Gunpowder Empire Read online

  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.r />
  “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 fam
ily 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?”