Gunpowder Empire

“I knew it was for something,” Jeremy said. Amanda stuck out her tongue at him. Almost forgotten by both of them, the siege of Polisso ground on.

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.”

“Fu

“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 co

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 ci

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