Household Gods

tugged at it. It came down over hips narrower than her own were — had been. What it had covered…

Her ears flamed. Her pubic hair was shaved as well, or as badly, as the hair on her legs. Awkwardly, she squatted over the pot. Damn, she’d hated doing that on camping trips, or on long drives when her father wouldn’t stop for anything but immediate, screaming emergency — and when he did, there’d only been bushes by the side of the road. He would never stop at someplace civilized, like a gas station.

As she squatted there, she knew the half-angry, half-sinking sensation she’d had on those drives. No toilet paper. None hiding under the bed among a jostling herd of dust bunnies. The stains on the loincloth told her what she didn’t want to know. Grimacing, struggling a bit as it passed the curve of her hips, she pulled it up.

There was no rent to go back to, no car, no impatient parents and squabbling sisters and hours more of travel before she could get clean again. Only the room she’d trapped herself in, the chest she hadn’t explored, the window she hadn’t dared look out of. Chest or window? Window or chest? The lady or the tiger?

After a moment, she walked over to the window. The light that came through was as strange as everything else. It wasn’t the harsh, uncompromising desert glare of Los Angeles, or the gray-gold wash of morning in Indiana. It was softer, moister than either. It reminded her of something. But where? When? The memory wouldn’t click.

She looked out, east, toward the strongest of the light. She couldn’t see the sun. Most of her horizon was the wall of another building across a narrow, muddy alley. It was as tall as the one she stood in, two stories, more or less. If she craned down the alley she could see what must be the front of it, where it shrank to a single story. The first floor of each building was stone, with whitewashed plaster above. The red tile roof on the building across the alley made her think of California houses, the ones she called pink palaces, by Taco Bell out of a Spanish hacienda.

She leaned out the window to peer north — left — up the alley. It opened on another street that ran perpendicular to it. Some of the buildings along it and across the other, wider street were of stone and plasterwork like the one she was in. One or two had front porches supported by stone columns. Others were built of wood, with thatched roofs. Picturesque, she thought, as if she were a tourist and could relish the quaint and the twee. But even as she thought the word, she discarded it. There was nothing cute or touristy about the muscular stench assaulting her nostrils. She was getting used to it, enough at least not to gag and choke, but it never came close to disappearing.

The alley was amazingly narrow; she could almost touch the house on the other side. The street beyond it was broader but equally unpaved, and no wider than a California alley. It didn’t look as if two cars could slip past each other in it. Not that she saw any try. There were no cars parked on it, either, the way there surely would have been anywhere in the Los Angeles area.

The thought slipped away before she grasped it. She didn’t see any cars. She didn’t hear any, either. A mournful cry close by nearly startled her out of her skin. It sounded like a train whistle crossed on a car horn and mis-mated with a flat trumpet. A human voice growled in the wake of it: “Come on, curse you!” The sound brayed out again. A sharp whack cut it short. The man snarled, “There, that’ll shift you, you dirty bugger.”

Nicole gasped. Automatically, as if in her own bedroom, she looked around for the telephone book, to find the number of the SPCA. No phone book. No phone. God, what if there was no SPCA?

She leaned out the window again, half sagging on the rough wood of the sill. Her knees weren’t so steady as they might be. Two figures came down the street, the man who had spoken and the thing that had made that braying sound: a small gray long-eared donkey.

The man looked as strange as everything else in this world, dream, hallucination, whatever it was. He wore a belted tunic of undyed wool, a little shorter than hers, with a hood shrugged down over his back. In one hand he held a rough rope knotted to the donkey’s halter, in the other a stout stick, no doubt the weapon with which he’d abused the poor beast.

The donkey tottered along under a massive load, four huge clay pots strapped to its back with a complicated set of leather lashings. The pots all together stood higher than the donkey, and looked hideously heavy.

The man caught her eye and waved without letting go of the stick, a bit of bravado that made her think of Tony Gallagher. “Good morning to you, Umma,” he called. His smile showed a couple of missing teeth. The molar in Nicole’s mouth twinged in sympathy. “Looks like a nice day, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so,” she answered — and ducked back into the room in astonished confusion. He’d spoken to her — and to the donkey, for that matter — in a language she’d never heard before. And she, worse, had answered in the same tongue.

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