Gunpowder Empire ct-1

by Harry Turtledove

  Amanda only shrugged. “I don't care. I'd rather be alive and free and explaining with a bunch of lies than killed or sold in a slave market somewhere in Lietuva. If Polisso falls, it doesn't matter whether the link with the home timeline comes back afterwards. Nobody would find us.”

  Jeremy hadn't thought of that. His sister was right. He wished she weren't. He said, “No guarantee the pistol would save us. If Polisso falls, we couldn't shoot enough Lietuvans to make much difference.” He wasn't sure he could shoot anybody. But if the choice was between killing and dying or being enslaved, he thought he could pull the trigger-not that there was any trigger to pull.

  He turned away, hurrying out into the courtyard and then across it. “Where are you going?” Amanda called after him.

  “To the storeroom and the kitchen.”

  “What for?”

  He didn't answer. He was trying not to break his neck in the darkness. When he got into the storeroom, he had to feel around to find what he wanted. It was pitch black in there, and he hadn't brought a lamp. Even in the dark, though, he didn't need long. And he knew where things were in the kitchen even without any light.

  “What on earth-?” Amanda said as he went past her and out toward the front door. “What are you doing with the sword and those knives?“

  “Putting them where we can grab them in a hurry if we have to,” Jeremy said. “We haven't got a pistol. The sword is the best we can do. And a couple of those carving knives have blades that are almost as long. They're better than nothing.”

  He hadn't been sure he could shoot anybody. He was even less sure he could stab somebody. And using a sword or a knife took more skill and practice than using a firearm. He had next to none of those, Amanda even less. In an emergency, though, you did what you could with what you had and hoped for the best. If this didn't count as an emergency, he'd never seen one.

  Amanda didn't argue with him. He'd been afraid she would. Instead, she went up the hall herself. She came back with one of the knives, looked at it, started to put it down, and then hung on instead. “Just in case,” she said.

  She didn't say in case of what. Jeremy didn't need her to draw him a picture. Women and girls had reasons not to want to be taken as slaves that most men didn't need to worry about. Who could say how much those would matter till the moment came?

  Maybe it wouldn't. Jeremy hoped not. Outside, more men in chainmail ran past. Like the last lot of soldiers, these yelled back and forth in neoLatin. With luck, that meant the Romans were getting the upper hand in the fight on the wall.

  With luck… “We ought to make a thanks-offering at the temple if the Lietuvans don't get in,” Jeremy said, and Amanda nodded.

  Somewhere not far away, a horn blared out a call. Both Jeremy and Amanda's heads whipped toward those notes. Jeremy had heard lots of Roman military horn calls. This didn't sound like any of them. It was wilder and fiercer. And if it wasn't a Roman horn call, it could only be…

  “The Lietuvans!” someone down the block cried-a sort of a despairing wail. “The Lietuvans are in the city!”

  A volley of musket fire that seemed to come from right up the street proved the man was right. More shouts rang out from most of the houses close by. Those were as full of dread as the first.

  And there were fresh shouts, shouts of “Kuzmickas!” and “Perkunas!” and other things Jeremy couldn't understand. They were all in an oddly musical language, one full of rising and falling syllables. Lietuvan in this world wasn't quite the same as Lithuanian in the home timeline, but it wasn't very far away.

  Amanda's lips were squeezed tight together. She looked as if she was clamping down hard on a scream. Jeremy didn't blame her. He was clamping down pretty hard himself. She whispered, “What are we going to do?”

  “Sit tight as long as we can,” Jeremy answered. “If it looks like the city's going to fall… If it looks like that, maybe our best chance is to try to get away. But we don't know how many Lietuvans got in, or how the fight's going. Everything still may turn out all right.”

  She nodded, even though her eyes called him a liar. Another volley of musketry rang out, this one even closer to the house. Men shouted the Roman Emperor's name and some ripe insults in neoLatin. The Roman legionaries hadn't given up this fight, then.

  Neither had the Lietuvans. They yelled back. More guns banged. Boots thudded on cobblestones. Soldiers ran back and forth right in front of the house. A wounded man shrieked. Jeremy couldn't tell if he was a Roman or a Lietuvan. When people were healthy, they all sounded different. When they were badly hurt, they all sounded the same.

  Metal clashed on metal. Matchlock muskets were slow and clumsy to reload any time. In the middle of the night, the job had to be next to impossible. You could reverse them and use them for clubs-or you could throw them down and use swords instead.

  It sounded as if the whole battle for Polisso were being fought there outside the house. That couldn't have been true. But it still seemed that way. Every shot and groan and sword clanging off sword or spearhead came to Jeremy's ears from what felt no more than five meters away. He could only have made sure of that by going out in the street and seeing for himself. Except for jumping off a cliff, he couldn't have found a better way to kill himself. He stayed inside.

  “Come on!” Amanda said whenever the Romans rallied- or whenever they wavered. “Come on-you can do it!” She suddenly stopped and looked amazed. “I'm rooting for people to kill other people. That's so sick!”

  “Tell me about it,” Jeremy answered. “I'm doing the same thing.”

  People were killing other people out there in the street. If more Romans killed Lietuvans than the other way round, Polisso would stay-what? Free? Polisso hadn't been free before the Lietuvans broke in. It wouldn't be free if they all packed up and marched away as soon as the sun came up. But it would be… unsacked. Jeremy didn't even know if that was a word. He didn't care, either. It was what he wanted, more than anything else in the world.

  He heard, or thought he heard, more shouts in neoLatin than in Lietuvan. The Romans sounded excited. The Lietuvans sounded scared. Or did they? Was he hearing it that way because that was what he wanted to hear? How could he tell? How could he know? By waiting to see what happened-no other way.

  Someone pounded on the front door.

  Jeremy froze. Amanda gasped. Someone pounded again- not with the knocker, but with a heavy fist on the oak timbers. Whoever was out there shouted something. The shout wasn't in neoLatin.

  “What are we going to do?” Amanda said. Jeremy started for the door. She grabbed his arm. “Don't let them in!”

  “Let them in? Are you nuts?” he said. “I'm going to pile furniture and stuff behind the door so they have a harder time breaking it down.”

  “Oh,” she said, and then, “I'll help.”

  They carried tables and chests of drawers in from the parlor and the bedrooms. The Lietuvans weren't pounding with fists any more. They'd found something big and heavy. By the way it thudded against the door, Jeremy would have guessed it was a telephone pole, except they didn't have telephone poles here. They didn't have many in Los Angeles any more, either, but some were still left. The door and the iron bar across it seemed to be doing all right. But the brackets that held the bar in place were starting to tear out of the door frame.

  “Why did they have to pick our house?“ Amanda groaned.

  “Because we're lucky,” Jeremy answered, which jerked a startled laugh out of her. He clenched his fingers around the hilt of the sword till his knuckles whitened. He didn't know how much good it would do, but it wouldn't do any if he didn't have it. “Where are the Roman soldiers when we really need them?”

  One of the brackets came loose with a tortured crunch of splintering wood. The door sagged back as if someone had punched it in the stomach. Jeremy and Amanda pushed against the pile of furniture to try to hold it closed. No good. More people were pushing from the other side. A Lietuvan's scowling, blood-streaked face appeared in the doo
rway. Sword in hand, he started scrambling over the obstacles toward Jeremy and Amanda.

  “Get back!” Jeremy shouted to his sister.

  She shook her head. “I'll help!” She had her kitchen knife out and ready, too.

  The Lietuvan thrust at Jeremy, who jerked back just in time to keep from getting spitted like a corn dog. With a mocking laugh, the soldier scrambled forward-till a little table broke under his weight. His laugh turned into a howl of dismay as he went down splat! on all fours.

  Jeremy jumped forward and stabbed him in the arm. The Lietuvan screamed. The sword grated on bone. Blood spurted out. Jeremy could smell it, like hot iron. The Lietuvan jerked away and ran back the way he'd come. The sword pulled free. Jeremy brandished the bloodstained blade.

  Later, he realized what an idiot he was. He'd been lucky with the one soldier. If the Lietuvan's pals had come after him, how could he have held them off? But just then a swarm of Romans shouting Honorio Prisco's name charged up the street. Instead of breaking into the house-had they intended to use it for a strongpoint?-the Lietuvans fell back.

  Jeremy stared at the bloody sword. He had blood on his hand, too, and on his arm, and splashed on the front of his tunic. He didn't know whether to be proud or be sick.

  Amanda said, “Let's prop the door closed. Maybe we can at least halfway fix that bracket, so it'll stay shut by itself. Then we won't be an easy target for every burglar in town.”

  “Burglars!” Jeremy dropped the sword-he almost dropped it on his toes, which wouldn't have been so good. “Right now, I don't… care at all about burglars.” He'd almost said something much juicier than that. “We've got… worse things to worry about than burglars.” That was also understated, and also true.

  “I know.” But Amanda cocked her head to one side, listening. “I think this new push really is driving the Lietuvans back. The noise does sound like it's farther from here and closer to the wall than it has been for a while.”

  “I hope so,” Jeremy said after cocking his head to one side and listening. He meant every word of that. In wondering tones, he went on, “I don't know whether to hope that Lietuvan bleeds to death or gets better.”

  His sister shrugged. “I don't much care one way or the other. All I care about is that you're all right.” She paused and seemed to be listening to herself in almost the same way as she'd just listened to the street fighting. “Did I really say that?” Slowly, she nodded. “I really did. And you know what else? I meant it, too.”

  “Good.” Jeremy picked up a leg from the table that had broken under the Lietuvan. He smacked it into his palm. “Maybe I can use this to hammer the bracket into place. If I could go get a couple of tools from Home Depot, fixing it would probably take about ten minutes. But if I could do that…” He let his voice trail away and got to work making what repairs he could.

  Going to the water fountain two days later reminded Amanda of what a close call Polisso had had. Bloodstains were everywhere. She'd never seen so much blood. Here and there, where it had pooled between cobblestones, flies gathered in buzzing clouds. They flew up as she walked past. One of them lit on her and crawled along her arm. She made a disgusted noise and shook it away.

  No bodies lay in the street. They'd already been dragged away, Romans and Lietuvans alike. They'd probably been plundered first: of weapons, of money, of armor, of food, of everything down to their shoes and their drawers. She wondered if scavengers in Polisso had quietly made sure some of the soldiers were dead. She wouldn't have been surprised.

  Bullet scars marked the brick and stone ground floors of houses and shops. Bullet holes peppered the timber upper stories. In one way, though, the damage would have been worse in the home timeline. Here, neither side had been able to shoot out any glass windows. As far as Amanda knew, Polisso had none.

  Several women were already at the fountain when she got there. “Everything all right with you, dearie?” one of them called.

  “I'm still here. I'm still in one piece,” Amanda answered. “The town's still here, too. It's… not in as many pieces as it might be.”

  The local woman laughed. “Ain't it the truth?” she said. “When those barbarians got inside, I didn't know whether to go up on the roof and throw tiles down on their noggins or hide under my bed.”

  “That's how Pyrrhus of Epirus got it,” another woman said. “Roof tiles, I mean, not hiding under the bed.”

  Amanda had heard of Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was the king who'd given his name to the Pyrrhic victory. He'd fought the Romans, beaten them thanks to war elephants, but almost ruined his army doing it. Afterwards, looking things over, he'd said, “One more victory like this and we're ruined!”

  That was where her knowledge stopped. And she would have bet knowing even that much put her ahead of nine out of ten-maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred-people in Los Angeles in the home timeline. But this housewife on the edge of the Roman Empire knew how he'd died, even though he'd been dead for more than 2,300 years.

  At first, that astonished Amanda. After a little while, though, it didn't any more. Pyrrhus was part of the locals' history in a way he wasn't back home. These Romans nowadays thought of themselves as-were-descended from the ones who'd battled and finally beaten Pyrrhus. They knew who he was the same way most Americans knew who Cornwallis was. He was almost a favorite enemy. He'd been tough, he'd been clever, he'd been dangerous-and he'd lost. What more could you ask for in a foe?

  Some of the women who'd been at the fountain the morning before started going on about what they'd seen. They were amazingly calm about mutilated bodies. Amanda gulped. The woman who'd mentioned Pyrrhus noticed she was green and said, “Sweetie, if those Lietuvan so-and-sos had whipped our boys, we'd look like that now.“

  She was right. That didn't make Amanda like it any more or make it any better. And when Roman legionaries took a town in Lietuva or Persia, they acted the same way. Soldiers played by tough rules in this world.

  Come to that, soldiers played by tough rules in any world. The home timeline didn't have much to be proud of. The main difference was, they tried to cover up the worst of what they did in the home timeline. Here, they were likely to boast about their atrocities. They thought such horrors made other people afraid of them.

  A cannonball howled through the air. The Romans had driven the Lietuvans out of Polisso, but King Kuzmickas hadn't given up and gone home. He was still out there, and so were his soldiers. If they couldn't storm the city, they still might starve it into surrendering.

  You're full of cheerful thoughts today, aren't you? Amanda said to herself.

  And then, all at once, she did feel better. Here came Maria. The slave girl smiled and waved to her. “Good to see you're safe,” she said.

  “Same to you,” Amanda answered.

  “I was worried,” Maria said. “You never can tell what will happen when the enemy gets into a city.”

  Amanda knew more about that now than she'd ever wanted to. “I'll say! The Lietuvans broke into our house. Ieremeo drove them off with his sword.”

  “Bravely done!” Maria said.

  “It was, wasn't it?” Amanda knew she sounded surprised. Bravery wasn't something people thought about much in the home timeline. How often did anyone there have the chance to be brave? How often did anyone there want the chance to be brave? Didn't the chance to be brave mean the chance to get killed, or at least badly hurt? Measuring yourself against a chance like that was what made bravery.

  “I should say it was,” Maria answered. “Your brother with just a sword against trained soldiers with mailshirts and helmets and everything… He couldn't have frightened them off all by himself, could he?” She suddenly looked frightened. “I mean no disrespect to him, of course, none at all.”

  What's that all about? But Amanda needed only a couple of seconds to realize what it was about. Maria had remembered she was a slave. She might have offended a freewoman. If she did offend, she could pay for it. Painfully.

  “It's all right,” Amanda s
aid quickly. “What's that proverb? 'Even Hercules can't fight two,' that's it. We would have been in a lot of trouble if the legionaries hadn't come up the street just then. The Lietuvans went off to fight them, and they never came back.”

  Now what was the matter? Maria was looking at her as if she'd picked her nose in public. Voice stiff with disapproval, the slave girl said, “I wouldn't have thought even an Imperial Christian would believe in Hercules.”

  “Who said I believe in him?” Amanda answered. “It's just a proverb.”

  Maria wouldn't see it. The more Amanda tried to explain, the more stubborn the slave got. As far as she was concerned, the word was the thing. “You've talked of pagan gods twice now in the last couple of weeks,” she said sadly. “Either one thinks they have power, or one tells lies on purpose, knowing they are lies. And lies come straight from Satan.”

  “You don't understand,” Maria told her. “I wanted you to know I wasn't mad because you said my brother couldn't fight off a bunch of Lietuvans by himself. I already knew he couldn't, and I was trying to find a fast way to say I knew it. That's all I was doing, honest.”

  “It is not honest to treat pagan things as if they are real,” Maria said. “If you believe they are real, how can you believe in the one true God?”

  “But I don't believe they are. I told you that, and it's the truth,” Amanda said.

  Even more sadly, Maria shook her head. “I will pray for you,” she said, and turned away.

  She didn't feel like being friendly any more. She couldn't have made it any plainer if she'd slapped Amanda in the face. Amanda had broken a rule nobody she approved of would break, and so she didn't approve of Amanda any more. No doubt she meant it when she said she would pray. In the here-and-now, though, that did Amanda no good at all.

  I don't belong here. This isn't my world. Of course I'm going to make mistakes in it every once in a while, Amanda thought miserably. If things were the way they were supposed to be, that wouldn't have mattered so much. She could have got away whenever she needed to. But not now. Whether this was her world or not, she couldn't get away from it-and she'd just lost the only real friend she had.