Gunpowder Empire

Thirteen

Having the Lietuvans gone didn't mean Polisso came back to normal right away. The city usually had farmers bringing in produce and eggs and sometimes livestock to sell in the market. Here, now, the farmers didn't have much to sell to the people in the city. Kuzmickas' soldiers had lived off the countryside as much as they could. Locusts might have stripped it barer. Then again, they might not have.

As they left, the Lietuvans had ruined as many grainfields as they could, too. Polisso and the surrounding farms could look forward to a lean harvest. Jeremy would have worried more about that if he'd expected to stay in town through the winter.

Being back in touch with the home timeline changed his whole way of looking at things. For better or worse-mostly for worse-he'd started to think of Polisso as home. Now he felt like a visitor, a tourist, again. Things that happened here happened to other people. They weren't likely to affect him much.

He was in touch with Michael Fujikawa again, too. His friend was back from his summer in alternate North China- and back to school at Canoga Park High. You're lucky, Michael wrote. You don't have to worry about history homework and Boolean operators.

Lucky, my left one. Jeremy answered. For one thing, I was scared Amanda and I would be stuck here for good-except it wouldn't be very good. And besides, think of all the work I'll have to make up when I do get back.

Poor baby. Here's the world's smallest violin playing “Hearts and Flowers” for you, Michael sent. Jeremy laughed. His grandfather had said that, and run his forefinger over the top of his thumb when he did to show the violin. The joke had to be ancient. Jeremy had never heard it from anybody but Grandpa. He wondered where on earth Michael had picked it up.

His friend went on, I am glad you two are okay, though. I knew something was wrong when we got cut off. Terrorists, I heard. That's no fun. Lucky they didn't have nukes.

“Gurk!” Jeremy said when that showed up on the Power-Book's monitor. Ordinary explosives and tailored viruses were bad enough. Nukes… Terrorists didn't have an easy time getting them, but bad things happened when they did. And how would anybody have rebuilt the transposition chambers if even vest-pocket nukes had gone off in them?

One thing happened after the Lietuvans went away- Jeremy and Amanda started selling pocket watches and mirrors and razors and Swiss army knives hand over fist. That wasn't just because they'd given them to King Kuzmickas, either. Their goods had always had snob appeal. But now Polisso's rich seemed to realize they wouldn't need to spend their last denari on grain. And so they started spending their money on luxuries instead.

After Amanda sold a blue-plate special, Jeremy said, “Shame we can't start taking payment in grain again, not in silver. But they'd still come down on us for hoarding if we tried.“

“Anybody who comes here from now on will have a hard time insisting on grain,” Amanda said. “I wish that hadn't happened.” She found more things to worry about than Jeremy did.

Shrugging, he said, “I don't know what else we could have done. We didn't have any place to put more grain once the transposition chambers stopped coming. Even if we did, people would have stopped giving it to us after the siege started. They didn't worry so much about money.”

“I suppose,” Amanda said, in a tone of voice that meant she was still worrying about it.

Jeremy didn't have the patience to straighten his sister out. (He also never wondered about how much patience she needed to get along with him.) He left the house and went over to the market square to see what sort of gossip he could pick up. (He thought of it as news.)

When he got there, he saw workmen busily repairing the city prefect's palace. Sesto Capurnio wouldn't have to worry about drafts or a leaky roof for very long. Ordinary people? What was the point of being rich and powerful if you couldn't get your roof fixed ahead of ordinary people? Masons patched holes with cement. Carpenters' hammers banged.

“Good thing the temple next door didn't get hurt too bad,” said a man in the market square. “The gods would have to wait their turn, too.”

“The gods can take care of themselves,” another man answered. “That's probably why nothing much happened to the temple. But what about the poor so-and-sos who got their shacks knocked flat? What are they going to do?“

“Same as always,” the first man said. “They'll get it in the neck.” By the way he spoke and dressed, he wasn't a rich man himself. When he talked about what happened to the poor, it was from bitter experience.

“I don't suppose the city prefect would have got hungry if the siege had gone on, either,” the second man said.

The first man laughed. “Not likely! City prefects don't go hungry. That isn't in the rules. If you don't believe me, just ask Sesto Capurnio.”

“I'll tell you what I believe,” his pal said. “I believe you're going to get in trouble if you don't stick a sandal in your big, flapping mouth.” For a wonder, the first man did shut up.

Jeremy bought a handful of pickled green olives from a vender with a crock of them that he wore tied around his neck with a leather strap so that it bounced against his belly. Jeremy savored what salt and vinegar could do for olives. He spat the pits onto the cobbles of the market square. He wouldn't have done that back in the home timeline, but things were different here.

What would I have been like, if I'd got stuck here for twenty years and then gone home? he wondered. Would I have done things like that without thinking about them, because everybody did them here? I bet I would.

Somebody came into the square at a run. People looked up. That was out of the ordinary, which meant it might be important. And sure enough, the man yelled, “News at the gate! Our army beat the lousy Lietuvans! They're on their way home, fast as they can go!”

People in the square didn't all jump up and start cheering. They nodded to one another, as if to say they'd expected as much. Had they? Maybe some of them had. But others wouldn't want to show that they'd thought anything else was possible. And one man said, “Why didn't our army come six weeks ago? Then we wouldn't have had to go through so much trouble.”

Another merchant said, “We're lucky they didn't wait till next spring, or till five years from now.”

He laughed to show he meant it for a joke. The men who heard him laughed, too, to show they knew it was one. Jeremy wasn't so sure. They might all have been kidding on the square. Agrippan Rome was so bound up in rules and regulations, all its wheels turned slowly. The army had to be less sluggish than most parts of the government. And it had done its job here, even if it hadn't done it very fast.

Would the Romans know what to do with freedom if they got it? They'd done without it for a long, long time.

Jeremy shrugged. It wasn't his worry, not any more. Sure enough, he was and felt like a visitor here once more, not somebody who might have to put down deep roots. And that suited him just fine. Not living in Polisso for the rest of his life, even if that meant going back to high school and catching up on everything he'd missed, seemed pretty good.

Everything is clean now, in both transposition chamber areas, Mom wrote. They're running a last few checks, and then we'll be able to come through.

Amanda raised an eyebrow when she read that. If everything were clean now, her folks should have been able to come straight through now. The technicians wouldn't be running more checks. She sighed. She could understand why they didn't want to risk letting a tailored virus loose in Agrippan Rome. Doctors here couldn't do anything about natural germs, let alone genetically engineered ones.

She said, “Answer. We'll see you when we see you, that's all. We miss you. It's already been too long. Send.”

The words-minus the opening and ending commands- appeared on the PowerBook's screen. They would also appear on the monitor Mom was looking at back home. When Mom and Dad came into Polisso again, word would be bound to get back to the city prefect. Amanda knew that Sesto Capurnio still half suspected she and Jeremy had knocked their parents over the head and buried them somewhere out of the way.

Well, I don't have to worry about what Sesto Capurnio suspects, not now, Amanda thought. She was just a tourist again, and she wouldn't even be that for very long. Burgers. Fries. Milkshakes. Sushi. Lamb vindaloo. Spit flooded into her mouth. She was tired of barley porridge and gritty brown bread.

It's been much too long, Mom agreed. You don't know how much we've missed you and worried about you. Well, it won't be much longer. I've got to go. See you soon.

“See you,” Amanda said. She'd done plenty of worrying about herself, too. Nice to know somebody else was also doing it for her. That was a big part of what parents were for.

She didn't want to leave the cellar. Going back into the world of Agrippan Rome, the world of stinks, the world with slavery and without electricity, reminded her of everything she'd left behind. She'd get it back again, though. And she and Jeremy would get Mom and Dad back, too. It was like living in a fairy tale when you got three wishes.

But the three wishes hadn't happened yet. She just had the promise that they would. What to do in the meantime? The only thing she could see, was to get on with her life. She felt like Cinderella, back with her stepmother and nasty stepsisters before the Prince came along with the glass slipper.

The next morning, she put a water jar on her hip and went to the fountain. She would never be able to go there without thinking of the Lietuvan cannonball ricocheting through the crowd of women that one dreadful morning. She noticed local women also looking at the scars it had left behind on the stonework. The real damage it had done, though, had nothing to do with stonework.

Maria was at the fountain. She and a couple of free women were talking about the victory the Romans had won against King Kuzmickas. People in Polisso hoped it meant the Lietuvans wouldn't invade again any time soon. Past that, they didn't much seem to care.

One of the free women waved to Amanda. “What do you think?” the local asked. “You went out there and gave the King presents. Will he try again soon?”

“How can I know that?” Amanda said reasonably. “I just met him for a little while. I don't know how badly the legions beat him, either. If they really smashed up his army, maybe he'll stay in his own country for a while. If they didn't, though, he might think he'd have better luck next time and try again.”

“Sounds sensible.” The local woman seemed surprised. Maybe she wasn't used to logically thinking things through. Even back in the home timeline, a lot of people weren't. That never failed to startle Amanda when she bumped into it, which probably wasn't sensible on her part.

Maria smiled at her. Amanda cautiously smiled back. The slave girl seemed willing to be friendly, at least to a certain degree, no matter what she believed. Maybe that meant Maria wasn't quite so strict herself as Amanda had thought. More likely, it just meant the slave couldn't help being a friendly person even if her beliefs were strict. Maria said, “You seem happy.”

Amanda nodded. “I am happy. I just got a message from my mother and father.“ She didn't have to say the message had crossed timelines to get here. ”They ought to be back in Polisso in a few days.“

“Oh, that is good news.” Maria set down her water jar and gave Amanda a hug. Yes, she was a friendly person, all right. “I know you and your brother have been worried about them.”

“A little.” Amanda didn't want to say how much. She couldn't say all the reasons why she and Jeremy had been worried, either.

“They will have worried about you even more, what with the two of you under siege here. I'm sure they will reward the messenger when he tells them you are all right,” Maria said. “I prayed that everything would turn out well for you and for them. I'm glad my prayers were answered.”

Amanda didn't quite know how to take that. “Thank you,” seemed the right thing to say. Stammering a little, she added, “Don't you, uh, pray for yourself, too? For your freedom?”

“Oh, yes,” Maria answered calmly. “But God hasn't chosen to hear that prayer yet. In His own good time, He will. Or, if it pleases Him, He will leave me as I am. His will be done.”

She means it, Amanda realized. Understanding that, believing it, was a bigger jolt than seeing how some people wouldn't think logically. Maria believed, no matter how friendly she was. Believing helped her accept her place. Accepting a low place wasn't something Americans were used to. Instead, they went out and tried to make it better. People in Agrippan Rome usually didn't. They couldn't.

“How do you stand it?” Amanda blurted.

“What can I do about it?” Maria still sounded calm and reasonable. “Nothing, not by myself.” After echoing Amanda's thoughts, she went on, “Since I can't do anything, what's the point of getting upset? It would only make life harder, and life is hard enough as is. I'm more ready to be free than I used to be, I think. Now that you showed me how the alphabet works, I can read more and more, though it's still not easy for me. I go on from day to day, and I pray, and I hope.”

“Would you like enough silver to buy yourself free?” Amanda asked impulsively. “I have it, you know.”

Maria smiled again and shook her head. “I would rather be your friend than your debtor. It would take me years to pay back that kind of money, if I ever could.”

“I didn't mean as a loan,” Amanda said. “If you want to be free, I'd gladly pay your owner what you're worth.” She couldn't change the whole Roman Empire here. But she could help a friend. If she got in trouble for that with Crosstime Traffic, too bad. She and Jeremy had piled up an awful lot of silver. Freeing Maria counted for more with her than buying grain. She'd had second thoughts about it before. Now that she was leaving… Yes, things seemed different somehow.

The slave girl's eyes went big and round when she realized Amanda meant it. “You would do that for me?” she said. Amanda nodded. Maria hugged her again. But then, worry in her voice, she asked, “What would I do if I were free?”

“You could go on working for your master, but as a freed-woman,” Amanda answered. “You know his business. Wouldn't he be glad to have you? You'd be your own person, though. You wouldn't be his.”

Even that wasn't a hundred percent true. Freedmen and freedwomen had obligations to the people who'd once owned them. But they couldn't be sold or mistreated, the way slaves could. And their children would be wholly free.

“I hardly believe my own ears,” Maria said.

“Well, you'd better,” Amanda told her. “I meant it. Take the water back, and I'll do the same. Then I'll meet you at Pulio Carvilio's shop.”

Maria's owner, a cobbler, was a short, stocky man with a broad face, hairy ears, and scarred hands. “What's this I hear?” he said in a gruff, raspy voice when Amanda came in. He pushed the sandal he was repairing off to one side and set the awl he held down on the table. “You want to buy Maria from me?”

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 skinned her in the deal, she didn't mind a bit.

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 funny hat. But Maria knew what it was. She clapped her hands together. “A Phrygian cap!”

“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 grinned at each other.

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.”

Mom added, “Besides, a lot of the people who teach those training courses have never been out in the alternates themselves. Saying, 'Never do this,' is a lot easier when you've never had to worry about doing it yourself.”

“Once you've gone out and seen some of the things people do in the alternates, a lot of the time you do want to change it. You can't help yourself. It's ugly,“ Dad said.

“What exactly are you saying?” Jeremy asked. “Are you saying we shouldn't pay any attention to what they tell us in the training sessions? Why do we have them, in that case?”

He liked authority no better than anyone else his age. If the stuff they fed him was pointless, he didn't want to have to go through it.

“No, I'm not saying that. You do have to pay attention,” Dad answered. “But what you run into in the real world-in the real alternates-isn't just the same as what they tell you about in training. When you get out on your own, you have to use your own judgment. Amanda did that. We're not mad at her. We're proud of her.”

Amanda looked so smug, Jeremy wanted to hit her. He didn't like her getting praised when he didn't. She probably didn't like him getting praised when she didn't. That wasn't his worry, though. That was hers.

Then Mom said, “We're proud of both of you, as a matter of fact. It sounds like you did a great job here. You're not supposed to be on your own yet. You're especially not supposed to be on your own in the middle of a war.”

Dad's chuckle had kind of a nasty edge. “The locals probably figured you bashed out our brains and buried us in the cellar.”

“That's not funny!” Amanda stopped acting smug. Her voice went shrill. “They did.“

“They sure did,” Jeremy agreed. “If they'd been any more suspicious, they would have tried digging down there. That wouldn't have been so good. They would have found all the grain we were storing, and they might have found the concrete over the subbasement.” He spoke quietly, so only the people in the courtyard could hear.

“They couldn't get through it,” Amanda said.

“No, but they sure would have wondered why it was there,” Jeremy said. “Locals aren't supposed to wonder about us at all.“ He'd learned that in a training session, too. He'd never thought to doubt it, either. It seemed too obvious to need doubting.

By then, Dad's grin had fallen from his face. He poured himself another cup of wine. “I thought I was joking,” he said.

“Nope.” Jeremy shook his head. “They do wonder about us. We sell things nobody else has. We sell for grain, not silver. They think that's weird, too. I don't know what we can do about it. Move out of Polisso, maybe, and start up again somewhere a long ways off. That would buy some time.”

“Less than you think,” Dad said. “News doesn't move fast here, but they keep records. They keep records like you wouldn't believe, in fact. There's bound to be a file on us back in Rome. Nobody's ever come out here to ask question, so they can't think we're real important. But if we showed up in Spain or Britain instead of Polisso, news of that would get back to Rome, too. And a clerk who'd seen the one file would also see the other one. He'd wonder why we disappeared here and set up shop there. And somebody would start asking questions then. Or am I wrong?“

Jeremy thought it over. He didn't have to think very long. He'd already had his own run-ins with the bureaucracy of Agrippan Rome. “No, you're right. I hope we don't have to pull out of here and start over on some other alternate that looks a lot like this one.”

“That would be a nuisance,” Dad agreed. “I wouldn't want to have to say we've lost our grip on Agrippan Rome.” Jeremy and Amanda both made horrible faces. Dad grinned at them. He had no shame-he was proud when he did something like that. Still grinning, he went on, “We're not the ones who make choices like that, anyway.”

“One good thing,” Amanda said: “Even if the locals here found out we're from crosstime, they couldn't do anything about it. As long as we could jump into a transposition chamber, we'd be safe.”

“True enough here,“ Mom said. “But there are alternates where they have the technology to go crosstime themselves if they ever get the idea. Some of those aren't nice worlds at all. Crosstime Traffic has to be real careful in places like that.”

“It might be better if we didn't go to those places ourselves,” Jeremy said. “Then we couldn't give ourselves away.”

“It might, but it might not, too,” Dad said. “If they found out how to build transposition chambers on their own and we didn't know till we bumped into them on some alternate where we were both working… well, that wouldn't be so good, either. So we stay and we watch and we try to be careful and we worry. Sometimes-a lot of the time-there are no clear answers, only hard choices.”

Jeremy thought about that, too. It reminded him- reminded him uncomfortably-of his own worries after he and Amanda got stuck here. He said, “Things don't seem as black-and-white to you as they do to me, do they?”

Dad and Mom looked at each other. They both started laughing at the same time. Jeremy started to get mad. Dad saw that, too. He held up a hand. “No offense,” he said. “Honest, none. It makes us feel good that you're growing up. It really does. It's just that-”

“You don't know how right you are,” Mom broke in.

“You sure don't,” Dad said. “That's what you'll do between now and when you're as old as we are. One of the things you'll do, anyway. You'll find out how right you are.”

“The older you get, the more complicated things look,” Mom said. “That's not because you'll get smarter. You'll just get more experience.”

“You won't get more RAM,” Dad added. “But you'll have a lot more programs and a lot more files on your hard disk that you can use and read.”

Not all of Dad's comparisons made sense to Jeremy. That one did. He said, “What do we do if somebody from a nasty alternate figures out how to go crosstime?”

Mom and Dad looked at each other again. They didn't laugh this time. Slowly, Dad said, “I don't know. I don't think anybody else knows, either. What do you think we ought to do?“

“A lot depends on when we find out they're doing it,” Amanda said while Jeremy was still chewing on it. “We can do things if we catch them quick that we can't if they have a chance to spread out.”

She was right. Jeremy could see as much. He said, “I just hope it doesn't happen, that's all.”

“Well, so do I,” Dad said. “But it probably will. It's almost bound to, sooner or later.” He raised his winecup in a toast. “Here's hoping it's later.”

They all drank to that.

Two days later, the Robinson family came into Polisso. As Jeremy and his kin had before them, they walked in through the western gate. As far as anyone here was concerned, they came from Carnuto. They were all small and dark. For looks and size, they fit in better than the Solters family did. They too had a boy and a girl. The boy, Michael, was thirteen or fourteen. The girl's name was Stephanie. She was Jeremy's age, and pretty enough almost to make him sorry he was leaving. That was all the more true because she seemed very impressed about what he and Amanda had gone through during the siege.

Amanda noticed Jeremy noticing Stephanie. She got him aside and asked, “Well, are you going to tell her all about what a hero you were?”

“No!” He shook his head violently. That hadn't even crossed his mind. He said, “I never even want to think about that again, let alone brag about it.”

His sister eyed him. After a few seconds, she nodded. He felt oddly relieved. He might have just passed a test, and an important one. Amanda said, “All right.” She started to turn away, then seemed to decide that wasn't enough. “Better than all right, in fact. I wouldn't like it if you got all bloodthirsty on me.”

“You don't need to worry about that,” Jeremy promised. “I saw that guy get shot when I was up on the wall at the start of the siege. It wasn't movie blood or video-game blood. It was real. I could smell it.“ He shuddered. ”And it could have been me as easy as him. Nothing but dumb luck, one way or the other. Anybody who goes on about how glorious war is, should have been there, you know what I mean?“

“Oh, yes.” Amanda nodded again. “I know just what you mean. I was there when that cannonball came down by the fountain. That could have been me, too. And you could see the blood in the cracks between the cobblestones for days afterwards. Maybe you still can, if you get down on your hands and knees and look close.”

Mr. and Mrs. Robinson were hashing things out with Mom and Dad. They were talking about business, and about exactly how big a snoop the city prefect was. It all mattered if you were going to do business in Polisso. Somehow, though, to Jeremy it seemed to be missing the real point.

And what is the real point, if you're so smart? he asked himself. After a little while, he came up with an answer: I suppose the real point is that life is cheap here, and you'll get in trouble if you forget it. He wondered if he should have gone to the beast shows and the gladiator games at the amphitheater. They would have made him sick, but they would have taught him the lesson he needed to know.

He also wondered if he ought to tell Michael and Stephanie Robinson to go. He shook his head. They wouldn't go on his say-so. The locals' blood sports would gross them out, just as they did with him. One way or another, the Robinsons would have to find out for themselves. And, seeing what Polisso was like, they probably would.

In neoLatin, Stephanie was saying, “It smells so bad now that we're in a town again.” She was careful about protecting the secret. Michael made gagging noises to show how he thought Polisso smelled. Jeremy hardly noticed the stink any more.

But he noticed the fresher air when he and his sister and his parents left Polisso the next morning. The breeze was out of the west, so it blew away the city stench as soon as he and his family got outside the wall. He looked back in amazement. Somebody might have sent the air through a washer and dryer. He noticed Amanda and Mom and Dad smiling, too.

They walked out toward the transposition chamber in the cave outside of town. A long line of cranes flew past overhead, bound for a warmer, friendlier country. Jeremy waved to the big, long-legged birds. He felt the same way.

No one in sight in either direction. The road west from Polisso wasn't a busy one. The Solters family didn't have to wait before they went up the hillside to the trap door. Even inside the cave, Jeremy had trouble making himself believe the chamber would really show up.

But then it appeared, on time to the second. The door opened. “In you go,” the operator said. To him, it was all routine. It wasn't routine to Jeremy. It never would be again. So what, though? This time, everything would work fine.

And it did.