The slave girl said, “Don't get into trouble on my account, Mistress Amanda.” She sounded worried. She looked worried, too.
Amanda snorted. “She can't do anything to me.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did she wonder how true they were. A banker's wife was an important person in Polisso. Which people you knew, what connections you had, mattered more here than in Los Angeles. Connections mattered back home, but the laws and customs there assumed one person was just as good, just as important, as another. That wasn't true here.
Maria's expression showed how untrue it was. The slave said, “She's got clout.”
“Well, if you think we don't…” Amanda let that trail away. The merchants from Crosstime Traffic had money. Nothing made a better start for connections. But money was only a start. Amanda wasn't from here. Livia Plurabella was local. And the authorities in Polisso were already curious-to say the least-about how the crosstime traders operated. If you think we don't have clout… you may be right.
She filled her jar at the fountain. Most of the women swung full jars up onto their heads and carried them home that way. A few, though, carried them on the hip full as well as empty. Even with a hand up to support the jar on her head, she couldn't have been smooth and graceful like the locals. She would have looked like a clodhopper, a country bumpkin-but country bumpkins carried water jugs on their heads, too.
She had just left the fountain when she heard a noise like distant thunder. It came from the north. But it wasn't thunder. Some clouds drifted across the sky, but there was no sign of rain. For a moment, she was puzzled. Then she knew what it had to be-gunfire. The Lietuvan army was on the way.
Eight
Jeremy didn't know whether climbing up on the city wall was a good idea. Amanda thought he was nuts. Maybe he was. But he wanted to see what was going on out beyond Polisso. He wasn't the only one, either. Lots of locals were up there, staring out at the advancing Lietuvan army.
Soldiers hurried back and forth on the top of the wall. If ordinary people got in their way, they pushed them aside. They didn't waste time being nice. Not far from Jeremy, a soldier knocked a man sprawling. When the local lurched to his feet, blood dripped down his face. He didn't say anything. If he had, the soldiers might have pitched him off the wall, and it was a long way down.
On came the Lietuvans. Their army was bigger than the Roman force that had come into Polisso. It flew banners of gold, green, and red-the colors of Lithuania in the home timeline. Lietuvan soldiers wore dull blue surcoats and tunics and breeches. That made them easy to tell apart from the Romans. Their helmets were simpler-more like iron pots plopped on their heads. Their weapons seemed almost identical, though. Horsemen had pistols or lances or bows and sabers. Foot soldiers carried pikes or muskets and straight swords.
They had cannon, too. You couldn't very well besiege a town without them. Slowly, the guns left the road and began taking up positions around the city. Cavalrymen went with them to protect them from any Roman attack.
But the Romans didn't seem interested in sallying from Polisso, not right then. Instead, they started shooting from the wall. Jeremy wished he had earplugs. Having a cannon go off close by was like getting smacked in the side of the head.
Flames belched from the gun's muzzle. So did a great cloud of dark gray smoke. The cannon and its four-wheeled carriage jerked back from the recoil. Ropes kept it from jerking back too far. At a sergeant's shouted orders, the gun crew yanked on the ropes and ran it forward again. A man with a dripping swab on the end of a long pole stuck it down the barrel to make sure no bits of powder or wadding still smoldered inside. The swab steamed when he brought it out again.
That smoke made Jeremy cough. It also smelled familiar. He wondered why for a couple of seconds. He'd never stood near a cannon going off before. Then he knew what the odor reminded him of. He'd smelled it at parks on the Fourth of July, when they set off fireworks. Gunpowder then, gunpowder now. Pretty flowers of flame in the night air then. A cannonball flying now.
Jeremy saw the divot it kicked up when it hit. It kept rolling after it struck the ground, too. The Lietuvans in its path dodged. Jeremy had read about a Civil War soldier who tried to stop a rolling cannonball with his foot. He'd ended up having the foot amputated.
The cannon crew were reloading as fast as they could. Another man used a tool called a worm-like a short corkscrew on the end of a long pole-to drag out any chunks of wadding the swab might have missed. As soon as he finished, still another man set a bag of powder in the muzzle of the gun. A soldier with a rammer shoved it down to the back of the cannon. In went the cannonball. It got rammed down, too. So did rags-the wadding-which made the cannonball fit tightly inside the barrel.
At the rear of the cannon, a soldier poked a sharp spike into the touch-hole. He punctured the powder bag so fire could reach the charge inside. To make sure it did, he sprinkled a little finely ground gunpowder in and around the touch-hole. “Ready!” he yelled to the sergeant. All the men on the gun crew jumped to one side, so the recoiling gun carriage wouldn't run over them.
“Fire!” the sergeant shouted. A soldier with a length of slowly burning fuse-they called it match here-on the end of a long stick, a linstock, brought the smoldering end to the touch-hole. Jeremy heard a brief fizz as the fine priming powder there caught. Then-boom!-the powder in the main charge caught and sent the cannonball hurtling toward the Lietuvans. The whole cycle started over.
Other cannon on the walls of Polisso were shooting, too. The din was unbelievable. And the Lietuvans started shooting back. Not all of their guns could reach the wall. Every so often, though, the wall would shudder under Jeremy's feet when a ball thudded home.
And Lietuvan foot soldiers marched forward so they could shoot their muskets at the Romans on the wall. They didn't break up and spread out, the way modern soldiers in the home timeline would have. Instead, they stayed in neat formation. A cannonball plowed through one block of men. Half a dozen Lietuvans went down one after the next, dead or maimed. The rest closed ranks and kept coming.
How did you train a man so he wouldn't run away when the fellow next to him got torn to pieces? This wasn't videogame blood. It was real. It would splatter you, all hot and wet. You could smell it. And you had to know it could have been your blood, it could be your blood next. But the Lietuvans advanced anyhow.
A gate opened-not one of the main city gates but a postern gate, a little one. Out thundered some of the heavy cavalry Jeremy had followed into the city not long before. The lancers roared toward a block of Lietuvan infantrymen.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Some of the matchlocks the Lietuvans carried went off. Two or three Roman horsemen and horses fell. The rest pitched into the Lietuvans, first with their lances, then with swords.
“Ha!” said a man near Jeremy. “We caught 'em by surprise. They didn't post pikemen out in front of their musketeers. Our lancers would've had a harder time then.”
He might have been talking about a football team not blitzing the quarterback on the other side. He wasn't a soldier. His tunic might have been twin to Jeremy's. But he spoke with a serious fan's serious knowledge. Civilians here knew how the game of war was played. Wars came along often enough to let the rules be known. They didn't change much from one to the next.
Out on the battlefield, more Lietuvan soldiers came up to help the men under attack. The Roman horsemen broke off the fight and galloped back toward the city. Behind them, Lietuvan muskets banged. Another couple of Romans slid out of the saddle. One of them thrashed and writhed on the grass. The other lay very still.