Gunpowder Empire

Amanda shook her head. “No. I want to buy her freedom.”

Pulio Carvilio stuck out his chin, which made his jowls wobble. “She's a good worker. It'll cost you. She's worth five pounds of silver if she's worth a copper.”

“Five pounds!” Amanda exclaimed. “That's robbery!” The haggle that followed was the strangest one she'd ever known. She was dickering over the price of another human being. When she let herself think about that, it made her sick,

I don't want her for myself she thought. I want her to be able to have herself.

She got Pulio Carvilio down to four pounds of silver, but no further. He had the advantage in the bargain. The only reason she haggled at all was that he would have been shocked if she hadn't. If he wanted to think he'd ski

Once they'd agreed, she and the cobbler and Maria had to go to the city prefect's palace to make everything official. It turned out to be more complicated than Amanda had expected. Almost everything in Agrippan Rome turned out to be more complicated than people from the home timeline expected. There were endless forms to fill out, most of them in triplicate. Pulio Carvilio couldn't read or write. That meant the clerk at the palace had to read everything to him, which made the whole business take twice as long as it should have. (Maria could hardly read, either, but the clerk didn't care about that. Till all the paperwork got filled out, she was just a piece of property with legs.) The clerk and Amanda both had to witness Pulio Carvilio's mark again and again and again.

And the clerk kept sniffing. “This is irregular,” he said several times. “That a female should make such a purchase… Most irregular.”

“Is it illegal?” asked Amanda, who knew it wasn't.

He was honest, or honest enough. He shook his head. “No. But it is irregular.”

“Never mind that,” Amanda told him. “Just think of the tax the Empire's getting.” She had to pay him ten percent of what she was paying Maria's master. The government said that kept people from freeing slaves on a whim. Maybe it did. But Amanda thought the main purpose of the law was to make the government money.

Finally, all three copies of all the forms were filled out. The clerk nodded to Maria and said, “Congratulations, Maria Carvilia. You are free.” As a freedwoman, she took the family name of her former owner. That was another sign freedwomen and freedmen weren't so very free after all. Amanda swallowed a sigh. She'd hoped for something better.

And then she got it. The clerk slid off his stool. He opened a drawer in a cabinet behind him. Amanda expected him to pull out one more document. Instead, he held what looked to her like nothing more than a fu

“A Phrygian cap,” the clerk agreed gravely. “The sign of your freedom.” He set it on her head. Except that it was red, not white, and only bulged out in front, it reminded Amanda of a chef's hat. Not counting her buck teeth, Maria was a nice-looking girl. Even she couldn't make the Phrygian cap seem anything but ridiculous to Amanda. But what Amanda thought didn't matter here. Maria's eyes glowed. The cap might have been odd-looking, but it meant everything in the world to her.

Amanda wondered how long freed slaves had been putting on Phrygian caps in Agrippan Rome. A thousand years? Two thousand? Longer still? Most of the time, she thought old customs held this world back. Here, she dimly understood what this one meant to Maria.

Pulio Carvilio kissed Maria on one cheek. The clerk kissed her on the other. Would they have done that if she were a middle-aged man? Amanda doubted it. But Maria kept on smiling, so she didn't say anything.

Then the brand-new freedwoman kissed her and whispered, “Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!” in her ear.

“It's all right. I'm glad to do it,” Amanda answered. For about half a minute, she felt really proud of herself. Then she thought of all the slaves in Polisso, in the vast empire of Agrippan Rome, she couldn't free. And that didn't count the slaves in Lietuva and Persia and the gunpowder empires farther east. Rome wasn't built in a day. Slavery wouldn't fall apart in a day, either. Too bad, she thought.

Three raps on the door. It could have been anybody. It could have been a neighbor asking to borrow a cup of olive oil. (Sugar, here, was uncommon and expensive-more a medicine than anything else.) It could have been, but Jeremy didn't think it was. He ran for the door as if shot from a gun. He got there half a step ahead of his sister. They gri

Jeremy took the bar off the door. Amanda unlatched it. There in front of the house stood Mom and Dad. The next couple of minutes were confused. Everybody was hugging and kissing everybody else. Passersby stopped and watched and called out comments instead of ignoring them the way they would have in the home timeline.

“It's so good to see you!” everyone kept saying over and over.

“Why don't you come on in?” Jeremy suggested at last. “Good idea,” Mom said. Jeremy and Amanda both kept looking at her. If they hadn't heard, they wouldn't have known she'd had her appendix out. She'd had plenty of time to get better.

“This town took a beating, didn't it?” Dad said, as Jeremy closed the door behind them. “It's in worse shape than I thought it would be.”

“Like I told you, the Lietuvans broke in once,” Jeremy answered. “The garrison managed to drive them out again.” He still didn't say anything about stabbing the Lietuvan soldier. He knew he wouldn't forget it, but wished he could.

Mom and Dad walked out into the courtyard. Dad clicked his tongue between his teeth when he saw the places where the kitchen roof had been repaired. The new tiles were a brighter red than those that had stood out in the sun for a while. “You were lucky,” he said. Jeremy nodded.

Amanda went into the kitchen. She came out carrying a tray. “I knew you were coming, so I baked a cake,” she said. It was, of course, a honey cake-honey did duty for sugar here most of the time. Along with it, the tray held a jar of wine and four cups.

Everyone poured out a small libation. The cake was sweet. The wine was sweeter. Having the family together again was sweetest of all. “How long till we can go home?” Jeremy asked. Like Amanda and his parents, he was still speaking neoLatin. Voices carried. No point in rousing suspicion.

“Our replacements left Carnuto a couple of days after us,” Mom answered, which told him what he needed to know and didn't tell the neighbors anything they didn't need to know.

“The accounts are in good shape,” Jeremy said. “We had to collect in silver, not grain, for a while. You know about that.”

Dad and Mom both nodded. Dad said, “You did what you had to do. No one will hold that against you. Sooner or later, we'll turn the silver back into grain.“

Amanda stirred. “I used some of the silver to buy Maria's freedom. I liked her before, but we got to be really good friends during the siege. The people we all work for will probably bill us on account of it.”

Jeremy thought the same thing. He hadn't said anything to Amanda about it, because he understood why she'd done what she'd done. Even so, he doubted Crosstime Traffic's accounting computers would.

But Dad just shrugged. Mom smiled. Neither one seemed the least bit upset. Dad said, “Don't worry about it, sweetheart. You're not the first person to do something like that, and you won't be the last.”

“Really?” Amanda sounded amazed. “When we train to go out into the alternates, they tell us and tell us not to have anything to do with freeing slaves. They say we're not supposed to mess with slavery at all.”

“They tell you that to keep you from getting into trouble,” Dad answered. “But you didn't get into trouble here. You did everything by the book.”