Household Gods

Terentianus shrugged. Pupianus balled up his fists and looked ready to challenge him to a round, but clearly thought better of it. With a loud snort and a stamp of his foot, he turned and stalked out.

Nicole knew exactly how he felt. If she hadn’t been ready to fall over with pain, she wouldn’t have let Terentianus near her with his forceps, either.

She wasn’t in pain any longer. She was in agony. The pain wouldn’t have gone away if she hadn’t had the tooth pulled. She could only pray that the agony would fade.

After a while, the length of which she was never exactly sure of, she found she could get to her feet and stay there. Terentianus had been watching her between patients: he had a damp cloth waiting, to wipe her face. It came away stained rusty red. “You were brave,” he told her.

“You bet I was,” she said thickly. The wine and the opium were still in her, making it very hard to care what she said. She pressed a hand to her throbbing jaw — which didn’t make it feel better, but kept it from feeling worse as she moved — and headed for the door. Terentianus didn’t try to stop her. He was probably glad to see the last of her.

As she made her slow, painful way back to the tavern, with every step sending a fresh twinge through the empty socket, she found some degree of distraction in the graffiti on the walls. There seemed to be a lot of them, and many of that lot seemed to be Christian. At first she thought her bleared eyes were playing tricks, but it was hard to mistake the two curved strokes of the fish, or a row of crosses with something biblical scrawled beneath. She found herself standing with her nose almost pressed to a wall full of such scribblings. The letters writhed and wriggled, but even so, they made a disturbing lot of sense. They were all about the Last Judgment, and they were downright ferocious. Their tone might have given even a Pentecostal preacher pause.

This wasn’t her Christianity. Hers, insofar as she had anything to do with it, was a lukewarm thing: Christmas, Easter, and a few rote prayers muttered out of habit. The one Christian she’d met here gave her the creeps, and these graffiti were worse. They didn’t make her think of Sunday quiet. They made her think of terrorists. Just like some of the more extreme Arab sects, these Christians wanted the next world so badly, they didn’t care what they did to this one.

She stood by the wall, hand pressed to her jaw, and stared blankly at a drawing of a man on a cross, with blood gushing from his numerous wounds. Some wag had added an enormous, equally effusive phallus. It was blasphemy, part of her said; but in this world, in this context, she couldn’t be as appalled as she should have been.

Particularly with reality staring her in the face. She hadn’t been one bit better than the wild-eyed fanatics who scrawled this graffito. Like them, she’d paid too little attention to this world and the things of this world. Just as with everything else in the country and the century she was born in, she’d taken decent medical care for granted. Then Fabia Ursa died; then the pestilence came; and now, on a far smaller but much more immediate scale, this cursed tooth had shown her, in detail, just how far medical science still had to go. Terentianus was perfectly competent by local standards, she was sure. He’d done what needed doing, done it as well and as fast as he could, and caused her as little pain as possible. He couldn’t help it that he knew nothing of antisepsis, next to nothing of analgesics, and nothing whatsoever of antibiotics.

Enough.

She had, at last, hit a wall. She’d been living from day to day, moment to moment, surviving, coping, even — sometimes — managing to enjoy this world she’d wished herself into. She’d been remarkably passive, when she stopped to think about it. A few doubts, some midnight regrets, a lot of culture shock and plain old all-American squeamishness — she’d had all of that. But she hadn’t ever really got up enough sheer force of feeling to wish herself away. It was all, however marginally, preferable to the life she’d left behind — even if she didn’t quite, ever, find the time or energy to change the things about the world she’d thought she’d change, back when she first arrived in Carnuntum. She could make herself think so, at any rate, if she tried hard enough.

It hadn’t really been real to her. That was the trouble. Even the deaths she’d seen — those people had been dead for eighteen centuries before she was even born. She’d felt them as she might have felt deaths in a book, with grief, yes, and real pain, but at a slight remove.

But one by one, blow by blow, they’d cracked through the shell that protected her. A good part of that was selfishness; she admitted it. Frank had said that of her before he walked out on her — one of his many pointed little gems of wisdom: “You don’t really care about anybody else. You say you do, you recite all the words, put on all the expressions. But when it comes right down to it, there’s nobody in your world but you. “

It was justice of a sort, then, that the last straw had been something that affected only her: an encounter with real, personal, private pain.

No matter where it came from, or how. She’d had enough. She’d learned her lesson. She was finished. With all her heart and soul, and with all her aching and abused flesh, she wished herself away. Back. Home to that other world, long and far removed from Carnuntum.

She squeezed her eyes tight and wished till her head pounded and her jaw screamed for mercy. Nothing.

Somewhere in delirium, while she was ill with the pestilence, she’d begged Liber and Libera to send her back to Los Angeles. She’d got a busy signal then, and then forgotten, till now. Till she knew beyond any doubt that she wanted out.

Well, she thought. When the line was busy, you hit the redial button, or put the phone on autodial, and kept on trying. And since this wasn’t exactly a line, and what she wanted was as close to magic as made no matter — what made this kind of magic work? Magic ring, phantom tollbooth, ruby slippers…

The plaque. She’d clean forgotten. The plaque she’d bought on her honeymoon and kept by her bed in West Hills. She’d focused on it, hadn’t she? She’d prayed to the gods whom she’d never have known if they hadn’t been depicted on that one piece of faux antiquity.

Or was it false? What if it was real? It seemed preposterous, but what if, somehow, the maker of the reproductions had made a mistake, and shipped the original with the copies? What if she’d been sold, not a reproduction, but an actual late-Roman votive plaque? What if that was the key?

In the fever of discovery, she almost forgot how much pain she was in. She pushed herself away from the wall she’d been leaning against all this time, and looked around with eyes that saw almost clearly. Somewhere along here, she seemed to remember, was a stonecutter’s shop.

Yes, there it was, right in the next block — as if it had been placed there specifically for her need. Samples of the stonecutter’s work were laid out along the front of the shop, propped against the wall. Some were headstones; he’d probably done a land-office business in those while the pestilence raged in Carnuntum. The sample stones were distinguished by gender: a soldier, a woman in a tunic. There were even partial inscriptions, stock phrases awaiting the insertion of a name.

And yes, he had a selection of votive plaques, dedicated to a wide variety of gods and goddesses. None of those on display was inscribed to Liber and Libera.

She quelled the sinking in her stomach. Maybe he had one inside. If not, he could make one. She didn’t have to drift passively through this life. She could take matters into her own hands: manufacture, or have manufactured, her own way home. If she couldn’t change this world, she might still escape it.

She went boldly into the dim space with its odors of stone dust and old sweat, and asked her question in a voice that wasn’t too mushy, she didn’t think. He’d been picking away at a bit of garland on a tombstone, but when she spoke he looked up a little sharply; saw what had to be a heroically swollen face; and blinked once before resorting to a bland expression. “What, Riper and — oh; Liber. Yes, Liber and Libera. There’s one right here — two, actually, now I stop to think. People are right fond of Liber and Libera, likely ‘cause they’re right fond of what they’re god and goddess of.” He winked at her as if he expected her to share the joke, and pulled a pair of plaques from among the many on the wall behind him. “Here you are. Take your pick.”

Neither one was the plaque, the one she’d bought on her honeymoon. One was larger, one was smaller, both were rather cruder work. She eyed them in disappointment. Didn’t magic need a solid link between her now and her then? Preferably the same link?

Still, she thought with robust twentieth-century skepticism, would it be necessary? If she was making her own future, then all that mattered should be that the plaque was like the one she’d used to bring herself here.

Or she could have one made. But, from the look of the shop, he was backed up for weeks; and she couldn’t wait. She wanted out now. “I like the smaller one better,” she said firmly. “What do you want for it?”