“Well, so what?” one of those women said when Amanda exclaimed about the loss. “Plenty of other old stuff in this town, sweetie, believe me.”
She wasn't wrong. A little talk showed that most of the other women had the same point of view. Amanda didn't, and couldn't. In the part of Los Angeles where she'd lived all her life, nothing dated back earlier than the middle of the twentieth century. The first European settlement in California wasn't much more than three hundred years old. To her, things that had stood for two thousand years were precious antiques. They weren't routine landmarks or, worse, old junk.
“If you worry about all the old things,” a woman said, “how are you ever going to put up anything new?” Again, most of the heads around the fountain bobbed up and down in agreement.
That wasn't a question with an easy answer, either. If you lived where other people had been living for a couple of thousand years, you didn't get excited about remains of the distant past. You took them for granted. And if, say, you needed building stone, you were liable to knock down something old and reuse what had gone into it. That was often easier and cheaper than hauling in new stone from somewhere else. And if that old building had been standing there for a thousand years, or fifteen hundred-so what?
Try as she would, Amanda couldn't think, So what? To her, it was worth keeping around just because it was old. The local women laughed at her. “If a place like that's falling down around your ears, what good is it?” one of them asked.
“Better to get rid of it,” another woman agreed.
“But… But…” Amanda tried to put her feelings into words. After some struggle, she did: “But you could learn so much about the way things were long ago if you studied old things.“
All the women around the fountain laughed at her. “Who cares, except for a few old fools with more money than sense?” said a squat woman with a burn scar on her cheek.
“Things weren't so different, anyway,” a gray-haired woman added.
By the standards of the home timeline, she wasn't wrong. Things in Agrippan Rome had changed much less in the twenty-one hundred years since Augustus' day than they had in the home timeline. And people here weren't much aware of the changes that had happened. When modern painters showed ancient scenes, they dressed people in modern clothes. They didn't remember that styles had changed. They had ancient Roman legionaries wearing modern armor, too. They did-usually-remember soldiers in the old days hadn't known about muskets. But that was about as far as it went.
A cannonball howled through the air overhead and smashed into something made of brick or stone. “There goes some more old junk!” The woman with the scar sounded gleeful. To her, it might have been a joke.
The gray-haired woman nodded. “Somebody'll need a new house or a new shop,” she said. “I hope it's somebody rich.”
“Because they can afford it better?” Amanda asked.
“No, by Jupiter!” The gray-haired woman kicked at the cobblestones. “Because poor folks like me always get it in the neck. Let the rich fools find out what it's like to do without.”
Several of the other women waiting their turn at the fountain nodded or spoke up in favor of that. But then one of them said, “If the Lietuvans pounded the walls the way they're pounding the city, we'd have more to worry about.”
“Maybe they want to scare us into surrendering,” the gray-haired woman said.
“Good luck!” Three women said it at the same time. The one with the burn scar added, “You have to be crazy to surrender to the barbarians.”
“Crazy or starving!” another woman put in.
“Even if you're starving, you have to be crazy,” the scarred woman said.
“What do the Lietuvans say about us?” Amanda asked.
Like her remark about saving old buildings, that one got less understanding than she would have wanted. The women around the fountain didn't know what the Lietuvans said. Not only that, they didn't care. King Kuzmickas' subjects were the enemy, and that was that. “I hope they come down with smallpox,” one said.
“I hope they come down with the plague,“ another said, overtrumping.
Everyone shuddered at that. This world had never known a plague outbreak as bad as the Black Death of the fourteenth century. It had seen several smaller ones over the years, though-plenty to make people afraid of the disease. Amanda and Jeremy had antibiotics to protect them if plague ever came to Polisso. The locals weren't so lucky.
Cannon on the wall boomed. They were trying to knock out the guns the Lietuvans were using. It wasn't easy, though. The trenches the Lietuvans dug so they could get their cannon closer and closer to Polisso didn't come right toward the city. If they had, cannonballs shot from the walls could have bounced along them and wrecked guns moving forward.
Instead, they approached at an angle. That way, the guns were harder to hit, even if they took longer to get really close. At each stop on the way, the Lietuvans parked them in pits protected by mounds of earth. The Roman cannon had trouble getting at them.
And the Lietuvans kept on shooting, too. Every few minutes, a cannonball would smack down somewhere inside Polisso. The woman with the scar on her cheek had filled her water jar, but she didn't leave. The company at the fountain was probably better than back at her house. When another crash resounded from not very far away, she said, “Gods be praised we haven't had any bad fires.”
Jeremy had thought of that, too. Here, it produced the same sort of shudder as mention of the plague had. In a city without fire engines, a big blaze was a deadly danger. The scarred woman rubbed at her cheek. Amanda wondered how she'd got burned. Even without a fire blazing out of control, Polisso had countless open flames. Lamps, candles, torches, fireplaces, cookfires, bonfires every now and then to get rid of garbage… So many things that could go wrong.
Another cannonball screamed in. In the heartbeat before it struck, Amanda thought, It sounds like it's coming straight at me. And it was. It slammed off the cobbles only two or three meters from where she was standing, banged against the side of the fountain, crashed into two walls, and clattered about on the road till it finally stopped.
Those first few crashes kicked up stone fragments of all sizes, some as deadly as bullets. Amanda yelped in sudden surprise and pain. A tiny chunk of flying stone had drawn a bloody line across the back of her hand. And she was lucky.
When she looked up from her own little wound, she found out just how lucky she was.
On one of its bounces, the iron ball had hit the scarred woman. It smashed her skull like a rock dropping on an egg. She lay facedown in the street. Her blood and the water from the jar she'd dropped puddled together. She'd never known what hit her. Another woman was down, clutching at her leg and screaming. Blood gushed from that wound, too. Which of the two women was luckier? Amanda couldn't have said.
Other women were also hurt by the cannonball and by the fragments. Their cries dinned in her ears. This was ten times worse than any traffic accident she'd ever seen. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to run away, too. Instead, she ran forward. She did what she could for the wounded women. That wasn't much past putting on bandages, making the more badly injured ones lie down, and telling them they'd be all right. Some of the time, she knew she was lying.
She wasn't the only one helping. Several other women who weren't hurt did the same. Screams brought men running, too. One of them was a doctor. He made bandages. He set broken bones. And he had opium against the pain. That wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. When Amanda had done all she could, she went home. She didn't realize she was sobbing till she was almost there.