Gunpowder Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  That was one of the questions, anyhow. Another was how long would the Romans farther south in the province of Dacia need to send an army up to Polisso and try to drive the Lietuvans back into their own kingdom? Jeremy had no idea what the answer to that was, but it was on his mind. It had to be on the mind of everybody trapped inside Polisso.

  It had to be on Kuzmickas’ mind, too, and on the minds of his soldiers. They wouldn’t want to be stuck between an advancing Roman army and the garrison of a town that still defied them. If they could take Polisso soon, it would be in their interest to do so. Getting their guns closer to the walls and shooting at all hours of the day and night made good sense for them.

  Jeremy didn’t think trying to storm Polisso made good sense for the Lietuvans. Annio Basso, the commandant of the city, would surely have agreed with him. So would all of Annio Basso’s colonels and captains. When everybody on one side thinks the other side couldn’t be dumb enough to try something—well, what better time to try it?

  No one in Polisso looked for an all-out assault on the walls. Jeremy certainly didn’t. Unlike some other men in Polisso, he didn’t claim afterwards that he did, either. Like just about everyone else in town, he was asleep when the attack started.

  King Kuzmickas’ men chose the middle of a dark, moonless night. Like anything else, that had both advantages and disadvantages. The inky blackness of nights without electric lights let them get close to the wall before the Romans saw them. On the other hand, that same inky blackness made them stumble and trip over their own feet and think they were closer to the wall than they really were. Taking everything into account, a little moonlight might have helped the attack.

  When the first horn calls and shouts of alarm rang out from the wall, Jeremy slept through them. He’d had trouble falling asleep, because the Lietuvans were shooting more than usual. Later, he realized they were hiding the racket their advancing soldiers made. But that was later. At the time, all he thought was that there was a devil of a lot of noise.

  Along with the gunfire, he heard shouts from the direction of the wall. At first, he couldn’t tell through the din what people were shouting. That they were yelling anything at all surprised him. Except for the cannon going off every now and then, he hadn’t heard much at night. He’d learned to ignore the cannon. How was he supposed to ignore people yelling like madmen?

  Then he made out what the soldiers were yelling: “Ladders!”

  He knew little about warfare. He didn’t want to learn anything more. But one thing seemed plain enough. When some people started shouting, “Ladders!” it was because other people were trying to climb them. The only people who could trying to climb ladders here were King Kuzmickas’ Lietuvans.

  For a little while, Jeremy thought Kuzmickas had gone out of his mind. Assaulting Polisso couldn’t possibly work—could it? Then he heard more shouts on the wall, and not all of them sounded as if they were in neoLatin. If the Lietuvans had got men up on the walls, that could mean only one thing.

  Trouble. Big trouble.

  Those shouts on the wall raised shouts inside Polisso. More and more people woke up and discovered their city was under attack. By the cries and screams Jeremy heard, a lot of the locals believed Polisso was as good as lost.

  At first, he thought they were idiots. Then he realized they might know more about what was going on than he did. He wished that hadn’t occurred to him. He would have been a lot happier if he hadn’t. Ignorance is bliss, ran through his mind.

  “Jeremy?” That was Amanda, out in the hall. “You awake?”

  “No, I’m still sound asleep.” He got out of bed. Sleeping in the clothes you also wore during the day had one advantage: you didn’t need to get dressed. He opened the door. “How are you?”

  “Not so good,” she answered. “What are we going to do?”

  Before Jeremy could answer, a herald up the street shouted, “Citizens of Polisso, stay in your homes! Do not give way to fear! Soldiers will keep the invaders out of the city!”

  “That’s what we’ll do,” Jeremy said. “We’ll sit tight—for now, anyway.”

  “Do you really think the soldiers can drive back the Lietuvans?” Amanda asked. “What do we do if they don’t?”

  “Well, we can’t run, because there’s nowhere to run to,” he said. “We can surrender and be slaves—if they don’t kill us for the fun of it—or we can fight. I don’t see much else. Do you?”

  “The basement,” she said. “The subbasement.”

  He shook his head. “They aren’t set up to live in. Maybe they ought to be, but they aren’t. If we were hiding for a few hours from people who would go away, that’d be different. But if the Lietuvans win, they’re here to stay. Before too long, we’d have to come out, and they’d have us.”

  Soldiers ran by the house, their chainmail clanking. They shouted in neoLatin. They were Romans, then. Jeremy didn’t know what he would have done if they’d been shouting in Lietuvan. Panicked, probably.

  “I wish we had Dad’s pistol,” Amanda said.

  “Wish for the moon while you’re at it,” Jeremy said. “Can you imagine trying to explain that to the city prefect?”

  Amanda only shrugged. “I don’t care. I’d rather be alive and free and explaining with a bunch of lies than killed or sold in a slave market somewhere in Lietuva. If Polisso falls, it doesn’t matter whether the link with the home timeline comes back afterwards. Nobody would find us.”

  Jeremy hadn’t thought of that. His sister was right. He wished she weren’t. He said, “No guarantee the pistol would save us. If Polisso falls, we couldn’t shoot enough Lietuvans to make much difference.” He wasn’t sure he could shoot anybody. But if the choice was between killing and dying or being enslaved, he thought he could pull the trigger—not that there was any trigger to pull.

  He turned away, hurrying out into the courtyard and then across it. “Where are you going?” Amanda called after him.

  “To the storeroom and the kitchen.”

  “What for?”

  He didn’t answer. He was trying not to break his neck in the darkness. When he got into the storeroom, he had to feel around to find what he wanted. It was pitch black in there, and he hadn’t brought a lamp. Even in the dark, though, he didn’t need long. And he knew where things were in the kitchen even without any light.

  “What on earth—?” Amanda said as he went past her and out toward the front door. “What are you doing with the sword and those knives?”

  “Putting them where we can grab them in a hurry if we have to,” Jeremy said. “We haven’t got a pistol. The sword is the best we can do. And a couple of those carving knives have blades that are almost as long. They’re better than nothing.”

  He hadn’t been sure he could shoot anybody. He was even less sure he could stab somebody. And using a sword or a knife took more skill and practice than using a firearm. He had next to none of those, Amanda even less. In an emergency, though, you did what you could with what you had and hoped for the best. If this didn’t count as an emergency, he’d never seen one.

  Amanda didn’t argue with him. He’d been afraid she would. Instead, she went up the hall herself. She came back with one of the knives, looked at it, started to put it down, and then hung on instead. “Just in case,” she said.

  She didn’t say in case of what. Jeremy didn’t need her to draw him a picture. Women and girls had reasons not to want to be taken as slaves that most men didn’t need to worry about. Who could say how much those would matter till the moment came?

  Maybe it wouldn’t. Jeremy hoped not. Outside, more men in chainmail ran past. Like the last lot of soldiers, these yelled back and forth in neoLatin. With luck, that meant the Romans were getting the upper hand in the fight on the wall.

  With luck…“We ought to make a thanks-offering at the temple if the Lietuvans don’t get in,” Jeremy said, and Amanda nodded.

  Somewhere not far away, a horn blared out a call. Both Jeremy and Amanda’s heads whippe
d toward those notes. Jeremy had heard lots of Roman military horn calls. This didn’t sound like any of them. It was wilder and fiercer. And if it wasn’t a Roman horn call, it could only be…

  “The Lietuvans!” someone down the block cried—a sort of a despairing wail. “The Lietuvans are in the city!”

  A volley of musket fire that seemed to come from right up the street proved the man was right. More shouts rang out from most of the houses close by. Those were as full of dread as the first.

  And there were fresh shouts, shouts of “Kuzmickas!” and “Perkunas!” and other things Jeremy couldn’t understand. They were all in an oddly musical language, one full of rising and falling syllables. Lietuvan in this world wasn’t quite the same as Lithuanian in the home timeline, but it wasn’t very far away.

  Amanda’s lips were squeezed tight together. She looked as if she was clamping down hard on a scream. Jeremy didn’t blame her. He was clamping down pretty hard himself. She whispered, “What are we going to do?”

  “Sit tight as long as we can,” Jeremy answered. “If it looks like the city’s going to fall…. If it looks like that, maybe our best chance is to try to get away. But we don’t know how many Lietuvans got in, or how the fight’s going. Everything still may turn out all right.”

  She nodded, even though her eyes called him a liar. Another volley of musketry rang out, this one even closer to the house. Men shouted the Roman Emperor’s name and some ripe insults in neoLatin. The Roman legionaries hadn’t given up this fight, then.

  Neither had the Lietuvans. They yelled back. More guns banged. Boots thudded on cobblestones. Soldiers ran back and forth right in front of the house. A wounded man shrieked. Jeremy couldn’t tell if he was a Roman or a Lietuvan. When people were healthy, they all sounded different. When they were badly hurt, they all sounded the same.

  Metal clashed on metal. Matchlock muskets were slow and clumsy to reload any time. In the middle of the night, the job had to be next to impossible. You could reverse them and use them for clubs—or you could throw them down and use swords instead.

  It sounded as if the whole battle for Polisso were being fought there outside the house. That couldn’t have been true. But it still seemed that way. Every shot and groan and sword clanging off sword or spearhead came to Jeremy’s ears from what felt no more than five meters away. He could only have made sure of that by going out in the street and seeing for himself. Except for jumping off a cliff, he couldn’t have found a better way to kill himself. He stayed inside.

  “Come on!” Amanda said whenever the Romans rallied—or whenever they wavered. “Come on—you can do it!” She suddenly stopped and looked amazed. “I’m rooting for people to kill other people. That’s so sick!”

  “Tell me about it,” Jeremy answered. “I’m doing the same thing.”

  People were killing other people out there in the street. If more Romans killed Lietuvans than the other way round, Polisso would stay—what? Free? Polisso hadn’t been free before the Lietuvans broke in. It wouldn’t be free if they all packed up and marched away as soon as the sun came up. But it would be…unsacked. Jeremy didn’t even know if that was a word. He didn’t care, either. It was what he wanted, more than anything else in the world.

  He heard, or thought he heard, more shouts in neoLatin than in Lietuvan. The Romans sounded excited. The Lietuvans sounded scared. Or did they? Was he hearing it that way because that was what he wanted to hear? How could he tell? How could he know? By waiting to see what happened—no other way.

  Someone pounded on the front door.

  Jeremy froze. Amanda gasped. Someone pounded again—not with the knocker, but with a heavy fist on the oak timbers. Whoever was out there shouted something. The shout wasn’t in neoLatin.

  “What are we going to do?” Amanda said. Jeremy started for the door. She grabbed his arm. “Don’t let them in!”

  “Let them in? Are you nuts?” he said. “I’m going to pile furniture and stuff behind the door so they have a harder time breaking it down.”

  “Oh,” she said, and then, “I’ll help.”

  They carried tables and chests of drawers in from the parlor and the bedrooms. The Lietuvans weren’t pounding with fists any more. They’d found something big and heavy. By the way it thudded against the door, Jeremy would have guessed it was a telephone pole, except they didn’t have telephone poles here. They didn’t have many in Los Angeles any more, either, but some were still left. The door and the iron bar across it seemed to be doing all right. But the brackets that held the bar in place were starting to tear out of the door frame.

  “Why did they have to pick our house?” Amanda groaned.

  “Because we’re lucky,” Jeremy answered, which jerked a startled laugh out of her. He clenched his fingers around the hilt of the sword till his knuckles whitened. He didn’t know how much good it would do, but it wouldn’t do any if he didn’t have it. “Where are the Roman soldiers when we really need them?”

  One of the brackets came loose with a tortured crunch of splintering wood. The door sagged back as if someone had punched it in the stomach. Jeremy and Amanda pushed against the pile of furniture to try to hold it closed. No good. More people were pushing from the other side. A Lietuvan’s scowling, blood-streaked face appeared in the doorway. Sword in hand, he started scrambling over the obstacles toward Jeremy and Amanda.

  “Get back!” Jeremy shouted to his sister.

  She shook her head. “I’ll help!” She had her kitchen knife out and ready, too.

  The Lietuvan thrust at Jeremy, who jerked back just in time to keep from getting spitted like a corn dog. With a mocking laugh, the soldier scrambled forward—till a little table broke under his weight. His laugh turned into a howl of dismay as he went down splat! on all fours.

  Jeremy jumped forward and stabbed him in the arm. The Lietuvan screamed. The sword grated on bone. Blood spurted out. Jeremy could smell it, like hot iron. The Lietuvan jerked away and ran back the way he’d come. The sword pulled free. Jeremy brandished the bloodstained blade.

  Later, he realized what an idiot he was. He’d been lucky with the one soldier. If the Lietuvan’s pals had come after him, how could he have held them off? But just then a swarm of Romans shouting Honorio Prisco’s name charged up the street. Instead of breaking into the house—had they intended to use it for a strongpoint?—the Lietuvans fell back.

  Jeremy stared at the bloody sword. He had blood on his hand, too, and on his arm, and splashed on the front of his tunic. He didn’t know whether to be proud or be sick.

  Amanda said, “Let’s prop the door closed. Maybe we can at least halfway fix that bracket, so it’ll stay shut by itself. Then we won’t be an easy target for every burglar in town.”

  “Burglars!” Jeremy dropped the sword—he almost dropped it on his toes, which wouldn’t have been so good. “Right now, I don’t…care at all about burglars.” He’d almost said something much juicier than that. “We’ve got…worse things to worry about than burglars.” That was also understated, and also true.

  “I know.” But Amanda cocked her head to one side, listening. “I think this new push really is driving the Lietuvans back. The noise does sound like it’s farther from here and closer to the wall than it has been for a while.”

  “I hope so,” Jeremy said after cocking his head to one side and listening. He meant every word of that. In wondering tones, he went on, “I don’t know whether to hope that Lietuvan bleeds to death or gets better.”

  His sister shrugged. “I don’t much care one way or the other. All I care about is that you’re all right.” She paused and seemed to be listening to herself in almost the same way as she’d just listened to the street fighting. “Did I really say that?” Slowly, she nodded. “I really did. And you know what else? I meant it, too.”

  “Good.” Jeremy picked up a leg from the table that had broken under the Lietuvan. He smacked it into his palm. “Maybe I can use this to hammer the bracket into place. If I could go get a
couple of tools from Home Depot, fixing it would probably take about ten minutes. But if I could do that…” He let his voice trail away and got to work making what repairs he could.

  Going to the water fountain two days later reminded Amanda of what a close call Polisso had had. Bloodstains were everywhere. She’d never seen so much blood. Here and there, where it had pooled between cobblestones, flies gathered in buzzing clouds. They flew up as she walked past. One of them lit on her and crawled along her arm. She made a disgusted noise and shook it away.

  No bodies lay in the street. They’d already been dragged away, Romans and Lietuvans alike. They’d probably been plundered first: of weapons, of money, of armor, of food, of everything down to their shoes and their drawers. She wondered if scavengers in Polisso had quietly made sure some of the soldiers were dead. She wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Bullet scars marked the brick and stone ground floors of houses and shops. Bullet holes peppered the timber upper stories. In one way, though, the damage would have been worse in the home timeline. Here, neither side had been able to shoot out any glass windows. As far as Amanda knew, Polisso had none.

  Several women were already at the fountain when she got there. “Everything all right with you, dearie?” one of them called.

  “I’m still here. I’m still in one piece,” Amanda answered. “The town’s still here, too. It’s…not in as many pieces as it might be.”

  The local woman laughed. “Ain’t it the truth?” she said. “When those barbarians got inside, I didn’t know whether to go up on the roof and throw tiles down on their noggins or hide under my bed.”

  “That’s how Pyrrhus of Epirus got it,” another woman said. “Roof tiles, I mean, not hiding under the bed.”

  Amanda had heard of Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was the king who’d given his name to the Pyrrhic victory. He’d fought the Romans, beaten them thanks to war elephants, but almost ruined his army doing it. Afterwards, looking things over, he’d said, “One more victory like this and we’re ruined!”