In High Places Read online

  What alternate were the newcomers from? One where Crosstime Traffic did business? Or one like this, where the slavers had it all to themselves? Annette couldn't tell on her own, and had no way to ask.

  With the newcomers getting the hardest jobs, some of the women who'd been tending vegetables became house slaves. When Annette stayed put in the garden plot, Emishtar said, "They should have brought you in. You are too smart for this." Her Arabic was getting pretty good, too.

  "I do not mind," Annette said.

  Emishtar laughed. "I know why you do not mind, too. That is one of the things that can happen to a slave woman."

  "I do not want it to happen to me." Annette was proud of herself. She just said it. She didn't scream it.

  "It can happen to you if you stay out here, too," the older woman said.

  "Don't remind me," Annette answered in Arabic—she didn't know how to put that into Emishtar's language.

  Emishtar either understood it or figured out what it had to mean. She laughed again. "I do not think you have to worry so much, though, not for a while," she said.

  "No? Why not?" Annette asked.

  "The master and the guards will try the new ones. They are new. And they look strange. That will make them seem . . . interesting."

  Annette thought Emishtar was half right. Blondes and redheads might seem unusual to the older woman, but they wouldn't to somebody from the home timeline. Still, the rest of what the older woman said was true. The blondes and redheads were the new fish, so they probably would seem extra interesting for a while. Who'd said variety was the life of spice? Annette didn't think it was Ambrose Bierce, even if it sounded cynical enough to come from him.

  While they were in the garden plots, the guards spent most of their time yelling at the new slave women. The language they used was oddly musical. It reminded Annette a little of an Irish brogue. On a visit to the west of Ireland a couple of years before, she and her folks had stopped at a pub for lunch. She'd needed a while to realize most of the Irishmen and -women eating and drinking there were speaking Erse, not English. The sounds of the older tongue had flavored the way they spoke hers.

  So maybe these are Celts, too, she thought. Their looks argued for it. But that didn't say anything about which alternate they'd been stolen from.

  They exclaimed at the hoes and trowels and three-tined cultivators they were supposed to use. To Annette, the tools were the most ordinary things in the world. They looked like Home Depot or Wal-Mart specials. They likely were—Annette's skirt had a label that said Wal-Mart—made in Bangladesh on it. Why get anything fancy and expensive for slaves? But they seemed something special to the fair-skinned women.

  Watching them, Emishtar smiled, showing off her crooked front teeth. "When I first come here, I thinks tools very good, too," she said.

  "They're all right." Annette didn't want to get excited about them.

  "Gooder than all right." Emishtar's grammar slipped—so did Annette's a lot of the time—but she made herself understood. She went on, "All tools this kind, all tools that kind, all same. AW just the same. All good, smooth handles. Not too heavy. Not too—" She paused and raised an eyebrow, looking for help.

  "Light?" Annette said. She picked up a pebble and easily tossed it up and down. "Light."

  "Light. Yes. Thank you. Is the word." Emishtar nodded. "Not too heavy. Not too light. All good to use."

  To her, as to the—Celtic?—women, tools were made one at a time, by hand. No wonder they got excited when they saw several that were just alike. / should have figured that out sooner, Annette thought, feeling dumb. She might take mass production for granted, but people from a low-tech alternate wouldn't. To them, it was as strange and marvelous as a transposition chamber, maybe more so.

  Once she'd read a story—she didn't know if it was true—set in the days when high technology hadn't yet spread all over the home timeline. An African from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere had to come into the big city for some reason or other. He saw an airplane flying overhead, but it didn't mean much to him. Maybe he thought it was magic, or maybe he didn't realize people rode inside it. Then he saw a two-horse team pulling a carriage. He laughed and snapped his fingers and exclaimed, "Why didn't I think of that?"

  The horse and carriage lay within the range of what he could understand, even if he hadn't thought of the arrangement till he saw it. The airplane was as far over his head in terms of ideas as it was high up in the sky. In the same way, the Celts—and Emishtar—could admire the gardening tools. They could see what those were for and how well they were made. The transposition chamber was beyond them. Even the safety on an assault rifle had been beyond that luckless slave in Jacques' gang.

  "Come on, get to work!" a guard shouted to her in Arabic. "You think you can stand around lollygagging all day long? Things don't work that way around here. You better believe they don't!"

  "I am so sorry. Please forgive me," Annette said. She got down on her hands and knees and started weeding. The guard went off to yell at somebody else. Annette hated acting like— well, like a slave. But sometimes the guards didn't just yell. Sometimes they smacked somebody with a billy club or a rifle butt or gave somebody a kick in the backside or in the ribs. Annette thought that enjoying hitting people who couldn't hit back was part of what went into being a guard.

  After this one got out of earshot, Emishtar whispered, "I so sorry, too. I so sorry guard not dead. I so sorry guard not on fire. I so sorry guard not in pile of manure. I so sorry guard not sick, horrible sick. I so sorry—"

  She went on for quite a while. She might not have known much Arabic. Everything she did know that was bad, she aimed at the guards. Long before she ran down, Annette was giggling helplessly. A guard sent her a suspicious look, but she was working as well as giggling. The guard didn't do anything but look.

  Emishtar said some things in her own language, too. Annette didn't understand all of that. What she could follow was along the same lines as the Arabic, but even juicier. She tried to remember some of the best parts.

  And Emishtar also showed her something else. The older woman had to do the work, just as Annette did. Even so, her spirit stayed free. Some of the slave women—and some of the slave men—seemed hardly more than beasts of burden to Annette. They'd accepted their fate. They were resigned to it. Emishtar reminded her it didn't have to be that way.

  And there were times when she needed reminding, too. Sometimes the home timeline felt a million miles away. Sometimes the transposition chamber in the subbasement also felt a million miles away. It might come and go, but how could a slave get down to it? Try as she would, Annette couldn't figure out a way to sneak past the guards or overpower them. And if she couldn't, she'd stay a slave forever.

  Here came the guards who'd ridden out like knights. Jacques counted them. They hadn't lost a man. What a shame, he thought. One of them had a bandaged forearm. He seemed more angry at himself than badly hurt. By the way his friends teased him, they thought the wound was pretty funny.

  For a moment, Jacques wondered why. War was a serious business, and the people on the other side were trying to hurt you just as hard as you were trying to hurt them. His leg still twinged every now and then to remind him the raiders who'd overrun his caravan had put a bullet through it.

  But that had been an even fight. Men on both sides used the same kinds of weapons. It didn't look as if the people around here had any firearms at all, let alone quick-shooting muskets like the ones the guards carried. Going up against them wouldn't be war, not in the true sense of the word. It wouldn't even be like hunting wolves, where your quarry was ferocious and had sharp teeth. It would be a lot more like hunting rabbits.

  Or, since you were hunting people, wouldn't it be a lot like murder?

  The guards didn't seem to think so. They were laughing and joking and telling stories. Jacques couldn't follow what they were saying, but he didn't need to know what the words meant. Their smiles and their gestures said they'd had a terrific
time doing whatever they'd done out there.

  One of them wore a strange necklace. That surprised Jacques—the guards didn't usually go in for display the way soldiers from the Kingdom of Versailles and its Muslim neighbors did. Then the man came close enough to let Jacques see what he'd strung on that cord.

  It was a necklace of human ears.

  A few bloodthirsty men in Jacques' kingdom kept souvenirs of their kills like that. Most, though, thought it was bragging. Jacques looked at it that way, too. And he wondered why anybody would want to brag about killing enemies who could hardly fight back. It didn't seem sporting.

  The guards keeping an eye on the roadbuilding gang called to the ones who'd gone . . . hunting. The horsemen in mottled clothes shouted back. Again, Jacques didn't need to know their language to have a notion of the kind of things they were saying. When a man threw back his head and thumped his chest as he spoke, he wasn't likely to be doing anything but boasting.

  One of the guards with the roadbuilders called, "We just taught the chicken thieves and cattle rustlers a lesson. See if they come bothering us any more."

  Jacques didn't know they'd come around before. He shrugged. Whatever the locals had done, what the guards did to them was like killing a mouse by dropping a building on its head.

  That guard went on talking in the language that sounded a little like Arabic, and then in the one that was full of hisses and sneezes. Jacques kept an eye on the slaves who spoke that tongue. He thought they were from right around here. They didn't look very happy. A couple of them muttered back and forth. But what could they do besides mutter? Not much, not that he could see.

  Then the guard spoke to the new men, the fair-haired men, who'd come up from the subbasement a few days earlier. Their speech reminded Jacques of the language men from Brittany used. He knew a few words of that tongue. The Duke of Brittany was a vassal—of sorts—to the King of Versailles. Some of the duke's men hardly spoke any French at all. If you didn't talk to them in Breton, you didn't talk to them.

  "Hello," Jacques said to a redheaded man with a droopy mustache. "Understand me?"

  He got back a wide-eyed stare. The other man's eyes were almost as green as leaves. "Understand," he said—or Jacques thought he did, anyway. It wasn't the same language as Breton, just one close to it, the way Catalan was close to French. When the redhead went on in a hurry, Jacques couldn't follow him at all.

  "No understand," he said, and threw his hands in the air. He knew only a few words of Breton. It wasn't like Arabic, which he actually spoke, even if he didn't speak it well. "Go slow," he added.

  Maybe the redhead didn't understand that, because he babbled on, fast as a galloping horse. Jacques put his two index fingers together, then very slowly moved them apart. Maybe sign language would work.

  And maybe nothing would. A guard yelled in the redhead's language—he had no trouble using it. Jacques wondered how the guards all spoke so many languages so well. Maybe Khadija knew. She knew all kinds of curious things. But Jacques didn't get a chance to wonder much about that. As soon as the guard got done yelling at the redhead, he switched to Arabic and yelled at Jacques: "Go on, you lazy good-for-nothing, dig! You didn't come out here so you could gab!" He set a hand on the club he wore on his belt to show what would happen if Jacques didn't dig.

  Jacques dug. Most of the time, the guards didn't threaten more than once. After that, they really walloped you. If you were dumb enough not to work while they were keeping an eye on you, you almost deserved to get clobbered. And if you were dumb enough to work hard when the guards weren't watching, you almost deserved . . . what?

  To be a slave, that's what, Jacques decided.

  After a bit, the man in the mottled clothes decided to bother somebody else. Jacques hadn't expected anything else. As soon as the fellow's eyes weren't on him any more, he slacked off. He had the chance to look this way and that and see what was going on around him. The first thing he saw was that the redhead with the droopy mustache was watching him.

  Plainly, the new slave didn't speak Arabic. Jacques tried him with French. So far, the only person here with whom he could speak his own language was Khadija—one more reason for him to think she was special. The redheaded man shook his head and spread his hands and shrugged. French didn't work.

  It would have to be Breton, then, or Jacques' tiny bits and pieces of it. He pointed towards a guard and said the nastiest thing he knew how to say. Would that make any sense to the redhead?

  The man's eyes widened again. He snorted. He almost giggled. He turned very red—his skin was so fair, it made the flush easy to see. He pointed toward the guard and said something else. Jacques wasn't sure exactly what it meant. He thought it had to do with horses—parts of horses, anyway. He knew which part of a horse he thought the guard was. He grinned at the redhead and nodded.

  "Dumnorix." The man with the mustache pointed at himself.

  Jacques gave his own name. He pointed at the redhead and tried to pronounce Dumnorix. The other man corrected him. When Dumnorix tried to say Jacques, he had trouble with the first sound. Jacques repeated it. On Dumnorix's second try, he got it right—or close enough, anyhow.

  That still didn't give them much to talk about. They could swear at the guards, but they'd been doing that before they found they had any words in common. Now Jacques could follow some of Dumnorix's bad language. And if Jacques cursed in Breton instead of French or Arabic, Dumnorix could understand some of that.

  Can I tell him about the safety on the guards' muskets? Jacques wondered. That was something Dumnorix needed to know. If he wanted to make trouble, and if he wanted to do it without getting killed right away, he had to know it.

  But when Jacques tried to explain, he ran into a stone wall. The man with the red mustache figured out he was talking about muskets. Jacques' sign language and his handful of words were plenty for that. To Dumnorix, though, the weapons weren't tools like picks and shovels. If Jacques understood him rightly, he thought they were magical.

  Try as Jacques would, he couldn't convince Dumnorix that magic had nothing to do with it. Dumnorix saw a thing that went bang! over here and killed somebody over there. He didn't see how the one was connected to the other.

  How did gunpowder work? Jacques couldn't explain that, though there were men back in the Kingdom of Versailles who could have. Jacques just knew that it worked. That wasn't enough for Dumnorix.

  Sometimes Jacques wanted to knock sense into the older man's foolish head. And then he wondered how Khadija felt when she was trying to explain things like the transposition chamber to him. Would it ever be anything but magic, as far as he was concerned? You got in it, it didn't seem to move, but you were somewhere else when you got out again. If that wasn't magic, what was it?

  It wasn't magic to Khadija, because she knew that it worked, maybe even how it worked. Jacques stopped being quite so annoyed with Dumnorix. Weren't the two of them in the same boat?

  Emishtar turned out to be right about the newly arrived women. The master forgot about the slaves who'd been there for a while. He started summoning the blondes and redheads who had come out of the subbasement. Some of them just went. Some raised a fuss. They ended up going anyway. They came back in tears.

  "Is part of being slave," Emishtar said in her halting Arabic.

  "It shouldn't be." Annette was furious. She'd read about things like this, but she'd never dreamt she would see them. She'd especially never dreamt they would happen because of people from the home timeline. "Women shouldn't have to put up with things like this."

  Emishtar's laugh sounded old as time. "Go ahead. Make men listen to you." She laughed again.

  In the home timeline, there were laws against things like this. Not only that, strong customs backed up the laws there. Annette would have said everybody followed those customs. And she would have been wrong, wrong, wrong. The proof of that was right here. Some people—not many, but enough—behaved the way they should as long as anybody was watching. As soon as th
e eyes went away . . .

  As soon as the eyes went away, they turned into slave drivers. Literally.

  What did they say, back in the home timeline, to explain why they were away so much? Were they supposed to be on vacation? On business trips? Working in some foreign country. If you googled them thoroughly, would a pattern show up? Of course it would. It would have to. Keeping a secret these days was next to impossible once somebody decided to look for it.

  The only way to keep a secret was not to let anybody know you had one in the first place. Then no one would start searching to see what it was.

  Too late, Annette thought. Much too late. Somebody from the home timeline who isn't in on it knows. All Annette had to do was get back and start sending e-mail and calling people on the phone.

  Now she laughed, almost as bitterly as Emishtar had. Yeah, that was all. Easy. Ha!

  Her friend eyed her. "What is joke?" Emishtar asked. If you had a joke, you told it. You didn't just sit on it. There were no written rules here, but that seemed to be one of the strongest unwritten rules. Things that were funny were too precious to be hoarded.

  "It's on me," Annette said. "If I could get away, if I could get back to where I come from, I have friends I could tell what's happened, friends who would rescue me." She spoke in short phrases to give Emishtar a better chance to understand.

  And the older woman did—or at least she understood the words. "But what is the joke?" she asked again, using her own language instead of Arabic.

  "If I could go back where I come from, I wouldn't need rescuing!" Annette exclaimed. "I would be free." She laughed again.

  This time, so did Emishtar. "Oh, yes. That is funny. That would be funny, only. . . ." She pantomimed laughing and crying at the same time. She was a natural mimic and actress. Annette wondered if they had theaters in whatever alternate she came from. If they did, she wondered whether women could perform in them. Or were they like the ones in ancient Greece and Shakespeare's London, where men and boys played all the parts?