Household Gods

except get drunk or get screwed. She wasn’t in the mood to invite a hangover. The other… her whole body tightened, and her stomach clenched. If she tried very hard, she could remember that last, tender night with Titus Calidius Severus. But no matter how hard she tried to cling to it, the Roman legionary’s hard hands and mocking voice ran over it and drowned it.

Julia had given up on her. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Why don’t you do that, too? And hope — or pray to Liber and Libera, since you’ve become so fond of them — that you’ll feel better in the morning.” She turned away from Nicole and headed for the stairs. “Good night,” she said over her shoulder.

That was as blunt, and as close to outright rude, as the freedwoman had ever dared be. It demonstrated rather forcibly how far Nicole had strayed from anything resembling decent manners.

She didn’t care. She had perfectly good reason for being unreasonable. If Julia couldn’t see that, then too bad for Julia.

As soon as Nicole had shaped the thought, she knew a stab — small but distinct — of guilt. Julia had been her best friend and ally in this whole ugly world. She didn’t deserve to be treated this way. “Then she should try harder to understand how I feel,” Nicole said to the air.

Nicole knew she should go up after Julia, and if not apologize, then at least try to smooth things over. But Julia was long gone.

Tomorrow would be soon enough. She’d wake again in Carnuntum as she always had. She’d do something to make it up to her freedwoman — something small but telling. She didn’t know what. She couldn’t, once she’d made herself think like a civilized adult, think much past the moment, or past the burden of this whole awful age.

She sniffled loudly, and blew her nose on her fingers. No Kleenex, no handkerchief. She grimaced and wiped her fingers on the rammed-earth floor, which at least had the virtue of being newly swept. She rubbed her hand on her tunic. A smear of dirt stained the faded wool. She brushed ineffectually at it. It was a losing battle. Every bit of it was the same: futile and hopeless.

She thrust herself to her feet, went over to the bar, opened the lid of one of the winejars and stared down into it. Plenty of wine in Carnuntum these days, with so many legionaries in town. The rich, fruity scent filled her nostrils. Even through the heaviness of tears, she grew a little dizzy with the fumes.

When she first came to Carnuntum, the very smell of wine gave her the horrors. Now she saw in it only oblivion, and blessed numbness.

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.

When Nicole lay down, she had feared she’d never fall asleep. But once she was as comfortable in that bed as she could be, she spiraled irresistibly down into the deeps of sleep. Worry faded, hopelessness sank out of sight. Dreams rose up around her, strange and yet familiar. A stair going down, a stair going up, round and round and round and…

21

Nicole wound slowly back toward consciousness. She lay with her eyes closed. The mattress under her was hard and lumpy and uncomfortable. A sigh, her first willed breath of the morning, hissed out through her nostrils. Another day in Carnuntum. Another day to get through without too many disasters. Another day to pray with all her heart that she could somehow, someday, without dying first, get out of there.

She rolled over. The mattress wasn’t any more comfortable on her side than on her back. It crinkled and rustled, shifting under her, jabbing into a rib. What the —?

Her own mattress, such as it was, was stuffed with wool. It didn’t rustle when she rolled over on it. Was she sick again? Had Julia or someone moved her onto a straw pallet while she was delirious?

She opened her eyes. She was looking out an open doorway into a hall.

But she’d shut the bedroom door the night before, shut and barred it, as she always had, ever since she came to Carnuntum.

The doorway was taller, wider. Its edges weren’t indifferently whitewashed wood. They were — painted