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 w
as 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 myself 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?
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 c
ity 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?“
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