Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  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 tha
t 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.