Fabio Lentulo thought that was funny, and laughed out loud. Jeremy hadn't meant it for a joke. There was a lot more raw agony in this alternate than in the home timeline. Bad things happened to people more often in Polisso than in Los Angeles. People here could do much less about them, too.
Joys, on the other hand… The Lietuvan soldiers were going away. With luck, they wouldn't be able to come back. That would do for joy till something better came along. Jeremy shook his fist at the withdrawing soldiers. He never wanted to see them again, or King Kuzmickas, either.
As soon as the Lietuvans were gone, the defenders of Polisso opened the gates. People poured out of the city. Some-the scavengers-made for the Lietuvan camp, to bring back and sell whatever the enemy had left behind. Others just wanted to get away from their houses, to get away from their neighbors, for a little while. Amanda was one of those.
She couldn't go by herself. That wasn't done. It wasn't safe, either. But she and Jeremy went out together. He didn't feel the need to get away as much as she did. But he did see- she made him see-she would be impossible unless she got out for a little while. Out they went.
As far as guns would reach from the wall, the ground was cratered, the grass torn to shreds. She'd seen that when she and her brother went to call on King Kuzmickas. When the wind swung, it brought the stink of the Lietuvan encampment to her nose. The Lietuvans had been even more careless of filth and dirt and sewage than the Romans were. That they could have still surprised her.
“They probably would have had to leave pretty soon even if there weren't a Roman army coming up from the south,” Jeremy said. “In an alternate like this, sickness kills more soldiers than bullets ever do.”
Amanda knew he was right. That didn't mean she felt like listening. She didn't answer. She just kept walking till the wind swung again and the stench went away. Then she stepped off the road. She lay down on her back in the grass. It tickled her ankles and her arms and her cheeks. She looked up and saw nothing but blue sky.
“Ahhh!” she said.
For a wonder, Jeremy didn't spoil the moment. He stayed out of her way and let her do what she wanted-what she needed-to do. When she sat up again, she brushed grass out of her hair with both hands. She looked forward to using real shampoo once more, too. Her brother stood by the side of the road, sword on his hip, watching for Lietuvan stragglers and any other strangers who might be dangerous. He'd plucked a long grass stem and put it between his teeth.
“Except for the sword, you look like a hick farmer on an ancient sitcom,” Amanda told him.
“Is that a fact?” he said, doing a bad half-Southern, half-Midwestern accent. Then he went back to neoLatin: “All the backwoods farmers on all those stupid programs were as modern as next week next to the peasants in this alternate.”
“Well, sure,” Amanda said. Peasants here were cut off from the wider world around them in a way nobody in America had been since the invention of the telegraph. They might have been more cut off from the wider world than peasants in
Europe since the invention of the printing press. That went back a long way, but only a third of the distance to the breakpoint between the home timeline and Agrippan Rome.
A cool breeze blew down from the mountains to the north. It didn't say winter was coming, not yet, but it did say summer wouldn't last forever. The harvest was on the way-and it would come even sooner in chilly Lietuva than here. There was another reason King Kuzmickas' army would have had trouble besieging Polisso much longer.
Jeremy spread his arms. The breeze made the wide sleeves of his tunic flap. He said, “Everything's so peaceful, so quiet. I'd almost forgotten what quiet is all about.”
“Cannon and muskets going off and cannonballs smashing into things are even noisier than traffic back home,” Amanda agreed. “They may be more dangerous, too.”
“Heh,” Jeremy said, and then, “It all seems so stupid. Is owning Polisso worth killing so many people? I can't see it.”
“Neither can I,” Amanda said. “But could you explain the Software War so it made sense to the city prefect here?”
“You can't explain anything so it makes sense to Sesto Capurnio. I ought to know,” Jeremy said. Amanda made a face at him. He made one right back at her. Then he went on, “All right. I know what you mean. But copy protection is something worth fighting over.“
“We think so. Would the Romans? Would the Lietuvans? Or would they figure it wasn't worth getting excited about, the way we do when it comes to owning one of these little cities?”
“Who knows?” her brother said. “I'll tell you something else, though-I don't much care just now.”
Amanda didn't care very much, either. She didn't feel like squabbling with Jeremy right this minute. The fresh breeze teasing her hair, the clean smell of the meadow, the calm after so much chaos, and the knowledge that she'd be going back to the home timeline before long… all of them joined together to make her as contented as she'd ever been. When she looked to her right, she saw a hawk flying by. The locals would have called that a good omen. She was willing to do the same.
Thirteen
Having the Lietuvans gone didn't mean Polisso came back to normal right away. The city usually had farmers bringing in produce and eggs and sometimes livestock to sell in the market. Here, now, the farmers didn't have much to sell to the people in the city. Kuzmickas' soldiers had lived off the countryside as much as they could. Locusts might have stripped it barer. Then again, they might not have.
As they left, the Lietuvans had ruined as many grainfields as they could, too. Polisso and the surrounding farms could look forward to a lean harvest. Jeremy would have worried more about that if he'd expected to stay in town through the winter.
Being back in touch with the home timeline changed his whole way of looking at things. For better or worse-mostly for worse-he'd started to think of Polisso as home. Now he felt like a visitor, a tourist, again. Things that happened here happened to other people. They weren't likely to affect him much.
He was in touch with Michael Fujikawa again, too. His friend was back from his summer in alternate North China- and back to school at Canoga Park High. You're lucky, Michael wrote. You don't have to worry about history homework and Boolean operators.
Lucky, my left one. Jeremy answered. For one thing, I was scared Amanda and I would be stuck here for good-except it wouldn't be very good. And besides, think of all the work I'll have to make up when I do get back.
Poor baby. Here's the world's smallest violin playing “Hearts and Flowers” for you, Michael sent. Jeremy laughed. His grandfather had said that, and run his forefinger over the top of his thumb when he did to show the violin. The joke had to be ancient. Jeremy had never heard it from anybody but Grandpa. He wondered where on earth Michael had picked it up.
His friend went on, I am glad you two are okay, though. I knew something was wrong when we got cut off. Terrorists, I heard. That's no fun. Lucky they didn't have nukes.
“Gurk!” Jeremy said when that showed up on the Power-Book's monitor. Ordinary explosives and tailored viruses were bad enough. Nukes… Terrorists didn't have an easy time getting them, but bad things happened when they did. And how would anybody have rebuilt the transposition chambers if even vest-pocket nukes had gone off in them?
One thing happened after the Lietuvans went away- Jeremy and Amanda started selling pocket watches and mirrors and razors and Swiss army knives hand over fist. That wasn't just because they'd given them to King Kuzmickas, either. Their goods had always had snob appeal. But now Polisso's rich seemed to realize they wouldn't need to spend their last denari on grain. And so they started spending their money on luxuries instead.