Harry Turtledove - Gunpowder Empire

A big blond man in a linen shirt with billowing sleeves and baggy breeches tucked into boots held up some furs. “You want pelts?” he asked in accented neoLatin. That accent and his clothes showed he came from Lietuva. “Make fine fur jacket. Marten? Sable? Ermine?”

“No, thank you.” Jeremy tried not to look at the pelts as he walked by. He couldn't have been much more revolted if the Lietuvan had tried to sell him a slave. No one in the home timeline had worn furs for more than fifty years. The mere idea turned his stomach. True, furs were warm, and this alternate had no substitutes. But Jeremy couldn't get over his disgust-and he couldn't sell pelts in the home timeline anyway. He sneaked glances at his sister and his parents. They all had that same tight-lipped look. They were trying not to show what they thought, too, then.

Up the stairs of the temple they went. The guards nodded to them. “In the name of the gods, greetings,” one of the soldiers called.

“Greetings to you,” Dad replied. He didn't have to mention the gods. That wasn't the custom for what Agrippan Rome called Imperial Christians. He went on, “We've just come to Polisso. We need to make an offering to the Emperor's spirit.”

“Go ahead, then, and peace go with you,” the guard said.

Before they entered the temple itself, they paused in an anteroom called the narthex. Several clerks stood there behind lecterns. Only the very most important people here worked sitting down. Dad steered the family to a clerk who was talking to a woman and had no one else waiting in line. That did him less good than he'd thought it would. The woman had a complicated problem, and took what seemed like forever to get it settled.

“You pick the shortest line, you take the longest time,” Mom said. “It's just as true here as it is at home.”

“I know,” Dad said gloomily. “You wish some of the rules would change when you travel, but they don't.” The locals who might overhear him would think he meant traveling from town to town. His own family knew better.

At last, the woman flounced off. Jeremy didn't think she'd settled anything. She seemed to be giving up. The clerk spent the next couple of minutes making notes on her case-or, for all Jeremy knew, doodling. Only after he'd used that time showing how important he was, did he look up and ask, “And how may I be of assistance to you?”-in classical Latin.

Most newcomers wouldn't have understood him. They would have had to ask him to repeat himself in neoLatin. He would have done it-and looked down his pointy nose at them while he was doing it. But Dad answered in the classical language: “Having arrived at the famous city of Porolissum”- using the ancient name was especially snooty-“we should like to make a thanks-offering to the spirit of the Emperor.”

“Oh.” Upstaged, the clerk seemed to shrink a few centimeters. “All right. Give me your name and the day you came into town.” That was in neoLatin. Since he couldn't score points with the old language, he stopped using it. Dad also returned to the modern tongue. The clerk went off to a wooden box full of papers and parchments and papyri. He finally found the one he wanted. “Ioanno, called Acuto; Ieremeo, called Alto; Melissa; and Amanda. Yes, you are all here, and as described.” He didn't seem happy about that. Dad had proved more clever than he would have liked. “You are Imperial Christians?”

“That's right,” Dad said.

“Then you will offer incense, not a living sacrifice?” “Yes,” Dad said.

“Very well. That is permitted.” By the way the clerk sounded, he wished it weren't. But he didn't decide such things. He just did what the people set over him told him to do. After scribbling several notes on his forms, he said, “You do understand, though, that you will pay as large a fee for the incense as people who believe in the usual gods pay for a sacrificial animal?”

“Yes,” Dad said again, this time with resignation. Why wouldn't the government tolerate Imperial Christians? Jeremy thought. It makes money off them.

“The fee for four pinches of incense, then, is twelve denari,” the clerk said. Dad paid. As far as Jeremy was concerned, the rip-off was enough to incense anyone. The clerk wrote some more. He handed Dad a scrap of parchment.

“Here is your receipt. Keep it in your home in a safe place. It is proof that you have offered sacrifice.” He pulled four tiny earthenware bowls from a cabinet behind him and handed one to each member of the Solters family. The bowls held, literally, a pinch of waxy incense apiece. “You may proceed into the sacred precinct. Set the bowls on the altar, light the incense, and offer the customary prayer. Next!”

That last was aimed at the woman standing behind the crosstime travelers. The clerk reminded Jeremy of someone who worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles, not a man who had anything to do with holiness. But then, for most people here religion was as much something the government took care of as roads and public baths.

As he walked into the temple proper, he brought the bowl up to his nose so he could sniff. The incense smelled faintly- very faintly-spicy. It was, no doubt, as cheap and as mixed with other things as it could be and still burn.

Sunbeams slanting in through tall windows lit up the interior of the temple. Mosaics on the walls and statues in niches showed every god the Agrippan Romans recognized, from Aphrodite and Ares to Zalmoxis and Zeus. One small statue pictured Jesus as a beardless youth carrying a lamb on his back. That kind of portrait had gone out of favor in Jeremy's world, but not here. Here, for most people, Jesus was just one god among many. Mithras the Bull-slayer had a more impressive image.

One of the sunbeams fell on the bust of the Roman Emperor behind the altar. Honorio Prisco III was a middle-aged man with a big nose, jowls, and a bored expression. As far as Jeremy could tell, he wasn't a very good Emperor. He wasn't a very bad Emperor, either. He just sort of sat there.

The sunbeam also highlighted a line around his neck that looked unnatural. The lower neck and top part of the chest on the bust never changed. The head and upper neck did whenever a new Emperor took the throne. A peg and socket held the two parts of the bust together. A new Emperor? Take the old ruler's portrait off the peg, pop on the new. There you were, easy as pie, ready to be loyal.

Several pinches of incense already smoked on the altar. Off to one side, a priest in a white toga-only priests wore togas these days-wrung the neck of a dove for a man who wasn't a Christian of any sort.

Dad set his incense bowl on the altar. Jeremy and Amanda and Mom followed suit. Several lamps burned on the altar. By each one stood a bowl full of thin dry twigs. Each member of the family took a twig and lit it at a lamp. They used the burning twigs to light their incense, then stamped them out underfoot.

Four thin twists of gray smoke curled upward. Along with his parents and sister, Jeremy said the prayer required of Imperial Christians: “May God keep the Emperor safe and healthy. May his spirit always be the spirit of truth and justice. Amen.” They all bowed to the bust of Honorio Prisco III, then turned away from the altar.

That prayer didn't say the Emperor was divine. It did say that the people who made it cared about him and wished him well. It was hardly religious at all, not in the sense Jeremy would have used the word back home. It was more like pledging allegiance to the flag. It showed that the people who did it willingly took part in the customs of this country.

Not far from the altar, two ordinary-looking men stood talking in low voices. They weren't being rude. They were quietly making sure the prayers were made the way they were supposed to be. People who didn't like being watched couldn't have stood living in Agrippan Rome.