In High Places Read online

  Jacques put his hand on her shoulder. She started to pull away, but then stood still. Gently, he said, "You can't even talk to her, can you?"

  "No." Khadija looked out at the rain. "What's that got to do with anything? She's still a person, isn't she?"

  "Some people wouldn't worry as much about their friends as you do about her," Jacques said.

  "My friends have the sense to take care of themselves—like you, for instance," Khadija said. "Birigida needs somebody to worry about her."

  "When you're home, you probably take in lost puppies and kittens, too," Jacques said. She stirred under his hand. He guessed that meant he was right. "Puppies and kittens don't know any better than to get lost. This Birigida does, or she ought to. Worrying about her won't get you anywhere—unless you land in trouble along with her."

  Khadija's sigh held more winter than the weather. "That makes more sense than I wish it did."

  "All right, then. You're a sensible person. You're the most sensible person I've ever met, I think. So listen to me, all right?" Khadija didn't tell him no. He knew she heard him. Listen to him? That, he feared, was another story.

  When the weather was bad, the guards didn't make people stay busy for the sake of staying busy. Annette had wondered if they would. Busywork fit the way the late twenty-first century thought. But there was only so much of it to do. And the house slaves didn't want the garden slaves helping.

  Annette needed a little while to figure out why. The house slaves feared the garden slaves would steal their jobs. They didn't want to leave the manor. They thought they would have to do harder, less comfortable work outside—and they were probably right.

  Even if they were, seeing how they acted made her sad. All the slaves should have pulled together against the people who ordered them around. They should have, but they didn't. They had factions, too, and the masters and the guards used those factions to keep them divided among themselves. Annette began to understand how masters in the home timeline had stayed on top for so long, even in places where slaves outnumbered them.

  She tried to talk about that with Emishtar. By the look the older woman gave her, Emishtar had always understood it. "Masters are masters," she said—she might have been talking about the weather. "Some not so bad, some bad, some worse. But always masters—oh, yes."

  "There shouldn't be any," Annette said fiercely. "Not anywhere. Keeping slaves is a great wickedness." In the home timeline, she didn't think she'd ever needed that word. But she didn't know another one that fit.

  "Being a slave is a great sorrow," Emishtar said. "If I had silver, though, if I had gold, would I buy slaves for myself? Of course I would. Why should I work like a donkey when someone else can work for me?"

  I can't blame her, not really, Annette thought. She's from a low-tech alternate. She doesn't know about machines. Slaves are the only labor-saving devices she does know. But slaves don't save labor, not really. They just put it on someone else's shoulders.

  Birigida worked harder when she had nothing to do than she did out in the garden plot. Everything she did was aimed at getting a house slave's job. She could see house slaves didn't have to do so much, too.

  Nothing she tried did any good. The house slaves either ignored her or screamed at her. None of them spoke her language, but that didn't matter. A shout and a scowl and a clenched fist meant the same thing to everybody. And the guards only laughed at her. They spoke her tongue, but that didn't help her. They wouldn't do anything for her. They'd seen she didn't want to work, so they wanted to make sure she did. One of them pointed in the direction of the garden, said something Annette couldn't follow, and laughed. You'll stay there till you rot, Annette guessed.

  Could looks have killed, the guard would have started rotting right then.

  The next day, Birigida hatched another scheme that didn't work and got her yelled at. "She'd better be careful," Annette said to Emishtar. "If she doesn't watch it, they'll put her on the roadbuilding gang."

  She meant it for a joke, but Emishtar took it seriously. "Serve her right, too," she said. Emishtar made a good friend— Annette had seen that. If she wasn't your friend, though, you weren't much more than a beast to her. Birigida was not her friend. To Emishtar, Birigida was a beast you couldn't count on, nothing more.

  After the storm finally blew off to the east, the guards took the women out to the garden plots. The roadbuilders got to stay in for another day. Some of the women grumbled. Annette wasn't overjoyed herself, but she understood. You couldn't make a roadbed from soupy mud. You could pull a lot of weeds, though. They came out of soft dirt more easily than from hard.

  The ground was still wet when they went out to the gardens. Annette's shoes squelched in the mud. When she got down on her hands and knees and started weeding, she got her dress filthy. That would have been more annoying to a slave in the home timeline than it was here. Here, at least, the slaves could get plenty of clean clothes.

  Some of the women had been surprised they didn't have to spin and weave, especially while it was raining. Annette wasn't, or not very. Her long cotton skirt came from Wal-Mart.

  What it meant to Annette was that the slaveowners found it easier or cheaper to buy clothes in the home timeline than to have their slaves make them. Or maybe they just hadn't thought of that. Maybe they would one of these days. Maybe listening to their own slaves would give them ideas. Annette hoped not. They'd already had too many ideas, and too many bad ones.

  As the women started to work, a guard came over and stood in front of Birigida. She looked up at him the way a kid who'd got caught doing something he wasn't supposed to at school looked at the principal. He growled at her. She nodded. He growled again. She nodded again. It went on for quite a while. At last, the guard turned his back and stomped away. He didn't kick mud in her face, but he might as well have. She bent down and started weeding as if her life depended on it.

  Maybe it did.

  Watching her, Annette worried. She couldn't keep that pace up for long. Nobody could. And when she slowed down, how much would she slow down? To what the rest of the slaves were doing? That would be enough to keep her out of trouble, anyway. Or would she slow down the way she usually did, doing so little she got noticed?

  Annette knew which way she'd guess. She wished she didn't.

  Emishtar also watched Birigida working. The woman with the crooked front teeth wasn't impressed, either. "Soon she will see a bird, or a leaf going by. That will be interesting. She will stop and watch. And she will forget what she is supposed to do."

  "She shouldn't," Annette said with a sigh. "I wish she wouldn't."

  Emishtar only shrugged. "They watch her all the time now. They don't watch us so much. So we don't have to do so much. We ought to thank her."

  That was more cold-blooded than Annette could make herself be. She'd seen hard living in the alternate Jacques came from. She'd lived hard herself, but she'd always known she was playacting. Till those raiders caught her, the home timeline had never been far away. Emishtar, by contrast, had never had it easy. She probably ate better and worked less as a slave than she had when she was free. That didn't leave a whole lot of room inside her for compassion.

  A blackbird hopped in the field. He caught worm after worm. He liked rain fine—it made the worms come up. She could watch the blackbird and work at the same time. Could Birigida? Annette kept sneaking glances over at her. The blond woman had slowed down some from her frantic opening burst, but she was still going pretty well. Annette nodded to herself in relief. She hadn't thought Birigida had it in her.

  Emishtar must not have, either. "Maybe the guard really say he will kill her if she does not work," she said. "Maybe she believe him, too." She paused to murder a weed. "Me, I would have knocked her over the head a long time ago." Yes, the milk of human kindness ran thin in Emishtar.

  "She's—" Annette started to say Birigida wasn't a bad person. People in the home timeline always said that. Annette couldn't do it here, not with a straight face. Birig
ida was out for Birigida, first, last, and always. She didn't care who knew it, either. That made her less likely to get what she wanted, of course. If she were a little smarter, she would have figured that out for herself. If she were a little smarter, she wouldn't have had a lot of her problems. Annette tried again: "She's doing fine right now." There. She'd told the truth without even being insulting. They said it couldn't be done, she thought.

  "Right now, yes," Emishtar said. "Can she keep it up?"

  The guards wondered, too. They circled Birigida like vultures over roadkill. If she gave them any kind of excuse, they would pounce. What happened then wouldn't be pretty. Annette could see as much. Could the blond woman? She sure hadn't been able to up till now. But she kept working away, and did enough so the guards let her alone. She wasn't the best worker in the garden plot, but for once she wasn't the worst, either.

  She got through the whole day without more than a warning or two. Annette wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes.

  As the sun sank in the southwest, the women trooped back toward the manor. Birigida let out a long, weary sigh. Well, for once she'd earned the right. Then, with Annette only two or three meters away, the blond woman muttered, "Lord, am I beat," to herself. Annette took two more steps, then tripped and almost fell. Birigida had spoken in English.

  Ten

  Jacques had never seen Khadija so excited. She was doing her best not to show it, which was like asking a house not to show it was on fire. She all but dragged Jacques out into the courtyard after supper. The older woman with the crooked teeth who was her friend smiled out at both of them.

  No matter what Emishtar thought, Khadija wasn't excited about Jacques himself. He wished she would be, but no. In a ferocious whisper, Khadija said, "You know Birigida?"

  "The one who won't work?" Jacques said, and Khadija nodded. Jacques went on, "I can't help knowing of her. You've hardly talked about anybody else lately. What now?"

  "She speaks my language. "

  "Arabic?" Jacques scratched his head. They were using French now, but she was from Muslim Marseille, so Arabic would be her first language. "Lots of people here speak Arabic. I didn't know this Birigida did, but so what?"

  Khadija gave him an impatient look. "No, no, no—not Arabic. My language, the language I use every day in the world I come from." She said a couple of soft sentences in it.

  He felt like thumping his head with his hand to let some light in on his brains. He'd known for a while now that she wasn't exactly a Muslim trader's daughter from Marseille. He'd known and he'd forgotten, because it didn't seem to matter. Now he tried to find something to say that wasn't stupid. The best he could do was, "If I didn't know better, I'd say that sounded like English."

  Khadija laughed and laughed. She laughed so hard, other slaves and guards stared at her—and at Jacques. Jacques didn't even know what he'd said that was funny. Khadija laughed till she got the hiccups. "Oh, dear," she said in between them. "Oh, dear."

  When the hiccups wouldn't stop, Jacques pounded her on the back. It didn't do much good. Nothing did much good when somebody had the hiccups—you just had to wait for them to stop. "Are you all right?" he asked crossly.

  "I—hie!—think so," she said, and then, "Oh, dear," again.

  "Is she all right?" a guard called to Jacques. "She acts like she's having a fit."

  "She says she thinks she is," Jacques told him. The guard waved and nodded, as if to say, That's good. Jacques understood why he wondered—slaves were worth a lot of money. What he didn't understand was why Khadija had the fit in the first place. "Will you please tell me where the joke is?" he grumbled.

  Little by little, she won back control of herself. "Oh, dear," she said one more time. Then, at last, she managed something that made a little sense: "I'm sorry." She took a deep breath and held it. She was still hiccuping, but not so often. After she breathed out, she went on, "The joke is, I really do speak English." She kept her voice low, so no one but Jacques could hear. "It's not quite the same English as the one you know about, but it's pretty close."

  "Oh." He scratched his head. "I guess that's funny." He liked Khadija too much to come right out and say, It's not that funny.

  Even if he didn't say it, she must have understood what he was thinking. "I am sorry," she repeated. One of the reasons he liked her so much was that she had such a good idea of what was going on inside his head.

  "Why does it matter so much that she speaks English?" he asked. Most of what was in his head right now was confusion. "Maybe some people in her, uh, world use it, too." He thought French would make a better language for them to use, but that seemed beside the point.

  "No." Khadija shook her head. "She doesn't speak some other dialect, the way people in your England do. She speaks the same kind of English as I do—the same kind as the guards and the masters, too. She's just pretending to be one of those people like Dumnorix."

  "Who would want to do something like that?" Jacques thought it was the craziest thing he'd ever heard. "She makes a lousy slave. They beat her. They kick her. They could take her into a back room and—well, never mind. Henri on the wheel, they could kill her. We've talked about that. So if she's one of those people, why doesn't she say so? Then all those horrible things would stop happening to her."

  "I don't know. I wish I did," Khadija said. "I know what I hope, though. I hope she's here as a, a spy for our government. If she is, and if she can get back, they'll come and rescue everybody."

  "That would be good." Jacques would have got more excited if he thought it was likely. "If she was a spy, wouldn't she want them not to notice her at all?"

  Khadija bit her lip. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? But what else could she be? She's not an ordinary slave—I'm sure of that."

  "No, she's a stupid slave. She's a lazy slave," Jacques said. "So how will you find out about her?"

  He watched Khadija. She started to charge right into that, but stopped before she said anything. It wasn't as easy a question as it looked at first. That she saw as much made Jacques think even more of her good sense than he did already. At last, she said, "I'll have to find a chance to talk to her in English. I don't see what else I can do."

  "I guess so." Jacques had been looking for some other answer. He hadn't found one, either. He knew why that one bothered him: "Then she'll know you aren't just a trader's daughter, too."

  "You're right. That's what worries me." Khadija looked as unhappy as he felt.

  And if she wasn't just a trader's daughter . . . "What are you, anyway?"Jacques asked.

  "In one way, I am a trader's daughter, but not from Marseille in your world," Khadija answered. "In another way, I'm your friend, or I hope I am." She took hold of his hands.

  He squeezed hers, not too hard. "Yes," he said. "Oh, yes."

  Annette watched Birigida with different eyes. Her first hope had been that the blond woman was investigating the slavers and getting ready to lower the boom on them. She tried to make herself believe it. Try as she would, she couldn't. Jacques had hit that nail right on the head—he might not be educated, but he wasn't dumb. If Birigida was a cop or a detective, she wouldn't want the guards to pay her any special attention. And she couldn't have got any more notice from them if she dyed her hair purple and painted her face green.

  But if she wasn't a spy, what was she? Did she work for Crosstime Traffic the way Annette and her folks did? Had she got captured in a slave raid? That made some sense, but only some. Annette didn't think Crosstime Traffic let anyone as bad at what she did as Birigida go out to the alternates. You were too likely to get in trouble and give yourself away—maybe give away the Crosstime Traffic secret, too. Annette supposed that risk was smaller in a low-tech alternate. Even so ...

  If Birigida wasn't a spy or a cop, if she wasn't somebody from Crosstime Traffic, what was she? Annette couldn't think of anything else, try as she would. That worried her. It made her angry, too. Birigida was some kind of key—that seemed plain. But what
would happen if you turned her in the lock? What would she open up?

  Because Annette spent so much time wondering about Birigida, she didn't pay enough attention to what she was supposed to be doing herself. "Have you fallen asleep out here?" a guard yelled at her in Arabic. "Pick it up, or you'll be sorry! I thought you were a good worker, not a lazy, useless fool like some I could name."

  Like Birigida, he meant. Annette had enough sense not to get in trouble that way. Why couldn't the blond woman from the home timeline do the same? "I am sorry, sir," Annette said, and she worked faster.

  The guard watched her for a little while. Then he nodded. "That's more like it." He went off to bother somebody else.

  "May the demons gnaw at him, that son of a jackal," Em-ishtar said in her own language. "May he eat dust and live in shadow in the underworld forever after he dies. And may he die soon."

  "May it be so," Annette answered in Arabic. When she said something like that, she meant she was annoyed at the guard. When Emishtar said something like that, she was really cursing him. To her, demons and the underworld were as real as the world in which she walked.

  When Birigida fell behind the other women near her in the garden plot, a guard slapped her. He would have spoken to Annette or Emishtar. They'd shown they were reliable. Birigida had shown she was anything but. She yelped. That only made the guard laugh. One day's worth of real work hadn't changed her, and hadn't made the men with the assault rifles stop watching her for signs of weakness like so many vultures.

  It hadn't made her stop showing weakness, either. Couldn't she see she paid for it whenever she did? Annette sighed. As far as she could tell, Birigida couldn't see anything.

  But she spoke English, American English from the late twenty-first century. That had to mean she came from the home timeline. It also had to mean the home timeline raised just as many jerks as any alternate did. Annette had already realized that—it only stood to reason. But realizing it and getting your nose rubbed in it were two different things.