid a wandering minstrel to sing her love songs in a crackling voice. Annetta watched the crowds pass, watched the guards pass, watched her fiancé as he sat nervously through silences that were somehow endearing. He was old but not ugly—when he combed his hair, anyway. Perhaps his beard could use a trim.

"Why me?" she asked him, blonde hair caught on the fall breeze. He noticed her shiver and ordered a servant to fetch her fur-lined cloak. "You were the only one to offer."

If he was surprised by her bluntness he didn't admit it. Nor was he surprised that no one else had asked: "You read too much," he chuckled, "and you aren't friendly enough, and when people pay you compliments you stare and ask them to elaborate. Like you're taking notes."

He never answered her question, but what he said was almost enough to count. He will be a good husband, she thought. He would never be brave, or dashing, or particularly smart, and she would never love him, but he would meet her expectations. And she would be a good wife.

And then he died.

Days before the ceremony, a messenger arrived at the Barbieri household: the bearer of bad news, he spun a tale that left Annetta's father pulling at his hair. Annetta herself listened intently, absorbing every detail. Then she turned, and went upstairs to her room, and shut the door, and was very quiet for a very long time.

It had been the Borgia, of course. Someone related to that family somehow had knocked into her fiancé somewhere in the streets; Rome was overcrowded, swollen with people even in the richer districts, and it was hard these days to walk the streets completely unmolested. But the Borgia, and all those clinging to their coattails, were reinventing the rules to better suit themselves. The churches had begun to preach obedience to state and God, in that order. When an official walked the streets, a path had better be made for him.

But Annetta's clumsy fiancé had not moved out of the way in time, or else had placed more stock in the protections of his family name than it still bore. The trouble with minor nobility, she thought numbly, and understood her father more than ever before. He had been killed right then, in a flash of silver and blur of sword, and there would be no punishment for his murder. There was, in fact, no murder, because to oppose or even irritate a Borgia man carried the death sentence by unwritten law.

Annetta, as was proper, wore mourning colors for a month. Her father seemed to age a year every day. Their family name would be remembered only in the context of bad luck and misery now. Who would she marry? Who would she become?

Three more months passed, and there were no more offers, and the family priest began finding lines in his Bible which spoke of the honor of the virgin woman. Perhaps, her father moaned, she should consider becoming a nun.

Annetta spent most of her time reading. She had failed in every expectation—was adrift, without purpose or direction. If she thought about it, she was also longing for the awkward affection of a man now dead…but to admit that would be to drown in a grief she would not name, and so she did not think about it. She never spoke of her fiancé, would never again mention his name.

This grief was harsh and sharp, a rusty nail or a decrepit tomb. Because she disliked running from duty Annetta bore her mourning as she had once planned to bear her children. She cradled her failure in her arms, rocked it as she slept. But she did not name it. It was not given that comfort, and it grew into something terribly bitter, and tough. Blunt Annetta shackled herself to her dead future and waited for it to catch up. The light in her eyes were so strange it scared the servants, and they began avoiding her room. She saw her father so little she barely knew his face when she happened to pass him in the halls.

The streets, in their anonymity, were something of a comfort. She took to wearing men's breeches as she did when fencing, wandering the districts to remind herself of life still lived. People gave her strange looks, and the soldiers she passed were guaranteed to whistle and smirk, but Annetta was beyond noticing such minor things. Yet no one accosted her; they hooted from a safe distance, as one might taunt a leper. Annetta Barbieri was kept apart.

And because she was alone, she was able to see the city as it began to fall down around itself. The Roma she had grown up in had changed, and was changing again. The Borgia guards were on edge, rattled; they'd been dying more and more these days. Thieves and mercenaries and disgruntled citizens were beginning to resemble vigilantes. The Borgia responded to the protests with cruelty shocking even for their bloodthirsty hearts, but it didn't seem to be enough. Something, someone, was inspiring discontent. Rebellion brewed under the surface. The ruling elite were no longer guaranteed docile obedience from their beaten hordes.

Annetta, as she roamed the streets, saw this and was intrigued. The people had been given a fresh purpose, though not all of them were brave enough to accept it. Even the rich districts had an old, unsightly edge to them lately; no one could be ensured a safe haven from the looming violence. Annetta did in fact take notes.

And then one day, months after she'd been made an almost-widow and a letdown both, she saw three Borgia soldiers harassing some poor fool for insults he'd thrown their way. His friends had scattered when the angry guards attacked, but he'd been too slow to escape; she recognized her hapless fiancé in the man, a bit, and something tightened in her chest.

A guard pulled his sword free from its scabbard. She cried out, or at least she thought she did, but no one reacted. People in the streets walked past with eyes plastered to the ground. Annetta moved a few steps forward. The victim fell a heap of ruined parts. His eyes were open and staring, and she saw herself reflected in them.

There was a loose bit of cobblestone by her feet; the streets weren't maintained very well. She bent down, almost self-conscious, and felt the weight of the rock in her hand. It was sturdy, fit nicely.

"Hey, girl," one of the guards snapped. "What are you doing? Move on, little bitch, if you want to stay safe and pretty."

Annetta threw the rock. It hit the man whose sword was out, hard enough that he stumbled back and dropped his blade. Annetta moved quickly to grab it. When she raised the sword as if to fight with it, all three of the guards laughed.

With good reason. Annetta had been trained in fencing, not swordplay, and it was all she could do to hold off the first blows as they came. Her arms burned, her wrists throbbed, and she couldn't keep the sword steady enough to swing it even once. It was heavy, and far too long, and her stance was all wrong, and in three seconds her back was to the wall behind her, with three snickering soldiers leering at her as they came closer.

A flash of white-on-red and someone screamed—

It was over before Annetta's startled eyes could comprehend the sight before them. The soldiers were dead, that much she realized, and rising from the small heap of corpses was a man dressed in voluminous robes of red and white, wearing cowl and armor and a scar across his lips. He was absolutely dripping weapons.

(He had a kind face, bearded and young. He was cripplingly handsome, and yet she wasn't attracted…his eyes were so sad, she thought. His frown was so natural and worn.)

He turned to face her, with no explanation of where he'd come from or who he was. If he was surprised to see a well-born woman in breeches holding a sword, his eyes gave no sign.

"The liberation of Roma has begun," he said. His voice was low and smooth, with a real bite. He spoke with stern authority, and there was no doubt he had the strength to back up his words (the pile of bodies he was so calmly standing by testified to that)…and yet, somehow, she heard him speak and saw a frightened teenaged boy.

"If you choose to flee, do so now," he continued, "but if you choose to fight, stand with me against the Borgia."

Choose to fight? Was there a choice? You want to battle like a man…

"Take back your city," the man said. "Rise to meet the burden you've been given."

Annetta smiled. There was something of a dagger in it.