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least badly hurt? Measuring yourself against a chance like that was what made
bravery.
I should say it was, Maria answered. Your brother with just a sword against
trained soldiers with mailshirts and helmets and everything... He couldn't
have frightened them off all by himself,, could he?
She suddenly looked frightened. I mean no disrespect to him, of course, none
at all.
What's that ail about? But Amanda needed only a couple of seconds to realize
what it was about. Maria had remembered she was a slave. She might have
offended a freewoman. If she did offend, she could pay for it. Painfully.
It's all right, Amanda said quickly. What's that proverb? 'Even Hercules can't
fight two,' that's it. We would have been in a lot of trouble if the
legionaries hadn't come up the street just then. The Lietuvans went off to
fight them, and they never came back.
Now what was the matter? Maria was looking at her as if she'd picked her nose
in public. Voice stiff with disapproval, the slave girl said, I wouldn't have
thought even an Imperial Christian would believe in
Hercules.
Who said I believe in him? Amanda answered. It's just a proverb.
Maria wouldn't see it. The more Amanda tried to explain, the more stubborn the
slave got. As far as she was concerned, the word was the thing. You've talked
of pagan gods twice now in the last couple of weeks, she said sadly. Either
one thinks they have power, or one tells lies on purpose, knowing they are
lies. And lies come straight from Satan.
You don't understand, Maria told her. I wanted you to know I wasn't mad
because you said my brother couldn't fight off a bunch of Lietuvans by
himself. I already knew he couldn't, and I was trying to find a fast way to
say I knew it. That's all I was doing, honest.
It is not honest to treat pagan things as if they are real, Maria said. If you
believe they are real, how can you believe in the one true God?
But I don't believe they are. I told you that, and it's the truth, Amanda
said.
Even more sadly, Maria shook her head. I will pray for you, she said, and
turned away.
She didn't feel like being friendly any more. She couldn't have made it any
plainer if she'd slapped
Amanda in the face. Amanda had broken a rule nobody she approved of would
break, and so she didn't approve of Amanda any more. No doubt she meant it
when she said she would pray. In the here-and-now, though, that did Amanda no
good at all.
I don't belong here. This isn't my world. Of course I'm going to make mistakes
in it every once in a while, Amanda thought miserably. If things were the way
they were supposed to be, that wouldn't have mattered so much. She could have
got away whenever she needed to. But not now. Whether this was her world or
not, she couldn't get away from it and she'd just lost the only real friend
she had.
Eleven
Jeremy saw more piles of rubble in Polisso than he had the last time he went
to the market square.
Amanda said, If this siege goes on, how much of the city will be left?
Beats me, he answered. We're just lucky we haven't had a bad fire. Polisso had
nothing better to fight fires than a big wooden tub with a hand pump and a
leather hose. They called it a siphon. Any blaze that got well started had no
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trouble staying ahead of it. Fire was a nightmare here, especially fire with a
strong breeze to fan it.
A gang of municipal slaves with shovels and hods cleared bricks from the
street. The skinny, weary-looking men worked as slowly as they could get away
with. Every once in a while, the overseer
who was much better fed than the work gang would growl at them. They'd speed
up for a little while after that, then ease back down to the usual pace again.
The overseer didn't growl too often. He knew when he could push them. They
knew when they could slack off, and by how much. If he didn't get that minimum
amount of work out of them, he would let them hear about it. They didn't want
that, so they gave him what he needed and not a copper's worth more.
Little by little, the work got done. If it wasn't finished today and it
wouldn't be they'd come back tomorrow. What difference did a day make, one
way or the other? That was how the slaves seemed to feel about it, and the
overseer as well.
When Jeremy and Amanda got to the market square, he saw that the city
prefect's palace had had several chunks bitten out of it. He had that odd
feeling you get when something bad happens to someone you don't like. He
didn't like Sesto Capurnio one bit, but he hoped he supposed he hoped none
of those cannonballs had mashed the prefect.
Next door to the palace, the temple stood undamaged. Look at that, said a man
who displayed some well-made wooden bowls and platters. Only goes to show, the
gods look out for their own.
Oh, garbage, the coppersmith beside him said. It could be fool luck just as
easy as not.
Plainly, they'd been going through all the variations in that argument for a
while now, in almost the same way as the slaves moved wreckage up the street.
They weren't in any hurry about it. The more they stretched it out, the longer
it could amuse both of them. In Polisso, entertainment was where you found it.
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