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screamed. She would have thrown something at him. Then again, he didn't need
to ask the question out loud. It hung in the air whether he asked it or not.
The scary part was, How are you going to do that? had an answer. The answer
was, Buy a slave to do the work for me. That was what the locals the
prosperous locals, anyhow did. They didn't have food processors or kneading
machines or automatic dishwashers or vacuum cleaners or washing machines or
any of a zillion other gadgets. They had people. They had them, and they used
them. That let the ones who weren't slaves take care of their business and
also think about things like literature and what passed for science here.
Seeing slavery was dreadful enough for somebody from late twenty-first-century
Los Angeles. Beginning to understand how and why it worked was a hundred times
worse. They'd better find us and get us out of here/' Amanda whispered.
Yeah Jeremy said. Both of them had forgotten the quarrel. As Amanda had
followed his thoughts not long before,, he hadn't had any trouble knowing what
she was thinking. It disgusted him as much as it did her. Yes, this was why
the locals kept slaves. Worse, this was why, from their point of view, it made
sense.
Amanda shook her head. No matter how much sense it made, it was still awful.
They'd better get us out, she repeated. That's right, Jeremy said. If they
don't get us out of here, we can sue them.
Wait a minute, Amanda said. Her brother looked back at her, bland as unsalted
butter. Amanda made a horrible face at him. It was so horrible, it made him
just barely crack a smile. She aimed her index finger as if it were a gun.
You're being ridiculous on purpose.
What about it? Jeremy retorted. It's better than being ridiculous by accident,
don't you think?
She didn't have a good answer for that. As cannon roared and muskets barked,
as walls fell down with a crash, she wondered if there were good answers for
anything not just in this world but in any. I wish we were back in the home
timeline, she said, which wasn't an answer but was the truth.
So do I, her brother said. And that and some silver will buy me wine in a
tavern. If they fix whatever's wrong if they can fix whatever's wrong
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they'll bring us home. If they don't, or if it isn't, we figure out how to
make the best of things here. He strode forward. You want me to grind flour
for a while?
Sure! Amanda said.
Jeremy was awkward rotating the central stone in the quern. She had to remind
him to keep feeding wheat in at the top. Otherwise, he would have happily
ground away at nothing. He worked steadily for about ten minutes. Then he
started grumbling and rubbing his shoulder. After another five minutes, he
stepped away from the counter with a proud smile on his face. There!
Amanda clapped her hands once, twice, three times. She couldn't have been
more sarcastic if she'd tried for a week. Wow! Congratulations! Yippee! she
said. That's about enough flour for a muffin a small muffin. Don't stop.
You're just getting the hang of it.
He looked as if she'd stabbed him in the back. I was trying to help, he said.
I know you were, she said. You were starting to do it, too and then you went
and stopped. Where do you think your bread comes from every day? Let me give
you a hint: it's not a miracle. It's me standing there turning that miserable
quern till my shoulder really starts hurting, and then turning it some more.
If I don't make flour, we don't eat bread. It's that simple or it would be,
except you can make flour, too. Go ahead. You were doing fine.
And what will you do while I'm taking care of that? Jeremy asked
suspiciously.
Me? I'll stand here fanning myself with peacock feathers for a while, Amanda
answered. Then I'll peel myself some grapes: a whole bowlful, I think. And
then I'll drop them into my mouth one at a time. I'll make sure I do all this
stuff while you're watching, too, so it drives you especially wild.
He gaped at her. She wondered if she'd gone too far with that, far enough to
make him angry. But then he started to laugh. Even better, he started to grind
more wheat into flour. Amanda wished she really did have some grapes to peel,
to help keep him going.
Jeremy already knew most women worked harder than most men in Polisso. That
stint at the quern drove the lesson home. So did the way his shoulder ached
the next day. He'd been doing work his body wasn't used to, and it told him it
wasn't happy.
Amanda spent more time than that at the quern just about every day. How did
her shoulder feel when she got up every morning? How would it feel twenty
years from now,, if she ground grain just about every day between now and
then? People's bodies wore out faster in this world than they did in the home
timeline. The work here was a lot harder. And, except for wine and opium,
nothing here could make pain go away. No one here had ever heard of aspirins,
for instance.
Down in the secret part of the basement, Jeremy tried to send a message to the
home timeline. As usual, no such luck. He wondered why he went on bothering.
Every time he failed, he felt terrible. But if I ever do get through, that'll
make up for all the times I don't!
Besides, if he didn't keep trying, what would that be? A sign that he'd given
up hope. He might be stuck in Agrippan Rome. Resigning himself to getting
stuck here was a whole different story.
The siege went on. The Lietuvans pounded away at Polisso. The gunners on the
walls shot back at them. Little by little, King Kuzmickas' cannoneers wrecked
the Roman guns. No doubt they lost some of their own, too. The question was
who could hold out longer, the besiegers or the besieged?
That was one of the questions, anyhow. Another was how long would the Romans
farther south in the province of Dacia need to send an army up to Polisso and
try to drive the Lietuvans back into their own kingdom? Jeremy had no idea
what the answer to that was, but it was on his mind. It had to be on the mind
of everybody trapped inside Polisso.
It had to be on Kuzmickas' mind, too, and on the minds of his soldiers. They
wouldn't want to be stuck between an advancing Roman army and the garrison of
a town that still defied them. If they could take Polisso soon, it would be in
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their interest to do so. Getting their guns closer to the walls and shooting
at all hours of the day and night made good sense for them.
Jeremy didn't think trying to storm Polisso made good sense for the Lietuvans.
Annio Basso, the commandant of the city, would surely have agreed with him. So
would all of Annio Basso's colonels and captains. When everybody on one side
thinks the other side couldn't be dumb enough to try something well, what
better time to try it?
No one in Polisso looked for an all-out assault on the walls. Jeremy certainly
didn't. Unlike some other men in Polisso, he didn't claim afterwards that he
did, either. Like just about everyone else in town, he was asleep when the
attack started.
King Kuzmickas' men chose the middle of a dark, moonless night. Like anything
else, that had both advantages and disadvantages. The inky blackness of nights
without electric lights let them get close to the wall before the Romans saw
them. On the other hand, that same inky blackness made them stumble and trip
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