Gunpowder Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  A water jug on her hip, Amanda walked down the street to the public fountain a couple of blocks from her house. She didn’t have to bring water back, not when it was piped into the place. But she or Mom went every few days anyway. Women didn’t just fill up their jars and walk away. They stood around and chatted, the way men were more likely to do in the market square. Locals said I heard it by the fountain when they meant I heard it through the grapevine.

  The last couple of times, Mom had sent Amanda to get water and listen to the chatter. Mom liked to go herself. That she stayed home gnawed at Amanda. Mom kept insisting everything was all right now. Trouble was, she didn’t act as if everything were all right.

  A girl about Amanda’s own age came out of a house not far from the fountain. “Hello, Maria,” Amanda said. “How are you this morning?” She’d got to know the local the last time her family was in Polisso.

  “I’m fine, thank you, Mistress Amanda,” Maria answered. She was short and skinny and dark. She had a delicately arched nose and front teeth that stuck out and spoiled her looks. In the home timeline, braces would have fixed that. Here, she was stuck with it. Her smile was sweet even so. “God bless you,” she told Amanda. She was a Christian, and not one of the Imperial sort. She clung tight to her beliefs, not least because she had little else to cling to. She was a slave.

  “What do you know?” Amanda said uncomfortably. She had tried and failed to imagine what it would be like to own somebody, or to be owned. If the prosperous potter Maria belonged to ever ran short of cash, he could sell her as if she were a secondhand car. And he could visit indignities on her no car ever suffered. Under local law, every bit of that was legal, too.

  “I know God loves me.” Maria did sound convinced of it. Maybe believing that helped keep her from fretting about her fate in this world. She went on, “And I know my master is worrying about the godless Lietuvans again.”

  “Is he?” Amanda said. Maria nodded. The Lietuvans weren’t really godless. But they did have their own gods. They didn’t much like the traditional Roman deities. And they really didn’t like the Christian God. In Lietuva, Christians still became martyrs. There weren’t many of them there. The handful who did live in the kingdom lived secretly, and in fear. Even in Amanda’s world, Lithuania had been the last European country to accept Christianity.

  Maria said, “He thinks they will go to war with the Empire. There have been more Lietuvan merchants and traders in town than usual. He says they are all spies.”

  The guard at the gate had talked about Lietuvan spies when Amanda and her family came into Polisso. Had he known something? Or had the city prefect or the garrison commander started worrying for no good reason? That could make everybody in town jumpy.

  “Why doesn’t your family have any servants, Amanda?” Maria asked. “You traders must be rich. You could afford them. Then you wouldn’t have to do work like this.” She didn’t say a slave’s work—it wasn’t, or wasn’t always, anyhow—but she meant something like that.

  “We like taking care of things for ourselves,” Amanda answered. It was an un-Roman attitude, but she couldn’t explain the real reasons.

  Maria looked puzzled. “But you don’t mind doing this?” She sounded puzzled, too.

  “It’s just something that needs doing,” Amanda said. If it were something she had to do every day of her life, she probably wouldn’t have felt that way about it. It wouldn’t just have been work. It would have been drudgery. Most of the year, she didn’t have to worry about it. Maria did.

  Other women at the fountain were talking about the Lietuvans, too. Maybe that meant there was something to Maria’s master’s alarm. Maybe it just meant they’d all heard the same rumors. Either way, Amanda knew she’d have to tell her folks about it. They didn’t want to get trapped in a war.

  A lot of the chatter at the fountain, though, could have happened in front of the lockers at Canoga Park High. The women and girls talked about who was seeing whom. They talked about who was cheating on whom. They traded news on where the prices were good, and on who had the best stuff. A couple of them asked Amanda about the mirrors her family was selling.

  “How do they give such good reflections?” a plump woman asked. “Nobody in town has ever seen anything like them.”

  Amanda went into her song and dance about buying the mirrors from people who lived a long way away. The less she admitted knowing about them, the fewer really pointed questions she’d get.

  “It’s too bad you won’t tell,” the plump woman said.

  “Oh, leave her alone, Lavinia,” another woman said. “You mean to tell me your kin haven’t got any trade secrets?”

  “Well, of course we do,” Lavinia said. “But not everybody’s so interested in ours.”

  That made Amanda want to fill up her jar and get back to the house as fast as she could. But the women took turns, and cutting ahead would get her talked about much more—and much more nastily—than any trade secrets. She had to wait and smile and pretend she didn’t know what Lavinia was talking about.

  While she was waiting, though, Jeremy came up the street calling, “Amanda! Amanda, come home quick!”

  Ice ran through her. “What’s the matter?” she said, afraid she already knew the answer.

  Her brother didn’t come right out and say it, not in front of all the women. He did say, “Mom needs you,” in a way that could only mean one thing.

  “I’m coming.” Amanda started away without a backwards glance.

  Quietly, Maria called, “I’ll pray for you,” after her. Amanda had told her Mom wasn’t feeling well. The rest of the women would soon know the same thing.

  Once Amanda got out of earshot of them, she asked, “What is it? How bad is it?”

  “Dad thinks it’s her appendix,” Jeremy answered. “All the pain is here now.” He rested his hand between his right hipbone and his belly button, then went on, “She’ll have to go back and have it out. That’s not something to take care of here. They’re sending a chamber now, down in the subbasement. He’ll go back with her, then come here again as soon as she’s okay.”

  Amanda nodded. “That’s fine. We can manage by ourselves for a couple of days, or whatever it takes. I just want to make sure Mom’s all right.”

  Her mother didn’t look all right, or anywhere close to it. By the dark circles under her eyes, the pain wasn’t just in one place now. It was worse than it had been, maybe a lot worse. But she tried hard to stay cheerful. She kissed Amanda and said, “I’ll be fine. If it is appendicitis, they won’t have any trouble fixing it once I get back to the home timeline.”

  Dad and Jeremy and Amanda all helped her down to the subbasement. The chamber appeared in the room fifteen minutes later. Dad and the operator eased Mom inside. Dad said, “I’ll send a message as soon as we know for sure, and I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

  “Okay,” Amanda and Jeremy said together. The chamber door slid shut. A moment later, the chamber disappeared. Amanda looked at Jeremy. He was looking back at her. For a little while, they were on their own.

  Five

  Jeremy thought people were looking at him. He had to go out in Polisso and pretend everything was normal. Mom and Dad had been gone for only a few hours. Jeremy felt as if his shield against the world were gone, too. Responsibilities weighed a million kilos. If he made a bad mistake, he couldn’t pass any part of it on to someone else. It was his.

  And he worried about Mom. Appendicitis was something simple enough to fix on the home timeline. But all the same, even doctors said the only minor surgery was surgery you didn’t have to have. If something went wrong…Or if it turned out not to be appendicitis, but something worse…

  He wouldn’t think about that. He told himself so, again and again. It was like trying not to think of a green-and-orange zebra. You could tell yourself you wouldn’t. You could tell yourself all sorts of things. The thought kept returning just the same.

  “Furs! I have fine furs!” a Lietuvan trader shouted
. Jeremy kept on walking through the market square. He didn’t want furs. He wanted to tell the Lietuvan what he thought of him for selling them. He couldn’t. A real Agrippan Roman might not have bought fur, but he wouldn’t have minded anyone selling it.

  And the locals call the Lietuvans barbarians, Jeremy thought. They’re more alike than they are different.

  They had reason to be, of course. Rome and Lietuva had lived next door to each other for a thousand years. They’d fought wars against each other. They’d traded. Ideas had gone across their border along with trade goods. NeoLatin had words for things like amber and wax and slave that were borrowed from Lietuvan. Lietuvan had more words taken from classical Latin and neoLatin: a whole host of technical terms, as well as words like wine and wheel and ship.

  Another Lietuvan in a fur jacket called, “Here! You are a young man! Buy yourself a slave girl! She’s well trained. She’ll do what you tell her.” He leered.

  The girl he pointed at was blond and skinny and broad-faced, with high cheekbones. She couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. Her threadbare tunic was filthy. She didn’t look well trained. She looked scared to death.

  “You want her?” the Lietuvan asked. “I’ll give you a good price.”

  “No.” Again, Jeremy kept on walking. Behind him, the Lietuvan said something in his own language. Whatever it was, it wasn’t praise. Jeremy didn’t care. He discovered he’d only thought being offered furs was disgusting. Now he found the real thing. If he gave the trader enough silver, the fellow would sell him the girl.

  He couldn’t. Dealing in slaves, even to set them free, was as illegal as could be for crosstime traders. Setting her free wouldn’t do her much of a favor, anyhow. What was called freedom here was often only the freedom to starve. Keeping her was just as much out of the question. She would ask questions the traders couldn’t answer, see things she wasn’t supposed to see, and learn things the locals shouldn’t know. Whatever happened to her would just have to happen.

  “Good luck,” Jeremy whispered. She would need it. He hoped she got an easy master. There were some: quite a few, in fact. That wasn’t really the problem with slavery. The problem with slavery was that there were masters, period.

  “Plums! Peaches! Who’ll buy my plums and peaches?” a peasant woman called. She wore a bright scarf wrapped around her head. Years of weathering had left her cheeks almost the same color as the plums in her basket. The peaches here were smaller and paler than the ones Jeremy knew from the home timeline. They didn’t taste just the same, either. They weren’t quite so sweet, but they had a spicy flavor he liked.

  He haggled long enough to look normal, then took a small basket full of them back to the house. He’d brought the basket himself. Nobody here gave out shopping bags or anything like them.

  Amanda opened the door as soon as he knocked. Smiles wreathed her face. “You’ve heard from Dad!” Jeremy exclaimed.

  His sister nodded. “It was her appendix, and now it’s out, and she’s going to be fine.”

  Some of the weight fell from Jeremy’s shoulders. “That’s…about the best news there is,” he said. “Did Dad say how long he’ll stay back there?”

  “A few days,” Amanda answered. “He can’t be quite sure yet, ’cause he has to see how Mom’s doing. But he said he’d get back here as soon as he could. And Mom shouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks—but she’ll have to wear a patch of false skin over the scar when she goes to the baths.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Jeremy said, but it made sense when he did. Nobody here had a scar like that. Agrippan Rome knew no anesthetics. It had no antibiotics. It had never heard of sterile operating techniques. A wound in the belly meant sure death from infection.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Amanda said. “She’s going to be okay. That does.”

  “Yeah.” Jeremy nodded. Yes, some of the weight was off. Things would get back to normal pretty soon. Now he could concentrate on how much business he and Amanda did before Dad came back to Polisso.

  And he could tell Michael Fujikawa the good news. He stayed up late to try and catch Michael getting up. When he went to the laptop in the hidden part of the basement, he found a message waiting for him. How’s your mom doing?

  “She went back to the home timeline,” he answered, as if his friend were standing there in front of him. The computer transcribed his words. “It was appendicitis. Dad was right about that. They took out her appendix. She’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Dad says he’ll be back in a few days—as soon as he’s sure she’s all right. She should be. The operation went fine.”

  He waited. He didn’t have to wait long. Michael must have been sitting at the laptop that connected them across the skein of alternates. That’s terrific! he said. I’m sorry she had to have the operation, but now she’ll be okay. So you and Amanda are by yourselves? How you doing?

  “We’re okay,” Jeremy said. “We can manage on our own for a little while, anyway. I want to see how much we can sell before Dad gets here again.”

  There you go, Michael told him. Show him what you can do by

  The message stopped there. Jeremy frowned, waiting for Michael to go on. But only the incomplete sentence stared at him. After half a minute or so, new words formed on the screen:

  TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Jeremy asked. The message program was still running, so those words went up on the monitor, too. “You there, Michael?” That appeared, too. What didn’t appear was an answer from Michael Fujikawa.

  Muttering, Jeremy ordered the computer to send the message. He got the same error report as before: TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE.

  “But I’m not even trying to send to the home timeline,” Jeremy protested. He really did swear when he saw those words go up on the screen. Then a chill ran through him. He wasn’t trying to send to the home timeline, but everything went through it. He called up the address code for the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad. That was the home timeline’s counterpart of this place. “Is everything all right there?” he asked, and told the laptop to send.

  TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE.

  That wasn’t good at all—not even slightly. Something had gone wrong somewhere between here and the world where he’d been born.

  He tried Michael one more time, and got the same error message. Really scared now, he left—fled—the basement. The secret door closed behind him.

  Amanda was not someone who gave in to panic. She was someone who always tried to look on the bright side of things. That was one reason her brother sometimes drove her crazy. Of course, Jeremy had woken her out of a sound sleep to tell her about the error message. She was not at her best yawning in the middle of the night.

  She went down to the basement to try to send messages to the home timeline herself. When she found she couldn’t, either, she went back to her bedroom. “It’ll be fine in the morning,” she said.

  “How do you know that?” Jeremy demanded.

  “Because nothing’s ever as awful when the sun comes out as it is at three in the morning, or whatever time it is now,” Amanda answered. Then she shut the door in his face.

  The computer still wouldn’t send messages when she got up in the morning. That wasn’t good news. It was, in fact, very bad news. With the sun shining down brightly on the courtyard, though, it didn’t seem so bad.

  Before long, Amanda was too busy to worry about it anyway. She and her mother had had all they could do to keep the house in some kind of order and to keep everybody fed without help from servants or slaves. Now she had to do it without Mom around. It was more work than one human being could do.

  She tried to get Jeremy to help. He didn’t want to. That made her lose her temper. “You listen to me, Jeremy,” she snapped. “If you don’t do what needs doing, I’ll tell Dad when he gets back here. Then you’ll catch it. And you know what else? You’ll deserve it, too.”
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br />   He helped. He was surly about it. He helped less than he would have if he’d known what he was doing. Sometimes just having an extra pair of hands and an extra pair of eyes made a difference, though.

  Breaking off from the housework to deal with customers every once in a while didn’t help, either. The one good thing about that was that nobody asked them, Where are your mother and father? The locals probably thought they would get better deals from the younger people in the family. They were wrong, but it kept them from being too curious.

  Two days passed. Three days. Four. Five. The computer kept giving the same error report whenever Amanda and Jeremy tried to send a message. No message from any of the other alternates or the home timeline came in.

  And Dad didn’t come back to Polisso.

  At first, Amanda wondered whether that was because something had gone wrong with Mom. No way to know for sure, not when the message system was down. As one day followed another, though, she began to realize that probably wasn’t the problem.

  “I think something’s wrong with the transposition chamber,” she said to Jeremy at supper the sixth night.

  When she put it that way, it didn’t sound so bad. If she’d said, I’m afraid we’re stuck here forever, it would have seemed much worse. But it would have meant the same thing.

  Her brother was sucking marrow out of a lamb shank. Amanda thought that took realism too far, but Jeremy really did like marrow. Air and marrow going through the center of the bone made a gross noise. He smacked his lips.

  “You may be right,” he said, scratching his chin. He was growing the scraggly beginnings of a beard. Razors here, even the straight razors the traders sold, were nothing but long, slim knives. No neat blades in plastic safety housings. You could do yourself some serious damage if you weren’t careful. From what he said, the beard itched coming in.