by Judith Tarr
Enough.
She had, at last, hit a wall. She’d been living from day to day, moment to moment, surviving, coping, even — sometimes — managing to enjoy this world she’d wished herself into. She’d been remarkably passive, when she stopped to think about it. A few doubts, some midnight regrets, a lot of culture shock and plain old all-American squeamishness — she’d had all of that. But she hadn’t ever really got up enough sheer force of feeling to wish herself away. It was all, however marginally, preferable to the life she’d left behind — even if she didn’t quite, ever, find the time or energy to change the things about the world she’d thought she’d change, back when she first arrived in Carnuntum. She could make herself think so, at any rate, if she tried hard enough.
It hadn’t really been real to her. That was the trouble. Even the deaths she’d seen — those people had been dead for eighteen centuries before she was even born. She’d felt them as she might have felt deaths in a book, with grief, yes, and real pain, but at a slight remove.
But one by one, blow by blow, they’d cracked through the shell that protected her. A good part of that was selfishness; she admitted it. Frank had said that of her before he walked out on her — one of his many pointed little gems of wisdom: “You don’t really care about anybody else. You say you do, you recite all the words, put on all the expressions. But when it comes right down to it, there’s nobody in your world but you. “
It was justice of a sort, then, that the last straw had been something that affected only her: an encounter with real, personal, private pain.
No matter where it came from, or how. She’d had enough. She’d learned her lesson. She was finished. With all her heart and soul, and with all her aching and abused flesh, she wished herself away. Back. Home to that other world, long and far removed from Carnuntum.
She squeezed her eyes tight and wished till her head pounded and her jaw screamed for mercy. Nothing.
Somewhere in delirium, while she was ill with the pestilence, she’d begged Liber and Libera to send her back to Los Angeles. She’d got a busy signal then, and then forgotten, till now. Till she knew beyond any doubt that she wanted out.
Well, she thought. When the line was busy, you hit the redial button, or put the phone on autodial, and kept on trying. And since this wasn’t exactly a line, and what she wanted was as close to magic as made no matter — what made this kind of magic work? Magic ring, phantom tollbooth, ruby slippers…
The plaque. She’d clean forgotten. The plaque she’d bought on her honeymoon and kept by her bed in West Hills. She’d focused on it, hadn’t she? She’d prayed to the gods whom she’d never have known if they hadn’t been depicted on that one piece of faux antiquity.
Or was it false? What if it was real? It seemed preposterous, but what if, somehow, the maker of the reproductions had made a mistake, and shipped the original with the copies? What if she’d been sold, not a reproduction, but an actual late-Roman votive plaque? What if that was the key?
In the fever of discovery, she almost forgot how much pain she was in. She pushed herself away from the wall she’d been leaning against all this time, and looked around with eyes that saw almost clearly. Somewhere along here, she seemed to remember, was a stonecutter’s shop.
Yes, there it was, right in the next block — as if it had been placed there specifically for her need. Samples of the stonecutter’s work were laid out along the front of the shop, propped against the wall. Some were headstones; he’d probably done a land-office business in those while the pestilence raged in Carnuntum. The sample stones were distinguished by gender: a soldier, a woman in a tunic. There were even partial inscriptions, stock phrases awaiting the insertion of a name.
And yes, he had a selection of votive plaques, dedicated to a wide variety of gods and goddesses. None of those on display was inscribed to Liber and Libera.
She quelled the sinking in her stomach. Maybe he had one inside. If not, he could make one. She didn’t have to drift passively through this life. She could take matters into her own hands: manufacture, or have manufactured, her own way home. If she couldn’t change this world, she might still escape it.
She went boldly into the dim space with its odors of stone dust and old sweat, and asked her question in a voice that wasn’t too mushy, she didn’t think. He’d been picking away at a bit of garland on a tombstone, but when she spoke he looked up a little sharply; saw what had to be a heroically swollen face; and blinked once before resorting to a bland expression. “What, Riper and — oh; Liber. Yes, Liber and Libera. There’s one right here — two, actually, now I stop to think. People are right fond of Liber and Libera, likely ‘cause they’re right fond of what they’re god and goddess of.” He winked at her as if he expected her to share the joke, and pulled a pair of plaques from among the many on the wall behind him. “Here you are. Take your pick.”
Neither one was the plaque, the one she’d bought on her honeymoon. One was larger, one was smaller, both were rather cruder work. She eyed them in disappointment. Didn’t magic need a solid link between her now and her then? Preferably the same link?
Still, she thought with robust twentieth-century skepticism, would it be necessary? If she was making her own future, then all that mattered should be that the plaque was like the one she’d used to bring herself here.
Or she could have one made. But, from the look of the shop, he was backed up for weeks; and she couldn’t wait. She wanted out now. “I like the smaller one better,” she said firmly. “What do you want for it?”
“That one?” The stonecutter considered. “Ten sesterces ought to do it.”
Distracted by pain and fogged by wine and poppy juice as she was, Nicole remained astonished. The limestone from which he’d carved the plaque was surely cheap, but he couldn’t set much value on his own labor — either that, or he’d turned out the piece much faster than she would have thought possible. On the other hand, he wasn’t inclined to haggle, and she’d been too badly battered to bargain as hard as she would have otherwise. She paid him eight sesterces and a couple of asses in lieu of a dupondius. got him to throw in a piece of sacking to wrap her purchase in, and carried it home with as much care as if it had been made of glass.
Julia greeted her with a cry of dismay. “Mistress! You’ve got blood all over your tunic.”
Nicole looked down at herself. She hadn’t even noticed. No wonder the stonecutter had looked at her so oddly. He must have thought her husband had belted her a good one — and she was buying off the gods of wine to soften him up the next time he polished off a jar or two or three.
At least she knew a cure for blood on wool. “Cold water,” she said, “that’s what it needs. And wine.”
“Wine?” Julia frowned. “Wine doesn’t do a thing for bloodstains.”
“The wine is for me,” Nicole said. She sat at a table near the bar — nearly falling the last inch or two onto the bench — and uncovered the plaque so that Julia could see it. “I’ll give Liber and Libera a little, too.”
Julia seemed excited all out of proportion to the occasion. It must have been a slow day for Julia, upstairs as well as down. “Let me see!” she said eagerly. She didn’t wait for Nicole to finish making her way through the stools and benches and tables. She negotiated the course with more agility than Nicole could have managed just then, and peered at the low relief. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. We could use a god or two to watch over us. ‘
If they watch over me as well as I’d like, Nicole thought, I won’t be here.
The thought was both delicious and — to her amazement — sad. Julia had been to the baths today, and found a clean tunic somewhere, too. She smelled as good as anyone in Carnuntum could. She was warm, standing next to Nicole, and solid, and somehow comforting. Julia, however unwitting, had been absolutely invaluable in showing Nicole how to cope with this world she’d found herself in. They weren’t friends, not exactly; friends were equals. Employer and employee? Somewhat more t
han that. Allies. Comrades in arms.
Nicole was going to miss Julia. The thought was so astonishing that she almost forgot to keep it to herself. The thudding ache in her jaw saved her. She must have clenched her teeth; she was struck with a sudden, piercing stab of pain. “Wine,” she said again, tightly. Julia gasped a little, as if she’d clean forgotten, and ran to fetch a cup.
Terentianus had told Nicole to rinse her mouth with it. He hadn’t told her it would feel as if she’d drunk gasoline and then thrown in a lighted match. She whimpered. Her eyes filled with tears of pain. Nevertheless, she gulped the stuff down. The second swallow wasn’t quite so bad. The damage was done; pain had gone into overload.
When the cup was almost empty, Nicole wet her forefinger with the dregs and smeared a little on Liber’s mouth, and a little on Libera’s.
Julia shook her head and smiled. “I never saw anybody give them a drink quite that way, Mistress. But I’ll bet they like it.”
“I hope they do,” Nicole said. She hadn’t been thinking before she did it, she’d just done what seemed appropriate. She was lucky. If she’d crossed herself backward, everyone in church would have known she was no Catholic. Here, what she’d done wasn’t wrong, just different. The cult of Liber and Libera, it seemed, didn’t have as many rules as the Christianity in which she’d grown up.
The Christianity they had here — did it have rules, aside from terrorist graffiti and apocalyptic mania? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And if she did happen to learn the answer, she had every intention of doing it from the twentieth century.
She drank a lot of wine that day. With each cup, she gave the stone god and goddess their share. If the wound got infected after all that, then the germs that did the job would be cutting through the alcohol bath in wetsuit and swim fins.
She drank a double cup, one of the cups she kept for her thirstiest customers, before she went upstairs to bed. Maybe, just maybe, it would dull the pain enough to let her sleep. She was in a fog as it was, drifting as if underwater, bouncing gently off walls and furniture. But the heart of the fog was a red and throbbing pain.
Sleep was as elusive as she’d feared. She couldn’t even toss and turn: it hurt too much. She lay as still as she could on the thin, lumpy mattress, and did her best to ignore the tiny stabs and stings of the vermin that inhabited it. She’d brought the plaque up with her, and propped it on the chest of drawers where she could see it from the bed. Liber and Libera. she prayed, take me back to my own time. Take me back to my own world. I don’t belong here. I was wrong to pray as I prayed. Please, make it right. You granted one prayer of mine. Only grant this one. and I’ll never trouble you again.
She couldn’t tell if she was getting through. The wine couldn’t do what the fever had done, blur the boundaries between the waking world and the world the gods inhabited. All it did was dull her reflexes and slow her mind, and drop her at last into a sodden sleep.
She drifted off in a dream of electric lights and chlorinated water, automobiles and stereos, antibiotics and, oh God, anesthetics, telephones and television, supermarkets and refrigerators, soap and insecticides and inner-spring mattresses. And — yes, yes indeed — equality under the law, whatever it might be in actual practice. If the gods were kind, if she’d worked the — magic? — rightly, she’d wake in a deliciously soft, heavenly clean bed in the century that was, after all she’d done to escape it, the one and only century for her.
She woke, yes. On a rough and scratchy, redolent and verminous mattress, in a century long before the one in which she was born, in the Roman city of Carnuntum.
16
It was a bitter waking, but Nicole had no intention of giving up. She’d storm heaven if she had to. Every night, with wine and impassioned prayer, she called on the god and goddess. She smeared their lips with wine, she left a cup of wine in front of their plaque, she drank more wine than she rightly should have. She was sincere. She was devoted. She wanted, above anything in this world, to go home.
And every morning, as surely as the sun rose over the eastward wall of Carnuntum, she woke in Umma’s bed, in Umma’s body. The gods were ignoring her, or else, as she began to fear, actively refusing to grant her prayer.
They’d brought her here. They could damned well send her home again.
Julia approved of this sudden access of piety. “We’re sure to have better luck around here now,” she said. Julia had two mottoes: Never ask questions and Always look on the bright side. Manumission hadn’t done a thing to change either of them.
That much Nicole had given her: her freedom. Umma, when she came back to this body, if she came back to it — small dark difficult thought, there, quickly suppressed — couldn’t legally undo what Nicole had done. It was a good thing, a decent gift to leave behind.
Nicole wasn’t ever tempted to stay. The one real friend she’d had here, Titus Calidius Severus, was dead. Lucius was Umma’s child, not her own, though yes, she’d miss him. Julia, too, and young Gaius, and one or two others. She was fond of them as she might have been of people she met on a long vacation, but with the sense, always, that this was their world and not hers; that whatever happened here, it was temporary. She wasn’t going to live out her days here.
Liber and Libera were silent, though their plaque was smeared with wine and the cup in front of it had been filled and refilled and filled again. Nicole, in the beginning of despair, prayed to the God she’d grown up with, the God whose followers in second-century Carnuntum seemed so much like twentieth-century extremists. He gave her no more answer than the Roman deities had. He was angry at her, she was sure, for having other gods before Him. Or maybe the Christians here and now were shouting so loud, they drowned her out.
She hadn’t wanted anything or wished for anything so strongly or with such concentrated determination since — when? Since she passed the bar, at the very least. Even the prayer that had brought her here was a dim and halfhearted thing beside this.
I made it one way, she thought on waking up yet again on the hard narrow bed in the upstairs bedroom behind the tavern. There has to be a way for me to go back.
The legally trained part of her mind pointed out that there didn’t have to be any such thing: hadn’t she ever heard of a one-way ticket? The rest of her was damned if that was the case. Really, truly, literally damned.
Slowly, reluctantly, and almost unregarded, the hole in the back of her mouth healed. When it was finally gone, she found herself free of pain for the first time since she’d come to Carnuntum.
The difference it made was amazing. “I should have had that tooth pulled a long time ago,“ she said one day in the dead of winter, a long way still from spring.
“I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” Julia responded, looking up from the dough she was kneading. “They say it afterwards, yes, but before? You couldn’t get a one of them near the nice man with the forceps in his hand.”
Remembering the burly man holding her arms and the other one grabbing her legs, remembering the forceps in her mouth and the roots of the molar tearing out of her jawbone, Nicole shuddered. “You are right,” she conceded. “You are too right.”
That afternoon — a fine one, as winter days went, with the temperature probably in the high forties and the sun peering out between spatters of rain — some very unusual customers swaggered into the tavern. The room that had always seemed, if not spacious, then large enough to swing a cat in, was suddenly not much larger than a closet.
There were only three of them, though at first there seemed to be more: big men, burly, and ripe even by the standards of this age. They were Germans, no doubt about it, Marcomanni or Quadi, she couldn’t tell which. They ordered wine in Latin with a distinct accent, guttural but understandable.
“One-as, two-as, or Falernian for four asses?” she asked, warily but crisply. As had the tribesmen in the market square, they surveyed the place as if they owned it. If they drew their swords and demanded the cash box, she couldn’t do much but hand it
over. Really, when she stopped to think, it was a wonder she hadn’t ever been robbed or mugged — crime here was low, though not nonexistent.
Nor was she about to become a statistic now. One of the Germans set a shiny silver denarius on the bar. “Falernian,” he said. The others nodded, tripling the order. “And you will give us bread and raisins and smoked pork to eat with it.” That was an order, and in more ways than one.
Nicole kept her temper. She nodded curtly, bringing to bear the skills she’d acquired perforce, for dealing with obnoxious customers. They’d given her money instead of simply taking what they wanted — that went a long way toward easing her temper.
She looked around for Julia, but the freedwoman had made herself scarce. If these bruisers from beyond the Danube wanted a little ripe woman with their smoked pork, they weren’t going to get it. Nicole was somewhat annoyed: she’d have welcomed backup, and some help filling plates and cups and bowls. But Julia had made it clear when she was manumitted that while she’d cheerfully sell her body, she wasn’t about to sell it to just anyone.
And if they took a fancy to a skinny black-haired piece with a missing tooth?
Not likely, Nicole thought grimly. Nor were they eyeing her in that particular way. They emptied their bowls and licked them clean, and ordered another round of Falernian, with another denarius to pay for it.
“Wine,” one of them said in reverent tones. “Wine is… good.” The others nodded as if he’d said something profound.
