In High Places Read online

  "You speak truth—it isn't," her mother agreed. "Still, you should not speak this truth in the streets. More than a few Franks"—the usual Arabic name for any Western European— "know this tongue, and would wonder why you grieve for the world."

  "You are right, and I am sorry," Annette said. "But the thought comes, and it does not want to go again."

  "Thoughts come as they will. There are times and places to let them free and times and places to hold them in," her mother said.

  Since that was plainly true, Annette nodded again. A local woman came by. She wore a long wool skirt that she held up with one hand to keep it out of puddles, a linsey-woolsey blouse, and a white lace cap whose pattern said what part of the kingdom she came from. She was, in other words, almost as covered up as Annette and her mother. But her face was bare to the world. Like about one face in three in this alternate, it showed smallpox scars. Seeing them made Annette want to shiver again. Except as a bioweapon, smallpox was long extinct in the home timeline.

  The hand that didn't hold up the Frenchwoman's skirt held on to a three-year-old. The toddler didn't mind mud. He jumped into every puddle between the cobblestones he found. "Henri on the wheel, don't do that!" his mother said. When the mud he splashed up splattered her once too often, she let go of his wrist and whacked his bottom. He howled. She wagged a finger in his face. "I told you not to do that. See what you get when you don't mind?"

  Annette had to work hard not to stare. In the home timeline, nobody would spank a child in public. Hardly anyone would spank a child in private. She wondered if this little boy would be warped for life. He hadn't gone ten meters before he was singing and looking for more mud puddles to jump into.

  "Children are tougher than you think," Annette's mother said, her voice dry.

  "They must be," Annette answered.

  "They are. Our ancestors got spanked, too, remember. They lived. He will, too—or he won't die from that, anyhow."

  "No." Annette let it go at that. Somewhere between a third and half of the children in this Paris died before they got to be five years old. Smallpox took some. So did measles and whooping cough and diphtheria. All of those had vaccines in the home timeline. But diarrhea, from one germ or another, was the biggest baby-killer here. Clean water and clean food made those kinds of illnesses almost unknown in the world where Annette grew up.

  Nothing was clean here. This Paris had no sewers. It dumped slops in the streets. The stink was everywhere. So were the flies. Not uncovering much of yourself had one more advantage here—you didn't get bitten so much.

  Annette and her mother walked past a butcher's shop. The meat was out there in the open. It wasn't refrigerated. No one knew about refrigeration in this alternate. If they wanted to preserve meat here, they dried it in the sun or salted it or smoked it. More flies crawled over the fresh meat on display. The butcher, his hands filthy and his leather apron bloody, brushed them away from a beef tongue as he haggled with a woman who wanted to buy it. When they settled on a price, he picked it up and gave it to her. She put it in a grimy canvas sack along with whatever else she'd already bought.

  A shop right next to the butcher's sold spices. Many of those came up from the Muslim kingdoms. Without refrigeration, meat went bad fast. If you used lots of pepper and cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger, you could keep on eating it for a while even after it started to go off. Of course, you might get sick if you did. But if the choice was between maybe getting sick and going hungry for sure, what would you do? You'd eat, and you'd hope.

  And you'd pray. A monk in a black robe sent Annette and her mother a sour stare as he walked past them. He was a Lad-nerian friar, an order that didn't exist in the home timeline. He wore both a wheel and a crucifix on a rawhide thong around his neck. The Ladnerians were reformers. They wanted to keep money out of the churches. That battle went on, and was usually lost, in one alternate after another.

  They turned a corner. "There." Annette's mother pointed ahead, to a market square next to the Seine. "There is your father's stall."

  "I see it," Annette answered. Beyond the merchants' stalls, men were fishing in the river. They did that in Paris in the home timeline, too. There, as far as Annette knew, nobody ever caught anything. Here, a man drew a trout out of the river. Several more lay at his feet. This Seine was less polluted than that one.

  That didn't mean it was clean. Annette's stomach did a slow flipflop as she watched a woman dip a bucket into the water and carry it away. Whenever it rained, it washed the filth from the streets into the river. Nobody here had ever thought of boiling water before using it, either, and bad water was at least as big a killer as bad food.

  Annette's father waved to her and her mother. His real name was Jacob. In this world, he went as Muhammad al-Marsawi— Muhammad, the man from Marseille. Here as in the home timeline, Muhammad was the most common men's first name.

  "Fine olive oil!" her father called. "The first pressing! Fine olive oil!" Olives didn't grow as far north as Paris. Olive oil was an expensive luxury here. People mostly used butter or lard instead. Nobody in this alternate had ever heard of cholesterol, either. It probably didn't matter. Disease killed most people here before heart attacks or strokes could.

  A merchant came up to her father's stand. Dad had a loaf of bread handy. He dipped it in the oil and offered it to the local. The man chewed thoughtfully. "It's not butter," he said.

  "No, it's not," Dad agreed. They were speaking French. The language was less perfectly polished here than in the home timeline. It also had what would have been a northern accent in Annette's world. The plagues hadn't hit so hard there, while they'd almost emptied Paris. Even all these centuries later, you could still hear that in the way people talked. This French had also borrowed many more words from Arabic than French had in the home timeline. Annette's father went on, "Where I come from, people would say it's better than butter."

  The merchant bowed. "You will forgive me for saying so, m'sieu, but you are not where you came from."

  "Really?" Dad raised an eyebrow and bowed back. "I never would have noticed." He and the merchant both laughed. The Klein family was based in Marseille. The transposition chamber that took them back and forth between worlds was there, too. One day soon, there was supposed to be a chamber in Paris. Annette would believe that when she saw it. Crosstime Traffic worked in so many alternates, no one of them got all the attention it should have.

  She liked this Marseille better than this Paris. The weather was nicer—warmer and drier. The city was cleaner. The streets there were all cobbled, and had real gutters to get rid of some of the garbage. Marseille didn't stink as badly. And the people who lived there were a little less backward, or at least more polite about it.

  This merchant seemed intent on sneering at the olive oil. "But since this is not butter, my friend, who will want to buy it? Who will want to use it?"

  "More people than you can imagine, m'sieu" Annette's father said. That was truer than the merchant could imagine. Olive oil from this alternate's southern France went back to the home timeline. So did olives pickled in vinegar and brine. The locals made them just fine, and had varieties different from the ones in the world where Annette grew up. The oil and the olives both brought Crosstime Traffic good money.

  The local merchant was a tougher customer. "If I buy it from you, who will buy it from me?" he asked. "It's not what people here are used to."

  "Paris has some cobblestones these days," Dad remarked, seemingly out of the blue. "It didn't used to."

  "Forgive me, m'sieu, but I do not see how this answers me." The merchant scratched his head. Annette was tempted to do the same thing.

  Dad only smiled. "One of the reasons Paris has some cobbles is that Marseille and other cities farther south have cobbles. Is it not so?" He waited for the local trader to nod, then went on, "The Kings of Versailles want to keep up with what their neighbors do. So do the people here. One thing their neighbors do is use more olive oil than they do. A clever man, as I'm sure
you are, would see that his customers remembered it while he was selling them the oil."

  "It could be." The merchant, being a merchant, tried not to show he was impressed. But he was; even Annette could see as much. Nobody here thought about advertising, not on purpose. You had a product and you cried it through the streets—that was as far as things went. The local added, "You are a clever man. No wonder you are rich."

  "I wish I were," Annette's father said. By this alternate's standards, anyone from the home timeline was richer than a king. Talking about that not only broke all the rules but was really stupid besides.

  Laughing, the merchant said, "However you please." No one in this timeline would ever admit to being rich. Nothing else could do a better job of attracting tax collectors. Rumors of money drew them the way dead meat drew vultures. The merchant went on, "I will buy five jars from you—no more. I'll see if I can move them the way you suggest. If they do well, I'll buy more when I see you again."

  He's going to try to create demand, Annette thought. The local probably didn't look at it in those terms, but that was what it amounted to. Annette's father bowed. He and the merchant haggled. When they reached a price they could both live with, they clasped hands. The merchant went off to get the money and to bring back workers to carry away the jars. Down farther south, the workers would have been slaves. Here, he probably paid them a little something. Slavery wasn't illegal in the Kingdom of Versailles, but it was uncommon.

  After the merchant paid and took his olive oil, Dad let out a sigh of relief. "We'll be going home soon now," he said. Anyone who understood Arabic would think he meant going back to Marseille. They would be going back there, all right. But after that, they'd be going back to the home timeline. Before long, Annette would start her freshman year at Ohio State. Along with her high-school diploma, she'd have a year of fieldwork to her credit. She could hardly wait.

  Jacques' feet hurt when he got back to Paris. He could feel every pebble in the roadway through the sole of his left boot. When he found the chance, he would have to see a cobbler and get thicker leather put on there. First things first, though. He needed to get back to Duke Raoul and let him know Count Guillaume had the message.

  He paid a boatman a couple of coppers to carry him over the Seine to the right bank. The duke's castle stood there, not far from the great cathedral. Raoul—or, more likely, one of his clerks—would repay him the boatman's fee. A lot of boats went back and forth on the Seine. A good many went up and down the river, too. Moving anything heavy was much cheaper by water than by land.

  The boatmen shouted and cursed at one another. None of them wanted to give way. They felt less manly when they had to. "Where will you find a cavern dark enough to hide your ugly face?" the man rowing Jacques screamed at a fellow on a barge that threatened to cut him off.

  "I would rather be a dog and bay at the moon than a wretch like you," the bargeman retorted. They paid each other more compliments till the rowboat slipped past. If they'd said things like that on dry land, they both probably would have gone for their knives. On the river, they took insults for granted. If Jacques' boatman and the other fellow met in a tavern, they were more likely to laugh and to buy each other wine than to brawl.

  Boats hardly ever smashed together, either. The system looked—and sounded—odd to somebody who wasn't part of it, but it worked.

  "Here you are, friend," Jacques' boatman said as the boat went aground near the riverside market.

  "Thanks." Jacques hopped out. Mud squelched under his feet. The boatman started waving his arms and shouting for a passenger so he could go back across the Seine. For the small fees he got, he worked hard.

  People in the market were waving their arms and shouting, too. Nobody ever bought at the first price. You had to pretend you were having a fit to get the seller to lower it. Then he would pretend to have a fit so he didn't have to lower it too much.

  Somebody from the south had just finished making a deal with a local merchant. Jacques knew of the merchant, but wasn't rich enough to buy from him. The local man looked pleased with himself as his followers carried off five big pottery jugs. The Arab looked pleased with himself, too. That usually meant a good bargain.

  Jacques sent the Arab a suspicious stare. Any trader up from the south might be a spy. The traders who went into Muslim countries from the Kingdom of Versailles always kept their eyes and ears open. Why wouldn't southerners do the same here?

  The Muslim merchant had two women with him. Were they wives? Were they daughters? Were they one of each? All Jacques could see of them were their hands and their eyes. He thought one of them couldn't be much if any older than he was, but he couldn't be sure. At least with girls from his own kingdom, you could see what they looked like. With these women, everything was a mystery. Did that make them less interesting or more? Again, he couldn't be sure.

  He spoke some Arabic and followed more. He wasn't fluent, but he could make himself understood. Anyone who spent a lot of time along the border picked up bits and pieces of the language they used on the other side. Plenty of King Abdallah's men knew fragments of French. The merchant was as smooth in it as if it were his birthspeech. For all Jacques knew, it was. Some who'd been born Christian followed Islam now. Some who'd been born Muslim now reverenced Jesus and Henri, too, but not so many.

  "We'll be going home soon," the trader said in Arabic. The younger woman and the older one both exclaimed in pleasure. They didn't want to stay here, any more than Jacques would have wanted to live in their country.

  Bowing to them, Jacques said, "May God give you a safe journey," in their language.

  They all exclaimed. Jacques couldn't hide his smile. Muslims were often surprised when they ran into a Christian who knew Arabic. Some of them couldn't have been more surprised if their horses had started talking. To be fair, this fellow didn't seem like that. "The Prophet's peace upon you," he said, and then, "Unless I am mistaken, you will be coming home from a journey."

  How did he know that? Jacques looked down at himself. It probably wasn't hard to figure out. He was splashed with mud up past his knees. His boots were wet—he'd had to ford a creek. His clothes were grimy. His hair probably stuck out in all directions, too. He ran his fingers through it, not that that would do much good. "Yes, you're right," he said—why not admit it?

  "Where have you come from, and what is the news?" the merchant asked, switching from Arabic to his flawless French.

  And Jacques started to tell him. Doing it would have been easier and more natural in his own language. But then he remembered the thought he'd had before. A merchant who was only a merchant might ask a question like that. So might a merchant who was also a spy. Sticking to Arabic—he wanted to practice—Jacques answered, "Not much news, I fear—not for a great lord like yourself. A long, dull way here." He pretended to yawn. Then he yawned for real—he truly was tired.

  "He speaks very well," the younger (he thought) veiled woman said to the older.

  Jacques knew better than to come right out and say something to her. He would have been too familiar if he had. He spoke to the merchant instead: "Your . . . daughter gives me too much credit." He put a question in his voice, since he wasn't sure the woman was a daughter.

  But the Arab merchant smiled and nodded, so he'd guessed right. The man said, "No, Khadija is always pleased to hear our speech. And she does not praise beyond what you deserve, for you speak very clearly. You are easy to understand." He bowed.

  So did Jacques. He knew Arabs praised more freely than people from his own kingdom. That was one of the things that made them hard to trust. Even more than Jesus, Henri taught that men should be modest, because most of them had plenty to be modest about. Jacques said, "Tell your daughter I thank her for troubling to understand my words."

  The older woman—Khadija's mother?—started to laugh. "We had better watch this one," she said. "He has a flatterer's tongue."

  If she hadn't laughed, Jacques would have thought she was angry. As things were, h
e took a chance and bowed to her, more deeply than he had to the merchant. "How can the truth be flattery?" he asked.

  All three Arabs laughed then. Khadija said, "You were right, Father. He is as smooth and slick as the oil you sell." In a different tone of voice, that would have been an insult. The way she said it, it sounded more like one friend teasing another.

  He went on chatting with them, not about things that could matter to a spy, just passing the time of day the way he would have with friends. He had to remind himself he needed to report to Duke Raoul. He wasn't late enough to make the duke wonder where he'd been, but he would be if he hung around the market square much longer.

  All the way to the castle, he wondered what Khadija looked like. Was she pretty? He had no way to know. He'd just seen her eyes and her hands. But he liked her, and so he thought she was.

  Two

  The innkeeper thought Annette and her family were odd because they had no servants or slaves. They couldn't hire locals, not without showing them things they shouldn't see. And there weren't enough people from Crosstime Traffic here to play the role. This alternate hadn't been opened for long. People from the home timeline still had a lot to learn here.

  Back home, people said Crosstime Traffic was spread too thin. When Annette was in the home timeline, she'd said the same thing. People had known how to travel from one alternate world to another for only about fifty years. They had so many to explore, so many to examine, so many to exploit. Without food and energy from the alternates, the home timeline probably would have collapsed by now. But there was so much to do. And even though Crosstime Traffic had become far and away the biggest corporation in the world, there weren't enough people to do it all in a hurry.