“I should say it was,” Maria answered. “Your brother with just a sword against trained soldiers with mailshirts and helmets and everything… He couldn't have frightened them off all by himself, could he?” She suddenly looked frightened. “I mean no disrespect to him, of course, none at all.”
What's that all about? But Amanda needed only a couple of seconds to realize what it was about. Maria had remembered she was a slave. She might have offended a freewoman. If she did offend, she could pay for it. Painfully.
“It's all right,” Amanda said quickly. “What's that proverb? 'Even Hercules can't fight two,' that's it. We would have been in a lot of trouble if the legionaries hadn't come up the street just then. The Lietuvans went off to fight them, and they never came back.”
Now what was the matter? Maria was looking at her as if she'd picked her nose in public. Voice stiff with disapproval, the slave girl said, “I wouldn't have thought even an Imperial Christian would believe in Hercules.”
“Who said I believe in him?” Amanda answered. “It's just a proverb.”
Maria wouldn't see it. The more Amanda tried to explain, the more stubborn the slave got. As far as she was concerned, the word was the thing. “You've talked of pagan gods twice now in the last couple of weeks,” she said sadly. “Either one thinks they have power, or one tells lies on purpose, knowing they are lies. And lies come straight from Satan.”
“You don't understand,” Maria told her. “I wanted you to know I wasn't mad because you said my brother couldn't fight off a bunch of Lietuvans by himself. I already knew he couldn't, and I was trying to find a fast way to say I knew it. That's all I was doing, honest.”
“It is not honest to treat pagan things as if they are real,” Maria said. “If you believe they are real, how can you believe in the one true God?”
“But I don't believe they are. I told you that, and it's the truth,” Amanda said.
Even more sadly, Maria shook her head. “I will pray for you,” she said, and turned away.
She didn't feel like being friendly any more. She couldn't have made it any plainer if she'd slapped Amanda in the face. Amanda had broken a rule nobody she approved of would break, and so she didn't approve of Amanda any more. No doubt she meant it when she said she would pray. In the here-and-now, though, that did Amanda no good at all.
I don't belong here. This isn't my world. Of course I'm going to make mistakes in it every once in a while, Amanda thought miserably. If things were the way they were supposed to be, that wouldn't have mattered so much. She could have got away whenever she needed to. But not now. Whether this was her world or not, she couldn't get away from it-and she'd just lost the only real friend she had.
Eleven
Jeremy saw more piles of rubble in Polisso than he had the last time he went to the market square. Amanda said, “If this siege goes on, how much of the city will be left?”
“Beats me,” he answered. “We're just lucky we haven't had a bad fire.” Polisso had nothing better to fight fires than a big wooden tub with a hand pump and a leather hose. They called it a siphon. Any blaze that got well started had no trouble staying ahead of it. Fire was a nightmare here, especially fire with a strong breeze to fan it.
A gang of municipal slaves with shovels and hods cleared bricks from the street. The skinny, weary-looking men worked as slowly as they could get away with. Every once in a while, the overseer-who was much better fed than the work gang- would growl at them. They'd speed up for a little while after that, then ease back down to the usual pace again.
The overseer didn't growl too often. He knew when he could push them. They knew when they could slack off, and by how much. If he didn't get that minimum amount of work out of them, he would let them hear about it. They didn't want that, so they gave him what he needed-and not a copper's worth more. Little by little, the work got done. If it wasn't finished today-and it wouldn't be-they'd come back tomorrow. What difference did a day make, one way or the other? That was how the slaves seemed to feel about it, and the overseer as well.
When Jeremy and Amanda got to the market square, he saw that the city prefect's palace had had several chunks bitten out of it. He had that odd feeling you get when something bad happens to someone you don't like. He didn't like Sesto Capurnio one bit, but he hoped-he supposed he hoped- none of those cannonballs had mashed the prefect.
Next door to the palace, the temple stood undamaged. “Look at that,” said a man who displayed some well-made wooden bowls and platters. “Only goes to show, the gods look out for their own.”
“Oh, garbage,” the coppersmith beside him said. “It could be fool luck just as easy as not.”
Plainly, they'd been going through all the variations in that argument for a while now, in almost the same way as the slaves moved wreckage up the street. They weren't in any hurry about it. The more they stretched it out, the longer it could amuse both of them. In Polisso, entertainment was where you found it.
Jeremy and Amanda went on to the temple. As usual, they had to wait in line in the narthex to buy incense for their thanks-offering. Today, though, the clerk who sold it to them and took down their names didn't act snooty. He said, “I've already made my offering. When the barbarians got in, I thought we were all done for. I've never been so glad in all my life.”
“I know what you mean,” Jeremy answered. “They broke into our house. If the legionaries hadn't driven them back…”
He didn't say anything about stabbing the Lietuvan soldier. He wasn't proud of that. He knew he'd had to do it-the man would have killed him without a second thought-but he still wished he hadn't. He decided he did hope the Lietuvan would get better-after he went home.
“No wonder you're here to make a thanks-offering, then,” the clerk said. In memory of the hard time just past, he was acting much more like a human being, much less like nothing but a gear in the Roman imperial machine.
“We're here.” Jeremy meant here, as in alive-not here, as in the temple narthex. “That's why we're making the thanks-offering.”
And the clerk-yes, amazingly lifelike-smiled and nodded. He understood what Jeremy had in mind. Who would have thought it? Clerks didn't get paid to understand, and so they mostly didn't bother. “Here is your incense,” this one said. “May your god and the spirit of the Emperor look kindly on the offering.”
“Thank you,” Jeremy said. After a disaster, people pulled together for a while. Mom and Dad had talked about how things were like that after the last big quake in L.A., and they always mentioned that. Sure enough, almost getting the city sacked counted for a disaster.
He and Amanda each had a little pinch of cheap incense in an even cheaper earthenware bowl. They walked into the temple's main hall side by side. There in the paintings, the mosaics, the statues in niches, were all the gods the locals believed in and Jeremy didn't. It was almost a WalMart of religion. Dionysus? Aisle 17. Mithras? Aisle 22. Isis? She's way over there by the checkout stands.
He whispered to Amanda. She smiled. But then, all at once, it didn't seem quite so funny. Maybe because he too was feeling the aftereffects of disaster, he suddenly saw the swarm of gods here as something more than superstition mixed with bureaucracy. Whether he really believed in them or not, the gods meant reassurance to a lot of people. And everybody needed reassurance every now and then, especially after a brush with catastrophe.
He went up to the altar in front of the Roman Emperor's bust. Even the line around the neck that showed where one head could replace another didn't bother him today. Wasn't it a symbol of how the Empire went on no matter what the Emperor looked like? It was if you looked at it the right way.