Household Gods by Judith Tarr Page B

own—her others—had. They were a little larger, too. No bras here, or none that she’d found. The nipples were wide and dark, with the look she’d come to know in her other body, that with the stretch marks on her belly told her that this body had borne at least one child.
    She stood briefly frozen. Children? That meant—

    No. If she’d had a husband, she would have found his clothes and belongings in the room, and him in her bed, too. This was the room of a woman who lived, or at least slept, alone.
    Her mouth twisted. Bless Liber and Libera. After all she’d gone through with Frank, the last thing she either wanted or needed was a husband.
    She shrugged into the brown tunic, stooped and picked up the sandals, pulled and wiggled them onto her feet. The straps puzzled her a bit, with their bronze eyelets, but her hands seemed to know how they went. After a few moments she stopped trying to guide them and let them do what they wanted to do. The fingers worked deftly, lacing and fastening.
    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 annoyance, she braced her back and pulled. The doors flew inward, nearly sweeping her off her feet. They were not hinged, she saw, but hung on pegs that fit into holes in the lintel and sill. How odd. How unusual. How—primitive? No. Just different.
    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 chamber pot 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 café 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