That was where her knowledge stopped. And she would have bet knowing even that much put her ahead of nine out of ten—maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred—people in Los Angeles in the home timeline. But this housewife on the edge of the Roman Empire knew how he’d died, even though he’d been dead for more than 2,300 years.
At first, that astonished Amanda. After a little while, though, it didn’t any more. Pyrrhus was part of the locals’ history in a way he wasn’t back home. These Romans nowadays thought of themselves as—were—descended from the ones who’d battled and finally beaten Pyrrhus. They knew who he was the same way most Americans knew who Cornwallis was. He was almost a favorite enemy. He’d been tough, he’d been clever, he’d been dangerous—and he’d lost. What more could you ask for in a foe?
Some of the women who’d been at the fountain the morning before started going on about what they’d seen. They were amazingly calm about mutilated bodies. Amanda gulped. The woman who’d mentioned Pyrrhus noticed she was green and said, “Sweetie, if those Lietuvan so-and-sos had whipped our boys, we’d look like that now.”
She was right. That didn’t make Amanda like it any more or make it any better. And when Roman legionaries took a town in Lietuva or Persia, they acted the same way. Soldiers played by tough rules in this world.
Come to that, soldiers played by tough rules in any world. The home timeline didn’t have much to be proud of. The main difference was, they tried to cover up the worst of what they did in the home timeline. Here, they were likely to boast about their atrocities. They thought such horrors made other people afraid of them.
A cannonball howled through the air. The Romans had driven the Lietuvans out of Polisso, but King Kuzmickas hadn’t given up and gone home. He was still out there, and so were his soldiers. If they couldn’t storm the city, they still might starve it into surrendering.
You’re full of cheerful thoughts today, aren’t you? Amanda said to herself.
And then, all at once, she did feel better. Here came Maria. The slave girl smiled and waved to her. “Good to see you’re safe,” she said.
“Same to you,” Amanda answered.
“I was worried,” Maria said. “You never can tell what will happen when the enemy gets into a city.”
Amanda knew more about that now than she’d ever wanted to. “I’ll say! The Lietuvans broke into our house. Ieremeo drove them off with his sword.”
“Bravely done!” Maria said.
“It was, wasn’t it?” Amanda knew she sounded surprised. Bravery wasn’t something people thought about much in the home timeline. How often did anyone there have the chance to be brave? How often did anyone there want the chance to be brave? Didn’t the chance to be brave mean the chance to get killed, or at least badly hurt? Measuring yourself against a chance like that was what made bravery.
“I should say it was,” Maria answered. “Your brother with just a sword against trained soldiers with mailshirts and helmets and everything…He couldn’t have frightened them off all by himself, could he?” She suddenly looked frightened. “I mean no disrespect to him, of course, none at all.”
What’s that all about? But Amanda needed only a couple of seconds to realize what it was about. Maria had remembered she was a slave. She might have offended a freewoman. If she did offend, she could pay for it. Painfully.
“It’s all right,” Amanda said quickly. “What’s that proverb? ‘Even Hercules can’t fight two,’ that’s it. We would have been in a lot of trouble if the legionaries hadn’t come up the street just then. The Lietuvans went off to fight them, and they never came back.”
Now what was the matter? Maria was looking at her as if she’d picked her nose in public. Voice stiff with disapproval, the slave girl said, “I wouldn’t have thought even an Imperial Christian would believe in Hercules.”
“Who said I believe in him?” Amanda answered. “It’s just a proverb.”
Maria wouldn’t see it. The more Amanda tried to explain, the more stubborn the slave got. As far as she was concerned, the word was the thing. “You’ve talked of pagan gods twice now in the last couple of weeks,” she said sadly. “Either one thinks they have power, or one tells lies on purpose, knowing they are lies. And lies come straight from Satan.”
“You don’t understand,” Maria told her. “I wanted you to know I wasn’t mad because you said my brother couldn’t fight off a bunch of Lietuvans by himself. I already knew he couldn’t, and I was trying to find a fast way to say I knew it. That’s all I was doing, honest.”
“It is not honest to treat pagan things as if they are real,” Maria said. “If you believe they are real, how can you believe in the one true God?”
“But I don’t believe they are. I told you that, and it’s the truth,” Amanda said.
Even more sadly, Maria shook her head. “I will pray for you,” she said, and turned away.
She didn’t feel like being friendly any more. She couldn’t have made it any plainer if she’d slapped Amanda in the face. Amanda had broken a rule nobody she approved of would break, and so she didn’t approve of Amanda any more. No doubt she meant it when she said she would pray. In the here-and-now, though, that did Amanda no good at all.
I don’t belong here. This isn’t my world. Of course I’m going to make mistakes in it every once in a while, Amanda thought miserably. If things were the way they were supposed to be, that wouldn’t have mattered so much. She could have got away whenever she needed to. But not now. Whether this was her world or not, she couldn’t get away from it—and she’d just lost the only real friend she had.
Eleven
Jeremy saw more piles of rubble in Polisso than he had the last time he went to the market square. Amanda said, “If this siege goes on, how much of the city will be left?”
“Beats me,” he answered. “We’re just lucky we haven’t had a bad fire.” Polisso had nothing better to fight fires than a big wooden tub with a hand pump and a leather hose. They called it a siphon. Any blaze that got well started had no trouble staying ahead of it. Fire was a nightmare here, especially fire with a strong breeze to fan it.
A gang of municipal slaves with shovels and hods cleared bricks from the street. The skinny, weary-looking men worked as slowly as they could get away with. Every once in a while, the overseer—who was much better fed than the work gang—would growl at them. They’d speed up for a little while after that, then ease back down to the usual pace again.
The overseer didn’t growl too often. He knew when he could push them. They knew when they could slack off, and by how much. If he didn’t get that minimum amount of work out of them, he would let them hear about it. They didn’t want that, so they gave him what he needed—and not a copper’s worth more. Little by little, the work got done. If it wasn’t finished today—and it wouldn’t be—they’d come back tomorrow. What difference did a day make, one way or the other? That was how the slaves seemed to feel about it, and the overseer as well.
When Jeremy and Amanda got to the market square, he saw that the city prefect’s palace had had several chunks bitten out of it. He had that odd feeling you get when something bad happens to someone you don’t like. He didn’t like Sesto Capurnio one bit, but he hoped—he supposed he hoped—none of those cannonballs had mashed the prefect.
Next door to the palace, the temple stood undamaged. “Look at that,” said a man who displayed some well-made wooden bowls and platters. “Only goes to show, the gods look out for their own.”
“Oh, garbage,” the coppersmith beside him said. “It could be fool luck just as easy as not.”
Plainly, they’d been going through all the variations in that argument for a while now, in almost the same way as the slaves moved wreckage up the street. They weren’t in any hurry about it. The more they stretched it out, the longer it could amuse both of them. In Polisso, entertainment was where you found it.
Jeremy and Amanda went on to the temple. As usual, they had to wait in line in the narthex to buy incense
for their thanks-offering. Today, though, the clerk who sold it to them and took down their names didn’t act snooty. He said, “I’ve already made my offering. When the barbarians got in, I thought we were all done for. I’ve never been so glad in all my life.”
“I know what you mean,” Jeremy answered. “They broke into our house. If the legionaries hadn’t driven them back…”
He didn’t say anything about stabbing the Lietuvan soldier. He wasn’t proud of that. He knew he’d had to do it—the man would have killed him without a second thought—but he still wished he hadn’t. He decided he did hope the Lietuvan would get better—after he went home.
“No wonder you’re here to make a thanks-offering, then,” the clerk said. In memory of the hard time just past, he was acting much more like a human being, much less like nothing but a gear in the Roman imperial machine.
“We’re here.” Jeremy meant here, as in alive—not here, as in the temple narthex. “That’s why we’re making the thanks-offering.”
And the clerk—yes, amazingly lifelike—smiled and nodded. He understood what Jeremy had in mind. Who would have thought it? Clerks didn’t get paid to understand, and so they mostly didn’t bother. “Here is your incense,” this one said. “May your god and the spirit of the Emperor look kindly on the offering.”
“Thank you,” Jeremy said. After a disaster, people pulled together for a while. Mom and Dad had talked about how things were like that after the last big quake in L.A., and they always mentioned that. Sure enough, almost getting the city sacked counted for a disaster.
He and Amanda each had a little pinch of cheap incense in an even cheaper earthenware bowl. They walked into the temple’s main hall side by side. There in the paintings, the mosaics, the statues in niches, were all the gods the locals believed in and Jeremy didn’t. It was almost a WalMart of religion. Dionysus? Aisle 17. Mithras? Aisle 22. Isis? She’s way over there by the checkout stands.
He whispered to Amanda. She smiled. But then, all at once, it didn’t seem quite so funny. Maybe because he too was feeling the aftereffects of disaster, he suddenly saw the swarm of gods here as something more than superstition mixed with bureaucracy. Whether he really believed in them or not, the gods meant reassurance to a lot of people. And everybody needed reassurance every now and then, especially after a brush with catastrophe.
He went up to the altar in front of the Roman Emperor’s bust. Even the line around the neck that showed where one head could replace another didn’t bother him today. Wasn’t it a symbol of how the Empire went on no matter what the Emperor looked like? It was if you looked at it the right way.
The altartop had been polished to begin with. The touch of lots of bowls with pinches of incense in them had worn it smoother still. The marble was cool and slick under Jeremy’s fingers as he set down his bowl. He reached for a twig, lit it at the waiting flame, touched it to the stuff in the bowl, and then stamped it out.
Smoke curled up from the pinch of incense. It smelled more greasy than sweet. It had to have next to no myrrh or frankincense in it. None could have come into Polisso since the siege started. Here, now, that hardly seemed to matter. The thought counted more than the actual physical stuff that went into it.
Beside him, her face serious, Amanda was lighting her thanks-offering. He wondered what she was thinking. He couldn’t ask, not here. Locals were coming up to make offerings of their own. He and his sister stood with their heads bent in front of the altar for a little while, then withdrew.
When they got outside, Amanda said, “That’s funny. I really do feel better.”
“I was thinking the same thing!” Jeremy exclaimed. “It meant something today. Even if we don’t exactly believe, we weren’t just going through the motions.”
His sister nodded. “That’s right. I was thankful I could make the offering.”
“There you go!” Jeremy said. “I was looking for that, but you found it.”
“I wish I could find some other things that matter more,” Amanda said. “A way home would be nice.”
“I know,” Jeremy said, and then, “I don’t know. I just don’t know any more.” Lost hope? He shook his head. It wasn’t that. He would never lose hope. But he’d lost optimism. Whatever had happened back in the home timeline, it was—it had to be—a lot worse than he’d thought when the connection between there and here first broke.
A cannonball sailed through the air. When you were out in the open, you could really watch them fly. They didn’t move too fast for the eye to follow, even if their paths did seem to blur. This one smashed into the roof of a leather worker’s shop. Red tiles—they really were a lot like the ones on the roofs of Spanish-style houses back in Los Angeles—crumbled into red dust and smoke. A woman—the leather worker’s wife, or maybe a daughter—let out a scream. He was down below, putting the finishing touches on a saddle. He threw it down and ran upstairs, cursing.
“I know how he feels,” Jeremy said.
“I know how she feels,” Amanda said.
Jeremy thought about that. Then he said, “He can’t hit back at the Lietuvans any more than she can.” He waited to see what Amanda would say. It was her turn to do some thinking. In the end, she didn’t say anything. But she did nod. Jeremy felt as if he’d passed an odd sort of test.
Rap, rap, rap. Pause. Rap, rap, rap. Amanda raised a pot of porridge several chain links higher above the fire so it wouldn’t scorch while she went to see who was at the door. Rap, rap, rap. Whoever it was wanted to make sure she and Jeremy knew he was there. Rap, rap, rap. She wondered if the knocker would come off or if the door would fall down. They’d had it fixed, but…
She almost ran into her brother in the front hall. “Want me to take care of it?” Jeremy asked.
She knew what he meant. The locals would expect to deal with somebody male. She stuck out her chin. She didn’t much care what the locals expected. “It’s all right,” she said. “They can talk to me. Or they can—” She used a gesture common in Polisso, but not commonly used by girls.
A local would have been horrified. Jeremy laughed. He bowed as if she were the city prefect. “All yours, then.”
Jeremy behind her, she unbarred the door and opened it. Just in the nick of time, too. The man standing there was reaching for the knocker again. “Good day,” Amanda said pleasantly. “No need to do that any more. We knew you were here.”
He blinked and then frowned. By the way one eyebrow went up even as his mouth turned down, he recognized sarcasm when he heard it. That was almost as rare in Polisso as it was in Los Angeles. He said, “You are requested to come to the city prefect’s palace at once.”
NeoLatin had separate words and separate verb forms for the singular and plural of you. He’d used the plural, including her and Jeremy. “Who requests that?” she asked.
“Why, the most illustrious city prefect himself, of course,” the man replied. He would be one of Sesto Capurnio’s chief secretaries, or maybe his steward. He wore a tunic of very fine wool with very little embroidery on it. That meant he had a good deal of money without much status. Did it mean he was a slave? It might well. Slaves here could have money of their own. They could even, though rarely, own other slaves. Amanda sometimes wondered how well anyone from the home timeline understood all the complications to society in Agrippan Rome. She knew she didn’t.
She did know the request wasn’t really a request. It was an order. But the fact that the city prefect hadn’t phrased it as an order meant she and Jeremy had gained status. It didn’t mean she could say no. She said yes the nicest way she knew how: “My brother and I are honored to accept the most illustrious city prefect’s kind invitation.”
“We certainly are,” Jeremy agreed.
The secretary or steward or whatever he was looked relieved to hear him speak up. You sexist donkey, Amanda thought. But this whole world was full of sexist donkeys. She couldn’t change it all by herself, no matter how much she wished she could. The man said, “Come with me, then, b
oth of you.”
Amanda moved the porridge higher above the fire and made it smaller so the food wouldn’t burn. And then go they did, back through the battered streets of Polisso. The gang of slaves they’d seen on their trip to the temple a few days before—or maybe a different gang—worked at its usual unhurried pace to clear away another ruined wall. When they got to the square, Amanda saw that a cannonball had hit the temple. Jeremy caught her eye. She knew what he was thinking. So much for miracles. She nodded.
But she really had felt better coming out of the temple after the thanks-offering. That wasn’t a miracle. She knew it wasn’t. It still counted for something, though.
Sesto Capurnio’s flunky led the two crosstime traders into the city prefect’s office. The prefect himself sat behind his desk. The painted busts of several recent Emperors stared out at Amanda and Jeremy from in back of him. Amanda found that slightly eerie, or more than slightly.
When Sesto Capurnio spoke, she half expected the lips on all the busts to start moving in time with his mouth. They didn’t, of course. Only he said, “Good day.”
“Good day, most illustrious prefect,” Amanda and Jeremy replied in chorus. He bowed. She curtsied. Still together, they went on, “How may we serve you?”
Sesto Capurnio shook his head. “I did not call you here on official business,” he said. “This is a…a private conversation. Yes, that’s it, a private conversation.” He looked pleased at finding the phrase.
Amanda glanced at Jeremy, just for a moment. His eyes met hers. Past that, their faces showed no expression. That was something they’d had to learn. But, even though Jeremy’s face stayed blank, she was sure he was thinking right along with her again. When an important person told you something was a private conversation, did you believe him? Not on your life!
Did you let him know you didn’t believe him? Not on your life!
Gunpowder Empire Page 19
