If you had grain to sell, you could pretty much name your price. Somebody would pay it. Jeremy knew how many modii of wheat were stored under the house. He didn't want to sell them, though, even if he could make a lot of silver on the deal. The local authorities already wondered about Amanda and him. They would ask why those sacks of wheat hadn't left the city, the way they thought the grain had. They would accuse him of profiteering if he sold now.
A soldier was arguing with a farmer. “You should take less,” he said.
“How come?” the farmer said. “When am I going to get another chance to make this kind of money?”
“But you're cheating me,” the soldier said.
“By the gods, I'm not,” the farmer answered. He was a big, burly man, almost as tall as Jeremy and half again as wide through the shoulders. Next to him, the soldier was a skinny, yappy little terrier. The farmer went on, “If you don't want to pay what I ask, you don't have to. I'll find other customers.”
“Not if the city prefect or the commandant sets a top price,” the soldier said. “They can do that. All they have to do is declare danger of siege. Everybody knows that's real. Then fixing prices is as legal as buying and selling slaves.”
“Oh, yes. It's legal. But prefects don't try it very often,” the farmer said. “And do you know why? Because when they set a top price, they always set it too cursed low. Then nobody wants to sell any grain. It just disappears from the market, and people start going hungry.“
“You- You-” The soldier looked as if he couldn't find anything bad enough to call the farmer. “To the crows with you!” he snarled at last, and stalked off. Disgust showed in every line of his body.
Laughing, the farmer turned to Jeremy and said, “I'd like to see him get a better deal from anybody else.”
Jeremy nodded. The farmer thought the way a merchant had to think. But if your city was in danger, didn't you have to ease off on that approach? If you didn't, wouldn't you end up without a city to do business in? Who decided when you did that? How did whoever it was draw the line?
Those were all good questions. Jeremy didn't have good answers for any of them. He was scratching his head as he went on to the temple dedicated to the Emperor's spirit.
When he stopped in the narthex to get a pinch of incense to light on the altar, the clerk who took his three denari for it looked puzzled. “By the records, Ieremeo Soltero, you have already made the required offering. Why are you here?”
“To make another offering,” Jeremy said. “Polisso may be in danger, after all.”
“How… public-spirited of you,” the clerk said.
Jeremy did his best to look modest. He felt more like a hypocrite than ever. But he wanted officials seeing him acting public-spirited. It might help take the heat off Amanda and him. Even if it didn't, it couldn't hurt. And what were three denari to him? Nothing but Monopoly money.
The clerk gave him his receipt and the incense. It smelled sweeter than the last pinch he'd got. Maybe they saved extra-cheap stuff for people making required offerings, and gave you something better if you were doing it because you really wanted to. Jeremy didn't know for sure. Up till now, he didn't think any trader had made offerings that weren't required.
He carried the incense into the temple proper. There they were; all the gods the Romans recognized, in statue or painting or mosaic form. They all seemed to be looking at him. He didn't believe in any of them except possibly Jesus, and the Jesus he knew wasn't the same as the one in this world. The effect was impressive even so.
Several pinches of incense already smoked on the altar. Either other people wanted to look public-spirited, or they were worried. Well, I'm worried, too, Jeremy thought. But he didn't believe lighting this incense would help make his worries go away.
He lit it anyhow, then stepped on the twig he'd used to make it start burning. The smoke from the incense definitely smelled better than it had the last time he sacrificed. The image of Honorio Prisco III stared blindly from behind the altar. Jeremy recited the prayer an Imperial Christian gave the Emperor's spirit. It still felt more like pledging allegiance to the flag than praying. But neither of the two men who stood near the altar to listen to prayers complained. He'd done what he needed to do, and he'd done it right.
And now he understood-a little better, anyhow-what his dad said about the uses of hypocrisy. He wondered if he'd ever have the chance to tell Dad so.
Even though Amanda's house had running water, she liked visiting the fountain. People of the female persuasion couldn't go as many places or do as many things in this world as men could. At the baths and at the public fountains, age and wealth and social class didn't matter so much. A woman could say what she pleased, and a lot of women did.
When Amanda went to the fountain on a warm, sticky summer afternoon, she found several women complaining about the soldiers quartered in their houses. “They eat like dragons,” said a plump middle-aged woman in a saffron tunic. “And then they grumble about the cooking! Do they pay a sestertio for what they get? Do they? Not likely!”
Another woman, also plump, nodded. “They lie around snoring till all hours, too. And they don't bathe often enough- or at all.” She held her nose. For good measure, she scratched as if she had fleas.
Amanda wondered how much she'd had to do with soldiers before. Her tunic was saffron yellow, too, which meant she had money. Saffron dye wasn't cheap here. And, in this world, you had to be rich to have enough food to get overweight.
A couple of lines of Kipling from English Lit also ran through Amanda's head.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' “Chuck 'im out, the brute!”
But it's “Savior of 'is country” when the guns begin to shoot.
They'd never heard of Kipling in Agrippan Rome. But he understood what made them tick, all right.
“The soldiers aren't so bad,” the slave girl named Maria said in a low voice. “We have some in our house, too, and they don't do anything worse than pat me a little.”
In the home timeline, that would have been bad enough. It struck Maria as a miracle of moderation here. Different worlds, different standards. Amanda had to work to make herself remember that. It wasn't always easy. Of course, next to Maria's being a slave to begin with, how big a deal was it that some soldiers let their hands roam more than they might have? Probably not very.
Maria asked, “How is your mother? I have not seen her for a while.”
“She and Father, uh, left Polisso,” Amanda said. “He took her to a healer in Carnuto who's supposed to be one of the best, this side of Rome or Athens.”
“I hope he will help her,” Maria said gravely. She didn't say anything about Dad and Mom leaving the two Solters children on their own here. By local standards, they were plenty old enough to take care of themselves.
“I got a letter from my father not long ago,” Amanda said. “He says Mother is doing much better.”
“She will do better away from Polisso. I think that's very likely,” Maria said. With a sour smile, Amanda nodded. Maria let out a small, sad sigh. “Having your letters must be nice. You can talk back and forth with Carnuto, and I can't even make myself heard across the street sometimes.”
I can talk back and forth a lot farther than that-or I could if we weren't cut off, Amanda thought. Out loud, she said, “If you want, I could teach you your letters. It isn't very hard. Then you'd be able to read and write, too, at least some. And it's like anything else. The more you do, the easier it gets.”
Maria's jaw dropped. “Could you?” she whispered. “I don't think my owner would mind. I'd be worth more to him if I knew something like that. And”-her eyes widened-“and I'd be able to read the Bible for myself. What could be better than that?”