Household Gods

“I don’t just think so. I know so.” Nicole hoped she did. To be wrong now, to be disappointed again… She didn’t want to think about that. If this plaque, the very same, the self-same one that had brought her here, couldn’t get her back to West Hills, nothing could. If nothing could… No. She wasn’t thinking about that.

Brigomarus coughed a time or two. Nicole’s stomach clenched – legacy of the pestilence. But no, it was just a catch in his throat, or maybe a touch of a cold. “There’s another reason I came, too,” he said, “and look, I almost forgot. I heard it from a German who came in screaming for a shield. The Emperor and the army are on their way. They’ll be here any day. The barbarians are yelling at the top of their lungs for something, anything to help them drive the Romans back.”

“Are they?” Nicole was listening with only half an ear. Her eyes kept coming back to the stone faces of the god and goddess. Those carven lips had kissed her palm in promise. Those bland and heedless faces had turned on her, and smiled, and granted her prayer.

It was as if she couldn’t keep two purposes in mind at once. Either she was surviving in this world, devoting every scrap of her attention to it, or she was concentrating totally on getting out of it. Now that she had the key – please, god and goddess, let it be the key – there was no room in her for anything else.

Those lips had kissed her palm well over a year ago, as Umma’s body reckoned time. What had happened to her body? How long had it been there? Had Umma been struggling to survive there as Nicole struggled to survive here? Ye gods, a Roman woman who couldn’t even read, trying to cope with all the complexities of life in Los Angeles – two minutes of that and they’d lock her away. Nicole had survived because life was simpler here, if orders of magnitude harder. The things she needed to cope with, she’d at least dimly heard of. What could Umma have made of the automobile, the telephone, the microwave oven?

Or – and maybe worse – what if Umma hadn’t been there at all? What if there was nobody home? Would Nicole leap forward in time, only to find that there was nothing there, no body to move into? What if she was – if she was -

She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t. She caressed the votive plaque with fingers that shook a little. She had to try. No matter what waited for her, it had to be better than what faced her here.

Brigomarus left, still baffled that his sister should be so delighted with his present and hardly seem interested at all in the news he’d brought. There was no way he could understand that the votive plaque was the best, the greatest news she’d ever wanted.

Nicole set it where the other one had been. She found a little wine – dregs, to be honest – in the bottom of one of the jars set into the bar, and offered it to the god and goddess. Then and only then did she get around to picking up the pieces of the broken amphora, finding another one, and going out and lugging back water.

Julia had been across the street in the fuller and dyer’s shop when Brigomarus came by. She was back by the time Nicole brought in the jar of water. Nicole didn’t ask what, if anything, Julia had been doing with Gaius Calidius Severus. It was none of her business.

The freedwoman was leaning on the bar, chin in hands, contemplating the plaque. When Nicole came in she rolled an eye at her and asked, “Where’d you get that, Mistress?”

“Brigo brought it,” Nicole answered. “Didn’t he tell you? He said you told him how the other one got broken.”

“Oh,” Julia said with a hunch of the shoulders. “Well. I forgot about that.” Had she? Nicole wondered. And wondered something else, too: something that was really rather reprehensible. Oh, surely not. Julia sold herself to strangers, but when it came to people she knew, she tended to either keep a roster of regulars or, as with young Calidius Severus, give it away for free. No, she was just remembering that she’d broken the first plaque, and indulging in a bit of guilt.

She came out of it soon enough. “That was nice of him,” she said. She tilted her head and squinted. “If you don’t mind me saying so, I think it’s a nicer carving job than the one we had before.”

“I think so, too,” Nicole said. And if she didn’t mean quite the same by that as Julia did, then Julia didn’t need to know it.

That night before she went to sleep, she begged Liber and Libera to send her back to California, back to the twentieth century. She was reaching them – she was. The way seemed open, as it hadn’t before. She drifted off with a smile on her face.

She woke… in Carnuntum.

19

Getting up with her belly empty and her scalp itching and her skin dark with soot was harder than it had ever been before. She stared around the bare little bedroom, and dismay changed rapidly into unabashed loathing. For the first time in a very long while, she wondered if she’d lost her mind.