Household Gods by Judith Tarr Page A

told her: whoever this was, it wasn’t Nicole Gunther-Perrin, West Hills, California, USA.
    This face—long, strong-nosed, strong-chinned—looked to be about the same age as the one she’d left behind. The eyes were dark, as she’d more than half expected. When she smiled, the broken tooth was visible, but it wasn’t as bad as it had felt. A corner out of an incisor, that was all. It didn’t disfigure her. It made her look rather interesting.
    Not bad, she thought, deliberately striving for objectivity—like a lawyer, think clearly, see all the angles, don’t involve the self if at all possible. This body she wore was no great beauty, but neither would it make people look away in the street. She considered it with some satisfaction. Beauty would have been too much. This was a good-looking woman, attractive without being too much so, and those cheekbones were everything she’d ever dreamed of when she was growing up. Her—other—face hadn’t had any to speak of.
    She smiled at the face in the mirror. It smiled back, dark eyes sparkling—no muddy catty green; and those black-brown curls framed it quite nicely indeed. “I’ll do,” she said. “I’ll definitely do.”
    She laid the mirror carefully in the makeup case and put it away. The odd feeling of trespass faded as she explored the rest of the drawers in the chest. They held several pairs of thick wool socks, not too unlike the ones you could order from L. L. Bean for winter weekend wear, and tunics of about the same style as the one she was wearing. Some were of wool, others, lighter, of linen. A couple were dark blue, one a rusty brown, and the others not only undyed but not particularly clean. There was a definite limitation to the color scheme here, and not too much regard for hygiene, either. With the tunics she found a pair of woolen cloaks, one old and growing threadbare, the other so new it still smelled powerfully of sheep.
    The last drawer, on the bottom, opened less easily than the rest. She had to set her back to it and pull, and hope she
didn’t break something. When it gave way at last, she found the drawer crammed full of rags. Dustrags? Cleaning rags? She frowned. They were all clean, but the stains on the ones she pulled out were hard to mistake. Even modern detergents couldn’t always remove the stain of blood.
    Bandages, then? Yes, she thought, in a way. Clearly, the Romans had never heard of tampons.
    That could be a nuisance. She hadn’t thought about such things when she’d prayed to Liber and Libera to snatch her out of her own place and time. She should have asked them for a stopover at a drugstore. The things she could have brought with her if she had—
    Obviously, that wasn’t how it worked. She told herself she didn’t care. She didn’t. She hadn’t prayed for physical comfort or material wealth. She’d asked for equality; for justice. For a world that gave a woman a fairer chance, and a better quality of life. They’d brought her here, hadn’t they? Then they must have given her the rest, too. If a price came with it, if she had to resort to rags for a week a month, then that was a price worth paying. After all, she couldn’t be the only one. Every other woman in this place—in Carnuntum—had to do the same. That was equality, after a fashion.
    She couldn’t help thinking that it would be even more equal if the men had to do it, too. But she doubted even gods had the power to change the world as profoundly as that.
    She pulled the blue tunic off over her head and picked up the brown, which seemed the cleanest of the lot. Before she put it on, she paused, looking down at herself. It felt strange, like being a voyeur, but she was inside the body she stared at.
    It wasn’t a bad body. The Nicole who’d lived in West Hills would have killed to be as slim as this. The breasts did sag a bit, more than her