"Fixing the Little Things" - FREE fantasy story

I was thinking it might be nice to post a free story here, if an idea came to me. An idea did come...at 1:30am. Naturally.

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Fixing the Little Thingsby E. M. Epps

On the way to the supermarket, Chris Begoin turned a corner and found herself on a hill looking down at an encampment of the Roman Imperial Army.
She didn't know at first, of course, that it was Roman, or Imperial. That it was an army was obvious. The rows and rows of leather tents inside a rough wooden wall, the rising plumes of campfire smoke, and the stench of horse manure and latrines made that clear even from a distance.
She squeaked down the frosted-over hill in her tennis shoes, wrapping her arms around herself. In Seattle, it had been May and she was wearing a T-shirt and khaki jacket. Here, it was cold enough to see her breath in the air.
Long before she came within sight of the camp sentries, she made herself invisible. Then, a few strides before she reached the defensive ditch outside the palisade wall, she closed her eyes, and twitched something, just a little, inside her head. When she reopened her eyes, she was inside the camp, in the wide, busy space between the wall and the tents.
The education of Hollywood told her that they were Romans. Chris roamed the broad roads between the blocks of tents, treading softly in case one of the men happened to be able to see her despite her spell. She wasn't sure how a Roman soldier would handle meeting a woman who was not only as tall as or taller than he was, but who also wore trousers and had boy-short hair spiked upright with gel. She would rather avoid finding out, if possible.
After a few minutes, she sat beside a fire between a beautiful, hawk-faced African in a wolfskin coat and a heavyset Mediterranean who looked like he would have been surly if he hadn't been busy being bored. Chris held herself as still as a stone and eavesdropped. She didn't have the gift of tongues, and her Latin extended no further than caveat emptor. But she she could guess well enough the meanings of Germania, barbari, defendimus, Imperium.
There was no point in wishing that her phone worked so she could look up "List of Roman Military Campaigns in Germany" on Wikipedia, and try to guess where and when they were. And that assumed this was even her universe, with her history, and her Romans. It balanced under her feet the same: but if the difference had not yet happened, she might not be able to tell.
Worldwalkers learn to accept very early in their careers that they will usually not understand what is going on, until the Universe is damn well good and ready to tell them.
Resigned, she scooted backwards out from between the two soldiers.
Chris wandered through the camp, hugging herself and rubbing her arms through her thin jacket. She could do a spell to stay warm, but she kept thinking of the rule: in any random group of a hundred, one will be able to see you. The odds increased drastically if she did another spell. So, for now, she shivered, and focused on finding the reason she had been sent here.
She was bemused about why she'd been chosen for this—whatever it was. Her knowledge of Roman history was restricted to what she remembered from school. Which was to say: she was pretty sure there'd been an Emperor named Nero; and Rome had burned during his reign; and he may or may not have been playing the fiddle at the time.
And she didn't do wars, either. Worldwalkers had specialties, generally. The high-powered types dealt with stuff like universes that had suffered nervous breakdowns and needed to be rebooted. Not too many of those. Or you might be the man with a gift for tumbling the plans of evil geniuses. Or curing plagues; or banishing monsters to microverses where they couldn't hurt anybody. Or, maybe, fighting a battle to defend whichever you thought was the right side.
Chris wasn't sure she had a specialty. Everything she was sent to do seemed to be fairly little. Fixing things. Being there at just the right moment to lend a hand: when the car broke down, when the triceratops stumbled through a hole in time, or when the decently-well-behaved demon seduced a not-very-well-behaved suburbanite girl.
She didn't feel shorted by that at all. No magician would ever say that little things didn't count. Big things, after all, are made of little things. Chris was proud of each and every thing she'd done, and wouldn't swap them for the world.
But she did, right now, feel utterly lost. Was she supposed to help these people win their next battle? Or see to it that they lost it? Who was she to judge which was right—and not even ethically speaking, but historically? From Chris's perspective, after all, the battle had already been won or lost thousands of years ago.
Though, of course, she didn't know who had won. So maybe it was a Schrödinger's cat of a battle; in the category of if a battle is won in the past, but the time traveler doesn't know how it ends up, does the tree still fall in the forest?
She realized this was a Great Big Thing She Shouldn't Think Too Hard About. Another skill worldwalkers needed: the intelligent ability to decide not to think about things.
Instead, she looked. Beyond her puffing breaths, she looked, with her eyes and more. She saw: A fraying strap on a bridle. A corn, rubbing the inside of the shoe of a junior officer sitting beside a fire. Fleas and lice, everywhere. A soldier with a burning toothache, miserable inside his tent, on the other side of a leather wall from her.
She stopped. She didn't know what the Universe wanted. But it trusted her; and she trusted it.
She stood close to the wall of the tent and closed her eyes. Even if someone passing by could sense magic a little, he might not notice her if he looked for her. Eyes are drawn to eyes.
Chris's magic did not need incantations or gestures. She just focused for a moment, on a spot outside of herself. Gave a little push, against heat and pain.
The soldier's toothache was gone. Chris tilted her head a little, towards the officer a dozen yards away; and his corn healed, too. And a flick of her attention toward the worn bridle strap.
There was nothing she could do about the fleas—not without doing a spell over the whole camp, which would surely draw attention. She decided to leave it for now.
She went onwards. Fixing things. A weakness in a shield, hidden by its linen and leather covering, which would cause it to shatter at a tap...a tent peg, creeping out of the cold earth. She mended one; stamped the other down.
An alcoholic with a cirrhotic liver, over there. That took a couple of minutes. She huddled by a campfire across from four grubby, slightly drunk men, and tried to block out the sound of their singing as she worked through the spell for one of them, slowly. When that was done she depended on their inattentive state to steal a couple of mouthfuls of their exceedingly nasty wine to warm herself up. Then she went onwards again.
The man would live another dozen years—if he did not die tomorrow with a German arrow through his eye. It was because of that unknowingness that Chris still felt at a loss. She didn't feel that she had done anything wrong, in helping out here and there. But nor did she have that sense within herself that she had accomplished what she had been sent to do. She could leave, she could go home, before she accomplished her purpose. She knew that in the abstract sense; but only in the abstract sense.
It was only because she knew she had the option to leave things undone that she knew she possessed free will. She also knew she would never exercise it.
Another philosophical thing she did not touch.
She'd been here a few hours now. The sun was going down, and Chris was freezing through and through. She crossed a wide road and broke out of the rows of barrack tents into an open space, with one large tent in the center and groupings off to each side. A dignified, olive-skinned man who looked about thirty walked by, heading towards one of the side tents with a purpose. A long scar across one cheek failed to keep him from being handsome.
Chris wanted to be inside more than anything. When the man paused outside the tent to remove his crested helmet and exchange a word with the soldiers guarding the entrance, she drew up close behind him, keeping her eyes down. She did not think twice before ducking through the tent flap after him.
He halted just inside the door. Chris stopped behind him. The man sitting inside the tent looked up from a wax tablet. In the soft lamplight, Chris saw his expression change in a way she couldn't pin down: for as soon as she saw the change begin, she had already responded to it, by freezing and closing her eyes.
Damn, she thought.
She held her breath, and hoped, and hoped, he had sensed her only, rather than seeing her. If he saw her she had no way to explain herself: no way to explain blue jeans and plastic shoes and boy-cropped brown hair, with or without the help of bad high school Spanish.
Keeping her eyes closed for that long moment was a nearly impossible thing. But she was listening, and she heard him shift his weight, but not rise out of his chair. She breathed shallowly through her mouth.
The man she was standing behind asked a question, his voice uncertain. She understood him well enough from his tone: What is it, Legate?
And she also understood the answer, which came too slowly for her taste: Nothing, Centurion.
And then they were off and talking, in that staccato tongue full of the ums and uses that she thought Spanish had been well rid of. She turned her head away so she would not catch the Legate's eyes, and crept sideways out from behind the handsome Centurion. There was a stool beside a brazier near the side of the tent, and she fell onto it gratefully, stretching out her hands to warm them over the coals. They continued talking, paying her no heed. She got up then, as quietly as possible, and went into the part of the tent that seemed to be the living quarters. There, half hidden, she helped herself to a piece of rocky bread and the contents of a cup mostly full of a liquid that actually tasted less bad if she told herself it was vinegar rather than wine.
Then she was glad she had left the stool, for the Centurion had pulled it up near his superior to look over some tablets with him. From their tones, Chris guessed that they knew each other well, though they were suitably professional.
Chris looked around. She had no particular reason or desire to go back outside. She went farther back into the tent, took a fur from the cot, wrapped it around herself, and quietly, very quietly, made herself a comfortable spot on the floor near the brazier. The wine, weak as it was, had gone to her head and the world went pleasantly detached. At first she craned her neck to admire the handsome Centurion. She smiled muzzily to herself. Then she peered at the other, somewhat older man. He was, she decided, interestingly attractive: it was because of his ilk that a certain kind of nose would later be named "Roman."
It was just when she had decided this that he rose suddenly, asking a question about vinum; and went to the other side of the tent to fetch himself and his subordinate some cups thereof. Something had changed when he sat back down. Chris watched the way he offered the cup, the way he picked up his stylus from the low table he had set it on, and then put it back a second later. As if he were ever so slightly nervous. And the Centurion's body language changed too. He shifted in his seat, his fluent speech pausing awkwardly, then jolting onward.
Chris frowned, watching them and trying to figure out what it was. Their topic, as far as she could tell from the mentions of milites, armum that she could catch, had not changed....
It took her a good five minutes before she figured out what it was: then it came to her like a blast.
They were head over heels in love with each other, were completely in the dark about each others' feelings, and were as awkward as crushing fourteen-year-olds about it.
Chris couldn't help it: she giggled.
The Legate's head spun towards her. Chris had time only to think Oh sh— before he had stood, knocking back his chair. Chris floundered in the fur that tangled around her. Then she stopped, because really, she was a magician, damn it.
Now that the Legate was looking right at her, her spell had been broken. The Centurion, too, had leapt to his feet. He drew his short, but very sharp-looking sword, stepping forward to protect his superior.
Chris understood the Legate's sense if not his words:
Who are you? What are you doing here?
The Centurion looked grim and menacing. Safely behind the protection of a spell, Chris sighed and got to her feet. Slowly. Thinking about what she wanted to do. To say.
They probably have a law against it, she thought. And I bet that doesn't stop anybody: it never does.
But if they go on behaving like this, they won't even have a chance to break it. Because neither will ever take the first step.
She drew herself up to her full height, not much shy of theirs. A short bunch, these Romans. She took a deep breath: and committed to her role.
Chris Begoin smiled at the Legate and the Centurion, and raised her hands in a vaguely benedictory motion.
"Soy Venus," she said grandly. "Dios del amor. Amor buena, amigos."
They stared at her.
Chris gestured at the Centurion with one hand, at the Legate with the other. Then, beaming with all the wicked glee of a faux goddess of love, she clasped her two hands together.
"Amor buena," Chris said again; "et buena fortuna."
The Centurion glanced over his shoulder at his Legate. The Legate glanced back at him. Underneath their anger and indigence, they both looked...just a touch embarrassed, was it? They had understood, both of them.
And that was the most, Chris thought, that she could hope for.
She drew another breath. Then she closed her eyes; cast up a sheet of harmless blue fire; and made one deliberate step forward.
The step would have taken her uncomfortably close to the point of the Centurion's sword: if it had not taken her home, instead.
The smell of woodsmoke and latrines vanished in the freshness of recent rain and the weight of car exhaust. Chris felt the unevenness of the cracked sidewalk under her feet, but she kept her eyes closed for a moment. Holding that last image in her mind—of that glance she'd witnessed.
She could see why it had been her, now. She would not have gone inside the tent, if she had not been cold. She would not have seen what was not being said, if she had understood their language. She would not have giggled, if she had not drunk the wine. And she certainly would have over-thought her response to being spotted.
It had, indeed, been a very little thing, she thought. They were probably not anyone important to history. They might die tomorrow—their tomorrow—in battle.
But she hoped that maybe—maybe—they would consider the advice of the ridiculous, slightly tipsy, sneakered goddess of love, first.
She thought they would. Otherwise, what would have been the point?
Just fixing the ­little things. As always.



With thanks to Wallace Breem and Madeline Miller for the inspiration.

If you enjoyed this story, please take one second to share it on your social network of choice using the share buttons below! You may also enjoy my novella, To Hell and Back Again...With a Little White Dog, which is set in a related universe.

Photo "Roman Marbles" remixed from Flickr user Steve Drolet (Tasitch) under Creative Commons license.