Gunpowder Empire

Twelve

Jeremy and Amanda both ate meat. Jeremy had never wondered why that didn't bother him when wearing fur did. If he had wondered, he would have said people needed protein, but they could keep warm without killing animals. And that would have been true, but it wouldn't have been the whole truth, though he might not have realized it wouldn't. The whole truth was that he was as much a part of his culture as the people of Agrippan Rome were of theirs. He noticed their quirks. His own were water to a fish.

Since he ate meat, he had to buy it in the market square. With Polisso besieged, there wasn't much to buy: pork every now and then, from people who kept pigs, and what the sellers claimed to be rabbit. Jeremy didn't buy any of that. His bet was that it would meow if you sliced it.

When he brought back pork, Amanda cooked it till it was gray. Back in the home timeline, people didn't worry about trichinosis any more. Here, the danger was as real as a kick in the teeth. All sorts of things you didn't need to worry about in the home timeline could make you sick here.

Even when he'd stopped buying very often, he kept going back to the market square. Women gossiped at the fountains. The square was for men. One drizzly morning, he heard a rumor he'd been hoping for: someone said the Roman Emperor, or at least an imperial army, was on its way north to fight the Lietuvans.

“How do you know it's true?” he asked the man who'd passed the news to him-one of the people who were selling what had to be roof rabbit.

“Well, my brother-in-law told me, and he's pretty sharp,” the fellow answered.

That did not strike Jeremy as recommendation enough. “How does he know?” he asked. “Who told him?”

“You think my brother-in-law would make something up?” The man with the mystery meat sounded indignant. Jeremy only shrugged, as if to say, How should I know? The other man thought it over. Then he shrugged, too. “Well, maybe he would.”

“Terrific,” Jeremy said.

“You want to buy some rabbit?” the man asked him. “If you've got any prunes or anything like that, you can make a nice, tasty sauce for it.”

“No, thanks,” Jeremy answered. “If I had mice, I'd get some of it from you. They'd all run away.”

“Funny,” the local said. “Ha, ha, ha, ha. There. You hear me laughing?”

“No,” Jeremy told him. “I didn't hear me joking, either.” The local sent him a gesture that meant something nasty. The one Jeremy gave back meant something just as nasty. They parted on terms of perfect mutual loathing.

Jeremy headed back to the house without any meat. On his way there, though, he heard two men who looked like blacksmiths talking about the army coming up from the south. That left him scratching his head.

He told Amanda about them. “What do you think?” he asked. “Were they listening to the other guy's brother-in-law?”

“Who knows?” she answered. “We'll just have to wait and see, that's all. Maybe everybody's saying, 'Yes, there's an army coming,' because we're all sick of being cooped up here. But maybe there really is an army. We won't know till it starts shooting at the Lietuvans. If it ever does.”

“Schrodinger's army,” Jeremy said, thinking of cats. Amanda made a face at him. He made one right back. She was his sister, after all. He couldn't let her get away with something like that. But he hadn't been joking with her, either. If you couldn't tell whether an army was real till it showed up- or didn't show up-how much good did it do you?

The only thing an army that might be real did was to pump up hope. That could help for a little while, maybe. But if more time went by and the army didn't show up, wouldn't hope sink lower than it would have if it hadn't been lifted in the first place?

He wondered if the city prefect or the garrison commander had got worried about morale in Polisso. Even if the rumors about an approaching Roman army weren't true, they might think it was in their interest to start them. Or people who were in danger of losing hope on their own might have started the rumors, to make themselves feel better. Or…

Jeremy gave up. He couldn't tell. He just didn't know, and he didn't have any real evidence one way or the other. Sooner or later, he'd find out. Till then…

Till then, I'll worry. That's what I'll do, he thought.

Amanda set her palm on the proper spot in the basement wall. The concealed door slid aside and let her into the chamber the locals weren't supposed to discover. The electric lights in there came on. Seeing them made tears sting her eyes. Some small part of the tears came because the lights were bright after the gloom of the basement. But most of them sprang from the lights' being electric. They were things from the home timeline. Every time she came down here, not being able to go back there ate at her more.

It's home, she thought as the door silently slid shut behind her. How can anybody blame me because I want to go home, because I don't want to stay here? People from Polisso would find Los Angeles endlessly marvelous, endlessly exciting. But they might well want to come back to the timeline of Agrippan Rome once they'd seen what there was to see. And Los Angeles was a richer place where you could do more things-do more kinds of things-than you could in Polisso. If it wasn't home, even that wouldn't matter. When it was…

The lights weren't all that reminded her of home. The sheet-metal cabinets, the table with the plywood top, the blue plastic chair with the slotted back-they were ordinary things, but they were things from her world. In the home timeline, you didn't have to be somebody important to sit in a chair with a back instead of on a stool. That wasn't a big difference between the two worlds, but it was a difference. Differences gnawed at her spirit like acid now.

And the computer. The difference there was what the PowerBook could-or rather, couldn't-do now. It was supposed to connect her to the home timeline, to the world that knew how to move between worlds, how to talk between worlds. It was supposed to, but it didn't. It was like a friend who'd let her down. It was a friend who'd let her down.

Amanda had to make herself walk to the blue plastic chair. She had to make herself pull it out, had to make herself sit down in it. And it took everything she had in her to make herself look at the laptop's monitor. Her brother said the same thing. She and Jeremy had been disappointed so many times.

Is anybody there?

Three little words. She'd heard that I love you was supposed to hit you like that when the right person said those three little words. These three? Nobody talked about these three. But I love you, even when she heard it from the right person, was going to have to do some pretty fancy work to top them.

She blinked. Is anybody there? stayed on the screen. She wasn't imagining it. If King Kuzmickas had taken Polisso without getting one single soldier scratched, he might have let out a whoop with one tenth the joy of the one that burst from Amanda's lips. She sprang out of the chair. She jumped up and down. She did the wildest, whirlingest dance the world had ever seen.

And then she did something a lot harder than that. Instead of answering right away, she turned her back on the beautiful monitor. She left the secret basement. The door closed behind her again, shutting her out. She went upstairs to primitive, smelly, besieged Polisso.

Jeremy was watering the herbs in the herb garden. A few spices, like pepper and cinnamon, were expensive, imported luxuries here. As for the rest, the ordinary ones like basil and thyme, you grew your own if you wanted them. Otherwise you did without.

“There's something I think you ought to see,” Amanda said.

She tried to sound calm, to hold the excitement out of her voice. She tried, but it didn't work. Jeremy's head came up as if he were a wolf scenting meat. “Is it-?” He stopped, as if he didn't want to go on for fear of hearing no.

But Amanda said, “Yes!”

Her brother whooped even louder than she had. He was out in the open, not in a soundproof basement. He didn't care at all, and neither did Amanda. Somebody next door exclaimed in surprise. They didn't care about that, either. Jeremy set down the water jug. It was a wonder he hadn't dropped it and smashed it. He grabbed Amanda's hands. They did sort of a two-person version of the crazy dance she'd done by herself down below.

They were both laughing and panting when they finally stopped. “What does it say?” Jeremy demanded. “Tell me what it says!”

“Come see for yourself,” Amanda told him. But then, as they both hurried to the stairs, she added, “It's just asking if we're here. I haven't even answered it yet.”

“Well, we'd better!” Jeremy said.

“You bet.” Fear filled Amanda as she set her palm on the patch of wall where it was supposed to go. The door slid aside, opening the secret part of the basement. She and Jeremy hurried in. They both ran to the PowerBook on the table. Her fear grew. Would the message still show on the screen? Had she imagined she saw it because she wanted to see it so badly?

Is anybody there?

The words were real. Seeing them there again, seeing Jeremy see them, made Amanda as happy as she had been when she saw them the first time. She would have been glad to go back to the temple to make one more thanks-offering.

Those three words made her more grateful than anything else she'd ever known.

“Wow,” Jeremy said, his eyes wide and shining. Amanda nodded. Jeremy shook his head, as if fighting to believe it. Amanda understood that, all right. Her brother started to say something, then stopped and shook his head again. He turned to her and almost bowed. “You found it. You do the talking.”

“Okay.” With that, she switched from neoLatin to English. “Answer.” That was an oral command the computer recognized. She paused to think for a moment, then just spoke simply: “This is Amanda. Jeremy and I are both here. We're all right, but the Lietuvans have Polisso under siege. What went wrong back there?”

That summed up what the home timeline needed to know, and what she and Jeremy most wanted to find out. She had another frightened moment when she sent the message. Would the laptop tell her it couldn't go through, the way the machine had so many times before?

It didn't. From everything she could tell, the message went crosstime just the way it was supposed to. Softly, she clapped her hands. Beside her, Jeremy said, “Yeah.”

Then they had to wait. That hadn't occurred to her. Back in Porolissum in the home timeline, wouldn't somebody be watching the monitor every single minute? She'd thought somebody would. Maybe she was wrong.

Five minutes went by. Ten. Fifteen. She wanted to kick something. She also wanted to scream. Had the message made it back to the home timeline?

And then the screen showed new words. Even before she read them, she and Jeremy both cheered again. Why not?

They weren't cut off any more. Only now, as the isolation ended, did Amanda realize how bad it had been.

She leaned forward to get a better look at the monitor. This is Dad, the new message began. She grinned at Jeremy, who was grinning back. Gladder than I can tell you that you're okay. We're starting to get things sorted out here, too.

“What happened?” Amanda asked again.

This time, the answer came back right away. Terrorists. Nationalist terrorists, Dad said. They bombed a lot of crosstime sites here in Romania, all on the same day. It was a nice piece of work, if you like that kind of thing.

“Terrific,” Jeremy said.

“Hush,” Amanda told him. “There's more.”

And there was. Their father went on, That would have been bad enough by itself, but they also planted tailored viruses at some of the blast sites. Guess what? Both of the ones that connect to Polisso in Agrippan Rome got lucky. They've finally managed to decontaminate enough to set up computers here, but I'm wearing a spacesuit to talk to you guys.

“Urk,” Jeremy said. This time, Amanda didn't hush him. She felt like going urk herself. Making real viruses these days was almost as easy as making computer viruses had been at the start of the twenty-first century. And real viruses could do as much damage in the real world as computer viruses had in the virtual world. They could, if you were ruthless enough to turn them loose. Nagorno-Karabakh and a big chunk of Azerbaijan next door were still uninhabitable. Armenians blamed Azerbaijanis; Azerbaijanis blamed Armenians. No one was ever likely to know who'd really used that Ebola variant. It was so hot, it had probably killed off whoever started it. That was poetic justice of a sort.

Fighting tailored viruses was dangerous enough in the home timeline. If one of them got loose in an alternate like Agrippan Rome, it might take out a third of the population or more. Natural epidemics had done that in the past. Unnatural epidemics… Amanda didn't even want to think about it.

“How's Mom?” Jeremy asked.

She's fine. She sends her love, Dad answered. Amanda breathed a sudden sigh of relief. If Mom's appendix had waited a little longer to act up, she would have got stuck here. That could have been very bad. Amanda couldn't think of anything much worse, in fact.

She asked, “How long before you're able to come and get us?”

Crosstime Traffic and the Ministry for the Environment here both have to decide it's safe, Dad said. A week or two, probably. But you said there was a war going on there?

“That's right,” Amanda said. She and Jeremy took turns telling what had happened since they got cut off. “We've had to sell for money instead of wheat and barley,” she put in at one point. “We didn't have any place to put the produce, and then we didn't want the locals calling us hoarders.”

Don't worry about that, Dad said. No one will complain that you went against the grain.

For a second, Amanda just accepted that. She opened her mouth to start to answer it. Then she saw the revolted look on her brother's face. She read the message again. She made a horrible face, too. “Well, that's Dad for sure,” she said.

“You better believe it,” Jeremy said. “Nobody else in the world makes puns that bad.” From revolted, his expression suddenly went crafty. “Except maybe me.” He spoke to the PowerBook: “Answer. Wheat like to tell you to clean up that last message. We could barley understand it. It seemed pretty corny. Send.“

“Ow!” Amanda exclaimed. “Where's something I can hit you with?” Jeremy looked proud of himself, which wasn't what she'd had in mind.

There was a pause at the other end. Amanda hoped Dad wasn't running out and throwing up. That could be awkward in an antivirus spacesuit. At last, he answered, Your sense of humor is as rye as I remember. He must have typed that in instead of dictating it. If he'd spoken into the computer, it would have written wry, which was right, and not rye, which was wrong, to say nothing of ghastly. For good measure, he added, But I don't want to be on the oats with you.

“That's rice,” Amanda said. Jeremy groaned, not quite in praise. It wasn't the best comeback, but they were running out of grains.

Dad got back to business. Just hang on till we finish decontaminating here, he said. That's all you need to do now. Like I told you, it won't be too long.

“As long as the Lietuvans don't get into Polisso again, we'll be fine,” Jeremy said. Amanda thought he'd put in one word too many, but it was too late to stop him.

Sure as houses, Dad wrote back, Again?

“They got some men in at night,” Amanda said. “Not too many, though, and Polisso is crawling with Roman soldiers. We had to pay the prefect a sort of a bribe to keep from having any quartered on us. They drove the Lietuvans out again.”

Are you all right? Is the house all right?

“We're fine,” Jeremy said quickly. “And the house is okay. A couple of cannonballs hit the roof and smashed some tiles, but that's it.”

He didn't say anything about the broken-down front door. It was just about as good as new, so Amanda could understand that. And he didn't say anything about the Lietuvan soldier who'd stumbled when the table broke under him. He didn't say anything about stabbing the Lietuvan, either. Amanda supposed she could also understand that. Jeremy didn't want to think about it, and it was all over with anyhow, and it would only worry Dad. We're fine was an awful lot simpler-and it was the truth.

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 supposed 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.