Gunpowder Empire ct-1

by Harry Turtledove

  “See you,” Amanda said. She'd done plenty of worrying about herself, too. Nice to know somebody else was also doing it for her. That was a big part of what parents were for.

  She didn't want to leave the cellar. Going back into the world of Agrippan Rome, the world of stinks, the world with slavery and without electricity, reminded her of everything she'd left behind. She'd get it back again, though. And she and Jeremy would get Mom and Dad back, too. It was like living in a fairy tale when you got three wishes.

  But the three wishes hadn't happened yet. She just had the promise that they would. What to do in the meantime? The only thing she could see, was to get on with her life. She felt like Cinderella, back with her stepmother and nasty stepsisters before the Prince came along with the glass slipper.

  The next morning, she put a water jar on her hip and went to the fountain. She would never be able to go there without thinking of the Lietuvan cannonball ricocheting through the crowd of women that one dreadful morning. She noticed local women also looking at the scars it had left behind on the stonework. The real damage it had done, though, had nothing to do with stonework.

  Maria was at the fountain. She and a couple of free women were talking about the victory the Romans had won against King Kuzmickas. People in Polisso hoped it meant the Lietuvans wouldn't invade again any time soon. Past that, they didn't much seem to care.

  One of the free women waved to Amanda. “What do you think?” the local asked. “You went out there and gave the King presents. Will he try again soon?”

  “How can I know that?” Amanda said reasonably. “I just met him for a little while. I don't know how badly the legions beat him, either. If they really smashed up his army, maybe he'll stay in his own country for a while. If they didn't, though, he might think he'd have better luck next time and try again.”

  “Sounds sensible.” The local woman seemed surprised. Maybe she wasn't used to logically thinking things through. Even back in the home timeline, a lot of people weren't. That never failed to startle Amanda when she bumped into it, which probably wasn't sensible on her part.

  Maria smiled at her. Amanda cautiously smiled back. The slave girl seemed willing to be friendly, at least to a certain degree, no matter what she believed. Maybe that meant Maria wasn't quite so strict herself as Amanda had thought. More likely, it just meant the slave couldn't help being a friendly person even if her beliefs were strict. Maria said, “You seem happy.”

  Amanda nodded. “I am happy. I just got a message from my mother and father.“ She didn't have to say the message had crossed timelines to get here. ”They ought to be back in Polisso in a few days.“

  “Oh, that is good news.” Maria set down her water jar and gave Amanda a hug. Yes, she was a friendly person, all right. “I know you and your brother have been worried about them.”

  “A little.” Amanda didn't want to say how much. She couldn't say all the reasons why she and Jeremy had been worried, either.

  “They will have worried about you even more, what with the two of you under siege here. I'm sure they will reward the messenger when he tells them you are all right,” Maria said. “I prayed that everything would turn out well for you and for them. I'm glad my prayers were answered.”

  Amanda didn't quite know how to take that. “Thank you,” seemed the right thing to say. Stammering a little, she added, “Don't you, uh, pray for yourself, too? For your freedom?”

  “Oh, yes,” Maria answered calmly. “But God hasn't chosen to hear that prayer yet. In His own good time, He will. Or, if it pleases Him, He will leave me as I am. His will be done.”

  She means it, Amanda realized. Understanding that, believing it, was a bigger jolt than seeing how some people wouldn't think logically. Maria believed, no matter how friendly she was. Believing helped her accept her place. Accepting a low place wasn't something Americans were used to. Instead, they went out and tried to make it better. People in Agrippan Rome usually didn't. They couldn't.

  “How do you stand it?” Amanda blurted.

  “What can I do about it?” Maria still sounded calm and reasonable. “Nothing, not by myself.” After echoing Amanda's thoughts, she went on, “Since I can't do anything, what's the point of getting upset? It would only make life harder, and life is hard enough as is. I'm more ready to be free than I used to be, I think. Now that you showed me how the alphabet works, I can read more and more, though it's still not easy for me. I go on from day to day, and I pray, and I hope.”

  “Would you like enough silver to buy yourself free?” Amanda asked impulsively. “I have it, you know.”

  Maria smiled again and shook her head. “I would rather be your friend than your debtor. It would take me years to pay back that kind of money, if I ever could.”

  “I didn't mean as a loan,” Amanda said. “If you want to be free, I'd gladly pay your owner what you're worth.” She couldn't change the whole Roman Empire here. But she could help a friend. If she got in trouble for that with Crosstime Traffic, too bad. She and Jeremy had piled up an awful lot of silver. Freeing Maria counted for more with her than buying grain. She'd had second thoughts about it before. Now that she was leaving… Yes, things seemed different somehow.

  The slave girl's eyes went big and round when she realized Amanda meant it. “You would do that for me?” she said. Amanda nodded. Maria hugged her again. But then, worry in her voice, she asked, “What would I do if I were free?”

  “You could go on working for your master, but as a freed-woman,” Amanda answered. “You know his business. Wouldn't he be glad to have you? You'd be your own person, though. You wouldn't be his.”

  Even that wasn't a hundred percent true. Freedmen and freedwomen had obligations to the people who'd once owned them. But they couldn't be sold or mistreated, the way slaves could. And their children would be wholly free.

  “I hardly believe my own ears,” Maria said.

  “Well, you'd better,” Amanda told her. “I meant it. Take the water back, and I'll do the same. Then I'll meet you at Pulio Carvilio's shop.”

  Maria's owner, a cobbler, was a short, stocky man with a broad face, hairy ears, and scarred hands. “What's this I hear?” he said in a gruff, raspy voice when Amanda came in. He pushed the sandal he was repairing off to one side and set the awl he held down on the table. “You want to buy Maria from me?”

  Amanda shook her head. “No. I want to buy her freedom.”

  Pulio Carvilio stuck out his chin, which made his jowls wobble. “She's a good worker. It'll cost you. She's worth five pounds of silver if she's worth a copper.”

  “Five pounds!” Amanda exclaimed. “That's robbery!” The haggle that followed was the strangest one she'd ever known. She was dickering over the price of another human being. When she let herself think about that, it made her sick,

  I don't want her for myself she thought. I want her to be able to have herself.

  She got Pulio Carvilio down to four pounds of silver, but no further. He had the advantage in the bargain. The only reason she haggled at all was that he would have been shocked if she hadn't. If he wanted to think he'd skinned her in the deal, she didn't mind a bit.

  Once they'd agreed, she and the cobbler and Maria had to go to the city prefect's palace to make everything official. It turned out to be more complicated than Amanda had expected. Almost everything in Agrippan Rome turned out to be more complicated than people from the home timeline expected. There were endless forms to fill out, most of them in triplicate. Pulio Carvilio couldn't read or write. That meant the clerk at the palace had to read everything to him, which made the whole business take twice as long as it should have. (Maria could hardly read, either, but the clerk didn't care about that. Till all the paperwork got filled out, she was just a piece of property with legs.) The clerk and Amanda both had to witness Pulio Carvilio's mark again and again and again.

  And the clerk kept sniffing. “This is irregular,” he said several times. “That a female should make such a purchase… Most irreg
ular.”

  “Is it illegal?” asked Amanda, who knew it wasn't.

  He was honest, or honest enough. He shook his head. “No. But it is irregular.”

  “Never mind that,” Amanda told him. “Just think of the tax the Empire's getting.” She had to pay him ten percent of what she was paying Maria's master. The government said that kept people from freeing slaves on a whim. Maybe it did. But Amanda thought the main purpose of the law was to make the government money.

  Finally, all three copies of all the forms were filled out. The clerk nodded to Maria and said, “Congratulations, Maria Carvilia. You are free.” As a freedwoman, she took the family name of her former owner. That was another sign freedwomen and freedmen weren't so very free after all. Amanda swallowed a sigh. She'd hoped for something better.

  And then she got it. The clerk slid off his stool. He opened a drawer in a cabinet behind him. Amanda expected him to pull out one more document. Instead, he held what looked to her like nothing more than a funny hat. But Maria knew what it was. She clapped her hands together. “A Phrygian cap!”

  “A Phrygian cap,” the clerk agreed gravely. “The sign of your freedom.” He set it on her head. Except that it was red, not white, and only bulged out in front, it reminded Amanda of a chef's hat. Not counting her buck teeth, Maria was a nice-looking girl. Even she couldn't make the Phrygian cap seem anything but ridiculous to Amanda. But what Amanda thought didn't matter here. Maria's eyes glowed. The cap might have been odd-looking, but it meant everything in the world to her.

  Amanda wondered how long freed slaves had been putting on Phrygian caps in Agrippan Rome. A thousand years? Two thousand? Longer still? Most of the time, she thought old customs held this world back. Here, she dimly understood what this one meant to Maria.

  Pulio Carvilio kissed Maria on one cheek. The clerk kissed her on the other. Would they have done that if she were a middle-aged man? Amanda doubted it. But Maria kept on smiling, so she didn't say anything.

  Then the brand-new freedwoman kissed her and whispered, “Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!” in her ear.

  “It's all right. I'm glad to do it,” Amanda answered. For about half a minute, she felt really proud of herself. Then she thought of all the slaves in Polisso, in the vast empire of Agrippan Rome, she couldn't free. And that didn't count the slaves in Lietuva and Persia and the gunpowder empires farther east. Rome wasn't built in a day. Slavery wouldn't fall apart in a day, either. Too bad, she thought.

  Three raps on the door. It could have been anybody. It could have been a neighbor asking to borrow a cup of olive oil. (Sugar, here, was uncommon and expensive-more a medicine than anything else.) It could have been, but Jeremy didn't think it was. He ran for the door as if shot from a gun. He got there half a step ahead of his sister. They grinned at each other.

  Jeremy took the bar off the door. Amanda unlatched it. There in front of the house stood Mom and Dad. The next couple of minutes were confused. Everybody was hugging and kissing everybody else. Passersby stopped and watched and called out comments instead of ignoring them the way they would have in the home timeline.

  “It's so good to see you!” everyone kept saying over and over.

  “Why don't you come on in?” Jeremy suggested at last. “Good idea,” Mom said. Jeremy and Amanda both kept looking at her. If they hadn't heard, they wouldn't have known she'd had her appendix out. She'd had plenty of time to get better.

  “This town took a beating, didn't it?” Dad said, as Jeremy closed the door behind them. “It's in worse shape than I thought it would be.”

  “Like I told you, the Lietuvans broke in once,” Jeremy answered. “The garrison managed to drive them out again.” He still didn't say anything about stabbing the Lietuvan soldier. He knew he wouldn't forget it, but wished he could.

  Mom and Dad walked out into the courtyard. Dad clicked his tongue between his teeth when he saw the places where the kitchen roof had been repaired. The new tiles were a brighter red than those that had stood out in the sun for a while. “You were lucky,” he said. Jeremy nodded.

  Amanda went into the kitchen. She came out carrying a tray. “I knew you were coming, so I baked a cake,” she said. It was, of course, a honey cake-honey did duty for sugar here most of the time. Along with it, the tray held a jar of wine and four cups.

  Everyone poured out a small libation. The cake was sweet. The wine was sweeter. Having the family together again was sweetest of all. “How long till we can go home?” Jeremy asked. Like Amanda and his parents, he was still speaking neoLatin. Voices carried. No point in rousing suspicion.

  “Our replacements left Carnuto a couple of days after us,” Mom answered, which told him what he needed to know and didn't tell the neighbors anything they didn't need to know.

  “The accounts are in good shape,” Jeremy said. “We had to collect in silver, not grain, for a while. You know about that.”

  Dad and Mom both nodded. Dad said, “You did what you had to do. No one will hold that against you. Sooner or later, we'll turn the silver back into grain.“

  Amanda stirred. “I used some of the silver to buy Maria's freedom. I liked her before, but we got to be really good friends during the siege. The people we all work for will probably bill us on account of it.”

  Jeremy thought the same thing. He hadn't said anything to Amanda about it, because he understood why she'd done what she'd done. Even so, he doubted Crosstime Traffic's accounting computers would.

  But Dad just shrugged. Mom smiled. Neither one seemed the least bit upset. Dad said, “Don't worry about it, sweetheart. You're not the first person to do something like that, and you won't be the last.”

  “Really?” Amanda sounded amazed. “When we train to go out into the alternates, they tell us and tell us not to have anything to do with freeing slaves. They say we're not supposed to mess with slavery at all.”

  “They tell you that to keep you from getting into trouble,” Dad answered. “But you didn't get into trouble here. You did everything by the book.”

  Mom added, “Besides, a lot of the people who teach those training courses have never been out in the alternates themselves. Saying, 'Never do this,' is a lot easier when you've never had to worry about doing it yourself.”

  “Once you've gone out and seen some of the things people do in the alternates, a lot of the time you do want to change it. You can't help yourself. It's ugly,“ Dad said.

  “What exactly are you saying?” Jeremy asked. “Are you saying we shouldn't pay any attention to what they tell us in the training sessions? Why do we have them, in that case?”

  He liked authority no better than anyone else his age. If the stuff they fed him was pointless, he didn't want to have to go through it.

  “No, I'm not saying that. You do have to pay attention,” Dad answered. “But what you run into in the real world-in the real alternates-isn't just the same as what they tell you about in training. When you get out on your own, you have to use your own judgment. Amanda did that. We're not mad at her. We're proud of her.”

  Amanda looked so smug, Jeremy wanted to hit her. He didn't like her getting praised when he didn't. She probably didn't like him getting praised when she didn't. That wasn't his worry, though. That was hers.

  Then Mom said, “We're proud of both of you, as a matter of fact. It sounds like you did a great job here. You're not supposed to be on your own yet. You're especially not supposed to be on your own in the middle of a war.”

  Dad's chuckle had kind of a nasty edge. “The locals probably figured you bashed out our brains and buried us in the cellar.”

  “That's not funny!” Amanda stopped acting smug. Her voice went shrill. “They did.“

  “They sure did,” Jeremy agreed. “If they'd been any more suspicious, they would have tried digging down there. That wouldn't have been so good. They would have found all the grain we were storing, and they might have found the concrete over the subbasement.” He spoke quietly, so only the people in the courtyard c
ould hear.

  “They couldn't get through it,” Amanda said.

  “No, but they sure would have wondered why it was there,” Jeremy said. “Locals aren't supposed to wonder about us at all.“ He'd learned that in a training session, too. He'd never thought to doubt it, either. It seemed too obvious to need doubting.

  By then, Dad's grin had fallen from his face. He poured himself another cup of wine. “I thought I was joking,” he said.

  “Nope.” Jeremy shook his head. “They do wonder about us. We sell things nobody else has. We sell for grain, not silver. They think that's weird, too. I don't know what we can do about it. Move out of Polisso, maybe, and start up again somewhere a long ways off. That would buy some time.”

  “Less than you think,” Dad said. “News doesn't move fast here, but they keep records. They keep records like you wouldn't believe, in fact. There's bound to be a file on us back in Rome. Nobody's ever come out here to ask question, so they can't think we're real important. But if we showed up in Spain or Britain instead of Polisso, news of that would get back to Rome, too. And a clerk who'd seen the one file would also see the other one. He'd wonder why we disappeared here and set up shop there. And somebody would start asking questions then. Or am I wrong?“

  Jeremy thought it over. He didn't have to think very long. He'd already had his own run-ins with the bureaucracy of Agrippan Rome. “No, you're right. I hope we don't have to pull out of here and start over on some other alternate that looks a lot like this one.”

  “That would be a nuisance,” Dad agreed. “I wouldn't want to have to say we've lost our grip on Agrippan Rome.” Jeremy and Amanda both made horrible faces. Dad grinned at them. He had no shame-he was proud when he did something like that. Still grinning, he went on, “We're not the ones who make choices like that, anyway.”

  “One good thing,” Amanda said: “Even if the locals here found out we're from crosstime, they couldn't do anything about it. As long as we could jump into a transposition chamber, we'd be safe.”