In High Places

by Harry Turtledove

  "Salamander?" Annette said, and then, "Oh." He didn't mean a little four-legged creature that lived in damp places and ate bugs. He meant a fire elemental. But that still left her confused. "What French priest?"

  "Why, the one in The Devil's Dictionary,"" her father replied, as if she should have known without asking. "A very fitting book for the circumstances, don't you think?" And so it was, but Dad always thought The Devil's Dictionary was a fitting book. In it, Ambrose Bierce didn't have a good word to say about anybody or anything, and all his prods and pokes and gibes had style. Dad grinned wickedly. "Can you imagine what would happen if I translated it into the French they use here?"

  "I can," Annette's mother said before she could answer. "They wouldn't understand half of it, and they'd want to burn you at the stake for the other half."

  That sounded about right to Annette. Dad mimed being wounded. As far as Annette was concerned, he was the biggest ham left unsliced. He knew it, too, and took advantage of it. It probably made him a better merchant than he would have been otherwise. And people in this alternate were less restrained than they were in the home timeline. They had no TV, no movies, no radio, no recorded music, no computer games. If they wanted fun, they had to make their own. Overacting when they haggled was part of it.

  Another caravan came up the road from the south. It was even bigger than the one coming down from Paris. The two edged past each other. Traders made a few hasty deals as they did. Caravan-masters screamed at both groups to keep moving. The dust they churned up was amazing. Annette's veil kept some of it out of her mouth and nose, but not enough. The guards from each caravan eyed those from the other as if they were about to fight. Nothing came of that, but it worried Annette just the same.

  She walked and rode, rode and walked. Peasants in the fields stared at the caravan. A lot of them wouldn't have traveled more than a day's walk from where they were born in their whole lives. Little by little, the weather grew warmer and drier. Marseille had a Mediterranean climate, like that of Los Angeles or Melbourne or Cape Town. The rugged North Atlantic ruled the weather in Paris.

  A hoopoe flew by, a bird that looked as if it had no business existing. It was salmon pink, had a feathery crest on its head, and made the strange noises that gave it its name. Birds of all sorts were more common here than they were in the home timeline. Over on the other side of the Atlantic that this world's sailors were only now beginning to cross, passenger pigeons still flew by the billion.

  Annette understood why birds and other wildlife were more common here—people were less common. They didn't have the tools to kill on a large scale, either. They didn't have many tools at all, in fact. Those peasants plowed behind oxen. They used hoes and spades and a few other hand tools. In good years, they raised enough to feed themselves and the towns. People went hungry in bad years.

  Seeing the towns made her want to cry. Paris was a real city—a raw, smelly city, a twisted ghost of the Paris in the home timeline, but a real city even so. Marseille, too. But even Lyon was just a little country town here. It huddled inside walls that followed the lines of the ones the Romans had built. People said wolves had howled outside those walls not long before the caravan got there.

  "Is there any alternate that has enough technology to let people be comfortable but hasn't messed up the environment getting it?" she asked her father in the hostel in Lyon.

  He thought for a minute, then shook his head. "Not that I've ever heard. If you've got technology, what do you use it for? To change the environment. That's what technology does. You do what seems best for yourself right then. You chop the head off the big bad wolf that ate your granny. You bake four-and-twenty blackbirds in a pie. And you worry about what happens later, later—if you worry at all."

  In this alternate, wolves still ate grannies. They hadn't got anybody when they prowled close to Lyon, but they could have. Blackbirds in Europe were different from the ones back in America. They were thrushes, and acted and sounded a lot like American robins. Europe had birds called robins, too, but they weren't closely related to the American kind. It all got confusing. People who studied birds used scientific names to clear up confusion like that. Annette wasn't a scientist, and got confused.

  She did know people here baked blackbirds in pies, even if they didn't make rhymes about it.

  When she thought about blackbird pie, she missed Burger King and Tuesday's Tapas and Panda Express even more than she had before. "I can't wait to get home!" she exclaimed.

  "Won't be long now," Dad said.

  The farther south Jacques got, the richer the countryside seemed to him. Traveling in the Muslim kingdoms rubbed his nose in how backward his own was. Everybody here seemed well fed. People ate wheat bread all the time. They didn't bother with barley or rye, let alone oats. When they grew oats, they fed them to their horses. Well, so did people in the Kingdom of Versailles. But Jacques had eaten plenty of oat porridge himself. He even liked oats—as long as he was with other people who ate them, too. Down here, it would have taken a torturer to get him to admit he'd ever touched them.

  And the farther south he went, the more he found himself speaking Arabic. A lot of the peasants were still Christians. They paid taxes to their overlords so they could keep their religion. And most of them spoke French. But Jacques couldn't always follow them when they did, and they couldn't always understand him, either. Their dialect was so nasal and singsong, it might as well have been another language.

  They had no trouble with his Arabic. Theirs sounded pretty much the same. When he mentioned that to Muhammad al-Marsawi, the merchant said, "Arabic has dialects, too. When I talk with a man from Egypt, or from Baghdad, we have to go slowly and figure out what we mean. Sometimes we even have to write things down. The written language is the same everywhere—well, almost—but people from different places pronounce the letters differently."

  "But Egypt and Baghdad—they're far, far away. They're over the sea. They're at the edge of the world." To Jacques, those all meant about the same thing. "No wonder people talk funny in places like that. We haven't come anywhere near that far, though, and already these people talk French like . .. like ... I don't know what."

  "It is different from what you hear in Paris," Muhammad agreed.

  "It sure is." Jacques took off his helmet, scratched his head, and put the helm on again. "Why don't you speak French the way they do down here? Really, this time."

  "Oh, I can talk like this," the Muslim trader said through his nose. That was what Jacques thought he said, anyhow. The Devil might have invented this dialect to torment him. When Muhammad al-Marsawi spoke again, it was in the French of Paris: "But if I did talk like that, people up there couldn't follow me. And so I talk the northern way when I'm with folk from the north."

  "Right." Thwarted again, Jacques wondered if there was anything Muhammad couldn't do. "Why don't you know all the other Arabic dialects, too?"

  "I don't hear them so often or need them so much," the trader answered as easily. Jacques couldn't trip him up no matter how he tried. He wondered what kind of luck Duke Raoul would have had. Raoul was about the cleverest man he knew. But he'd started to think Muhammad al-Marsawi was just as clever. The Muslim was slick as boiled asparagus.

  Jacques glanced over to the shrouded shape of Khadija. He was happier thinking about her than about her father. She gave signs of being clever, too, but—when she wasn't talking about demons—she didn't intimidate him the way Muhammad al-Marsawi did. For one thing, she was female. For another, he thought she was around his own age—though how could you be sure from a pair of eyes? And, for a third, he thought she liked him.

  Oh, he didn't think she liked him like that. She'd given no sign of it if she did. But she talked at him as they traveled south. She couldn't very well talk with him, not when he answered through her father. Still, she did talk. And he thought he heard a smile in her voice every now and then. He even thought he saw a smile in her eyes once or twice. People always talked about how expressive ey
es were. And eyes told a lot—when you saw them with the rest of somebody's face. By themselves, they were a lot harder to judge.

  "Good day," she called to him in French two mornings after they left Lyon. "I hope you are well. I hope you slept well."

  "Please thank your daughter and tell her I am very well, and that I rested well," Jacques said to Muhammad al-Marsawi. He also used French. Speaking his own language felt good. "Tell her also that I hope the same is true for her."

  The trader bowed. "By some miracle, I think she will hear you even if I do not speak. Perhaps an angel will whisper your words into her ear. What do you think, eh?"

  He was grinning. He might have been inviting Jacques to share the joke. The only trouble was, Jacques wasn't sure there was any joke to share. It sounded more like blasphemy to him. Of course Khadija could hear Jacques even if her father didn't pass his words on to her. Jacques had just done his best to be polite instead of talking straight to her. He hadn't imagined anybody, Muslim or Christian, joking about angels. God's messengers were serious business—just like demons.

  "My father. . ." Khadija said in Arabic. Her voice held no smile now. Instead of being a daughter, she might have been a mother scolding a naughty little boy.

  "Yes, I know. I went too far," Muhammad al-Marsawi answered, as if he deserved that scolding. He looked back to Jacques. "Never mind me, my young friend. There are times when my tongue runs away like an unbroken horse, and I do not even have the fun of getting drunk first. Life is full of sorrows." His face turned sad, comically sad. He made fun of himself as easily as he made fun of angels.

  But this, at least, was a familiar kind of foolery. Jacques had heard other Muslims act sad that they couldn't drink wine or beer or spirits. He'd also seen some who went ahead and drank whether they were supposed to or not. To them, that was a sin, but all men were sinners, weren't they? Muslim or Christian, that didn't matter. Nobody acted the way he—or even she—should all the time.

  "Easy to make peace with me," Jacques said. He lifted his pike a few inches, aiming the point toward the heavens. "Have you made your peace with God?"

  "I hope I have," the trader answered. "But that's my worry, don't you think?"

  The question made Jacques scratch his head. He scratched his head a lot around Muhammad al-Marsawi and his family. They seemed to look at the world through a different window, and they saw different things. And then they went and talked about them! Wasn't salvation everybody's business? Jacques had never known anybody, Christian or Muslim, who didn't think so. Society on both sides of the border was set up with that in mind. If Jacques understood Muhammad al-Marsawi—and he thought he did—the merchant said what other people thought didn't matter.

  Jacques didn't ask him about that. One of these days, Muhammad and his family would come back to Paris. Duke Raoul could worry about it then. It was too much for a messenger and caravan guard to get to the bottom of.

  And Jacques had other things to worry about. The road from Lyon went south and a little east. The country rose. There were fewer farms and more forests. Some places, trees and brush hadn't been cleared back far enough from the road. Some places, they'd hardly been cleared back at all. He muttered to himself. All the guards were muttering and fuming. If this wasn't ambush country, he'd never seen any that was.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when they made it to Grenoble, in the valley of the Isère. But a look south from the town told him the worst part of the journey still lay ahead. Real mountains still stood between the caravan and Marseille, mountains with forests of oak and ash and elm and hickory on their lower slopes and darker, gloomier pine woods farther up their sides. They might have been daring honest men to come through them.

  A long, slogging day and a half out of Grenoble . . .

  Four

  Annette thought the countryside south of Grenoble some of the most beautiful she'd ever seen. The woods, the blue, blue sky, the crisp air, the little streams leaping down over rocks and making miniature waterfalls—it all reminded her of walking through a national park back in the home timeline. But this was no park. It was just part of the countryside.

  Choughs were raucous overhead. They looked like skinny crows, except they had red legs and feet. Some had red beaks, too. Others had yellow. Dad said they were two different kinds of bird. Annette didn't worry about that one way or the other. She was happy enough admiring them. They swooped and tumbled in the air like Olympic gymnasts. Unlike gymnasts, they didn't have to worry about falling.

  Having branches in new leaf overhead was nice. Annette enjoyed the shade. When she got to Marseille, her hands would be suntanned. So would a rectangle that included the bottom of her forehead, the skin around her eyes, the top of her nose, and the top of her cheeks. The rest of her? Fishbelly white. When you saw people with really strange patterns of tan and pale skin in the home timeline, you could bet they'd been out working in the alternates.

  Mom was as bad off as Annette was. Dad wasn't, not quite— at least his whole face saw the sun. At the moment, he looked worried. "This is the worst part," he said for the third or fourth time that morning. "If we can get through this stretch, it's all downhill from here." He meant that literally as well as figuratively.

  Something changed, up in the air. Annette looked up, trying to see what it was. She didn't see anything for a moment. Then she realized that was the problem. The choughs were gone. The caravan hadn't bothered them. What would have?

  Up ahead, the road turned a corner. She couldn't see what lay around the corner because of the trees. She didn't think much of it when her part of the caravan stopped. That happened every now and then. You didn't need a freeway to make a traffic jam. Horses and mules and people and a narrow road would do the job just fine. If another good-sized party was trying to come up this dirt track while her caravan was going down it...

  The caravanmaster's horn blew urgently from the head of the column. Guards pounded up toward the van. Annette couldn't see how the pikemen kept from fouling one another with their long-shafted weapons, but they did.

  "I don't like the look of that," Mom said.

  "Neither do I." Dad pulled the pistol from his belt. He was one of the most peaceable men in the world, but even peaceable men had trouble staying that way if the people around them wouldn't.

  The volley of musket fire came from the woods on both sides of the road. The roar was like the end of the world. Wounded men screamed. So did wounded horses. Their cries of pain were terrible. Women on the rack might have shrieked like that. Dad cried out and stared at his hand. He was only slightly wounded—but the precious pistol went flying. In the movies, cops shot pistols out of bad guys' hands all the time. In real life, that was wildly unlikely. But unlikely didn't mean impossible. Whoever fired at him doubtless hadn't tried to knock away the handgun. He'd done it, though, try or not.

  Another volley boomed. Thick smoke showed where the musketeers hid behind trees and rocks. It smelled like a Fourth of July fireworks display in a park. Warm summer nights and fireflies didn't belong in this chaos, but Annette couldn't help thinking of them. The smell of gunpowder smoke summoned them to her mind.

  "Get the gun!" Dad said urgently. He was opening and closing his right hand, trying to make it work again, while blood dripped from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.

  Annette took two steps toward the pistol. Then a spooked horse bowled her over. She squawked and fell. The horse didn't trample her. That was good luck, the way Dad's losing the handgun was bad luck. The beast's hooves thumped down all around her. It could as easily have kicked her in the head.

  As soon as the horse thudded away, Annette's mother pulled her to her feet. "Are you all right?" Mom asked in a strange, shaky voice.

  "Get the pistol!" Dad said again, and then, "Where the devil did it go?" The horse that had knocked Annette down wasn't the only one going crazy. One of the animals must have kicked it away—in the chaos, who could say where?

  And Annette and her mother got no ti
me to search for it. Men were running out of the woods. Some wore robes, others tunics and breeches. Some had swords, some had spears, some had pistols. A few wore helmets. None seemed to have any other armor. They were all screeching like banshees.

  "Run!" Dad shouted. "I'll hold them off!"

  But there was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. The brigands were coming from both sides. One of them grabbed Annette. She flipped him over her shoulder and slammed him to the ground. She'd taken years of judo classes. She'd never imagined they would come in handy against a ruffian who might not have had a bath in his whole life. But they did. Nobody in this world fought like that. The bandit landed on his head and lay still afterwards. Annette hoped she hadn't killed him, but she didn't hope very hard.

  She sent another man flying a moment later. Then somebody clouted her just above the ear with a spearshaft. All the judo classes in the world couldn't help her with that. The world flared red for a moment, then went black. She crumpled, and never knew when she hit the ground.

  The caravanmaster's horn call meant trouble up ahead. Clutching his pike, Jacques trotted forward to see what had gone wrong. Up till now, nothing had. Older men who'd made a lot of these journeys were talking about how smooth this one was. Talking too soon was never a good idea.

  If a robber band wanted to strike the caravan, this was a good place to do it. The forest came down close to the road on either side. They weren't close to any towns. All the same, Jacques had trouble believing anyone would try to bother this particular caravan. Its guards and merchants could put up a good fight.

  Then he saw the roadblock ahead. The tree trunks and boulders made sure nobody was going forward. From behind the roadblock, a man shouted in Arabic: "Surrender, you dogs! You cannot hope to get away!"

  "If you want us, you'll have to take us!" the caravanmaster yelled back. He was up on horseback. His sword leaped free of the scabbard. The blade flashed in the sun. He shouted again, this time in French: "God and Jesus and sweet Henri with us!"