Some of the Lietuvans had been in Polisso a long time, long enough to have brought their wives down from their own country. The fair-haired women, tall by the standards of this world, left the town with their men. The locals spattered them with filth, too. Some of the things they called them made the names they gave the Lietuvan men sound friendly by comparison.
At last, after what seemed much too long, the hubbub moved closer to the gate. Amanda retreated to the courtyard, but the stink of hydrogen sulfide lingered there, too. Jeremy walked into the courtyard a minute or so later. He looked grim. He must have been watching the Lietuvans leave from another window.
“Nice people,” he said. He didn't mean the Lietuvans. He meant the locals who had harried them on their way.
Amanda nodded. “Really.”
“We wouldn't do anything like that,“ Jeremy said.
“Oh, I don't know.” Amanda remembered her U.S. History class again. “Look what happened to the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.”
“So?” Her brother didn't buy the argument. “That was a hundred fifty years ago. Are you saying we'd keep slaves because they kept slaves in the South before the Civil War?”
“Well… maybe not,” Amanda admitted. “But the Second World War was a lot closer to now than the Civil War was. People acted more like us.”
“A little, maybe, but not a whole lot,” Jeremy said. “It was still a long time ago. They didn't have any computers. They only had one telephone for every seven people in the country. You ask me, that's backward.“
He'd just finished a high-school U.S. History course. Now that he reminded her of it, Amanda remembered running into that statistic, too. But she never would have thought of it on her own. She asked, “How do you come up with that stuff?”
She'd asked him questions like that before, so he knew what she meant. He'd never been able to give her a good answer, though. He couldn't now, either. He said, “I don't know. I just do,” which told her nothing whatsoever. But then he said, “How do you know what people are feeling? I can't do that, or not very well.”
“No?” Amanda said in surprise-surprise that vanished when she thought it over and realized Jeremy was right. He didn't just see how people worked. He always had to work it through inside his mind. Sometimes he didn't come up with the right answers even then. Maybe that was the other side of the coin to being able to remember how many telephones the United States had during World War II. Given a choice, Amanda knew which one she would rather be able to do.
But people didn't get choices like that. They were what they were, and had to make the most of it. Some remembered better and thought straighter than others. Some felt more clearly than others. A lucky handful, maybe, could do all those things well. Whatever you were good at, though, you needed to make the most of it. If you did, things wouldn't turn out too bad most of the time.
Amanda wished that hadn't occurred to her just then. Every once in a while, things happened to you where it didn't matter how smart you were or how well you remembered or how clearly you felt. Getting stuck in Agrippan Rome sure looked like one of those things. Amanda didn't see what she or Jeremy could have done to stop that.
He started to say something else, but some more noise outside the house made him stop. “What now?” Amanda exclaimed. “Lietuvans again?”
“Doesn't quite sound like that,” Jeremy answered, and he was right. These shouts sounded happy and excited. They didn't have the fierce, baying undertone that had been there when people jeered the Lietuvans out of Polisso. He said, “We'd better go find out.” Amanda nodded. Her brother didn't need to think very clearly to have that straight.
She got to a window just in time to see and hear another herald coming up the street. “War!” he shouted. “Lietuvan soldiers have crossed the border. We have begun the fight to drive them back. Because the gods love us, we will win. War! Hear ye! Hear ye! War is declared!”
Seven
Jeremy had thought bullets and cannonballs would start flying as soon as war between Rome and Lietuva was declared. That was how things worked in his world-not that people there bothered declaring war any more. They just launched missiles and sent tanks over the border. Things were more formal here. The gunpowder empires clung to rituals and customs that had their roots in the days of ancient Greece. And even if bullets and cannonballs flew fast here, too, armies didn't. They were tied to the speed at which a man could march and a horse-drawn wagon could roll. Nobody went anywhere in a hurry, not in the world of Agrippan Rome.
The people of Polisso took advantage of the time they had before the Lietuvans arrived. More soldiers came into the town, these troops tramping up from the south. More wagons full of wheat and barley came with them. As far as men and supplies went, Polisso was ready to stand siege.
Whether the walls were ready was another question. They were made of thick stone, sure enough. But even thick stone walls fell down if enough cannonballs hit them. In the home timeline, people had solved that by building huge earthen ramparts instead of stone walls. They weren't so impressive, but they worked better. A cannonball that hit piled-up earth didn't go crash! It went thud! and buried itself without doing much harm.
Nobody here had figured that out yet. It had taken two or three hundred years to see in the home timeline, and wars there had been a lot more common than they were here. There, in the centuries right after the invention of guns, Europe had been crowded with a whole slew of kingdoms and principalities and duchies and independent archbishoprics and free cities and even the occasional republic. Somebody was always fighting somebody else, and either coming up with new tricks on his own or stealing the almost-new tricks somebody else had come up with a few hundred kilometers away.
It wasn't like that here. Almost all of Europe belonged to either Rome or Lietuva. Almost all the Near East belonged to either Rome or Persia. The gunpowder empires did fight among themselves. But they usually fought once a generation, more or less. There wasn't the unending strife that had lit a fire under change in the home timeline.
And now is the time, Jeremy thought. Joy and rapture.
The first Lietuvan cavalrymen reached the outskirts of Polisso eight days after news of the declaration of war. They attacked a wagon train bringing still more grain into the town. Jeremy heard the details only later, in the market square. At the time, all he noticed were a few distant bangs, like Fourth of July fireworks at a park a couple of kilometers away. The big, clumsy matchlock pistols cavalrymen here carried couldn't be reloaded on horseback. The Lietuvans did most of their damage with bow and sword and lance.
Most of the time, they would have set fires all through the fields around Polisso. Not much point to that today, though, because it had rained the day before. The horsemen trampled long swaths through the green, growing wheat, then rode back the way they'd come.
Several of the wagons rumbled past the house where Jeremy and Amanda were living. Some of the animals that pulled them had been hurt. Some of the men who drove them had been hurt, too.
Jeremy gulped at the sight of bandages strained- soaked-with blood. He gulped even more at the sight of flesh punctured by bullets or split by swords. Some of the wounds had been roughly stitched up in the field. The drivers and guards who'd been hurt moaned or wailed or screamed.
In Los Angeles in the home timeline, Jeremy saw gore at the movies or on TV or in video games. He'd hardly ever run into the real thing himself. Oh, he'd gone past a restaurant once not long after a shooting, and he'd seen a few traffic accidents where people got hurt. But he'd never seen so many men other men had hurt on purpose before. And he'd never had the feeling, This could happen to me. He did now.