Gunpowder Empire

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 was 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 city 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?“

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 doorway. 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 said 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.