Gunpowder Empire ct-1

by Harry Turtledove

  When she carried a water jar to the fountain early one muggy morning, she stared in surprise and dismay. A cannon-ball had smashed the marble plaque-and most of the brick wall in which it was set. Chunks of shattered stone and brick lay in the street. Women kicked through them on the way to get water.

  “Well, so what?” one of those women said when Amanda exclaimed about the loss. “Plenty of other old stuff in this town, sweetie, believe me.”

  She wasn't wrong. A little talk showed that most of the other women had the same point of view. Amanda didn't, and couldn't. In the part of Los Angeles where she'd lived all her life, nothing dated back earlier than the middle of the twentieth century. The first European settlement in California wasn't much more than three hundred years old. To her, things that had stood for two thousand years were precious antiques. They weren't routine landmarks or, worse, old junk.

  “If you worry about all the old things,” a woman said, “how are you ever going to put up anything new?” Again, most of the heads around the fountain bobbed up and down in agreement.

  That wasn't a question with an easy answer, either. If you lived where other people had been living for a couple of thousand years, you didn't get excited about remains of the distant past. You took them for granted. And if, say, you needed building stone, you were liable to knock down something old and reuse what had gone into it. That was often easier and cheaper than hauling in new stone from somewhere else. And if that old building had been standing there for a thousand years, or fifteen hundred-so what?

  Try as she would, Amanda couldn't think, So what? To her, it was worth keeping around just because it was old. The local women laughed at her. “If a place like that's falling down around your ears, what good is it?” one of them asked.

  “Better to get rid of it,” another woman agreed.

  “But… But…” Amanda tried to put her feelings into words. After some struggle, she did: “But you could learn so much about the way things were long ago if you studied old things.“

  All the women around the fountain laughed at her. “Who cares, except for a few old fools with more money than sense?” said a squat woman with a burn scar on her cheek.

  “Things weren't so different, anyway,” a gray-haired woman added.

  By the standards of the home timeline, she wasn't wrong. Things in Agrippan Rome had changed much less in the twenty-one hundred years since Augustus' day than they had in the home timeline. And people here weren't much aware of the changes that had happened. When modern painters showed ancient scenes, they dressed people in modern clothes. They didn't remember that styles had changed. They had ancient Roman legionaries wearing modern armor, too. They did-usually-remember soldiers in the old days hadn't known about muskets. But that was about as far as it went.

  A cannonball howled through the air overhead and smashed into something made of brick or stone. “There goes some more old junk!” The woman with the scar sounded gleeful. To her, it might have been a joke.

  The gray-haired woman nodded. “Somebody'll need a new house or a new shop,” she said. “I hope it's somebody rich.”

  “Because they can afford it better?” Amanda asked.

  “No, by Jupiter!” The gray-haired woman kicked at the cobblestones. “Because poor folks like me always get it in the neck. Let the rich fools find out what it's like to do without.”

  Several of the other women waiting their turn at the fountain nodded or spoke up in favor of that. But then one of them said, “If the Lietuvans pounded the walls the way they're pounding the city, we'd have more to worry about.”

  “Maybe they want to scare us into surrendering,” the gray-haired woman said.

  “Good luck!” Three women said it at the same time. The one with the burn scar added, “You have to be crazy to surrender to the barbarians.”

  “Crazy or starving!” another woman put in.

  “Even if you're starving, you have to be crazy,” the scarred woman said.

  “What do the Lietuvans say about us?” Amanda asked.

  Like her remark about saving old buildings, that one got less understanding than she would have wanted. The women around the fountain didn't know what the Lietuvans said. Not only that, they didn't care. King Kuzmickas' subjects were the enemy, and that was that. “I hope they come down with smallpox,” one said.

  “I hope they come down with the plague,“ another said, overtrumping.

  Everyone shuddered at that. This world had never known a plague outbreak as bad as the Black Death of the fourteenth century. It had seen several smaller ones over the years, though-plenty to make people afraid of the disease. Amanda and Jeremy had antibiotics to protect them if plague ever came to Polisso. The locals weren't so lucky.

  Cannon on the wall boomed. They were trying to knock out the guns the Lietuvans were using. It wasn't easy, though. The trenches the Lietuvans dug so they could get their cannon closer and closer to Polisso didn't come right toward the city. If they had, cannonballs shot from the walls could have bounced along them and wrecked guns moving forward.

  Instead, they approached at an angle. That way, the guns were harder to hit, even if they took longer to get really close. At each stop on the way, the Lietuvans parked them in pits protected by mounds of earth. The Roman cannon had trouble getting at them.

  And the Lietuvans kept on shooting, too. Every few minutes, a cannonball would smack down somewhere inside Polisso. The woman with the scar on her cheek had filled her water jar, but she didn't leave. The company at the fountain was probably better than back at her house. When another crash resounded from not very far away, she said, “Gods be praised we haven't had any bad fires.”

  Jeremy had thought of that, too. Here, it produced the same sort of shudder as mention of the plague had. In a city without fire engines, a big blaze was a deadly danger. The scarred woman rubbed at her cheek. Amanda wondered how she'd got burned. Even without a fire blazing out of control, Polisso had countless open flames. Lamps, candles, torches, fireplaces, cookfires, bonfires every now and then to get rid of garbage… So many things that could go wrong.

  Another cannonball screamed in. In the heartbeat before it struck, Amanda thought, It sounds like it's coming straight at me. And it was. It slammed off the cobbles only two or three meters from where she was standing, banged against the side of the fountain, crashed into two walls, and clattered about on the road till it finally stopped.

  Those first few crashes kicked up stone fragments of all sizes, some as deadly as bullets. Amanda yelped in sudden surprise and pain. A tiny chunk of flying stone had drawn a bloody line across the back of her hand. And she was lucky.

  When she looked up from her own little wound, she found out just how lucky she was.

  On one of its bounces, the iron ball had hit the scarred woman. It smashed her skull like a rock dropping on an egg. She lay facedown in the street. Her blood and the water from the jar she'd dropped puddled together. She'd never known what hit her. Another woman was down, clutching at her leg and screaming. Blood gushed from that wound, too. Which of the two women was luckier? Amanda couldn't have said.

  Other women were also hurt by the cannonball and by the fragments. Their cries dinned in her ears. This was ten times worse than any traffic accident she'd ever seen. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to run away, too. Instead, she ran forward. She did what she could for the wounded women. That wasn't much past putting on bandages, making the more badly injured ones lie down, and telling them they'd be all right. Some of the time, she knew she was lying.

  She wasn't the only one helping. Several other women who weren't hurt did the same. Screams brought men running, too. One of them was a doctor. He made bandages. He set broken bones. And he had opium against the pain. That wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. When Amanda had done all she could, she went home. She didn't realize she was sobbing till she was almost there.

  Nine

  Jeremy wouldn't have thought he could sleep with muskets and cannon goi
ng off within a hundred meters of the house- to say nothing of the ones the Lietuvans were shooting at Polisso. But he didn't have a whole lot of trouble. When he was tired enough, he did sleep. Amanda had complained the first few days after the shooting started. She hadn't since, or not about the noise. She'd come home splashed with blood and green around the gills when the cannonball smashed down by the fountain. Jeremy hadn't said a word to her about that. He'd known the same horror when he came down off the wall. In person, war was even uglier than books and movies made it out to be.

  And yet the Romans and the Lietuvans took it in stride. So did the people in the other gunpowder empires in this world. He'd wondered about that even before this round of fighting broke out. Now, lying on his lumpy bed, looking at the ceiling it was too dark to see, he thought he'd found an answer. He didn't know if it was the answer, but it was an answer.

  In his world, almost everybody lived to grow old. Pain-killing drugs that really worked cushioned the end when it came at last. Before the end, most people went through most of their lives without a whole lot of pain. Few cared to risk their comforts by shooting at their neighbors. If your life was likely to be long and pretty comfortable, why would you take the chance of throwing it away?

  But that was in the home timeline. Things were different here. They'd been different in his world too, before anesthetics and antibiotics and dentists who knew what they were doing. Here, babies and toddlers died all the time from diarrhea and typhoid fever and whooping cough and diphtheria. One child in three didn't live to be five years old. Here, toothaches went on and on-unless teeth got pulled while the sufferer was awake. Here, infections and boils and blood poisoning and food poisoning happened every day. Here, there were no tetanus shots. People died from smallpox and the plague and tuberculosis. If they got cancer, they died from that, too-died slowly and in agony, a centimeter at a time.

  In this kind of world, war looked different. You weren't likely to live a long, healthy, pain-free life no matter what you did. If you died in battle, that was liable to be a faster, more merciful death than you would get if you weren't a soldier. With all those things being so, why not take up a sword or a pike or a musket and try to do unto the other fellow before he did unto you?

  Jeremy didn't think soldiers paused and reasoned that out. They didn't have to. In Agrippan Rome-and in Lietuva, too-songs and poems and statues celebrated generals who'd won glory and soldiers who'd been heroes. If a young man didn't want to stay on the farm, what was he likely to do? Join the army. That was the best chance to change his lot he was likely to have.

  The other difference was, wars here weren't overwhelmingly destructive. In the home timeline, two dozen countries could blow up the world if they ever thought they had a reason to. Here, most of Agrippan Rome wouldn't feel this war at all. Neither would most of Lietuva.

  And so, people seemed to think, why not fight? So what if we fought twenty years before, and fifty years before, and seventy, and a hundred ten? This time, we might win, or at least get even.

  All that made some sense when looked at from a distance. When seen close up, it could have been the mad logic of beings from another planet. Jeremy still had nightmares about the man with most of his jaw shot away and his gobbling cries of pain. He didn't know everything that went into Amanda's nightmares, but he knew she had them. She'd scared him awake crying out in the night more than once.

  Outside of Polisso, a Lietuvan cannon barked. A couple of seconds later, inside Polisso, the cannonball crashed home. What did it hit? Whom did it maim? Jeremy didn't know. Wherever it came down, it was too far away for him to hear the shrieks of the wounded.

  He yawned. He shifted his weight again on the lumpy mattress. The wooden bed frame creaked. He closed his eyes. It seemed no darker with them closed than it had with them open. He yawned again. Another cannon fired, and another. No doubt more of them went off all through the night, but he never heard them.

  He woke up with light leaking in through the slats of the shutter. Sitting up in bed, he scratched his chin. His beard was on the scraggly side. It would probably stay that way for another couple of years. He didn't care. Better a scraggly beard than shaving with a straight razor with nothing but olive oil to use instead of shaving gel.

  Yawning some more, shaking his head to get the cobwebs out, he walked down the hall to the kitchen. He was almost there before he consciously noticed the gunfire. He shook his head again, this time in surprise. This was how you got used to being stuck in the middle of a war. Till a cannonball tore a hole in your house, you just went on about your business.

  Amanda was already in the kitchen, eating bread and honey and drinking watered wine. “Good day,” she said.

  “Good day,” Jeremy answered. He tore his own piece of bread from the loaf. No one here had ever heard of sliced bread. That annoyed him. It wasn't the biggest thing that did, though. He said, “Don't you get sick and tired of speaking this language?”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.“ His sister nodded. ”But what choice have we got? If the locals hear us using English, what will they think? They'll think it's Lietuvan. That's the only foreign language anyone's likely to hear around here. And if they think it's Lietuvan, they'll think we're spies. So-neoLatin.“

  “NeoLatin,” Jeremy agreed dully. He bit into the bread. It tasted good, but it was gritty. Was this how it would be for the rest of his life? A language that wasn't his, food that wore down his teeth, an empire that had forgotten freedom and never heard of so many other things?

  Another cannonball smashed something to smithereens. If the gunner had turned his cannon a little to the left… In that case, Jeremy might not have had to worry about the rest of his life.

  Amanda didn't want to go back to the water fountain, not after what had happened there. She didn't think she was more likely to get hurt there. That wasn't it. She could get hurt anywhere, and she knew it. But she didn't want to be reminded of where the other women had got hurt.

  The locals hadn't done much to clean things up, either. Broken stone and bricks still lay where they had fallen. For that matter, the cannonball still lay there, too. It wasn't all that much bigger than her closed fist. Strange to think something so small could have done so much harm.

  As no one had cleaned up the rubble, so no one had cleaned up the bloodstains. They were brownish-black now, and dry, not wet, gleaming scarlet. But she still knew what they meant. They meant anguish for people who hadn't done anything to deserve any. How many husbands were without wives, how many children without mothers, because of that round lump of iron?

  Most of the women at the fountain this morning hadn't been there when the cannonball struck home. Amanda thought she could tell which ones had. They were the ones who flinched whenever another cannonball smacked into Polisso. Amanda flinched, too. After seeing what she'd seen, she didn't know how anyone could keep from flinching.

  The slave girl named Maria came out of her house with a water jar on her hip. “Good morning, Mistress Amanda,” she said. “God bless you.”

  “God bless you,” Amanda answered automatically. But, in this place, that didn't seem adequate. She waved with her free hand. “Do you think God blessed what happened here?”

  Maria only shrugged. “I am sorry, truly sorry, people were hurt. But I am less than a mote in the eye of God. I cannot know His purposes. Neither can any other mere mortal.”

  “You really mean that,” Amanda said in slow wonder.

  “You really doubt it.” Maria sounded every bit as amazed.

  They both stared, neither understanding the other in the least. Maria said, “I thought even an Imperial Christian would have more faith in the Lord.”

  Amanda said, “I thought even a strong Christian would be able to think for herself a little bit.”

  And then, at the same time, they both said, “How can you be so blind?”

  That might have killed the strange, delicate friendship that had grown up between them. Friendship between slave and free wasn't easy
in Agrippan Rome. Neither was friendship between a native of Agrippan Rome and someone from the home timeline. Pile the one on top of the other and this friendship should have been impossible to begin with. But Amanda and Maria really did like each other.

  Maria's eyes twinkled. Amanda's eyes sparkled. They both started to laugh. Maria wagged a finger at Amanda. “You are impossible!” she said.

  “Well, you are pretty difficult yourself,” Amanda retorted. They laughed some more.

  “You are more than half a heathen,” Maria said. By the standards of strong Christians in Agrippan Rome, that was true and more than true.

  “You're drunk on God,” Amanda said. By the standards of ordinary Americans in the home timeline, that was also true and more than true. Maria had very little but her God. No wonder she clung to Him so tightly. After a moment, Amanda added, “You're nice anyway, though.”

  “So are you,” Maria said. They put down the jars and hugged each other.

  Another cannonball crashed into a building. A rumbling roar followed the first sharp impact. A wall-or maybe the whole building-had fallen down. “I hope nobody was inside,” Amanda said.

  “Me, too,” Maria said. They hugged again, clutching each other for whatever reassurance they could find. Then, with a sigh, Maria picked up her water jar. “Amanda-” She broke off.

  “What is it?” Amanda asked.

  “I've prayed so hard.“ Maria's voice was soft and shaky, her thin face pinched with worry. ”I've prayed and prayed and prayed, and the Lietuvans are still out there. They're still smashing things up. They're still killing people. I know it's God's will-but I have so much trouble seeing why.“ She sounded on the edge of tears.

  “And you're asking me?” Amanda said in dismay. “That kind of question makes me feel like Adas, holding up the heavens on my shoulders.”