Gunpowder Empire ct-1 Read online

  It made for a language more compact than English. Classical Latin didn't need a lot of the helping words English used. Its word endings did the job instead. If you didn't have an implant, classical Latin was probably harder to learn than English.

  And classical Latin wasn't dead in Agrippan Rome. Far from it. People spoke neoLatin in their everyday business. But the men who mattered-the bureaucrats who kept the Empire going whether the ruler was a genius or a maniac or a murderer or all three at once-wrote in the classical language. So did scholars and historians and poets. They looked down their noses at neoLatin. Learning the old tongue, learning to be elegant in it, was a big part of what raised a man to the higher classes of society here.

  Sometimes the upper crust even spoke classical Latin among themselves-usually when they didn't want ordinary people to know what they were talking about. In Amanda's world, the Catholic Church had used Latin the same way into the twentieth century.

  “The lamp-seller won't get in trouble for writing his sign like that, will he?” Jeremy asked.

  Dad shook his head. “It's not against the rules. Just-snooty. Maybe he sells to rich people. Maybe he wants poor people to think he sells to rich people, so he can get away with charging more.”

  “Snob appeal,” Mom said.

  Agrippan Rome had its share of real snobs, its share and then some. Aristocrats here carried on an old, old tradition, and boy, did they know it. They looked down their noses at anybody who wasn't one of them. In a way, that made Amanda want to laugh. For all his gold and all his slaves, even the richest aristocrat here didn't have a car or a phone or a computer or a refrigerator or air-conditioning or a doctor who knew much or any of a million other things she took for granted when she was home.

  But people were people, in her timeline or any of the alternates. Knowledge changed. Customs changed. Human nature didn't. People still fell in love-and out of love, too. They still schemed to get rich. They squabbled among themselves. And they needed to feel their group was better than some other group. Maybe they had more money. Maybe they had blond hair. Maybe they spoke a particular language. Maybe they had the one right religion-or the one right kind of the one right religion. It was always something, though.

  And they showed off. A woman stood in the middle of the street holding up a puppy. Her friends gathered to pet it. It snapped at one of them. She smacked it in the nose. It yipped. The woman who owned it smacked it, too. People here didn't worry about cruelty to animals. That was custom, not human nature. Too bad, Amanda thought.

  She and her family went up the main street that led into Polisso from the west gate. At the third good-sized cross street, they turned left. All the houses and shops and other buildings had numbers on them. That let the vigili-the police-find any place in town in a hurry. It let the city prefect collect taxes more easily, too. The numbers didn't look just like the ones Amanda was used to, but they used the same system. What she thought of as Roman numerals were for display here, the same as they were in her world.

  Dad turned right on the next big cross street. The important streets, like that one, were paved with cobblestones. You had to be careful when you walked, or you could turn an ankle. The lanes and alleys that branched off from the main streets weren't paved at all. They were dusty when it was dry and streams of stinking mud when it rained.

  “Here we are-24 Victorious Emperor.” Dad looked pleased with himself for remembering the way. The house-an upper story of whitewashed wood above a lower one of whitewashed stone-showed little to the street. Only narrow windows with stout shutters and a door with heavy iron hinges interrupted the stonework. All the display would go on the inside, in the rooms and in the courtyard.

  The door also had a heavy iron knocker. Before Dad could grab it, Jeremy did. He raised it and brought it down three times. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “Welcome, welcome, three times welcome!” Marco Petro, called Calvo, was a stout man with blue eyes and a big nose. His bald head gave him his nickname. In Jeremy's world, his name was Mark Stone. He clasped hands with Dad and Jeremy and blew kisses to Mom and Amanda. “Come in, come in, come in.” People here liked saying and doing things in threes. They thought it was lucky. That way why Jeremy had knocked three times.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Dad answered. Jeremy shot him a suspicious look. Marco Petro had sounded normal. He was just… talking. The way Dad said it, he might have been poking fun at the custom he was following.

  Or, then again, he might not have. You never could tell with Dad.

  By the way Marco Petro boomed laughter, he thought Dad was sending up local customs. He stood aside to let the Solters family come in, then closed the door behind them. It was close to ten centimeters thick, of solid oak. He set a stout iron bar in brackets to lock it.

  Closing the door cut off most of the light in the entry hall. Jeremy blinked, trying to help his eyes adapt. Marco Petro laughed again, on a different note. Now he too sounded like somebody gently-or maybe not so gently-mocking the culture in which he'd been living. “Good to see you folks,” he said. He kept on using neoLatin, but in a way that suggested he would rather have spoken English. “Messages by thinking machine are fine, but real live people are better.”

  Mom curtsied. “Thank you so much for the generous praise. Better than a thinking machine!” She couldn't come out and say computer. It wasn't just that the word didn't exist in neoLatin. The idea behind the word didn't exist, either.

  Marco Petro bowed to her. “More sarcastic than a thinking machine, too. Take your packs off. Make yourselves at home. You will be at home for the next three months. Come out into the courtyard, why don't you? We'll get you something wet.“

  Bees buzzed among the flowers in the courtyard garden. A fountain splashed gently. This house had running water. It was cold, and the germs in it would give you stomach trouble in nothing flat if you weren't immunized, but it ran. A statue of Agrippa's son and successor, the Emperor Lucius, stood not far from the fountain. It was a small recent copy of a famous piece in Rome. It wasn't all that well carved, but the gilding on the armor and the lifelike paint on the flesh and face helped hide flaws.

  Jeremy thought painted statues were gaudy, to say nothing of tacky. But the ancient Greeks and Romans had always done that. In Jeremy's world, the custom had died out. It lived on here. When in Agrippan Rome, you did as the Romans did.

  “Lucinda!” Marco Petro called as he hurried into the kitchen. “Bring out some wine, will you, dear? The Solteri are here.” He wouldn't serve the guests himself. He was the head of a family. That would have been beneath his dignity. He had his daughter do it instead.

  In most households this wealthy, a servant or a slave would have brought the wine. But Crosstime Traffic rules prohibited owning or dealing in slaves. Even if they hadn't… Jeremy shook his head. He'd seen slavery here, and it sickened him. How could one person buy, sell, own another? The locals did, though, and it bothered them not a bit. Some-not all, but some-slaves seemed contented enough. That puzzled Jeremy, too.

  Servants also weren't a good idea here. Along with the transposition chamber in the subbasement, this house had other gadgets and weapons from the home timeline. The locals thought the merchants who lived here were eccentric for doing their own housework. But there was no law against being eccentric.

  Marco Petro came back out into the courtyard. His wife came out, too, from another door. Her name was Dawn. Here, she went by Aurora, which meant the same thing. “Welcome, welcome, three times welcome!” she called. “Marco, are you getting something for them?”

  “Lucinda's taking care of it, dear,” Marco Petro answered.

  He sounded like someone holding on tight to his patience. His wife nagged. Jeremy had seen that before. The merchant turned toward the kitchen. “How are you coming, Lucinda?” “Ill be right there, Father.”

  Lucinda Petra came out carrying a big tray of hammered copper. On the tray were an earthenware jar of wine, seven hand-blown glass cups, a loaf o
f brown bread, and bowls of honey and olive oil for dipping. In this world, only Lietuvans and other barbarians ate butter.

  Lucinda was Jeremy's age. She had blue eyes like her father. She didn't have a big nose, though, or, as far as he could see, anything else wrong with her. She was the main reason he'd hurried into Polisso. He never had got up the nerve to tell her how cute he thought she was.

  Even without his saying anything, Amanda could tell what he was thinking. “Stop staring,” she whispered.

  “Stifle it,” Jeremy answered sweetly.

  After Lucinda set the tray on a table, she poured wine for everybody. Agrippan Rome thought of wine the way a lot of Europeans did in Jeremy's world. Babies here started drinking watered wine as soon as they stopped nursing. As children got older, they watered it less and less. It was probably safer than drinking the water.

  In his own world, there were good reasons not to let kids drink wine. They had plenty of other things to drink: water and milk that wouldn't make them sick, fruit juices, soda. They could get behind the wheel of a car and kill themselves and other people. And they were just starting out in life. Who his age or Amanda's was ready to take a place in the grown-up world?

  There wasn't much else to drink here. There were no cars.

  People started working at twelve or thirteen-sometimes at eight or nine-and worked till they dropped. The line between children and adults blurred. It was a different world. One whiff of the ripe, ripe air told how different it was.

  Marco Petro splashed a little wine on the paving stones of the courtyard. “To the spirit of the Emperor,” he murmured.

  Everyone else imitated the ritual. The traders would have done it with their customers. They did it among themselves, too, to stay in practice. The paving stones showed plenty of stains, some old, some new, If they hadn't, the locals would have wondered why. The most obvious answer was that the people here didn't wish the Emperor well. That would have been dangerous.

  “By what you've sent back home, business has been good here,” Dad remarked, dipping a chunk of the brown bread into olive oil.

  “Not bad at all,” Marco Petro agreed. “Hour-reckoners and mirrors, especially. Everybody who's anybody wants to pull out an hour-reckoner and see what time it is. All the people with hour-reckoners want everybody else to see them seeing what time it is. They want to show off, you know. And if you've been looking at yourself in polished bronze, or not looking at yourself at all, a real mirror seems like a miracle.”

  Lucinda smiled. “They do wonder why we'd rather have grain than gold.”

  “They always have,” Jeremy said. Talking about trade with Lucinda was easier than talking about other things. “As long as they don't wonder where it goes, everything's fine.”

  “We make sure of that,” Aurora Petra said. Jeremy nodded. Most of the grain went back to the home timeline through the transposition chamber in the subbasement. Some went out in wagons, though: enough to make it look as if more did. That grain didn't go any farther by road than the chamber outside of town. The locals saw it leave Polisso. That was what counted.

  “It'll be funny, going back to Cincinnati after living here for a while,” Lucinda said. “Do without things for a while, and they don't seem real any more.”

  “It's like jet lag, only more so,” Jeremy said.

  “That's just what it's like,” Lucinda agreed. Jeremy felt proud. His sister made a face at him. He ignored her.

  “I hope things stay quiet with Lietuva,” Mom said.

  “The guard at the gate was talking about Lietuvan spies,” Amanda put in.

  “They aren't keeping Lietuvan merchants out of the Empire, so it should be all right,” Marco Petro said. The kingdom to the north and east ruled what were Poland and Belarus and Ukraine and the Baltic countries and some of European Russia in Jeremy's world. Every generation or two, it fought a war with Rome. Neither side ever gained much, but they both kept trying. No, human nature didn't change much across timelines.

  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.