Household Gods

Then at last they were on and she was standing straight, ready to face the world. “Ready or not,” she said to it, “here I come.”

Unbarring the double door was easy, but it didn’t open. What to do next? When she pushed against the handles, nothing happened. She pushed harder. Nothing. With a hiss of a

This whole world would be different, more differences than she had ever known. She had to stop, to swallow the surge of panic. Culture shock didn’t begin to describe it. She groped for the remnants of her former dizzy joy. Most of what was left was simply dizziness. It was still better than the black horrors. She was glad to be here. She had prayed to be here. The gods had given her the language and, it seemed, a little body-knowledge. Surely they’d have given her enough other skills to get by.

The hall was only a hall, if rather dark: no electric lights here. One or two doorways opened on either side. Only hers had an actual door. In the others, curtains hung from rod-and-ring arrangements, like shower curtains in a bathtub – if shower curtains could be made of burlap.

People might be sleeping behind those curtains, or eating or using the chamberpot or doing whatever people did in curtained rooms in the morning. Nicole didn’t want to look in – to disturb them, she told herself. But some of it was fear and a kind of crippling shyness. She wasn’t ready to see what those people looked like.

At the end of the short hallway, wooden stairs descended in unlit gloom. She drew a breath so deep, she coughed – the stink of this whole world was concentrated here, overlaid with a sharp tenement reek – and squared her shoulders and girded her loins, metaphorically speaking. “Let’s see what we’ve got,” she said a little breathlessly, and set foot on the topmost step.

The stairs opened into an expanse of near-darkness. It felt wider and more open than the area above, and the air, as a consequence, was easier to breathe. It had a new sharpness here, a pungency that wasn’t unpleasant. It reminded her of a student cafe at Indiana, dark and shut up and quiet in the morning before anyone came to open it.

She groped her way along the wall to a glimmer of light that seemed to mark a line of shuttered windows. Shutters, yes. She worked the rawhide lashings free and flung them back, blinking in the sudden glare of daylight.

As she turned back to the room, she clapped her hands in delight that was only about three-quarters forced. “A restaurant!” she said. How wonderful of Liber and Libera – not only a nice body, no husband, and a simpler world, but a direct line to the best food, too. No more frozen di

The room was wider than it was long, and higher than the rooms and hallway above. It held half a dozen tables, no two of them identical – all handmade by human beings, no soulless mass production here – and a small forest of similarly various stools. Toward the rear was a long counter that looked like something out of Rancho Santa Fe: it was made of stones cemented together, with a flat slate top. Arranged on it in rows were baskets of things to nibble on: walnuts, raisins, prunes, faintly wilted green onions.

Nicole let the joy well up again, till she laughed with it. “No Fritos, no Doritos, no Cheetos, no Pringles.” It was a litany of delight.

Set into the countertop were several round wooden lids with iron handles. She passed them by to explore what must, here, do duty for stove and microwave. Just past the wooden lids was an iron griddle over an open fireplace set into the counter. Another fireplace opened farther down. A complicated arrangement of chains hung over it. From several hung a row of pots on hooks.

There didn’t seem to be a chimney. There was a hole in the roof above each fireplace – so that was why the second floor was set back like that, this must be like a walled and covered porch – and the window was open, un-glazed and unscreened. That was all the venting there seemed to be. Soot stained the roofbeams and the plaster of the walls.

“You would think,” she said to the nearer fireplace, “someone here would have thought of the chimney.”

That was a deficiency, and disappointing, nearly as much so as the absence of tampons, but Nicole had to make the best of it. The oven helped. It stood past the farther fireplace, and it was wonderful. Beehive-shaped and made of clay, it could have been the prototype for every pizza oven she’d ever seen… except that, like the fireplaces, it had no proper venting. She would have to see if she could do something about that.

Next to the charming oven stood a large pot full of grain, and what she recognized after a moment as a mill. She fed a few grains of – wheat, she supposed it was – into the opening of the upper stone, then turned it. A sprinkling of flour sifted out of the bottom. She lifted a pinch of it between thumb and forefinger and tasted it. It wasn’t Gold Medal quality, coarse and a little gritty, but it hadn’t come from a factory the size of a city block, either. She’d made it with her own hands. She knew exactly where it came from, and how it got there, too.

She smiled proudly at it. How wonderful. How beautifully natural.

She walked across the rammed-earth floor to the front door, which was made the same way as the one in her room. This time, she opened it without hesitation or fumbling. Learning this first trick of living in Carnuntum made her as proud as if she’d just passed the bar exam.

The view from the doorway was a wider version of the one she’d had from her upstairs window. A building or two down from hers, several large stones were set crosswise in the street, sticking up several inches above the unpaved dirt. An oxcart rolled and squeaked past them without trouble. She saw that its wheels fit into deep ruts in the dirt, evidently a standard width apart.

So why the stones?

Dust. Dirt. Rain – of course, she thought. The stones would help a pedestrian cross from one side of the street to the other without sinking up to her knees in mud.

While she was congratulating herself on having solved yet another mystery of this brave new world, the fellow in the oxcart waved in friendly fashion and said, looking straight at her, “Good morning, Umma! I’ll have some lettuces to sell you next week.”

Nicole felt the heat rise to her cheeks, the hammering in her breast – panic again. She fought it as she’d learned to do at moot court in law school: by turning her back on it and concentrating on her response. “That’s good,” she said, carefully speaking in Latin. The man waved again and went on. She sagged against the doorframe, weak with relief. He hadn’t noticed anything odd.

While she got her wits back together, a woman came past walking an ugly little dog on a leather leash. She nodded to Nicole. People knew this Umma, and apparently liked her, or at least respected her. Nicole was a stranger here, but Umma wasn’t. How in the names of Liber and Libera was she supposed to find her way with people whom she’d never seen before in her life, but who expected her to know everything about them?

She could do it. She knew she could. This wasn’t Los Angeles. This was a simpler world, a purer world, brighter and more i