Gunpowder Empire

“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.

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 over their own feet and think they were closer to the wall than they really were. Taking everything into account, a little moonlight might have helped the attack.

When the first horn calls and shouts of alarm rang out from the wall, Jeremy slept through them. He'd had trouble falling asleep, because the Lietuvans were shooting more than usual. Later, he realized they were hiding the racket their advancing soldiers made. But that was later. At the time, all he thought was that there was a devil of a lot of noise.

Along with the gunfire, he heard shouts from the direction of the wall. At first, he couldn't tell through the din what people were shouting. That they were yelling anything at all surprised him. Except for the cannon going off every now and then, he hadn't heard much at night. He'd learned to ignore the cannon. How was he supposed to ignore people yelling like madmen?

Then he made out what the soldiers were yelling: “Ladders!”

He knew little about warfare. He didn't want to learn anything more. But one thing seemed plain enough. When some people started shouting, “Ladders!” it was because other people were trying to climb them. The only people who could trying to climb ladders here were King Kuzmickas' Lietuvans.

For a little while, Jeremy thought Kuzmickas had gone out of his mind. Assaulting Polisso couldn't possibly work- could it? Then he heard more shouts on the wall, and not all of them sounded as if they were in neoLatin. If the Lietuvans had got men up on the walls, that could mean only one thing.