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CHAPTER TWENTY

Municipium Aelium Carnuntum,

Capital of Pannonia Superior

November 5th, 166 CE

“Drippy!” Jeremey McCladden said cheerfully, as their horses plodded down the street.

The sound was a wet plock-plock-plock; this stretch wasn’t cobbled, except with garbage thoroughly wetted down by the cold drizzle and trodden by feet and various types of hooves and wheels into the nameless mix of smelly mud. The horses’ heads were drooping, and occasionally one would let out a blubbering equine sigh with a flutter of lips. It was around thirty miles since they’d set out from Vindobona in a cold predawn, and they’d done it at a quick walking pace most of the way, stopping to rest, feed and water the horses occasionally.

It wasn’t far enough to justify a string of remounts. Not quite.

A mangy-looking dog huddled disconsolately against a brick wall with peeling, dirty stucco. It growled at them, head down and eyes sidelong, then cringed and ran as one of their escorts prodded at it with a spear butt.

Roman towns, especially ones founded as adjuncts to military bases or colonia built as homes for retired veterans, often had a few broad straight paved streets, and a grid plan. Unfortunately they also had lots of lanes and alleys and narrow side streets, rarely paved in a provincial backwater like this. It didn’t have sēmitae either, which was Latin for sidewalks; those were a luxury for the stone-paved main drag.

The climate’s totally different, but these Roman towns here sort of look a bit . . . Mexican, Jeremey thought. Not all the details, but the overall impression, and from what people say, it’s like that over most of the Empire. Like real backwoods old-style parts of Mexico, that is. The Prof thinks so too and he spoke the language and spent time down there, missions against the cartels. I suppose the Mexicans got it from the Spaniards and the Spaniards got it from the Romans when they were Romans, and didn’t change some of the basics of how they built houses and towns for a long, long time.

“Bad as New England,” Filipa said morosely.

The wide hood of her birrus Britannicus cloak was drawn forward, and looked a little strange since she had a hat on underneath it. He had gotten the impression she’d enjoyed studying at Harvard, but not the local weather there.

“Californian! Which is to say, wimp! You should try the Kickapoo Valley this time of year. This would be a drought and a heat wave there,” Jeremey said, with continued and deliberately annoying good cheer.

Which is also an exaggeration of my hometown weather for rhetorical effect. Slight exaggeration.

“Bah, humbug,” Paula said. “People there in Deep Flyover Country have fur . . . had fur . . . whatever . . . anyway, and lived in caves, and wrestled with bears for fun. Wrestled bears in a sexual way. They didn’t bite them, though, because they usually didn’t have any teeth.”

“Humbug bah-bah-bah,” Mark agreed; he was a New Yorker too. “Good day to stay inside with some hot cocoa, and here we spend it riding all the way from Vindobona.”

“All the way . . . all thirty immense, endless miles. I love horses but I miss cars,” Filipa said.

“Maybe hot cocoa with some rum. Maybe a cappuccino—”

“Jesus and Buddha on a tandem bike, Mark!” Filipa said dolorously. “Don’t bring up hot cocoa! Or coffee. I’d be so, so sad when I finished slashing you to death for reminding me!”

“Remember caffeine withdrawal?” Paula said hollowly, and they all winced.

Carnuntum was easily twice as big as Vindobona. Besides being the provincial capital, it was the headquarters of Legio XIV Gemina—the Fourteenth Legion of the Twins, currently much depleted by detachments, like its namesake neighbor upstream; its castrum was east of town.

And it was the headquarters of the Pannoniorum classis, the Empire’s river fleet on this stretch of the Danube, and had been for a little over a hundred years. The civil settlement was within a substantial wall of its own—this was on the frontier—and had better than fifty thousand people. Plus most of what second-century Romans considered the modern conveniences: public fountains fed by an aqueduct, for example, and lots of public baths.

And there was a big arena to the south of town and outside the wall, with seats for fifteen thousand, and an attached ludus, a gladiatorial school. The locals constantly boasted it was bigger than many in Italy, and smacked their lips over the shows the gladiators put on.

“Yeah, here we are, back in the big city, civilization with a capital C,” Paula said sourly, obviously thinking of those displays of mass sadism, and other things like the slave markets. “Look, I need a drink, maybe a snack. Still a long time to dinner.”

It hadn’t been the sort of a day where you stopped to do lunch by the side of the road, and it had been a long time since breakfast. Which had been light, because Roman breakfasts usually were. The staff on the Villa Lunae had learned to do bacon and scrambled eggs and hash browns or a passable cheese-and-ham omelet; nobody in Vindobona did yet.

“That’s a cantina, isn’t it?” she went on.

She’d actually said taberna, the local equivalent; even when they spoke English now, they salted it with Latin.

Only five English speakers on the planet, and about ten, maybe fifteen million who speak Latin from the cradle, which is one in every . . . oh, less than one in ten, but not much less, of the human race, Jeremey thought. So it’s inevitable. Natural. And hell, learning Latin literally saved my life. So Latine loquor OK!

The street was more or less straight and typical of a nonfancy, nondestitute lower-middle to working-class neighborhood in a Pannonian town important enough to have a wall. Which put space inside at a premium but not enough of one to breed insulae, big apartment blocks like Rome or a few others of the great cities in the southlands.

Single-story artisan shops fronted this street, built of brick or stone and surfaced in rather spotty painted stucco. They rose to two stories a room’s width back to provide apartments over their work for the shopkeepers and workmen, and all the roofs were topped by red Roman tile. The one across from the taberna was a fulling-and-dyeing establishment, and somewhat aromatic even on a day like this given that the Roman clothworkers used pounding in stale human urine . . . pounding by human feet . . . for fulling. That meant degreasing the wool and then working the cloth to make the fibers knit.

“Thank God I discovered fuller’s earth,” Paula said with a snort.

“Amazing how helpful a map with little x marks is for prospecting,” Filipa said. “Once you learn how to read a map.”

Paula nodded. “And all that good Girl Scout shit. Now to spread the know-how around.”

Fuller’s earth was a special type of clay that did about the same thing as the stale urine and didn’t stink nearly as much. It had come into use along with mechanical fulling mills in Europe around a thousand years from now. They had a pilot plant on the Villa Lunae now, with the first windmill working wooden hammers to beat the cloth. When it wasn’t grinding grain, but number two windmill was under construction and going much faster.

“Spread it soon,” she qualified. “Sometime before next summer, preferably. Can you imagine what this would be like in hot weather? Talk about pissed off!”

But they’d all become case hardened to stinks. It was dark enough on an overcast November day that many of the buildings had oil lamps lit inside, light leaking out through shutters. There were few glass windows in this part of town, of course. Hypocausts didn’t go this far down the scale either, though some prosperous upper-middle-class types had a room or so equipped with them for special occasions.

“Yeah, a drink and snack sounds good, and it’s a couple-three miles more to the castra navalis,” Jeremey agreed. “It’s going to be slow work through town, too. Fil, Mark?”

“Yup,” Mark said, looking a little less semiconscious.

“Twist my pinkie,” Filipa said, and extended the digit, adding to Jeremey:

“Ooooogh, brutal torture, you win!” when he pretended to grab it.

They all swung down and hitched their horses; the guards took nose bags off a packhorse one of them had on a leading rein and slipped them over the animals’ heads. The horses munched doggedly, glad to stop even in the wet and even gladder of the chopped green oat fodder that was like chocolate truffles to them.

Sarukê jerked a thumb at one of the bodyguards. Bossing them was her job by general consent, since she’d recruited them in the first place; none of them argued with her.

Not twice, at least, he thought.

Jeremey had done martial arts himself for quite a while, but . . . 

But Christ, she’s fast! Of course, she was in the arena for years and came out alive and compos mentis . . . sorta. Those places are like asylums for the criminally insane, only run by trusties recruited from the inmates. If there’s a better school for all-in dirty fighting, I haven’t heard of it. And flunking out there means death.

The guards were ex-arena types like her, hard and tough and scarred, cold eyed and quick as cats. They all had mail shirts of the type a lot of the auxiliaries wore, thigh length with doubling straps over the shoulders, and wore swords and daggers at their belts. They had shields and helmets as well, three carried spears, and the other pair had bows like Sarukê’s, cased now against the damp.

A real armored brute squad, but they like working for us. Good pay, nice perks, and we don’t treat them like something you scrape off your shoe, unlike a lot of elevated types here. If there’s anybody it’s dumb to treat like that, it’s a bodyguard!

The unlucky guard on first watch hitched his cloak tighter around his shoulders, drew the hood further over his helmet, and prepared to keep an eye on the horses without more than a token grumble. He crowded up against the wall to get a little shelter from rain and wind under the porch-like overhang of the roof, too; all the houses had that.

Anyone unwisely trying to steal a horse or put sticky fingers into the saddlebags would get the full brunt of his discomfort. Given Artorius’ status, the part-time amateur town watch, the vigiles, would only object if he left a body for them to dispose of, and a couple of sestertii for buy yourself a drink on us, good folk would take care of that.

That and the capacious, all-forgiving Danube.

Woodsmoke trickled out of covered holes above him, adding something more agreeable to the general urban pong.

Sarukê looked unfazed and even fresh, but then she’d spent the first twenty years of her life on the Pontic steppe well northeast of here, riding constantly in weather that made this look like a promenade by the beach in San Diego. While living in tents and felt-lined wicker huts on wheels through Russian . . . or Ukrainian . . . winters to boot.

They all had cloaks tightly woven from un-fulled wool, with the natural lanolin grease still in it. The best were a British export . . . from the province of Britannia, at least . . . and shed water very well, though they smelled like wet sheep while they did. The guards had been delighted to get a new one each as a free perk; anyone who traveled any distance or did outdoor work and could afford it bought them.

Shed water very well . . . for a while, he added to himself.

Jeremey was acutely conscious that a while had passed them by on the road some time ago, and both the tunics he had on underneath were damp and cold if not sopping and chilly, along with the tight leather riding breeks and the knee socks under his boots—the latter newfangled knitted types, another thing Romans hadn’t heard of. They’d all toughened up and he flattered himself he’d started out tougher than any but the Prof.

But this is ridiculous.

The Sarmatian opened the door and stuck her head into the taberna, looking around conscientiously, then said:

Caupona”—which translated as hostess, or tavernkeeper-with-a-feminine-ending—“we take two tables. One back there, one out by door.”

They all crowded in, shaking out their cloaks and hanging them and their wide, round Zorro hats of waxed leather up on pegs, in the dim flickering light of a couple of oil lamps. It was warmer inside, especially farther away from the door and the shuttered window. Mostly because the long L-shaped slate-topped bar at the back had several pots sunk into its surface, and a fire underneath one of them, leaking smoke and much more welcome heat and an appetizing tang of fresh bread just out of the oven and ham-and-bean soup.

The bread oven’s bricks still radiated heat, and a grill over a bed of glowing charcoal did more. For something done on the grill, customers usually brought the raw materials themselves and paid to have it cooked. There were baskets and bowls of raisins, walnuts, prunes and green onions set out on the counter for snacking; the ceiling was blackish with long-accumulated soot.

In the standard fashion a steep stairway led from behind the bar up to the apartment above, blocked only by a curtain of coarse cloth. The wall there was shelves with various food items in rodent-repellent containers; the floor below the lowest shelf had amphorae—basically big elongated pots—leaning against the wall.

A small barrel of what the locals amusingly deluded themselves into thinking was beer rested on an X of poles, and there was a stack of firewood beside it.

Smoke hung under the blackened beams above their heads, slowly trickling out through a couple of holes whose exterior covers kept leaks to a slow drip. Nobody had the novelty of fireplaces and chimneys here yet, obviously. It would probably take at least a generation for them to filter this far down the social scale. No matter how enthusiastically the upper classes of Pannonia and the local military officers were taking to them.

Especially now that word had spread about how Marcus Aurelius had ordered their installation wholesale in the Palatine palaces back in Rome. Mark had done up a set of instructions with woodblock illustrations, too, and a cadre of experienced Pannonian bricklayers would make a very well-paid trip. Many of them would probably stay in Rome too, and make a good thing of it career-wise if they survived the giant city’s mephitic breath.

If the Emperor wears a beard, everyone wears a beard, he thought, stroking his own close-cropped light-brownish-yellow one.

The last four had worn beards, and it had become a fixed habit Empire-wide.

Mind you, shaving here is a pain the ass and dangerous, so three cheers and one cheer more for Da Boss Beard.

There were only three other customers, all at one table. All were ordinary-looking townsmen in multiple layers of tunics and scarves, cloaks and legging-like knee socks of woven, sewn wool under the straps of their thick-soled sandals or in one case closed shoes. That was the garb that greeted the onset of cold weather, for people who were traditionalists about not submitting to the barbarian degradation of trousers. A lot did wear pants through the winter.

All of it looked moderately clean apart from the odorous mud on the socks, because it would be washed and put away in spring and kept in the drawer until needed in late fall, around now. By next spring, they’d really need washing. People didn’t stop going to the baths, though; but two of them smelled in spite of it, evidently from the fuller’s shop across the way, and the elder of those was giving the bodyguards appraising looks in a way that marked him as a veteran. Roman garrison towns were lousy with those.

People kept bathing, if only because those were the only really warmly heated buildings in town, at least ones that people at this social level could get into.

The tavernkeeper behind the bar was in her thirties and a bit worn looking with a chipped front tooth, though rather attractive in a slim, high-cheeked dark Mediterranean way. The other woman there was probably her slave; one of the things that had surprised them was how far down the social scale slave ownership went. About like owning a car in Henry Ford’s early Model T days, not universal but fairly widespread above the level where people were focused completely on the struggle to buy that day’s loaf.

She was younger than the caupona, looking about their own age to the ex-graduate students’ American eyes and therefore probably at least two or three years younger than that. She was buxom and had a vaguely Germanic appearance, pale skin and blue eyes and dark-blond hair. And she was dressed in a much more stained and threadbare tunic that looked like a hand-me-down from her mistress, not least because it was rather tight. She was also obviously not wearing a strophium, the long cloth breast band that was the Roman answer to the bra.

Wowza! Jeremey thought, giving breast and hip and backside a look.

Roman high fashion thought the ideal woman’s figure was small busted and wide hipped. One thing you could rely on, apparently, was that whatever the local ideal of beauty was, most people wouldn’t have it.

But I have more rational tastes. And she looks tasty!

One thing he did like about the second century was that you were expected to ogle. She preened a bit when she caught him at it.

And he noted the full lower lip and blue eyes wandering lazily over the new-come . . . and visibly affluent . . . men. Even the bodyguards were modestly affluent by this neighborhood’s standards, since they got a denarius and a half a day and their keep too.

Scrub her down, and that’s quite a fox! Better than a hot-water bottle on a cold night . . . or any other day of the week!

There were two children as well who were obviously the caupona’s, looking bored on a day when they couldn’t go out to play. One was a boy about eight or nine, with a wooden toy legionary’s short sword in the belt that confined his grubby undyed brown-gray tunic. He was tossing dice idly on the brick floor, while his five-year-old sister played with a wooden doll, though they both stopped to gape at the newcomers.

Sarukê put the four guards on the table nearest the door, and told off one to spell the man with the horses in a quarter hour, then settled down herself with a rustle and chink, undoing the under-the-chin thong that held the cheek guards of her helm closed and setting it on the table before her with them folded in.

She automatically nudged her sword scabbard out of the way with her left foot as she did, in a manner that left the bone-and-rawhide-covered hilt accessible. Two of the other guards produced dice of their own and started tossing them, betting lightly. That was the local equivalent of playing music or a game on your phone to while away the time.

The caupona was gaping at her, too. Blonde hawk-faced Sarmatian women five foot nine tall, in mail hauberk and helm and with a long ring-hilted straight sword and dagger and a covered bowcase-quiver on their belts, weren’t a common sight here. To put it mildly.

Though they’ve heard of Sarmatians, and probably seen them now and then, here selling horses. And heard stories about Sarmatian amazons, though they’re not all that common even back home north of the Black Sea and I doubt many of them were ever here.

She gaped even more at Paula; voluptuous black women with skin like polished ebony and West African features weren’t everyday here either, even in the provincial capital. And most of all at Filipa—Korean features were much less common, vanishingly so, and she was in male clothing. Which was extremely unusual and severely frowned on. Though not technically illegal the way it would have been in, say, Victorian-era Europe or America.

Though by my standards, everyone here including moi wears a baggy Mother Hubbard sack dress—the women just have longer skirts on theirs. Mine would come to my calves if it wasn’t pulled up through the belt.

You could see her blinking too at the fact that all four of the civilians were noticeably taller than average; the women five-four and five-five, Jeremey at five-ten. And Mark Findlemann was a hair over six feet. Which made him basketball-player towering in the Roman Empire of 166 CE, though when you saw him move his gawky frame you wouldn’t mistake him for an athlete. Jeremey and Filipa wore spatha swords at their belts, too, as was common for well-to-do travelers in the frontier provinces but not for female ones. They all had belt knives at their hips, but those were standard.

Jeremey stepped up to the bar. “What’s your best wine?” he said. “How much?”

“Wu-wu—” the caupona stuttered.

Then she mastered herself: “Ah has Falernian, sir,” she said, and listed the price—which was steep, in local terms. “Th’ gennuwine art’cle.”

Her Pannonian accent was fairly thick, the local equivalent of a mountain-an’-holler hillbilly twang. And her eyes widened again when he tossed three denarii down on the counter, the silver ringing sweetly on the slate. A place like this wouldn’t see anything but copper and brass most days. Money and formal, bookish diction both marked him as upper class, as surely as the bodyguards and his clothes.

The pocket sewn into his tunic where he kept his change was an innovation too.

“Falernian for us and our guards, then, good caupona—watered half and half, and a second when we’re finished.”

The locals only drank unwatered wine when they were drinking strictly to get drunk. He went on:

“Bread, oil, cheese, and bowls of that—”

He indicated the thick bean soup simmering with a slow pop of bubbles in one of the big pots set into the stone counter. The others contained varieties of the local wines.

“—for our whole party. Just the thing on a cold day and it smells good! Make change when we leave, if there’s any left.”

“Yessir. Julia, stop gawking an’ move!”

Julia the probable slave girl had been staring at the silver with a delighted smile. She turned it on him and upped the wattage; he gave her a smile back, but shook his head.

Jeremey snagged a handful of raisins and went back to the table. Mark was nearly asleep now that he was motionless and warm, or at least less cold; he could ride by now, but only after a fashion and he still detested it even with more than a year of Prof-enforced practice. Paula was shifting uneasily on her stool, and probably longing for the hot room at the baths and a long soak. She was better on horseback now than her fellow New Yorker, but despite the way she’d trimmed down and toned up, it was still an aching strain for her to put in hours in the saddle. Especially in this miserable weather.

Even he and Filipa, who’d ridden a fair bit as teenagers and much, much more since they got here, were tired. It was different when you had to ride to get somewhere, instead of doing it for fun.

They all paused for a moment to warm their hands on the pottery bowls of hot bean soup an eager Julia brought out, returning with a tray of fresh bread, cheese, bowls of oil, onions and a little loose salt in a clay cup to be administered with fingers and thumb. Nobody had heard of saltshakers here either, though the upper classes used elaborately chased and decorated little bowls made of silver or gold. The caupona herself poured out the strong white—actually sort of amber—Falernian, mixed it and brought the big cups out.

“What do you think the Prof wants us all for?” Paula asked, sipping and giving a sigh. “Eat your soup before it goes cold,” Paula added to Mark gently, with a firm pat on the shoulder that was half wake-up shake. “It’ll warm the rest of you right up.”

He blinked himself back to consciousness and plied his spoon.

The caupona returned to the bar, where she kept looking at them out of the corner of her eye. Julia served the table with the bodyguards, laughing and joking as she set out their food and drink and casually slapping off wandering hands, though she seemed a little wary of Sarukê.

Don’t worry, blondie, she’s utterly monogamous, Jeremey thought.

Paula had spoken in Latin, because they made that a habit most of the time, unless secrecy was necessary. English attracted attention by its sheer foreignness even if nobody could understand it. There wasn’t anything much like the sound of English on the entire planet; there just weren’t any Indo-European languages with its stripped-down analytic form yet, and that strongly affected the way it hit the ear. Latin and Greek and Celtic and Proto-Germanic . . . and Sarmatian and Middle Persian and the Prakrits they were talking in India now . . . were still all first or second cousins by contrast, as close as French and Spanish or English and Swedish had been up in their native time.

They’d been arguing about the summons from the Prof since it arrived, of course.

“Probably another emergency on the 75-15-10 side of things,” Mark said, as his eyes came open under the stimulus of the soup. “An interruption for our work, in other words.”

Jeremey snorted with a sound that was half a chuckle; he thought it was funny to use the formula for gunpowder as a code for the military part of their project. The Prof probably intended irony. Paula rolled her eyes. She didn’t find it either amusing or ironic, though she reluctantly admitted the necessity. A little experience with the Marcomanni from across the river went a long way. Seeing a farmstead after their raiders had passed through . . . 

From Grandma to the toddlers, according to the descriptions from the guards, and I believe them—more so as Fil and the others wouldn’t talk about it at all and started gulping their wine if I asked, so I stopped asking them about it, he thought. With the guts hanging out too. Got to admit, that gave me the incipient heaves even at secondhand and I’m not squeamish like these big-city types. Before we got here they thought chickens hatched headless, bloodless, gutted and in sealed plastic bags. And pigs turned into pork chops by magic. Not the Prof, of course; he’s even more of an old-style country boy than I am.

“I don’t really mind,” Mark said, then qualified it: “Except the riding in the rain part. But the paper thing’s out of my hands now until the next round of innovations—the guys we’ve had on it from the beginning know it better than I do now, we did a lot of trial and error, and Josephus’ little factory in Sirmium is going great guns and he’s expanding it fast and talking about a branch office in Rome run by one of his younger relatives. That Simonides kid going partners with Josephus and his own dad now that he really knows the moves. Big market there, what with all the upper-crust types and government offices. A couple of years from now in Egypt they’ll start wondering why orders for papyrus are falling off a cliff. And the printing’s really coming along.”

“Finally,” Filipa said dryly.

“Finally,” Mark agreed, unbothered and yawning hugely. “One man trains two, two train eight, so it goes. There’s a big market here for less expensive books, too. And frankly I’m glad for a break from trying to translate books into a language that just doesn’t have the vocabulary to express a lot of the concepts. Though I think Galen will be a big help, especially with the medical stuff. Zeal of a convert and he’s smart as a whip. I think newsletters in the bigger cities would pay, too . . . ”

“Yeah, well, Sarukê and I—”

Filipa gave a glance and smile at the Sarmatian; the tables weren’t that far apart. She got one back, too, as the wirapta lounged at her ease, alert and relaxed as a cat with her wine cup in her right hand and a hunk of bread she’d just dunked into the soup in the other.

“—aren’t really needed with the horse stuff, not any more. The new gear is spreading fast now. The Emperor just ordered horseshoes and saddle samples and instructors from the units here sent to every single cavalry ala between Eboracum and Nisibis.”

Eboracum to Nisibis meant from northern England to southeastern Turkey, in twenty-first-century terms. Marcus Aurelius had been impressed. And what the cavalry had by this time next year, everyone except the absolute backwoodsmen would copy in the next decade or less along with the horse-collar harness and new-style wagons the military logistics train was adopting wholesale.

The Romans were calling it all the Pannonian gear. Jeremey sniggered every time he thought of the elaborate theories historians a few centuries from now would probably spin out of that. All of them more believable than time travel . . . 

“The gospel of positional arithmetic’s coming along too,” she added. “Besides being useful, some of the philosophical types find it fascinating. The Emperor and his court doc, Galenos, had me drilling them on the times table for a while. They spent twenty minutes . . . while I was there . . . talking about the deep underlying philosophical meaningfulness of having a symbol for nothing and one for infinity and how something could be bounded and infinite at the same time. Hallelujah! Next, algebra, which I’m doing a refresher course on because it’s been a long time since undergrad. Their geometry is already pretty good, though.”

Her specialty had been Classical technology, including the intellectual side like math, which meant keeping up her modern math too so that she could make comparisons.

“Well, I could have used the winter to keep fiddling with the McCormick reaper back at the villa,” Jeremey said judiciously. “I know I can get the goddamned thing working for more than twelve feet at a time eventually.”

And I’m not eager to meet the Marcomanni up close, nosiree Bob, as granddad’s granddad would say. Or the Vandals or the Quadi. Nor the Langobards neither.

“But everyone on the villa was wowed with the cradle scythes this harvest, which beat sickles all to hell. Cut more than half off the time to get the grain in and that pushed yields up a bit because there’s less lodging or shattering when you finish quicker. Saved a mint on harvest workers, too. Five, six thousand denarii easy, and everyone in the district is talking about it.”

“Everyone’s talking including big landowners who have friends and relatives all over,” Paula said thoughtfully. “And write to their friends and relatives, all over. And the friends and relatives do likewise.”

Jeremey nodded. That would spread things around faster. Paying harvest gangs was an inescapable heavy cost for big operators that suddenly wasn’t anymore, or at least only one-tenth as inescapable. Which would have unpredictable follow-on consequences.

Cutting the market price of wheat, just for starters, especially when you add in the riding plows and seed drills and threshing machines. And reducing incomes in the places the harvest gangs come from. But everyone who buys their bread will have more money to spend on other stuff, like meat now and then . . . 

“Threshing got done in jig time too. And the corn and potatoes and sunflowers and soybeans and tomatoes and whatnot did fine, next year there’ll be plenty to use, not just keep for seed. The hops are doing well too.”

He smacked his lips.

Mark muttered. “Real beer! Thank God!”

Jeremey went on: “We planted six acres of corn last year, this spring we planted three hundred and sixty. It looks like we’ll get four times the yield per acre or more since we got it in timely and the spring rains were good, call it eighteen to twenty-four thousand bushels once it’s off the cob, plus we’ve got people lined up to buy it so they can grow it. The locals turn out to actually like polenta and cornbread. And it’s pretty much the same ratio with the rest too, tons of spuds and stuff. God but I love having French fries and more-or-less Heinz ketchup again whenever I want ’em.”

Paula chuckled evilly. “I don’t think the locals realize quite what the spinning wheels and treadle looms with flying shuttles mean, besides ten times the output for the same work,” she said. “I do just purely love disrupting things here. Rome may be all the civilization going here and now, but this civilization needs a kick in the ass so bad. Multiple kicks. Kicked over and over until it squeals and blubbers.”

Filipa made an enquiring sound and the black woman went on:

“Before, with hand spinning and all, it took one hundred and fifty labor hours . . . all by women, of course . . . ”

“ . . . of course,” Filipa said.

“Why not?” Jeremey said innocently.

Then he whipped his legs up under the table as they both tried to kick him, grinning.

Paula glared and continued: “—to produce one middling quality plain wool tunic. That’s just the spinning and weaving. With the new stuff, it takes ten hours, one long day’s work instead of more than two weeks. Same-same on the fulling, bleaching and dyeing. Going to be a lot of women saying goodbye to perpetual distaff and spindle in every spare moment. Giving them time to think, hopefully.”

Jeremey laughed. “You know Quintus, that furniture-maker apprentice guy we took along to the villa our first summer, to help out with the woodworking side? I looked in on him in Vindobona to chew the fat . . . he’s not a bad sort. That carpenter’s shop he started? He’s got eight men and a smith working for him now full-time and he’s turning out four or five spinning wheels a day, he took my hints about division of labor to heart, real little Fordist assembly line there. And three or four of the new looms every week too. And he’s got a team of girls going around demonstrating how to use them, in the city and the countryside both, run by his elder sister. They get a commission on sales.”

“You suggested that?” Filipa said.

“No, Quintus came up with that on his own. Smart cookie! He’s making money hand over fist, paid off that loan he got from Josephus early and he’s buying a house ’cause he’s about to marry upward. But others are starting up, in Sirmium and here in Carnuntum, and probably further away soon. The army buildup helps. They’re buying all the cloth they can get and paying top dol . . . well, top denarius. That keeps the established players from grumbling too loud. And it means they can afford the new stuff.”

“Type A invention, like the Prof says,” Mark said. “Nothing the locals can’t make with the tools and materials they’ve got. They just needed a demonstration of the idea, and why it’s worth the trouble.”

Fairly soon everyone was wiping out their bowls with the last heels of the—tasty, if gritty—brown bread and draining the last of the second cup of Falernian, which was quite good if you didn’t mind your wine sweetish.

Though today it would be even better warmed and spiced the way Austrians did it for cold days when I visited here back uptime.

One thing riding all day in the chilly wet was guaranteed to do was work up an appetite.

Wine hits you differently too, when you don’t spend the day sitting in front of a screen.

Filipa gave a signal to Sarukê, who got the guards moving. With a word, and also by grabbing the one who was chatting with the big-busted barmaid by the collar of his mail shirt and hauling him off with an admonition that the five-finger discount was cheaper.

Jeremey saw the caupona, who he’d picked up was called Mistress Umma, had the change ready on the bar: two sestertii, one dupondius and three copper as. More than half the cost had been ordering the Falernian, which came all the way from south-central Italy, rather than the local stuff.

“Oh, keep it,” he said, with a waving gesture. “Excellent bean soup, mistress Umma. I liked the bits of ham.”

Ham here in Pannonia was more like the Spanish jamón serrano he’d tasted a few times in Europe than the blander American product, or something halfway between that and the Wien style; about like Smithfield from Virginia, but he thought it tasted even better. The Americans and their guards spent a moment getting their now merely damp hooded poncho cloaks back on, and adjusting their hats—it was still raining out there, and had gotten darker and colder.

“You know,” Paula said as they left, “that Falernian isn’t bad at all.”

Then shifting to English for a moment: “But God, what I’d give for a diet Dr. Pepper or a Coke Zero!”

Mark looked around at the gray, wet late afternoon with a shudder. “On a day like this, cocoa with rum, or a cappuccino, definitely,” he replied in the same language.

“Oh, we’ll all have hot cider with cinnamon and nutmeg, to go with our cheeseburgers with the Prof,” Filipa said. “Or maybe Nene Chicken with kongnamul bap!”

“Coconut cream pie for dessert!” Paula said, and they drew up their hoods.

“We’ll have sugar next year from the sugar beets and we’ve got cream—I’m working on a separator and pasteurization. Coconuts . . . those will take a while!” Jeremey said.

He swung into the saddle, prompting another sigh from the horse, and looked back over his shoulder at a choked-off sound. Mistress Umma was standing in the doorway, staring after them with a hand to her heart as if she was having a sudden attack of angina, her mouth open and eyes bulging.

Well, yeah, it was a really big tip, but that reaction’s a bit much, he thought as the plock-plock-plock of hooves in mud sounded again.

Then he put it out of his mind. Pretty soon they’d learn what the Prof had in his, for better or worse.

Wonder what he was doing today?


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Framed