Judith Tarr - Household Gods

And such an easy prayer to answer, though not — they admitted to each other — as strictly usual as most. Most prayers were for wealth or fertility or escape from the morning-after price wine inevitably exacted. Such a wish as this: how wonderfully novel, and how simple, too. Nicole had traveled to Carnuntum. This plaque, on which Liber and Libera’s power was now so singularly focused, had come from that ancient city. And, best of all, when the plaque was made, a woman of Nicole’s blood and line had been living in Carnuntum. Is it not wonderful? they said to one another. Is it not meant? Is it not a beautiful symmetry, as beautiful as we are ourselves?

What pleasure, too, in granting the prayer; what divine and divinely ordained ease. This woman’s spirit was as light as thistledown, for all its leaden weight of worry. Purest simplicity to waft it out of the flesh, to send it spiraling down the long road into that other, kindred body.

Such lovely days, those had been, so much more delightful than these, which were nothing if not dull. How perceptive of this woman to comprehend it, and how ingenious of her to utter a prayer they could grant.

Because she was so clever a child of men, and because they were, in their stony hearts, as generous as gods can sometimes choose to be, they granted her spirit a gift. As it spun backward through the years, they instructed it in the language that mortal men had spoken then, the beautiful Latin that was so little like the harsh barbaric rattle of its native English. It had not thought, silly thing, to ask; but how else could it share fully in those lively times, those vivid and brightly sunlit years before the world grew gray and old?

After all, they assured each other, they were granting her every wish, both expressed and unexpressed. They could do no less for their first worshipper in so many hundred years. Our blessing on you, they called after the swiftly flitting spirit. May all gods keep you, and prosper you, and give you joy.

Nicole’s dreams were strange. She rode a spiral through the dark. Spiral dance? Spiral galaxies? — No: a helix, for she went down, backward, as well as round and round. Damn, what did that remind her of? It was dim, shadowed, fluxing in and out of her perception. And yet…

There. She grasped it and held on tight, before it slipped away again. She’d seen it on TV. Watson and Crick. The Double Helix.

DNA — that was it. Building block of life. Ascending chain of being. Descending stair of existence. She could feel the rungs under her feet, the gravity that drew her down and down, round and round.

She’d never dreamt such a dream before. She’d never been so aware of dreaming, either. Would she remember when she woke? Usually, she didn’t want to. This wasn’t frightening, nor particularly weird as dreams went. It was interesting. Words flitted past her, whispers, murmurs in a language she didn’t know, yet felt — strangely — that she did. How odd, she thought in passing. How wonderful. How deliciously strange.

Maybe after all it was the waking she wouldn’t want to remember. Maybe she wanted to stay inside the dream. She’d dream it to the hilt. She promised herself that, far down the spiral stair, the endlessly turning helix of her own and only self.

Still dreaming but starting to swim out of the long spiraling dark, Nicole rolled over in her bed.

The mattress was lumpy. Her eyelids were still asleep, but her brain roused slowly, taking count of the individual senses. Yes — there were lumps under her. Hard ones. She hissed. Damn those kids! They knew the rule. No hiding toys in Mommy’s bed. Whichever one had done it, it was going to cost. Early bedtime for Kimberley, no Teddy Grahams for -

She drew in a deep, would-be calming breath. Her eyes flew open. She gasped, gagged, almost puked all over the bedclothes. Jesus Christ! What a stink! The last time she’d smelled anything even close to this bad, the septic tank had backed up at Cousin Hedwig’s house in Bloomington. But this was a richer, more complex odor, compounded of sewage and barnyard and city dump and locker room and apartment-house fire. It was a stench with character, a stench to be respected and admired, even a stench to be savored. If you were going to build a stench to order, these were the specs for the very finest, luxury model.

It was such a stench, in fact, that for a couple of seconds her nose overwhelmed her eyes. Even as she decided that a garbage truck must have overturned on the front lawn, she realized something more immediately important.

This wasn’t the room she’d gone to bed in, or any room she remembered, anytime, anywhere.

Wan daylight seeped in through a wood-framed window. There was no glass, only wooden shutters thrown back. Flies danced in the shaft of pale light and buzzed through the room: the window had no screen, either. An enormous hairy black fly landed on the wall near the bed and perched there, rubbing its hands together. The wall was roughly plastered and even more roughly whitewashed. Dark spots here and there suggested that a good many flies had met their death on it.

Aside from the bed, the room was sparsely furnished. A battered chest of drawers stood against one wall, its yellowish pine looking as if it had been the victim of an amateur refinisher. There was no chair, only a pair of stools like — well, like milking stools; they were more or less that shape and about that size. No TV. No photos of kids; no radio, no alarm clock, no lamp on the nightstand. For that matter, no nightstand. No closet, either. Just the bare box of a room and narrow lumpy cot of a bed and the chest and the stools.

On the chest sat a pitcher, a two-handled cup, and a bowl, all of pottery glazed the same gaudy red as the sticks of sealing wax Nicole had affected in her brief but passionately romantic phase, between thirteen and thirteen and a half.

Terra sigillata, she thought. The words shouldn’t have made any sense to her; she knew she’d never known them before. And yet she knew what they meant: sealing-wax ware. That was the name for the crockery on the chest.

A lamp squatted next to the bowl. Another sat on a stool. She’d seen the genie emerging from one just like them in Aladdin. But Aladdin’s lamp had been bronze or brass or something like that. These were plain unglazed clay.

Nicole sat up carefully, as if her head might rock and fall off her shoulders. She wasn’t hung over: she didn’t drink. She wasn’t on anything — no drugs, prescription or otherwise. She might be dreaming, but she could never have dreamt that monumental stink. Which only left -

“I’ve gone crazy,” she said.

Sitting up, she could see the floor. It was no more reassuring than any of the rest of it. No beige shag carpeting here, only bare, well-rubbed boards. Carefully, almost fearfully, she ventured to look up. Boards again. Rough boards, and low, too.

She couldn’t, quite, touch the ceiling, but she could brush her hand across the blanket that covered her. She remembered vividly, distinctly, the touch and feel of her own comforter, its soft down-filled thickness, the faintly wilted but crisp and brightly printed cotton. Its pattern was called Cinnabar. She’d admired the colors when she bought it, deep green to match her eyes, rich dark purple, terracotta, and a touch of red and gold. This wasn’t her comforter. It was a blanket, rough wool worn thin and threadbare, dyed a sad, faded blue.

She itched just looking at it. She scrambled it away from her, thrusting it aside with a hand that -

A hand that — was not her hand.

The fingers twitched when she told them to twitch. The arm lifted when her mind said Lift. But it was not her arm. She knew what her arm looked like. How could she not know what —?