In High Places

by Harry Turtledove

  "Well, I hadn't heard that you did," the duke said. "If I had, I wouldn't have offered this to you. We'll see what happens, then. Don't make it obvious you're snooping, either. If you do, you won't learn anything worth having. Do you read and write?"

  "I read some. I've picked it up on my own, mostly. I might be able to write my name. Past that—" Jacques shrugged. He'd never needed to write before. Now maybe he did. He went on, "I read some French, I should have said. I can't make head nor tail of the funny squiggles the Muslims use."

  "All right. Don't let it worry you. If you want to, after you come back I'll have someone teach you more. It comes in handy all kinds of ways."

  "Thanks, your Grace. I'd like that." Jacques bowed again. "I'll never make a scholar, but I like to learn things."

  "That's a fair start for a spy. Of course, it's also a fair start for a gossipy old granny." Even when Duke Raoul praised you, he liked to jab you with a pin, too. He smiled a crooked smile at Jacques. "And if you do get too snoopy, maybe Muhammad there will think you're trying to see under Khadija's veil, eh? And maybe he'll be right, too." He nudged Jacques with his elbow and strode off whistling a bawdy tune.

  Jacques stared after him. Raoul wasn't wrong—he wouldn't mind finding out what Khadija looked like. That wasn't why he stared, though. He understood why the duke knew Muhammad al-Marsawi's name. The merchant was wealthy, and Raoul was interested in him. But that Raoul also had Muhammad's daughter's name on the tip of his tongue . . . She was just a girl. Jacques wouldn't have thought she was important enough to stick in a duke's mind. But Raoul kept track of all kinds of things. That was part—a big part—of what made him what he was.

  The pikeman practicing next to Jacques sent him a jealous glance. "His Grace spent a lot of time with you," the man said. He was probably twice Jacques' age. Though short, he was broad-shouldered and strong. He made a good enough soldier, but no one would promote him to sergeant if he lived to be a hundred.

  Since Jacques didn't want trouble from him, he tried to shrug it off. "He wanted to know about. . . some things I saw on my way up from Count Guillaume's fortress." Everybody knew he'd been there. He'd almost talked about Muhammad and Khadija. But hadn't Raoul told him to keep his mouth shut? If he didn't, the duke might—likely would—hear about it.

  "He spent a lot of time," the older man repeated. "I've fought for him since you were born, and he's never spent that kind of time with me."

  "Duke Raoul does as he pleases," Jacques said. The other pikeman couldn't very well argue with that. There were ways to get the duke to notice you. Jacques had found one—he'd done well at what Raoul told him to do, and he'd dealt with people Raoul found interesting. If you made a big enough mistake, that would make the duke notice you, too. Afterwards, you'd wish it hadn't, but it would. Jacques feared the other pikeman would draw the Duke of Paris' eye that way, if he ever did.

  Caravan guard! That was something. It beat carrying messages back and forth. And he'd get a chance to see what the Muslims' country was like. People in the Kingdom of Versailles were jealous of their southern neighbors. The Muslims were richer. People said they were smarter. They lived more comfortable lives. Paris tried to be like Marseille. No one had ever heard of Marseille trying to be like Paris.

  All at once, Jacques wished he hadn't let Muhammad al-Marsawi and his family know he understood Arabic. Now they would be on their guard around him. If they'd thought he only spoke French, they might not have watched what they said in their own language. But he'd wanted to show off. He'd wanted to impress the merchant—and the merchant's daughter. He hadn't worried about what might come of that.

  Duke Raoul would have. Jacques was sure of it. The duke always thought before he did things. He was as clever as any Arab. Jacques wished he could be like that. He'd never be a duke, of course—he didn't have the blood. But he might make a captain, or even a colonel. And if he made colonel, his children, when he had them, could marry into the nobility. Oh, snobs would sniff, but they could do it. And his grandchildren might be nobles themselves. If you were going to rise in the Kingdom of Versailles, that was how you went about it.

  Jacques laughed at himself. Here he was, seventeen years old, not even a sergeant, and dreaming of being a captain or a colonel. Dreaming higher than that, in fact—dreaming as high as any man in this kingdom could dream. If Raoul found out he wanted his grandchildren to be nobles, what would the duke do?

  That was a scary thought. Or was it? Wouldn't Raoul grin and wink and nudge him and whisper, "Good luck"? Somewhere two or three hundred years ago, hadn't one of Raoul's many-times-great-grandfathers gone and done what Jacques dreamt of now? Sure he had. Noble families, except the king's, hadn't come down from before the days of the Great Black Deaths. They had their start in the newer days, the days of Henri, the days of the Final Testament.

  Muslims sneered at Christians for following Henri. They said Muhammad was the last man through whom God spoke.

  Jacques made the sign of the wheel over his heart. He didn't care what Muslims thought. He knew what he believed.

  But he didn't like the idea of Muhammad al-Marsawi laughing at him because of his religion. And he really didn't like the idea of Khadija laughing at him because of it. He didn't know what he could do about that, short of converting.

  Christians did, every now and then. The Kingdom of Berry had been all Christian once. Little by little, the people there were giving up their faith. Some wanted to escape the higher taxes Christians had to pay in a Muslim kingdom. Others, though, others decided God was on the Muslims' side. Didn't their wealth and power show that? Lots of people must have thought so, because Berry didn't have many Christians left in it these days.

  Things were different here in the Kingdom of Versailles. The only mosques here were for traders up from the south. If you converted to Islam, you couldn't even stay and pay extra taxes. You had to leave the kingdom. Except for the clothes on your back, you couldn't take your property with you, either.

  In spite of that, people did convert and go into exile. Not a flood of them, but a slow, steady trickle. Some thought they had a better chance of getting rich down in the Muslim lands. Others, again, really believed in what they were doing. They had to, or they wouldn't have put themselves to so much trouble.

  Jacques didn't like the idea that his kingdom and the other Christian kingdoms to the north and east were the Muslims' poor, backward cousins. One of these days, we'll know as much as they do, he thought. One of these days, we'll be as rich as they are. And then . . . And then they'd better look out, because we'll have a lot of paying back to do.

  He lunged with the pike one more time. It was perfect. Duke Raoul would have been proud of him.

  "Are we ready?" Dad asked for what had to be the twentieth time.

  Mom finally lost patience with him. "I don't know about you," she said, a certain edge in her voice, "but I am."

  The sarcasm didn't faze him. When he was in one of these moods, nothing fazed him. He just turned to Annette and said, "And you, Khadija? Are you ready?"

  "Yes, my father," she answered. Her mother snapped back at Dad. Annette mostly didn't. Life was too short. She let him work the jumpiness out of his system.

  "Are you sure?" he persisted. "You have everything you will need to take back to Marseille?"

  "Yes, my father," Annette said again. Now, whether she wanted it to or not, a certain edge found its way into her voice. The room they were staying in, like any room in any inn in this alternate, held no more furniture than it had to. It had beds, stools, a chest that now stood open. Nobody could have much doubt about whether her stuff was packed. Dad ... got the fidgets.

  "God be praised!" he said now. He let it go at that, a sign that this case wouldn't be so bad as some of the ones Annette had seen him have.

  "Let's go," Mom said. "I want to head back to the south as soon as we can. This caravan has taken too long coming together."

  "It's here now," Dad said, "^fwe have everything out of the roo
m, let's load the mules and get on our horses and be on our way."

  Annette was ready to go. Back to Marseille, back to the home timeline, back to the United States . . . Fieldwork was an adventure, but going off to college would be an adventure, too. And the dorms, unlike this inn, would have showers and computers and fasartas, and wouldn't have bugs. There was something to be said for adventures that didn't smell bad.

  The innkeeper met his departing guests in the stables. He wasn't fat and jolly, the way innkeepers were supposed to be. He was scrawny and looked like a man who worried all the time. He had a pinched mouth and deep lines between his eyes. He also had horrible bad breath. In the home timeline, a dentist would have fixed his troubles long ago. Here, all you could do with a rotting tooth was pull it. They had no anesthetics but wine and opium. You went to the dentist as a last resort.

  He bowed and made the sign of the wheel. "May the roads be fair for you. May God watch over you. May your travels bring you back to my inn once more," he said in pretty good Arabic. Annette was sure he meant the last part. Her father had paid him well.

  "It will be as God wills," Dad said, which sounded impressive and meant exactly nothing. Then he asked a question that did mean something: "Have you heard any news of how the roads are?" He didn't mean whether they were muddy or dry. That would change with the weather. He meant whether bandits had been raiding lately.

  "What news I have is good," the innkeeper said. "King Abdallah is supposed to have smashed Tariq's band of thieves. If that is true, they will not trouble you on your way home."

  "May it be so!" Dad sounded as if he meant it, and he did mean it. The Kleins were at risk till they got back to Marseille. Dad had the disguised pistol. He also had a radio that looked like a set of worry beads. If they got in trouble, they could let the Crosstime Traffic people in Marseille know what had happened. But help couldn't reach them faster than the speed of a galloping horse, and that might not be fast enough.

  After exchanging one more set of bows with the innkeeper, Dad led the horses and mules through the winding streets of Paris to the riverside market square where the caravan was assembling. Shopkeepers popped out of their stores to try to sell him medicines or brass candlesticks or carved wooden figurines or bullet molds or whatever else they had for their stock in trade. He waved them all away. "Next time, my friends, next time," he said in French, again and again. That was as polite a way as Annette could imagine to tell them to get lost.

  Merchants and pack animals swarmed in the market square. The chaos and the noise and the smell were very bad. People shouted and swore in half a dozen languages. Muslims in flowing robes made broad, sweeping gestures. Traders from the Kingdom of Versailles got excited over trifles, much as Frenchmen might have done in the home timeline. Men from the Germanies wore tight breeches and brimless round caps. They stood with their arms folded across their chests and waited for things to get moving. A couple of Englishmen wore breeches like the Germans but had on flat, broad-brimmed hats that looked like leather pancakes.

  Listening to them, Annette could follow their brand of English about half the time. Chaucer had lived in this alternate, too, and had written, though the plague killed him here before he started The Canterbury Tales. The merchants' English was a lot like his—German with a French overlay. It didn't have most of the layers of vocabulary that had come afterwards in the home timeline. In this alternate, England had never been a great power. The British Isles were a backwater in Europe, which was a backwater in the world. Scotland was still independent here. Ireland held hah0 a dozen little kingdoms that fought among themselves all the time.

  "What dost tha mean, tha great gowk?" one of the Englishmen shouted at another. Annette wondered what a gowk was. Nothing good, plainly. Maybe she would have done better with this dialect if she'd grown up in Yorkshire or somewhere like that.

  The merchants chatted about what they'd bought and what they'd sold and the prices they'd got. They argued about who would go where in the southbound caravan. Nothing got settled in a hurry. A lot of them took squabbling over such things as a game. Haggling over prices was a game here, too. You had to play along, or the locals would think you were peculiar. It wasted a lot of time, but then, so did sitting in front of a TV screen. People who didn't find one way or another to waste time probably weren't human.

  While the traders talked and bickered, the men who would guard them on the way south stood around and waited. Some of the guards would be mounted when the caravan finally got moving. They had big, clumsy matchlock pistols in holsters on their belts, and spares tucked into their boot tops. Dad's was made to look like theirs. Unlike his, the locals' were single-shot muzzle-loaders. Reloading a pistol like that on horseback was as near impossible as made no difference. That was why they all carried more than one.

  Musketeers had matchlocks, too, but longer ones that would fire farther. They would march on foot. They wore iron back-and-breasts—most of them had light linen surcoats on over them— and high-crested helmets. Feathers or plumes of horsehair topped some of the helms. They marked sergeants and officers.

  Pikemen wore similar armor. They and the musketeers looked a lot like Spanish conquistadors from the home timeline. No conquistadors in this alternate—the plague had left Spain almost empty. The pikemen were careful to keep their long spears upright. They could have snarled traffic even worse than it was already if they'd let the pikes drop to the horizontal.

  Pikemen, musketeers, and cavalrymen all wore swords along with their main weapons. If a spearshaft broke, if they couldn't reload a matchlock fast enough, they could still defend themselves. Even in the home timeline, officers sometimes wore ceremonial swords to this day. These, though, weren't ceremonial blades. Their leather-wrapped hilts were plain and businesslike, and bore dark sweat stains that said they'd seen use.

  One of the pikemen looked familiar to Annette. She needed a moment to figure out why, because he hadn't worn a helmet the last time she saw him. She nudged her mother. "Look," she said. "That's the fellow we were talking with here the other day."

  Her mother looked that way. "Why, so it is," she said. "We'll have to watch what we say when he's around. His Arabic isn't bad." Her gaze sharpened. "I wonder if that's why he's along. It seems like something Duke Raoul would do."

  "Spy on Muslim merchants, you mean?" Annette asked.

  "Maybe," Mom said. "Maybe just spy on us. We come from a lot farther away than Marseille, after all. Even though we try our best to fit in, even though we speak the languages perfectly, we're strangers here. Maybe it shows enough to make the locals wonder. I hope not, but maybe."

  The pikeman—Jacques, his name was—noticed Annette and her mother looking in his direction. He nodded back at them. His smile, Annette suspected, was aimed at her in particular. She pretended not to notice it. The trip south could get complicated all kinds of ways.

  Three

  As long as nothing went wrong, guarding a caravan was easy duty. Jacques laughed at himself. As long as nothing went wrong, any duty was easy. But he'd had to hurry down to Count Guil-laume's fortress, worrying every step of the way. If you were alone, you always had to worry.

  Well, he was anything but alone here. A small town might have gone on parade—and on slow parade at that. Animals ambled along. People either walked or rode beside the beasts of burden. Everybody gabbed with everybody else. Nobody seemed to care when the caravan got to Marseille. The merchants had nobody to haggle with but one another. They might as well have been on holiday.

  As for Jacques' fellow guards ... Most of them were older men, in their twenties or thirties or even forties. To him, men in their forties were almost as old as the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. That was a good age for a ruler, for someone like Duke Raoul. For a man out in the field? He had his doubts.

  He needed a while to realize the older men had their doubts about him, too. They called youngsters tadpoles, and seemed to think he couldn't do anything his mother hadn't taught him. That made him furious. He
needed a while to realize they thought his fury was funny. He stopped giving them the satisfaction of steaming where they could see it. They treated him better after that—he'd shown he could figure something out, anyhow.

  When he left Paris, he thought he would spend most of his time spying on Muhammad al-Marsawi and his wife—and his daughter. Things didn't work like that. The caravanmaster rotated his guards three or four times a day, so nobody kept the same station too long.

  Jacques didn't need long to see that that was fair. A few hours as a rear guard, eating everybody else's dust, drove home the lesson. But it meant he couldn't even get close to Muhammad and his family most of the time. At first he thought Duke Raoul would be angry at him for falling down on the job. He was hustling up to the front of the caravan so everyone else could breathe his dust for a while when he saw he was being silly. Raoul knew how caravans worked. He knew better than Jacques did, and that was for sure. So he couldn't have expected Jacques to spend every waking moment around Muhammad al-Marsawi . . . and Khadija. Marseille was a long way from Paris. / have time, he thought.

  He breathed a great big sigh of relief. He didn't have to keep twisting his head to see where the Muslim trader was and what he was up to. A lot of Henri's preaching was about the patient man and what he could do. Jacques had listened to endless sermons from those verses in the Final Testament, but they hadn't made much sense to him. Now, all at once, they did.

  He got his first chance to talk with Muhammad when the caravan encamped the second night out from Paris. The caravan-master had stopped in a meadow that gave the animals good grazing and the people enough room to pitch their tents. Swallows swooped overhead, hawking bugs out of the sky. A white wagtail—actually, the bird was mostly gray and black, though it had a white face—hopped in the grass. Chaffinches called from the bushes around the meadow.

  "I hope you are well," Jacques said to the merchant, and then, "Do you need help with your tent?"