One of the brackets came loose with a tortured crunch of splintering wood. The door sagged back as if someone had punched it in the stomach. Jeremy and Amanda pushed against the pile of furniture to try to hold it closed. No good. More people were pushing from the other side. A Lietuvan's scowling, blood-streaked face appeared in the doorway. Sword in hand, he started scrambling over the obstacles toward Jeremy and Amanda.
“Get back!” Jeremy shouted to his sister.
She shook her head. “I'll help!” She had her kitchen knife out and ready, too.
The Lietuvan thrust at Jeremy, who jerked back just in time to keep from getting spitted like a corn dog. With a mocking laugh, the soldier scrambled forward-till a little table broke under his weight. His laugh turned into a howl of dismay as he went down splat! on all fours.
Jeremy jumped forward and stabbed him in the arm. The Lietuvan screamed. The sword grated on bone. Blood spurted out. Jeremy could smell it, like hot iron. The Lietuvan jerked away and ran back the way he'd come. The sword pulled free. Jeremy brandished the bloodstained blade.
Later, he realized what an idiot he was. He'd been lucky with the one soldier. If the Lietuvan's pals had come after him, how could he have held them off? But just then a swarm of Romans shouting Honorio Prisco's name charged up the street. Instead of breaking into the house-had they intended to use it for a strongpoint?-the Lietuvans fell back.
Jeremy stared at the bloody sword. He had blood on his hand, too, and on his arm, and splashed on the front of his tunic. He didn't know whether to be proud or be sick.
Amanda said, “Let's prop the door closed. Maybe we can at least halfway fix that bracket, so it'll stay shut by itself. Then we won't be an easy target for every burglar in town.”
“Burglars!” Jeremy dropped the sword-he almost dropped it on his toes, which wouldn't have been so good. “Right now, I don't… care at all about burglars.” He'd almost said something much juicier than that. “We've got… worse things to worry about than burglars.” That was also understated, and also true.
“I know.” But Amanda cocked her head to one side, listening. “I think this new push really is driving the Lietuvans back. The noise does sound like it's farther from here and closer to the wall than it has been for a while.”
“I hope so,” Jeremy said after cocking his head to one side and listening. He meant every word of that. In wondering tones, he went on, “I don't know whether to hope that Lietuvan bleeds to death or gets better.”
His sister shrugged. “I don't much care one way or the other. All I care about is that you're all right.” She paused and seemed to be listening to herself in almost the same way as she'd just listened to the street fighting. “Did I really say that?” Slowly, she nodded. “I really did. And you know what else? I meant it, too.”
“Good.” Jeremy picked up a leg from the table that had broken under the Lietuvan. He smacked it into his palm. “Maybe I can use this to hammer the bracket into place. If I could go get a couple of tools from Home Depot, fixing it would probably take about ten minutes. But if I could do that…” He let his voice trail away and got to work making what repairs he could.
Going to the water fountain two days later reminded Amanda of what a close call Polisso had had. Bloodstains were everywhere. She'd never seen so much blood. Here and there, where it had pooled between cobblestones, flies gathered in buzzing clouds. They flew up as she walked past. One of them lit on her and crawled along her arm. She made a disgusted noise and shook it away.
No bodies lay in the street. They'd already been dragged away, Romans and Lietuvans alike. They'd probably been plundered first: of weapons, of money, of armor, of food, of everything down to their shoes and their drawers. She wondered if scavengers in Polisso had quietly made sure some of the soldiers were dead. She wouldn't have been surprised.
Bullet scars marked the brick and stone ground floors of houses and shops. Bullet holes peppered the timber upper stories. In one way, though, the damage would have been worse in the home timeline. Here, neither side had been able to shoot out any glass windows. As far as Amanda knew, Polisso had none.
Several women were already at the fountain when she got there. “Everything all right with you, dearie?” one of them called.
“I'm still here. I'm still in one piece,” Amanda answered. “The town's still here, too. It's… not in as many pieces as it might be.”
The local woman laughed. “Ain't it the truth?” she said. “When those barbarians got inside, I didn't know whether to go up on the roof and throw tiles down on their noggins or hide under my bed.”
“That's how Pyrrhus of Epirus got it,” another woman said. “Roof tiles, I mean, not hiding under the bed.”
Amanda had heard of Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was the king who'd given his name to the Pyrrhic victory. He'd fought the Romans, beaten them thanks to war elephants, but almost ruined his army doing it. Afterwards, looking things over, he'd said, “One more victory like this and we're ruined!”
That was where her knowledge stopped. And she would have bet knowing even that much put her ahead of nine out of ten-maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred-people in Los Angeles in the home timeline. But this housewife on the edge of the Roman Empire knew how he'd died, even though he'd been dead for more than 2,300 years.
At first, that astonished Amanda. After a little while, though, it didn't any more. Pyrrhus was part of the locals' history in a way he wasn't back home. These Romans nowadays thought of themselves as-were-descended from the ones who'd battled and finally beaten Pyrrhus. They knew who he was the same way most Americans knew who Cornwallis was. He was almost a favorite enemy. He'd been tough, he'd been clever, he'd been dangerous-and he'd lost. What more could you ask for in a foe?
Some of the women who'd been at the fountain the morning before started going on about what they'd seen. They were amazingly calm about mutilated bodies. Amanda gulped. The woman who'd mentioned Pyrrhus noticed she was green and said, “Sweetie, if those Lietuvan so-and-sos had whipped our boys, we'd look like that now.“
She was right. That didn't make Amanda like it any more or make it any better. And when Roman legionaries took a town in Lietuva or Persia, they acted the same way. Soldiers played by tough rules in this world.
Come to that, soldiers played by tough rules in any world. The home timeline didn't have much to be proud of. The main difference was, they tried to cover up the worst of what they did in the home timeline. Here, they were likely to boast about their atrocities. They thought such horrors made other people afraid of them.
A cannonball howled through the air. The Romans had driven the Lietuvans out of Polisso, but King Kuzmickas hadn't given up and gone home. He was still out there, and so were his soldiers. If they couldn't storm the city, they still might starve it into surrendering.
You're full of cheerful thoughts today, aren't you? Amanda said to herself.
And then, all at once, she did feel better. Here came Maria. The slave girl smiled and waved to her. “Good to see you're safe,” she said.
“Same to you,” Amanda answered.
“I was worried,” Maria said. “You never can tell what will happen when the enemy gets into a city.”
Amanda knew more about that now than she'd ever wanted to. “I'll say! The Lietuvans broke into our house. Ieremeo drove them off with his sword.”
“Bravely done!” Maria said.
“It was, wasn't it?” Amanda knew she sounded surprised. Bravery wasn't something people thought about much in the home timeline. How often did anyone there have the chance to be brave? How often did anyone there want the chance to be brave? Didn't the chance to be brave mean the chance to get killed, or at least badly hurt? Measuring yourself against a chance like that was what made bravery.