Gunpowder Empire Read online

  Jeremy and his father put on knee-length woolen tunics. Jeremy’s was undyed, his father’s a dull blue. Both tunics had embroidery around the sleeves and the neck opening, Dad’s more than Jeremy’s. Jeremy’s socks were also of wool, hand-knitted; his sandals were leather, with bronze buckles. His underwear came down to his knees. It was wool, too. It itched. A plain floppy felt hat finished his outfit. Dad’s hat boasted a braided leather band and a bright pheasant feather sticking up from it.

  Mom and Amanda wore tunics that fell all the way to their ankles. Amanda’s was blue like Dad’s. Mom’s was saffron yellow, which showed the family had money. So did her shiny brass belt, the gold hoops in her ears, and her lace headdress. Amanda wore a brass belt, too, but not such a wide one. Her headdress was lower and flatter than Mom’s. That meant she wasn’t married.

  A computer guided the transposition chamber. An operator sat in the chamber with the travelers. He didn’t change, and looked like the odd man out. He had manual controls in case of emergency. Fortunately, emergencies were rare. Emergencies where the manual controls would do any good were even rarer. Jeremy chose not to dwell on that.

  He tried to tell when the chamber reached the right alternate. He tried whenever he went crosstime, and he always failed. If he’d been waiting for the chamber, he would have seen it materialize. Inside it, he might as well not have left the home timeline.

  The trip to the alternate seemed to take about forty-five minutes. When he got out and looked at the sun, though, it would be in the same place in the sky here as it had in the home line. Duration across timelines was a tricky business. Quantum physics seemed simple beside it.

  Out of the blue—or so it felt to Jeremy—the operator said, “Okay, you’re here.” Jeremy muttered to himself. Caught by surprise again.

  He got up and stretched. The ceiling of the chamber was only a few centimeters above his head. Tall in his own timeline, he would seem taller in the alternate. The locals weren’t as well nourished as people back home. I’d make the basketball team here, he thought. I’d play center, too.

  Somebody had scribbled something on the wall by the door. He leaned closer to get a better look. THE ONE AND ONLY HOMEMADE TIME MACHINE, it said. He grinned. That hadn’t been there the last time he came to Agrippan Rome. Odds were it wouldn’t be there when the chamber came back for his family. The company usually made that kind of stuff disappear in a hurry.

  “Here you go.” The operator opened the door, the way a steward would on a shuttlecraft. The air they’d brought with them from the home timeline mingled with what the locals breathed. That was cool and damp. The transposition chamber had materialized in a cave two or three kilometers from Polisso. The cave overlooked the road to the west. That road never had a whole lot of traffic. When video cameras in the cave showed it was clear in both directions, people could go down and head for town with the locals none the wiser.

  Dad was the first one out the door. “Time to make the best deals we can,” he said in neoLatin. He used English as little as he could while they were in the alternate. So did everybody else. What people in Polisso didn’t hear, they couldn’t wonder about.

  Jeremy and Amanda followed their father around to the cargo compartment. The first things Dad got out were two swords in leather sheaths. He gave Jeremy one and buckled the other one on himself. No one here traveled cross-country unarmed. Then he pulled out four packs full of trade goods. Everybody in the family got one of those.

  “A good thing bandits don’t know we’re coming, or we’d really have things to worry about,” Mom said as she slung her pack on her back.

  “Need more than swords to keep off bandits,” Dad agreed.

  Jeremy put on his own pack. Like the others, it was full of wind-up pocket watches almost the size of a fist, mirrors in gilt-metal frames, straight razors, Swiss army knives, and other examples of what would have been thoroughly outdated technology in his world. Here, though, no one could match it. No one could come close. Traders from Crosstime Traffic got wonderful prices.

  If they’d been limited to what they could carry on their backs, they would have lost a lot of business. But they weren’t. Another transposition chamber brought more trade goods to a subbasement under the house they used in Polisso. People hardly ever traveled through that one. If strangers appeared in Polisso from nowhere, the locals would wonder how they got there. Walking in and out through the west gate was a different story. Anybody could understand that.

  Dad was checking the monitors to make sure nobody could see the family when they came out of the cave. Jeremy went over to look at the screens, too. They showed grassy hillsides. Motion and an infrared blip drew Jeremy’s eye. It was only a rabbit hopping along. He relaxed. The Roman military highway arrowed off toward the west, as scornful of the landscape it crossed as any American interstate.

  “Looks good,” Jeremy said.

  Dad nodded. “Yes, I think so, too.” He raised his voice a little. “Come here, Melissa. See anything you don’t like?”

  Mom took a long, careful look at the monitors. She shook her head. “No, everything looks fine.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Dad said.

  The mouth of the cave wasn’t wide enough to let anyone in or out. A camouflaged trapdoor nearby took care of that. Jeremy and Amanda hurried down the hillside to the highway. When Jeremy got to it, the soles of his sandals slapped against the paving stones. That road had been there for two thousand years. It wasn’t heavily traveled, but still…. How many others had walked it before him?

  The breeze blew from out of the west. The grass on either side of the road rippled like seawater. A starling flew by overhead. It made metallic twittering noises. Jeremy didn’t hate starlings here the way he did in California. They belonged here. They weren’t imported pests.

  “Cooler here than when we left,” Mom said. Jeremy nodded. She was right. It didn’t mean much, though. Weather changed randomly from one timeline to another.

  “Let’s go,” Dad said. They started east toward Polisso, which lay not far past the curve of the next hill.

  Amanda could see the walls of Polisso ahead when the wind shifted. She wrinkled her nose. Dad broke a rule: he dropped into English to say, “Ah, the sweet smell of successpool.” The pun wouldn’t work in neoLatin.

  “Funny,” Amanda said, meaning anything but.

  Horse manure. Garbage—old, old garbage. Sewage. Wood smoke, thick enough to slice. People who hadn’t bathed for a long time. Those were some of the notes in the symphony of stinks. The scary thing was, it could have been worse. People here knew about running water. There were public baths. But the pipes only went through the richer parts of town. The baths were cheap, but they weren’t free. Not everybody could afford them.

  After coughing, Amanda said, “Those who travel across time learn things about smells that those who stay home never imagine.” It sounded more impressive in neoLatin. It would have been true no matter what language she spoke.

  “In a few days, you won’t even notice,” Mom said. That was also true. Amanda wouldn’t have believed it the first time she came to Polisso. She’d wanted to throw up. She hadn’t, quite. Some people did when they first went crosstime. Living in cultures that knew little about sanitation and cared less took work.

  Sandstone walls, lit by the sinking sun, seemed to turn to gold. The long black barrels of cannon stood on wheeled carriages atop the wall. More big guns poked out from the tall, narrow windows of siege towers that strengthened the fortifications. Some of those towers and parts of the wall were visibly newer than others. Polisso had stood siege before.

  A wagon drawn by half a dozen horses came rattling and squealing out of the gate. The horses’ iron-shod hooves and the iron tires on the wagon wheels banged and clanked against the paving stones of the highway. The horses strained against their harness. The wagon was full of sandstone blocks. Pulling it couldn’t have been easy for the animals.

  The driver was a swarthy little man with a bi
g black mustache. He wore a tunic like Jeremy’s, but shabbier and with less embroidery. “Gods look out for you,” he said, as Amanda and her family stepped off onto the grass by the side of the road to give the wagon plenty of room to go by.

  “And for you as well,” Dad answered politely.

  “Thanks, friend,” the driver said. His neoLatin had an accent a little different from what Amanda had learned through her implant. That guttural undertone said he came from the province of Dacia—probably from right here in Polisso. Amanda sounded as if she came from Italy, or perhaps Illyricum or southern Gallia.

  With a leer for Amanda, or for Mom, or maybe for both of them, the local flicked the reins. Men here weren’t shy when they liked somebody’s looks. Amanda stuck her nose in the air. So did her mother. The driver just laughed. You couldn’t discourage them that way. The Solters family walked on toward Polisso.

  A gate guard yawned, showing two broken teeth. He and his comrades wore surcoats of dull red linen over light mailshirts. They tucked baggy wool trousers into rawhide boots that rose almost to their knees. Their helmets had a projecting brim in front and a downsweeping flair in back to protect their necks.

  They all wore swords on their hips. Some of them carried pikes twice as tall as they were. The rest shouldered heavy, clumsy-looking matchlock muskets. A lot of them had nasty scars. They’d seen action somewhere.

  “God look out for you,” Dad called to the guards.

  “Gods look out for you as well,” answered the guard with the broken teeth. He had a small plume of red feathers sticking up from his helmet. That meant he was a sergeant. It also meant he could read and write, which many of the other guards couldn’t do. And it meant he was going to ask nine million questions and write down all the answers. Sure enough, he pulled out an enormous book with pages made from parchment, a reed pen, and a brass bottle of ink. “Your names?”

  “I am Ioanno Soltero, called Acuto,” Dad answered.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch, went the pen. “They call you clever, eh?” the sergeant said. “Should they?”

  With a wry shrug, Dad answered, “If I were as clever as that, would I let people know I was clever?”

  “Huh,” the sergeant said. “And the people with you?”

  “My son, Ieremeo Soltero, called Alto,” Dad said. The sergeant nodded as he wrote that down. Jeremy was tall. Dad went on, “My wife, Melissa Soltera. My daughter, Amanda Soltera.” Women didn’t have semiofficial nicknames tacked on after their family names.

  “Occupation?” the sergeant asked.

  “We are merchants,” Dad replied. “We work with Marco Petro, called Calvo, whom you will know. If you do not recognize us, some of your men will.”

  Several guards nodded. One said, “I remember the Solteri from last year and the year before that. Don’t you, Sarge?”

  “Of course I do. You think I’m stupid?” the sergeant snapped. “But that doesn’t matter. We’ve got to have the records.” He turned back to Dad. “Nature of your trade and merchandise?”

  “Hour-reckoners, mirrors, knives with many attached tools, razors, and other such small things of great use, all at best prices.” Dad got in a quick sales pitch.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. The sergeant wrote it down without changing expression. He paused to reink the pen, then asked, “Declared value of your merchandise?”

  “Nine hundred aurei,” Dan answered. Merchants bringing more than a thousand goldpieces’ worth of goods into a town had to pay a special tax. Nobody admitted bringing in more, not if there was any way around it.

  The sergeant grunted. He knew the rules at least as well as Dad. If he wanted to be difficult, he could search the Solters’ packs. His broad-shouldered shrug made his mail-shirt clink. Merchants whose goods were worth more than a thousand aurei were rich enough to land a nosy sergeant in hot water. He seemed to decide snooping beyond what the law required was more trouble than it was worth. “Religion?” he asked. “Your greeting and your names make you Christians or Jews.”

  “We’re Imperial Christians,” Dad said. “We’re peaceful people. We don’t cause trouble.”

  Another grunt. “Yeah, that’s what they all say.” The sergeant wrote it down, though. “Now—your home province and birthplace?”

  It went on and on. Agrippan Rome floated on a sea of parchment, papyrus, and, in recent years, paper. The Empire had been a going concern for more than two thousand years. Amanda wondered if anyone had ever thrown anything out in all that time. Somewhere in Polisso, were there records of travelers who’d come through this gate five hundred or a thousand or fifteen hundred years before? She wouldn’t have been surprised. Had anybody looked at them since a bored guard took them down? That would have surprised her.

  After what seemed like forever and was almost half an hour, the sergeant said, “All right. Everything seems in order. Entry tax for a grade-three town, a family of four, merchant class, is…Let me see.” He had to check a sheet of parchment nailed to the guardhouse wall. Once he had checked it, he did some figuring on his fingers. “Eighteen denari.”

  Dad grumbled. Grumbling was good form. It said you weren’t too rich to worry about money. Grumble a lot, though, and you risked annoying the guardsmen. “Here.” Dad handed over the small silver coins. They weren’t all quite the same size or shape, but they all weighed the same. The Empire was careful about its coinage.

  The sergeant counted the denari. Twice. Then he nodded. “You have paid the entry tax,” he said formally. “You do not have the seeming of Lietuvan spies. Enter, therefore, into the city of Polisso. May your dealings be profitable. You will report to the temple of the spirit of the Emperor for the required sacrifice. If not, your failure will be noted.” He sent Dad a hard look.

  In this paperwork-mad society, not sacrificing would be noticed. But Dad only said, “We will. I told you, we’re Imperial Christians.”

  Christianity here had the same name as it did back home, but it wasn’t the same thing. In this world, it never had become the most important faith in the Roman Empire. The Empire here hadn’t gone through the troubles it had in Amanda’s world. It had stayed strong and mostly prosperous. People hadn’t worried so much about the next world. For most of them, this one had seemed enough. The new belief and the old ones had mingled much more here. Even the Christians who didn’t call themselves Imperial were less strict about other gods than the ones in the home timeline.

  Judaism here wasn’t as different as Christianity, but it wasn’t the same, either. Jews here didn’t believe the Emperor was divine, the way most people did. But they did think of him as God’s viceroy on earth. They would sacrifice to his good health and good fortune, but not to his spirit.

  In this world, Muhammad had never been born. It was a different place, with a different history. Finding things in it the same as they were back home would have been the real shocker.

  “Come on,” Jeremy said. “Let’s get moving.”

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” Mom asked. He didn’t answer, but pushed on into Polisso. The rest of the family followed.

  Once upon a time, the town had been a camp where a Roman legion stayed. It still kept the square layout and grid of main streets it had had then. In between those streets that joined at neat right angles, little lanes and alleys wandered every which way. Houses had their lower story of stone or brick, the upper floors of timber. Some of them had balconies that reached across the lanes toward balconies reaching from the other side. Amanda wondered how sunlight ever trickled down there. By the damp, nasty smell, it often didn’t.

  A triumphal arch sprouted in the middle of a square. Men on horseback, ox carts, and people on foot went past it or under it. They didn’t look at it twice. Why should they? To them, it was just part of the landscape. Amanda pointed to the figure in relief above the keystone. “There’s Agrippa.”

  Even after almost two thousand years of weathering, even with bird droppings streaking his face and his ceremonial armor, Marcus Vipsanius
Agrippa still looked tough. The sculptor showed him as a burly, muscular man with bushy eyebrows, a big nose, and a chin that stuck out. Here, as in Amanda’s world, he’d been a lifelong friend and helper to Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. In both worlds, Augustus had married his daughter to Agrippa. He’d given Agrippa his ring during an illness, showing he wanted Agrippa to be his heir.

  Augustus was always getting sick—and always getting better. Agrippa was the picture of health—till, in Amanda’s world, he died in 12 B.C. He was only fifty-one. Augustus kept right on getting sick—and getting better—for another quarter of a century before he finally died, too.

  In this world, Agrippa had stayed healthy. It made an enormous difference. Augustus tried to conquer Germania, the way his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, had conquered Gallia. When the Germans rebelled, in Amanda’s world Augustus had had to send a bad general against them. Agrippa was already more than twenty years dead. The other general—his name was Varus—got three Roman legions massacred. The German revolt succeeded. In Amanda’s world, the Roman frontier stopped at the Rhine till the Empire fell.

  Things weren’t the same in this world. Here, Augustus had had Agrippa to use against the Germans. Agrippa was old by then—he was the same age as Augustus—but he knew his business. He beat the Germans and killed their chief. Settlers from the Empire came in, as they had in Gallia. Germania became a Roman province. Here, it still was a Roman province.

  And when Augustus finally died here, who succeeded him? Agrippa. “My hair is white, but I am still strong,” he said when he became Emperor. He proved it, too. He reigned for twelve years on his own, and he conquered Dacia—the land that had become Romania in Amanda’s world. The Romans had conquered it in her world, too, but not for almost another hundred years. They’d never held it very firmly there. Here, it was still called Dacia, and it still belonged to Rome.

  One man, Amanda thought, looking up at Agrippa. One man made all that difference. In her world, the German invasions helped bring down the Roman Empire. In this one, the people of Germania became Romanized. They came to speak and read and write Latin. Cities sprang up there, Roman cities. Some great Roman Emperors and some great scholars and writers—and a lot of good soldiers—here had had German blood. The same held true for Dacia, though not quite to the same degree.