Part of Amanda was ashamed at losing her cool. “Nothing, really,” she mumbled. But the rest of her was angry, and she decided she wouldn't sweep it under the rug after all. There weren't any rugs here to sweep it under, anyhow. She shook her head. “No, not nothing. I don't see you in the kitchen. I don't see you with a sore shoulder. I just see you eating bread.”
“I'm making money for us,” he answered.
That was true. And if they were stuck here for good, they would need all the money they could get their hands on. Amanda had just been thinking about that. But even so… “I could do that just as well as you could,” she said.
“You could do it pretty well, yeah,” her brother said. “Just as well? I don't know. Some of the locals get weird about dealing with a girl.”
“That's 'cause they're a bunch of sexist yahoos,” said Amanda, who'd gone all the way through Gulliver's Travels not long before. The parts of the book everybody knew, where he went to Lilliput and then to Brobdingnag, were only the icing on the cake. The real essence came later.
“Sure they are,” Jeremy said. “But just because an attitude is stupid, that doesn't mean it's not real.”
Again, he wasn't wrong. That didn't mean Amanda liked his being right. “If I could only get out of this kitchen more, I'd show you what I can do,” she said.
He didn't say, How are you going to do that? If he had, she wouldn't just have 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-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 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.