He wondered whether Amanda would point that out. She didn't, not in so many words. Instead, she asked, “Do you think you could stand it if we had to stay here forever?”
“I wouldn't like it, that's for sure,” Jeremy answered. “Stand it? I don't know. What other choice would I have?”
“It would be horrible,” Amanda said.
He couldn't very well argue with that. They still had enough merchandise from the home timeline to make a lot of money, probably enough to keep them wealthy for the rest of their lives. But even the richest people in Polisso did without so many things anyone from the home timeline took for granted. It would seem a bare, empty life. They might as well be shipwrecked among savages. As a matter of fact, they were. “We just have to go on,” Jeremy said. “I don't know what else to tell you.”
His sister nodded. “It's what I keep telling myself,” she said. “Sometimes it lets me get through the day-most of the time, in fact. But when they go and knock a hole in the house-two holes in the house-even going on doesn't seem very easy.”
“Yeah. I know.” Jeremy cocked his head to one side. There was a new breeze in the kitchen because of those two holes. “I go down to the basement, and I try to send a message back home from the PowerBook, and it doesn't let me…”
“I go down there, too,” Amanda said. “Sometimes I don't even try to send a message. But the door opens when you touch the palm lock. The electric lights come on. The furniture looks like it comes from Home Depot or WalMart-and it does. There is a computer. I see all that stuff, and I remember we did come from the home timeline. It's not just something I dreamt or made up inside my head.“
Jeremy made himself grin. “If it is, we're both nuts the same way.” He spoke in a low voice-and in English. Making himself use his own language instead of neoLatin took a real effort.
And hearing English made Amanda blink. “That's right,” she said in the same tongue. “Will we ever be able to speak our own language to anybody but each other?”
“I don't know.” For safety's sake, Jeremy fell back into neoLatin. “I just don't know.”
Another cannonball screeched by overhead. It slammed into a house or shop not too far away. Jeremy and Amanda looked at each other. If the Lietuvans broke into Polisso or starved it into surrender, nothing they'd talked about would matter very much. They wouldn't have to complain about how empty even the richest person's life here was. They wouldn't be rich. They'd be slaves-or they'd be dead.
Amanda was sewing up a tunic seam when someone rapped on the door. She wanted company just then about as much as she wanted another head. But Jeremy was at the market square, and it might be business. With a mutter of regret, she put down the tunic. She walked out of the courtyard and up the entry hall. The door was barred. She took the bar out of its brackets, set it aside, and opened the door.
There stood Lucio Claudio, called Fusco. “Good day,” Amanda said, meaning anything but. “What can I do for you?”
“I am looking for Ieremeo Soltero,” answered Gaio Fulvio's man of affairs.
“He's not here right now,” Amanda said. “Can I help you?”
“I doubt it,” Lucio Claudio said. Amanda glanced over at the iron bar she'd just put down. No, you can't hit him over the head with it, she told herself. People would talk. It seemed a great pity. The local, who didn't know she was contemplating his sudden departure from this world, went on, “It has to do with the official report he submitted.”
“Oh. Then I can help you.” Amanda stepped aside and gestured politely. “Won't you come in? Would you care for some wine?”
“It is written in the classical language. How could you-?” But Lucio Claudio caught himself. He'd already done business with Amanda. “No. Wait. You have already proved that you are familiar with it.”
“That's right. I have. And I am.” Amanda's smile was anything but sweet. She repeated, “Won't you come in?”
Lucio Claudio's face said mere females had no business knowing classical Latin. It also said mere merchants had no business knowing the old language. And if the merchant happened to be a girl, or the girl happened to be a merchant… “Very well.” He didn't sound any happier about being there than Amanda was to have him there.
When she took him back to the courtyard, she pointed to the hole in the kitchen roof. Jeremy had put boards over it, but the roofer hadn't replaced the shattered tiles. As she pointed, a cannonball thudded home somewhere not far away. She said, “At a time like this, don't you have more important things to worry about than official reports? We submitted it on time. It's accurate. Isn't that enough to satisfy you?“
The local's swarthy skin darkened further, probably with annoyance. He said, “What could be more important than keeping complete and thorough records?”
“You're joking,” Amanda said. Then she realized he wasn't. In Agrippan Rome, records were at least as important as people. Another cannonball landed somewhere a little farther away. She asked, “Don't you think you ought to be worrying about keeping the Lietuvans out of Polisso? Shouldn't everything else wait on that?”
“Certainly not,” he answered. She might have suggested that he ate with his fingers-except the locals did eat with their fingers, and had a complex set of manners for doing so. “Though besieged, we are still Roman. Life must go on as normally as possible.”
That could have sounded brave and noble. To Amanda, it sounded infuriating. But she didn't let her anger show. She would have to keep on dealing with Lucio Claudio and with people like him. Or, if she didn't, other crosstime traders would. If there still are other crosstime traders, she thought. If they ever come back to Agrippan Rome. She shivered. She doubted more and more that they ever would.
All she said, then, was, “Let me get you your wine, in that case, and you can go ahead.”
She poured a cup for herself, too. If she hadn't, Lucio Claudio might have thought she was trying to poison him. He spilled some on the paving stones and murmured a prayer to Dionysus. Amanda spilled some, too. She prayed for the Emperor's spirit, not to any of the gods. An Imperial Christian could go that far and no further.
Lucio Claudio's sneer said he didn't think it was far enough. But it was legal. He didn't complain, not out loud. Instead, he took out the official report Jeremy had written. “Some of this is not as clear as it ought to be,” he said.
Amanda knew her brother had written the report so it wouldn't be clear. She couldn't very well tell that to Lucio Claudio, though. “You must be mistaken,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, I am not,” he insisted. “Look here, where the report speaks of your sources for these remarkable trade goods you have…”
“May I see it, please?” she asked. Reluctantly, Lucio Claudio handed it to her. People were careful with papers here. This was the only copy of the official report. The only way to get another one would be to have a secretary copy it all out. She read the passage he pointed at, then said, “It seems plain enough to me.”
“Nonsense,” Lucio Claudio said.
“It is not nonsense,” Amanda said. “Don't they teach anyone in Polisso what an ablative absolute is and how to use it?” If she could argue about classical Latin grammar and how it worked, she wouldn't have to argue about what was and wasn't in the official report.
And she'd flicked Lucio Claudio on his pride. He took a big, angry gulp of wine. “We may be near the frontier here, but we have good schools,” he insisted. “We have excellent schools, in fact. Why, three hundred years ago the poet Settimo Destro, called Sinistro, had his verses quoted from one end of the Empire to the other. And where did he come from? Right here in Polisso!”