Up till then, he'd never worried about how long an army took to pass any particular place. While he was waiting, it seemed like forever. In fact, it was several hours. He kept looking down at his wrist to find out just how long. That would have worked better if he'd worn a wristwatch. In Agrippan Rome, he couldn't. Even the big mechanical pocket watches Crosstime Traffic traders sold here were way ahead of the state of the art.
At last, the coast was clear. Jeremy scooted out of the cave and made it to the road before anybody coming from Polisso spotted him. He sauntered toward the city as if he had not a care in the world. Pretending to be carefree took more acting than anything else he'd done since coming to this alternate.
Pretending to be carefree also proved the wrong role. Travelers in Polisso hadn't been allowed to leave while the army was going in. A gray-haired merchant leading a train of mules was the first man who came up to Jeremy. The merchant stared at him and said, “Boy, don't you know there's a gods-cursed army just ahead of you?”
Jeremy couldn't very well claim he didn't know. The horses and oxen of the cavalry and baggage train had left unmistakable hints an army was on the move. So he smiled and shrugged and nodded.
The merchant's eyes got bigger yet. “Well, then, don't you know you're an idiot?”
If he'd smiled and shrugged and nodded again, the older man would have been sure he was one. Instead, he asked, “What are you talking about?”
“What am I talking about? What am I talking about?“ The merchant seemed convinced he was an idiot anyway. ”The gods must watch over fools like you, even if you are a big, strong fool. Don't you think those soldiers would have grabbed you and put you in a helmet if they'd spotted you?“
“Gurk,” Jeremy said. The man with the mule train seemed to think that was the first sensible thing to come out of his mouth. He got his mules going again and left Jeremy standing in the middle of the road. After a couple of minutes, Jeremy walked on to Polisso.
Other travelers coming out of the city sent him strange looks. They too must have wondered what he was doing ambling along in the army's wake. None of them asked him any questions, though. They just went on about their own business.
When he got back to Polisso, the gate guard who'd let him out of the city checked him back in. He too said, “You're lucky the soldiers didn't see you.” After a moment, he took off his helmet and scratched his head. “How come they didn't?”
“I'd gone off the road when they came. I was trying to knock over rabbits with rocks,” Jeremy answered. He spread his hands. “No luck.”
“I wouldn't think so.” The gate guard laughed at the idea. “You'd need a cursed lot of it to hit one.” Then he laughed again. “And when you saw the soldiers, I'll bet you bloody well made sure they didn't see you.”
“Well-yes.” Jeremy had been inside the cave. Of course they hadn't seen him. But he could agree without actually lying. The guard clapped him on the back and waved him into Polisso. He didn't have good news for Amanda: no sign of the transposition chamber and no contact with the home timeline. But he was happy just the same. The good news was, he would be able to tell her the bad news in person. He hadn't been pulled into the army.
What would happen if there really was a war? He did his best not to think about that.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson complained that the King of England quartered his soldiers on the American colonists. Amanda remembered that from the U.S. History class she'd taken two years before. It hadn't meant anything to her then except one more fact she had to know for a test. People in the United States hadn't had soldiers quartered on them for a long, long time.
But she wasn't in the United States any more. Some of her neighbors had soldiers living in their houses and eating their food. She and Jeremy were lucky it hadn't happened to them.
“I wonder why they didn't try to give us any soldiers,” she said at breakfast, two days after the army came to Polisso.
“They like what we sell, and they don't want to make us so angry we'll go away and won't come back,” Jeremy answered, spooning up barley mush. “That's the only thing I can think of.”
“What do we do if they say, 'Here, take these four'?” Amanda asked.
“I'm going to give the city prefect a couple of thousand denari,” Jeremy said. “Why not? Silver's not much more than play money for us. I'll tell him to use it to buy food for the reinforcements. We'll do that instead of letting them in here.”
“Can you be smooth enough to get away with it?” Amanda asked.
Her older brother shrugged. “I can-because I have to. Dad would probably do a better job of it, but he's not here. That leaves me.”
“I'm not a potted plant, you know,” Amanda said.
“No, but you're a girl,” Jeremy answered. “As far as the locals are concerned, you might as well be a potted plant.”
That stung, especially because it was true. Amanda's chin went up. “So what?”
Jeremy held up a hand. “Look, I know it's no big thing. Everybody you've skinned on a deal here knows it's no big thing. But if you go try to talk to the city prefect, what will he and his flunkies see? A girl. Guys like that are like principals- they can't see past the end of their noses.“
The principal at Canoga Park High was a woman. That didn't spoil Jeremy's point: Ms. Williams definitely couldn't see past the end of her nose. Amanda sighed. “All right,” she said. “No, not all right, because it isn't. But I can see why you've got to be the one who goes. Macho!” She spat that out as if it were the dirtiest word ever invented. Right then, she felt it was.
“Most alternates that haven't had an industrial revolution are like this,” Jeremy said. “If you don't have machines, size and strength count for more than they do with us. Guys don't have babies, either.”
“It's still not right,” Amanda said.
“Did I tell you it was?” Her brother gave her a don't-blame-me look. “But even if it's not-even though it's not- it's real.”
And that was also true, and also stung. But the next day, Jeremy went to see the city prefect. Amanda went to the public water fountain with a jug on her hip to listen to the talk there. That's what people here think women are good for, she thought. Carrying water and gossip. And I can't even rock the boat.
There was gossip, too-plenty of it. A plump woman with an enormous wart on the end of her nose spoke in important tones: “I hear the city prefect ordered all the Lietuvan traders out of Polisso last night.”
“No, that isn't true,” the slave girl named Maria said. “A lot of them are leaving, but they're leaving on their own.”
“How do you know so much?” The woman with the wart- not a regular at the fountain-looked down her nose past it at the slave.
Maria didn't get angry. Amanda had never seen her get angry. Maybe that was because she was a slave and couldn't afford to. Maybe it was because she was a Christian-what they called a strong Christian here, not an Imperial Christian- and didn't believe in it. Or maybe she was just a nice person. She said, “I pray with a girl who serves at the inn where the Lietuvans stay. That's what she told me.”
“Well, I heard my news from someone who heard it from the city prefect's second secretary's cousin's hairdresser,” the plump woman said.
Amanda laughed out loud. If that woman thought her account trumped what an eyewitness said… But a couple of the other ladies filling water jugs were nodding, too. They must have believed it did. Both of them were free and fairly prosperous. As far as Amanda could see, both of them were also fairly dumb.