Household Gods (9 page)
Authors: Judith Tarr
She smiled at the face in the mirror. It smiled back, dark eyes sparklingâno muddy catty green; and those black-brown curls framed it quite nicely indeed. “I'll do,” she said. “I'll definitely do.”
She laid the mirror carefully in the makeup case and put it away. The odd feeling of trespass faded as she explored the rest of the drawers in the chest. They held several pairs of thick wool socks, not too unlike the ones you could order from L. L. Bean for winter weekend wear, and tunics of about the same style as the one she was wearing. Some were of wool, others, lighter, of linen. A couple were dark blue, one a rusty brown, and the others not only undyed but not particularly clean. There was a definite limitation to the color scheme here, and not too much regard for hygiene, either. With the tunics she found a pair of woolen cloaks, one old and growing threadbare, the other so new it still smelled powerfully of sheep.
The last drawer, on the bottom, opened less easily than the rest. She had to set her back to it and pull, and hope she
didn't break something. When it gave way at last, she found the drawer crammed full of rags. Dustrags? Cleaning rags? She frowned. They were all clean, but the stains on the ones she pulled out were hard to mistake. Even modern detergents couldn't always remove the stain of blood.
didn't break something. When it gave way at last, she found the drawer crammed full of rags. Dustrags? Cleaning rags? She frowned. They were all clean, but the stains on the ones she pulled out were hard to mistake. Even modern detergents couldn't always remove the stain of blood.
Bandages, then?
Yes,
she thought,
in a way.
Clearly, the Romans had never heard of tampons.
Yes,
she thought,
in a way.
Clearly, the Romans had never heard of tampons.
That could be a nuisance. She hadn't thought about such things when she'd prayed to Liber and Libera to snatch her out of her own place and time. She should have asked them for a stopover at a drugstore. The things she could have brought with her if she hadâ
Obviously, that wasn't how it worked. She told herself she didn't care. She didn't. She hadn't prayed for physical comfort or material wealth. She'd asked for equality; for justice. For a world that gave a woman a fairer chance, and a better quality of life. They'd brought her here, hadn't they? Then they must have given her the rest, too. If a price came with it, if she had to resort to rags for a week a month, then that was a price worth paying. After all, she couldn't be the only one. Every other woman in this placeâin Carnuntumâhad to do the same. That was equality, after a fashion.
She couldn't help thinking that it would be even more equal if the men had to do it, too. But she doubted even gods had the power to change the world as profoundly as that.
She pulled the blue tunic off over her head and picked up the brown, which seemed the cleanest of the lot. Before she put it on, she paused, looking down at herself. It felt strange, like being a voyeur, but she was inside the body she stared at.
It wasn't a bad body. The Nicole who'd lived in West Hills would have killed to be as slim as this. The breasts did sag a bit, more than her ownâher othersâhad. They were a little larger, too. No bras here, or none that she'd found. The nipples were wide and dark, with the look she'd come to know in her other body, that with the stretch marks on her belly told her that this body had borne at least one child.
She stood briefly frozen. Children? That meantâ
No. If she'd had a husband, she would have found his clothes and belongings in the room, and him in her bed, too. This was the room of a woman who lived, or at least slept, alone.
Her mouth twisted. Bless Liber and Libera. After all she'd gone through with Frank, the last thing she either wanted or needed was a husband.
She shrugged into the brown tunic, stooped and picked up the sandals, pulled and wiggled them onto her feet. The straps puzzled her a bit, with their bronze eyelets, but her hands seemed to know how they went. After a few moments she stopped trying to guide them and let them do what they wanted to do. The fingers worked deftly, lacing and fastening.
Then at last they were on and she was standing straight, ready to face the world. “Ready or not,” she said to it, “here I come.”
Unbarring the double door was easy, but it didn't open. What to do next? When she pushed against the handles, nothing happened. She pushed harder. Nothing. With a hiss of annoyance, she braced her back and pulled. The doors flew inward, nearly sweeping her off her feet. They were not hinged, she saw, but hung on pegs that fit into holes in the lintel and sill. How odd. How unusual. Howâprimitive? No. Just different.
This whole world would be different, more differences than she had ever known. She had to stop, to swallow the surge of panic. Culture shock didn't begin to describe it: She groped for the remnants of her former dizzy joy. Most of what was left was simply dizziness. It was still better than the black horrors. She was glad to be here. She had prayed to be here. The gods had given her the language and, it seemed, a little body-knowledge. Surely they'd have given her enough other skills to get by.
The hall was only a hall, if rather dark: no electric lights here. One or two doorways opened on either side. Only hers had an actual door. In the others, curtains hung from rod-and-ring
arrangements, like shower curtains in a bathtubâif shower curtains could be made of burlap.
arrangements, like shower curtains in a bathtubâif shower curtains could be made of burlap.
People might be sleeping behind those curtains, or eating or using the chamber pot or doing whatever people did in curtained rooms in the morning. Nicole didn't want to look inâto disturb them, she told herself. But some of it was fear and a kind of crippling shyness. She wasn't ready to see what those people looked like.
At the end of the short hallway, wooden stairs descended in unlit gloom. She drew a breath so deep, she coughedâthe stink of this whole world was concentrated here, overlaid with a sharp tenement reekâand squared her shoulders and girded her loins, metaphorically speaking. “Let's see what we've got,” she said a little breathlessly, and set foot on the topmost step.
The stairs opened into an expanse of near-darkness. It felt wider and more open than the area above, and the air, as a consequence, was easier to breathe. It had a new sharpness here, a pungency that wasn't unpleasant. It reminded her of a student café at Indiana, dark and shut up and quiet in the morning before anyone came to open it.
She groped her way along the wall to a glimmer of light, that seemed to mark a line of shuttered windows. Shutters, yes. She worked the rawhide lashings free and flung them back, blinking in the sudden glare of daylight. As she turned back to the room, she clapped her hands in delight that was only about three-quarters forced. “A restaurant!” she said. How wonderful of Liber and Liberaânot only a nice body, no husband, and a simpler world, but a direct line to the best food, too. No more frozen dinners. No more Lean Cuisine. No more Thrifty Gourmet, not ever again.
The room was wider than it was long, and higher than the rooms and hallway above. It held half a dozen tables, no two of them identicalâall handmade by human beings, no soulless mass production hereâand a small forest of similarly various stools. Toward the rear was a long counter that looked like something out of Rancho Santa Fe: it was made of stones cemented together, with a flat slate top. Arranged
on it in rows were baskets of things to nibble on: walnuts, raisins, prunes, faintly wilted green onions.
on it in rows were baskets of things to nibble on: walnuts, raisins, prunes, faintly wilted green onions.
Nicole let the joy well up again, till she laughed with it. “No Fritos, no Doritos, no Cheetos, no Pringles.” It was a litany of delight.
Set into the countertop were several round wooden lids with iron handles. She passed them by to explore what must, here, do duty for stove and microwave. Just past the wooden lids was an iron griddle over an open fireplace set into the counter. Another fireplace opened farther down. A complicated arrangement of chains hung over it. From several hung a row of pots on hooks.
There didn't seem to be a chimney. There was a hole in the roof above each fireplaceâso that was why the second floor was set back like that, this must be like a walled and covered porchâand the window was open, unglazed and unscreened. That was all the venting there seemed to be. Soot stained the roofbeams and the plaster of the walls.
“You would think,” she said to the nearer fireplace, “someone here would have thought of the chimney.”
That was a deficiency, and disappointing, nearly as much so as the absence of tampons, but Nicole had to make the best of it. The oven helped. It stood past the farther fireplace, and it was wonderful. Beehive-shaped and made of clay, it could have been the prototype for every pizza oven she'd ever seen ⦠except that, like the fireplaces, it had no proper venting. She would have to see if she could do something about that.
Next to the charming oven stood a large pot full of grain, and what she recognized after a moment as a mill. She fed a few grains ofâwheat, she supposed it wasâinto the opening of the upper stone, then turned it. A sprinkling of flour sifted out of the bottom. She lifted a pinch of it between thumb and forefinger and tasted it. It wasn't Gold Medal quality, coarse and a little gritty, but it hadn't come from a factory the size of a city block, either. She'd made it with her own hands. She knew exactly where it came from, and how it got there, too.
She smiled proudly at it. How wonderful. How beautifully natural.
She walked across the rammed-earth floor to the front door, which was made the same way as the one in her room. This time, she opened it without hesitation or fumbling. Learning this first trick of living in Carnuntum made her as proud as if she'd just passed the bar exam.
The view from the doorway was a wider version of the one she'd had from her upstairs window. A building or two down from hers, several large stones were set crosswise in the street, sticking up several inches above the unpaved dirt. An oxcart rolled and squeaked past them without trouble. She saw that its wheels fit into deep ruts in the dirt, evidently a standard width apart.
So why the stones?
Dust. Dirt. Rainâof course, she thought. The stones would help a pedestrian cross from one side of the street to the other without sinking up to her knees in mud.
While she was congratulating herself on having solved yet another mystery of this brave new world, the fellow in the oxcart waved in friendly fashion and said, looking straight at her, “Good morning, Umma! I'll have some lettuces to sell you next week.”
Nicole felt the heat rise to her cheeks, the hammering in her breastâpanic again. She fought it as she'd learned to do at moot court in law school: by turning her back on it and concentrating on her response. “That's good,” she said, carefully speaking in Latin. The man waved again and went on. She sagged against the doorframe, weak with relief. He hadn't noticed anything odd.
While she got her wits back together, a woman came past walking an ugly little dog on a leather leash. She nodded to Nicole. People knew this Umma, and apparently liked her, or at least respected her. Nicole was a stranger here, but Umma wasn't. How in the names of Liber and Libera was she supposed to find her way with people whom she'd never seen before in her life, but who expected her to know everything about them?
She could do it. She knew she could. This wasn't Los Angeles. This was a simpler world, a purer world, brighter and more innocent, if not exactly cleaner. It couldn't be as sexist as the world she came from, and it certainly couldn't be so rampantly unjust. People would accept her because they were conditioned to accept her. She wouldn't have to fight constant paranoia and mistrust, gender-bashing and racism and discrimination and all the rest of it. Here she could be what she fundamentally was: not a pair of boobs and a skirt, not a gringa, not a yuppie, but a plain and simple human being.
Her hand, she discovered, had risen to the side of her jaw. Damn that tooth. Tylenol would take care of it, but they wouldn't have that here. They probably didn't even have aspirin.
“I'll just have to make the best of it,” she said to herself. “I can do that. I can.”
Someone opened the front door of the building across the street: a stocky, balding man with a dark beard going gray. The sign above the door read, TCALIDIUSSEVERUSFULLOETIN-FECTOR, all the letters run together. Nicole needed a moment to separate one word from the next in her mindâT. CALIDIUS SEVERUS, FULLO ET INFECTORâand another to read in Latin instead of English. It came to
Titus Calidius Severus, fuller and dyer
âafter a moment's alarm at
infector,
which meant different things in English and Latin.
Titus Calidius Severus, fuller and dyer
âafter a moment's alarm at
infector,
which meant different things in English and Latin.
The man stabbed the pointed bottom of a large amphora into the dirt just to one side of the doorway. He waved and grinned at her. The grin showed a gap here and there. “Morning to you, Umma,” he called. “You look pretty today. But then,” he added, “you look pretty every day.”
“Erâthank you,” she said. Exactly how well did Umma and thisâCalidius?âknow each other?
Well, she thought with an inner headshake, that didn't matter, not anymore. She was her own person here. She would make up her own mind.
The fuller and dyer retreated into his shop. Nicole had barely begun to relax before he came out again carrying another
amphora, which he thrust into the ground on the other side of his doorway. He waved again, this time without the grin and the greeting, and went back inside. His building looked like hers: one story in front, two in the back, living quarters set over a shop. From the look of the buildings up and down the street, this whole district was much the same.
amphora, which he thrust into the ground on the other side of his doorway. He waved again, this time without the grin and the greeting, and went back inside. His building looked like hers: one story in front, two in the back, living quarters set over a shop. From the look of the buildings up and down the street, this whole district was much the same.
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