Household Gods Read online

  The woman was younger than she was, somewhere in her twenties, maybe, and half a head taller than Nicole — than Umma. However tall that was. Her skin was fairer than Umma’s, almost like Nicole’s own. Her eyes were gray, her hair neither blond nor brown and very, very dirty, rudely hacked into a bob like those of Liber and Libera on their votive plaque.

  Her hands and face were clean enough, but her bare feet were black, not simply dirty like Nicole’s — Umma’s, Nicole reminded herself. She wore a stained, shabby tunic, shabbier than any of those Nicole had found in the chest of drawers. The body under that tunic was ripe, with wide hips and full breasts whose nipples thrust against the wool, but the odor that came off it went far past ripeness.

  “I’m sorry I slept so late that you were up before me, Mistress.” The young woman’s words still tumbled over one another, as if she had to get them all in before someone stopped her. “It won’t happen again, I promise it won’t. ‘

  Nicole recognized that nervousness, though it seemed exaggerated. Employee in front of employer when employee was noticeably late. She knew the feeling herself.

  With sympathy came a rush of relief. If this woman worked for her, then she had a guide, somebody to walk her through the things she needed to live in this world. She hadn’t known how badly she wanted something like this till she had it. She wanted to fall on the woman’s neck and thank God — or gods — for the gift.

  Common sense kept her where she was, and made her say, “It’s all right. No harm done.”

  Nicole had just, not entirely advertently, observed the cardinal rule of any lawyer or executive in a new job: make friends with the staff. Do that and they’ll do your job for you, show you the ropes without your having to ask.

  It seemed to work with this — what? Waitress? Cook? Hired girl? Her face lit up. “Oh, thank you, Mistress! What a kind mood you’re in today.” She was almost beautiful when she smiled. With the stink that came off her, though, who would want to get close enough to her to notice? She went on eagerly, almost too fast to understand: “Shall I make breakfast for you, Mistress? Still plenty of bread from yesterday. Or I could — “

  “No,” Nicole said before she fell over herself trying to please. “No, that would be fine.” The body she wore was suddenly, ferociously hungry. It wanted to be fed now.

  The — employee, Nicole guessed she could call her — smiled happily. She was as simple as a child, it seemed — nerves and shakiness one moment, puppy-eagerness the next. “Good! Good, then. The children should be down any time now. I’ll see they’re fed, too, Mistress. Everybody’s sleepy today — everybody but you, Mistress Umma. ‘ She ventured another smile.

  Nicole smiled back. It seemed unkind not to. The result was mildly startling: another of those wide, delighted grins. As the younger woman turned and went back toward the counter, she was humming under her breath.

  Damn, thought Nicole, she’s easy to please. Men might think so, too, the way she walked. Dawn Soderstrom had swiveled her hips like that, but she’d needed heels to do it. Anyone who could manage it barefoot had determination, and one hell of a limber spine.

  Once the woman was gone about her business, backfield in motion, odor, and all, Nicole could focus on what she’d said. She — Nicole — Umma — was mother to — two? three? how many? — children she’d never seen before.

  And what about Kimberley and Justin, back in West Hills, back in the twentieth century? It hit her with a force so strong it knocked the breath out of her. All the while she’d been veering between panic and selfish delight, she hadn’t spared a moment’s thought for her own children. It might almost seem she was glad to be shut of them — to escape the daily drag of responsibility, the interruptions, the disruptions. Had she been hoping she’d be spared that here? Was she so terrible a mother?

  God. What had happened to her own body, back in West Hills? Was it just… unoccupied? Had it gone into some kind of coma? What would happen to the kids? She hadn’t even gone in to kiss Kimberley good night, to see if her fever had gone down, or checked in on Justin and made sure he had his teddy beside him in case he woke up in the middle of the night. She’d been so tired, so fed up, so far over the top, that she’d put herself to bed and said her prayer and gone to sleep without a thought for her children.

  No. No, something must have happened, the same way something had happened to make sure she spoke Latin. Somebody or something would look after Kimberley and Justin, at least till morning. Then -

  Oh, God. They’d find her in a coma or worse. Would Kimberley know to dial 911? Would Justin -

  She couldn’t think about that. She had to hope — to pray — they’d be all right. Her last prayer had been answered. Why not this one, too?

  “Liber,” she whispered, “Libera, if you’re listening, do this one last thing for me, will you please?” Damn, she sounded like Nicole-in-the-office, asking Cyndi to do her a favor. Good legal secretaries sit at the right hand of God, every lawyer knows that, but it might not be strictly kosher to address a pair of gods as if they were the original administrative assistants.

  She shook herself. It didn’t matter. “Just take care of them, okay?”

  If she’d hoped for some sign, some feeling at least that she’d been heard, she didn’t get it. She caught herself smiling slowly, widely, and not at all nicely. If Nicole Gunther-Perrin wasn’t home anymore, there was no doubt at all who would inherit the kids. Frank and Dawn wouldn’t get much of a vacation. And Frank would finally, after all this time, be left holding the baby — literally. Twice over.

  “There is justice in the universe,” Nicole said to the reek-rich air.

  Her — servant, whatever, came back out of the shop carrying a chunk of bread, a small bowl, and a cup on a wooden tray. “Thank you,” Nicole said as the young woman set the tray down on a table just inside the door, where the light from outside was brightest.

  “You’re welcome, Mistress.” The woman, whose name Nicole was going to have to learn soon or be in trouble, smiled another of those wide smiles. “Oh, you are kind today! Have the gods blessed you, then, Mistress? Is this a white day?”

  Nicole stared blankly at her. The part of her that knew Latin knew that a white day meant a lucky day, marked in white on the Roman calendar. It still didn’t explain why the woman should be so transparently delighted to get a simple thank-you. Either Umma had been an ogre or something else was going on, something Nicole didn’t know enough to catch.

  Her stomach growled loudly, drowning out the rattle of her thoughts. It wanted breakfast, and it wanted it now.

  She pulled a stool over to the table, sat down, and examined her breakfast. The bread made her want to giggle. Had it been served in slices instead of a slab half a dozen slices thick, it would have done for Roman Meal: same medium-brown color, same coarse flour. She’d eaten a lot of bologna sandwiches on Roman Meal, growing up in Indianapolis. She tore off a piece and bit into it. It was fresher than any Roman Meal she’d ever eaten, and had a slightly smoky taste from being baked over a wood fire.

  It was also grittier than any Roman Meal she’d ever eaten. She glanced at the stone quern beside the oven. Was that what had broken her front tooth, and what set the back one to aching whenever she wasn’t busy thinking about something else?

  So she’d chew carefully. She was hungry.

  When she’d taken the edge off her hunger with a good portion of the bread, she took time to explore the rest of the tray. The shallow earthenware bowl was full of thick, shiny, green-yellow liquid. She sniffed. Her eyebrows rose. Remembering dinners in fancy restaurants before Frank stopped taking her and started taking Dawn instead, she twisted off another piece of bread and dipped it in the bowl. She tasted again. Yes, she’d called it. Olive oil. They were still eating bread that way in Italian restaurants, eighteen centuries from now.

  Olive oil was a fat, but God knew it was better than butter. This body didn’t look as if it needed to worry much about its weight. Even so, a lifetime of habit
persuaded Nicole to push the bowl of oil away and investigate the cup. Again she sniffed. Again her eyebrows rose, but this time they rose higher. Wine? At breakfast? What was she supposed to be, an alcoholic?

  Dammit, she needed to know her employee’s name. Rather than sing out Yo! or You there! she coughed. That did it: the young woman looked up from the two trays she was filling as she’d filled Nicole’s. Her eyes were wide, her face a mask of apprehension. All her emotions seemed to be broad, cartoonish, as if she were playing a role, and not too well, either.

  Those emotions were real. Nicole would have been willing to bet on that. They were just… exaggerated. For effect? Or because she’d never learned to tone them down? “Is something wrong, Mistress? “ she asked anxiously.

  “Yes,” Nicole said, and the woman’s face went white. Terror? Good Lord, Nicole thought. Umma must have been a raving tartar. She smoothed her voice as much as she could, though she couldn’t rid it of all the disapproval. That was too deeply ingrained, for too long, in Nicole’s other — future — life. “I don’t think I’ll be having wine this morning. Would you bring me some water instead?”

  “Water?” The other woman’s eyebrows flew up almost to her hairline.

  She was as astonished as if Nicole had asked for — well, wine. Or Scotch. Or creamed angleworms on toast. “Mistress, are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Nicole hadn’t meant to snap so hard. She hadn’t meant to crush the servant — just to shake her loose from her incredulity and set her to fetching the water. The young woman looked as if she expected to be fired without a reference. More gently, as gently as she could, Nicole said, “I may stop drinking wine altogether. Water’s more healthy, don’t you think?”

  “Healthy?” The servant’s eyebrows went up even higher this time. She was easy to reassure, at least; soften the tone even a little and she forgot she’d ever been snapped at.

  Or else she really was too incredulous to watch her step around an employer she so evidently feared. Nicole had to be acting completely and shockingly out of character.

  “Healthy?” she repeated. “Water? Mistress, your customers won’t think so, if you try to tell them such a thing.”

  “What do you mean?” Nicole said.

  Her employee stared at her. She had, she realized, just asked her first truly stupid question here in Carnuntum. The young woman retreated to the long stone counter, as if it represented some kind of refuge. Something in the way she walked, and in the things she’d said, made Nicole see it suddenly for what it was. It wasn’t a counter. It was a bar.

  Not caring for an instant what the other woman might think, she hurried over to it and lifted the wooden lids she’d ignored before. Under each of them rested an amphora with a bronze dipper. The strong alcoholic smell of wine floated up to her nose.

  Umma wasn’t running a restaurant. She was running a tavern. Nicole startled herself with the intensity of her revulsion and anger. How many men of Carnuntum would stagger home drunk to abuse their spouses and children because of this place? Any one of them could have been her father: face red with drink and rage, mouth open wide as he bellowed at his wife, hand swinging up to hit whatever, or whomever, got in its way.

  “I will not,” she said tightly, “sell — this — “

  The employee didn’t understand. “Mistress, most of it’s not Falernian, but it’s all the best we can get for the price. Why, you said — “

  Nicole cut her off. She had to understand. It was very, very important that she understand. “I will not sell wine. “

  Her expression must have been alarming. The young woman started to babble again. “Mistress, are you ill? Have you lost your senses? You know we have to sell wine. If you don’t, nobody will come here. We’ll all go hungry.”

  “I could serve — “ Nicole started to say coffee, only to discover that the Latin she’d acquired had no word for it. She used the English instead.

  “Coffee?” The young woman’s accent did strange things to the vowels. “I don’t know what that is, Mistress. Where would you get it? How would you serve it?”

  Nicole started to answer, but stopped. Blue Mountain coffee came from Jamaica, Kalossi Celebes from Indonesia, Kona from Hawaii, good old unexciting Yuban from Colombia. She didn’t know much about Roman history, but she was pretty sure those weren’t places the Romans had ever heard of.

  Her employee seemed absolutely convinced she couldn’t make a go of a restaurant that didn’t serve wine. Nicole had no way of knowing whether she was right, not on her first morning in Carnuntum.

  This was the only guide she had, the only hope of getting through without being labeled insane or worse. She’d seen it in movies, how the alien landed on earth with a head full of data but missing a few of the most important. He was always found out, and then he had to suffer. Did the Romans have police? Government agencies? Whatever they’d call the CIA?

  She had to fit in, at least at first. She had to act normal, or people would ask too many questions, questions she couldn’t answer. “Very well,” she said grudgingly. “We’ll keep on serving wine. For now. But,” she went on, and that was firm, “I will drink water.”

  The servant sighed deeply, the kind of sigh that said, You may be crazy, but you’re still the boss. “Yes, Mistress,” she said, meekly enough, and poured her a cup from a pitcher on the bar.

  Because the cup was earthenware and not glass, Nicole couldn’t admire its crystal clarity as she would have liked. But when she sipped, she let out a sigh of pleasure. Now this was water, water as it ought to taste. What came out of the tap in Los Angeles was as full of chlorine as a swimming pool, and full of God only knew what all other chemicals. None of those pollutants here — just good, pure H2O.

  “See?” Nicole set down the empty cup. “This is what’s good for you.”

  “Yes, Mistress.” The young woman sounded even more resigned, and even more dubious, than she had before.

  A clatter from upstairs distracted them both from what might have been an uncomfortable pause. The servant smiled. “Here come the children, Mistress. They were sleepy today, weren’t they?”

  “Weren’t they?” Nicole echoed. Her employee, fortunately, didn’t seem to notice how hollow her voice sounded. How in the world was she going to convince — how many? — children she’d never seen before that she was their mother? She had no idea what to do or say — no time to think, either, before they were on her.

  4

  IT went, thank God, better than she’d dared hope. It still wasn’t easy, not for her, but the kids, like the servant, seemed prepared to take her on faith. Why not? She looked like their mother. She sounded like their mother. Who else could she be?

  By now she took in data as automatically, and almost as effortlessly, as she had when she was studying for the bar exam. As she had then, she shut out emotions that wouldn’t immediately serve her purposes, simply recorded them and filed them away to deal with later.

  She had — Umma had — two children: a son named Lucius, who looked about eight years old, and a daughter called Aurelia, a couple of years younger. Aurelia reminded Nicole of Kimberley. It wasn’t just that they were near enough the same age, and it certainly wasn’t that they looked alike — Aurelia, naturally enough, looked like a smaller version of Umma. But the way she carried herself, the turn of her head when she looked at her mother, the prim little purse of her mouth, were all strikingly like Kimberley.

  It struck Nicole rather strongly, if belatedly, that Umma might be one of her ancestors. The dream she’d had, the double spiral ladder of DNA, could have been the way she’d traveled here. Almost all of her great-grandparents had come to the United States from Austria. Carnuntum was — had been — would be — in Austria. Suppose their several-dozen-times great-grandparents had come from here, from this town?

  What a chain of coincidences if it was true: that she should have honeymooned in Carnuntum, that she’d found the votive plaque, that it had become the constant occupant of
her nightstand, even long after it stopped being a symbol of her marriage to Frank Perrin. And after that marriage had gone sour beyond all repair, when her job imploded on her and her whole life was falling apart, a prayer expressed as a wish had done the impossible, had brought her down through the long chain of genes into this one of all her myriad ancestors.

  Another thought trod on the heels of the first. If Umma was her ancestor, then so was either Lucius or Aurelia — or, for that matter, so were both of them. She swallowed a sudden, nearly hysterical giggle. They were children, half her size. Hard to imagine that they’d grow up, have children of their own, and those would have children, and…

  Right now, at this moment in the long skein of time, they were children, as real and unmistakable as Justin or Kimberley. They tore into breakfast as if, if they ate it fast enough, they’d grow into adulthood between the first bite and the last. She kept her mouth shut when they soaked their bread in olive oil and ate it greasy and dripping. They were growing children. They could get away with it.

  At least, she thought, they aren’t swilling down cholesterol with the fat. Did people in the Roman Empire even know what cholesterol was?

  The children’s table manners could have been better, but she kept quiet about those, too. For now. Lucius wolfed down every crumb of his bread, licked lips glistening with oil, and snapped to the young woman, “Julia! More bread.”

  “Yes, young sir,” Julia said, and dropped her own breakfast to rise and do as he ordered. She smiled a-trifle sadly at Nicole. “Doesn’t he sound just like his father, Mistress? He tries so hard to be a little man — so good of him, and so well done, with your poor husband gone among the shades so young. We’ve need of a man about the house.”