Gunpowder Empire ct-1

by Harry Turtledove

  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!”

  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 cannon-ball 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.