Gunpowder Empire

by Harry Turtledove

“Well, if somebody else did do it, they’re liable to come up from the subbasement and wipe us out in the next twenty minutes,” Jeremy said. “What are we going to do about that?”

  Amanda hadn’t the faintest idea. She hadn’t thought she could feel any worse than she did already. Now she discovered she was wrong. “Thanks a lot,” she told her brother. “You just gave me something brand new to worry about.”

  He shook his head. “Nope. No point worrying about that, because we can’t do anything about it. What we can do is worry about this lousy official report, and about selling as much as we can, and about doing whatever we can to make sure the Lietuvans don’t take Polisso. Getting captured and sold into slavery can ruin your whole day.”

  “So can getting killed,” Amanda pointed out.

  “That, too,” Jeremy said.

  He was so grave, so earnest, so serious, that Amanda started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. When Jeremy was being reasonable, she didn’t want to think. When he was being serious, she wanted to act like a clown. What went through her mind was, Anybody would think he’s my big brother, or something.

  “I don’t know what else we can do except wait and hope and keep trying our best as long as we’re stuck here,” he said now.

  That was what she’d been thinking, too. She hadn’t liked the idea. It was the best they could manage. No doubt of that. It still seemed grim. Or it had seemed grim, till he said it. Then, all of a sudden, it was the funniest thing in the world. That made no sense at all, which didn’t stop it from being true. She giggled.

  Jeremy gave her an odd look. “You’re weird,” he said.

  “You only just noticed?” Amanda laughed harder than ever. It was probably no more than reaction to too much stress carried for too long. It felt awfully good anyhow.

  Solemn as usual, Jeremy shook his head again. “No, I’d suspected it for a while now.”

  “Really? What gave you the clue, Sherlock?” I’m punchy, Amanda thought. Well, who could blame me? I’ve earned the right.

  The market square was a busy place these days. Everybody who lived in Polisso was trying to get hold of enough food to last out a siege. The soldiers who’d come to reinforce the garrison were laying in food, too. They all reminded Jeremy of squirrels gathering nuts for the winter. But that was important business for the squirrels, and this was important business for the locals.

  If you had grain to sell, you could pretty much name your price. Somebody would pay it. Jeremy knew how many modii of wheat were stored under the house. He didn’t want to sell them, though, even if he could make a lot of silver on the deal. The local authorities already wondered about Amanda and him. They would ask why those sacks of wheat hadn’t left the city, the way they thought the grain had. They would accuse him of profiteering if he sold now.

  A soldier was arguing with a farmer. “You should take less,” he said.

  “How come?” the farmer said. “When am I going to get another chance to make this kind of money?”

  “But you’re cheating me,” the soldier said.

  “By the gods, I’m not,” the farmer answered. He was a big, burly man, almost as tall as Jeremy and half again as wide through the shoulders. Next to him, the soldier was a skinny, yappy little terrier. The farmer went on, “If you don’t want to pay what I ask, you don’t have to. I’ll find other customers.”

  “Not if the city prefect or the commandant sets a top price,” the soldier said. “They can do that. All they have to do is declare danger of siege. Everybody knows that’s real. Then fixing prices is as legal as buying and selling slaves.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s legal. But prefects don’t try it very often,” the farmer said. “And do you know why? Because when they set a top price, they always set it too cursed low. Then nobody wants to sell any grain. It just disappears from the market, and people start going hungry.”

  “You—You—” The soldier looked as if he couldn’t find anything bad enough to call the farmer. “To the crows with you!” he snarled at last, and stalked off. Disgust showed in every line of his body.

  Laughing, the farmer turned to Jeremy and said, “I’d like to see him get a better deal from anybody else.”

  Jeremy nodded. The farmer thought the way a merchant had to think. But if your city was in danger, didn’t you have to ease off on that approach? If you didn’t, wouldn’t you end up without a city to do business in? Who decided when you did that? How did whoever it was draw the line?

  Those were all good questions. Jeremy didn’t have good answers for any of them. He was scratching his head as he went on to the temple dedicated to the Emperor’s spirit.

  When he stopped in the narthex to get a pinch of incense to light on the altar, the clerk who took his three denari for it looked puzzled. “By the records, Ieremeo Soltero, you have already made the required offering. Why are you here?”

  “To make another offering,” Jeremy said. “Polisso may be in danger, after all.”

  “How…public-spirited of you,” the clerk said.

  Jeremy did his best to look modest. He felt more like a hypocrite than ever. But he wanted officials seeing him acting public-spirited. It might help take the heat off Amanda and him. Even if it didn’t, it couldn’t hurt. And what were three denari to him? Nothing but Monopoly money.

  The clerk gave him his receipt and the incense. It smelled sweeter than the last pinch he’d got. Maybe they saved extra-cheap stuff for people making required offerings, and gave you something better if you were doing it because you really wanted to. Jeremy didn’t know for sure. Up till now, he didn’t think any trader had made offerings that weren’t required.

  He carried the incense into the temple proper. There they were, all the gods the Romans recognized, in statue or painting or mosaic form. They all seemed to be looking at him. He didn’t believe in any of them except possibly Jesus, and the Jesus he knew wasn’t the same as the one in this world. The effect was impressive even so.

  Several pinches of incense already smoked on the altar. Either other people wanted to look public-spirited, or they were worried. Well, I’m worried, too, Jeremy thought. But he didn’t believe lighting this incense would help make his worries go away.

  He lit it anyhow, then stepped on the twig he’d used to make it start burning. The smoke from the incense definitely smelled better than it had the last time he sacrificed. The image of Honorio Prisco III stared blindly from behind the altar. Jeremy recited the prayer an Imperial Christian gave the Emperor’s spirit. It still felt more like pledging allegiance to the flag than praying. But neither of the two men who stood near the altar to listen to prayers complained. He’d done what he needed to do, and he’d done it right.

  And now he understood—a little better, anyhow—what his dad said about the uses of hypocrisy. He wondered if he’d ever have the chance to tell Dad so.

  Even though Amanda’s house had running water, she liked visiting the fountain. People of the female persuasion couldn’t go as many places or do as many things in this world as men could. At the baths and at the public fountains, age and wealth and social class didn’t matter so much. A woman could say what she pleased, and a lot of women did.

  When Amanda went to the fountain on a warm, sticky summer afternoon, she found several women complaining about the soldiers quartered in their houses. “They eat like dragons,” said a plump middle-aged woman in a saffron tunic. “And then they grumble about the cooking! Do they pay a sestertio for what they get? Do they? Not likely!”

  Another woman, also plump, nodded. “They lie around snoring till all hours, too. And they don’t bathe often enough—or at all.” She held her nose. For good measure, she scratched as if she had fleas.

  Amanda wondered how much she’d had to do with soldiers before. Her tunic was saffron yellow, too, which meant she had money. Saffron dye wasn’t cheap here. And, in this world, you had to be rich to have enough food to get overweight.

  A couple of lines of Kipling from English Lit also ran throu
gh Amanda’s head.

  For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck ’im out, the brute!”

  But it’s “Savior of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

  They’d never heard of Kipling in Agrippan Rome. But he understood what made them tick, all right.

  “The soldiers aren’t so bad,” the slave girl named Maria said in a low voice. “We have some in our house, too, and they don’t do anything worse than pat me a little.”

  In the home timeline, that would have been bad enough. It struck Maria as a miracle of moderation here. Different worlds, different standards. Amanda had to work to make herself remember that. It wasn’t always easy. Of course, next to Maria’s being a slave to begin with, how big a deal was it that some soldiers let their hands roam more than they might have? Probably not very.

  Maria asked, “How is your mother? I have not seen her for a while.”

  “She and Father, uh, left Polisso,” Amanda said. “He took her to a healer in Carnuto who’s supposed to be one of the best, this side of Rome or Athens.”

  “I hope he will help her,” Maria said gravely. She didn’t say anything about Dad and Mom leaving the two Solters children on their own here. By local standards, they were plenty old enough to take care of themselves.

  “I got a letter from my father not long ago,” Amanda said. “He says Mother is doing much better.”

  “She will do better away from Polisso. I think that’s very likely,” Maria said. With a sour smile, Amanda nodded. Maria let out a small, sad sigh. “Having your letters must be nice. You can talk back and forth with Carnuto, and I can’t even make myself heard across the street sometimes.”

  I can talk back and forth a lot farther than that—or I could if we weren’t cut off, Amanda thought. Out loud, she said, “If you want, I could teach you your letters. It isn’t very hard. Then you’d be able to read and write, too, at least some. And it’s like anything else. The more you do, the easier it gets.”

  Maria’s jaw dropped. “Could you?” she whispered. “I don’t think my owner would mind. I’d be worth more to him if I knew something like that. And”—her eyes widened—“and I’d be able to read the Bible for myself. What could be better than that?”

  Not all the books in the New Testament here were the same as they were in the home timeline. The Gospel according to John didn’t exist in Agrippan Rome. It was supposed to date from the first half of the second century. By then, history here was different enough from what had happened in Amanda’s world that John either hadn’t written or had never been born at all. The Acts of the Apostles had the same name, but didn’t say all the same things. And some of Paul’s epistles went to churches to which he hadn’t written in the home timeline. Comparative Bible scholarship across timelines was a field that was just getting off the ground.

  It was also a field Maria had never heard of. She never would, either. As far as she knew, hers was the Bible. Amanda said, “Yes, I think you should be able to.” There were two or three translations into classical Latin (none by St. Jerome, who’d never lived here) and several more into neoLatin. Some of those were from the classical Latin, others from the original Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. Imperial Christians had an official version. Other kinds of Christians had different favorites.

  “The Bible. The word of God, in my mouth.” Maria looked as if she’d just gone to heaven. “It would be a miracle.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Amanda said. “It’s just something you learn how to do, like—like weaving, for instance.”

  “But everybody learns how to spin and weave,” Maria said. “You have to, or you don’t have any clothes. Reading isn’t like that. Plenty of free women—plenty of rich women, even—can’t read.”

  “It’s not hard, honest,” Amanda said. In the home timeline, the only people who could spin or weave were the ones who did it for a hobby and the ones who worked in living-history museums. Almost everybody could read, though. Across the timelines, people first learned what they most needed to know. Back home, that was reading. Here, it was weaving.

  Livia Plurabella came up and said, “May I speak to you for a moment, Amanda Soltera?”

  “Sure,” Amanda said, and turned away from Maria. The slave dropped her eyes to the cobblestones. When free people spoke with each other, she had to show she knew her place. Amanda asked, “Is something wrong with the razor you bought, my lady?”

  “No, no, no.” Impatiently, the banker’s wife shook her head. “I just wanted to put a flea in your ear.”

  “What do you mean?” Amanda understood the phrase. The older woman wanted to warn her about something. She didn’t know what the banker’s wife thought she needed warning about.

  Livia Plurabella spelled it out: “It’s all very well to be polite to a creature like that.” She pointed toward Maria, who still made as if she were paying no attention to her social betters. “It’s all very well to be polite, yes. We are by the fountain, after all. The usual rules do slip. If they didn’t, we’d never hear anything juicy, would we?” She smiled, but only for a moment. “There is a difference, you know, between being polite and being friendly. That’s a bit much, don’t you think?”

  The most annoying thing was, Livia Plurabella meant well. She was trying to save Amanda from showing bad manners. That meant Amanda couldn’t get as angry as she wanted to. Smashing her water jug over the older woman’s head would get her talked about, no matter how tempting it was. She said, “Oh, it’s all right. I don’t think the slave girl minds.”

  Livia Plurabella took a deep breath. “Whether she minds isn’t the point, dear,” she said sharply. Then she gave Amanda a suspicious look. “Are you making fun of me, young lady?”

  “I wouldn’t do that for the world,” Amanda exclaimed.

  “Hmm.” The banker’s wife didn’t seem any happier. “On your head be it,” she said, and stalked away.

  On your head be it. No matter how Amanda usually aped the manners of this world, she wasn’t really part of it. She didn’t feel in her belly that being friendly with a slave was wrong, the way a free woman here would. Livia Plurabella’s warning would have horrified a local merchant’s daughter. It wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place, because a local merchant’s daughter would have played by the rules without needing to be warned. If Amanda felt like breaking the rules every once in a while, she would, and that was all there was to it.

  She turned back to Maria. “Where were we? Talking about how easy reading is, weren’t we?”

  The slave girl said, “Don’t get into trouble on my account, Mistress Amanda.” She sounded worried. She looked worried, too.

  Amanda snorted. “She can’t do anything to me.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did she wonder how true they were. A banker’s wife was an important person in Polisso. Which people you knew, what connections you had, mattered more here than in Los Angeles. Connections mattered back home, but the laws and customs there assumed one person was just as good, just as important, as another. That wasn’t true here.

  Maria’s expression showed how untrue it was. The slave said, “She’s got clout.”

  “Well, if you think we don’t…” Amanda let that trail away. The merchants from Crosstime Traffic had money. Nothing made a better start for connections. But money was only a start. Amanda wasn’t from here. Livia Plurabella was local. And the authorities in Polisso were already curious—to say the least—about how the crosstime traders operated. If you think we don’t have clout…you may be right.

  She filled her jar at the fountain. Most of the women swung full jars up onto their heads and carried them home that way. A few, though, carried them on the hip full as well as empty. Even with a hand up to support the jar on her head, she couldn’t have been smooth and graceful like the locals. She would have looked like a clodhopper, a country bumpkin—but country bumpkins carried water jugs on their heads, too.

  She had just left the fountain when she heard a noise like distan
t thunder. It came from the north. But it wasn’t thunder. Some clouds drifted across the sky, but there was no sign of rain. For a moment, she was puzzled. Then she knew what it had to be—gunfire. The Lietuvan army was on the way.

  Eight

  Jeremy didn’t know whether climbing up on the city wall was a good idea. Amanda thought he was nuts. Maybe he was. But he wanted to see what was going on out beyond Polisso. He wasn’t the only one, either. Lots of locals were up there, staring out at the advancing Lietuvan army.

  Soldiers hurried back and forth on the top of the wall. If ordinary people got in their way, they pushed them aside. They didn’t waste time being nice. Not far from Jeremy, a soldier knocked a man sprawling. When the local lurched to his feet, blood dripped down his face. He didn’t say anything. If he had, the soldiers might have pitched him off the wall, and it was a long way down.

  On came the Lietuvans. Their army was bigger than the Roman force that had come into Polisso. It flew banners of gold, green, and red—the colors of Lithuania in the home timeline. Lietuvan soldiers wore dull blue surcoats and tunics and breeches. That made them easy to tell apart from the Romans. Their helmets were simpler—more like iron pots plopped on their heads. Their weapons seemed almost identical, though. Horsemen had pistols or lances or bows and sabers. Foot soldiers carried pikes or muskets and straight swords.

  They had cannon, too. You couldn’t very well besiege a town without them. Slowly, the guns left the road and began taking up positions around the city. Cavalrymen went with them to protect them from any Roman attack.

  But the Romans didn’t seem interested in sallying from Polisso, not right then. Instead, they started shooting from the wall. Jeremy wished he had earplugs. Having a cannon go off close by was like getting smacked in the side of the head.

  Flames belched from the gun’s muzzle. So did a great cloud of dark gray smoke. The cannon and its four-wheeled carriage jerked back from the recoil. Ropes kept it from jerking back too far. At a sergeant’s shouted orders, the gun crew yanked on the ropes and ran it forward again. A man with a dripping swab on the end of a long pole stuck it down the barrel to make sure no bits of powder or wadding still smoldered inside. The swab steamed when he brought it out again.