Trouble. Big trouble.
Those shouts on the wall raised shouts inside Polisso. More and more people woke up and discovered their city was under attack. By the cries and screams Jeremy heard, a lot of the locals believed Polisso was as good as lost.
At first, he thought they were idiots. Then he realized they might know more about what was going on than he did. He wished that hadn't occurred to him. He would have been a lot happier if he hadn't. Ignorance is bliss, ran through his mind.
“Jeremy?” That was Amanda, out in the hall. “You awake?”
“No, I'm still sound asleep.” He got out of bed. Sleeping in the clothes you also wore during the day had one advantage: you didn't need to get dressed. He opened the door. “How are you?”
“Not so good,” she answered. “What are we going to do?“
Before Jeremy could answer, a herald up the street shouted, “Citizens of Polisso, stay in your homes! Do not give way to fear! Soldiers will keep the invaders out of the city!”
“That's what we'll do,” Jeremy said. “We'll sit tight-for now, anyway.”
“Do you really think the soldiers can drive back the Lietuvans?” Amanda asked. “What do we do if they don't?“
“Well, we can't run, because there's nowhere to run to,” he said. “We can surrender and be slaves-if they don't kill us for the fun of it-or we can fight. I don't see much else. Do you?”
“The basement,” she said. “The subbasement.”
He shook his head. “They aren't set up to live in. Maybe they ought to be, but they aren't. If we were hiding for a few hours from people who would go away, that'd be different. But if the Lietuvans win, they're here to stay. Before too long, we'd have to come out, and they'd have us.”
Soldiers ran by the house, their chainmail clanking. They shouted in neoLatin. They were Romans, then. Jeremy didn't know what he would have done if they'd been shouting in Lietuvan. Panicked, probably.
“I wish we had Dad's pistol,” Amanda said.
“Wish for the moon while you're at it,” Jeremy said. “Can you imagine trying to explain that to the city prefect?“
Amanda only shrugged. “I don't care. I'd rather be alive and free and explaining with a bunch of lies than killed or sold in a slave market somewhere in Lietuva. If Polisso falls, it doesn't matter whether the link with the home timeline comes back afterwards. Nobody would find us.”
Jeremy hadn't thought of that. His sister was right. He wished she weren't. He said, “No guarantee the pistol would save us. If Polisso falls, we couldn't shoot enough Lietuvans to make much difference.” He wasn't sure he could shoot anybody. But if the choice was between killing and dying or being enslaved, he thought he could pull the trigger-not that there was any trigger to pull.
He turned away, hurrying out into the courtyard and then across it. “Where are you going?” Amanda called after him.
“To the storeroom and the kitchen.”
“What for?”
He didn't answer. He was trying not to break his neck in the darkness. When he got into the storeroom, he had to feel around to find what he wanted. It was pitch black in there, and he hadn't brought a lamp. Even in the dark, though, he didn't need long. And he knew where things were in the kitchen even without any light.
“What on earth-?” Amanda said as he went past her and out toward the front door. “What are you doing with the sword and those knives?“
“Putting them where we can grab them in a hurry if we have to,” Jeremy said. “We haven't got a pistol. The sword is the best we can do. And a couple of those carving knives have blades that are almost as long. They're better than nothing.”
He hadn't been sure he could shoot anybody. He was even less sure he could stab somebody. And using a sword or a knife took more skill and practice than using a firearm. He had next to none of those, Amanda even less. In an emergency, though, you did what you could with what you had and hoped for the best. If this didn't count as an emergency, he'd never seen one.
Amanda didn't argue with him. He'd been afraid she would. Instead, she went up the hall herself. She came back with one of the knives, looked at it, started to put it down, and then hung on instead. “Just in case,” she said.
She didn't say in case of what. Jeremy didn't need her to draw him a picture. Women and girls had reasons not to want to be taken as slaves that most men didn't need to worry about. Who could say how much those would matter till the moment came?
Maybe it wouldn't. Jeremy hoped not. Outside, more men in chainmail ran past. Like the last lot of soldiers, these yelled back and forth in neoLatin. With luck, that meant the Romans were getting the upper hand in the fight on the wall.
With luck… “We ought to make a thanks-offering at the temple if the Lietuvans don't get in,” Jeremy said, and Amanda nodded.
Somewhere not far away, a horn blared out a call. Both Jeremy and Amanda's heads whipped toward those notes. Jeremy had heard lots of Roman military horn calls. This didn't sound like any of them. It was wilder and fiercer. And if it wasn't a Roman horn call, it could only be…
“The Lietuvans!” someone down the block cried-a sort of a despairing wail. “The Lietuvans are in the city!”
A volley of musket fire that seemed to come from right up the street proved the man was right. More shouts rang out from most of the houses close by. Those were as full of dread as the first.
And there were fresh shouts, shouts of “Kuzmickas!” and “Perkunas!” and other things Jeremy couldn't understand. They were all in an oddly musical language, one full of rising and falling syllables. Lietuvan in this world wasn't quite the same as Lithuanian in the home timeline, but it wasn't very far away.
Amanda's lips were squeezed tight together. She looked as if she was clamping down hard on a scream. Jeremy didn't blame her. He was clamping down pretty hard himself. She whispered, “What are we going to do?”
“Sit tight as long as we can,” Jeremy answered. “If it looks like the city's going to fall… If it looks like that, maybe our best chance is to try to get away. But we don't know how many Lietuvans got in, or how the fight's going. Everything still may turn out all right.”
She nodded, even though her eyes called him a liar. Another volley of musketry rang out, this one even closer to the house. Men shouted the Roman Emperor's name and some ripe insults in neoLatin. The Roman legionaries hadn't given up this fight, then.
Neither had the Lietuvans. They yelled back. More guns banged. Boots thudded on cobblestones. Soldiers ran back and forth right in front of the house. A wounded man shrieked. Jeremy couldn't tell if he was a Roman or a Lietuvan. When people were healthy, they all sounded different. When they were badly hurt, they all sounded the same.
Metal clashed on metal. Matchlock muskets were slow and clumsy to reload any time. In the middle of the night, the job had to be next to impossible. You could reverse them and use them for clubs-or you could throw them down and use swords instead.
It sounded as if the whole battle for Polisso were being fought there outside the house. That couldn't have been true. But it still seemed that way. Every shot and groan and sword clanging off sword or spearhead came to Jeremy's ears from what felt no more than five meters away. He could only have made sure of that by going out in the street and seeing for himself. Except for jumping off a cliff, he couldn't have found a better way to kill himself. He stayed inside.
“Come on!” Amanda said whenever the Romans rallied- or whenever they wavered. “Come on-you can do it!” She suddenly stopped and looked amazed. “I'm rooting for people to kill other people. That's so sick!”
“Tell me about it,” Jeremy answered. “I'm doing the same thing.”
People were killing other people out there in the street. If more Romans killed Lietuvans than the other way round, Polisso would stay-what? Free? Polisso hadn't been free before the Lietuvans broke in. It wouldn't be free if they all packed up and marched away as soon as the sun came up. But it would be… unsacked. Jeremy didn't even know if that was a word. He didn't care, either. It was what he wanted, more than anything else in the world.