“Most alternates that haven’t had an industrial revolution are like this,” Jeremy said. “If you don’t have machines, size and strength count for more than they do with us. Guys don’t have babies, either.”
“It’s still not right,” Amanda said.
“Did I tell you it was?” Her brother gave her a don’t-blame-me look. “But even if it’s not—even though it’s not—it’s real.”
And that was also true, and also stung. But the next day, Jeremy went to see the city prefect. Amanda went to the public water fountain with a jug on her hip to listen to the talk there. That’s what people here think women are good for, she thought. Carrying water and gossip. And I can’t even rock the boat.
There was gossip, too—plenty of it. A plump woman with an enormous wart on the end of her nose spoke in important tones: “I hear the city prefect ordered all the Lietuvan traders out of Polisso last night.”
“No, that isn’t true,” the slave girl named Maria said. “A lot of them are leaving, but they’re leaving on their own.”
“How do you know so much?” The woman with the wart—not a regular at the fountain—looked down her nose past it at the slave.
Maria didn’t get angry. Amanda had never seen her get angry. Maybe that was because she was a slave and couldn’t afford to. Maybe it was because she was a Christian—what they called a strong Christian here, not an Imperial Christian—and didn’t believe in it. Or maybe she was just a nice person. She said, “I pray with a girl who serves at the inn where the Lietuvans stay. That’s what she told me.”
“Well, I heard my news from someone who heard it from the city prefect’s second secretary’s cousin’s hairdresser,” the plump woman said.
Amanda laughed out loud. If that woman thought her account trumped what an eyewitness said…But a couple of the other ladies filling water jugs were nodding, too. They must have believed it did. Both of them were free and fairly prosperous. As far as Amanda could see, both of them were also fairly dumb.
“Too bad they’ll let the Lietuvans go,” one of those ladies said. “We could hold them for hostages in case the barbarians attack.”
“What would the Lietuvans do to Romans they caught, then?” Amanda asked. She didn’t call the woman a jerk, no matter what she thought.
“Well, they’d do that anyway. They are barbarians,” the woman answered. All the women gathered around the fountain nodded this time. Maybe the Lietuvans really did do horrible things to any Romans they caught. Maybe the Romans just thought they did. How was anybody supposed to know for sure? Go out and let the Lietuvans capture you? That didn’t seem like a good idea to Amanda.
A squad of soldiers marched by. Nobody in Agrippan Rome had ever heard of the wolf whistle, but the men in the dull red surcoats had no trouble getting the message across. Guys in Los Angeles usually weren’t so crude. Amanda turned her back on the soldiers. That only made them laugh.
Some of the other women just ignored the men’s leers and gestures and suggestions. A few of them smiled back, though. That horrified Amanda. If they encouraged the soldiers, those men would go right on acting that way. They would think they were right to act that way.
How could she say that, so someone who’d spent her whole life in Agrippan Rome would understand? It wasn’t easy. People here took lots of things for granted that nobody in the home timeline would have put up with for a minute. The best Amanda could do was, “If you give them a smile, they’ll only want more.”
“Maybe I will, too, dearie,” a woman twice her age said. Everybody except Amanda laughed. And she didn’t push it any more. What was the use? She wasn’t going to change this alternate single-handed.
She wished she hadn’t had that thought. If she really was stuck here, how much would this alternate end up changing her?
Six
The city prefect was a moon-faced, middle-aged man named Sesto Capurnio and nicknamed Gemino, which meant he was one of a set of twins. As far as Jeremy knew, the other half of the pair didn’t live in Polisso. Jeremy didn’t know whether that meant he lived in some other town or wasn’t alive at all.
Sesto Capurnio collected modern art. That meant something different here from what it would have in Los Angeles. Nobody in Agrippan Rome would know what to make of abstract painting or sculpture. Hardly any cultures that hadn’t invented the camera produced art that didn’t try to represent reality. Photographs reproduced the real world more exactly than painters and sculptors could hope to do. That let them in fact, it almost forced them to—try other things.
What the city prefect called modern art were pieces done by artists of Agrippan Rome from the past couple of hundred years. Even that made him unusual. For most collectors here, the older, the better. If they had an early Roman copy of an ancient Greek original, that was good. If they had the Greek original itself, that was heaven. But Sesto Capurnio was different.
Several busts of recent Emperors stared at Jeremy from behind the city prefect. The effect was eerie, not least because they were painted to look as realistic as they could. Eyes of ivory and colored glass added to the effect. Jeremy had seen the head of Honorio Prisco III in the temple. He still had trouble getting used to the style.
Sesto Capurnio also had several paintings on his wall. Some were landscapes, others scenes taken from mythology. One showed Christ and Mithras beating back a demon together. Official Roman belief mixed faiths in a blender.
And he had a pot made in the shape of a dog’s head with a rabbit in its mouth. You drank from the dog’s left ear. Jeremy was no art critic, but he knew what he liked. The best thing anyone could have done with that pot was break it. Into little pieces. Lots of them. The more, the better.
“It is good to see you, young Ieremeo,” Sesto Capurnio said. Jeremy could have done without that young. But then, Sesto Capurnio was a pompous fool. He spoke neoLatin in a way that suggested he’d start spouting the classical language any minute. He never quite did, but still….
“I thank you, most illustrious prefect of the great municipality of Polisso.” Jeremy laid it on with a trowel, too. If he sounded as educated as the prefect, Sesto Capurnio couldn’t score any style points off him. He went on, “I am glad to see that city garrison has been reinforced. The barbarians will surely know better than to trouble us now.”
“Of course they will,” Capurnio said. They were both lying through their teeth. They both knew it, too. Nobody wanted to see new soldiers coming into the city. If they were here, that meant Polisso was liable to need them.
Jeremy picked up a heavy leather sack full of silver. “I know these men will need supplies,” he said. “Here is my family’s small gift to the city, for the sake of the soldiers who have just come.” He set the sack on the table behind which Sesto Capurnio sat.
“You are generous.” The city prefect picked up the sack. One of his eyebrows jumped in surprise at the weight. “By the gods, you are generous.”
He didn’t seem to want to set the money down. Jeremy wondered how many denari would stick to his fingers. Some, no doubt. This was a world that ran on nudges and winks and greased palms. Come to that, most worlds did. This one, though, was more open about it than a lot of them.
With a small sigh, Sesto Capurnio said, “I am sure the soldiers will be grateful for your bounty.” That meant he knew he couldn’t get away with lifting the whole sack. If Jeremy told an officer he’d given Capurnio money and the soldiers had seen none of it, that could make the prefect’s life difficult.
“It is the least we can do,” Jeremy said. By that, he meant, It is the most we can do. Don’t ask us to do anything else.
“Very generous. Very kind. A gift whose like I wish we had from every prosperous citizen of Polisso,” the city prefect said. By that, he probably meant, I will have a gift like this from every man who doesn’t want soldiers in his house, drinking the best wine and coming on to the slave women—or to his wife and daughters.
“The town needs to be as safe and secure as it c
an,” Jeremy said. “And now, most illustrious prefect, if you will excuse me…”
Instead of going through the usual polite good-byes, Capurnio said, “Wait one moment, Ieremeo Soltero, if you would be as generous with your time as you are with your silver. There is something I would like to know from you, and I hope you will be kind enough to tell me.”
“If I can, I will,” Jeremy said. “I should not speak about the secrets of my trade, any more than any other merchant would.”
“Of course not,” the city prefect said. “What I want to know is, why are you making this generous gift, and not your father?”
“Oh,” Jeremy said, as if he’d expected just that question. In fact, it did not surprise him all that much. “My father and mother went out of Polisso a few days ago. That is why.”
“I see.” Sesto Capurnio shuffled through sheets of papyrus and paper and parchment. “I have no record of their leaving the city.”
Jeremy gulped. In Agrippan Rome, not to have a record of something was serious business. Records proved a person was real. They proved that things had really happened. By contrast, not having records meant something hadn’t happened at all. That could be a problem. If Jeremy and Amanda were stuck here in Polisso with no escape through a transposition chamber, it could be a big problem.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Jeremy said. “They had to go back to Carnuto, and so they did. If your guards don’t know about it, they can’t have been keeping up with things very well, can they?”
The city prefect had poked him, so he poked back. Accusing the gate guards of not keeping the proper records was like accusing Sesto Capurnio of sleeping on the job. Capurnio glared. “You will give me an affidavit concerning this?” he asked in a harsh voice.
An affidavit would give him the record he wanted. Jeremy nodded. “Sure I will,” he said. He didn’t like lying, but he liked being cut off from the home timeline even less.
“Very well.” By Sesto Capurnio’s scowl, it was anything but. Jeremy wished he hadn’t angered the city prefect. But if Capurnio didn’t believe Mom and Dad had left Polisso, what was he going to believe? That Jeremy and Amanda had killed their parents? The punishment for that was putting each guilty person in a sack with a dog, a cock, and a snake and throwing all the sacks in the river. In some ways, Agrippan Rome had changed very little from ancient days.
Sesto Capurnio called in a secretary. The man took down Jeremy’s statement, using a stylus to write the words on wax that coated one side of a wooden tablet. That was what the locals used for a scratch pad. When the secretary made a mistake, he rubbed it out with the blunt end of the stylus and wrote over it.
“Let me have that,” Capurnio said when Jeremy was done. The secretary gave him the tablet. He read the affidavit aloud. “Is this the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” he asked at the end.
“It is,” Jeremy answered. Some of it was true: his mother and father had left Polisso, and he didn’t know when they’d be back. If they hadn’t gone out by way of the west gate…the locals didn’t need to know that.
“Do you swear by…” Capurnio paused. “You are an Imperial Christian, is that not so?”
“Yes, illustrious prefect.”
The illustrious prefect’s face said he had a low opinion of all Christians, Imperial or otherwise. His words, though, were all business: “Do you swear, then, by your God and by your hopes for the Emperor’s health, long life, and success that what you have stated is true and complete?”
“I do, illustrious prefect.”
“Go on, then—and thank you again for your generosity,” Sesto Capurnio added grudgingly.
“Thank you for your kindness, illustrious prefect,” Jeremy said. Sesto Capurnio turned around and looked at his collection of imperial heads. The Emperors stared back without a blink. Jeremy left the city prefect’s house in a hurry. He had the feeling Capurnio might not have let him go if he stayed much longer.
Amanda sat in the courtyard with a customer. They both enjoyed the warm summer sun. House sparrows sat on the edge of the red roof tiles and chirped. A starling hopped around in the herb garden. Every now and then it plunged its banana-yellow beak into the dirt. Sometimes it got something good to eat. Sometimes it had to try again.
She could have seen house sparrows and starlings in Los Angeles, of course. Neither was native to North America. She didn’t know how house sparrows had got there. At the end of the nineteenth century, a mad Englishman who wanted America to have all of Shakespeare’s birds had imported ten dozen starlings to Central Park in New York City. He’d brought in nightingales, too. The nightingales promptly died out. There were millions and millions of starlings all over the continent. It struck Amanda as a bad bargain.
Her customer was a matron named Livia Plurabella. She was a little older than Mom, and would have been a beauty if smallpox scars hadn’t slagged her cheeks. She took the scars in stride, much more than she would have in Amanda’s world. Here, plenty of women—and men, too—had their looks ruined the same way. Men could hide pockmarks with a beard. Women had to make do with powder and paint. Livia Plurabella didn’t even try. She must have known a losing battle when she saw one.
“Let me have a look at that one, if you please,” she said, pointing to a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl handle. “I like the way it gives back the sunlight.”
“Here you are, my lady,” Amanda said. The older woman was the wife of the richest banker in town. He wasn’t a noble. In fact, he was the son of a freedman. Banking wasn’t a high-class profession in Agrippan Rome. But, here as everywhere else, money talked. And money Marco Plurabello had.
His wife opened the razor. “Isn’t that something?” she murmured. She seemed to admire the glitter of the sun off the edge even more than the way it brought out the pink and silver of the mother-of-pearl. She shaved a patch of hair on her arm. “Well!” she said. “Isn’t that something?” The blade was of better steel and sharper than anything local smiths could make.
“If you strop it regularly, it will last you a lifetime,” Amanda said. That was true, even though women in Agrippan Rome shaved more places than they did in California. The notion of shaving with a straight razor made Amanda queasy anyway. Jeremy hadn’t wanted to try it, either. A mistake with that thing wasn’t a nick. It was a disaster.
Livia Plurabella looked at the bare spot on her forearm. She felt of it. “I believe you,” she said. By the way she brought those words out, she didn’t use them every day. She closed the razor. It clicked. She waited, one eyebrow raised.
“A hundred fifty denari.” Amanda answered the unspoken question.
“Well!” the banker’s wife said again. “I thought you would put the price in grain.”
“We’ve changed our policy there,” Amanda said.
“Sensible. Very sensible.” Livia Plurabella nodded. “I’ll give you eighty for the razor.”
“I’m sorry, but no. We haven’t changed our policy there at all,” Amanda said. “We don’t haggle.” She still wondered how much trouble they would get into for taking money instead of grain. If Crosstime Traffic wanted to yell about that, the company was welcome to yell as much as it cared to. She and Jeremy had nowhere to store grain if they couldn’t ship it out of Polisso. But they were trying to bend as few rules as they could.
Livia Plurabella frowned. It was the sort of frown that said, You can’t possibly mean what you just said, kid. It was meant to intimidate Amanda. Instead, it made her mad. The matron said, “I don’t know that I want this razor enough to pay one hundred fifty denari for it.”
“That’s for you to decide, my lady,” Amanda said politely. “We’ve sold several at that price—or the equivalent in grain—and nobody’s complained. If you want to keep on using something ordinary, though, go right ahead.”
Livia Plurabella frowned again. This time, she looked worried. Amanda hoped she was imagining other women having something she didn’t. Amanda also hoped she was imagining
the other women laughing at her because she didn’t have it. Advertising was one more place where the home timeline had a long lead on Agrippan Rome. Amanda had seen a million commercials. Almost without thinking, she knew what buttons to push. And Livia Plurabella didn’t know what to do when Amanda pushed them.
“I don’t think you’re being reasonable about the price,” she complained. But her voice lacked conviction.
Amanda pounced: “Oh, but I am, my lady. You admired the mother-of-pearl. It comes all the way from the Red Sea.” What little mother-of-pearl the Romans had did come from there. She went on. “And if you can find an edge like that on any other razor—”
“Any razor you don’t sell, you mean,” the other woman broke in.
“Yes, that’s right.” Amanda nodded proudly. “Everything we sell is of the best quality. If you can find something to match it anywhere else, go ahead and do that.”
She pushed another button there. People in Polisso couldn’t get anything to match what the crosstime traders sold, and they knew it. Livia Plurabella’s face said just how well she knew it. “Oh, all right.” She sounded angry—more angry at the world than angry at Amanda. “A hundred fifty denari. We have a bargain.”
“I’ll write up your contract,” Amanda said, and she did. She hoped Livia Plurabella could read. Otherwise she would have to witness the local woman’s mark. Even if she did, Marco Plurabello might still raise a stink and claim she’d cheated his wife. That wouldn’t be true or just, but he was a power in Polisso. He wouldn’t need truth or justice on his side to get what he wanted.
But Livia Plurabella proved to have her letters, as Amanda had hoped she would. If any woman in Polisso was likely to, a banker’s wife would. “Let me have that pen, please,” the matron said, Amanda gave it to her. She wrote her name on both copies of the contract. “Here.”
“Thank you very much, my lady,” Amanda said.
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