Maybe one of these days I’ll get the whole story out of you, Dad wrote. Even when he couldn’t see faces and hear voices, he wasn’t so easy to fool. But he went on, For now, I’m just glad you are fine. I hope I’ll see you soon. I’ve got to go get out of this suit and clean up now. I love you, and so does your mom.
“ ’Bye,” Amanda and Jeremy said together. They didn’t get an answer. Amanda wished they would have, but Dad had already said he was going. “They found us again!” she said. She couldn’t imagine a more wonderful sentence.
“Yeah.” By the glow in Jeremy’s eyes, neither could he.
But then Amanda found one: “We’re not going to have to stay here.”
“Yeah!” Jeremy said again. “That would have been—pretty bad. I kept trying not to worry about it, but…” His voice trailed away. “Sometimes you can’t help it.”
“No. You can’t.” Amanda had thought about living out the rest of her life here, and wondered how long it would be. It would certainly have seemed long, with hard work filling so much of it. She wouldn’t have had the whole world and lots of alternates at her fingertips, the way she had back home. Anything outside of Polisso would have faded to a whisper, almost to a dream.
She would have had to live with stench and dirt the rest of her life. Sooner or later, the drugs they had here would have run out or got too old to do any good. Doctors in Agrippan Rome didn’t know anything, and mostly didn’t know they didn’t know anything. Dentists were even worse. If her wisdom teeth gave her trouble when they came in, what could she do? Take poppy juice and hope for the best.
But none of that was the worst. If she and Jeremy were stuck in Polisso, they would have had to become part of the city in a way they weren’t now. They would have had to make real friends, good friends, here. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have any. How were you supposed to live your life without friends?
When you made friends, though, you went out with them and you did what they did. If they wanted to go to the arena to watch beasts fight or gladiators go at each other, how could you say no all the time? They thought that was good, clean fun. If you didn’t, how could you stay friends?
It got worse, too. She and Jeremy were both young. If they had to stay in Polisso, they might—they probably would—end up getting married. Marriages here were usually business arrangements, not love matches like the ones in the home timeline. Even so, how could you live with somebody when you couldn’t tell that person what you really were?
And here, if she and Jeremy did marry, they would be bound to marry somebody with money. In Polisso, if you had money, you had slaves. That would have put them nose to nose with something they fought to keep at arm’s length. Amanda didn’t see any way she could persuade a Roman husband slavery was wrong. Since she couldn’t…Could she be a good mistress? Maybe. If she were, would it make her feel any less unclean? She doubted that. She doubted it very much.
She also had one worry that Jeremy didn’t. What would having a baby be like in this world without hospitals? Women did it all the time. Polisso wouldn’t have had any people if they didn’t. But mothers died here from childbed fever. Babies died, too. More than a third of the babies born in Agrippan Rome didn’t live to be five years old. How could you love a child if you knew you might lose it the next minute? How could you not love it if it was yours? She didn’t see an answer to either question.
Now she wouldn’t have to look for one. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said.
“Okay.” Jeremy’s voice came from far away. Had he been thinking about all the reasons he was glad not to be trapped here? Amanda wouldn’t have been surprised.
The door slid shut after she and Jeremy left the secret part of the basement. There they were, back in Agrippan Rome. Amanda sighed. Staying here for another week or two was going to be hard. But staying forever would have been a lot harder.
Jeremy was playing catch in the street with Fabio Lentulo and trying not to get smashed when he heard somebody say, “They’re going!” He didn’t have much chance to worry about who was going. The apprentice had thrown the ball so that he had to catch it without banging into either a mule or the soldier who was leading it.
“Watch yourself, kid,” the soldier growled with the sour disapproval so many grownups had for anybody younger than they were.
“Sure,” Jeremy said. Even if the soldier’s whiskers were turning gray, he could probably whale the stuffing out of somebody who didn’t fight for a living. Besides, Jeremy had just made a great catch. He wasn’t going to be fussy with anybody about anything.
He tossed the ball high in the air, so that Fabio Lentulo would have time to run under it—if he ran right into the middle of another bunch of soldiers. He didn’t. One of the soldiers picked up the ball and flipped it to him. “Thanks,” he said—the legionary could have kept it just as easily.
When he threw it back, though, he tried to take Jeremy’s head off with it. Jeremy had won a point in the game, and he didn’t like it. Jeremy won another point—or at least kept from losing one—when he snatched the ball out of the air. Fabio Lentulo sent him a gesture that was anything but complimentary.
“Same to you, with olive oil on it,” Jeremy said. They both laughed. Buddies could insult each other as much as they pleased. But if Jeremy had aimed his gibe at Fabio Lentulo’s mother instead of the apprentice, he would have had a fight on his hands. In some ways, Polisso and Los Angeles weren’t so different.
Two men came up the street toward Jeremy and Fabio Lentulo. One of them said, “Are you sure they’re pulling out?”
“By the gods, you can go up on the wall and see for yourself if you don’t believe me,” the other man replied.
“They haven’t got the nerve to stay and fight it out,” the first man said.
His friend shrugged. “I don’t know about that. If you ask me, they’re going off to fight the relieving army when it’s still too far from Polisso for the garrison here to pitch into ’em from behind.”
They walked on, still arguing in a good-natured way. “Well?” Fabio Lentulo said. “You going to throw me the ball or not?”
“Here.” Jeremy tossed it to him, soft enough for a six-year-old to catch. “Did you hear what they said? Sounds like the Lietuvans are leaving.”
“To the crows with the Lietuvans.” Fabio Lentulo threw the ball so that Jeremy would have to splash through a puddle to go after it.
But he didn’t go after it. He just let it fall with a thump. It didn’t have much bounce to it. He said, “If they let me, I’m going up onto the wall. I don’t know about you, but I want to see King Kuzmickas leave.”
“Why? So you can wave bye-bye?” Fabio Lentulo knew Jeremy and Amanda had gone out to give the King of Lietuva presents.
Jeremy sent back the gesture the apprentice had given him. “No, so I can be sure he’s gone. Or didn’t you worry about a cannonball coming down on your head or getting sold into slavery?”
“Me, I kept hoping a cannonball would come down on my boss’s head. He already treats me like a slave,” Fabio Lentulo answered. He probably wasn’t kidding, or not very much. An employer could order an apprentice around much as a master could order a slave. The difference was, an apprentice became his own man once he was trained. A slave was never his own man; he always belonged to somebody else. Fabio Lentulo went on. “Besides, none of that stuff happened to him. His place didn’t get hit even once.” He spread his hands, as if to say, What can you do?
“All right. I still want to see Kuzmickas leave, so I’m going up on the wall,” Jeremy said. “Are you coming?”
“Oh, I’ll come,” Fabio Lentulo said. “You’re not going to be able to go around town telling people I’m yellow.” Jeremy’s challenge would have got a lot of young men in Los Angeles to go with him. Here in Polisso, any of them would have risen to it as automatically as a trout rising to strike at a fly. People here did behave in a more macho way than they did in the home timeline. They thought that was what they were sup
posed to do, and they did it.
In school, Jeremy had learned nothing could travel faster than light. He didn’t think his teachers had heard about the speed with which rumor could spread. He and Fabio Lentulo were part of a line going up the stone stairs to the top of the wall. Grumbling soldiers herded the civilian gawkers along like so many sheep. “Yes, the barbarians are pulling out,” they said. “You can take your gander, if it makes you happy. Mind you don’t get your stupid heads shot off. The Lietuvans haven’t quit fighting, and they aren’t gone yet.”
Jeremy discovered how true that was a moment later. A Lietuvan soldier popped up out of a trench, aimed a matchlock in his general direction, and pulled the trigger to bring the burning match down on the priming powder. The priming powder caught and set off the main charge. The musket went off. A great cloud of gray smoke made the musketeer vanish. The bang of the gun reached Jeremy half a second later—about the same time as the bullet whined past his head. He ducked. He couldn’t help it.
When he looked behind him, he saw that Fabio Lentulo had ducked, too. That made him feel better. Now his friend couldn’t tease him for being a coward, either. And why did such teasing matter to him? Maybe he had more macho in himself than he wanted to admit.
But even though some of the Lietuvans were still shooting at Polisso, the rest did seem to be leaving. Tents around the city were coming down. Wagons drawn by horses or mules or oxen were rolling away. Companies of musketeers like the man who’d shot at Jeremy were marching off to the south. Distantly, the breeze brought commands in musical Lietuvan to Jeremy’s ears.
“They are going,” he said.
“Looks that way,” Fabio Lentulo agreed. Then he yelled something truly vile at King Kuzmickas. He followed it with a gesture much nastier than the one he and Jeremy had aimed at each other.
He wasn’t the only one doing such things, either. Half the men seemed to be swearing at the Lietuvans or sending them obscene gestures or doing both at once. The big blond soldiers shouted back in their language. They sent the Romans gestures different but no less foul.
And some of them kept on shooting at Polisso. The legionaries on the wall shot back at them. About ten meters in front of Jeremy, a civilian fell down, clutching at his leg. His howl of pain pierced the jeers like a sword piercing flesh.
When Jeremy and Fabio Lentulo walked by where he’d been wounded, the crosstime trader didn’t look at the scarlet puddle of blood on the stone. He didn’t need to look to know it was there. He could smell the hot-metal scent, as he had when he stabbed the Lietuvan soldier.
By contrast, the apprentice stared and stared at the gore. “Got him good,” he remarked. “Did you hear him yell?”
“A deaf man would have heard him yell,” Jeremy answered.
Fabio Lentulo thought that was funny, and laughed out loud. Jeremy hadn’t meant it for a joke. There was a lot more raw agony in this alternate than in the home timeline. Bad things happened to people more often in Polisso than in Los Angeles. People here could do much less about them, too.
Joys, on the other hand…The Lietuvan soldiers were going away. With luck, they wouldn’t be able to come back. That would do for joy till something better came along. Jeremy shook his fist at the withdrawing soldiers. He never wanted to see them again, or King Kuzmickas, either.
As soon as the Lietuvans were gone, the defenders of Polisso opened the gates. People poured out of the city. Some—the scavengers—made for the Lietuvan camp, to bring back and sell whatever the enemy had left behind. Others just wanted to get away from their houses, to get away from their neighbors, for a little while. Amanda was one of those.
She couldn’t go by herself. That wasn’t done. It wasn’t safe, either. But she and Jeremy went out together. He didn’t feel the need to get away as much as she did. But he did see—she made him see—she would be impossible unless she got out for a little while. Out they went.
As far as guns would reach from the wall, the ground was cratered, the grass torn to shreds. She’d seen that when she and her brother went to call on King Kuzmickas. When the wind swung, it brought the stink of the Lietuvan encampment to her nose. The Lietuvans had been even more careless of filth and dirt and sewage than the Romans were. That they could have still surprised her.
“They probably would have had to leave pretty soon even if there weren’t a Roman army coming up from the south,” Jeremy said. “In an alternate like this, sickness kills more soldiers than bullets ever do.”
Amanda knew he was right. That didn’t mean she felt like listening. She didn’t answer. She just kept walking till the wind swung again and the stench went away. Then she stepped off the road. She lay down on her back in the grass. It tickled her ankles and her arms and her cheeks. She looked up and saw nothing but blue sky.
“Ahhh!” she said.
For a wonder, Jeremy didn’t spoil the moment. He stayed out of her way and let her do what she wanted—what she needed—to do. When she sat up again, she brushed grass out of her hair with both hands. She looked forward to using real shampoo once more, too. Her brother stood by the side of the road, sword on his hip, watching for Lietuvan stragglers and any other strangers who might be dangerous. He’d plucked a long grass stem and put it between his teeth.
“Except for the sword, you look like a hick farmer on an ancient sitcom,” Amanda told him.
“Is that a fact?” he said, doing a bad half-Southern, half-Midwestern accent. Then he went back to neoLatin: “All the backwoods farmers on all those stupid programs were as modern as next week next to the peasants in this alternate.”
“Well, sure,” Amanda said. Peasants here were cut off from the wider world around them in a way nobody in America had been since the invention of the telegraph. They might have been more cut off from the wider world than peasants in Europe since the invention of the printing press. That went back a long way, but only a third of the distance to the breakpoint between the home timeline and Agrippan Rome.
A cool breeze blew down from the mountains to the north. It didn’t say winter was coming, not yet, but it did say summer wouldn’t last forever. The harvest was on the way—and it would come even sooner in chilly Lietuva than here. There was another reason King Kuzmickas’ army would have had trouble besieging Polisso much longer.
Jeremy spread his arms. The breeze made the wide sleeves of his tunic flap. He said, “Everything’s so peaceful, so quiet. I’d almost forgotten what quiet is all about.”
“Cannon and muskets going off and cannonballs smashing into things are even noisier than traffic back home,” Amanda agreed. “They may be more dangerous, too.”
“Heh,” Jeremy said, and then, “It all seems so stupid. Is owning Polisso worth killing so many people? I can’t see it.”
“Neither can I,” Amanda said. “But could you explain the Software War so it made sense to the city prefect here?”
“You can’t explain anything so it makes sense to Sesto Capurnio. I ought to know,” Jeremy said. Amanda made a face at him. He made one right back at her. Then he went on, “All right. I know what you mean. But copy protection is something worth fighting over.”
“We think so. Would the Romans? Would the Lietuvans? Or would they figure it wasn’t worth getting excited about, the way we do when it comes to owning one of these little cities?”
“Who knows?” her brother said. “I’ll tell you something else, though—I don’t much care just now.”
Amanda didn’t care very much, either. She didn’t feel like squabbling with Jeremy right this minute. The fresh breeze teasing her hair, the clean smell of the meadow, the calm after so much chaos, and the knowledge that she’d be going back to the home timeline before long…all of them joined together to make her as contented as she’d ever been. When she looked to her right, she saw a hawk flying by. The locals would have called that a good omen. She was willing to do the same.
Thirteen
Having the Lietuvans gone didn’t mean Polisso came back to normal
right away. The city usually had farmers bringing in produce and eggs and sometimes livestock to sell in the market. Here, now, the farmers didn’t have much to sell to the people in the city. Kuzmickas’ soldiers had lived off the countryside as much as they could. Locusts might have stripped it barer. Then again, they might not have.
As they left, the Lietuvans had ruined as many grainfields as they could, too. Polisso and the surrounding farms could look forward to a lean harvest. Jeremy would have worried more about that if he’d expected to stay in town through the winter.
Being back in touch with the home timeline changed his whole way of looking at things. For better or worse—mostly for worse—he’d started to think of Polisso as home. Now he felt like a visitor, a tourist, again. Things that happened here happened to other people. They weren’t likely to affect him much.
He was in touch with Michael Fujikawa again, too. His friend was back from his summer in alternate North China—and back to school at Canoga Park High. You’re lucky, Michael wrote. You don’t have to worry about history homework and Boolean operators.
Lucky, my left one. Jeremy answered. For one thing, I was scared Amanda and I would be stuck here for good—except it wouldn’t be very good. And besides, think of all the work I’ll have to make up when I do get back.
Poor baby. Here’s the world’s smallest violin playing “Hearts and Flowers” for you, Michael sent. Jeremy laughed. His grandfather had said that, and run his forefinger over the top of his thumb when he did to show the violin. The joke had to be ancient. Jeremy had never heard it from anybody but Grandpa. He wondered where on earth Michael had picked it up.
His friend went on, I am glad you two are okay, though. I knew something was wrong when we got cut off. Terrorists, I heard. That’s no fun. Lucky they didn’t have nukes.
“Gurk!” Jeremy said when that showed up on the Power-Book’s monitor. Ordinary explosives and tailored viruses were bad enough. Nukes…Terrorists didn’t have an easy time getting them, but bad things happened when they did. And how would anybody have rebuilt the transposition chambers if even vest-pocket nukes had gone off in them?
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