Thud-thump! Dirt falling on a body made a dreadfully final sound. The gravediggers filled in the hole, compacting the dirt with their shovels. Then they took some of the stones the crew behind them were using to fill in the roadbed. They tamped those down on top of the grave, too, so wolves or foxes or wolverines would have a harder time digging in. Again, the guards let them doit.
That could have happened to me. A chill ran through Jacques in spite of the heat of the day. If somebody thumped him, he knew he might lose his temper and go after his tormentor. And if he did, he would lie dead moments later. He would go into the ground without even the proper last rites. As far as he knew, he was the only Christian here. If he died without confession, without forgiveness, where else could he go but straight to hell?
But if anybody treated him like a lumpish farm animal, if he snapped and hit back without even thinking . . .
Did all slaves feel this way all the time? Jacques hadn't, not up till now. That other death made him feel the possibility of his own in a way he never had before. He was close to the edge of doing murder, and just as close to being murdered on account of it.
Once the brief funeral was over, the roadbuilding gang went back to work. The guards didn't even have to order the slaves into action. They just fell to, as if they had nothing else to do with their time. Jacques found that he wasn't sorry to be swinging the pick again. The harder he worked, the less he had to think about what had happened there that afternoon.
Along with the rest of the gang, he tramped back to the manor for supper. After he ate, his time was his own. He usually did what the rest of the roadbuilders did: he went straight to sleep. Sometimes, when he had more spirit than usual, he would wash a little before falling into bed. The Muslims washed a little more often than he did. So did the men whose language was all sneezes and snorts. The ones who spoke the language that sounded a little like Arabic washed less often. To him, it didn't make much difference one way or the other.
This evening, though, he walked in the courtyard with Khadija. He was glad she wasn't too tired to come walking with him. In a low voice, he told her what had happened. He spoke French, hoping no one else here understood it.
"That poor fool," she said in the same language when he finished. "Oh, that poor, brave fool."
"The musket wouldn't even shoot for him," Jacques said bitterly. "Are these people evil wizards with spells on their weapons?"
Khadija shook her head. "No, no, no. It's only a trick that poor slave didn't know. I do know about these muskets." How did she know? The same way she knew about transposition chambers? How was that? Jacques didn't even have the chance to ask, for she went on, "They have a little lever on the side that clicks back and forth." She showed him what she meant with a stiff forefinger. "It's called the 'safety.' When it's in one place, the musket can't shoot even if someone pulls the trigger. It can't go off by accident, either. You have to move the safety to the other place before the musket will work. The slave wouldn't have known about that."
"I sure didn't. I never thought of such a thing." Jacques scratched his head. "It's a good idea, though, isn't it? With a gun that spits so many bullets, you don't want it spitting them by mistake."
"That's why they have the safety." Khadija cocked her head to one side, studying him as daylight leaked out of the sky. "You're clever, to figure that out so fast."
"Am I?" Even to himself, Jacques sounded bleak. "But you already knew it, didn't you? How?"
Khadija stopped. She looked up at him, there in the deepening twilight. To a guard watching from the manor's outer wall, it must have seemed like a tender moment. "I'm not going to tell you that," she replied. "If you think about it, you'll probably come up with the right answer. But don't ask me if you do, because I won't tell you if it is, either."
"Why not?" Jacques didn't feel tender. He was angry. "The way you go on about this and that and the other thing, you might as well be one of these people yourself." His wave took in the whole manor—and the road and the gardens outside, too.
Khadija looked horrified. No, she looked terrified. Or was it both at once? Both at once, Jacques decided. She tried to stare in every direction at once. "I just hope to heaven they didn't hear you, or they didn't understand you if they did."
"How come?" Jacques demanded, but her fright made him lower his voice. "The way you're carrying on, you really are one of. . . ." He ran down like a water wheel whose stream dried up. Of itself, his hand shaped the sign of the wheel. "Oh, Jesus and Henri," he whispered. "You are."
She didn't answer. For a heartbeat, that puzzled him. Then he remembered she'd told him she wouldn't. She'd also told him he could figure out what the truth was. Well, he had, all right, and plainly faster than she'd thought he would. Maybe he really was clever. If so, he wished he were stupid. Some things hardly seemed worth finding out.
After a moment, she said, "There's a difference between these people and me. You need to remember that."
Jacques nodded jerkily. "I'll say. They're the masters and the guards. You're a slave just like me. What bigger difference is there?"
"No, that's not what I meant," Khadija said. "The difference is, these people are outlaws. They're the worst kind of outlaws anybody's seen in a long, long time. If I could get to my . . . my duke, I guess you'd say, he'd land on them with both feet. He would, and he could—if I could let him know about this. By whatever oath you want from me, Jacques, I swear that's true." She took his hands in hers.
It must have looked like another tender moment. Jacques' head whirled, but not the way it should have around a pretty girl. If she could get away, she might be able to rescue all the slaves. That was what it boiled down to. "How do I help?" he asked.
"Well, I don't know yet," she answered. "But if I get the chance, I'll take you with me if I can. All right?"
"If it helps me get away from this place, it's better than all right," Jacques said.
Annette lay on her bed in the women's dormitory. She felt sick to her stomach, and it had nothing to do with the food slaves got here. She'd just broken about half the rules Crosstime Traffic set. And she hadn't just broken the rules. She'd thrown down the pieces and danced on them.
No matter what she'd done, and no matter what she might do, nothing she did could come close to what the slavers were doing. Remembering that helped steady her. Yes, she'd given away most of the Crosstime Traffic secret to somebody from another alternate. Well, so what? Look what these people were doing!
As if to prove as much, one of the house slaves came in and lay down on her bed. She was young and good-looking, and she'd been summoned to the master's residence. That was another thing a slaveowner could do—and a slave couldn't stop him, not unless she wanted something even worse to happen to her. There was one more charge against these people, too.
House slaves didn't have to work as hard as the ones who went out to the gardens. For a little while, Annette had hoped she would get called back to the manor. That was the kind of hope a slave had—not to do what she wanted, but to do something a little less nasty than something else. Now, though, Annette decided she didn't mind going out to the vegetable gardens. She didn't want anybody noticing her the way that pretty house slave had been noticed.
To help keep that from happening, Annette didn't keep herself as clean as she might have. If she had a smudge of dirt on one cheek, if her hair was matted and greasy, if she didn't smell very good, if onions filled her breath, who would pay attention to her like that? She wanted to wash. She wanted hardly anything more. One of the hardest things about going to the alternates was dealing with filth. Here, though, it made for protective coloration. Annette shook her head. No, protective discoloration was more like it.
In a bed not far away, Emishtar was snoring. The other woman had as much to worry about as Annette. In fact, since she was older and from a low-tech alternate, she probably wasn't anywhere near as healthy, so she had more to worry about. But she didn't seem to worry nearly so much. She just went on d
oing as little as she could get away with. The only thing that did seem to bother her was too much work.
/ should be so lucky, Annette thought. In spite of her worries, she found herself yawning. All of them put together couldn't keep her awake till midnight, not with the day she'd put in. She yawned again, and fell asleep.
Somebody banging on a gong woke her much too early the next morning. That was low-tech, which didn't mean it didn't work. She yawned and rolled out of bed. Every time she did that, she shook her head in disbelief. This was her life? All she had to look forward to was another day of pulling weeds under the hot sun? Such as it was, this was it, all right.
And she had to move fast, too, or she wouldn't have time to finish breakfast, or maybe even get any. As she left the women's barracks, her eyes went toward the building she'd come out of when she got to this alternate. Somewhere down in the subbase-ment, a transposition chamber came and went. If she could get aboard it...
She laughed at herself. That would have been funny if it weren't so sad. For one thing, she had no idea when the chamber came and went. For another, the way down was always guarded. In the movies, one unarmed person could take on a swarm of guards with assault rifles and win. Annette wished life imitated art. The third-quarter moon rode high in the southern sky. She could wish for that, too, while she was at it.
Men and women were lining up for breakfast. They mingled only at meals and in the little stretch of time after supper and before sleep. Whoever set this place up might have been—had been—evil, but wasn't stupid. Far from it, worse luck. Making attachments hard to form let everything run more smoothly. People in love would take chances for the ones they loved that they wouldn't take in ordinary times.
Jacques came in a few minutes after Annette. He waved to her. She smiled and nodded back. If she got out of here, she would have to try to bring him with her, or to come back if she made it alone. It wasn't just that she'd promised, though she had. But getting down to that subbasement might take more muscle than any one person had.
What would Crosstime Traffic do with her—do to her—if she brought Jacques back to the home timeline? What would the company do with—do to—Jacques? Annette shrugged. She'd worry about that when the time came, if it came. She had plenty of worse things to worry about now.
One of those worries was, what if getting down to the sub-basement took more muscle than any two people had? What was she supposed to do then? Lead a slave revolt? She quailed at the thought. She didn't like leading any better than she liked following. She couldn't even talk to most of the slaves. And if they did rise, the guards would massacre them—and would laugh while they were doing it, too. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name.
Details, details. She mocked herself. It might have been funny if it weren't so sad.
She took a bowl. She took a spoon. A cook—another slave— dipped a ladle in a big pot of porridge and filled her bowl. She got plenty. The one cruelty they seemed to skip here was starving the slaves. It wasn't exciting—barley and peas and beans stewed forever, with chopped sausage and onions thrown in for flavor. But it wasn't terrible. Some of the slaves said they were eating better than they ever had in their lives.
Emishtar sat down beside her. "Good morning," Annette said in the language that sounded a little like Arabic but wasn't.
"Good morning," the older woman answered in Arabic.
"You good?" Annette asked.
Emishtar nodded. "I good. Thank you. You good?"
"I good, too. Thank you."
On they went, each using the other's language as best she could. As long as they stuck to clichés and stock phrases, they did all right. When they tried to go beyond those, they had more trouble. Every day, though, each of them learned a few more words. Almost every day, one of them figured out something new about the grammar in the other's language. They had a long way to go, but they were gaining.
Emishtar glanced over toward Jacques. "Nice young man," she remarked, her voice very, very casual.
"Is she?" Annette tried to be casual, too. Making a mistake like that didn't help. Emishtar laughed her head off. Annette tried again: "Is he?"
"I think so," the older woman said. "I think you think so, too."
Annette's ears heated. "And so?" she said. That made a handy, all-purpose question.
Emishtar grinned at her. "And so nothing. Nice young man, is all." It wasn't all. It wasn't even close to all, not by that grin. She enjoyed teasing Annette. She wasn't mean about it—she did it the way a friend would.
If I'm stuck here for good. . . Annette didn't want to think like that, not when she knew the transposition chamber came and went down there in the subbasement. But the slavers were careful. They had to be. If they slipped up, they knew what kind of trouble they'd land in.
In the movies and on TV, bad guys did dumb things and got caught because of it. Annette supposed that was true a lot of the time in real life, too. But the only mistake these people had made that she could see was buying her for a slave—and they didn't know she was from the home timeline.
"Come on! Time to work!" a guard shouted. Annette understood the words in Arabic, and she understood them in Em-ishtar's language, too. Was that progress, or was it a sign she'd already been here too long?
Men on horseback trotted up the road from the manor toward Jacques and the rest of the roadbuilding gang. Jacques would have ridden by the side of the road, not on the paving stones—horses liked soft ground underfoot better than hard rock. Maybe the guards on the horses didn't know that. They didn't seem like especially good riders. But they had those quick-shooting muskets slung over their shoulders. They weren't going out there to mix it up. They were going out to shoot whatever got in their way. How good a horseman did you need to be to do that?
The guards keeping an eye on the roadbuilders waved to the riders as they went past. Some of the horsemen waved back. They called out in the language that sounded like the one Englishmen used. That would have done Jacques more good if he'd spoken any English.
Off the riders went, down the track in the direction from which that horseman had come before. On the track, the horses kicked up a cloud of dust. People who were paying attention would have time to disappear before the riders got dangerously close. If a dozen men with muskets like that had been after Jacques, he would have done his best to disappear.
He shoveled some dirt into a basket, then turned to one of the slaves swinging a pick. "If you had to, how would you fight these people?" he asked in quiet Arabic.
"How?" The Muslim paused to wipe sweat off his forehead with his arm. "Carefully, by God—that's how." He also spoke in a low voice.
Jacques laughed, but it was one of those painfully true jokes. "What could you do against them? Hope to catch one alone and stab him in the back?"
"Probably your best chance," the other man agreed. "Odds are bad, though. I wouldn't want to try it at all, not unless I had to. I'd have about as much chance as a farm dog going up against an armored man."
One of the remaining guards strode toward them. "Enough chatter," he said. "Pay attention to what you're supposed to be doing."
With a sigh—a soft, quiet sigh—Jacques shoveled more dirt into the basket. That other slave swung his pick. The guard turned around and walked away. / might jump him from behind, Jacques thought. I know about the safety, thanks to Khadija.
If he could get a guard's musket and shoot all the other guards right here before they realized he understood how to use the weapon . . . Well, then what? The sound of gunfire would bring more guards. They would open up while he was still explaining to the other men who would snatch up muskets what a safety was and how to move it so their new firearms would shoot. And he could only talk to men who spoke Arabic.
He was ready—he was eager—to take chances to be free. But he saw the difference between taking chances and committing suicide. Trying to jump a guard and steal his musket seemed suicidal. Too bad, Jacques thought. Too bad, too bad.
What would happen if he just tried to run away? Again, he didn't need to be a monk or a scholar to figure that out. They would go after him, and they would probably catch him. When they did, they would make him very unhappy. He didn't know how, but he was sure they would. Anybody whose slave tried to run away would punish him once they got him back. These people seemed likely to be very, very good at punishment.
He glanced over at another guard. Even if he could grab a musket, even if he could arm his fellow slaves, even if he could get rid of all the guards and capture the manor and kill the master, he'd still be stuck here. He couldn't go back to the Madrid from which he'd been yanked, much less to the Kingdom of Versailles.
But there was a link between this place and Madrid. The transposition chamber. He had no idea how to make it work. He didn't, no. Khadija does. She belongs to these people, but she's not bad like most of them.
He wondered how he was so sure. He knew her better than he knew the ones who'd enslaved him. And she's too pretty to be bad. He did laugh at himself this time, and loaded another shovelful of dirt into the basket.
Eight
Day followed day. Annette quickly lost track of which day of the week it was. That didn't seem to matter. About all she had to measure time were the ripening of the vegetables and the slow swing of the sun to the south. The weather got cooler—cooler, yes, but not really cold.
Emishtar greeted the sun with a prayer every morning. At first, it was just noise to Annette. A few words at a time, a few phrases at a time, she learned to understand the whole thing. It was rather pretty. It was also another sign of how much time she'd spent here. Too much, too much, she thought.
More slaves, men and women, came up from the subbase-ment one night. They were blonds and redheads, with fair, freckled skins and eyes of blue or green or gray. When summer's full heat came back, they would roast. None of the slaves spoke a language they understood, while theirs made no sense to anyone else. The guards could shout at them and make sense, but the guards had implants, so they were able to learn languages in a hurry.
In High Places Page 13
