“NeoLatin,” Jeremy agreed dully. He bit into the bread. It tasted good, but it was gritty. Was this how it would be for the rest of his life? A language that wasn’t his, food that wore down his teeth, an empire that had forgotten freedom and never heard of so many other things?
Another cannonball smashed something to smithereens. If the gunner had turned his cannon a little to the left…In that case, Jeremy might not have had to worry about the rest of his life.
Amanda didn’t want to go back to the water fountain, not after what had happened there. She didn’t think she was more likely to get hurt there. That wasn’t it. She could get hurt anywhere, and she knew it. But she didn’t want to be reminded of where the other women had got hurt.
The locals hadn’t done much to clean things up, either. Broken stone and bricks still lay where they had fallen. For that matter, the cannonball still lay there, too. It wasn’t all that much bigger than her closed fist. Strange to think something so small could have done so much harm.
As no one had cleaned up the rubble, so no one had cleaned up the bloodstains. They were brownish-black now, and dry, not wet, gleaming scarlet. But she still knew what they meant. They meant anguish for people who hadn’t done anything to deserve any. How many husbands were without wives, how many children without mothers, because of that round lump of iron?
Most of the women at the fountain this morning hadn’t been there when the cannonball struck home. Amanda thought she could tell which ones had. They were the ones who flinched whenever another cannonball smacked into Polisso. Amanda flinched, too. After seeing what she’d seen, she didn’t know how anyone could keep from flinching.
The slave girl named Maria came out of her house with a water jar on her hip. “Good morning, Mistress Amanda,” she said. “God bless you.”
“God bless you,” Amanda answered automatically. But, in this place, that didn’t seem adequate. She waved with her free hand. “Do you think God blessed what happened here?”
Maria only shrugged. “I am sorry, truly sorry, people were hurt. But I am less than a mote in the eye of God. I cannot know His purposes. Neither can any other mere mortal.”
“You really mean that,” Amanda said in slow wonder.
“You really doubt it.” Maria sounded every bit as amazed. They both stared, neither understanding the other in the least. Maria said, “I thought even an Imperial Christian would have more faith in the Lord.”
Amanda said, “I thought even a strong Christian would be able to think for herself a little bit.”
And then, at the same time, they both said, “How can you be so blind?”
That might have killed the strange, delicate friendship that had grown up between them. Friendship between slave and free wasn’t easy in Agrippan Rome. Neither was friendship between a native of Agrippan Rome and someone from the home timeline. Pile the one on top of the other and this friendship should have been impossible to begin with. But Amanda and Maria really did like each other.
Maria’s eyes twinkled. Amanda’s eyes sparkled. They both started to laugh. Maria wagged a finger at Amanda. “You are impossible!” she said.
“Well, you are pretty difficult yourself,” Amanda retorted. They laughed some more.
“You are more than half a heathen,” Maria said. By the standards of strong Christians in Agrippan Rome, that was true and more than true.
“You’re drunk on God,” Amanda said. By the standards of ordinary Americans in the home timeline, that was also true and more than true. Maria had very little but her God. No wonder she clung to Him so tightly. After a moment, Amanda added, “You’re nice anyway, though.”
“So are you,” Maria said. They put down the jars and hugged each other.
Another cannonball crashed into a building. A rumbling roar followed the first sharp impact. A wall—or maybe the whole building—had fallen down. “I hope nobody was inside,” Amanda said.
“Me, too,” Maria said. They hugged again, clutching each other for whatever reassurance they could find. Then, with a sigh, Maria picked up her water jar. “Amanda—” She broke off.
“What is it?” Amanda asked.
“I’ve prayed so hard.” Maria’s voice was soft and shaky, her thin face pinched with worry. “I’ve prayed and prayed and prayed, and the Lietuvans are still out there. They’re still smashing things up. They’re still killing people. I know it’s God’s will—but I have so much trouble seeing why.” She sounded on the edge of tears.
“And you’re asking me?” Amanda said in dismay. “That kind of question makes me feel like Atlas, holding up the heavens on my shoulders.”
Maria nodded. If she was offended, she kept it to herself. Lots of people here used figures of speech from the Greek myths even if they didn’t believe in them. People did the same thing in the home timeline, though not so much. The slave girl said, “You think about these things, anyhow. A lot of people never do.”
“Maybe I do, but I haven’t got any real answers,” Amanda said. “Either things happen because God makes them happen, or they happen because they just happen—you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes,” Maria said. “Some people call Fortune a god. I don’t believe that.” She set her chin and looked stubborn.
“Well…” Amanda paused. “If things happen because God make them happen, then you need to figure out why bad things happen.”
“Satan,” Maria said. “It has to be Satan.”
“But if God’s all-powerful, why does He let Satan do things like that?” Amanda asked. Maria’s face was the picture of hard, serious thought. After close to half a minute, she gave Amanda a sad little shrug. Amanda also shrugged. She said, “I don’t know, either. And if things just happen because they happen, what can you do about it? Nothing I can see.”
“You sound like a philosopher,” Maria said wistfully.
Amanda laughed. “Not likely! Philosophers are supposed to have answers, aren’t they? All I’ve got are questions.”
“Maybe even questions help,” Maria said. “All I had before were things to worry about.” She still had those, of course. But they didn’t seem to worry her quite so much.
Water poured out of the fountain. Amanda filled her jug. Maria filled hers. She put it on her head when she was through. As usual, Amanda put hers on her hip again. Maria looked tall, erect, and graceful carrying her jar the way she did. Amanda knew she would have looked like a clumsy fool trying to do the same. Enough women carried full jars the way she did to keep her from standing out. That was all she cared about.
“See you soon,” Maria said.
“Take care of yourself,” Amanda answered. “Do you have enough to eat?”
“Yes. My owner hasn’t changed what he gives me at all,” Maria said. My owner. There it was, ugly as a slap in the face. Just hearing the words made Amanda want to be sick, or to lash out and hit something. But Maria took them in stride, if not for granted. Real worry in her voice, she asked, “What about you, Amanda? Are you and your brother all right?”
“We’re fine, so far,” Amanda said. She and Jeremy were a good deal better off than that, but she didn’t want to sound as if she were bragging. She didn’t think Maria would do anything to betray her trust, but you never could tell who might be listening.
“That’s good,” Maria said, and then, wistfully, “You’ve got money. If you’ve got money, you can always get food, as long as there’s any food to get.”
Again, she didn’t make anything special out of it. It was just the way this world worked. It was probably the way any world worked. But hunger was a much more common guest here than in Los Angeles in the home timeline.
Maria went into her owner’s house. Amanda turned away and started back toward the house where she and Jeremy lived. Those words again—her owner. Words, and the ideas behind them, had enormous power.
But what can I do? Amanda thought unhappily. Even if she bought Amanda, set her free, and found her work where she could make a living—not always
easy to do for a freedwoman—then what? How many slaves just like her would remain in Polisso afterwards? Up into the thousands, surely. How many in all of this Roman Empire? In Lietuva? In Persia? In the gunpowder empires in India? In China? Millions all told, without a doubt.
And Crosstime Traffic had only a few outposts in this whole world. Some problems were just too big to solve with what was available to tackle them. Amanda hated that, which didn’t make it any less true.
Jeremy was sitting in the courtyard reading a poem when a cannonball crashed into the kitchen. The poem had kept him interested all the way through. It was in neoLatin, about a girl on a trading ship who’d been captured by Scandinavian pirates but escaped, and about her adventures getting back to the Empire. It wasn’t great literature. It was more like this world’s closest approach to reality TV. But it wasn’t dull, not even slightly.
All the same, he dropped the scroll and jumped to his feet when half a dozen roof tiles exploded into red dust. A magpie that had been sitting on the roof flew away as fast as it could, screeching in alarm.
From her room, Amanda let out a startled squawk: “What was that?”
“We just got hit,” Jeremy answered. “I’m going to see how bad.”
There was a hole in the roof in the kitchen, and another one in the far wall. But the planks under the roof tiles weren’t smoldering. The cannonball hadn’t smashed any weight-bearing beams. No big cracks ran out from the whole in the wall. The stonework still seemed sound.
Amanda came into the kitchen behind Jeremy. As he had, she looked around. “We’re lucky,” she said after a few seconds.
“I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “I can put boards over the hole in the roof to keep the rain out till somebody really repairs it. And some plaster will take care of the one in the wall.”
“I suppose so.” Amanda hesitated. “Do you think we’ll ever get back?”
In a way, the question came out of the blue. In another way, Jeremy had trouble thinking about anything else. How surprising was it that his sister felt the same way? Not very. He shrugged. “I have to think so. Whatever’s gone wrong, it can’t stay messed up forever.” Why not? he wondered. It shouldn’t have got messed up in the first place. Since it has, who knows how long it can stay that way?
He wondered whether Amanda would point that out. She didn’t, not in so many words. Instead, she asked, “Do you think you could stand it if we had to stay here forever?”
“I wouldn’t like it, that’s for sure,” Jeremy answered. “Stand it? I don’t know. What other choice would I have?”
“It would be horrible,” Amanda said.
He couldn’t very well argue with that. They still had enough merchandise from the home timeline to make a lot of money, probably enough to keep them wealthy for the rest of their lives. But even the richest people in Polisso did without so many things anyone from the home timeline took for granted. It would seem a bare, empty life. They might as well be shipwrecked among savages. As a matter of fact, they were. “We just have to go on,” Jeremy said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
His sister nodded. “It’s what I keep telling myself,” she said. “Sometimes it lets me get through the day—most of the time, in fact. But when they go and knock a hole in the house—two holes in the house—even going on doesn’t seem very easy.”
“Yeah. I know.” Jeremy cocked his head to one side. There was a new breeze in the kitchen because of those two holes. “I go down to the basement, and I try to send a message back home from the PowerBook, and it doesn’t let me….”
“I go down there, too,” Amanda said. “Sometimes I don’t even try to send a message. But the door opens when you touch the palm lock. The electric lights come on. The furniture looks like it comes from Home Depot or WalMart—and it does. There is a computer. I see all that stuff, and I remember we did come from the home timeline. It’s not just something I dreamt or made up inside my head.”
Jeremy made himself grin. “If it is, we’re both nuts the same way.” He spoke in a low voice—and in English. Making himself use his own language instead of neoLatin took a real effort.
And hearing English made Amanda blink. “That’s right,” she said in the same tongue. “Will we ever be able to speak our own language to anybody but each other?”
“I don’t know.” For safety’s sake, Jeremy fell back into neoLatin. “I just don’t know.”
Another cannonball screeched by overhead. It slammed into a house or shop not too far away. Jeremy and Amanda looked at each other. If the Lietuvans broke into Polisso or starved it into surrender, nothing they’d talked about would matter very much. They wouldn’t have to complain about how empty even the richest person’s life here was. They wouldn’t be rich. They’d be slaves—or they’d be dead.
Amanda was sewing up a tunic seam when someone rapped on the door. She wanted company just then about as much as she wanted another head. But Jeremy was at the market square, and it might be business. With a mutter of regret, she put down the tunic. She walked out of the courtyard and up the entry hall. The door was barred. She took the bar out of its brackets, set it aside, and opened the door.
There stood Lucio Claudio, called Fusco. “Good day,” Amanda said, meaning anything but. “What can I do for you?”
“I am looking for Ieremeo Soltero,” answered Gaio Fulvio’s man of affairs.
“He’s not here right now,” Amanda said. “Can I help you?”
“I doubt it,” Lucio Claudio said. Amanda glanced over at the iron bar she’d just put down. No, you can’t hit him over the head with it, she told herself. People would talk. It seemed a great pity. The local, who didn’t know she was contemplating his sudden departure from this world, went on, “It has to do with the official report he submitted.”
“Oh. Then I can help you.” Amanda stepped aside and gestured politely. “Won’t you come in? Would you care for some wine?”
“It is written in the classical language. How could you—?” But Lucio Claudio caught himself. He’d already done business with Amanda. “No. Wait. You have already proved that you are familiar with it.”
“That’s right. I have. And I am.” Amanda’s smile was anything but sweet. She repeated, “Won’t you come in?”
Lucio Claudio’s face said mere females had no business knowing classical Latin. It also said mere merchants had no business knowing the old language. And if the merchant happened to be a girl, or the girl happened to be a merchant…“Very well.” He didn’t sound any happier about being there than Amanda was to have him there.
When she took him back to the courtyard, she pointed to the hole in the kitchen roof. Jeremy had put boards over it, but the roofer hadn’t replaced the shattered tiles. As she pointed, a cannonball thudded home somewhere not far away. She said, “At a time like this, don’t you have more important things to worry about than official reports? We submitted it on time. It’s accurate. Isn’t that enough to satisfy you?”
The local’s swarthy skin darkened further, probably with annoyance. He said, “What could be more important than keeping complete and thorough records?”
“You’re joking,” Amanda said. Then she realized he wasn’t. In Agrippan Rome, records were at least as important as people. Another cannonball landed somewhere a little farther away. She asked, “Don’t you think you ought to be worrying about keeping the Lietuvans out of Polisso? Shouldn’t everything else wait on that?”
“Certainly not,” he answered. She might have suggested that he ate with his fingers—except the locals did eat with their fingers, and had a complex set of manners for doing so. “Though besieged, we are still Roman. Life must go on as normally as possible.”
That could have sounded brave and noble. To Amanda, it sounded infuriating. But she didn’t let her anger show. She would have to keep on dealing with Lucio Claudio and with people like him. Or, if she didn’t, other crosstime traders would. If there still are other crosstime traders, she thought. If they
ever come back to Agrippan Rome. She shivered. She doubted more and more that they ever would.
All she said, then, was, “Let me get you your wine, in that case, and you can go ahead.”
She poured a cup for herself, too. If she hadn’t, Lucio Claudio might have thought she was trying to poison him. He spilled some on the paving stones and murmured a prayer to Dionysus. Amanda spilled some, too. She prayed for the Emperor’s spirit, not to any of the gods. An Imperial Christian could go that far and no further.
Lucio Claudio’s sneer said he didn’t think it was far enough. But it was legal. He didn’t complain, not out loud. Instead, he took out the official report Jeremy had written. “Some of this is not as clear as it ought to be,” he said.
Amanda knew her brother had written the report so it wouldn’t be clear. She couldn’t very well tell that to Lucio Claudio, though. “You must be mistaken,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, I am not,” he insisted. “Look here, where the report speaks of your sources for these remarkable trade goods you have….”
“May I see it, please?” she asked. Reluctantly, Lucio Claudio handed it to her. People were careful with papers here. This was the only copy of the official report. The only way to get another one would be to have a secretary copy it all out. She read the passage he pointed at, then said, “It seems plain enough to me.”
“Nonsense,” Lucio Claudio said.
“It is not nonsense,” Amanda said. “Don’t they teach anyone in Polisso what an ablative absolute is and how to use it?” If she could argue about classical Latin grammar and how it worked, she wouldn’t have to argue about what was and wasn’t in the official report.
And she’d flicked Lucio Claudio on his pride. He took a big, angry gulp of wine. “We may be near the frontier here, but we have good schools,” he insisted. “We have excellent schools, in fact. Why, three hundred years ago the poet Settimo Destro, called Sinistro, had his verses quoted from one end of the Empire to the other. And where did he come from? Right here in Polisso!”
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