Household Gods

A clamoring throng of people streamed toward the southwestern gate of the city, all heading, as she was, for the amphitheater. They chattered as they went, sounding at least as excited as she felt. “Lions, I heard,” one said. “I heard tigers,” somebody else declared. People scoffed at that, to his evident disgust: he folded his arms and set his jaw and retreated into injured silence. “Bears,” a woman said behind him. “There are always bears.”

“Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!” Nicole was wearing sandals, not ruby slippers, and the road was neither yellow nor brick, but she kicked up her heels regardless.

Cahdius Severus didn’t seem to find anything too strange about her behavior, though his glance was more than a little amused. “I’m with everybody else except that one idiot,” he said: “I won’t believe they’ve got tigers till I see ‘em with my own eyes.”

Nicole blinked at the absolute literality of his comment. For an instant – a very brief instant – she felt a little of the old, sinking sensation, the awareness that went all the way to the bone, that no, indeed, she wasn’t in Kansas anymore; nor in West Hills, either. She felt more as if she’d fallen into a sword-and-sandal epic from late-night TV.

They jostled through the gate. In the sudden coolness beneath it, as people crowded together to pass the bottleneck, Nicole found herself pressed against Calidius Severus. She had to clutch at his shoulder or trip and fall. He caught her easily, as if he’d done it often before, and held her in a calm familiar grip.

She stiffened. He let go. Neither exchanged a glance. Nicole was still breathing hard as she emerged into the sunlight. It was painfully bright after the dimness of the gate. That was why she blinked so hard, she told herself; and she’d been pushed to go a fair bit faster than she wanted to, to keep up with the crowd. That was why her breath came so quick. Of course it was. She wasn’t feeling anything toward the man who walked decorously beside her.

The amphitheater stood not far outside the city’s walls, a couple of hundred yards, she reckoned, surrounded by a meadow of knee-high grass.

At the sight of it, Nicole stopped cold. She’d come this way before, and seen almost exactly the same view, on her honeymoon. Frank had stood beside her then, a good deal cleaner and a good deal sweeter-smelling than the man who was with her now.

The impact, the sense of deja vu, was much stronger than it had been inside the baths. She’d seen only the floor plan, so to speak, in a twentieth-century landscape of ruins and modern town. Here and now…

Even in the late twentieth century, the amphitheater had been clearly recognizable for what it was, with banks of earth leading down toward a central stage dug out well below ground level. Eighteen-hundred-odd years had changed remarkably little. In this much older time, retaining walls supported the banked earth, but they had a look of surprising age: well-seasoned timbers and stone much worn and overgrown with moss. Nicole on her honeymoon had been bored, jetlagged, and only vaguely interested in old dead things. In this old dead world that felt all too distinctly here-and-now, she knew a moment’s vertigo, a confusion of places and times. That was then – nearly two thousand years in the future. This was now, eighteen hundred years in her own past.

She must have looked alarming. “You all right, Umma?” Titus Calidius Severus asked in evident concern.

“Yes,” she said quickly, and as firmly as she could. She pulled herself together and made herself walk on. “Maybe a touch of the sun.”

He eyed her sidelong, but he didn’t call her on the lie. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You won’t end up all brown like a farm woman.”

In the twentieth century, leaving skin cancer out of the equation, tan was in – it showed you weren’t confined to a factory or an office all day long. Here, it was just the opposite: a pale face was a face that hadn’t been out sweating in the sun all day. But both meant the same thing: leisure to do whatever you liked, whenever you wanted to do it.

Nicole’s head had begun to ache, as it usually did when she’d had enough of here-and-there, now-and-then. She distracted herself as she had before, with the details of her surroundings. The countryside, like the amphitheater, hadn’t changed much – wouldn’t change much – in eighteen centuries. It was still meadows and grainfields and patches of woods, with an apple orchard or two for variety. One of the meadows, off to the east, was planted thickly with – stones?

Gravestones. It wasn’t a meadow; it was a cemetery.

She shivered slightly. To the Nicole who had stood here – would stand here – eighteen centuries from now, all this country, and all these people, were dead. Long dead and gone to dust.