Household Gods

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 than 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.