“Let me have a look at that one, if you please,” she said, pointing to a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl handle. “I like the way it gives back the sunlight.”
“Here you are, my lady,” Amanda said. The older woman was the wife of the richest banker in town. He wasn't a noble. In fact, he was the son of a freedman. Banking wasn't a high-class profession in Agrippan Rome. But, here as everywhere else, money talked. And money Marco Plurabello had.
His wife opened the razor. “Isn't that something?” she murmured. She seemed to admire the glitter of the sun off the edge even more than the way it brought out the pink and silver of the mother-of-pearl. She shaved a patch of hair on her arm. “Well!” she said. “Isn't that something?“ The blade was. of better steel and sharper than anything local smiths could make.
“If you strop it regularly, it will last you a lifetime,” Amanda said. That was true, even though women in Agrippan Rome shaved more places than they did in California. The notion of shaving with a straight razor made Amanda queasy anyway. Jeremy hadn't wanted to try it, either. A mistake with that thing wasn't a nick. It was a disaster.
Livia Plurabella looked at the bare spot on her forearm. She felt of it. “I believe you,” she said. By the way she brought those words out, she didn't use them every day. She closed the razor. It clicked. She waited, one eyebrow raised.
“A hundred fifty denari.” Amanda answered the unspoken question.
“Well!” the banker's wife said again. “I thought you would put the price in grain.”
“We've changed our policy there,” Amanda said.
“Sensible. Very sensible.” Livia Plurabella nodded. “I'll give you eighty for the razor.”
“I'm sorry, but no. We haven't changed our policy there at all,” Amanda said. “We don't haggle.” She still wondered how much trouble they would get into for taking money instead of grain. If Crosstime Traffic wanted to yell about that, the company was welcome to yell as much as it cared to. She and Jeremy had nowhere to store grain if they couldn't ship it out of Polisso. But they were trying to bend as few rules as they could.
Livia Plurabella frowned. It was the sort of frown that said, You can't possibly mean what you just said, kid. It was meant to intimidate Amanda. Instead, it made her mad. The matron said, “I don't know that I want this razor enough to pay one hundred fifty denari for it.”
“That's for you to decide, my lady,” Amanda said politely. “We've sold several at that price-or the equivalent in grain-and nobody's complained. If you want to keep on using something ordinary, though, go right ahead.”
Livia Plurabella frowned again. This time, she looked worried. Amanda hoped she was imagining other women having something she didn't. Amanda also hoped she was imagining the other women laughing at her because she didn't have it. Advertising was one more place where the home timeline had a long lead on Agrippan Rome. Amanda had seen a million commercials. Almost without thinking, she knew what buttons to push. And Livia Plurabella didn't know what to do when Amanda pushed them.
“I don't think you're being reasonable about the price,” she complained. But her voice lacked conviction.
Amanda pounced: “Oh, but I am, my lady. You admired the mother-of-pearl. It comes all the way from the Red Sea.” What little mother-of-pearl the Romans had did come from there. She went on. “And if you can find an edge like that on any other razor-”
“Any razor you don't sell, you mean,” the other woman broke in.
“Yes, that's right.” Amanda nodded proudly. “Everything we sell is of the best quality. If you can find something to match it anywhere else, go ahead and do that.”
She pushed another button there. People in Polisso couldn't get anything to match what the crosstime traders sold, and they knew it. Livia Plurabella's face said just how well she knew it. “Oh, all right.” She sounded angry-more angry at the world than angry at Amanda. “A hundred fifty denari. We have a bargain.”
“I'll write up your contract,” Amanda said, and she did. She hoped Livia Plurabella could read. Otherwise she would have to witness the local woman's mark. Even if she did, Marco Plurabello might still raise a stink and claim she'd cheated his wife. That wouldn't be true or just, but he was a power in Polisso. He wouldn't need truth or justice on his side to get what he wanted.
But Livia Plurabella proved to have her letters, as Amanda had hoped she would. If any woman in Polisso was likely to, a banker's wife would. “Let me have that pen, please,” the matron said, Amanda gave it to her. She wrote her name on both copies of the contract. “Here.”
“Thank you very much, my lady,” Amanda said.
“I'll send a slave with the money,” the banker's wife said. Her father-in-law had once been a slave. That didn't keep her from owning them. Amanda wondered why not. One of the harder things about living in Agrippan Rome was that there were so many questions she couldn't ask. One of these days- one of these years-scholars would look at history and literature and law and custom here and figure out some answers to questions like those. But Amanda wanted to know now.
The trouble with finding the alternates and visiting so many of them was that there were always more questions than answers. There probably always would be. There sure were now. Too many alternates, not enough people exploring them. The last time anything this important happened in the home timeline, Columbus discovered the New World. The alternates were far, far bigger than North and South America, and they'd been known for less than a lifetime. No wonder there were still so many things to learn. The wonder was that people from the home timeline had found out as much as they had.
Then Livia Plurabella said, “I've heard you people don't keep slaves. Can that be true?” She wasn't shy about indulging her curiosity.
“Yes, it's true,” Amanda said. That was no secret.
“Really?” The local woman's eyes, their edges outlined with powdered antimony, went wide. “By the gods, dear, how do you ever get anything done without other people to do it for you?”
“We do it ourselves,” Amanda answered. She didn't mention that they had gadgets here no locals could see. Aside from the wrongs of slavery-and its being illegal for people from the home timeline to have anything to do with-having the gadgets made it impossible for the traders to have slaves, too. Too many questions they would have to answer.
Amanda laughed at herself. There'd been answers she wanted to get. But there were also answers she couldn't give.
She'd certainly puzzled Livia Plurabella. “How do you manage that?” the banker's wife asked. “When do you sleep? When do you bathe?”
“We just do what needs doing, as best we can.” Amanda thought she could ask one of her questions now: “How do you own people who are just like you?”
“They aren't people just like me. They're slaves,“ Livia Plurabella said, completely missing Amanda's point. This had to be the first time anyone had ever questioned slavery in the matron's hearing. She hesitated. She was polite, too, in her own way. Then she asked, “You're Christian, aren't you, dear?”
“Yes,” Amanda said. “Imperial Christian.”
“I know Christians have some… some different ideas.” Yes, Livia Plurabella was working very hard to be polite. She went on. “Do Christians have some sort of… interesting notion that slavery is bad? I never heard they-you-did.”
“No, they-uh, we-don't,“ Amanda answered. That was true for all kinds of Christians in Agrippan Rome. It had also been true for Christians in the Roman Empire of Amanda's world. The New Testament didn't say one thing about putting an end to slavery. People hadn't really started opposing it till the rise of democracy in England and America and France suggested that all men should be equal under the law-and till machines started doing work instead of slaves. Even then, America had needed a war to get rid of slavery.