Gunpowder Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  Amanda was happier arguing town pride than the official report, too. “Three hundred years is a long time,” she said. “What have you done since your left-handed poet lived?” Sinistro meant left-handed. “Not much, if you don’t understand what this means.”

  “Suppose you explain it,” Lucio Claudio said.

  “I don’t need to explain it. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Let me read it to you, so you can see for yourself.” Read it she did, in classical Latin: “‘ They having secured the required articles from their suppliers, who, having taken all precautions to produce them with the maximum practicable degree of quality and artistic excellence, conveyed the aforementioned goods to those who would distribute them for retail distribution, they delivered these aforesaid articles of commerce to the famous metropolis for final distribution to and among its most excellent citizens.’ There! Isn’t that obvious?”

  Lucio Claudio fumed. He’d wanted to talk about the official report in neoLatin. But if Amanda stuck to the old language, he had to do the same. If he didn’t, he would lose face. He would sooner have been blown to bits by a Lietuvan cannonball than admit that a merchant’s daughter knew more about classical Latin than he did.

  Instead of admitting it, he snatched the official report away from her. He went through it till he found another passage he didn’t like. Triumph in his voice, he said, “What about this? It does not explain why you have these remarkable goods and no one else does. That, after all, was the whole point of requiring an official report from you in the first place.”

  “So you could steal our trade secrets, you mean,” Amanda said. That made Lucio Claudio look as if he’d bitten into a lemon. Everybody was touchy about trade secrets in Agrippan Rome. With no patents or copyrights to protect knowledge, people had to be. Not even the government could poke at them too hard, not without risking trouble. Amanda held out her hand. “Let me see it, if you please. How can I answer when you keep taking things away from me?”

  “Here,” Lucio Claudio said. “And no quibbles over ablative absolutes this time, if you please. The sentences are very straightforward.”

  Even you understand them, you mean? It was on the tip of Amanda’s tongue, but she didn’t say it. A bureaucrat who was doing his job, going through the motions, was one thing. A bureaucrat with a personal grudge was something else again, and something much more dangerous. She read Jeremy’s answer and nodded. “You’re right. This is very straightforward. It says we get our goods from the finest suppliers in the Roman Empire. That’s the truth. The quality of what we sell proves it.”

  “But who are these suppliers?” Lucio Claudio demanded. “Why can’t anyone else find them and deal with them?”

  “That is our trade secret,” Amanda said. “If everyone knew where to get these goods, where would our living be?” She smiled. “Would you like some more wine?”

  They went round and round for the next hour. Jeremy had done a good job of writing the report so that it sounded impressive but didn’t say anything. Finally, Lucio Claudio gave up and went away. Amanda would have liked that better if she hadn’t been pretty sure he would come back.

  People in Polisso had stopped carrying food out in the open. That was an invitation to get knocked over the head and have it stolen. After almost four weeks, the Lietuvan siege was starting to pinch the city. When shoppers brought grain or olives home from the market square, they put them in leather sacks that could have held anything. They tried not to go alone, too. Having friends along made thieves try someone else.

  Jeremy bought wheat and barley in the market square every so often. He wanted people to see him doing it. That way, nobody would start wondering if he and Amanda were hoarding.

  He, too, had a plain leather sack for carrying home the grain. He headed back to his house by himself, but he wasn’t worried. He was young and big and looked strong. No one had bothered him yet.

  He was only a couple of blocks from the house when three punks stepped out of a shadowed doorway. “Oh, it’s you,” the biggest one said—they’d met before. “What have you got?”

  Before Jeremy could answer, a cannonball smashed through a door about a hundred meters away. One punk flinched, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Jeremy said, “I’ve got barley.” He felt fairly safe admitting it. Plenty of people were going back and forth. If the three toughs tried robbing him, they’d get jumped on. People here were more likely to do that than they were in Los Angeles in the home timeline. Punks often carried knives here, but so did ordinary men. You didn’t run the risk of going up against an assault rifle with your bare hands.

  And the leader of this little gang shook his head. “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. No doubt he sounded much more innocent than he was. He could see this wasn’t a good spot for a robbery as well as Jeremy could—better, probably. He gave Jeremy a mocking little half-bow. “What jokes have you got?”

  “Oh, jokes.” Jeremy tried not to show how relieved he was. “Let me think.” He’d looked at The Laughter-Lover a long time ago. “Well, there was the cheapskate who named himself as heir in his own will.”

  The punks groaned, which was about what that one deserved. “You can do better,” their leader said. You’d better do better, his tone warned. If they started thumping Jeremy for telling lousy jokes, ordinary people might not stop them—might join in, as a matter of fact.

  He tried again: “There was a halfwit who bought a house and went around carrying one stone from it so he could show people what it was like.”

  They groaned again. They didn’t seem quite so disgusted this time, though. “What else have you got?” the biggest one asked.

  “There was another halfwit—this one wanted to cross a river,” Jeremy said. “When he rode onto the ferryboat and didn’t get down from his horse, somebody asked him why not. He said, ‘I can’t! I’m in a hurry!’”

  “That’s not too bad,” the leader said after looking at his two buddies to see what they thought. “But try to have some better ones next time we run into you.” He swaggered on up the street.

  Jeremy stood there staring after him till a bad-tempered man in a tunic full of fancy embroidery shouted for him to get out of the way. That tunic shouted, too, and what it said was, I’m important! Don’t mess with me, or you’ll be sorry! In Los Angeles, that kind of display would have provoked Jeremy to ignore the bad-tempered man. People here paid more attention to status. With a twinge of regret, Jeremy moved.

  He got the barley back to the house without any more trouble. Amanda said, “We have a new hole in the roof to fix.” She pointed. Sure enough, another cannonball had hit the kitchen, about two meters to the left of the first hole.

  Jeremy said something about what the Lietuvans did for fun that he couldn’t possibly have known for sure. Then he asked, “Are you all right? Is the house all right?”

  “It scared me out of a year’s growth, but it didn’t hurt me,” his sister answered. “It seemed worse than the last one, because it didn’t go out through the wall. It banged around inside the kitchen till it finally stopped. I was here in the courtyard. It smashed some jars. Some grain got spilled, but it missed the big amphora full of olive oil, thank goodness.”

  “That would have been a mess,” Jeremy agreed.

  “It sure would,” Amanda said. “But do you know what? I wasn’t even thinking about the mess. I was thinking how bad it would be to lose the whole amphora of oil when we’re under siege and it would cost an arm and a leg to buy another one.” She looked at him. “I’m starting to think the way the locals do. That scares me worse than the cannonball in the kitchen.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Jeremy said. If they really were stuck in Agrippan Rome forever, they would have to make that adjustment sooner or later. They couldn’t live here the way they would have back in the home timeline. Polisso was a different place—such a different place!—from Los Angeles. They couldn’t look at the world here the same way and hope to survive.

  Will I
end up buying slaves, then? Jeremy shuddered and shook his head. Nothing could make him do that. Better to be dead than to do that, even if it was as ordinary for someone rich here as owning a fancy car was back in L.A.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Amanda whispered. The horror in her eyes matched the horror Jeremy felt. “We can’t. No matter what else we do, we can’t.”

  “No. We won’t,” Jeremy said. “Not ever. No matter what.” He did his best to laugh. It sounded pretty ghastly. “This is all dumb, anyhow. Before too long, we’ll be back in touch with the home timeline. Mom and Dad will come up from the transposition chamber in the subbasement, and everything will be fine.”

  “Sure.” Amanda nodded. But she wouldn’t look at him. A cannonball screeched through the air and thudded home fifty meters away. Somebody screamed. That was all real. The home timeline? The home timeline seemed like a dream, and a fading dream at that.

  Ten

  If I can’t go back to the home timeline, what do I have to do to make this one as bearable as I can? The longer Amanda stayed in Polisso, the more she asked herself that question. Asking it was easy. Finding any kind of answer wasn’t.

  The only thing she could come up with was, Get rich. Stay rich. If she had money, she wouldn’t go hungry. The food she did eat would be a little better. Her clothes would be warmer in the winter, and not quite so scratchy. Her bed would be a little softer. She would be able to buy books to help pass the time. If she got sick or hurt herself, she would be able to buy poppy juice—opium—to ease the pain.

  And that was about all. So much of what she’d taken for granted would be gone forever. If her teeth gave her trouble, she could either get them pulled without anesthetic or suffer. If she got sick with something that the medicines she and Jeremy had wouldn’t cure, she would either get well or die on her own. No doctors worth the name. No hospitals.

  She ground wheat into flour in a stone quern. The repeated motion made her shoulder ache. If she did it for years, it would give her arthritis. If she didn’t do it, she wouldn’t have any bread to eat. The work was boring. It would have gone by faster if she could have gabbed with friends or listened to music or watched TV while she did it. No phone. No CD player. No TV.

  “No nothing,” she muttered. Grind, grind, grind. When she baked at home, she’d taken flour for granted, too. Machines made it. It came out of a sack. When you had to make it yourself, you didn’t take it for granted. Why couldn’t she get more than this pathetic little bit with each turn of the quern? Grind, grind, grind.

  Jeremy walked into the kitchen. “How’s it going?” he asked cheerfully. Why shouldn’t he be cheerful? He wasn’t grinding flour. Amanda screamed at him. He jumped half a meter in the air. “Well, excuse me for breathing,” he said when his feet thumped back onto the ground. “What did I say that was wrong?”

  Part of Amanda was ashamed at losing her cool. “Nothing, really,” she mumbled. But the rest of her was angry, and she decided she wouldn’t sweep it under the rug after all. There weren’t any rugs here to sweep it under, anyhow. She shook her head. “No, not nothing. I don’t see you in the kitchen. I don’t see you with a sore shoulder. I just see you eating bread.”

  “I’m making money for us,” he answered.

  That was true. And if they were stuck here for good, they would need all the money they could get their hands on. Amanda had just been thinking about that. But even so…“I could do that just as well as you could,” she said.

  “You could do it pretty well, yeah,” her brother said. “Just as well? I don’t know. Some of the locals get weird about dealing with a girl.”

  “That’s ’cause they’re a bunch of sexist yahoos,” said Amanda, who’d gone all the way through Gulliver’s Travels not long before. The parts of the book everybody knew, where he went to Lilliput and then to Brobdingnag, were only the icing on the cake. The real essence came later.

  “Sure they are,” Jeremy said. “But just because an attitude is stupid, that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

  Again, he wasn’t wrong. That didn’t mean Amanda liked his being right. “If I could only get out of this kitchen more, I’d show you what I can do,” she said.

  He didn’t say, How are you going to do that? If he had, she wouldn’t just have screamed. She would have thrown something at him. Then again, he didn’t need to ask the question out loud. It hung in the air whether he asked it or not.

  The scary part was, How are you going to do that? had an answer. The answer was, Buy a slave to do the work for me. That was what the locals—the prosperous locals, anyhow—did. They didn’t have food processors or kneading machines or automatic dishwashers or vacuum cleaners or washing machines or any of a zillion other gadgets. They had people. They had them, and they used them. That let the ones who weren’t slaves take care of their business—and also think about things like literature and what passed for science here.

  Seeing slavery was dreadful enough for somebody from late twenty-first–century Los Angeles. Beginning to understand how and why it worked was a hundred times worse. “They’d better find us and get us out of here,” Amanda whispered.

  “Yeah,” Jeremy said. Both of them had forgotten the quarrel. As Amanda had followed his thoughts not long before, he hadn’t had any trouble knowing what she was thinking. It disgusted him as much as it did her. Yes, this was why the locals kept slaves. Worse, this was why, from their point of view, it made sense.

  Amanda shook her head. No matter how much sense it made, it was still awful. “They’d better get us out,” she repeated.

  “That’s right,” Jeremy said. “If they don’t get us out of here, we can sue them.”

  “Wait a minute,” Amanda said. Her brother looked back at her, bland as unsalted butter. Amanda made a horrible face at him. It was so horrible, it made him—just barely—crack a smile. She aimed her index finger as if it were a gun. “You’re being ridiculous on purpose.”

  “What about it?” Jeremy retorted. “It’s better than being ridiculous by accident, don’t you think?”

  She didn’t have a good answer for that. As cannon roared and muskets barked, as walls fell down with a crash, she wondered if there were good answers for anything—not just in this world but in any. “I wish we were back in the home timeline,” she said, which wasn’t an answer but was the truth.

  “So do I,” her brother said. “And that and some silver will buy me wine in a tavern. If they fix whatever’s wrong—if they can fix whatever’s wrong—they’ll bring us home. If they don’t, or if it isn’t, we figure out how to make the best of things here.” He strode forward. “You want me to grind flour for a while?”

  “Sure!” Amanda said.

  Jeremy was awkward rotating the central stone in the quern. She had to remind him to keep feeding wheat in at the top. Otherwise, he would have happily ground away at nothing. He worked steadily for about ten minutes. Then he started grumbling and rubbing his shoulder. After another five minutes, he stepped away from the counter with a proud smile on his face. “There!”

  Amanda clapped her hands—once, twice, three times. She couldn’t have been more sarcastic if she’d tried for a week. “Wow! Congratulations! Yippee!” she said. “That’s about enough flour for a muffin—a small muffin. Don’t stop. You’re just getting the hang of it.”

  He looked as if she’d stabbed him in the back. “I was trying to help,” he said.

  “I know you were,” she said. “You were starting to do it, too—and then you went and stopped. Where do you think your bread comes from every day? Let me give you a hint: it’s not a miracle. It’s me standing there turning that miserable quern till my shoulder really starts hurting, and then turning it some more. If I don’t make flour, we don’t eat bread. It’s that simple—or it would be, except you can make flour, too. Go ahead. You were doing fine.”

  “And what will you do while I’m taking care of that?” Jeremy asked suspiciously.

  “Me? I’ll stand here fanning m
yself with peacock feathers for a while,” Amanda answered. “Then I’ll peel myself some grapes: a whole bowlful, I think. And then I’ll drop them into my mouth one at a time. I’ll make sure I do all this stuff while you’re watching, too, so it drives you especially wild.”

  He gaped at her. She wondered if she’d gone too far with that, far enough to make him angry. But then he started to laugh. Even better, he started to grind more wheat into flour. Amanda wished she really did have some grapes to peel, to help keep him going.

  Jeremy already knew most women worked harder than most men in Polisso. That stint at the quern drove the lesson home. So did the way his shoulder ached the next day. He’d been doing work his body wasn’t used to, and it told him it wasn’t happy.

  Amanda spent more time than that at the quern just about every day. How did her shoulder feel when she got up every morning? How would it feel twenty years from now, if she ground grain just about every day between now and then? People’s bodies wore out faster in this world than they did in the home timeline. The work here was a lot harder. And, except for wine and opium, nothing here could make pain go away. No one here had ever heard of aspirins, for instance.

  Down in the secret part of the basement, Jeremy tried to send a message to the home timeline. As usual, no such luck. He wondered why he went on bothering. Every time he failed, he felt terrible. But if I ever do get through, that’ll make up for all the times I don’t!

  Besides, if he didn’t keep trying, what would that be? A sign that he’d given up hope. He might be stuck in Agrippan Rome. Resigning himself to getting stuck here was a whole different story.

  The siege went on. The Lietuvans pounded away at Polisso. The gunners on the walls shot back at them. Little by little, King Kuzmickas’ cannoneers wrecked the Roman guns. No doubt they lost some of their own, too. The question was who could hold out longer, the besiegers or the besieged?