Household Gods

3

Still dreaming but starting to swim out of the long spiraling dark, Nicole rolled over in her bed.

The mattress was lumpy. Her eyelids were still asleep, but her brain roused slowly, taking count of the individual senses. Yes — there were lumps under her. Hard ones. She hissed. Damn those kids! They knew the rule. No hiding toys in Mommy’s bed. Whichever one had done it, it was going to cost. Early bedtime for Kimberley, no Teddy Grahams for -

She drew in a deep, would-be calming breath. Her eyes flew open. She gasped, gagged, almost puked all over the bedclothes. Jesus Christ! What a stink! The last time she’d smelled anything even close to this bad, the septic tank had backed up at Cousin Hedwig’s house in Bloomington. But this was a richer, more complex odor, compounded of sewage and barnyard and city dump and locker room and apartment-house fire. It was a stench with character, a stench to be respected and admired, even a stench to be savored. If you were going to build a stench to order, these were the specs for the very finest, luxury model.

It was such a stench, in fact, that for a couple of seconds her nose overwhelmed her eyes. Even as she decided that a garbage truck must have overturned on the front lawn, she realized something more immediately important.

This wasn’t the room she’d gone to bed in, or any room she remembered, anytime, anywhere.

Wan daylight seeped in through a wood-framed window. There was no glass, only wooden shutters thrown back. Flies danced in the shaft of pale light and buzzed through the room: the window had no screen, either. An enormous hairy black fly landed on the wall near the bed and perched there, rubbing its hands together. The wall was roughly plastered and even more roughly whitewashed. Dark spots here and there suggested that a good many flies had met their death on it.

Aside from the bed, the room was sparsely furnished. A battered chest of drawers stood against one wall, its yellowish pine looking as if it had been the victim of an amateur refinisher. There was no chair, only a pair of stools like — well, like milking stools; they were more or less that shape and about that size. No TV. No photos of kids; no radio, no alarm clock, no lamp on the nightstand. For that matter, no nightstand. No closet, either. Just the bare box of a room and narrow lumpy cot of a bed and the chest and the stools.

On the chest sat a pitcher, a two-handled cup, and a bowl, all of pottery glazed the same gaudy red as the sticks of sealing wax Nicole had affected in her brief but passionately romantic phase, between thirteen and thirteen and a half.

Terra sigillata, she thought. The words shouldn’t have made any sense to her; she knew she’d never known them before. And yet she knew what they meant: sealing-wax ware. That was the name for the crockery on the chest.

A lamp squatted next to the bowl. Another sat on a stool. She’d seen the genie emerging from one just like them in Aladdin. But Aladdin’s lamp had been bronze or brass or something like that. These were plain unglazed clay.

Nicole sat up carefully, as if her head might rock and fall off her shoulders. She wasn’t hung over: she didn’t drink. She wasn’t on anything — no drugs, prescription or otherwise. She might be dreaming, but she could never have dreamt that monumental stink. Which only left -

“I’ve gone crazy,” she said.

Sitting up, she could see the floor. It was no more reassuring than any of the rest of it. No beige shag carpeting here, only bare, well-rubbed boards. Carefully, almost fearfully, she ventured to look up. Boards again. Rough boards, and low, too.

She couldn’t, quite, touch the ceiling, but she could brush her hand across the blanket that covered her. She remembered vividly, distinctly, the touch and feel of her own comforter, its soft down-filled thickness, the faintly wilted but crisp and brightly printed cotton. Its pattern was called Cinnabar. She’d admired the colors when she bought it, deep green to match her eyes, rich dark purple, terracotta, and a touch of red and gold. This wasn’t her comforter. It was a blanket, rough wool worn thin and threadbare, dyed a sad, faded blue.

She itched just looking at it. She scrambled it away from her, thrusting it aside with a hand that -

A hand that — was not her hand.

The fingers twitched when she told them to twitch. The arm lifted when her mind said Lift. But it was not her arm. She knew what her arm looked like. How could she not know what —?

She throttled down hysteria. Look, she thought. Look at it. Study it. Make sense of it.

It wasn’t her arm. It was thinner — a great deal thinner. There were muscles on it, hard ropy muscles, no softness, no deskbound flab. Her arm was smooth-skinned and round and dusted with pale blond hairs, not these rougher and thicker dark ones. The skin was darker, too; not the darkness of a California tan but a warmer olive tone that had to be its natural shade. There was a scar above the wrist, a good two inches long. She had no scars, not on her arms.

This was not her arm. Nor her hand. Her hands were smooth, the nails filed and rounded and painted a light and unobtrusive shell-pink.

This was — these were, as the right emerged from the blanket to join the left — battered, callused. The nails were short and ragged. They had black dirt ground in under them. If these hands had ever seen a nail-file or an emery board, let alone a bottle of nail polish, it hadn’t been in years.

Hysteria yammered still, not far under her hard-fought calm. She looked around, not wildly but not what you’d call calmly either. No mirror on the wall. Mirror, mirror, she thought dizzily. Who’s the craziest of us —?

Calm. Be calm. She raised those stranger’s hands, those hands that answered when she called, and laid them shaking against her cheeks. Like a blind woman, she explored the face that, it seemed, she had come to live behind. Not her face, of course not. No soft, faintly sagging curves. No blunt German nose. This was leaner, longer, with cheekbones standing sharp in it, and a nose with a pronounced arch. She had to look — God, she couldn’t giggle, she’d break down completely — she had to look something, maybe a little more than something, like Sheldon Rosenthal.

Calm. Calm. Focus. Explore. Make this make sense. She ran her tongue over her — someone’s — teeth. They weren’t hers, any more than the rest of it. No years of orthodontia here. No caps, no crowns, no carefully cleaned and regularly brushed and flossed tributes to modern dentistry. These are crooked. One in front was broken. Two uppers and one lower, a molar, were gone, long gone, the gaps healed over, no sign of a wound.

One of those that hadn’t vanished still made its presence felt. It was broken, too, and ached, not horribly but persistently, as if it had settled in and meant to stay. She prodded it with a finger. It twinged. Her finger jerked away. Dentist, she wrote in a mental file. Find. Make appointment. Soonest.

Find where? Find how? Where was she?

Here. She was here. Wherever here was. She had to keep going. She had to take inventory. Right now she had two choices. She could fret about tiny details, or she could fall down in a screaming fit.

She wiped her finger on the blanket, shuddering a little at the scratchy wool, and reached up to touch her hair. It felt greasy, dirty between her fingers. It was shorter and curlier than her own — what she remembered as her own. Her scalp itched, too. Dandruff, she thought.

She pulled a strand forward to peer at it out of the corner of her eye. It was dark, dark brown, almost black — nothing like her own light brown shoulder-length professional woman’s cut with its faded blond rinse. The name of the rinse was as clear as if she’d read it on the wall: Amber Essence. She’d chosen it as much for its name as for what it did for her hair.

Nicole lowered the hand with care, folded back the blanket, and rose gingerly to feet that had not, till now, belonged to her. They were filthy, black with grime, hard-soled and ragged-nailed. They were — and this was almost a pleasure — both smaller and narrower than her own broad Austrian farmer’s feet. Cleaned and pedicured, they might have been something to look at.

They protruded from beneath the hem of a garment as completely unlike her Neiman-Marcus sweats as this body was unlike her own. Wool again — no wonder she wanted to scratch — dyed much the same color as the blanket. The rasp of her legs against it told her what her eyes confirmed as she pulled it up: they were desperately in need of shaving, though not grown out as full and shaggy as if they’d never been shaved at all. Under the furze of dark hair they were, like her arms, leaner, narrower, finer-boned, than the ones she’d always owned, with long ropes of muscles in the calves. The ankles were fine, finer than hers had ever been; her legs went to thunder thighs at the drop of a plate of strudel. No thunder thighs here. These were lean but shapely, muscled and strong, as if she — this body — worked out on the stair-stepper every day.

Her foot brushed something under the bed. She reached down and pulled out a pair of sandals that, for fancy leatherwork, would have run into three figures at a boutique on Ventura Boulevard — if they were new. These were anything but. The leather was faded and filthy and sweat-stained, and patched here and there.

For a moment, as she reached for the sandals, she’d touched something else. She hesitated, shutting down visions of skulls and bones and monsters under the bed. Go on. Find out everything.

She stooped and got a grip on the thing and pulled it out. Her nose wrinkled. Bigger than a skull, than two skulls, wide-mouthed, unglazed like the lamps, sloshing with acrid liquid: no doubt about it. She’d found the facilities. A chamberpot. A real, live chamberpot.

She wasn’t dreaming. Dreams didn’t take care of every last detail. Even fantasy gamers didn’t do that — and she’d seen a few when Frank was in his Multiple-User Dungeon phase. Dreams slid over the essentials of life: an unshaved leg, a half-full chamberpot, a bladder that told her in no uncertain terms it would like to finish filling the pot.

So she’d gone crazy, yes? Gone right around the bend. She’d never had such a detailed dream in her life.

She’d never heard of anyone going crazy quite like this. Delusions could come only from your own experience. She knew that. She’d seen it on TV, one night when she’d actually had time to watch, some shrink show or other, or maybe one of those movies, disease of the week, delusion of the decade, whatever. Maybe it was the shrimp she’d had for dinner. No, they’d been frozen. The ones from lunch at Yang Chow? God, shrimp twice a day. Not only was she in a rut; she was repeating herself from one meal to the next.

This sure wasn’t any repetition of anything she’d done before. She was feeling punchy again. She couldn’t get a grip on anything. This body she was in, this room, these things that were all completely and unmitigatedly strange — this was insanity. Had to be. The shrink show had talked about that, too. “Things aren’t real,” some thin intense person had said, rocking back and forth, talking to her — his — its knees pulled up to its chest. “Things don’t connect. The world isn’t there, not the world. You know? Just all this not-realness.”

This was not real, it could not be real, but it was as real as a stink in the nose, a prickle of wool, a taste of sour morning mouth and bad teeth and something she couldn’t identify and didn’t want to.

She got hold of what she could get hold of, which was an increasingly urgent need to use the bathroom. Except that, according to the chamberpot, there was no bathroom.

She glanced at the door. A bar lay across it, a heavy wooden thing lying on dark metal hooks. She had no desire, none whatsoever, to lift that bar and open that door and see what was on the other side of it. Even if it was her bedroom, or a nice safe insane asylum — because it might not be. It might be blank nothingness, or worse: it might be the world that went with this room.

She pulled up the tunic to identify the garment underneath: linen, she recognized that, though it was rougher than her linen suits, and undyed. It looked more like a loincloth than panties, and had no elastic to hold it up. She tugged at it. It came down over hips narrower than her own were — had been. What it had covered…

Her ears flamed. Her pubic hair was shaved as well, or as badly, as the hair on her legs. Awkwardly, she squatted over the pot. Damn, she’d hated doing that on camping trips, or on long drives when her father wouldn’t stop for anything but immediate, screaming emergency — and when he did, there’d only been bushes by the side of the road. He would never stop at someplace civilized, like a gas station.

As she squatted there, she knew the half-angry, half-sinking sensation she’d had on those drives. No toilet paper. None hiding under the bed among a jostling herd of dust bunnies. The stains on the loincloth told her what she didn’t want to know. Grimacing, struggling a bit as it passed the curve of her hips, she pulled it up.

There was no rent to go back to, no car, no impatient parents and squabbling sisters and hours more of travel before she could get clean again. Only the room she’d trapped herself in, the chest she hadn’t explored, the window she hadn’t dared look out of. Chest or window? Window or chest? The lady or the tiger?

After a moment, she walked over to the window. The light that came through was as strange as everything else. It wasn’t the harsh, uncompromising desert glare of Los Angeles, or the gray-gold wash of morning in Indiana. It was softer, moister than either. It reminded her of something. But where? When? The memory wouldn’t click.

She looked out, east, toward the strongest of the light. She couldn’t see the sun. Most of her horizon was the wall of another building across a narrow, muddy alley. It was as tall as the one she stood in, two stories, more or less. If she craned down the alley she could see what must be the front of it, where it shrank to a single story. The first floor of each building was stone, with whitewashed plaster above. The red tile roof on the building across the alley made her think of California houses, the ones she called pink palaces, by Taco Bell out of a Spanish hacienda.

She leaned out the window to peer north — left — up the alley. It opened on another street that ran perpendicular to it. Some of the buildings along it and across the other, wider street were of stone and plasterwork like the one she was in. One or two had front porches supported by stone columns. Others were built of wood, with thatched roofs. Picturesque, she thought, as if she were a tourist and could relish the quaint and the twee. But even as she thought the word, she discarded it. There was nothing cute or touristy about the muscular stench assaulting her nostrils. She was getting used to it, enough at least not to gag and choke, but it never came close to disappearing.

The alley was amazingly narrow; she could almost touch the house on the other side. The street beyond it was broader but equally unpaved, and no wider than a California alley. It didn’t look as if two cars could slip past each other in it. Not that she saw any try. There were no cars parked on it, either, the way there surely would have been anywhere in the Los Angeles area.

The thought slipped away before she grasped it. She didn’t see any cars. She didn’t hear any, either. A mournful cry close by nearly startled her out of her skin. It sounded like a train whistle crossed on a car horn and mis-mated with a flat trumpet. A human voice growled in the wake of it: “Come on, curse you!” The sound brayed out again. A sharp whack cut it short. The man snarled, “There, that’ll shift you, you dirty bugger.”

Nicole gasped. Automatically, as if in her own bedroom, she looked around for the telephone book, to find the number of the SPCA. No phone book. No phone. God, what if there was no SPCA?

She leaned out the window again, half sagging on the rough wood of the sill. Her knees weren’t so steady as they might be. Two figures came down the street, the man who had spoken and the thing that had made that braying sound: a small gray long-eared donkey.

The man looked as strange as everything else in this world, dream, hallucination, whatever it was. He wore a belted tunic of undyed wool, a little shorter than hers, with a hood shrugged down over his back. In one hand he held a rough rope knotted to the donkey’s halter, in the other a stout stick, no doubt the weapon with which he’d abused the poor beast.

The donkey tottered along under a massive load, four huge clay pots strapped to its back with a complicated set of leather lashings. The pots all together stood higher than the donkey, and looked hideously heavy.

The man caught her eye and waved without letting go of the stick, a bit of bravado that made her think of Tony Gallagher. “Good morning to you, Umma,” he called. His smile showed a couple of missing teeth. The molar in Nicole’s mouth twinged in sympathy. “Looks like a nice day, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so,” she answered — and ducked back into the room in astonished confusion. He’d spoken to her — and to the donkey, for that matter — in a language she’d never heard before. And she, worse, had answered in the same tongue.

If she let it, that other language came to her lips as readily as English. When she thought What in God’s name is going on? it came out as Qui in nomin Dei fit? It sounded something like the Spanish that made sizable parts of Los Angeles seem a foreign country, but that wasn’t quite right, either.

When her mind groped for the name of the language, she felt a shift and a click, a sensation somewhat like opening a program that someone had installed on her computer’s hard drive without bothering to tell her. Frank would do a thing like that. But did Frank know Latin?

“Sed non possum latine loqui,” she protested, and stopped. She wanted to scream, or to giggle crazily. Could you say But I can’t speak Latin in Latin? Of course you could. She’d just done it.

As if opening that one file had opened another cross-referenced to it, her memory came clearer than it had since she awakened in this strange place, in this body that wasn’t hers. She remembered the wish she’d made just before she went to bed in West Hills, California. Or maybe it had been a prayer, to Liber and Libera, the gods with the names that to her had always meant both freedom and sympathy. To go back to their time. To live in their world.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, deliberately making herself speak English. Odd, came the fugitive thought, that the language hadn’t vanished with all the rest of her, subsumed in strangeness.

She didn’t believe it. But she’d felt the gods’ kisses on her palm — could feel them now, like the memory of a static shock. She looked down at the rough, callused, workworn hand and the arm it sprang from. That was not the hand that had felt the touch of those stony lips, or that small and doubled snap of divine energy.

Once more Nicole turned to the window, half hoping that it would look down on something she knew. The street was still there, the house next door, but the man and the donkey were gone. Other people had taken their place, a morning rush of people. Rush hour in — where? Ancient Rome? Most of them wore tunics and kept their heads down. A few men strutted along importantly in what looked like enormous beach towels wrapped around their bodies and tucked over one shoulder. Togas, those had to be togas.

Something creaked and squeaked — the axle of a cart, she saw as it trundled past. The wheels, solid slabs of wood without spokes, sent up a cloud of dust. So did the hooves of the oxen drawing the cart. One of the oxen lifted its tail and dropped a trail of steaming green dung down the middle of the alley. No one came rushing out with a pooper-scooper. The cart creaked down the street and groaned round a corner and out of sight.

Once more she looked up, straining to see northward. More buildings, a gray stone wall, and beyond them a blue curve of hills. Those hills… she knew them. She remembered…

“The hills on the other side of the Danube,” she whispered, not noticing or caring whether in English or Latin. She remembered those hills. They hadn’t been so thickly forested when she saw them, but she’d promised herself never to forget their shape, the way they rose and swelled under the soft blue-gray sky. She hugged herself. She was cold and warm, both at once: awed, astonished, terrified, overjoyed.

“Carnuntum! “ In Latin, with this body’s accent, it had a sweeter, stronger rhythm than she’d known before, and a lilt to it like the refrain of a song. “I’m in Carnuntum! This is the Roman Empire, and I’m in Carnuntum, and the year is — the year is — “

That, she didn’t know. It hadn’t been uploaded, or installed, or whatever the word was. As if her brain had hit a bad sector, the lawyerly part of her clicked awake, looked around, and said a flat, No. And, when the rest of her tried to argue with it: This isn’t real. This isn’t Carnuntum. You’re hallucinating.

Really, counselor? the rest of her asked a little too sweetly, the same tone she’d taken in court more than once, just before she moved in for the kill. So it’s not Carnuntum. and this isn’t the Roman Empire. How do I know enough about either of them to hallucinate anything this elaborate?

The lawyer-self couldn’t answer that. Nicole turned in the room, all the way around, from window back to window again. After awe, fear, hysteria, panic, disbelief, all the wild mishmash of shock and realization, she settled on the best of all, the one she should have had from the first: dizzy, singing joy.

“Thank you,” she said in a voice almost too full for sound. Then, louder: “Thank you, god and goddess! Thank you!” She danced across the room in a country-western step that wouldn’t be invented for — how long?

She paused before she spun right out of the window, and forced some small calm. So — what did she know? The Roman Empire had gone on for a long time, then declined and fallen. The label on Liber and Libera’s plaque, which she’d read often enough to have memorized it, said it dated from the second century A.D. She could reasonably suppose that that was the time she’d come back to, at least till she had a chance to ask. If that was when she was, the Achy-Breaky Shuffle wouldn’t be born for another eighteen hundred years.

Good thing, too, probably.

Still whirling with delight in her discovery, she pulled open a top drawer of the chest. She hesitated an instant, with a completely silly attack of guilt — this wasn’t her room, after all. These weren’t her clothes.

This wasn’t her body, either, but she was using it. She had to cover it somehow.

The drawer she opened held three or four loincloths like the one that clung clammily to her hips and buttocks. She pulled it off with a hiss of relief and put on a clean one.

Under the loincloths on the drawer lay a small and carefully made wooden box. It was not too heavy, not too light, longer than it was wide, about half as deep as the breadth of her hand. She lifted it out and set it on top of the chest. It wasn’t locked or latched. Its lid yielded easily to the pressure of her fingers.

A scent of dust and old wood wafted out of the box as she opened it, overlaid with a strong, musky perfume. A small pot lay inside the box. When she opened it, she found it half full of white powder. Two more, smaller yet, held a greasy salve the color of — “Sunset Blush,” Nicole said in English. She used Touch of Dawn herself. Sunset Blush was for serious occasions and for old beauties with fading eyesight, who thought its strong carmine red could trick people into thinking they were young again.

Nicole knew what this box was, then. A makeup set. Jumbled in with the pots were a wooden comb with very fine teeth; a pair of tweezers of bronze or tarnished brass; a thin and pointed piece of the same metal, about as long as her little finger, that might have been a toothpick; and another implement that looked like nothing so much as a coke spoon. She didn’t think the Romans had known about cocaine. Maybe it was the Romans’ answer to a Q-tip: not stylish, except perhaps in a campy way, but practical. Did they even have cotton here? she wondered. And what did they use for paring nails, if they didn’t have nail scissors or clippers?

She was losing herself in detail again. She had to stop doing that. She had to accept, to absorb. She had to be part of this world.

She contemplated the makeup jars, the implements, the block of what must be eyeliner — kohl? — and the little brushes, and thought of her makeup kit at home — at what used to be home. She drew a shuddering breath. She couldn’t be either stylish or practical, not by the standards of this place and time. Not till she could see other women, could know how they did it. That meant going out. That meant appearing in front of people, talking to them as she’d talked to the drover. Her hands were cold, the palms damp. The gods’ kisses itched and stung.

Shakily, she returned the jars and implements to the makeup box. She’d paid no particular attention to the square of polished bronze that she’d found on the bottom, except to take it out and see if something else lay underneath. As she went to put it back in, she caught her hand’s reflection in it, and the reflection of the box’s lid, and realized, with a little shock of recognition, what the thing was for.

“Speculu’!” she said, then repeated herself in English: “A mirror!” She snatched it out. Her hand was shaking almost too hard to hold the mirror, but she stilled it with a strong effort of will, and stared avidly at the face reflected in the bronze. It wasn’t clear, not like the silvered mirrors she remembered, but dark and faintly blurry. Still, it was enough for the purpose. It bore out what her hands had told her: whoever this was, it wasn’t Nicole Gunther-Perrin, West Hills, California, USA.

This face — long, strong-nosed, strong-chinned — looked to be about the same age as the one she’d left behind. The eyes were dark, as she’d more than half expected. When she smiled, the broken tooth was visible, but it wasn’t as bad as it had felt. A corner out of an incisor, that was all. It didn’t disfigure her. It made her look rather interesting.

Not bad, she thought, deliberately striving for objectivity — like a lawyer, think clearly, see all the angles, don’t involve the self if at all possible. This body she wore was no great beauty, but neither would it make people look away in the street. She considered it with some satisfaction. Beauty would have been too much. This was a good-looking woman, attractive without being too much so, and those cheekbones were everything she’d ever dreamed of when she was growing up. Her — other — face hadn’t had any to speak of.

She smiled at the face in the mirror. It smiled back, dark eyes sparkling — no 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.

Bandages, then? 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 had -

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 place — in Carnuntum — had 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 own — her others — had. 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 meant -

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. How — primitive? 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 bathtub — if shower curtains could be made of burlap.

People might be sleeping behind those curtains, or eating or using the chamberpot or doing whatever people did in curtained rooms in the morning. Nicole didn’t want to look in — to 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 coughed — the stink of this whole world was concentrated here, overlaid with a sharp tenement reek — and 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 cafe 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 Libera — not 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 identical — all handmade by human beings, no soulless mass production here — and 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.

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 fireplace — so that was why the second floor was set back like that, this must be like a walled and covered porch — and the window was open, un-glazed 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 of — wheat, she supposed it was — into 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. Rain — of 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 breast — panic 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, TCALIDIUSSEVERUSFULLOETINFECTOR, all the letters run together. Nicole needed a moment to separate one word from the next in her mind — T. CALIDIUS SEVERUS, FULLO ET INFECTOR — and another to read in Latin instead of English. It came to Titus Calidius Severus, fuller and dyer — after 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.”

“Er — thank you,” she said. Exactly how well did Umma and this — Calidius? — know 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.

A man in a dirty gray tunic paused in front of Calidius’ shop. He hiked up the tunic. Nicole, staring in blank astonishment, saw that he wore no drawers, or loincloth either. He took himself in hand, casual as if he did this every day, and urinated into one of the amphorae. A strong yellow stream arced out and down, dwindled, dribbled, and gave out. He shook himself once or twice, let the tunic drop, and went on his way with a sigh of relief and a nod for Nicole.

It took all she could do to nod back. Every instinct of Midwestern upbringing and Los Angeles survival training was yelling in outrage. But there was no mistaking what the two tall jars were for, or that the man had simply been doing what was, for this place and time, his civic duty.

So did the next one who came by, a man of much higher social status from the look of his crimson tunic and halfway clean toga. He was as casual as the first one had been, as coolly matter-of-fact, and as unconcerned by the presence of a spectator — and a female spectator at that.

Wonderful, she thought. I’ve got a public pissoir across the street from my restaurant. That should do wonders for business.

Nicole Gunther-Perrin would have marched straight off to complain to Calidius. But Nicole Gunther-Perrin was wearing the body of a woman named Umma. Should she, shouldn’t she? What could she get away with?

While she dithered, she became aware, distinctly and unmistakably, that someone had come up behind her. Whoever it was was silent, and she certainly couldn’t see through the back of her head, but for the first time in her life she realized someone was nearby solely by smell. With a gasp she regretted as soon as it was out, she spun.

The woman who d come up behind her gasped, too, in evident alarm, and ducked her head so low that she seemed to be babbling into the loose fold of tunic over her ample breasts: “I’m sorry, Mistress Umma, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you. Please believe me.”

“It’s all right,” Nicole said automatically. She was shaking, not so much from startlement now as from the proximity of another human being from this world, this time. People passing by, people across the street, were distant enough that she could, if she had to, pretend that they didn’t count. There was no pretending this woman was anything but real. Every sense said so: sight, sound, smell so strong she could taste it — and, if she dared reach out, she could touch, too. She kept her hand in a fist at her side, and, as she’d done when she first woke, took refuge in the recording of details.

The woman was younger than she was, somewhere in her twenties, maybe, and half a head taller than Nicole — than Umma. However tall that was. Her skin was fairer than Umma’s, almost like Nicole’s own. Her eyes were gray, her hair neither blond nor brown and very, very dirty, rudely hacked into a bob like those of Liber and Libera on their votive plaque.

Her hands and face were clean enough, but her bare feet were black, not simply dirty like Nicole’s — Umma’s, Nicole reminded herself. She wore a stained, shabby tunic, shabbier than any of those Nicole had found in the chest of drawers. The body under that tunic was ripe, with wide hips and full breasts whose nipples thrust against the wool, but the odor that came off it went far past ripeness.

“I’m sorry I slept so late that you were up before me, Mistress.” The young woman’s words still tumbled over one another, as if she had to get them all in before someone stopped her. “It won’t happen again, I promise it won’t. ‘

Nicole recognized that nervousness, though it seemed exaggerated. Employee in front of employer when employee was noticeably late. She knew the feeling herself.

With sympathy came a rush of relief. If this woman worked for her, then she had a guide, somebody to walk her through the things she needed to live in this world. She hadn’t known how badly she wanted something like this till she had it. She wanted to fall on the woman’s neck and thank God — or gods — for the gift.

Common sense kept her where she was, and made her say, “It’s all right. No harm done.”

Nicole had just, not entirely advertently, observed the cardinal rule of any lawyer or executive in a new job: make friends with the staff. Do that and they’ll do your job for you, show you the ropes without your having to ask.

It seemed to work with this — what? Waitress? Cook? Hired girl? Her face lit up. “Oh, thank you, Mistress! What a kind mood you’re in today.” She was almost beautiful when she smiled. With the stink that came off her, though, who would want to get close enough to her to notice? She went on eagerly, almost too fast to understand: “Shall I make breakfast for you, Mistress? Still plenty of bread from yesterday. Or I could — “

“No,” Nicole said before she fell over herself trying to please. “No, that would be fine.” The body she wore was suddenly, ferociously hungry. It wanted to be fed now.

The — employee, Nicole guessed she could call her — smiled happily. She was as simple as a child, it seemed — nerves and shakiness one moment, puppy-eagerness the next. “Good! Good, then. The children should be down any time now. I’ll see they’re fed, too, Mistress. Everybody’s sleepy today — everybody but you, Mistress Umma. ‘ She ventured another smile.

Nicole smiled back. It seemed unkind not to. The result was mildly startling: another of those wide, delighted grins. As the younger woman turned and went back toward the counter, she was humming under her breath.

Damn, thought Nicole, she’s easy to please. Men might think so, too, the way she walked. Dawn Soderstrom had swiveled her hips like that, but she’d needed heels to do it. Anyone who could manage it barefoot had determination, and one hell of a limber spine.

Once the woman was gone about her business, backfield in motion, odor, and all, Nicole could focus on what she’d said. She — Nicole — Umma — was mother to — two? three? how many? — children she’d never seen before.

And what about Kimberley and Justin, back in West Hills, back in the twentieth century? It hit her with a force so strong it knocked the breath out of her. All the while she’d been veering between panic and selfish delight, she hadn’t spared a moment’s thought for her own children. It might almost seem she was glad to be shut of them — to escape the daily drag of responsibility, the interruptions, the disruptions. Had she been hoping she’d be spared that here? Was she so terrible a mother?

God. What had happened to her own body, back in West Hills? Was it just… unoccupied? Had it gone into some kind of coma? What would happen to the kids? She hadn’t even gone in to kiss Kimberley good night, to see if her fever had gone down, or checked in on Justin and made sure he had his teddy beside him in case he woke up in the middle of the night. She’d been so tired, so fed up, so far over the top, that she’d put herself to bed and said her prayer and gone to sleep without a thought for her children.

No. No, something must have happened, the same way something had happened to make sure she spoke Latin. Somebody or something would look after Kimberley and Justin, at least till morning. Then -

Oh, God. They’d find her in a coma or worse. Would Kimberley know to dial 911? Would Justin -

She couldn’t think about that. She had to hope — to pray — they’d be all right. Her last prayer had been answered. Why not this one, too?

“Liber,” she whispered, “Libera, if you’re listening, do this one last thing for me, will you please?” Damn, she sounded like Nicole-in-the-office, asking Cyndi to do her a favor. Good legal secretaries sit at the right hand of God, every lawyer knows that, but it might not be strictly kosher to address a pair of gods as if they were the original administrative assistants.

She shook herself. It didn’t matter. “Just take care of them, okay?”

If she’d hoped for some sign, some feeling at least that she’d been heard, she didn’t get it. She caught herself smiling slowly, widely, and not at all nicely. If Nicole Gunther-Perrin wasn’t home anymore, there was no doubt at all who would inherit the kids. Frank and Dawn wouldn’t get much of a vacation. And Frank would finally, after all this time, be left holding the baby — literally. Twice over.

“There is justice in the universe,” Nicole said to the reek-rich air.

Her — servant, whatever, came back out of the shop carrying a chunk of bread, a small bowl, and a cup on a wooden tray. “Thank you,” Nicole said as the young woman set the tray down on a table just inside the door, where the light from outside was brightest.

“You’re welcome, Mistress.” The woman, whose name Nicole was going to have to learn soon or be in trouble, smiled another of those wide smiles. “Oh, you are kind today! Have the gods blessed you, then, Mistress? Is this a white day?”

Nicole stared blankly at her. The part of her that knew Latin knew that a white day meant a lucky day, marked in white on the Roman calendar. It still didn’t explain why the woman should be so transparently delighted to get a simple thank-you. Either Umma had been an ogre or something else was going on, something Nicole didn’t know enough to catch.

Her stomach growled loudly, drowning out the rattle of her thoughts. It wanted breakfast, and it wanted it now.

She pulled a stool over to the table, sat down, and examined her breakfast. The bread made her want to giggle. Had it been served in slices instead of a slab half a dozen slices thick, it would have done for Roman Meal: same medium-brown color, same coarse flour. She’d eaten a lot of bologna sandwiches on Roman Meal, growing up in Indianapolis. She tore off a piece and bit into it. It was fresher than any Roman Meal she’d ever eaten, and had a slightly smoky taste from being baked over a wood fire.

It was also grittier than any Roman Meal she’d ever eaten. She glanced at the stone quern beside the oven. Was that what had broken her front tooth, and what set the back one to aching whenever she wasn’t busy thinking about something else?

So she’d chew carefully. She was hungry.

When she’d taken the edge off her hunger with a good portion of the bread, she took time to explore the rest of the tray. The shallow earthenware bowl was full of thick, shiny, green-yellow liquid. She sniffed. Her eyebrows rose. Remembering dinners in fancy restaurants before Frank stopped taking her and started taking Dawn instead, she twisted off another piece of bread and dipped it in the bowl. She tasted again. Yes, she’d called it. Olive oil. They were still eating bread that way in Italian restaurants, eighteen centuries from now.

Olive oil was a fat, but God knew it was better than butter. This body didn’t look as if it needed to worry much about its weight. Even so, a lifetime of habit persuaded Nicole to push the bowl of oil away and investigate the cup. Again she sniffed. Again her eyebrows rose, but this time they rose higher. Wine? At breakfast? What was she supposed to be, an alcoholic?

Dammit, she needed to know her employee’s name. Rather than sing out Yo! or You there! she coughed. That did it: the young woman looked up from the two trays she was filling as she’d filled Nicole’s. Her eyes were wide, her face a mask of apprehension. All her emotions seemed to be broad, cartoonish, as if she were playing a role, and not too well, either.

Those emotions were real. Nicole would have been willing to bet on that. They were just… exaggerated. For effect? Or because she’d never learned to tone them down? “Is something wrong, Mistress? “ she asked anxiously.

“Yes,” Nicole said, and the woman’s face went white. Terror? Good Lord, Nicole thought. Umma must have been a raving tartar. She smoothed her voice as much as she could, though she couldn’t rid it of all the disapproval. That was too deeply ingrained, for too long, in Nicole’s other — future — life. “I don’t think I’ll be having wine this morning. Would you bring me some water instead?”

“Water?” The other woman’s eyebrows flew up almost to her hairline.

She was as astonished as if Nicole had asked for — well, wine. Or Scotch. Or creamed angleworms on toast. “Mistress, are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Nicole hadn’t meant to snap so hard. She hadn’t meant to crush the servant — just to shake her loose from her incredulity and set her to fetching the water. The young woman looked as if she expected to be fired without a reference. More gently, as gently as she could, Nicole said, “I may stop drinking wine altogether. Water’s more healthy, don’t you think?”

“Healthy?” The servant’s eyebrows went up even higher this time. She was easy to reassure, at least; soften the tone even a little and she forgot she’d ever been snapped at.

Or else she really was too incredulous to watch her step around an employer she so evidently feared. Nicole had to be acting completely and shockingly out of character.

“Healthy?” she repeated. “Water? Mistress, your customers won’t think so, if you try to tell them such a thing.”

“What do you mean?” Nicole said.

Her employee stared at her. She had, she realized, just asked her first truly stupid question here in Carnuntum. The young woman retreated to the long stone counter, as if it represented some kind of refuge. Something in the way she walked, and in the things she’d said, made Nicole see it suddenly for what it was. It wasn’t a counter. It was a bar.

Not caring for an instant what the other woman might think, she hurried over to it and lifted the wooden lids she’d ignored before. Under each of them rested an amphora with a bronze dipper. The strong alcoholic smell of wine floated up to her nose.

Umma wasn’t running a restaurant. She was running a tavern. Nicole startled herself with the intensity of her revulsion and anger. How many men of Carnuntum would stagger home drunk to abuse their spouses and children because of this place? Any one of them could have been her father: face red with drink and rage, mouth open wide as he bellowed at his wife, hand swinging up to hit whatever, or whomever, got in its way.

“I will not,” she said tightly, “sell — this — “

The employee didn’t understand. “Mistress, most of it’s not Falernian, but it’s all the best we can get for the price. Why, you said — “

Nicole cut her off. She had to understand. It was very, very important that she understand. “I will not sell wine. “

Her expression must have been alarming. The young woman started to babble again. “Mistress, are you ill? Have you lost your senses? You know we have to sell wine. If you don’t, nobody will come here. We’ll all go hungry.”

“I could serve — “ Nicole started to say coffee, only to discover that the Latin she’d acquired had no word for it. She used the English instead.

“Coffee?” The young woman’s accent did strange things to the vowels. “I don’t know what that is, Mistress. Where would you get it? How would you serve it?”

Nicole started to answer, but stopped. Blue Mountain coffee came from Jamaica, Kalossi Celebes from Indonesia, Kona from Hawaii, good old unexciting Yuban from Colombia. She didn’t know much about Roman history, but she was pretty sure those weren’t places the Romans had ever heard of.

Her employee seemed absolutely convinced she couldn’t make a go of a restaurant that didn’t serve wine. Nicole had no way of knowing whether she was right, not on her first morning in Carnuntum.

This was the only guide she had, the only hope of getting through without being labeled insane or worse. She’d seen it in movies, how the alien landed on earth with a head full of data but missing a few of the most important. He was always found out, and then he had to suffer. Did the Romans have police? Government agencies? Whatever they’d call the CIA?

She had to fit in, at least at first. She had to act normal, or people would ask too many questions, questions she couldn’t answer. “Very well,” she said grudgingly. “We’ll keep on serving wine. For now. But,” she went on, and that was firm, “I will drink water.”

The servant sighed deeply, the kind of sigh that said, You may be crazy, but you’re still the boss. “Yes, Mistress,” she said, meekly enough, and poured her a cup from a pitcher on the bar.

Because the cup was earthenware and not glass, Nicole couldn’t admire its crystal clarity as she would have liked. But when she sipped, she let out a sigh of pleasure. Now this was water, water as it ought to taste. What came out of the tap in Los Angeles was as full of chlorine as a swimming pool, and full of God only knew what all other chemicals. None of those pollutants here — just good, pure H₂O.

“See?” Nicole set down the empty cup. “This is what’s good for you.”

“Yes, Mistress.” The young woman sounded even more resigned, and even more dubious, than she had before.

A clatter from upstairs distracted them both from what might have been an uncomfortable pause. The servant smiled. “Here come the children, Mistress. They were sleepy today, weren’t they?”

“Weren’t they?” Nicole echoed. Her employee, fortunately, didn’t seem to notice how hollow her voice sounded. How in the world was she going to convince — how many? — children she’d never seen before that she was their mother? She had no idea what to do or say — no time to think, either, before they were on her.