Household Gods (79 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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But next to a reed pen, it was a stunning advance in technology. And with technology came advances in thinking. The more people had access to books, the fewer were ignorant, and the less superstition there could be. And women could start making laws, or finding ways to assure that laws were made.
A better day was coming. In the time from which Nicole had chosen to flee, you could see its dawn on the horizon, bright enough to read a newspaper by. It was midnight here, darkest midnight. And there weren't any newspapers to read, either. Nicole had never thought of
USA Today
as an instrument of liberation, but it was. In what it signified, in what it implied: a literate population that wanted, and expected, to be fed the news in bite-sized pieces.
And she was eighteen hundred years away from it, and she couldn't go home. She had no one to blame for it but herself. She'd wished herself into this. No one else could wish her out.
The first tears caught her by surprise. Ever since she'd realized Carnuntum in the second century wasn't what she thought it would be—wasn't anything even close—she'd done her best to stay strong, to grit her teeth: even the one that had troubled her in this body, the one that had had to be pulled at such a cost in pain. She'd tried to roll with the punches, to keep from giving way to despair. Her best hadn't been too bad, either. When she'd cried before, she'd always done it in the privacy of her bedchamber—her miserable, bare, stinking bedchamber.
Now, as if at last a dam had broken, more and more tears followed those first two, and she couldn't seem to stop them. What would Julia think, watching her employer, her former owner, go to pieces right in front of her?
Julia, as far as Nicole could tell through tear-blurred vision, was astonished. “Mistress!” she said. “What on earth is the matter?”
“Everything,” Nicole answered, which was true, comprehensive, and absolutely useless.
Julia got up, came around the table, and laid a hand on Nicole's shoulder. “Everybody feels that way now and again. You just have to get through the bad times and hope they'll be better tomorrow.”
Again, that was good, sensible advice. Nicole knew as much. But she was, for the moment, something less than sensible. “No, it won't!” she cried. “It'll be just the same as it is today.” She could conceive of no stronger condemnation of Carnuntum than that.
“Well—” Julia hesitated. “When things change, they usually get worse.”
“How
could
they get worse?” Nicole demanded. “What could be worse than—this?” The sweep of her hand took it all in: stinking tavern, stinking city, stinking world.
But Julia had a ready answer: “Things were just—the way they always had been, till last year. Then the pestilence came, and that was worse, and then the Marcomanni and Quadi, and that was worse yet, and then the legions drove them back across the river, and that was better for the city, yes, but it was worse for you, wasn't it, on account of that one cursed soldier?”
She had to stop there, to draw a breath. Nicole fired back before she could go on: “Yes, and how many other bastards like him are there in the army that we'll never, ever hear about, either because the women they raped are too ashamed to come forward, or because the legionaries killed them after they were done screwing them?”
“Bound to be some,” Julia agreed with chilling calm. “But that isn't what you asked, is it, Mistress? You asked how things could be worse. I told you.”
Nicole shook her head so violently that the tears veered wide of their accustomed tracks. “That's just how things have got worse already. Not how they could get worse than they already are.”
Julia blinked, then stared, then started to laugh. For sure she was amused, and a little taken aback. Maybe she was
trying to jolly Nicole out of her gloom. “No wonder Marcus Aurelius listened to you when you complained about that legionary. You can split hairs just like a lawyer.”
But Nicole was not about to be jollied. “And a whole fat lot of good that does me, too,” she said.
“It got you ten
aurei,”
Julia pointed out.
“Getting raped got me ten
aurei,”
Nicole said with bitter, legalistic precision. “Believe me, I'd rather not have them. Besides,” she added even more bitterly, “who ever heard of a lady lawyer? Who ever heard of a lady
anything
in Carnuntum?”
Julia sighed. “Well, Mistress, it doesn't look as if anything I can say will cheer you up. Do you want a jar or two of wine? Would that help?”
“No!” Nicole stamped her foot. If she'd been Kimberley, that sort of behavior would have earned her a time-out. If she'd been Lucius, it would have got her a whack on the fanny. Because she was an adult, she could do as she pleased—but nothing she could do here pleased her. There was nothing
to
do, except get drunk or get screwed. She wasn't in the mood to invite a hangover. The other … her whole body tightened, and her stomach clenched. If she tried very hard, she could remember that last, tender night with Titus Calidius Severus. But no matter how hard she tried to cling to it, the Roman legionary's hard hands and mocking voice ran over it and drowned it.
Julia had given up on her. “I'm going to bed,” she said. “Why don't you do that, too? And hope—or pray to Liber and Libera, since you've become so fond of them—that you'll feel better in the morning.” She turned away from Nicole and headed for the stairs. “Good night,” she said over her shoulder.
That was as blunt, and as close to outright rude, as the freedwoman had ever dared be. It demonstrated rather forcibly how far Nicole had strayed from anything resembling decent manners.
She didn't care. She had perfectly good reason for being unreasonable. If Julia couldn't see that, then too bad for Julia.
As soon as Nicole had shaped the thought, she knew a stab—small but distinct—of guilt. Julia had been her best friend and ally in this whole ugly world. She didn't deserve to be treated this way. “Then she should try harder to understand how I feel,” Nicole said to the air.
Nicole knew she should go up after Julia, and if not apologize, then at least try to smooth things over. But Julia was long gone.
Tomorrow would be soon enough. She'd wake again in Carnuntum as she always had. She'd do something to make it up to her freedwoman—something small but telling. She didn't know what. She couldn't, once she'd made herself think like a civilized adult, think much past the moment, or past the burden of this whole awful age.
She sniffled loudly, and blew her nose on her fingers. No Kleenex, no handkerchief. She grimaced and wiped her fingers on the rammed-earth floor, which at least had the virtue of being newly swept. She rubbed her hand on her tunic. A smear of dirt stained the faded wool. She brushed ineffectually at it. It was a losing battle. Every bit of it was the same: futile and hopeless.
She thrust herself to her feet, went over to the bar, opened the lid of one of the winejars and stared down into it. Plenty of wine in Carnuntum these days, with so many legionaries in town. The rich, fruity scent filled her nostrils. Even through the heaviness of tears, she grew a little dizzy with the fumes.
When she first came to Carnuntum, the very smell of wine gave her the horrors. Now she saw in it only oblivion, and blessed numbness.
And in the morning she'd wake up with a headache, and the world would still be too much with her, and what would she do after that? Drink another jar of wine? Her father had taken that road; she knew where it led. But now she understood why he'd done it. She even came close to forgiving—a thing she'd never imagined she'd do.
She reached for the dipper. Instead of pouring the wine into a cup, she poured out a puddle in front of Liber and
Libera. She let the last dribble of wine spill down the faces of the god and goddess—side by side, coequal, and maddeningly indifferent.
If you don't bet, you can't win.
Who had said that? She heard it in her father's voice, a voice she'd spent most of her life trying to forget.
Imagining things,
she thought. And if she saw, or imagined she saw, a sparkle in Liber's limestone eyes, and in Libera's, surely it was but lamplight catching the wetness of the wine. There was no hope. There was no winning this game of gods and shifting time. The die, as the Romans liked to say, was cast. She couldn't go back. What she did now in front of the votive plaque, she did by force of habit, nothing more.
She dropped the dipper back in the winejar and covered it with the wooden lid. She blew out all the lamps but one, which she carried with her up the narrow rickety stairs.
Julia was already snoring. She had a clear conscience, or else she had no conscience at all. Or maybe she was just dead-tired from having worked sunup to sundown.
Nicole wasn't much better off herself. She went on stumbling feet into the bedchamber, set the lamp on a stool by the bed, and closed the door behind her and barred it. It wouldn't stop an intruder who really wanted in, but it would slow him down a little. That was as much as she could hope for in this world.
She lay down on the hard, lumpy, uncomfortable bed and blew out the lamp. Her nightly prayer was worn thin with use, the same plea as always, word for ineffectual word. She should give up on it. But she was too stubborn.
If you don't bet, you can't win.
Was that her father's voice? Or another? Or even … two others? Or was it nothing but her imagination? She'd prayed this prayer for so long, and been ignored so completely. The god and goddess couldn't be turning toward her at last. Of course not. She was bound here forever, condemned to this primitive hell, for her great sin, the sin of hating the world she was born to.
 
 
On the votive plaque, Libera's limestone eyes turned to meet Liber's. The goddess' naked stone shoulders lifted in a shrug. The god's hands rose in a gesture that meant much the same. If there had been anyone in the tavern, he would have heard a pair of small, exasperated sighs.
Mortals,
Libera's shrug said. And Liber's gesture agreed:
Give them what they want, and watch them discover they never wanted it in the first place.
They were really too busy in this age of the world, to trouble themselves with this refugee from that dull and sterile age still so far in the future. Why on earth was she so desperate to go back there? There, she'd merely existed. Here, she'd
lived.
She'd known love and pain, sickness and war, danger and excitement and all the other things that made life worth living. How could she abandon them for a world in which nothing ever really happened?
Still, there was no doubt about it. She honestly wanted to go back. Now that Liber and Libera had turned their attention on this petitioner, every prayer she'd sent, every plea she'd raised, ran itself through their awareness. She'd been storming heaven, crying out to them to let her go.
She hadn't framed her prayers in the proper form. Some gods were particular about such things. But if Liber and Libera had been of that disposition, they would never have granted Nicole's first petition. Neither were her offerings of precisely the right sort. Still, they were offerings, and sincerely meant. No divinity could fail to be aware of that.
Once more the limestone gazes met. Liber's expression was wry. Libera's was exasperated.
Well; if this foolish woman thinks she can change her mind yet again, she'll just have to live with it.
They nodded in complete agreement. For a moment, they basked in its glow, well and divinely content to have solved this niggling problem. A house spider, weaving its disorderly web on the ceiling above the plaque, froze for a moment at the brief flare of light. A moth started toward it, but it faded too quickly. The moth fluttered off aimlessly, its tiny spark of awareness barely impinging on the god and goddess' own. The tavern was dark again, and utterly still.
 
 
When Nicole lay down, she had feared she'd never fall asleep. But once she was as comfortable in that bed as she could be, she spiraled irresistibly down into the deeps of sleep. Worry faded, hopelessness sank out of sight. Dreams rose up around her, strange and yet familiar. A stair going down, a stair going up, round and round and round and …
 
 
N
ICOLE WOUND SLOWLY BACK toward consciousness. She lay with her eyes closed. The mattress under her was hard and lumpy and uncomfortable. A sigh, her first willed breath of the morning, hissed out through her nostrils. Another day in Carnuntum. Another day to get through without too many disasters. Another day to pray with all her heart that she could somehow, someday, without dying first, get out of there.
She rolled over. The mattress wasn't any more comfortable on her side than on her back. It crinkled and rustled, shifting under her, jabbing into a rib. What the—?
Her own mattress, such as it was, was stuffed with wool. It didn't rustle when she rolled over on it. Was she sick again? Had Julia or someone moved her onto a straw pallet while she was delirious?
She opened her eyes. She was looking out an open doorway into a hall.
But she'd shut the bedroom door the night before, shut and barred it, as she always had, ever since she came to Carnuntum.
The doorway was taller, wider. Its edges weren't indifferently whitewashed wood. They were—painted metal? And that shimmer close to her eyes, so close she had to shorten
focus, almost cross her eyes, to see it, was a railing, bright silver—aluminum.
She was dreaming. She drew in another deep breath. And smelled—nothing. No city stink. No reek of shit and garbage and smoke and unwashed humanity. In their place was … not quite nothing, after all. A faint, tingling, half-unpleasant smell. Floor wax and—disinfectant? Yes.
She rolled onto her back again. This was a wonderful dream, realistic to the point of pain. She didn't ever want to wake up.
She drank in every detail. The mattress under her, with its crinkly plastic cover. The sheets, white and faintly rough on her skin, but smoother than anything she'd known in Carnuntum. The ceiling: no hand-planed boards fitted together unevenly, but acoustic tiles, each one exactly like the one beside it, machine-made, perfect; and a frosted-glass panel over a pair of fluorescent tubes. Their pale, purplish-white glow was the brightest thing she'd seen, except for the sun itself, in well over a year.
Nicole shivered. Part was wonder. Part was chill. She'd got used to being chilly in Carnuntum, where fires and braziers didn't do nearly enough to fight the cold.
She was in Carnuntum, then. As vivid as the dream was, as real as it felt, the cold was unmistakable.
Or else … it was air-conditioned to a fare-thee-well. She looked down at herself, at her body lying in the bed. Crisp white sheet, industrial strength. On top of it, a baby-blue blanket better dyed than the one she'd had in Carnuntum, but only about half as thick, and not wool, either. On top of the blanket, her arm.
Her
arm. She needed a moment to recognize it. She hadn't seen it in a year and a half. Pale, on the fleshy side, manicured fingers—no, this wasn't Umma's work-hardened arm. This one, without question, belonged to Nicole Gunther-Perrin. It had something—probably the lead for an IV—taped to it. There were other discomforts, wires, leads taped here and there, connected to monitors that beeped and whistled when she moved. And one niggle that mounted to annoyance,
which felt like the worst bladder infection she'd ever had, and was—had to be—a catheter.
All of which meant, which had to mean—
She lifted the sheet and let out a startled snort of laughter. The white cotton gown, or front of a gown, was even less prepossessing than the grimy wool tunic in which she'd first awakened in Carnuntum. But the body it so halfheartedly concealed was
hers,
slightly flabby tummy, heavy thighs, and all.
A tall black woman in a nurse's uniform strode into the room, alerted probably by the changes in the monitors. At sight of Nicole half sitting up, staring at her, she stopped. Her eyes went wide. “You're awake,” she said.
Nicole swallowed against a sudden and completely involuntary surge of terror. The same terror with which she'd faced every morning in Carnuntum. Would today be the day? Would she finally, somehow, blow her cover, and let the whole world know that she wasn't anything like what she seemed?
She took refuge, and warmth, in a small flash of temper at the nurse's belaboring of the obvious.
“Scilicet vigilans sum. Sed
ubi
sum?”
The woman's eyes widened even further. “Say what, honey?” Under her breath, she muttered something that sounded like,
Possible brain damage?
Nicole opened her mouth to snap at her:
What are you, deaf? Didn't you hear me?
But she stopped. She'd been speaking Latin. It had come out that way automatically, as it had for the past year and more. But the nurse had spoken plain, ordinary, wonderful, familiar English.
Nicole had to kink her brain a bit to remember how the words went. When they came back, the vowels were flavored still, a little, with Latin. “I said, of course I'm awake. But where? I know this is a hospital. Which one?” The last of it came out in the harsh Midwestern accent she'd tried to soften since she moved to California, but it was better than the mock-Italian of the first few words.
“West Hills Regional Medical Center, ma'am,” the nurse
answered her. That was the closest hospital to Nicole's house; she'd taken Kimberley and Justin to the ER there a time or two.
The nurse frowned, wondering, maybe, if she'd really heard gibberish from this patient after all. “Do you know your name, ma'am?” she asked.
“Nicole Gunther-Perrin,” Nicole said—biting down hard on the temptation to answer,
Umma.
She rattled off her address for good measure, with satisfaction entirely out of proportion to the achievement. Street number. Street name. Zip code. All the lovely architecture of the modern identity.
The nurse glanced at the card at the foot of the bed, then nodded. Nicole had got it right. She hadn't known she was holding her breath till she let it out. She asked the question she'd been working her way up to, the one that truly mattered: “How long have I been here?”
She held her breath again, consciously this time. She'd been in Carnuntum a year and a half. If she'd been gone so long, Kimberley would hardly know her. Justin—Justin wouldn't remember her at all. And the bills she would have run up! The law firm's medical coverage was more than decent, but a year and a half in the hospital? She'd be as broke as if she'd stayed in Carnuntum.
Or—She froze. What if it was even worse? What if she'd been in a coma for five years? Ten? Twenty? What if—?
The nurse cut off her thoughts before they spiraled into hysteria. “Honey,” she said in her warm Southern drawl, “you've been here six days.”
Nicole nearly collapsed with relief. She stiffened herself as best she could, and looked down at her hands—
her
hands. Yes, that was the nail polish she'd put on last, badly grown out and somewhat chipped, but definitely her own.
Six days. Thank God. No—thank gods.
Now the next question, much less painful, but she had to know. “How did I get here?”
But the nurse held up a hand. “You just stay right there, Ms. Gunther-Perrin. I'm going to call Dr. Feldman. She'll
tell you everything you need to know. She'll want to run some tests on you, too, I bet.”
“Wait!” Nicole cried. “Just let me ask about my childr—”
But the nurse had already whipped about and gone. Fled, Nicole almost thought, except that nurses were often like that. They didn't want to get involved, and for sure they didn't want to assume the responsibility of treating the patient like a human being instead of a piece of furniture.
She stayed where she was, drinking in the sight of that bare and sterile room. The other bed in it, nearer the window, was empty. Beyond it, through glass, actual glass without bubble or waver or crack, she saw blue, faintly hazy sky and the sun-baked, brush-covered hills that said, distinctly,
California.
They had never looked so good in all the years she'd lived there.
A different nurse, Hispanic or maybe Filipina, appeared in the doorway. She stared at Nicole. “Could you bring me this morning's
Times,
please?” Nicole asked, taking care to speak English.
The nurse looked more startled than ever, turned and fled. What was wrong with them all? Hadn't they ever had a person in a coma wake up before?
Probably not sitting up, talking, and demanding the latest news. Nicole lay back on the crackly bed. She couldn't exactly luxuriate in it, but it was
clean.
That alone was well worth wallowing in.
She was still not entirely sure she wasn't dreaming. Pinching herself didn't help. She could dream that sharp little pain, couldn't she?
Even the little things were wonderful. The blank face of the TV hung from the ceiling: she couldn't find the remote, and wasn't inclined to hunt for it. Just knowing it was there, somewhere, was enough. The IV on its rack, and the different monitors. All that plastic and metal and glass, none of it even imaginable to a mind raised in the second century.
She lay for a long while staring at the clock on the wall. What a marvel it was. Time measured out in hours and
minutes and seconds. No need to rely on the sun, or to remember whether it was summer or winter, whether the hours were longer or shorter depending on the length of the day.
Forty-five minutes and sixteen seconds after the black nurse fled, a woman strode briskly into the room. She was short and very thin, the sort of person who crackles with nervous energy. Her hair was brown and wavy and beginning to go gray. She didn't seem to take much notice of it; it was pulled back in a bun, out of sight and out of mind. She wore little makeup—next to none by Roman standards. Under the white coat, she wore a plain linen shirtdress in a shade of beige that didn't exactly suit her. No jewelry, no wedding ring. Stethoscope around neck, clipboard in hand: she was as little like a Roman physician as it was possible to be.
Her voice was as brisk as her gait, firm, no nonsense in it. “Good morning,” she said. “My name is Marcia Feldman. I'm a neurologist here at West Hills Medical. I understand you're back with us again?”
“I think so, yes,” Nicole answered a little dryly.
“So,” Dr. Feldman said. Her quick eyes had settled, fixed on Nicole's face. “Suppose you tell us what happened.”
“You don't know?”
That was almost insolent. Dr. Feldman didn't bridle at it, but maybe she stiffened very slightly. “No,” she said, “we don't. Anything you can tell us will help.”
Nicole lowered her eyes, shamed into politeness. “I don't know. I went to bed—six days ago, the nurse said. Next I knew, I was here.” That was the official story, the one she'd stick to. Anything else would get her the rubber room. “How did I get here? The nurse wouldn't tell me.”
“Your older child came in to wake you. When she couldn't, she dialed nine-one-one.” Dr. Feldman frowned at a line on her clipboard, and tapped her pen on it. “Could you give me the child's name, please?”
“Kimberley,” Nicole answered promptly. “She's four. Her brother L—
Justin
—is two.” Lucius was gone, eighteen hundred years dead. But he'd fathered someone who'd fathered or borne someone who … Nicole shut the thought away. She
missed him suddenly, fiercely, and altogether unexpectedly. She—yes, she mourned him.
No. Think of the living children—of her own continuance, and her own future. Whom she hadn't seen in a year and a half. Whom suddenly she missed with a sensation like pain. “Are they all right?”
The doctor made a note on the chart, and cast a flicker of a smile at Nicole. “Yes, they're fine. They're with your ex-husband and his—girlfriend?”
Of course they would be. Nicole couldn't rise to anger at Dawn now, or at Frank for falling for her. “That's right,” she said. “Thank you.” Above all, she must convince this doctor that she was sane. She had to convince herself, too, if in a different way. Had she, could she have, dreamed it all in six days of coma?
Not now. Convince the doctor, then worry about the rest. “Doctor, what happened to me?”
“We're still trying to determine that. You've been completely unresponsive from the time you were admitted till a few minutes ago.” Dr. Feldman tapped the chart again. “I understand you suffered a disappointment at work the day before your daughter discovered you unconscious and un-rousable.”
“Oh. The partnership.” To Nicole, it felt as if it had happened a year and a half before, not a week. She'd been through so much since, and so much worse since, that, while it still rankled, it didn't seem so very catastrophic anymore. Then, perhaps more slowly than she should have, she got Dr. Feldman's drift. “You think I tried to kill myself.”
Dr. Feldman nodded. “That certainly crossed my mind, yes. But I must say the evidence supports your denial. No drugs, no alcohol, no excess carbon monoxide, no gas. No trauma, either, nor any brain tumor or injury or aneurysm or anything of that sort. But no responses, not above the reflex level.” She grinned suddenly, wryly. Nicole liked her just then, liked her a great deal. “Layman's language lets me put it best, Ms. Gunther-Perrin: the lights were on, but nobody was home.”

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