The rest of the cavalry got back into Polisso. The spectators and some of the soldiers on the walls cheered. Jeremy found himself yelling and clapping his hands along with everybody else. He wondered if he had lost his mind. This wasn't a football game. People were dying, really and truly dying, out there. How could you cheer?
Were the Romans better than the Lietuvans? Was Emperor Honorio Prisco III a finer fellow than King Kuzmickas? Not so you'd notice. But the Lietuvans were trying to break into Polisso and do horrible things to the people inside. Jeremy was one of those people, Amanda another. The Roman horsemen were fighting to keep the Lietuvans out. Wasn't that a reason to cheer for them? The locals thought so, and Jeremy had a hard time believing they were wrong.
After a pause, the Lietuvans moved forward again. This time, they did what the man by Jeremy had said they should. They put a double line of pikemen in front of the musketeers. If horsemen came out again, the long pikes would help keep them away.
Cannon kept booming from the wall. Every so often, a cannonball would knock people over like a bowling ball knocking down pins. But bowling pins didn't keep moving after they were hit. They didn't scream, either. Through the guns' thunder, Jeremy heard the shrieks of wounded men.
Again, though, the Lietuvans who weren't wounded kept right on coming. When they got close enough, the musketeers touched the smoldering ends of their matches to the vents of their guns. Bang! Bang! Bang! Flame shot from the muzzles of all the muskets. A fogbank of smoke swallowed up the Lietuvan soldiers.
Bullets cracked past overhead. A couple of them didn't crack past, but struck home with wet, meaty thunks. Blood poured from a Roman artilleryman's face. It was amazingly red. He let out dreadful gobbling cries of pain. One of his pals led him off to a surgeon. What could the locals do for a shattered jaw, though? That wound would have been bad in the home timeline.
And the man standing next to Jeremy clutched at himself and fell over. One minute, he was handicapping the war. The next, it reached out and grabbed him. He looked more astonished than hurt. He tried to say something, but blood poured from his mouth and nose instead. It poured from the wound in his chest, too. Jeremy gulped. He hadn't realized how much blood a man held. He had to step back in a hurry, or it would have soaked his shoes. After four or five minutes, the man on the flagstones stopped moving. He just lay there, staring up at nothing with eyes that would never close again.
More bullets whistled by. The civilians on the wall decided that wasn't a good place to stay. They went down inside Polisso in a disorderly stream. Jeremy gaped at the corpse that had been a happy, living, breathing man only minutes before. That could have been me, he thought. If the Lietuvans had aimed a little more to the left, that could have been me.
Death had never seemed real to him. At his age, it hardly ever did. But the sight-and the smell, for the man's bowels had let go-of that body made him believe in it, at least for a little while. So did the snap of another bullet, right past his ear. He didn't have to be here. He'd come up to see what war looked like. He'd found out more than he wanted to know.
Roman musketeers were shooting back at the Lietuvans as Jeremy went down the stone stairs and back into the city. He was nearer the end of the stream of civilians than the beginning. He took some small pride in that. As he walked back toward the house where he and Amanda were staying, he wondered why.
From the inside, Polisso hardly seemed a city under siege, not at first. Amanda's day-to-day life changed very little. The smoke and the smell of gunpowder were always in the air. Jeremy was right. It did smell like the Fourth of July.
Every so often, a cannonball would crash down inside the city. But that hardly seemed important, not at first. It wasn't as if Amanda could see the damage for herself while she stayed at home. No news crews put it on TV. No reporters interviewed bloodied survivors. It might have been happening in another country. But it wasn't.
Before too long, the bombardment got worse. The Lietuvans dug trenches and pits so they could move their cannon forward without getting hammered by Polisso's guns. As soon as each cannon came into range, it started blasting away at the city.
Amanda thought business would go down the drain during the siege. People wouldn't want to leave their homes, would they? They wouldn't want to spend money on luxury goods, either, would they? After all, they might need that money for food later on.
They came in droves. The people who could afford what Crosstime Traffic sold had enough money that they didn't need to worry about saving it to buy grain. As long as there was grain, they would be able to afford it.
Livia Plurabella came back to the house to buy a watch. She and Amanda were in the courtyard talking when a cannon-ball smacked home two or three houses away. The banker's wife took it in stride. “That was close, wasn't it?” she said, and went back to talking about which pocket watch she would rather have.
“You were afraid of a sack before, my lady,” Amanda said. “Aren't you worried about one now?”
Livia Plurabella blinked. “I was. I remember talking about it with you, now that you remind me,” she said. “But now… Now life has to go on, doesn't it? We'll do the best we can to hold out the barbarians. And if we can't-then that will be the time to be afraid. Till then, no.”
She made good sense. “Fair enough,” Amanda said. Another cannonball hit something not too far away with a rending crash. Amanda managed a shaky laugh. “Sometimes not being afraid is pretty hard, though.”
“Well, yes.” Livia Plurabella's laugh was a long way from carefree, too. “But we have to try. The men expect it from us. They say they want us all quivering so they can protect us, but they go to pieces if we really act like that. Haven't you noticed the same thing?”
Amanda didn't know everything there was to know about how things worked in Agrippan Rome. She thought back to the home timeline. Things weren't so openly sexist there, but all the same… She found herself nodding. “I think you have a point, my lady.”
“Of course I do.” The banker's wife took her own lightness for granted. “Now show me these hour-reckoners again, if you'd be so kind.”
“Sure.” Amanda held them up, one after the other. “These are the three most popular ladies' styles.” One was metal-flake green, one was eye-searing orange, and one was hot pink. Like the men's pocket watches, they all had gilded reliefs on the back. Amanda had never decided which one was the most tasteless. She wouldn't have been caught dead with any of them.
But Livia Plurabella sighed. “They're all beautiful.” Amanda only smiled and nodded. If her drama teacher at Canoga Park High had seen her face just then, he would have known she could act. “Which one costs what?” the local woman asked.
“This one is two hundred denari.” Amanda pointed to the green monstrosity. “This one is two hundred ten.” She pointed to the orange catastrophe. “And this one is two hundred twenty-five.” She pointed to the pink abomination.
As she often did with customers, she guessed which one Livia Plurabella would choose. She turned out to be right again, too. The banker's wife picked up the pocket watch with the hot-pink case. “This is so elegant, I just can't say no to it. Two hundred fifteen, did you say, dear?”
“Two twenty-five,” Amanda answered. Again, what she was thinking didn't show on her face. Livia Plurabella wasn't the sort of person to make slips by accident. She'd wanted to see if Amanda would call her on it. Knowing that, Amanda enjoyed calling her on it twice as much.
“Two twenty-five.” Livia Plurabella's voice drooped. But she nodded anyhow. “Well, all right. We can do that. Draw up the contract.”
The cannon kept booming as Amanda wrote out the classical Latin. She hardly looked up from what she was doing. Life went on, sure enough. She couldn't do anything about the Lietuvans outside. Since she couldn't, she tried to pretend they weren't there.