Gunpowder Empire

Three

“Safe trip! God go with you!” Amanda called as Marco Petro and Aurora and Lucinda Petra left the house and strode toward the west gate of Polisso. They would leave Agrippan Rome through the other transposition chamber. As long as they were seen to leave the town and weren't seen to go out of this alternate, everything was fine.

“Thank you. See you before too long,” Marco Petro answered. He had a sword on his belt and carried a bow. He wore a quiver of arrows on his back. A leather pouch on his hip hid a pistol. That was for real emergencies, though. They had pistols here-long, clumsy, single-shot pistols. His neat little automatic was something else altogether.

A couple of skinny little boys in ragged tunics watched the traders leave. No one else paid much attention. They looked like ordinary people. Why get excited?

The Petri tramped down the street. They walked carefully because of the cobblestones. Tripping and breaking an ankle just when they were leaving would have been awful. The surface would get better on the flat paving stones of the highway. Still, the Petri didn't have to go very far.

Next to Amanda, Jeremy blew Lucinda a kiss. Her back was turned, so she didn't see it. Amanda sighed. Jeremy was socially challenged. He even knew it, but knowing it and doing something about it were two different beasts.

Mom called, “Safe journey!” too. Marco Petro turned and waved. So did his wife. They rounded a corner. Marco Petro started singing a song. Amanda could pick it out for a little while. The the noise of Polisso swallowed it up.

“Just us now.” Dad sounded cheerful about it.

Amanda wasn't so sure she was cheerful. Maybe Dad hadn't intended to, but he'd reminded her how alone they were here. Jeremy seemed to have the same feeling. He went into the house without looking at anybody else.

A gray cat darted up the street. It gave Amanda and her parents a wary green glance and kept on running. Mom said, “Maybe I'll leave some scraps in front of the door and see if we can make friends.”

“Good luck,” Amanda said. Cats here were more like wild animals than pets. They lived in towns because towns were full of rats and mice. They didn't want much to do with people.

“It could happen.” Mom was a born optimist.

“Let's go in and set up,” Dad said. “It's late now, so we may not have any new business today. If we don't, we will tomorrow.”

They took a few watches and mirrors and razors and Swiss army knives and arranged them on a display stand in a room near the front door. Most of the trade goods went into a strong room by the kitchen. A lot of houses in Polisso had strong rooms. This one was special. Local thieves couldn't come close to winning against technology from the home timeline. Burglar alarms with infrared sensors meant traders were waiting for them even before they tried beating modern alloys and locks that read thumbprints.

“We'd better get supper started,” Mom told Amanda.

Amanda made a face, but she went off to the kitchen. Like most alternates, Agrippan Rome had rigid gender roles. At home, Dad and Jeremy did at least half the cooking. Not here, even though the work was a lot harder here.

Supper was barley porridge. It had mushrooms and onions and carrots chopped up in it. It also had bits of sausage. The sausage came from a local butcher shop. Amanda carefully didn't think of what all might have gone into it. Whatever it was made of, it didn't taste bad. It had a strong fennel flavor, like Italian sausage on a pizza, only more so. Since the rest of the porridge was bland, that perked it up.

Washing dishes was another pain. You couldn't get anything clean, not the way it would have been back home. Scrubbing a bowl with a rag in cold water without soap would have frustrated a saint. Going back to the home timeline for most of the year had let Amanda forget how tough things were here. The first evening reminded her in a hurry.

After the sun went down, the only lights in the main part of the house were olive-oil lamps and candles. The traders couldn't show anything different from what other people in Polisso had. Trouble was, those lamps and candles didn't give off a whole lot of light. Shadows lurked in corners. They reared when flames flickered. And, when a lamp ran dry or a candle burned out, they would swoop.

Amanda found herself yawning. You didn't get sleepy right after sundown back home. Electric lights held night at bay. Not these feeble lamps. Here, night was night, the time to lie quiet. Like somebody out of a fairy tale, Amanda carried a candle to bed. It gave just enough light so she didn't trip and break her neck, but not a dollar's worth more.

She yawned again when she got to the bedroom. The bed, she remembered, was all right. Leather lashings attached to the frame weren't as good as a box spring, but they weren't bad. The mattress was stuffed with wool. It got lumpy, but you could sleep on it. The blanket was wool, too. No one here knew about sheets. The pillow, now, the pillow was full of goose down. That would have cost a pile of benjamins back home.

Before Amanda went to sleep, she rubbed on insect repellent. It came in a little pottery jar, so it looked like a local medicine. Unlike local medicines, it really worked. Bedbugs and fleas and mosquitoes were bad enough. Lice… Amanda shuddered and slathered on more repellent. She'd found out the hard way why lousy meant what it did.

She blew out the candle. The darkness that had been hovering poured down on her. She could hardly tell the difference between having her eyes open and closed. She didn't keep them open very long anyway. Sleep hit her over the head like a rock.

Next thing she knew, the new day's first sunlight was trickling in through the shutters. That wasn't what woke her, though. The new day's first wagon was clattering past outside. A second one followed, and a third, and a fourth. Like a lot of towns in Agrippan Rome, Polisso had a law against wheeled traffic at night. That let people sleep. But as soon as it got light…

She'd slept in her tunic. On a hot night, she would have slept nude. Nude and regular clothes were the only choices you had here. Nobody'd thought of pajamas or nightgowns or anything of the sort.

For breakfast, Amanda ate leftover porridge from the night before. It had sat in the pot all night. Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old wasn't a nursery rhyme here. It was a way of life. No refrigerators in Agrippan Rome. No ice at all in summertime. (No ice cream, either. She sighed. Thinking of food could make her homesick like nothing else.)

No one had finished eating before somebody knocked on the door. Jeremy said something rude in English.

“Try that in neoLatin,” Dad said. The knock came again. It was louder and more insistent. He muttered a few words that might have been neoLatin-or might not, too. “People go to bed with the sun here. They wake up with the sun, and they're ready to do business.”

Bang! Bang! Bang! Whoever was out there sounded ready to break down the door.

Amanda rose from her stool. “I'll get it,” she said. “I'm almost done here.”

When she opened the door, the man outside was reaching for the knocker to pound some more. He dropped his hand. He also gave back a step in surprise. People in Polisso often did the first time they saw Amanda. She was five or six centimeters taller than this fellow, for instance.

“Bono diurno.” she said sweetly. “What can I do for you, sir?”

He didn't return her good day. Instead, still staring, he blurted, “You're not Marco Petro!” A moment later, he added, “You're not even part of his family,” which made a little more sense.

“No, sir,” she agreed, still polite. The man was olive-skinned, but he still turned red. Sometimes the best way to make someone feel foolish was to pretend not to notice how foolish he was. She went on, “The Petri have taken a load of grain out of Polisso. I'm Amanda Soltera. We Solteri are from the same firm. We'll be staying in town for a while.” She waited. When the man kept on standing there with his mouth hanging open, she prompted him by repeating, “What can I do for you, sir?”

Hearing it a second time seemed to make him notice her as a person, not just a phenomenon. He said, “I am here to do business. Let me see your father.” Then he paused and asked in a small voice, “Is he nine feet tall?”

The Roman foot was a little shorter than the one the USA had used till it went metric. Even so, nobody in the world was nine Roman feet tall. Amanda didn't like the rest of what the local had said, either. “You can do business with me, sir. What do you need? An hour-reckoner? A razor? A knife with many tools? One of the special mirrors we sell?”

“You… do business?” the man asked. In Polisso, women didn't, except those on their own or too poor not to. Amanda didn't fit either of those categories. He could see that much. Under his breath, he said, “Well, you are an Amazon in size- why not in manner?”

Amanda pretended not to hear that. If she didn't hear it, she didn't have to decide whether it was compliment or insult. She said, “Please come in,” and then, as he walked past her, “Whose man of affairs are you?”

He stopped and gave her a funny look. Not only was she a person, she was a person with a brain. “How do you know I am anyone's man of affairs?”

“By the way you dress. By the way you talk. If you were a merchant on your own, you would have a different way of speaking. If you were a noble, your tunic would have more embroidery.” It would be of finer wool, too, but Amanda didn't mention that.

“Well, girl, you are right,” the local said. He tried to get some of his own back with that faintly scornful girl and with the way he went on: “I am Lucio Claudio, called Fusco. I have the honor to serve the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio, called Magno-and he is great indeed.“

Amanda knew who Gaio Fulvio was. He had probably the largest estate of any noble who lived in Polisso. He'd dealt with Crosstime Traffic traders before, but never with the Solters family. “We are pleased to have the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio for a customer,” she said. “I ask you again, what would he like?”

“An hour-reckoner,” Lucio Claudio answered. “He has seen those that other men in the city have. They are more convenient than water clocks. He can carry one with him, and he does not have to keep a slave boy filling and emptying basins.”

“True,” Amanda said gravely. So it was. A lot of nobles in Polisso had figured out the same thing years before. Some still hadn't, though. If their grandfathers hadn't had watches, they didn't want them, either. Things changed slowly in Agrippan Rome. That made people want to think they didn't change at all. But things always changed, whether people wanted them to or not.

She led Gaio Fulvio's man to the room where the trade goods were on display. His eyes went from one big pocket watch to another. Before he spoke or pointed, she told herself she knew which one he'd choose. When he said, “That one,” she almost hugged herself with glee. She'd hit it right on the money.

He'd picked the biggest, gaudiest watch the merchants carried. To Amanda, it looked like a bright blue enamel turnip with gilding splashed here and there. The back had a gilded relief of Cupid shooting an arrow into Paris as he gazed at Helen of Troy. It couldn't have been more tasteless if it tried for a week.

But it was popular as could be in Polisso. People here liked things that were big and bright and overdecorated. They admired them. Two hundred years before Amanda's time, the Victorians in her world had been the same way.

She took the watch off the stand and wound it. It started to tick. Lucio Claudio heard the noise, too. He leaned forward. “You should wind it once a day,” Amanda told him. “This is how you set the hour. It is now near the end of the first hour of the day.” In Agrippan Rome, the first hour of the day began at sunrise, the first hour of the night began at sunset. Day and night always had twelve hours each. Daytime hours were longer in summer, nighttime in winter. Water clocks measuring steady bits of time had already begun to dent that idea. Mechanical clocks would probably kill it, the way they had in Amanda's world.

Lucio Claudio held out his hand. Amanda gave him the pocket watch. He held it up to his face to look at the dial (it had Roman numerals on it, which was as old-fashioned here as it would have been in the home timeline) and listen to the ticking. “There are gears and springs inside to make it work?” he asked.

“That's right,” Amanda said. The locals knew about such things. The ones in the watch were smaller and finer than any they could turn out for themselves, though.

“How is it that no one else can make such things?” Lucio Claudio inquired.

“That's our trade secret,” Amanda answered, not quite comfortably. “Everyone who makes or sells things has trade secrets. Others would steal if we didn't.” People stole in the home timeline. They stole in every alternate ever found. They were people, after all. They had an easier time here than some places. No one in Agrippan Rome had ever thought of patent laws.

“Only you,” the local said musingly. “How very lucky for you. I wonder if we should not ask for a report-an official report, mind you-on how you came to be so lucky.”

Alarm trickled through Amanda. Official reports were trouble. They meant the ponderous bureaucracy of Agrippan Rome had noticed the crosstime traders. Amanda supposed that was bound to happen sooner or later. She wished it hadn't happened while she was here. It would make life a lot more complicated.

Letting Lucio Claudio see that wouldn't help. “If the city prefect asks us for an official report, I'm sure we'll give him one,” Amanda said. “In the meantime, do you want to buy the hour-reckoner for the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio?”

Lucio Claudio's nickname meant dark. His scowl certainly lived up to it. Why? Had he hoped the threat of an official report would scare Amanda? (It did, even if she didn't show it.) He looked at the pocket watch again. “Yes, the most illustrious nobleman does want it,” he said. He wasn't nearly so good at hiding unhappiness as Amanda was. “What is your price?”

“You know you've chosen the finest hour-reckoner we have,” Amanda said. She vastly preferred a plain old five-benjamin wristwatch herself, but nobody'd asked her. “That one costs five hundred modii of wheat.” A modio-in classical Latin, a modius-was a little less than nine liters.

“That is too much,” Gaio Fulvio's man said. “The most illustrious nobleman will give you two hundred fifty modii.” Haggling was a way of life here. Offering half the opening price was a standard opening move-so standard, it was boring.

But Amanda shook her head. “I am sorry, sir. Our prices are firm. You will have heard that, I think.” Lucio Claudio scowled again, which meant he had heard it. He just hadn't believed it. Amanda added, “We have fixed prices for all our hour-reckoners. If the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio would like something cheaper-”

That did it. She'd hoped it would. The locals were vain. They showed off, and took pride in showing off. Lucio Claudio turned red. “No!” he snapped. “Nothing but the best, the finest, for the most illustrious nobleman. Your price is outrageous, but he will pay it.”

Yes, he would have tried to dicker more if he hadn't known about the fixed-price policy. Amanda hid a snicker, imagining how Gaio Fulvio would have lost face if he'd gone out in public with a cheap watch. She said, “I thank you, and I thank the most illustrious nobleman. I will write out a contract for the sale-”

“You write the classical tongue? You read it?” Lucio Claudio said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Amanda answered. “Many merchants do. It helps us in our business.” Literacy wasn't all that unusual in Agrippan Rome. In a town like Polisso, perhaps a quarter of the men had their letters. More knew neoLatin than the old language, though.

“But you are a girl-a woman-a female,” Gaio Fulvio's man sputtered. Far fewer women could read and write, even in neoLatin. It was a sexist society, no doubt about it. And neoLatin wasn't valid for most business deals, which made life harder still.

Amanda enjoyed poking just because the society was so sexist. “I am a merchant,” she said proudly.

The pen, like most, was a reed with a hand-carved nib. Penknives really were pen knives here. Amanda neatly printed a standard sales contract. She gave it to Lucio Claudio to sign.

He read it over, looking for anything wrong. To his obvious disappointment, he found nothing. “Let me have the pen,” he said, and scrawled his name in the space she'd left for it.

“I hope the most illustrious nobleman gets good use from his hour-reckoner,” Amanda said, letting him down easy. Not too easy, though: “He can have it as soon as he pays.”

“Of course. Payment will come to you soon. I'm sure he will be pleased to carry the hour-reckoner.” Lucio Claudio got out of there in a hurry. Amanda closed the door behind him, then went back to finish her breakfast.

A skinny stray dog gnawed at something in a pile of garbage near Polisso's main square. It growled as Jeremy and his family walked by. When they didn't bother it, it lowered its head again. “Poor pup,” Amanda said.

She was right. By the standards of anybody from the home timeline, everybody here was poor. Jeremy knew all the things the locals didn't have. But they didn't know, and so it didn't bother them. Some of them thought they were rich. They tried to keep what they had, and to get more. The ones who didn't have so much wished for more, schemed for more. People, again.

In the square and in the roofed colonnades to either side, farmers and craftsmen and traders sold everything under the sun. Here a man hawked cups. Another man carried a tray of sweet rolls and shouted about how good they were. A craftsman displayed wooden buckets on a stand. A storyteller told a fable about the Emperor Agrippa and the beautiful Queen of China. Agrippa had never gone anywhere near China, but that didn't stop the storyteller. Every so often, someone would toss a coin into the bowl at his feet. A blank-faced peasant woman stood behind a big basket of onions she'd carried from her farm. Come evening, she'd go home with the ones she hadn't sold.

On the far side of the square stood the prefect's palace and the temple to the spirit of the Emperor. The clerks and secretaries and nobles who ran Polisso worked in the prefect's palace. Soldiers stood guard in front of it. Nobody was going to give the rulers any trouble. Just for a moment, Jeremy remembered the guards in front of the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad.

Dad pointed to the temple. “We'll make our offering. We'll get our certificate. Then nobody will worry about us any more.”

“That sounds good to me,” Jeremy said. They were in public, so he couldn't come out with what he really thought. He felt like a hypocrite, sacrificing to a spirit he didn't believe in. Dad insisted that hypocrisy greased the wheels between people. If you always said just what you thought, nobody could stand you, he'd say. And you'd hate everybody who did it to you. Jeremy wasn't convinced.

A big blond man in a linen shirt with billowing sleeves and baggy breeches tucked into boots held up some furs. “You want pelts?” he asked in accented neoLatin. That accent and his clothes showed he came from Lietuva. “Make fine fur jacket. Marten? Sable? Ermine?”

“No, thank you.” Jeremy tried not to look at the pelts as he walked by. He couldn't have been much more revolted if the Lietuvan had tried to sell him a slave. No one in the home timeline had worn furs for more than fifty years. The mere idea turned his stomach. True, furs were warm, and this alternate had no substitutes. But Jeremy couldn't get over his disgust-and he couldn't sell pelts in the home timeline anyway. He sneaked glances at his sister and his parents. They all had that same tight-lipped look. They were trying not to show what they thought, too, then.

Up the stairs of the temple they went. The guards nodded to them. “In the name of the gods, greetings,” one of the soldiers called.

“Greetings to you,” Dad replied. He didn't have to mention the gods. That wasn't the custom for what Agrippan Rome called Imperial Christians. He went on, “We've just come to Polisso. We need to make an offering to the Emperor's spirit.”

“Go ahead, then, and peace go with you,” the guard said.

Before they entered the temple itself, they paused in an anteroom called the narthex. Several clerks stood there behind lecterns. Only the very most important people here worked sitting down. Dad steered the family to a clerk who was talking to a woman and had no one else waiting in line. That did him less good than he'd thought it would. The woman had a complicated problem, and took what seemed like forever to get it settled.

“You pick the shortest line, you take the longest time,” Mom said. “It's just as true here as it is at home.”

“I know,” Dad said gloomily. “You wish some of the rules would change when you travel, but they don't.” The locals who might overhear him would think he meant traveling from town to town. His own family knew better.

At last, the woman flounced off. Jeremy didn't think she'd settled anything. She seemed to be giving up. The clerk spent the next couple of minutes making notes on her case-or, for all Jeremy knew, doodling. Only after he'd used that time showing how important he was, did he look up and ask, “And how may I be of assistance to you?”-in classical Latin.

Most newcomers wouldn't have understood him. They would have had to ask him to repeat himself in neoLatin. He would have done it-and looked down his pointy nose at them while he was doing it. But Dad answered in the classical language: “Having arrived at the famous city of Porolissum”- using the ancient name was especially snooty-“we should like to make a thanks-offering to the spirit of the Emperor.”

“Oh.” Upstaged, the clerk seemed to shrink a few centimeters. “All right. Give me your name and the day you came into town.” That was in neoLatin. Since he couldn't score points with the old language, he stopped using it. Dad also returned to the modern tongue. The clerk went off to a wooden box full of papers and parchments and papyri. He finally found the one he wanted. “Ioanno, called Acuto; Ieremeo, called Alto; Melissa; and Amanda. Yes, you are all here, and as described.” He didn't seem happy about that. Dad had proved more clever than he would have liked. “You are Imperial Christians?”

“That's right,” Dad said.

“Then you will offer incense, not a living sacrifice?” “Yes,” Dad said.

“Very well. That is permitted.” By the way the clerk sounded, he wished it weren't. But he didn't decide such things. He just did what the people set over him told him to do. After scribbling several notes on his forms, he said, “You do understand, though, that you will pay as large a fee for the incense as people who believe in the usual gods pay for a sacrificial animal?”

“Yes,” Dad said again, this time with resignation. Why wouldn't the government tolerate Imperial Christians? Jeremy thought. It makes money off them.

“The fee for four pinches of incense, then, is twelve denari,” the clerk said. Dad paid. As far as Jeremy was concerned, the rip-off was enough to incense anyone. The clerk wrote some more. He handed Dad a scrap of parchment.

“Here is your receipt. Keep it in your home in a safe place. It is proof that you have offered sacrifice.” He pulled four tiny earthenware bowls from a cabinet behind him and handed one to each member of the Solters family. The bowls held, literally, a pinch of waxy incense apiece. “You may proceed into the sacred precinct. Set the bowls on the altar, light the incense, and offer the customary prayer. Next!”

That last was aimed at the woman standing behind the crosstime travelers. The clerk reminded Jeremy of someone who worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles, not a man who had anything to do with holiness. But then, for most people here religion was as much something the government took care of as roads and public baths.

As he walked into the temple proper, he brought the bowl up to his nose so he could sniff. The incense smelled faintly- very faintly-spicy. It was, no doubt, as cheap and as mixed with other things as it could be and still burn.

Sunbeams slanting in through tall windows lit up the interior of the temple. Mosaics on the walls and statues in niches showed every god the Agrippan Romans recognized, from Aphrodite and Ares to Zalmoxis and Zeus. One small statue pictured Jesus as a beardless youth carrying a lamb on his back. That kind of portrait had gone out of favor in Jeremy's world, but not here. Here, for most people, Jesus was just one god among many. Mithras the Bull-slayer had a more impressive image.

One of the sunbeams fell on the bust of the Roman Emperor behind the altar. Honorio Prisco III was a middle-aged man with a big nose, jowls, and a bored expression. As far as Jeremy could tell, he wasn't a very good Emperor. He wasn't a very bad Emperor, either. He just sort of sat there.

The sunbeam also highlighted a line around his neck that looked unnatural. The lower neck and top part of the chest on the bust never changed. The head and upper neck did whenever a new Emperor took the throne. A peg and socket held the two parts of the bust together. A new Emperor? Take the old ruler's portrait off the peg, pop on the new. There you were, easy as pie, ready to be loyal.

Several pinches of incense already smoked on the altar. Off to one side, a priest in a white toga-only priests wore togas these days-wrung the neck of a dove for a man who wasn't a Christian of any sort.

Dad set his incense bowl on the altar. Jeremy and Amanda and Mom followed suit. Several lamps burned on the altar. By each one stood a bowl full of thin dry twigs. Each member of the family took a twig and lit it at a lamp. They used the burning twigs to light their incense, then stamped them out underfoot.

Four thin twists of gray smoke curled upward. Along with his parents and sister, Jeremy said the prayer required of Imperial Christians: “May God keep the Emperor safe and healthy. May his spirit always be the spirit of truth and justice. Amen.” They all bowed to the bust of Honorio Prisco III, then turned away from the altar.

That prayer didn't say the Emperor was divine. It did say that the people who made it cared about him and wished him well. It was hardly religious at all, not in the sense Jeremy would have used the word back home. It was more like pledging allegiance to the flag. It showed that the people who did it willingly took part in the customs of this country.

Not far from the altar, two ordinary-looking men stood talking in low voices. They weren't being rude. They were quietly making sure the prayers were made the way they were supposed to be. People who didn't like being watched couldn't have stood living in Agrippan Rome.

That was one of the traders' biggest problems here. The locals weren't just curious. They were snoopy. About everything. Jeremy glanced over at Amanda as the family left the temple. That fellow to whom she'd sold the blue-plate special-that was how he thought of the big blue pocket watches-had talked about making them submit one of the Empire's dreaded official reports about how they could turn out such things when nobody else here knew how. Dad would have to figure out a way around that.

Out in the market square, a herald was shouting, “Hear ye! Hear ye! The great and mighty Emperor of the Romans, Honorio Prisco III, has declared that the Roman Empire will keep the peace with the Kingdom of Lietuva for as long as King Kuzmickas chooses to keep it!”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Jeremy asked. “It doesn't sound like it means anything.” A lot of the proclamations the government put out didn't sound as if they meant anything.

But Dad said, “It means we're liable to have a war. Lietuva has wanted to take this province away from Rome for years. And if King Kuzmickas does decide to go to war, the Emperor is saying he'll get all the fight he wants.”

Border provinces like Dacia did sometimes change hands between Agrippan Rome and Lietuva. In the Middle East, Mesopotamia-Iraq in the home timeline-and Syria went back and forth between the Romans and Persians every so often. But the heartland of each great empire was too far from its neighbors to be conquered. The ruling dynasties might change, but the empires went on and on.

Oddly, gunpowder made that more true, not less. Hearing as much had puzzled Jeremy at first. But it made sense if you looked at it the right way. Cannons could knock down the strongest fortress or city wall. And cannons, here, were also very, very expensive. Only central governments pulling in taxes from huge tracts of land could afford to have a lot of them. That meant anybody who rebelled against the central government was likely to lose. He wouldn't be able to get his hands on enough cannons to fight back well.

There had been gunpowder empires in Jeremy's world, too. The Ottoman Turks, the Moguls in India, and the Manchus in China had all run states like that. In his world, though, Europe had had lots of countries, not one big, overarching empire. They'd competed, kicking technology and thought ahead and leading to the scientific and industrial revolutions.

Competition here was weaker. The dead hand of the past was stronger. This is how they did it in the good old days carried enormous weight in Agrippan Rome… and in Lietuva, and in Persia, and in the two gunpowder empires that split India between them in this alternate, and in China. The Japanese here were pirates who raided China's coast, the same as the Scandinavians did in Europe.

A beggar with a horrible sore on his face held out a skinny hand to Jeremy and whined, “Alms, gentle sir?”

Jeremy gave him a sestertio, a little copper coin. “That was a mistake,” Dad said with a sigh.

“How come?” Jeremy asked. “Look what happened to the poor man.”

“For one thing, that sore is probably a fake,” Dad said. “And if it's not a fake, he probably picks at it and rubs salt in it to keep it looking nasty. Beggars' tricks are as old as time. And for another… Well, you'll find out.”

And Jeremy did, in short order. He'd given one beggar money. All the other beggars in the market square hurried toward him. He might have been a magnet and they bits of iron. They showed off blind eyes, missing hands and feet, and sores even uglier than the first man's had been. None of them had bathed in weeks, if not years. Most of them called for coppers. Some, the bolder ones, screeched for silver.

“I can't give them all money,” Jeremy said in dismay.

“Which is why you shouldn't have given it to any of them,” Dad “said. ”Just keep walking. They'll get the message.“

Little by little, the beggars did. By ones and twos, they drifted back toward their places in the square. Some of them cursed Jeremy, as much for getting their hopes up as for not giving them any coins. Others didn't bother. They might as well have been merchants. If business in one place didn't suit them, they'd look somewhere else.

“Did they try to slit your belt pouch?” Dad asked.

After checking, Jeremy shook his head. “No.”

“You're lucky.”

“I am lucky,“ Jeremy said slowly. He didn't mean it the way his father did. ”I don't have to live the way they do.“ A day in Polisso taught more about human misery than a year in Los Angeles. ”Most of what's wrong with them, a doctor back home could fix in a hurry. I've always had plenty to eat, and a house with a heater that works.“

“Coming here can make you feel guilty about living the way we do at home,” Amanda said.

Jeremy nodded. That was what he'd been trying to say. His sister had done a better job of putting it into a few words.

“There's nothing wrong with the way we live,” Dad said. “Anybody who says poverty makes you noble has never been poor-really poor, the way these people are. But you were right. We are lucky that we don't have to live like this all the time.“

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. Even when they were in Polisso, they didn't live just like the locals. They had links back to the home timeline. If something went wrong, they could get help or leave. They had a swarm of immunizations. They couldn't come down with smallpox or measles or typhoid fever or cholera. Smallpox didn't even exist any more in the home timeline. They had antibiotics against tuberculosis and plague. The locals didn't-they had doctors who believed in the four humors and priests who prayed. One was about as much use as the other-as much, or as little.

A drunk lurched out of a tavern. He stared around with bleary, bloodshot eyes, then sat down next to the doorway. He wasn't going anywhere, not any time soon. Some things didn't change from one timeline to another. Jeremy's also had its share of drunks, and probably always would.

“Make way! Make way! In the name of the city prefect, make way!” bawled a man with a loud voice.

Up the street came a gang of slaves carrying firewood to heat the water in the public baths. They were skinny, sorry-looking men, all of them burdened till they could barely stagger along. They belonged to Polisso, not to any one person. That made their lives worse, not better. Because they didn't serve anyone in particular, no one in particular cared how they were treated. The overseer shouted out his warning again.

Neither Jeremy nor anybody else in his family said much the rest of the way back to the house. That gang of slaves reminded them again all how lucky they really were.