Harry Turtledove: Gunpowder Empire

But it was popular as could be in Polisso. People here liked things that were big and bright and overdecorated. They admired them. Two hundred years before Amanda's time, the Victorians in her world had been the same way.

She took the watch off the stand and wound it. It started to tick. Lucio Claudio heard the noise, too. He leaned forward. “You should wind it once a day,” Amanda told him. “This is how you set the hour. It is now near the end of the first hour of the day.” In Agrippan Rome, the first hour of the day began at sunrise, the first hour of the night began at sunset. Day and night always had twelve hours each. Daytime hours were longer in summer, nighttime in winter. Water clocks measuring steady bits of time had already begun to dent that idea. Mechanical clocks would probably kill it, the way they had in Amanda's world.

Lucio Claudio held out his hand. Amanda gave him the pocket watch. He held it up to his face to look at the dial (it had Roman numerals on it, which was as old-fashioned here as it would have been in the home timeline) and listen to the ticking. “There are gears and springs inside to make it work?” he asked.

“That's right,” Amanda said. The locals knew about such things. The ones in the watch were smaller and finer than any they could turn out for themselves, though.

“How is it that no one else can make such things?” Lucio Claudio inquired.

“That's our trade secret,” Amanda answered, not quite comfortably. “Everyone who makes or sells things has trade secrets. Others would steal if we didn't.” People stole in the home timeline. They stole in every alternate ever found. They were people, after all. They had an easier time here than some places. No one in Agrippan Rome had ever thought of patent laws.

“Only you,” the local said musingly. “How very lucky for you. I wonder if we should not ask for a report-an official report, mind you-on how you came to be so lucky.”

Alarm trickled through Amanda. Official reports were trouble. They meant the ponderous bureaucracy of Agrippan Rome had noticed the crosstime traders. Amanda supposed that was bound to happen sooner or later. She wished it hadn't happened while she was here. It would make life a lot more complicated.

Letting Lucio Claudio see that wouldn't help. “If the city prefect asks us for an official report, I'm sure we'll give him one,” Amanda said. “In the meantime, do you want to buy the hour-reckoner for the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio?”

Lucio Claudio's nickname meant dark. His scowl certainly lived up to it. Why? Had he hoped the threat of an official report would scare Amanda? (It did, even if she didn't show it.) He looked at the pocket watch again. “Yes, the most illustrious nobleman does want it,” he said. He wasn't nearly so good at hiding unhappiness as Amanda was. “What is your price?”

“You know you've chosen the finest hour-reckoner we have,” Amanda said. She vastly preferred a plain old five-benjamin wristwatch herself, but nobody'd asked her. “That one costs five hundred modii of wheat.” A modio-in classical Latin, a modius-was a little less than nine liters.

“That is too much,” Gaio Fulvio's man said. “The most illustrious nobleman will give you two hundred fifty modii.” Haggling was a way of life here. Offering half the opening price was a standard opening move-so standard, it was boring.

But Amanda shook her head. “I am sorry, sir. Our prices are firm. You will have heard that, I think.” Lucio Claudio scowled again, which meant he had heard it. He just hadn't believed it. Amanda added, “We have fixed prices for all our hour-reckoners. If the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio would like something cheaper-”

That did it. She'd hoped it would. The locals were vain. They showed off, and took pride in showing off. Lucio Claudio turned red. “No!” he snapped. “Nothing but the best, the finest, for the most illustrious nobleman. Your price is outrageous, but he will pay it.”

Yes, he would have tried to dicker more if he hadn't known about the fixed-price policy. Amanda hid a snicker, imagining how Gaio Fulvio would have lost face if he'd gone out in public with a cheap watch. She said, “I thank you, and I thank the most illustrious nobleman. I will write out a contract for the sale-”

“You write the classical tongue? You read it?” Lucio Claudio said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Amanda answered. “Many merchants do. It helps us in our business.” Literacy wasn't all that unusual in Agrippan Rome. In a town like Polisso, perhaps a quarter of the men had their letters. More knew neoLatin than the old language, though.

“But you are a girl-a woman-a female,” Gaio Fulvio's man sputtered. Far fewer women could read and write, even in neoLatin. It was a sexist society, no doubt about it. And neoLatin wasn't valid for most business deals, which made life harder still.

Amanda enjoyed poking just because the society was so sexist. “I am a merchant,” she said proudly.

The pen, like most, was a reed with a hand-carved nib. Penknives really were pen knives here. Amanda neatly printed a standard sales contract. She gave it to Lucio Claudio to sign.

He read it over, looking for anything wrong. To his obvious disappointment, he found nothing. “Let me have the pen,” he said, and scrawled his name in the space she'd left for it.

“I hope the most illustrious nobleman gets good use from his hour-reckoner,” Amanda said, letting him down easy. Not too easy, though: “He can have it as soon as he pays.”

“Of course. Payment will come to you soon. I'm sure he will be pleased to carry the hour-reckoner.” Lucio Claudio got out of there in a hurry. Amanda closed the door behind him, then went back to finish her breakfast.

A skinny stray dog gnawed at something in a pile of garbage near Polisso's main square. It growled as Jeremy and his family walked by. When they didn't bother it, it lowered its head again. “Poor pup,” Amanda said.

She was right. By the standards of anybody from the home timeline, everybody here was poor. Jeremy knew all the things the locals didn't have. But they didn't know, and so it didn't bother them. Some of them thought they were rich. They tried to keep what they had, and to get more. The ones who didn't have so much wished for more, schemed for more. People, again.

In the square and in the roofed colonnades to either side, farmers and craftsmen and traders sold everything under the sun. Here a man hawked cups. Another man carried a tray of sweet rolls and shouted about how good they were. A craftsman displayed wooden buckets on a stand. A storyteller told a fable about the Emperor Agrippa and the beautiful Queen of China. Agrippa had never gone anywhere near China, but that didn't stop the storyteller. Every so often, someone would toss a coin into the bowl at his feet. A blank-faced peasant woman stood behind a big basket of onions she'd carried from her farm. Come evening, she'd go home with the ones she hadn't sold.

On the far side of the square stood the prefect's palace and the temple to the spirit of the Emperor. The clerks and secretaries and nobles who ran Polisso worked in the prefect's palace. Soldiers stood guard in front of it. Nobody was going to give the rulers any trouble. Just for a moment, Jeremy remembered the guards in front of the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad.

Dad pointed to the temple. “We'll make our offering. We'll get our certificate. Then nobody will worry about us any more.”

“That sounds good to me,” Jeremy said. They were in public, so he couldn't come out with what he really thought. He felt like a hypocrite, sacrificing to a spirit he didn't believe in. Dad insisted that hypocrisy greased the wheels between people. If you always said just what you thought, nobody could stand you, he'd say. And you'd hate everybody who did it to you. Jeremy wasn't convinced.