Household Gods

If she let it, that other language came to her lips as readily as English. When she thought What in God’s name is going on? it came out as Qui in nomin Dei fit? It sounded something like the Spanish that made sizable parts of Los Angeles seem a foreign country, but that wasn’t quite right, either.

When her mind groped for the name of the language, she felt a shift and a click, a sensation somewhat like opening a program that someone had installed on her computer’s hard drive without bothering to tell her. Frank would do a thing like that. But did Frank know Latin?

“Sed non possum latine loqui,” she protested, and stopped. She wanted to scream, or to giggle crazily. Could you say But I can’t speak Latin in Latin? Of course you could. She’d just done it.

As if opening that one file had opened another cross-referenced to it, her memory came clearer than it had since she awakened in this strange place, in this body that wasn’t hers. She remembered the wish she’d made just before she went to bed in West Hills, California. Or maybe it had been a prayer, to Liber and Libera, the gods with the names that to her had always meant both freedom and sympathy. To go back to their time. To live in their world.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, deliberately making herself speak English. Odd, came the fugitive thought, that the language hadn’t vanished with all the rest of her, subsumed in strangeness.

She didn’t believe it. But she’d felt the gods’ kisses on her palm – could feel them now, like the memory of a static shock. She looked down at the rough, callused, workworn hand and the arm it sprang from. That was not the hand that had felt the touch of those stony lips, or that small and doubled snap of divine energy.

Once more Nicole turned to the window, half hoping that it would look down on something she knew. The street was still there, the house next door, but the man and the donkey were gone. Other people had taken their place, a morning rush of people. Rush hour in – where? Ancient Rome? Most of them wore tunics and kept their heads down. A few men strutted along importantly in what looked like enormous beach towels wrapped around their bodies and tucked over one shoulder. Togas, those had to be togas.

Something creaked and squeaked – the axle of a cart, she saw as it trundled past. The wheels, solid slabs of wood without spokes, sent up a cloud of dust. So did the hooves of the oxen drawing the cart. One of the oxen lifted its tail and dropped a trail of steaming green dung down the middle of the alley. No one came rushing out with a pooper-scooper. The cart creaked down the street and groaned round a corner and out of sight.

Once more she looked up, straining to see northward. More buildings, a gray stone wall, and beyond them a blue curve of hills. Those hills… she knew them. She remembered…

“The hills on the other side of the Danube,” she whispered, not noticing or caring whether in English or Latin. She remembered those hills. They hadn’t been so thickly forested when she saw them, but she’d promised herself never to forget their shape, the way they rose and swelled under the soft blue-gray sky. She hugged herself. She was cold and warm, both at once: awed, astonished, terrified, overjoyed.

“Carnuntum! “ In Latin, with this body’s accent, it had a sweeter, stronger rhythm than she’d known before, and a lilt to it like the refrain of a song. “I’m in Carnuntum! This is the Roman Empire, and I’m in Carnuntum, and the year is – the year is – “

That, she didn’t know. It hadn’t been uploaded, or installed, or whatever the word was. As if her brain had hit a bad sector, the lawyerly part of her clicked awake, looked around, and said a flat, No. And, when the rest of her tried to argue with it: This isn’t real. This isn’t Carnuntum. You’re hallucinating.

Really, counselor? the rest of her asked a little too sweetly, the same tone she’d taken in court more than once, just before she moved in for the kill. So it’s not Carnuntum. and this isn’t the Roman Empire. How do I know enough about either of them to hallucinate anything this elaborate?

The lawyer-self couldn’t answer that. Nicole turned in the room, all the way around, from window back to window again. After awe, fear, hysteria, panic, disbelief, all the wild mishmash of shock and realization, she settled on the best of all, the one she should have had from the first: dizzy, singing joy.

“Thank you,” she said in a voice almost too full for sound. Then, louder: “Thank you, god and goddess! Thank you!” She danced across the room in a country-western step that wouldn’t be invented for – how long?