Instead, they approached at an angle. That way, the guns were harder to hit, even if they took longer to get really close. At each stop on the way, the Lietuvans parked them in pits protected by mounds of earth. The Roman cannon had trouble getting at them.
And the Lietuvans kept on shooting, too. Every few minutes, a cannonball would smack down somewhere inside Polisso. The woman with the scar on her cheek had filled her water jar, but she didn't leave. The company at the fountain was probably better than back at her house. When another crash resounded from not very far away, she said, “Gods be praised we haven't had any bad fires.”
Jeremy had thought of that, too. Here, it produced the same sort of shudder as mention of the plague had. In a city without fire engines, a big blaze was a deadly danger. The scarred woman rubbed at her cheek. Amanda wondered how she'd got burned. Even without a fire blazing out of control, Polisso had countless open flames. Lamps, candles, torches, fireplaces, cookfires, bonfires every now and then to get rid of garbage… So many things that could go wrong.
Another cannonball screamed in. In the heartbeat before it struck, Amanda thought, It sounds like it's coming straight at me. And it was. It slammed off the cobbles only two or three meters from where she was standing, banged against the side of the fountain, crashed into two walls, and clattered about on the road till it finally stopped.
Those first few crashes kicked up stone fragments of all sizes, some as deadly as bullets. Amanda yelped in sudden surprise and pain. A tiny chunk of flying stone had drawn a bloody line across the back of her hand. And she was lucky.
When she looked up from her own little wound, she found out just how lucky she was.
On one of its bounces, the iron ball had hit the scarred woman. It smashed her skull like a rock dropping on an egg. She lay facedown in the street. Her blood and the water from the jar she'd dropped puddled together. She'd never known what hit her. Another woman was down, clutching at her leg and screaming. Blood gushed from that wound, too. Which of the two women was luckier? Amanda couldn't have said.
Other women were also hurt by the cannonball and by the fragments. Their cries dinned in her ears. This was ten times worse than any traffic accident she'd ever seen. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to run away, too. Instead, she ran forward. She did what she could for the wounded women. That wasn't much past putting on bandages, making the more badly injured ones lie down, and telling them they'd be all right. Some of the time, she knew she was lying.
She wasn't the only one helping. Several other women who weren't hurt did the same. Screams brought men running, too. One of them was a doctor. He made bandages. He set broken bones. And he had opium against the pain. That wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. When Amanda had done all she could, she went home. She didn't realize she was sobbing till she was almost there.
Nine
Jeremy wouldn't have thought he could sleep with muskets and cannon going off within a hundred meters of the house- to say nothing of the ones the Lietuvans were shooting at Polisso. But he didn't have a whole lot of trouble. When he was tired enough, he did sleep. Amanda had complained the first few days after the shooting started. She hadn't since, or not about the noise. She'd come home splashed with blood and green around the gills when the cannonball smashed down by the fountain. Jeremy hadn't said a word to her about that. He'd known the same horror when he came down off the wall. In person, war was even uglier than books and movies made it out to be.
And yet the Romans and the Lietuvans took it in stride. So did the people in the other gunpowder empires in this world. He'd wondered about that even before this round of fighting broke out. Now, lying on his lumpy bed, looking at the ceiling it was too dark to see, he thought he'd found an answer. He didn't know if it was the answer, but it was an answer.
In his world, almost everybody lived to grow old. Pain-killing drugs that really worked cushioned the end when it came at last. Before the end, most people went through most of their lives without a whole lot of pain. Few cared to risk their comforts by shooting at their neighbors. If your life was likely to be long and pretty comfortable, why would you take the chance of throwing it away?
But that was in the home timeline. Things were different here. They'd been different in his world too, before anesthetics and antibiotics and dentists who knew what they were doing. Here, babies and toddlers died all the time from diarrhea and typhoid fever and whooping cough and diphtheria. One child in three didn't live to be five years old. Here, toothaches went on and on-unless teeth got pulled while the sufferer was awake. Here, infections and boils and blood poisoning and food poisoning happened every day. Here, there were no tetanus shots. People died from smallpox and the plague and tuberculosis. If they got cancer, they died from that, too-died slowly and in agony, a centimeter at a time.
In this kind of world, war looked different. You weren't likely to live a long, healthy, pain-free life no matter what you did. If you died in battle, that was liable to be a faster, more merciful death than you would get if you weren't a soldier. With all those things being so, why not take up a sword or a pike or a musket and try to do unto the other fellow before he did unto you?
Jeremy didn't think soldiers paused and reasoned that out. They didn't have to. In Agrippan Rome-and in Lietuva, too-songs and poems and statues celebrated generals who'd won glory and soldiers who'd been heroes. If a young man didn't want to stay on the farm, what was he likely to do? Join the army. That was the best chance to change his lot he was likely to have.
The other difference was, wars here weren't overwhelmingly destructive. In the home timeline, two dozen countries could blow up the world if they ever thought they had a reason to. Here, most of Agrippan Rome wouldn't feel this war at all. Neither would most of Lietuva.
And so, people seemed to think, why not fight? So what if we fought twenty years before, and fifty years before, and seventy, and a hundred ten? This time, we might win, or at least get even.
All that made some sense when looked at from a distance. When seen close up, it could have been the mad logic of beings from another planet. Jeremy still had nightmares about the man with most of his jaw shot away and his gobbling cries of pain. He didn't know everything that went into Amanda's nightmares, but he knew she had them. She'd scared him awake crying out in the night more than once.
Outside of Polisso, a Lietuvan cannon barked. A couple of seconds later, inside Polisso, the cannonball crashed home. What did it hit? Whom did it maim? Jeremy didn't know. Wherever it came down, it was too far away for him to hear the shrieks of the wounded.
He yawned. He shifted his weight again on the lumpy mattress. The wooden bed frame creaked. He closed his eyes. It seemed no darker with them closed than it had with them open. He yawned again. Another cannon fired, and another. No doubt more of them went off all through the night, but he never heard them.
He woke up with light leaking in through the slats of the shutter. Sitting up in bed, he scratched his chin. His beard was on the scraggly side. It would probably stay that way for another couple of years. He didn't care. Better a scraggly beard than shaving with a straight razor with nothing but olive oil to use instead of shaving gel.
Yawning some more, shaking his head to get the cobwebs out, he walked down the hall to the kitchen. He was almost there before he consciously noticed the gunfire. He shook his head again, this time in surprise. This was how you got used to being stuck in the middle of a war. Till a cannonball tore a hole in your house, you just went on about your business.