Household Gods

And in the morning she’d wake up with a headache, and the world would still be too much with her, and what would she do after that? Drink another jar of wine? Her father had taken that road; she knew where it led. But now she understood why he’d done it. She even came close to forgiving – a thing she’d never imagined she’d do.

She reached for the dipper. Instead of pouring the wine into a cup, she poured out a puddle in front of Liber and Libera. She let the last dribble of wine spill down the faces of the god and goddess – side by side, coequal, and maddeningly indifferent.

If you don’t bet, you can’t win. Who had said that? She heard it in her father’s voice, a voice she’d spent most of her life trying to forget. Imagining things, she thought. And if she saw, or imagined she saw, a sparkle in Liber’s limestone eyes, and in Libera’s, surely it was but lamplight catching the wetness of the wine. There was no hope. There was no winning this game of gods and shifting time. The die, as the Romans liked to say, was cast. She couldn’t go back. What she did now in front of the votive plaque, she did by force of habit, nothing more.

She dropped the dipper back in the winejar and covered it with the wooden lid. She blew out all the lamps but one, which she carried with her up the narrow rickety stairs.

Julia was already snoring. She had a clear conscience, or else she had no conscience at all. Or maybe she was just dead-tired from having worked sunup to sundown.

Nicole wasn’t much better off herself. She went on stumbling feet into the bedchamber, set the lamp on a stool by the bed, and closed the door behind her and barred it. It wouldn’t stop an intruder who really wanted in, but it would slow him down a little. That was as much as she could hope for in this world.

She lay down on the hard, lumpy, uncomfortable bed and blew out the lamp. Her nightly prayer was worn thin with use, the same plea as always, word for ineffectual word. She should give up on it. But she was too stubborn.

If you don’t bet. you can’t win. Was that her father’s voice? Or another? Or even… two others? Or was it nothing but her imagination? She’d prayed this prayer for so long, and been ignored so completely. The god and goddess couldn’t be turning toward her at last. Of course not. She was bound here forever, condemned to this primitive hell, for her great sin, the sin of hating the world she was born to.

On the votive plaque, Libera’s limestone eyes turned to meet Liber’s. The goddess’ naked stone shoulders lifted in a shrug. The god’s hands rose in a gesture that meant much the same. If there had been anyone in the tavern, he would have heard a pair of small, exasperated sighs. Mortals, Libera’s shrug said. And Liber’s gesture agreed: Give them what they want, and watch them discover they never wanted it in the first place. They were really too busy in this age of the world, to trouble themselves with this refugee from that dull and sterile age still so far in the future. Why on earth was she so desperate to go back there? There, she’d merely existed. Here, she’d lived. She’d known love and pain, sickness and war, danger and excitement and all the other things that made life worth living. How could she abandon them for a world in which nothing ever really happened?

Still, there was no doubt about it. She honestly wanted to go back. Now that Liber and Libera had turned their attention on this petitioner, every prayer she’d sent, every plea she’d raised, ran itself through their awareness. She’d been storming heaven, crying out to them to let her go.

She hadn’t framed her prayers in the proper form. Some gods were particular about such things. But if Liber and Libera had been of that disposition, they would never have granted Nicole’s first petition. Neither were her offerings of precisely the right sort. Still, they were offerings, and sincerely meant. No divinity could fail to be aware of that.

Once more the limestone gazes met. Liber’s expression was wry. Libera’s was exasperated. Well; if this foolish woman thinks she can change her mind yet again, she’ll just have to live with it.

They nodded in complete agreement. For a moment, they basked in its glow, well and divinely content to have solved this niggling problem. A house spider, weaving its disorderly web on the ceiling above the plaque, froze for a moment at the brief flare of light. A moth started toward it, but it faded too quickly. The moth fluttered off aimlessly, its tiny spark of awareness barely impinging on the god and goddess’ own. The tavern was dark again, and utterly still.